by Julie Dobrow
Horan points out that “Todd’s verbal claims had pushed her rival into a very tight corner” and all Mattie could do was dredge up the 1898 trial and insinuate that its outcome meant Mabel was immoral and untrustworthy. Mattie wrote to Herbert Jenkins at Little, Brown, “I know of no ‘friend of the family’ who could possess hundreds of unpublished poems of my Aunt Emily Dickinson. The original editor who intimated as such, at South Hadley last November, is the person convicted of a fraudulent land transaction in open Court.” Mattie went on to suggest she was certain her Aunt Lavinia had broken off relations with Mabel and it was thus improbable that Mabel somehow was in possession of poems, but if she were, that they were obtained “by false pretenses.” In a letter to her attorney, Theodore Frothingham, Mattie wrote of Vinnie’s efforts to “eliminate Mrs. Todd from any further connection with her sister’s work.” She went on to assert that Mabel could not be trusted and concluded, “I have no wish or intention to involve myself in a lawsuit against your advice, but it is apparent that I cannot submit in silence to the gross flouting of my family’s wishes or to the intolerable liberties being taken with the family inheritance.”16
But Frothingham responded to Mattie, “I think that to be doing any further thing now would be doing a vain thing. It would not strengthen our position in any way.” As Horan writes, “the publishers were far less interested in unverifiable allegations about morality . . . than in discovering who was holding what properties.”17
When Mabel died, it fell to Millicent to complete the job of editing those “properties” that Mabel had long held in the camphorwood chest, and to verify that she had legal standing to publish them. Millicent noted in her introduction to Bolts of Melody that the unpublished poems could be broadly categorized in two ways: poems that contained Emily’s interlined corrections or in which she noted possible word substitutions, and those that were untouched. The latter were often fragments, many times written on scraps of paper, brown paper bags, in the margins of drugstore bargain flyers or the inside of envelopes that, Millicent observed, appeared to be the paper Emily liked most. Millicent found these fragments confusing and often near illegible, even to one familiar with Emily’s hand. “Their appearance was so discouraging that I put off grappling with them from year to year, wondering indeed as I did so whether I should ever attempt to disentangle them, whether the time required would not be wasted.” But, she found eventually “after laboriously puzzling out a word, a line, a stanza, letter by letter, with all the alternatives one is rewarded by seeing, suddenly, a perfect poem burst full-blown into life. The clarity of the thought shines forth in striking contrast to the chaos of the manuscript.”18
Millicent spent years working with these “scraps.” As she later wrote in the preface to Bolts of Melody, this work proved important because “the result has been the discovery of some of Emily’s finest poetry, because these are the poems she wrote in her fullest maturity . . . it is precisely because, during her last years, these thoughts were jotted down at white heat and never revised that some of her most powerful poems, dealing with fundamental areas of experience, are contained in this volume. Like the dormant life-germ of a plant these verses, buried for sixty years, are at last reaching light and air in full vitality.”19 For instance, Millicent used the example of an unfinished poem she numbered 600:
The sun in reining to the west
Makes not as much of sound
As cart of man in road below
Adroitly turning round.
That whiffletree of amethyst20
Millicent worked diligently to decipher words, put together pieces of torn paper and discern what Emily intended among papers “smothered with alternative words and phrases crowded into every available space.” An example of a “scrap” Millicent elected to record separately was one she numbered 623:
Soft as the massacre of suns
By evening’s sabres slain.21
While she was able to put some of these poems into a more final form, others remained incomplete. Millicent noted even “some of her finished poems are rough, rugged, awkward. But that she intended. In some of these unfinished poems, however, not only is the idea obscured by the form; the idea itself is obscure—not sharp enough to pierce through the words.”22
With the finished poems, Millicent, like Mabel, first made a fresh copy of each poem, looking both at Emily’s original and at Mabel’s copies. She stated that it was historically important to have Mabel’s transcriptions because “they have correctly preserved a good many poems which might otherwise have been lost” and because in Further Poems and Unpublished Poems, Mattie had altered some of the poems’ words and orderings (although Emily sometimes wrote different versions of poems that Sue might have had and Mabel did not). But in any case, Millicent wrote that Mabel’s versions were “available to check the accuracy of the published versions.”23
AN EXAMPLE OF ONE OF EMILY DICKINSON’S “SCRAPS.”
Millicent wrote that in her efforts to “discover Emily’s own preference,” she often ignored Mabel’s changes and instead, “in no single instance have I substituted a word or phrase not suggested by Emily herself.” Like Mabel, Millicent did attempt to standardize Emily’s spellings, but pointed out that she did so only “with great reluctance, I . . . changed archaic spelling to conform to current usage.”24 For the most part, Millicent left Emily’s unique punctuation intact.
Millicent also parted company with Mabel and Higginson’s practice of naming poems, except where Emily, herself, had indicated a title. Like her mother and Higginson, Millicent chose to place the poems within thematically named chapters. While writing, “nothing reveals the scope of Emily Dickinson’s insight more than the variety of her themes,” Millicent was also aware of the limitations of such an arrangement. She thought that optimally, “the poems of Emily Dickinson should eventually be arranged in the order of composition as well as by subject matter” because this would best demonstrate “her inner development.” Millicent was also keenly aware that the selection of poems “for a definitive edition of the works of Emily Dickinson will be easier in fifty years than it is now,” because at the present time, the push was to have all of the poems published25—an initiative Millicent heartily embraced, feeling it was her responsibility to make “all the data” public. It was part of fulfilling her promise to Mabel.
Either Millicent took a page from Mabel’s dramatic playbook, or a clever publicist for Harper realized that the story of these long-hidden poems’ reemergence would boost sales. “In 1929, at the request of her mother, Millicent Todd Bingham unlocked the camphorwood box containing the poems of Emily Dickinson,” read a flyer advertising Bolts of Melody. “There were hundreds of them; over half had never been published . . . the resulting volume is a gift of inestimable value to the large audience which has long recognized the genius of Emily. Although her personal life was shrouded in mystery, the greatness of her work . . . is as fresh and exciting today as it was sixty years ago.”26
Bolts of Melody, its title derived from the poem “I would not paint a picture” (unnamed and unnumbered in Millicent’s version, poem 348 in the Johnson edition), contained well over six hundred poems total, including both finished and unfinished poems. Critical reviews were mixed. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Hillyer said, “no praise can be too high for Mrs. Bingham’s editing. . . . The editor’s preface is written with masterly skill and gives the key to her method.” Richard Sewall at Yale University, who would later write a definitive biography of Emily and also become an important confidant of Millicent’s, wrote in The New England Quarterly, “In no previous collection have the major problems of editing Emily Dickinson’s poems been more clearly recognized, and Mrs. Bingham has made excellent progress toward their solution.” In the journal Poetry, Babette Deutsch wrote something that must have particularly pleased Millicent. She stated that while she wished Millicent had chosen to arrange the poems chronologically rather than thematically, “one would not wish to exchange th
e carelessness and presumption of Emily’s niece, guided, apparently, in her treatment of the manuscripts by her own view of the quarrel, for a decorous pusillanimity. But for all her hesitancies and some few mistakes of judgment, Mrs. Bingham has done an admirable job.”27
But writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Amherst College professor George Whicher used the opportunity to excoriate members of the Dickinson family, cast aspersions on Mabel and David, and insinuate the Mabel/Austin relationship; he opened up wounds that Millicent had hoped were healed. Whicher explained to the reading public that “the Austin Dickinson ménage which Emily had mildly characterized as ‘Vesuvius at home’ became more of an inferno than ever, with Sue as hellcat-in-charge” after Austin’s death. (In fact, Whicher was being a bit misleading in this statement: while Emily probably did know about Austin’s marital issues, the reference to “Vesuvius at home” came from a line in a poem, “Volcanoes be in Sicily” [number 1705]—it was not a clear or direct reference to the doings next door at The Evergreens.)28 The ensuing trial led by Lavinia, whom Whicher characterized as a “semi-demented creature,” succeeded, he suggested, in getting the public to see that the Todds were the sort of people who would want to pull the bright stars around them—like Emily Dickinson’s poetry—into their own orbit. When the trial verdict went against Mabel, Whicher concluded, it alienated her from all things Dickinson so that she hid away hundreds of poems for decades—an act he compared to Henry James in The Spoils of Poynton . . . with Mabel “in the role of the woman who defies legal conventions rather than let a thing of beauty fall into the hands of despoilers.”29
Millicent was both alarmed and horrified. This review hurt her deeply “because he spoke of the Todds’ ‘well-known acquisition habits.’” But what really distressed her was Whicher’s insinuation that “the whole thing [was] rooted in the Dickinson-Todd relationship.”30
However, Millicent put aside the threat of Whicher’s further exposing Mabel and Austin’s relationship, the rift between the two families, and the periodic appearances of Emily’s poetry when she saw the vindicating review of both her books in The New Yorker:
The student of Emily Dickinson cannot help but be struck by the marked difference between the poems edited by Mrs. Bingham and those edited by Mrs. Bianchi. The latter’s compilations were remarkable for their haphazard arrangement and general tone of carelessness and lack of insight into the material, and Mrs. Bianchi’s Life and Letters when compared with Mrs. Todd’s edition of the Letters, is clearly sentimentalized and doctored. . . . Mrs. Bingham brings all this into focus. She is concise, comprehensive, and only a little bitter. The spell cast over the poet’s work is beginning to break, and Mrs. Bingham looks forward to a complete, definitive edition once a few remaining obstacles are overcome.31
Looking back from the vantage point of 1964, Millicent felt keenly that her own childhood in Amherst and her work on the life and poems of Emily Dickinson had given her an understanding of the poet that few others could match. She wrote that her chief contribution to Dickinson scholarship was “the editing of the poems in Bolts of Melody. This meant deciphering the most illegible manuscripts . . . it simplified the work of subsequent editors. It meant a selection of the final word among many variants left by Emily. . . . I knew which word she would have chosen. I feel sometimes as if Emily and I were going it alone.”32 But in the 1950s, Millicent was far from alone in her quest to publish and interpret Emily Dickinson, and she was only halfway through her publishing journey.
Millicent’s publication quests took years to realize, not only because of her meticulous research but also because momentous events periodically interrupted her progress. In 1947, Millicent had a hysterectomy that was, she wrote, “performed as a prophylactic based on suspicion.” Shortly after that, Walter’s health began to decline. En route to a psychology conference in 1951, Walter had trouble breathing and very little stamina. Millicent was frantic. They got home safely, but shortly afterward he collapsed. Millicent arranged for nursing care and for an oxygen tent “but I did not fully take it in,” she recalled. “I thought he was just tired.”33 But it was more than that—Walter was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
Millicent and Walter had planned to spend the 1950s “writing about the things we knew,” as Millicent later said. Walter intended to issue a revision of his book Aptitudes and Aptitude Testing (first published in 1937) to include work he’d done during World War II for the Army, and to begin working on an autobiography that would also be a history of the industrial psychology movement. Millicent considered a return to geography (she published a short history of Miami in 1948 and enjoyed the work so much that she considered doing more), but she mostly felt obligated to launch the research for her last two books on Dickinson, one on the early letters of members of the Dickinson family, including letters from Emily to Austin, and one about Emily’s relationship with Judge Otis Lord, drawing heavily from their correspondence. Millicent’s ambivalence about this topic was clear: though she believed that such a book would be popular and an important contribution to the growing body of works about Emily Dickinson’s life, “I was not at all sure whether those letters should ever be published at all,” she recalled.34
Despite concerns over Walter’s declining health, the two spent a great deal of time in the early 1950s “driving hither and yon in New England and New York State to try to search out people still living who might have memories or documents that would be useful.”35 Millicent believed that unraveling the mystery of Lord’s relationship with Emily Dickinson would yield important information about both the poet and her poetry. She also believed she knew what she might find. In the first chapter of Emily Dickinson: A Revelation, Millicent wrote that when Austin had given her mother packets of Emily’s correspondence, one envelope was different from all the rest. This envelope contained letters Austin told Mabel were “very special and personal.” Mabel declined to publish them in either edition of her volumes of Emily’s letters, as Austin had not wished them made public. “A glance was enough to show . . . that the drafts it contained were indeed different . . . my mother did not consider publishing the group in question. She put them back in the envelope and placed it at the bottom of the pile of Emily’s manuscripts in the camphorwood chest where it remained unopened for almost forty years.” When Millicent opened the chest, Mabel told her “that I would do well to find out all I could about Judge Lord.” Millicent claimed to have asked Mabel no questions, but “accepted the challenge and took the first exploratory steps.”36
Judge Otis Phillips Lord, eighteen years older than Emily Dickinson, a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, was a close friend of Edward Dickinson’s. Lord and his wife, Elizabeth, were frequent guests at the Dickinson Homestead. Emily had known him for her entire life, but it seems that after his wife died in 1877, Judge Lord might have expressed a more-than-fatherly interest in his old friend’s older daughter. Millicent cited two pieces of evidence suggesting a bond between Judge Lord and Emily: first, Mabel’s recollection that shortly after she moved to Amherst in 1881, Sue Dickinson admonished her not to go to the home of her two sisters-in-law, whom she stated hadn’t “any idea of morality.” According to Mabel, Sue had told her that one day, she walked into the drawing room at The Homestead and found Emily “reclining in the arms of a man.” Mabel did not record whether Sue specifically suggested that the man was Judge Lord, though presumably the judge was well-known to Sue. Millicent argued, “it is worth bearing in mind that this was the time when Emily’s idolatry of Judge Lord was reaching its peak,”37 and therefore, she concluded the man must have been Lord. (Many years later, professor and literary critic Christopher Benfey wrote on Slate.com, “The notion of Emily Dickinson making out in her living room is so foreign to our conception of her that her autumnal tryst with Judge Lord has never become part of the popular lore about her.”)38
The second and perhaps more independent indicator of a powerful bond between Lord and Emily was Colonel Th
omas Wentworth Higginson’s description of Emily Dickinson’s funeral, at which he had been present. In his diary, Higginson had written that in Emily’s coffin Vinnie placed “two heliotropes by her hand, to take to Judge Lord.”39 How Higginson knew this was never made clear.
JUDGE OTIS PHILLIPS LORD MIGHT HAVE EVINCED SOME ROMANTIC INTEREST IN HIS OLDEST FRIEND’S OLDEST DAUGHTER LATE IN HIS LIFE. EMILY WROTE HIM A NUMBER OF LETTERS. SOME SCHOLARS BELIEVE THAT LORD WAS THE INTENDED RECIPIENT OF EMILY’S SO-CALLED “MASTER LETTERS,” AS WELL.
Since Emily kept no known or saved diary, other “evidence” would have to be found in her letters or poetry. Millicent knew that three extant letters in Mabel’s camphorwood chest deserved special scrutiny. Mabel had published just six lines of one of these letters in her 1894 edition of Emily’s letters, and had concealed the identity of the recipient under the heading “To _ _ _ _ _ _,” even deleting the title “Master.” While even today the true intended recipient of the so-called Master letters is contested, there’s no debate about the depth of feeling Emily expressed in them. For instance, in a 1986 publication of the entire text of the Master letters, Dickinson scholar Ralph Franklin notes that the letters “indicate a long relationship, geographically apart, in which correspondence would have been the primary means of communication. Dickinson did not write letters as a fictional genre, and these were surely part of a larger correspondence yet unknown to us.” Franklin’s recounting of the Master letters shows how contemporary scholars have attempted to date them by analyzing the formation of Emily’s letters and comparing them to her handwriting at different points of her life, a potentially important clue in identifying the identity of “Master.”40