by Julie Dobrow
At the same time, Gilbert Montague—the same distant Dickinson cousin whom Mattie had discreetly contacted about her divorce—began to evince interest in acquiring the Dickinson papers. A wealthy, bright and self-made man, Montague was imbued with a sense of his own importance. His marriage to Amy Angell Collier had united two prominent New England families. His law practice largely consisted of representing big oil companies and trying to advance private enterprise. Montague thought nothing of reminding people of his wealth, a tactic he used in aggressively pursuing things that he wanted. A man with an acquisitive bent and an inveterate collector of autographs and other papers, once Montague became aware of Mattie’s Dickinson papers, he wanted to possess them. But not only Mattie’s papers. After the publication of Millicent’s books in 1945 demonstrated another Dickinson cache, Montague decided to go after Millicent’s Dickinson papers, as well.
Montague invited Millicent to dine with him in New York. At first, the tone of their correspondence was warm, even effusive. “Dear Mr. Montague,” Millicent wrote after her visit to his home in November 1945, “I left your house last night all a-quiver. It was not alone the feeling of having stepped through the Bibliothèque National, the Library of Congress and the British Museum all together—but a sense of having somehow been among the height of our culture—the sources of strength for our very existence. I am really at a loss to thank you for one of the most memorable evenings I ever spent.”7
The following year, after seeing Montague again at a Dickinson exhibit in New York, and learning of his intent to purchase Hampson’s Dickinson collection for Harvard, Millicent “wrote an enthusiastic letter to Mr. Montague . . . I congratulated him on his benefaction and said that he would go down in history as the liberator of one of our greatest poets and that we were all to be congratulated that at least scholarship would come before partisanship, or words to that effect.”8 It was not certain that Montague would be able to procure the papers from Hampson; in the meantime, Montague made clear to Millicent that he was interested in her Dickinson collection, as well. But then, he wasn’t the only one.
William Jackson, the man at the helm of Harvard’s Houghton Library from the time the library opened in 1942, had earned the nickname of “The Grand Acquisitor” for his tireless work adding to Harvard’s already considerable holdings. Knowing of Montague’s promise to purchase the Bianchi/Dickinson manuscripts owned by Alfred Leete Hampson for Harvard and learning of Millicent’s holdings, Jackson sensed another conquest. He approached Millicent, expressing interest in acquiring her collection. Millicent was certainly aware of the potential to make a great collection of Dickinson papers at Harvard. A Radcliffe alumna, she had warm feelings toward her alma mater. However, she explained to Jackson that before she considered parting with the papers, she must fulfill her promise to her mother to complete the books on which she was presently working. Millicent felt that for the sake of future scholarship it would be optimal for all of Emily’s papers to be in the same place, but she questioned whether Harvard was the most fitting place. Millicent related years later her belief that “all her manuscripts should be in one place and I hoped and believed that that would be Amherst, for it was Amherst where she was born, where she lived, wrote and died.”9 So Millicent deflected Jackson’s initial approaches.
Because of her conviction that Emily’s papers ultimately belonged back in the town in which they had been written, Millicent contacted Charles Cole, the newly inaugurated president of Amherst College. Cole, an economic historian, would later serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Chile in the early 1960s—but it is clear that he honed his diplomatic skills while at Amherst in his dealings with Millicent and Harvard over the Emily Dickinson manuscripts. Little did Cole know when Millicent first contacted him in 1946 that he would spend the entire fourteen years of his presidency, and beyond, handling Millicent and issues pertaining to her Emily Dickinson papers.
Soon after Millicent initiated contact with him, Cole traveled to Washington, where he spent two hours with the Binghams. In a confidential internal memo he stated that Millicent “has a collection of curios (and I mean curios) such as Ashanti stools, Japanese rice bowls and the like, collected by her father on his various trips . . . my guess is they are mostly curiosities only.” Millicent, he wrote, wanted to give these to Amherst if a designated room could be set up for their display. Millicent also owned an eighty-acre woodlot outside Amherst that she wanted to donate to the college as “an especially good place to study certain warblers.” This land, the pragmatic Cole concluded, might “have real value for Amherst if it was ever decided to put up an FM radio station.”
“And here is the real thing,” he wrote, “She has the bulk of the surviving Emily Dickinson manuscripts in her possession. These latter are of simply inestimable literary significance, partially in view of the many corrections of the different versions through which the poems progressed, and further from the fact that no really well equipped editor has worked on them. Even as a matter of market value, my guess is that these manuscripts would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Cole concluded, “if we are to get the manuscripts, I think we will: 1) (God help us) have to take the curios and exhibit them somewhere, at least during the life of Mr. and Mrs. Bingham; 2) have to accept Pelham Knob and I see no difficulty in that; 3) have to promise to keep the Emily Dickinson/Mabel Loomis Todd materials together in a room designated thus.” To seal the deal, Cole thought, would require Amherst to “urge her gently from time to time. It may be necessary to talk about warblers,” he wryly commented, “but the appropriateness and value to Amherst of the Dickinson manuscripts are such that I think Amherst would be well justified even in expending two rooms on their acquisition.”10
It’s possible that Amherst had attempted to get some of Mattie’s Dickinson manuscripts earlier. Millicent had been told by a member of the Amherst College Board of Trustees in 1931 that “when an honorary degree was conferred on Mrs. Bianchi . . . it was given with the hope and expectation that it would result in her presenting her manuscripts to the college. This, as we know, she did not do.”11 So when Millicent told Charles Cole about her own collection of Dickinson manuscripts, the idea of an Amherst College collection was likely already percolating.
Cole also noted in his confidential memo that the Library of Congress was “making terrific efforts to get Mrs. Bingham to promise them the Emily Dickinson manuscripts.” Pulitzer Prize–winning poets Archibald MacLeish (who had also served as the head of the library from 1939 to 1944) and Robert Penn Warren (the only person to have been awarded a Pulitzer for both poetry and fiction) were dispatched to contact Millicent on behalf of the Library of Congress. They each urged her to give her Dickinson papers to the library. “Following our conversation in my office. . . . It would help us a great deal working toward a solution of a rather thorny and difficult problem,” MacLeish wrote to Millicent, if she would consider giving her papers to the library.
But once again, Millicent held out, hoping that Hampson would not sell his papers to Montague, or that Montague would somehow decide to give the papers to Amherst instead of Harvard. Later in life, Millicent would regret having rejected the Library of Congress’s approaches: in 1961 she wrote of her “catastrophic errors of judgment,” including “not to have given the Emily Dickinson papers to the Library of Congress in 1945,” which would have “released me from ten years of anguish.”12
As the 1940s came to an end, there was still no resolution about where Emily Dickinson’s papers would reside. Millicent was holding on to hers, and Alfred Leete Hampson had yet to reach a deal with Gilbert Montague. However, Hampson’s lack of income, coupled with the deteriorating conditions of The Evergreens and of his own health, left him struggling with mounting expenses. He and Mary resolved to sell off some of Emily Dickinson’s letters to raise cash. But the redoubtable William McCarthy advised them not to sell things in a piecemeal fashion.
McCarthy leveraged Hampson’s debts and fears to his own a
dvantage. In 1948, McCarthy left Houghton Library to become a dealer in rare manuscripts. He had been cultivating a relationship with the Hampsons for years, vowing to defend Mattie’s reputation and to “care for Emily” by helping them find a home for her papers. That home, he suggested, must be more secure than The Evergreens, and must have sufficient financial backing to make the transactions worthwhile to all parties. McCarthy also assisted the Hampsons by combing through rooms at The Evergreens, uncovering letters long stored in trunks, under the eaves and hidden away in closets. After a few false starts with other potential buyers, in the first months of 1950, McCarthy let the Hampsons know that Gilbert Montague wanted to buy their collection for Harvard.
As a collector, Montague did not want only the Emily Dickinson papers in Hampson’s possession to go to Harvard. Knowing this, William Jackson apparently told Montague that Millicent had “promised to yield up her own collection” if Harvard acquired Hampson’s, too. There is no evidence of Millicent’s “promise” in any written correspondence between her and Jackson. But thus assured, Montague provided Harvard with an initial gift of $25,000 to purchase the Dickinson papers from Alfred Leete Hampson.
As soon as Millicent learned of the forthcoming sale of the papers in March of 1950, she was troubled. “The announcement appeared in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune,” she recalled years later. “I was disturbed by several things . . . that I knew to be untrue. The Herald Tribune said, for instance, that the gift included ‘seventy-five percent of the Emily Dickinson poems.’ Who invented that, I wondered? Next, Emily’s papers ‘passed into the hands of her sister-in-law [Sue Dickinson],’ after Lavinia’s death. How was that?” Millicent knew, of course, about all the Dickinson papers and poems she retained. Though Walter tried to reassure her that what got reported in newspapers wasn’t entirely accurate, Millicent was not comforted. In addition, at the time that Montague’s gift was announced, Harvard announced the hiring of literary scholar Thomas H. Johnson to edit a “definitive” edition of Dickinson’s poetry. Johnson was quoted as saying, “We have no assurance that any of Emily Dickinson’s works now in print is an accurate transcription of her original writing.” For Millicent, who had already invested two decades trying to be as precise as possible about her own Dickinson transcriptions, and who was fiercely protective of Mabel’s reputation and work on the Dickinson transcriptions, there could not have been a more stinging slap in the face. Or a more public one. “I remembered the years and years I had spent on the poems contained in Bolts of Melody, verifying every single word and being as accurate as I knew how having been trained as a scholar in science and accurate to the seventh . . . decimal point—I carried over that accuracy into the editing of the poems.”13 Millicent began to realize how fraught her dealings with Harvard would become.
In fact, the announcement of Montague’s acquisition of the Dickinson papers and their subsequent gift to Harvard came about as the result of Alfred Leete Hampson’s illness and subsequent desperate need for money. He had resisted McCarthy’s attempts to broker a sale to Montague, but Montague became impatient, threatening that such tactics would ruin Hampson’s reputation. He dispatched legal emissaries to pressure Hampson further.14 When Hampson was taken to the hospital and placed in intensive care in late April of 1950, he finally conceded and signed a letter of agreement. In early May, William Jackson sent Montague a celebratory note with the heading “V-Emily Day.”
Jackson’s promise to unite the papers proved difficult to deliver. Millicent still believed, “it is obvious that all should be in the same place,” but by the spring of 1950, she was starting to doubt that this would ever truly happen. Both Harvard and the Library of Congress were still trying to procure her Dickinson papers. In another imaginary conversation in her journal, Millicent wrote about what she planned to tell Mr. Jackson when he came to call on her including her opinion that a very “competent” editor needed to be hired for the preparation of a new volume of Emily’s poetry. She planned to tell Jackson that she needed to retain the papers while she was working on her books, and of her underlying belief that Emily’s papers belonged not in Cambridge, but across the state, in Amherst. Rather than seeing it all as a business transaction, Millicent continued to view the situation as part of the ongoing tragedy spawned by the Mabel/Austin relationship. “It seems to me as if now is not the time . . . to go into the sordid story of Austin’s disillusionment and the reasons for it, and the effect on Bianchi, not to mention our family, as well as on Emily,” she wrote. “The virulence he [Jackson] encounters in the Hampsons is only a reflection of that of the real thing in the midst of which I grew up.”15 At this point, despite her beliefs about where the papers belonged and the offer from the Library of Congress, Millicent was still considering giving her papers to Harvard because more than anything, she wanted a full collection of Emily Dickinson’s works to be available for future scholarship. She never considered the idea of selling them. To Millicent, the idea of receiving cash for her collection was repugnant; to do so, she said, “would be inconsistent with my own unremunerated effort as well as with that of my mother . . . it was a labor of love.”16
Around the same time, in the early 1950s, Millicent agreed to let Thomas Johnson, the Harvard-anointed editor, come see the manuscripts she was holding. Millicent hoped that Johnson’s “variorum” edition of the poems (a volume containing different variants of the text) would also be the first to publish Emily’s poems in chronological order, knowing the limitations of arranging them thematically.
Johnson, who held a doctorate in American literature from Harvard, was best known for his work on colonial American literature, not the poetry of the Victorian era, or romantic or realism movements. But, in the name of scholarship, Millicent was willing to have Tom Johnson examine her manuscripts. In exchange for this gesture of good will, Millicent hoped and expected that Harvard would not interfere with her own work. She was still not ready to give up her collection to Harvard.
But after Jackson reported Millicent’s reluctance about giving up her manuscripts to Gilbert Montague, the distant Dickinson cousin decided that he needed to have a more deliberate hand in the negotiations. Montague began to pressure Harvard. Realizing that Millicent’s reasoning revolved around holding the original documents while she continued work on her books, Montague urged Harvard to issue an injunction against Harper. They should prevent the publication of Millicent’s next two books on the basis of claiming legal ownership of all Dickinson papers, regardless of who held them. This claim would be made with the rationale that all of Emily’s papers had been inherited by Lavinia, bequeathed to Mattie and then to Hampson. Even though Lavinia gave some of the manuscripts to Mabel, she claimed that Mabel did not have their copyright. Therefore, Harvard’s position would be that only the Dickinsons and then Hampson had ever legitimately held the copyright—and that when Harvard bought the papers from Hampson they also bought the rights. Montague boldly asserted that Harvard would claim the copyright and control over all past publications and all future manuscripts that drew from Emily’s letters or poems. If Harvard did not follow through on these demands, Montague threatened to sue them. This threat escalated and went on for years. Jackson explained Harvard’s position in a letter written to Amherst College president Charles Cole: “Bluntly speaking, we are being bludgeoned into it by threats of law suits from a benefactor, and apparently these are not idle threats.”17
Cole later wrote to Millicent that he felt her willingness to share Photostats of her Dickinson material with Harvard had been a tactical error: “Had you not made the material available to Johnson, I think they [Harvard] would have had to give you permission to publish your books so as to be able to go on with their variorum edition.” Elsewhere he wrote that Millicent had “thus lost her major bargaining point with Harvard.”18 But as Walter conveyed Millicent’s willingness to Jackson during a meeting in New York, he said that in return the Binghams were expecting that Harvard would “not interfere with my work which
was now approaching completion. . . . Mr. Jackson assured him that they would not interfere in any way.”19
To make certain of this, Walter went to Cass Canfield, the attorney for Harper, and asked him to get something in writing from Harvard. Canfield said he would write a letter to Harvard at once. Thus assured, Walter and Millicent went to spend the summer on Hog Island.
When they heard nothing from Harvard by the end of the summer of 1950, Millicent recalled, “somehow I had a feeling that all was not well; so I wrote to Harpers . . . asking to see what they had heard from Harvard—whether they had had the needed assurance. They replied saying that there had been no answer to Mr. Canfield’s letter written in June and they enclosed a copy of his letter.” Much to Millicent and Walter’s dismay, they realized that Canfield had not asked Harvard for an assurance that they would not interfere with Millicent’s books, only that they would grant her permission to see what was in the Dickinson collection they were acquiring from Hampson. Walter felt he had been remiss in not being more insistent or clearer with Canfield and waiting too long to follow up when they had heard nothing back from Harvard. “To the end of his life, Walter blamed himself for this.”20