by Julie Dobrow
The Master letters contain some of Emily Dickinson’s most beautifully poignant imagery. “I wish that I were great, like Mr—Michael Angelo, and could paint for you,” she wrote in the first one. “You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—.” In the second, perhaps from early 1861, she wrote, “A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart—pushing aside the blood—and leaving her all faint and white in the gust’s arm.” The third, tentatively dated later in 1861, contains the plaintive “Could you come to New England—(this summer—could) Would you come to Amherst—Would you like to come—Master?”41
But besides these three much written-about letters were several others, perhaps more definitively meant for Judge Lord. Millicent reported these letters were separated from others that were found after Emily’s death, and that unlike Emily’s other correspondence, they were not destroyed. She wrote that Austin wanted “to shield [Emily] from the curiosity of those who would pry into her deepest feelings in order to speculate about the nature of friendship which, although he knew it had been sacred to her, he himself did not wholly understand. He knew to whom these letters had been written—imposing, dignified Judge Lord, his father’s best friend,” and that Mabel, “because of [Austin’s] attitude considered them hallowed and left them alone.”42 Millicent was the first person to publish the Master letters in full, in Emily Dickinson’s Home. But that still didn’t make the connection between Emily and Judge Lord complete.
Millicent knew that to truly solve the puzzle of the object of Emily’s affection, and possibly the riddle of why Emily chose a life of relative seclusion, she would need to find proof that some version of Emily’s letters had actually reached Judge Lord. In addition, she wrote, if “even a single draft of a letter from him to Emily turned up, it would reveal more of his attitude toward her than can be inferred with safety either from her own letters and notes or from his family’s attitude or hers toward the friendship.”43
So Millicent set off in search of proof. Her inquiry sent her to the Library of Congress, then to Salem, Massachusetts, where Judge Lord had lived, to other towns and cities throughout Massachusetts, and to destinations in New York and Connecticut, seeking living descendants who might be willing to share any papers or information. But evidence proved elusive—some relatives were unable to provide information, and others were unwilling to be forthcoming. Millicent meticulously documented her efforts, despite the little they yielded. She later admitted that though she had hoped to find “documentary evidence . . . that some stray letters might have been overlooked by those bent on wiping out all trace of it,” in fact she had not found any such documents.
Yet she did find sufficient information about the judge and his family to piece together enough of his association with the Dickinsons that, assembled alongside similar information from Emily and her family, Millicent felt capable of crafting a narrative outlining their story. Millicent became convinced there was a love relationship between Emily Dickinson and Judge Lord, that Emily’s “messages to the man who during the last years of her life held her ‘soul at the white heat’ until his death two years before her own” demonstrated this conclusively. And she believed that some of Lord’s relatives and descendants either withheld or destroyed information that would shed further light on a romantic relationship with Emily.
Millicent based her conclusions around a number of pieces of “evidence.” First, there were Emily’s own writings, including references to Judge Lord in a few existing letters she had written to other people, the “My lovely Salem smiles at me” line from one of her letters circa 1878 (the year after Judge Lord’s wife died) and seemingly clear references in some of her poems, such as the often-cited lines from one of her poems:
How fleet, how indiscreet an one,
How always wrong is love—
Second, Millicent referenced Mabel’s story about Sue Dickinson’s warning, and third, she cited the purported attitude of Abigail Farley West, Lord’s niece (and Susan Dickinson’s good friend), about Emily; she had supposedly described the relationship between her uncle and Emily Dickinson as “immoral,” though this description was passed along to Millicent secondhand.44
Some later Dickinson scholars have not concluded, as Millicent did, that Judge Otis Phillips Lord played such a primary role in Emily Dickinson’s love life. Many have suggested that, among other things, “Master” was really just an amalgam, not a particular person but a muse or imagined figure, citing lack of written evidence to conclude there was any romantic relationship.45 But some people have thought otherwise. In 2012, John Evangelist Walsh published Emily Dickinson in Love, a book in which he attempted to demonstrate and reconstruct a love relationship between Emily and Lord. His many assertions are not well documented in any evidence and, as one reviewer suggested, “Walsh does not let the facts get in the way of a good story.”46 Being the stickler for documentation that she was, Millicent would undoubtedly have found Walsh’s book severely lacking, even though he arrived at a conclusion similar to her own. In 2014 poet Susan Snively published The heart has many doors, a novel elaborating on Millicent’s work in Emily Dickinson: A Revelation. While she admits taking “liberties” in putting together her fictionalized account of a relationship between Emily and Lord, Snively writes, “at the heart of this narrative lie many of the poet’s poems and letters”47—using them as Millicent did, to arrive at a similar conclusion. Scholars at the Emily Dickinson Museum conclude, “A romantic relationship late in the poet’s life with Judge Otis Phillips Lord is supported in Dickinson’s correspondence with him as well as in family references.”48
The reviews of Emily Dickinson: A Revelation must have done little to quell Millicent’s fears about not being taken seriously by literary critics and the academy. Scholar and English professor Walter McIntosh Merrill described the book as “rather slight and even pretentious in its total effect, because Mrs. Bingham tends to overstate her thesis. From the title page on, the reader is kept in suspense; one innuendo after another leads him to expect momentarily a sensational revelation,” but that in the end, “the reader feels rather cheated.”49 Writing in the journal American Literature, Jay Leyda (who would later write and publish two volumes’ worth of The Years and Letters of Emily Dickinson) wrote, “the new letters are remarkable. . . . Mrs. Bingham’s editorial attitude is admirable—the book’s center remains the letters themselves.” His generally positive review concluded that other reviewers who were more critical were harsher because “perhaps it was easier for critics to dismiss the book and its implications than to revise their prejudged images of Emily Dickinson.”50
Though Millicent did receive an honorary doctorate from Dickinson College (no relation to the Amherst family) in early May of 1952, in large part because of her earlier work on Emily, she still worried that because her formal training was not in literature, she would never be fully accepted as a true Dickinson scholar. In fact, the citation for her honorary doctorate of letters read, “You have made for yourself a career in two widely separated fields, the science of geography and the art of biography. You know more, perhaps, than any other woman alive about the physical forces which shaped the world into a theatre for the activities of the human race, and about the spiritual and cerebral forces which brought into being the esoteric meanings, the flashing insights, the awareness of beauty that made the poems of Emily Dickinson true ‘bolts of melody,’ as you have named them.” Though flattered, Millicent reflected privately in her diary, “What Dr. Edel [president of Dickinson College] said of me was quite overwhelming but . . . not true.”51 This honor only seemed to reinforce her belief that her professional decisions rendered her an imposter in both of her chosen fields.
Millicent was likely aware of the many inherent ironies in her writing of a romantic relationship between Emily and the much-older Judge Lord, which had possibly developed while he was still married. Though Millicent never said this directly, the parallels to her own mother’s relat
ionship with Austin were unmistakable. Otis Lord and Austin Dickinson were both graduates of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Mabel had thought of Austin as more like her father, Eben Jenks Loomis, than any other man she’d ever met; Emily revered Otis Lord in part because of his close relationship with Edward Dickinson. Lord’s surviving descendants were every bit as upset about the insinuation of a possible relationship with Emily Dickinson as Emily’s family was about a relationship between Austin and Mabel.
The publishing of presumptive love letters between an unmarried couple was certainly something that would have struck a very painful chord within Millicent, who struggled with the decision of whether to publish her mother’s and Austin’s love letters. In the end, Millicent never published any of Mabel’s and Austin’s letters (they wouldn’t appear in print until Polly Longsworth presented them in 1984). But in the case of Emily Dickinson, Millicent clearly knew her decision meant that she “assumed a grave responsibility . . . my only criterion has been this: will they [the letters] help to bring about a better understanding of Emily Dickinson?”52
Looking back on this work, Millicent told an interviewer this book had been “intended as the climax, the last of my four books, [but] because of its brevity, the publishers said that it could be rushed through the press quickly.” When Emily Dickinson: A Revelation was published in November of 1954, Millicent recalled, “it made little impression. Since it is an enlightening source-book I was disappointed.”53
There were two other intertwining reasons Millicent had negative associations with this book.
In the early 1950s, as Millicent worked on the interviews and to find written documentary evidence of an Emily/Lord relationship, Walter grew progressively weaker. “I will not enlarge upon the anguish of those months as Walter lay struggling for breath in the next room while I worked against time trying for his sake to finish the manuscript,” she said in 1959. When one of Walter’s doctors told her she had “an aura of frustration” that was not helping Walter’s recovery, Millicent reluctantly agreed to go to Hog Island to finish her work. “It would not take long, we thought. Then I would return refreshed with added strength for the long pull ahead, for Walter would be ill for a long time. And so, against my deepest feelings, I was persuaded to leave him and go to Maine.”54 Walter died just three weeks later.
Millicent’s guilt about being apart from Walter at the end of his life never abated. On the train returning to New York after learning of Walter’s death, she wrote in her diary, “I was overwhelmed by the realization of what I had been deprived of, doing for him at the last, reading to him each time. I marvel I could ever have consented to leave him, no matter how necessary for me the doctor said it was. How could I?” Weeks after his death she berated herself further: “beating with knotted rope is not good enough for me. I deserve suffering, torture and grief such as paralyzes me now. It is blackness and despair. It does not help to pray.” Months later, the feeling had not lessened: “Oh, if only I had tried as hard to please Walter as he did to please me!” she lamented. She pondered whether she should return to Dr. Ehrenclou to help her process these feelings, and then poignantly suggested, “Today, from the depths of my heart, I thought of Emily’s solitude and compared it to my own.”55
Though Millicent would later acknowledge a childhood rheumatic fever predisposed Walter to heart problems, she truly believed that his decline in health emanated from another source: the battles with Harvard University that had begun.
CHAPTER 14
BATTLING OVER EMILY’S PAPERS (1946–1959)
“They are reviving an ancient feud”
When Mattie Dickinson Bianchi first began publishing books of her aunt’s poems and letters in 1914, Mabel must have been aware that her own collection of unpublished Dickinson poems and letters was an untapped gold mine, worth both literary prestige and a significant amount of money. Someday, she knew, someone would want those manuscripts. Mabel’s 1929 suggestion that she was holding hundreds of unpublished poems made literary analysts, publishers and poetry fans wonder what Dickinson treasures might still be out there, and who was in possession of which literary properties. Mabel’s reissue of The Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1931, which contained many previously unpublished letters, certainly proved that she hadn’t teased the public about the unseen documents.
The jousting over who had copyright to Emily’s poetry and letters went on for years. Between 1929 and 1942, Mattie continued to claim copyright of all Emily’s works. Her efforts are documented by several large files of letters held at Harvard; there are innumerable requests sent to Mattie, via her publisher, asking for permission to read an Emily Dickinson poem on the radio, to put poems to music, to utilize a poem in a play. Mattie tried to control this universe as tightly as she could. Mabel’s reentry to the Emily Dickinson space was therefore particularly threatening, confirming that there were letters and poems outside of Mattie’s possession. But Mattie was unable to get either her attorneys or her publishers to take up a lawsuit against Mabel and Millicent to rein in their use of any Dickinson materials, in large part because no one was certain of how much original Dickinson material the Todds retained. But these questions took a different turn in 1943, when Mattie Dickinson Bianchi died.
With no biological heir, Mattie named Alfred Leete Hampson executor of her home and estate, and bequeathed to him the copyrights to all her books. Mattie had met Hampson in New York in 1920, shortly after she divorced her husband. As numerous Dickinson biographers point out, Count Bianchi had run up significant debts against Mattie’s inheritance that left her scrambling for funds. By 1916, Mattie had had enough drama and enough debt. She consulted a New York–based attorney, a distant cousin by the name of Gilbert H. Montague, about divorce.1 Four years later, when she made the acquaintance of Alfred Leete Hampson, Mattie was once again a single woman.
Hampson, twenty-three years younger than Mattie, has been variously described as her “secretary,” her “literary advisor” and her “devoted companion.” After the trauma and theatrics of her relationship with Alexander Bianchi, mild-mannered Hampson must have been a soothing presence. The nature of their relationship has been speculated about in a novel entitled The Path Between and hinted at in some scholarly articles. Elizabeth Horan writes that while Hampson maintained a separate address from Mattie, the pair “spent every summer together in the Evergreens, where he brought order, typing, and planning skills to the Dickinson legacy.”2 Biographer Lyndall Gordon suggests that for Mattie, the “condition for collaboration was not accuracy; it was unquestioning loyalty. Hampson was more than happy to oblige.”3 Hampson became Mattie’s coeditor on a series of books, including several volumes of Emily’s poetry. He was unquestionably devoted to Mattie, and revered the memory and work of her aunt Emily.
After Mattie’s death, Millicent was poised to publish the first two of her books about Emily Dickinson. She wrote, “Harpers lawyers felt that it was in the public interest that they publish both books. They felt the risk that Mr. Hampson would try to stop publication . . . should be taken and they doubted very much that he had any firm ground on which to stand. The right to exclusive possession in publication, even if legally enforceable by a member of the family, could hardly be passed on, they thought, to one unrelated to the family; or at least they thought there was a doubt about it.”4 When Ancestors’ Brocades and Bolts of Melody were published in 1945, there was no lawsuit. It became clear that while Hampson and Mary Landis (the woman he married four years after Mattie’s death) had a trove of Dickinson papers in their possession, so did Millicent.
After Mattie’s death, questions about finding a permanent home for the Dickinson papers began to arise. Millicent was sixty-three; Hampson was ten years younger but ill with recurring hepatitis. Hampson was also consumed by fears that the deteriorating conditions in The Evergreens meant that the precious Dickinson papers might not be safe.
William McCarthy, an emissary from Harvard’s Houghton Library, saw this situation clearl
y. McCarthy had had his eye on the Dickinson papers for a long time. He’d met Mattie during preparations for an Emily Dickinson centennial exhibition in 1930, and began ingratiating himself. McCarthy knew that to earn Mattie’s trust he must pledge allegiance to her and eschew any contact with the Todds; as Lyndall Gordon points out, McCarthy “had gone so far as to declare himself Madame Bianchi’s ‘slave for life.’”5 After Mattie’s death he befriended Hampson by continuing to insist on a “shrine for Emily,” and building on Hampson’s fears about the papers going up in flames, stressing the need to find a safer home for them.
McCarthy was a former student of loyal Amherst College alumnus R. M. Smith. Smith believed that the Dickinson papers should go to his alma mater, not Harvard. When he heard from McCarthy about his plans to get the Dickinson papers, he sounded the alarm to Amherst College professor and Dickinson scholar George Whicher: McCarthy, he said, “has designs on selling them either to a prominent national library or to an equally prominent eastern university. . . . Now is the time for an Amherst millionaire to step forward and do a handsome thing for you and Amherst.” But Mattie Dickinson Bianchi, who had not liked the portrait of Emily that Whicher had painted in his writing, left specific instructions in her will prohibiting Whicher from quoting Dickinson materials. Correctly assuming that Hampson would similarly cut him out, Whicher responded to Smith that “as long as Hampson was in the picture Amherst College was not interested in acquiring the Emily Dickinson manuscripts.” He wrote to Millicent, “in other words, I cannot say too emphatically to the world in general and to everyone in particular that I am through with Emily Dickinson and all her relatives and their hangers on. I have made my contribution toward cleaning up of that mess, and I expect from now on to be concerned with other and pleasanter matters.”6