by Julie Dobrow
Austin came with Mabel to Boston and spent several days with her prior to her departure. Mabel wrote in her journal that their parting did not fill them with sadness for they recognized that “it was the best thing for now. He and I understand each other fully and time and distance have no power over either of us.”57 Mabel, Caro and John departed for Ireland at the beginning of June 1885, waving from the ship to both David and Austin, who had accompanied her to the dock.
Before she sailed on the Pavonia, Mabel gave Austin a book to read in her absence. In her journal she had drafted the note, which accompanied this book: “And do you remember, my dearest, the drumming of the partridges in those spring woods? . . . We have heard it many times, dear, but that day was a holy spot in our lives. And I am going away, and here is this book for you to read—full of everything under the sun—but reaching at last the real peace and joy and unattestable fulfillment of my life in you, Austin; whom I love so that I am lifted solemnly to God by it—so that, as you said yesterday, neither of us can ever be lonesome again. That is over forever. Each has found his and her absolute ideal—living or dead, we are always mated to each other, and loneliness is past. Oh! Darling, darling!”58 And Austin’s farewell note to Mabel was equally effusive: “What in this hurry and excitement can I say for my last word my darling, but the old I love and I love you. We have learned what these mean, how much they hold for us, and that they hold more with each new day. Our separation is for comparatively short, and no separation in the future will be but temporary. . . . Whatever may come or go, we abide—and change not, each the others hope and joy, inspiration and strength.”59
On the journey across the Atlantic, Mabel reveled in the sights and the sensory delights of sailing. While others retreated to their cabins, seasick, she proudly wrote, “I quiver with ecstasy, and when the great waves completely darken the little fronts, striking the heavy glass with a noise like thunder, I feel a thrill about my heart like my earliest girlish joys which warms my whole being like mutual wine and champagne. The freedom of yesterday afternoon and evening I cannot describe.”60 In letters home to both David and Austin, Mabel noted that she was spending much time with the captain of the ship and crew who were impressed with her ability to stay above deck no matter what the conditions, and that she was known as “the life of the steamer.”
For the next three months, Mabel and the Andrews couple traveled throughout Ireland, Scotland, England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France. Mabel and Austin wrote each other frequently. Austin’s letters document that during this period, he and David saw each other very often, sometimes spending time planning the house that they would build for the Todds.
At the end of July 1885, Austin included along with his letter one that his sister Emily had written to Mabel. In this letter, Emily expressed her pleasure in Mabel’s friendship (“I trust you are homesick—That is the sweetest courtesy we pay an absent friend”), her appreciation for a painting Mabel had given her (“Your Hollyhocks endow the House, making Art’s inner Summer, never Treason to Nature’s”) and asked Mabel to “Touch Shakespeare for me.”61 Mabel was moved and delighted to have Austin’s sister acknowledge their mutual connection to great literature.
Though Molly and Eben certainly counted on the enforced separation when Mabel spent the summer in Europe to stem the flow of Mabel and Austin’s passion, it seemingly had the opposite effect. “I am getting on better than at first, bearing the separation more philosophically, but it is not easy, and I chafe under it,” Austin wrote to Mabel while she was in Europe. “I ought to have gone too, and if I had—and had had it in mind long enough to put all my matters clearly before my sisters—I doubt if we should have returned.” And Mabel responded, “Dear darling your letter of yesterday . . . was like wine to me. I have been a new creature ever since. . . . Home of my soul, to which I am coming most joyfully back. I shall not want to travel alone, very soon again. I love you.”62
When Mabel returned to the United States on September 13, David met her in Boston. The next day he returned to Amherst to teach, and Austin arrived to spend some time with Mabel before she went to Hampton, New Hampshire, with her mother, grandmother and Millicent. The dance between Mabel and her two men continued.
For the next decade, Mabel periodically indulged in lengthy journal entries in which she expounded on the injustices of Austin having to continue in a marriage to someone as wrong for him as Sue, of how she felt herself a “martyr,” of the bouts of unhappiness she had when, despite Austin’s frequent reassurances of his love for Mabel, he never saw fit to extricate himself from his marriage or to adequately protect her from Sue’s wrath.
Mabel lived with a constant sense of twoness. Her real life, she felt, was with Austin. But that was not how she really lived, and it made Mabel all the more bitter. She had constant reminders that their proximity to each other was only temporal, with events large and small demonstrating that though Austin told her she was the center of his life, she was in fact on its periphery. Mabel was constantly frustrated by her inability to share things or be spontaneous with Austin. She was reminded of her marginalized role by an unending parade of milestones they could not celebrate together, numerous separations and holidays spent apart.
“My soul [and I] are becoming very well acquainted of late,” she wrote in 1885. “I have a strange sort of life—it is not a bit like anybody else’s and it is often far unhappier, it is sometimes infinitely happier. . . . But not always can I live in the ideal. And then I suffer.”63
As the years of her relationship with Austin wore on, she periodically felt the need to leave town and escape. “It has been good for me to be here [away] this minute, to get out of the pain and endurance and the ruts in Amherst,” she wrote in her journal. “I live under a dead weight in Amherst. O! That my particular pain might never, never crush me again. I so dread a return of my 8 years of agony.”64
Mabel was even more specific in a letter to Austin, marking their seventh Thanksgiving apart: “That standing-aside-and-looking-on sort of feeling that I have always had used to hurt me and make me very lonely. I am used to it by now . . . truly pain has come to be so constant a state with me that I take it rather as a matter of course. . . . But I see the world slipping from me—I see it becoming daily more impossible for me to live in the little town which is yours. I see myself more and more alone. . . . I see power over all this lying idly in your hands, and you the only person able to cope with this terrible thing.”65 She rarely blamed Austin in this manner; if she ever thought that his inability to affect true change in his life was a weakness or fault, she never saw fit to commit this to paper. Never once did she write that Austin was too irresolute to leave his marriage; not once that he was too ambivalent.
On a dozen or more occasions in her journal and in letters, she hoped they would not have to wait for eternity to live together and be able to publicly avow their love while they were still on this earth. And there were moments during their thirteen-year relationship when it appeared things might change.
MABEL SAVED THIS SCRAP OF PAPER ON WHICH SHE WROTE HER NAME AS SHE TRULY WISHED IT COULD APPEAR.
Mabel sometimes addressed Austin in her letters as “my sweet husband.” In 1887, Austin gave Mabel an engagement and wedding ring. In one of her reflections on her childhood, Millicent recalled how mortified she was when her mother had taken off the wedding ring she’d received from David and wore instead the one she’d gotten from Austin to a function at Amherst College.
Then in 1888, Mabel and Austin attempted to conceive a child. They referred to this as “The Experiment.” Many of their letters between 1888 and 1890 refer to this obliquely. In sharp contrast to the relief she felt when a pregnancy scare with David turned out to be nothing, Mabel invested much hope in the idea that she and Austin could produce a child. In particular, she expressed disappointment when they failed to conceive. (From looking at the range of symbols Mabel used to document when she got her period and when she and Austin had sex, it is not a
t all clear that she understood any more about when ovulation occurred than she had when she accidentally conceived Millicent.) It’s hard to know what they thought they would have done if Mabel had become pregnant. Would David have claimed it as his child? Would they have banked on Austin’s reputation around Amherst to ensure that an illegitimate child would still be treated with respect because it was his? Did they think about or consider what Millicent’s reaction to such a sibling would be? Or Ned’s, or Mattie’s? Would this have been what finally made Austin decide that he could leave his marriage, leave his beloved Amherst and start over somewhere else? Polly Longsworth suggests that Austin’s trip through the Midwest and South to New Orleans in 1887 “may have been, at least in part, a scouting trip to see how life together in the West would work.”66 Mabel’s diaries and journals are certainly sprinkled with allusions such as “Austin and I are looking into life together a good deal.”
But it was not to be. The two never saw a successful conclusion to “The Experiment,” and they never attempted to leave Amherst for a new life elsewhere. Their two homes were separated by just a meadow, but their lives remained separated by so much more.
It was perhaps in this way that Mabel came to understand Emily’s separation from the world and her need to express emotions and insights through words on a page. As Emily wrote in a poem Mabel would later title “Lost Joy”:
I had a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till sudden I perceived it stir,—
It grew as I pursued,
Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.67
No doubt the joy lost because of the strains coming from her relationship with Austin made Mabel receptive to poetic messages like these. Without experiencing this intense period of the greatest love, the greatest sadness and the greatest exclusion, it is unlikely that Mabel would have had the emotional depth to understand the poet and her poetry in quite the same way. It was also this dichotomy between the joy and pain of Mabel’s relationship with Austin that set the stage for the tumult to come.
CHAPTER 4
DICKINSONIAN INSPIRATION: MABEL’S CREATIVE OUTPUT (1883–1893)
“Strange cadences” and “the gift of expression”
“27! I! It seems impossible in most things. I feel like a child—in fact it always seems true that I am 18 and I suppose I act so,” wrote Mabel in her journal in 1883.1 Though Mabel expressed similar sentiments on her birthday for the next several years, in truth both her personal and professional lives were taking on a new character. Her relationship with Austin continued to deepen and mature at the same time as her professional aspirations and accomplishments began to soar. It was a period of enormous productivity and creativity for her. During the next decade of her life, Mabel became an even more sought-after musician in the Amherst area, she continued to refine her painting and she began to publish prolifically (in this period she had several dozen articles appear in print and published the first five books that she either wrote or edited). It was during this decade that Mabel launched many of her civic endeavors, several of which she believed aligned her more closely with the Dickinson family. Mabel began to travel widely and started to write and lecture about her adventures. The development of her art, music and writing as well as the perspective that her international travels gave her, positioned Mabel to achieve what was arguably her most significant professional accomplishment—the editing and publication of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
As she would later write in her preface to the second volume of Emily’s poetry, “Like impressionist pictures, or Wagner’s rugged music, the very absence of conventional form challenges attention. In Emily Dickinson’s exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of word might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music.”2 Indeed, Mabel’s own work as a musician, artist and writer, and her exposure to non-Western forms of artistic expression, prepared her for and would govern and deepen her understanding of Emily’s “strange cadences.”
Mabel recognized that while she had many innate artistic talents, these talents were finite. Even in her early twenties, she knew her lasting gift to the world might not be in any one of the areas she cultivated. In her journal she predicted she would look back on her life and see “the flower pictures I painted, the sonatas I played or the writing I did . . . all these seemed mere loopholes.”3 Her talents would, in fact, prepare her for her most lasting contribution—just not in the ways she originally envisioned.
Mabel always took her music seriously. She practiced religiously and performed widely. Even as an adult Mabel strove to continue learning. Not content only to master the performance of new repertoire, Mabel truly wanted to understand more about the structure of the music she was learning. During the winter of 1883 she took a correspondence course in harmony with one of her former professors. And in 1890, she took vocal lessons from famed Italian singing teacher and composer Augusto Rotoli at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Mabel also was an avid consumer of music. The scrapbooks she kept throughout her life are filled with programs of concerts she attended, including performances by legendary musicians such as pianist Arthur Rubinstein and opera singer Enrico Caruso. Though she enjoyed playing Bach and Beethoven, the music that seemed to resonate most with Mabel was the complexly textured and richly orchestrated Romantic music being written in the late nineteenth century. In a journal entry Mabel described her rapturous reaction to a cello concerto by another contemporary Romantic composer, Robert Volkmann: “[the piece] affected me most powerfully. . . . Lo, I waited, and as the tears fell fast and my heart throbbed with longing, I saw myself—blindly but with a passionate truth seeking for peace and right and surety through the one struggle of my life. . . . I felt my soul in those sorry, trembling chords which tried so hard to find this one solitary note of joy and peace and content.”4
But it was perhaps her interest in non-Western music that would later prove to make Mabel receptive to the nontraditional rhythms of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In her travels around the world on eclipse expeditions with David, Mabel heard and fell in love with music as diverse as Javanese gamelan, Japanese min’yō folk music and traditional Hausa music in Libya. Whenever Mabel traveled abroad, she tried to capture her observations in words, in sketches and in passages of music she wrote out in her journal. “A strange, hypnotic quality characterized the native music of Tripoli,” she wrote. “There is more in it than mere sound. I have been myself transported bodily into the depths of Sahara by these monotonously chanted tales, I have felt the free winds blow in my face as the racing dromedary bore me on to strange scenes over moonlit sands.”5
In addition to her music, Mabel continued to take her art very seriously. From the time she arrived in Amherst throughout the next decade, Mabel spent a significant amount of her time painting and worked hard to refine her art. She maintained her relationship with Martin Johnson Heade and periodically studied with him until his death in 1904. Eager to extend her artwork beyond canvas, Mabel learned to paint screens and clothing and took china-painting lessons in 1890. She began to sell some of her art and gave painting lessons as a means of bringing in additional family revenue.
Mabel’s favorite subjects were those found in nature—the same source for many of Emily Dickinson’s powerful metaphors. Her painting of monarch butterflies on milkweed was selected by famed nineteenth-century entomologist Samuel Scudder to be the cover illustration for his classic twelve-volume study of butterflies, published in 1888. Just as Emily Dickinson would masterfully capture a minute bit of nature in words, Mabel attempted to do so in art, though she was never fully satisfied with her efforts. (Years later, in 1965, Millicent donated about sixty of her mother’s flower paintings to what was at the time known as the Hunt Botanical Collection at Carnegie Mellon U
niversity. The curator described the collection as “evocative of the Victorian age, but, for the most part, mercifully free from sentimentality.” That said, Carnegie Mellon ultimately concurred with Mabel’s own assessment of her paintings: they deaccessioned them in 1986.)6 But Mabel clearly felt her paintings of flowers were worthy efforts because she gave one of them to Emily.
The years of 1883–1894 were also years when Mabel’s relationship with Austin Dickinson inspired her to become more deeply involved with Amherst’s civic life. Austin, of course, was at the epicenter of the town in which he’d grown up. He had a hand in everything in Amherst, from its infrastructure to its aesthetics.7 For her part, Mabel’s civic activities ranged from the organization and leadership of local Amherst clubs and organizations to fund-raising for social causes to participation on national boards. She would later use her platforms as a writer and public speaker to promote some of her civic work, and she often utilized her talents as an artist and musician to extend the reach of her civic endeavors.
In 1893, Mabel started to work with others to found the Amherst Woman’s Club and also the Amherst Historical Society, which officially began in 1899. In 1894, Mabel helped to start the Mary Mattoon chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Amherst. She presided over the group for years, and served as regent to the national board of the DAR until 1903. She was also instrumental in the founding of organizations outside of Amherst—for example, a conversation with author May Alden Ward and newspaperwoman Helen Winslow at a tea Mabel hosted in her home led to the formation of the Boston Authors Club (BAC), an organization that honors books and authors with Boston-area ties. Mabel was one of the original officers of the BAC.
Mabel was, in her own way, also involved in issues of racial equality. She was proud of her grandparents’ involvement with the abolitionist movement in Concord, Massachusetts, and referred to it frequently in her journals. Millicent told a story in her 1960 “Reminiscence” of how, in about 1892, Mabel had discovered that “when two Negro boys invited their guests to Commencement,” the “Southern boys refused to go to the promenade if the Negro couples were permitted to attend. Having heard this, my mother invited them as our houseguests . . . along with Katherine Garrison, granddaughter of William Lloyd Garrison—and had a reception” for them.8