by Julie Dobrow
Millicent donated two portraits of Eben to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery collection. Both were painted by Edwin Burrage Child in 1910. The first depicts a kindly looking man with shoulder-length white hair and a full beard. He is dressed in an immaculate white suit, almost like the famous photographs of Mark Twain, and he sits before a full bookshelf. In the other portrait, Eben appears slightly rumpled, tired, his face worn by the years and by long hours spent outdoors. He holds a thick book in which the fingers of his right hand are marking a place about two-thirds through. The artist seems to have caught Eben midchapter.
Though his own formal education was limited, Eben was by inclination a scientist and a naturalist. In her tribute, Millicent referred to Eben as “a child of Nature. He was part of the great outdoors; his brilliant eyes always alert, his fine nostrils vibrating to that other sense which we sometimes envy wild animals, and his ears, Indian-like, adjusted to the significance of a cracking twig or other slight wood noise.”11 Eben’s own observations were so acute that Asa Gray, the most noted nineteenth-century botanist, and naturalist/biologist Charles Darwin lauded his descriptions of an unfolding fern frond.12 Millicent spent a great deal of time with her grandfather, learning to observe and to systematically record her observations of nature. She recalled, “He inculcated in me at that age a love of nature and love of the out of doors and he taught me the common birds from the time I was so little that I don’t remember.”13
Millicent spent a number of summers in her early childhood with her grandparents in Hampton, New Hampshire. In a 1959 interview she recalled how Eben took her for long walks in the salt marshes adjacent to the beaches and taught her to identify migrating shore birds. Millicent remembered once hearing a man announce that he wished to have sandpiper pie for lunch, going out and shooting a “bag full of birds,” but selecting only two for his meal. Millicent was so horrified and disgusted that she reflected, “I think this turned me into a conservationist at the age of six.”14
In addition to giving his granddaughter an appreciation for nature and inspiring in her a lifelong belief in the need to preserve the natural world, Eben also encouraged her to become an avid reader. Millicent stated that even well into his eighth decade, Eben spent several hours a day devouring books. Millicent was amazed by his ability to recite arcane knowledge from a variety of sources. From him, Millicent picked up a love of reading about natural history, a genre that she preferred to any other.
But it was perhaps her grandfather’s pairing of a scientific mind with a poetic soul that affected Millicent most profoundly. “He was more and more a poet throughout his life, an artist in his attitude toward science and toward life. This combination was his intellectual power; the scientist perfecting his observations by the poet’s vision, the poet resting in his flights of fancy upon a carefully trained scientific habit of thought. He was supported in each realm by his love of the other.”15
Millicent shared Eben’s love of nature and poetry with her mother, an important common thread despite their contrasting personalities. It also provided them both with insights about how observing nature could open up new insights. This would help them understand and relate to Dickinson’s enigmatic poetry, so much of which employs nature’s imagery.
So close was Millicent’s relationship with her grandfather that in one of her “Reminiscences” she wrote poignantly, “The last word, the night before he died, as I sat beside his bed and said, ‘Grandpa, I love you,’ which was hard for me to say even to him whom I loved best. The last word he whispered was ‘And I love you.’”16
Millicent’s relationship with her grandmother Molly was perhaps less close than her relationship with Eben, but no less influential. Molly instilled in her granddaughter the importance of their shared matrilineal line. “I think my Grandmother Loomis was more responsible for what I turned out to be than any other one person,” Millicent reflected in 1959. “She was a Puritan of the Puritans. She was very proud of her descent from John Alden. She brought me up to think that nothing that I could ever do as long as I lived would begin to measure up with what had gone before me. . . . She was . . . very conscientious with all of the virtues which the Puritans held [and which] she hoped to see in me. . . . Her standards were my standards.”17 Molly continually impressed upon Millicent the importance of being a “Wilder woman,” and the principles incumbent to this heritage. Discipline, subordination of personal desire and self-denial were some of the Puritan virtues Millicent believed her grandmother passed along to her. In a letter written to Millicent in 1897, Molly stated, “The heroic spirit is always strong and clearly defined and keeps us alive and even happy in spite of circumstances.”18
The photographs of Molly, which Millicent lovingly preserved, show a woman with a severe profile, a sharp aquiline nose, and hair meticulously braided and arranged atop her head. She never smiles and never looks right at the camera; indeed, most of the photos depict her only in profile.
In 1933, Millicent recalled that Molly was “the embodiment of the Moral law. A descendent of two generations of Puritan divines, she upheld the Right, which sometimes became the Intolerant, against all compromise.” Millicent recalled her grandmother’s extreme Puritan parsimony: “She worked for my future betterment, she saved for me out of her meager store, even walking to save a carfare so that its equivalent might be added to my savings bank account.”19 This emphasis on frugality and living a lifestyle that was thriftier than one’s means necessitated was something Millicent grew to embrace and practice throughout her life.
Inspired by her grandmother, Millicent’s emerging beliefs about faith tended to be dualistic. Beginning in childhood but continuing throughout her entire life, Millicent saw the world in stark black and white contrast. In a paper she wrote in 1945 titled “The New England Way,” Millicent reflected that the Puritan influence was “firm as the granite which moulds the surface features of a New England scene were the convictions of its people a hundred years ago.”20
In 1905, Millicent expounded on the development of her faith in one of her “Reminiscences”: “the evolution of prayer is one of the most characteristic of a person’s most intimate trains of thought.” Her own prayers, thoughtfully and meticulously recorded, reveal her developing personal and professional aspirations, as well as the strict moral standards she expected from herself and others.
In later years, Millicent added prayers that reflected on her desires and fears about relationships and a career, such as “do no sins”; “give me a noble purpose in life”; or “may I have a noble, true gentleman for a husband.” One of the prayers that Millicent added in was to “love Mamma more dearly.”21
As an adult Millicent became acutely aware of how her prayers reflected her hopes, dreams and concerns—especially as they related to her highly ambivalent feelings about her mother. “I had a solemn feeling that I should act according to the commandment and love Mamma more than anything in heaven above or by the earth below,” she reflected in 1905. “Therefore, this sincere prayer that I might love her more dearly than I did.” Millicent recognized this prayer might have been “a strange request for a child,” reflecting a “gnawing desire that I could become more Christian so that I could make my Mother more so. I can’t remember when I hadn’t the intuition as a little child that Mamma having no faith, lacked something which perhaps I could sometime give her.”22
As a young girl Millicent was also passionate about music and writing. Mabel was convinced from early in Millicent’s life that she had enormous musical talent and strove to teach her little girl piano from the moment she could lay hands on the keyboard. But like so many children, Millicent rebelled. In a 1959 interview, Millicent recalled being so appalled at the idea of “being taught by my mother that I felt as if I would scream but, of course, I never did . . . she decided and I concurred, that I better try something else than the piano. What a relief! So we tried the violin. She could not instruct me.”23
Nonetheless, Millicent remai
ned a gifted and agile musician. She became an excellent violinist and singer and, though she had railed against it, played the piano quite well. But she gave them all up for three principal reasons. First, long weeks of traveling internationally with her parents in her late teens and early twenties meant no time for serious practicing—and being a perfectionist, Millicent knew that this would render attaining musical excellence impossible.
MILLICENT, AGE 10. SHE CHOSE TO LEARN THE VIOLIN BECAUSE IT WAS AN INSTRUMENT HER MOTHER COULDN’T TEACH HER.
Second, Millicent was both blessed and cursed to have perfect pitch. In some ways, this made it easy for her to become a good musician. But in other ways, it meant that even the slightest flaw in intonation or instruments not being perfectly tuned to one another made playing music almost unbearable for her: “the tones I produced fell so far short of what I demanded of myself that I got only agony out of it.”24 She was inordinately sensitive to issues of pitch even outside of music: dogs barking or car horns blaring made her exceedingly uncomfortable and anxious throughout her life.
Finally, Millicent felt the need to differentiate herself from Mabel. “My mother, of course, was practicing all the time. . . . She was very outgoing. She was not a scholar. She was just a person of enormous ability in anything she wanted to do, and she did it without the slightest feeling of effort.”25 For Mabel, music brought her together with other people; for Millicent, music set her apart. Though Millicent was always a devoted consumer of music and avid concertgoer who retained programs of every concert she attended, her own musicianship all but ended as a young adult.
Writing also became an important form of self-expression, relief and companionship for Millicent early in life. “I sometimes wonder why I want to write things down? Is it the desire to get rid of a thought in order to have the individual free for a succeeding one? Or is it to preserve what unpremeditated moments my experience may have had. It relieves emotional pressure. . . . A unique life, strange and interesting though it may seem, is not as useful as that which can express the joys of little things.”26 Millicent, ever analytical, was certainly correct that her writing served many purposes. And because she considered it important, she saved it. All of it.
In addition to her diaries and journals, Millicent also sought to express herself through various forms of creative writing. When she was about nine years old, Millicent wrote about a new invention she called the “Snoring Extinguisher.” Her description reveals something of the kind of child she was—thoughtful, creative and yet reticent to engage directly with people. “I thought of this queer thing last summer, for someone in the hotel with me used to wake me up at night with snoring,” she explained. “It is composed of a flexible tube with an open end. The other end is a round, bowl shaped thing, which fits onto the mouth, and is fastened on by an elastic, which goes around the head. . . . The end . . . fits onto the ear, and when a person snores the sound will go through the tube and into the ear. So the sound will wake the person up, and then he will stop snoring.”27
Periodically in later life, Millicent allowed herself to indulge in other forms of creative writing, mostly limericks or poems. But for the most part, once she left childhood, she left this vehicle for creativity and self-expression behind. However, these early roots would serve her well in editing the Dickinson poetry that would otherwise have been lost to the world. Her love of writing and early inclination to use language creatively, combined with a reclusive nature she shared with Dickinson, made her uniquely prepared to edit the poet’s work with remarkable insight. Millicent’s three books about Emily’s life would later exemplify the ways in which Millicent understood the poet; in Bolts of Melody, the heretofore unpublished Dickinson poems, Millicent would purposively select only words Emily herself had offered as possibilities for unfinished poems, even if these selections were unusual.
The normal developmental urge most children have to start differentiating themselves from their parents was perhaps especially pronounced in Millicent. Just as she refused to play the piano because her mother was such a gifted pianist, she gave up writing any type of fiction because she knew that this was something that Mabel herself aspired to do. Even though her fledgling childish efforts had shown creative promise, Millicent felt the need to pursue other paths.
Another reason Millicent might have abandoned creative writing was that her formal education encouraged more structured and analytical means of expression. During the first few years of her life, her parents and grandparents homeschooled Millicent. By her own reporting, she could read independently by age four and learned about nature and the scientific method from her father and grandfather at an early age.
Millicent began attending “a school for young ladies” in Amherst when she was eleven. She attended this school for six years, during which time she studied writing, literature, mathematics, Latin, French and deportment. An excellent student, her monthly report cards (of which she saved every one) show that she shone particularly brightly in languages—and always received a perfect “100” in deportment. Years later Millicent recalled one of her greatest drives was that “[I] liked to be better than anybody else in school.”28 Indeed, her drive to excel in academics became a common theme of Millicent’s life and she berated herself for her inability to achieve perfection in all things, obsessing about it in countless journal entries throughout her life.
Mary Stearns, the widowed daughter-in-law of a former Amherst College president and founder of the school Millicent attended, proved to be not only an influential teacher for Millicent but also enormously important in the development of her outlook on the world. Writing in 1963 about the people who most influenced her life, Millicent stated, “Mrs. Stearns, generous and understanding, yet uncompromising on moral standards and conduct. She reinforced Grandma Loomis’ attitude which became my own.”29 So profound was Mary Stearns’s influence on Millicent that after Stearns’s death in 1905, Millicent wrote a book in tribute.
As much as Millicent got out of her education at Mrs. Stearns’s school, Mabel and David felt that their daughter was still not quite prepared for the rigors of a college education. They arranged to have Miss Heloise Edwina Hersey, a well-known women’s educator and Vassar graduate, test Millicent’s preparedness. In her 1901 book To Girls: A Budget of Letters, Hersey wrote, “Education, like religion, we may say reverently, is to be known by its fruits.” She went on to extrapolate about the elements that must comprise a good and fulfilling education for women which she incorporated into the mission of her school: discipline, a sense of proportion and a way of “vitalysing [sic] the process.”30 This educational philosophy of preparing women not only for a liberal arts education but also for finding concrete ways to apply it, became influential for Millicent throughout her life.
When Miss Hersey determined that Millicent’s education had been “very hit or miss—absolutely nothing systematic in it whatever,” Millicent spent a year in Boston filling in the gaps in her education “to get me into shape before I presented myself to the Vassar authorities.”31 With the supplementary training she received at Miss Hersey’s school, Millicent was able to matriculate at Vassar without taking any additional examinations. Millicent parlayed her education at Vassar in French literature and language skills into a number of real-world uses; her subsequent decision to pursue graduate degrees in geology and geography was similarly not just a quest for knowledge but a quest for expertise that could have a number of practical applications.
A solemn child who spent more time in her formative years with her grandparents than with her peers, Millicent would observe the world but not question it. Looking back on her life in her eighty-third year, she suggested her early life led her to “an acceptance of a state of mystification, bathing in impenetrable mystery, my natural state, and it means—silence. This may have been what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote to my mother, referring to ‘the quaint little girl with the deep eyes, every day more fathomless.’”32 Millicent certainly believed that the bond she
felt with the poet emanated from whatever brief meeting might have occurred in the halls of The Homestead—that somehow, Emily managed to see into young Millicent’s eyes, divined her nature and perfectly encapsulated it in a dozen words, as sparse and as insightful as one of her poems.
Millicent believed that her parents and her grandparents kept her in a bubble. “My mother kept me over-protected. There was no mention of anything important in childhood. The main idea was to shield me, never any arguing in my presence. Result, I lived in a world of my own. My thoughts and feelings were entirely suppressed.” When she looked back on her youth and adolescence, Millicent felt strongly that this overprotection adversely affected the development of her social interactions. “They kept everything from me, or thought they did. They never spoke of Dickinson . . . or the fact that Grandma had cancer, or that it would be fatal.”33
For these reasons, it’s not surprising that as Millicent’s girlhood yielded to adolescence, her romantic attachments were characterized by great reticence and self-doubt. Through her father’s teaching at Amherst College and her mother’s socializing with David’s students, Millicent was exposed to a revolving door of bright and eligible young men. Her diaries and journals reveal that she did develop crushes on a number of Amherst students, but she never acted on her feelings. “Boys were as remote from me as a Japanese Buddha,” she recalled. “They were a race apart; but I could worship from afar.”34