by Julie Dobrow
Mabel sometimes donated artwork to raise money for charitable causes. She was once so moved after hearing a lecture about the plight of Native American children that she organized an art exhibition and raised funds for the Ramona School for Indian girls in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a school endowed by royalties from former Amherst resident, author and Dickinson friend Helen Hunt Jackson’s book focusing on a Native American heroine, Ramona. Mabel wrote in notes she took in March of 1886, “We trust that all will attend this exhibition . . . in the interest of the school for Indian girls,” and went on to discuss her realization that her artwork could be used to help raise awareness about a cause.9
It wasn’t Mabel’s actual involvement in civic activities that was truly noteworthy compared with her nineteenth-century female peers; it was her vision of it. For Mabel, civic engagement meant playing a guiding role. In a paper about Mabel’s contributions, Millicent stated, “Nowadays we should call it leadership—that quality by which any woman in the town who had anything to give was marshaled into line for service which was thenceforth rendered not grudgingly, under compulsion, but gladly, for the sake of the cause in question.”10 And Millicent was right—Mabel was always elected chair or president of every organization of which she was a part.
While her musical, artistic and civic ventures were quite productive during this period of time, it was perhaps in her writing that Mabel took the biggest creative and professional leap. And it was, perhaps, her ardent desire to be known and remembered as a writer that would compel her to associate herself closely with the genius of Emily Dickinson.
In September of 1883, Mabel wrote excitedly in her journal, “my really beloved story ‘Footprints’ was published in the New York Independent. And I had 25 dollars from it!”11 The story of two lovers’ discovery of each other, “Footprints” was something Mabel had started writing early in 1883, just months after her Rubicon moment. Though fiction, it was a tale that had great resonance for Mabel. Her protagonist, Dr. Henry Arnold, is clearly based on Austin: “he was past the first flush of his youth—youth which had brought him much pain, a good deal of endurance, many longings which were principally unfulfilled. . . . His life had been such that Nature had become more to him than father, mother or brothers.” The two main female characters, Lilian Dwight, “a stylish elegant girl” with a “rich contralto” voice, and Mildred, “the one person, the only person he knew, who had ever responded to his subtle thoughts, or to whom indeed it had ever seemed possible to express them,” could be read as an amalgam of herself. Henry identifies Mildred initially by the footprints she leaves on the beach, and the story concludes with Henry and Mildred’s footprints in the sand, side by side, together.12
Inspired by the publication of “Footprints,” Mabel became determined to refine her craft. Several years after the publication of this story, Mabel wrote in her journal after returning from a sleigh ride with Austin and reflecting on the lovely winter scene, “If I have any genius it then awakes and I could write, write freely, brilliantly, strongly, as long as it lasts. . . . I can remember well the delicious joy of creating, as I wrote, and my joy and belief to be unequalled for me by anything else in the world. I have a perfect passion all the time to write.”13
Indeed, of all her many talents, the one that Mabel found to be most compelling was her writing. She was thoughtful and reflective about the craft. “Expression of writing is absolutely easy and natural to me, and is always a delight . . . but I say, unconsciously to myself a good deal—there is plenty of time, you are ripening and mellowing and strengthening all the time,” she ruminated on one occasion in her journal. On another, she commented, “If I had the time there would be nearly every day recorded thought which I know would be worth refining and saving permanently.”14
In addition to her public writings, of course, Mabel was a devoted diarist and journal keeper. In the times when she, herself, was unable to maintain her diary (right after Millicent’s birth in 1880 and again in 1913 when she had a cerebral hemorrhage) Mabel prevailed upon David and Millicent to fill in for her and dictated to them what she wanted written. It was not only a sense of her own importance and the worth of recording the minutiae of her daily life for posterity, or even the cultural custom of so many nineteenth-century women to maintain a diary that inspired Mabel to write each day; Mabel knew that a writer needed to maintain discipline in writing. In 1888 she observed, “My love for writing in itself is immensely increased—every year makes it stronger.”15
Mabel also knew that an important part of the writing process is revision. This became critical in her work on Dickinson’s poems. She once wrote a story entitled “Stars and Garden,” which she described as something that had “lain so near my heart so long.” When she read it to Austin, he was impressed with it but felt that she needed to edit it and rewrite the ending, for “if it turned out as people say, badly, it would be more artistic and affective. Of that I was myself absolutely sure, but it rent my heartstrings to change it.”16 Mabel reworked the story several times, and after a series of rejections, finally published it in installments in the Home Magazine in 1900.17
Mabel also tried her hand at writing drama. In the summer of 1900 she drafted a play “based on some little paper-covered novel.”18 But like fiction writing, playwriting was never a modality in which she found any true success.
Mabel did experience more success in her nonfiction writing. Over the course of her lifetime she published more than two hundred articles on an astonishing array of topics that appeared in periodicals ranging from the children’s literary magazine St. Nicholas to the Century Magazine to Harper’s Magazine, and in newspapers from the local Amherst Record and Springfield Republican to national papers including the Boston Transcript and the New York Tribune. She had a regular job reviewing books for a number of magazines. She wrote or edited a dozen nonfiction books that were published. “I know I have things to say,” Mabel once reflected in her journal, “and I know I have the gift of expression—a ‘great power of observation and description,’ as dear Louisa Alcott said of my very girlish writings. But if I were to become sufficiently well-known to be asked for articles and stories, that sort of stimulus would be very sweet to me. I do long for a little real, tangible success. That is not the motive to me, for my writing is done from a love of the doing per se, but it is so beautiful to be appreciated!”19
Mabel began to realize a little tangible success from her writing after she went on an astronomical expedition to Japan with David in 1887. Mabel’s careful descriptions of the “exotic” things she saw and experienced found their way into a series of articles she wrote that was published in the Nation, entitled “The Eclipse Expedition to Japan.” She subsequently wrote and later published two other articles about this trip, “Ten Weeks in Japan,” which appeared in St. Nicholas and “Ascent of Mt. Fuji the Peerless,” which came out in the Century Magazine. The interest generated by these unusual travelogues that described things and people few Westerners had seen served to launch Mabel into the world of newspaper and magazine journalism. Mabel also began to learn to use some of David’s photographic equipment on this expedition, ensuring that not only would the journey be well documented with words but also with photos. Her connections to some of the leading editors of the day would prove useful in years to come as she publicized Emily Dickinson’s poetry with articles about it in newspapers and magazines.
It was on this trip to Japan that two other important facets of Mabel’s writing became apparent. The first was her ability to articulate her own role in some very unusual circumstances and bring this before the reading audience: a ride down a crowded Japanese street in Tokio [sic] in a jinrickisha, experiencing a strong earthquake, living in a castle atop a mountain awaiting the eclipse. A highlight of this trip was the ascent up Mt. Fuji. Mabel became the first Western woman to successfully make the climb. Her article about this trek, ostensibly cowritten with David, focused on the wonders of ascending this peak of over twelve thousand feet, the “mo
untain sickness” experienced, the Japanese pilgrims paying religious homage to the mountain, the sights and sounds along the climb. “Grandeur and majesty, with desolation and loneliness, unspeakable, form the crown of Fuji-San,” they concluded in this detailed, if often flowery description.20
The second facet of Mabel’s developing narrative style that became more apparent than ever on this expedition was her ability to spin events and present them in a more positive light than they probably deserved. Despite months of planning, shipping heavy equipment trans-pacifically and the arduous process to set it up atop a Japanese mountain, and traveling thousands of miles to get there, when the night of the eclipse came about in mid-August, the clouds closed in, obscuring the view. Privately Mabel observed in her diary, “The clearest day for weeks, until almost an hour before the eclipse. Then clouds arose in the mist and spread all over like the finger of . . . fate. . . . I am so sad for David beyond words. He bears it nobly.”21
But in the second of the series of articles she wrote for the Nation, Mabel stated, “Sixteen thousand miles of continent and ocean traversed for three wonderful minutes, and unremitting labor during every clear night, and on all days for whatever sort, all for that little time, which may or may not be cloudy, at its own sweet will. Such are the chances of an astronomer’s life, but glorious his compensation when nature is kind.”22 Of course nature had not been kind to David. It never would be. But in writing this article, Mabel demonstrated her ability to parlay the experience into something that helped to shape and advance her own career.
And yet, as Millicent was to observe many years later, the one thing for which Mabel most wished to be known and for which she would have given up all her other talents—her writing—was ultimately not to be her legacy. Mabel wrote to David in 1926, “I ought to have written the great American novel,” and a few years later opined, “I should like immensely to write something that would be really popular and would stay in the world for at least a few years.”23 Millicent stated in one of her “Reminiscences” that her mother “cared a great deal about writing and she wrote from the time she was a little child . . . she published little stories, but she never succeeded in doing the one thing that she wanted most to do and that was to write either a great novel or a great play. That she never did do.”24 As Longsworth notes, “Mabel had a clear enough eye for genius in writing to recognize ultimately that she herself didn’t possess it.”25
MABEL TITLED THIS POEM “LOST JOY.” THE IMAGE ON THE LEFT IS EMILY’S ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT, THE IMAGE ON THE RIGHT, MABEL’S HANDWRITTEN TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS POEM.
But Mabel certainly could recognize genius in writing. She had seen this immediately when Sue Dickinson shared some of her sister-in-law’s poems. It would ultimately not be as a writer, but as an editor of these poems, that Mabel would most lastingly leave her mark.
CHAPTER 5
LINGERING PURITANISM AND MILLICENT’S SENSIBILITIES (1884–1897)
“Am I really of their era rather than my own?”
In 1887, when Millicent was seven years old, her father taught her how to take and record the daily temperature each morning. In an interview seventy years later, Millicent stated, “I don’t know whether it was because he wanted the temperature, or . . . to teach me to be methodical and systematic from the very early days.”1 Whatever David’s intent, he instilled in his only child a habit she maintained for the rest of her life. It established early in Millicent’s life a pattern of work and personal practice—a desire to record the world around her—that was not only disciplined and systematic but also bordered on the obsessive. Recording and organizing her world ensured some kind of dependable foundation and control: a way of ordering a life that must have often felt in disarray.
As a child, Millicent compulsively kept lists. In addition to the records of daily temperatures, she kept inventories of the species of birds she saw, the books she read and the places she traveled. She believed that these habits were not only a way of recording the world around her but also “a more observable gauge of my industriousness.” Millicent’s childhood obsession with list making was certainly in accord with the general Victorian fascination with systems of order and control.2 Later in life this drive to systematically catalog the world around her would make Millicent feel kinship with Emily Dickinson, whose careful botanical observations and herbarium paralleled Millicent’s own lists and collections.
Like her mother, Millicent saved and organized letters, programs, calling cards, newspaper clippings, report cards, doodles, dried flowers, ribbons and other souvenirs in a series of scrapbooks that she began in childhood and continued through midlife. Some of Millicent’s scrapbooks are so stuffed that their leather bindings cracked long ago under the weight of their contents. She not only meticulously recorded her life but seemed to be gripped by a fanatical desire to preserve it. Later, this propensity to collect and save would cause personal angst as well as contribute to the debates surrounding Emily Dickinson’s papers.
Around the same time that she began recording the daily temperature Millicent began to keep a daily diary. By the time she was fifteen, Millicent was, like Mabel, writing daily in both a journal and a diary. In a series of notes for an autobiography she never got around to writing, Millicent recalled, “I began at the age of seven to write a daily diary. It became a habit. . . . The diary took on more and more the role of confessor, the only companion, as Emily Dickinson said her ‘lexicon’ was. It has served me well for long periods of time.”3
Sometimes, Millicent’s journals contained imaginary conversations with other people, at times going on for pages. Often dealing with objects of her affection, these imaginary dialogues were conversations Millicent wished for but didn’t dare have in real life. For instance, in 1896 she melodramatically wrote of her first real crush, “Millicent, I’ve noticed you so often walking down the street but never dared to do more than smile”; “Oh Alden, I, too, have only but dared to smile at you, though I have longed to talk to you and tell you so much that is in my heart.” Millicent continued to indulge in these types of imaginary dialogues in her journals as she grew up, with the conversations becoming ever more complex. In a 1911 dialogue, she constructed a conversation with another romantic object, whom she simply called “C”—possibly representing Carol Fleming, one of several women with whom Millicent might have had some kind of romance.
“C: I can’t understand you at all.”
“M: How, if you love and care, can you cease to care? Is love like a spigot you turn on and off? If you don’t care for me, then I’ll just have to put that behind me.”4
Late in life, Millicent mused, “What is the deepest undercurrent? What the surge that has driven me from first to last? When I was quite small, my dear grandfather said: ‘The trouble with Millicent is, she takes care.’ Maybe so. He was [a] wise man.”5 Millicent recalled that David had once said to her, “You live in your own world—apart.” She quipped, “Where else?”6
Where else, indeed? From the start, Millicent’s childhood was significantly different from those of her peers. Her worldview was colored by an inherited set of morals and values that indelibly influenced all of her personal relationships and made her different from other people in her life. She was acutely, painfully aware of this divide, as well as what she saw as the marked disparity between herself and her mother. In this isolation, Millicent was perhaps able to understand better than most how for Emily Dickinson, too, one’s inner life and poetic imaginings could become more real and meaningful than actual social interactions.
In notes for her autobiography, Millicent pondered “Am I really of their era rather than of my own? I wonder. My faults and virtues are certainly those of a Puritan, tightly controlled and inhibited by all sorts of critical judgments and moral anxieties.”7 For Millicent, much as she craved to be like others and to cultivate close friendships and romantic relationships, this Puritan mentality perpetually set her apart. She always felt as if she were living in the wrong century.
Many of Millicent’s early childhood memories and reflections on the seminal influences of her life are about her grandparents. As a child, Millicent lived as much with her grandparents as with her own parents, staying with them when Mabel and Austin began their romantic relationship and when Mabel and David traveled abroad on astronomical expeditions. In fact, she did not live in Amherst with her parents full time until she was eight, nor did she travel abroad with them until she was nineteen. This meant Millicent had extremely close relationships with her maternal grandparents, as well as with her great-grandmother, who lived with them until her death in August 1893. Millicent described the day she died as “the most indelible date of my childhood.”8 In her autobiographical notes, when Millicent mentions the “paramount influences of my childhood,” she names her grandparents and great-grandmother before her parents.
EBEN JENKS LOOMIS, CIRCA 1910; MARY ALDEN WILDER LOOMIS, 1879.
There is a lovely anecdote that opens a book Millicent wrote in 1913 as a tribute to her grandfather. She recounts how the previous summer she and Eben had been sitting in a car in Newport, Rhode Island, awaiting the return of a family friend. A girl walked past the car, glanced in, and then circled back. Through the open window, she said to Millicent, “Excuse me, but will you tell me that old gentleman’s name? He shows so much thought in his face.” Millicent wrote, “A mind so filled with fascinating facts, so clear in its understanding and interpretation of them, a spirit so exquisite in its trust and its power of direct beholding had quickened a mere passer-by. The poor girl asked his name. It was her way of getting a little nearer to the beautiful nature she perceived.”9 Millicent remembered Eben as having “a nature as open as the sunny meadow and as filled with light as the June sky.”10