After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  Despite this mandate, Millicent managed to get the last word. While the note preceding Emily Dickinson: A Revelation reads, “All writings of Emily Dickinson contained herein are published with the approval of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, who claim all the literary rights and copyrights therein,” the note contained within the preface of Emily Dickinson’s Home repeats that language but also contains another sentence. “But, I add, I think the claim is invalid and made without knowledge of what the writings are or from whom or why acquired.”38

  Jay Leyda, a filmmaker and literary historian working on his Emily Dickinson sourcebook, wrote to Millicent about what he called Harvard’s “evil impasse” in not allowing her books to be published. When they finally were in print, he commented, “What a bombshell you’re sending the world! And a lovely bombshell, too.”39

  Even though Millicent had intended Emily Dickinson: A Revelation, her book about the possible relationship between Emily and Judge Lord, to be the last of her four Dickinson books, Emily Dickinson’s Home, her book meant to contextualize Emily’s life, was taking longer to publish. Harper felt there had already been so much delay that they decided to publish the two books in the reverse order. Revelation was published in 1954, Home the following year. Though Millicent got some strong letters about these books (critic John Ciardi wrote her, “I have just finished reading Emily Dickinson’s Home . . . and I cannot put it down without telling you how impressive I found it in both humanity and scholarship” and author Jay Leyda wrote her that Emily Dickinson: A Revelation was a gift to the world because it delineated Emily’s “period of happiness, even though we sense it mostly through its conclusion. . . . But you were right to print these documents, and in exactly this way”),40 they were largely ignored by the press. That same year, Thomas Johnson’s much-anticipated variorum edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry came out, completely overshadowing Millicent’s works. Millicent sardonically noted in her diary that Harvard University Press didn’t “even have the courtesy” to send her a copy. When she procured one, she observed that the preface contained Harvard’s claim of “sole ownership of and sole right of possession in all the Dickinson manuscripts now in the possession of Mrs. Millicent Todd Bingham and all the literary rights and copyrights therein by virtue of Harvard’s purchase agreement in 1950 with Alfred Leete Hampson, heir of Emily Dickinson’s niece, Mrs. Martha Dickinson Bianchi.”

  “How can I express the disappointment, the mounting disillusionment, the sense of frustration and futility which built up to a climax in those words in the publisher’s preface to the variorum edition of the poems published in 1955?” she reflected a few years later. “Here is the very book which I had made possible, the implication was that I had obstructed the work of the Harvard editor when the opposite was the case . . . indeed, without my help and without my manuscripts the variorum edition of the poems could not have been possible. It seemed to me then and still seems to me . . . doubly incredible, in view of the fact that all my mother’s work, as well as my own, had been used in the preparation of this very book.”41

  Beaten down but not defeated, Millicent maintained in her private writings that she had continued to fulfill the “sacred trust” that was her possession of the Emily Dickinson materials she had been given by her mother, materials that had “survived uninjured through any vicissitudes, frequent changes of residence, transfers of one storage warehouse to another, Florida hurricanes and after my mother’s death in 1932, a wholesale burglary of our house in New York.” To Millicent, there was still great meaning in the papers she possessed. “As custodian of these precious documents my part is now finished. The collection has been preserved intact. To scholarship I have fulfilled my obligation as honestly and as carefully as I know how to.”42 At this point she knew she would never give the papers to Harvard. She was convinced, as she had been from the start, that she must send the papers back to Emily’s home.

  In early March 1956, Millicent wrote to Charles Cole, “It is hard to plead my own cause, and I am not in the habit of doing so. And I have tried in writing this letter not to be influenced by the grievous injury I have suffered, professional as well as personal, culminating in the gratuitous insult of Harvard’s published claims. If my gift to Amherst College is finally accepted, and the literary remains of Emily Dickinson are at last jointly owned by two distinguished institutions of learning, do you not think the time will have come, seventy years after her death, to stop talking about exclusive claims, to put an end to these prohibitive claims asserted by the last member of her family and still being exercised today by Harvard? Or are the wishes of Mrs. Bianchi to continue to dominate the field?”43

  By April of 1956, the Amherst College Board of Trustees voted to accept Millicent’s gift. In the initial agreement, Millicent gave Amherst all of her Emily Dickinson materials and her family archives. The copyrights to her books were reassigned to Amherst, and what became known as the “Todd Family materials” started to be shipped to the college, where they were stored in Morgan Hall “pending decisions about a permanent location.”

  The Dickinson poems were cataloged by Jay Leyda at the Folger Library and sent to Amherst in two batches, one in 1956 and one the following year. As part of the agreement, Amherst agreed to pay for Millicent to hire an assistant to help with the cataloging, and to pay the rent for a separate space in which sorting and organizing could take place. Millicent hired Gladys McKenzie to help with the tasks at hand. Gladys was a Swarthmore graduate, a pacifist, a Quaker, and had worked as an archivist for the Library of Congress. She had spent forty years working for the National Council for the Prevention of Wars. Bright, extremely well-organized and very independent minded, she was the perfect person to assist Millicent with the colossal task of going through the Todd family papers.

  Charles Cole had been dubious from the start about whether accepting the “Todd Family materials” would be as advantageous to Amherst as accepting some of Millicent’s other gifts. But in 1960, President Cole informed Millicent the college could not commit two or more rooms in a new building or library and “a separate building seemed even more impracticable.” Therefore, he went on, while the Amherst College Board of Trustees “would have been happy to do anything possible in the way of renovating . . . the room assigned as the Mabel and David Todd Room,” they wanted to “release” Millicent from the terms of her gift with regard to the family artifacts and family papers, in the case that she would not find this offer acceptable.44

  Of course, the real jewels among Millicent’s gifts, as far as Amherst was concerned, were the Dickinson manuscripts. But as might have been expected given the tortuous and protracted dealings of the preceding decade among several institutions, once Amherst finally had the Dickinson manuscripts in its possession, the controversies didn’t end.

  “I have never made any concealment of my belief that Amherst College was the logical donee to hold all the Emily Dickinson material,” Gilbert Montague wrote to Millicent in May of 1956. He disingenuously added it was to his “regret that this was contrary to the desire of Madame Bianchi and her heir.”45 Millicent was keenly aware of Montague’s many ties with Harvard, which seemed to belie his professed “belief” about where Emily’s materials belonged. Millicent also knew that her gift to Amherst was an end game. But there were other issues still to be resolved.

  “In 1956, having given all of the Dickinson manuscripts which came to me from my mother, as well as all of my copyrights, to Amherst College, I am no longer in a position to make decisions as to how they are handled, but I do retain the right to express an opinion,” Millicent wrote, “and the opinion is this—that when a trade edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson is penned it ought to be edited by a person of top caliber, a man of letters, a poet and critic as well as a person of integrity and high purpose.” By this time Millicent was convinced Thomas Johnson was not the man for such a job; she railed on him as “a compiler and not a very careful one at that.” Millicent fervently believed Am
herst had the right to help find an editor for such a volume. “This thing is bigger than a dispute between Amherst and Harvard over legal technicalities. It is a question of a correct text for the standard edition—the permanent form in which the poems of Emily Dickinson will be known from now on. It demands of the editor expertness of the highest order, no less.”46

  Johnson’s 1955 variorum edition of the poems compiled Emily Dickinson’s poems from all known manuscripts. He arranged them chronologically, according to his best efforts to date them based on Emily’s changing handwriting. The 1,775 poems (including both complete poems and poem fragments) in this volume were assigned numbers that are still often used to identify the poems.

  Millicent believed that “if Archibald MacLeish could be persuaded to undertake the job of editing, it would be a face-saver all around.” Beginning in about 1957, she and Charles Cole corresponded about whether there might be an “Amherst edition” of the poems, which Millicent believed would be “an inspiration” and which Cole believed was “not something to be entered into lightly, for I think it precludes the possibility of ever reaching an agreement with Harvard and I would much prefer to settle everything by agreement.” Millicent took it upon herself to correspond directly with MacLeish about this prospect: “Even more I hope that you will be the editor—the one to decide which version of controversial poems are to be included in a standard edition. It deserves no less.” But MacLeish demurred. “I am naturally very much pleased that such an idea should have occurred to you—pleased and honored,” he wrote to Millicent. “Whether or not I could accept the task satisfactorily is something you and the Harvard Press and Amherst College should think about carefully. I am not in any sense of the word a scholar.”47

  It’s not clear how seriously anyone at Amherst considered the idea of putting out another edition of the poems. But in 1960, Harvard decided to put out a new edition. When Harvard made this announcement, Amherst sought legal opinion about whether Millicent’s copyrights, which they now owned—including her copyright on Bolts of Melody and all the Dickinson poems in it—would be violated. In 1977, Charles Cole wrote that when he first heard that Harvard was considering putting out a new edition he was dismayed that “Houghton Mifflin was going ahead and would ignore Amherst’s copyrights relying on permission from Harvard.”48

  Charles Cole knew the prospect of legal action was something neither institution would undertake easily. But as he wrote to Millicent in 1959, “I think there is no way for Amherst to influence Harvard short of a lawsuit and I am in agreement with you that that is undesirable.”49 Cole wished to continue to pursue other ways of trying to influence Harvard, which included an implicit threat of legal action he probably had no intention of ever taking.

  The first attorney Amherst consulted couldn’t say definitively whether the statute of limitations to transfer literary rights to the poems from Lavinia to Mabel to Millicent had expired. Amherst went on to solicit opinions from several copyright lawyers, including Francis Plimpton (brother of Calvin, Cole’s successor as president of Amherst College), Philip Wittenberg and Eustace Seligman, an Amherst graduate and trustee of the college then considered to be the premier copyright attorney in the United States. Seligman’s opinion was that “it would be impossible to determine who had title to the words of Emily Dickinson without a court case. He said that if it went to court Amherst had a much better than even chance of winning and sort of indicated that he would enjoy handling our case.” Cole sent this opinion to Harvard’s president. “There was a long pause during which I know Harvard sought legal opinions too. My guess is that it was appalled by the thought that it mightn’t/didn’t have good title even to the material it had bought.”50

  In the years that followed, Cole suggested that there were a long series of negotiations between Amherst and Harvard. All along, he recalled, “Amherst took a high moral stand. We did not want money, but would want justice done to Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham for their arduous work in editing and publishing the poems. . . . Amherst also wanted recognition of the fact that publication of poems to which it held copyright was by its permissions.”51

  In 1960 incoming Amherst College president Calvin Plimpton and Harvard’s Nathan Pusey signed an agreement that stated that a future complete edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems should include both Harvard and Amherst in permissions, and Harvard agreed to “suggest to the editor of any future edition of the poems that they include suitable recognition of the contributions to scholarship made by Mrs. Bingham and Mrs. Todd.” Though not specifically spelled out in this agreement, there was, perhaps, a tacit understanding that were the agreement to be signed, neither institution would take formal legal action against the other. This followed Cole’s belief that “agreements” between educational institutions were vastly preferable to lawsuits. Harvard University’s Leslie Morris, curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, believes a subtext was “an agreement to disagree,” for not everything was defined in the agreement.52

  But perhaps “agreements” are also less enforceable. At the end of 1966, Plimpton wrote to Pusey complaining that recent books contained neither of the stipulations earlier agreed to. In January of 1967, Pusey responded to Plimpton that reprintings of the poems didn’t acknowledge Amherst but would in the future, and said that while Harvard couldn’t dictate to any editor what she or he should say about Millicent’s and Mabel’s contributions, “we are calling the matter now to the attention of the various editors of editions already published so that they will have the suggestion before them before any further reprintings are issued.” Plimpton reported back to Millicent later that year: “In President Pusey’s letter to me, he promised that they would take pains to make sure that any reprinting, as well as new publications, carried the same acknowledgement of Amherst’s permission and also they would make the most vigorous urging to make sure that your scholarship and that of your mother’s was included. . . . I think, however, in general they sound exceedingly contrite and I think things are back on the tracks again.”53

  Though Millicent wrote in her diary, “Amherst College prefers not to tangle with Harvard,” in fact at least two presidents of the college appear to have made a good faith effort to do just that. Charles Cole’s consistent correspondence with Millicent over several years demonstrates that he seems to have gone beyond thinking her a difficult person to deal with, and just humoring her, or talking about warblers to get her papers; he had a good deal of respect for her work and worked diligently to broker an agreement with Harvard that he believed was both fair and honorable. Calvin Plimpton, for his part, pursued this agreement, and went on record with his belief that Harvard had violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreement, and he tried to set it right.

  In 1957, Millicent found herself astonished by something she received in the mail. “On my return last night from New York I found your letter of January 30, informing me that the Trustees of Amherst College voted to confer upon me the Degree of Doctor of Letters at Commencement,” she wrote to Charles Cole. “This is not only a very great surprise, it is an equally great honor, which I accept with gratitude and with humility. Please express to them my deep appreciation of an honor which stamps with their approval my long crusade to free the work of Emily from the exclusive claims which in the past have hampered scholars in their study of her poetry. This honor will compensate for the long years of grueling work and frustration.”54

  The citation read at Amherst’s commencement that year noted Millicent’s achievements as a geographer and author of scholarly books and articles, and as a conservationist in establishing the Todd Wildlife Sanctuary on Hog Island. But then the citation stated:

  In more recent years you have changed your career and completed the unfinished work of your mother by deciphering, editing and publishing hundreds of hitherto unknown poems of Emily Dickinson; in three books based on careful research and a deep knowledge of this community you have portrayed the ambiance in which that poe
try was created. As recognition of Emily Dickinson has grown apace, it has brought with it an increased realization of the debt owed to your mother and to you, not only by scholars but all those whose minds are touched or whose hearts are quickened by the eternal and penetrating beauty of the lines written by America’s greatest poet here on Main Street in Amherst Town.55

  In November of 1960, Millicent wrote in her journal:

  It is curious that I have always felt that my mother’s bequests to me were not gifts but trusts. . . . Emily’s manuscripts? They were a trust, a sacred trust, to be returned as Colonel Higginson and as my mother hoped, to Amherst. But those were trusts not to me or to mother alone, but to those yet unborn who will care for an untouched wilderness . . . and the manuscripts must be placed where they will not only be safe, but revered. To have accepted money for either trust—a precious gift temporarily in my possession—would have been unthinkable—out of keeping with my attitude and endeavor and set of values.56

  And in this trust Millicent had succeeded.

  When the battles over where Emily Dickinson’s papers would reside were finally resolved in 1960, Millicent reflected about the toll it had all taken. “I have been trying to think what has motivated me all along,” she wrote.

  I have thought it was loyalty to my mother’s wishes, whether or not I agreed with her objectives. But I think it is rather the wish to rectify an injustice. It may be that I cannot change this drive until I am destroyed by it. . . . Had I given the Emily Dickinson manuscripts to the Library of Congress in 1945, as they wanted me to do, I should have been spared the past years of anguish—the righteous indignation—Walter would have been spared the disillusionment and suffering of the last months of his life . . . and my story, with a different ending from what, if I live, it will have now.57