by Julie Dobrow
One young man, in particular, caught Millicent’s eye. Alden Hyde Clark grew up in Amherst before moving to New York when his father, renowned economist John Bates Clark, accepted a professorship at Columbia. Alden returned to Amherst to attend college. As a teenager, Millicent was smitten with “the supreme object of my hero-worship.” Alden was the first person with whom Millicent carried on lengthy imaginary conversations in her journals. Though it appears that Millicent mostly admired Alden from afar and did little or nothing to engage with him, she carried her torch for him for many years. Still stewing about it at age eighty-three, Millicent wrote of her love for Alden: “from whom I could not expect more than a smile in passing. . . . And yet he occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else—any other boy.”35 Ironically, later in her life Millicent would turn her affections to Alden’s younger brother, John Maurice Clark, who would also spurn her. But for the duration of her life, Millicent often thought of Alden Clark. He was her first unrequited love.
Even as a young child, Millicent had complicated feelings about her mother. On the one hand, she dutifully loved and admired many things about Mabel, felt incredibly protective of her and devoted to her. But on the other, Millicent found much about her mother questionable, perhaps in part because Mabel so often left Millicent with her grandparents or great-grandmother, and partially because of her own unyielding Puritan values.
Looking back on her childhood many decades later, Millicent reflected that, like most children growing into adolescence, she simply wanted to be like everyone else, to fit in. But Millicent’s parents were markedly different—from the way they decorated their home to the ways in which they behaved. “Other people’s fathers stayed at home, indulging in no outside activities,” Millicent recalled. “My father was perpetually travelling. Each expedition to a foreign country resulted in a welter of heathenish objects which we housed on the return.” And as for her mother, while Mabel painted, played music, had a public speaking career and wrote well, “She indulged herself in doing them. Of course I did not approve. Other people’s mothers did not do that sort of thing. They were hausfraus. They stayed at home and they were cooks and my mother never went near the kitchen.”36
Millicent’s mother was also beautiful, charming and vivacious—and she knew how to use all of these gifts to her advantage. Young Millicent was in awe of her mother’s charms, but began to resent them as she began to realize that she herself lacked the same charisma. “She was extremely pretty and she had great allure and I didn’t approve in the least, because I felt people should earn what they had not just by looking at a person. . . . I felt it was a graft of the worst variety.” Millicent was horrified when “once I opened my mother’s bureau drawer . . . and I found a little pot of rouge! Well, I can’t tell you what a horrible shock it was to me to think that anybody would disguise anything that they were by nature. It was simply so dishonest that I could not tolerate it and I really felt very disapproving of my mother.”37 Millicent was equally disapproving of her mother’s proclivity for wearing fashionable clothes and high heels.
As Millicent grew into adolescence, Mabel would urge her daughter to go out and “have fun.” Often Mabel would take Millicent along with her to Amherst College dances. But Millicent hated going to cotillions because it was her mother who was the life of the party, her mother whose dance card was always quickly filled by eager young college boys and her mother who would dance until dawn. Millicent sat on the side, watching. “Mamma talked and held people better than I did. She danced better than I did. The boys at a dance preferred to dance with her than with me. In a word, there just wasn’t any use in trying to compete. And I never did. Also I never thought about it—it was just one of those things one accepts like the fact of one’s parentship.”38
Years later, Millicent pondered what her life and character would have been like if she been able to elicit male attention the way her mother did. Mabel, she wrote, had all the qualities that drew men to her “like flies on sticky fly paper.” Millicent wondered if she, too, had been able to attract people as her mother had, might this have changed “my point of view . . . not to mention my technique of living?” Yet for Millicent, these differences represented a huge gulf between herself and Mabel. “Unthinkable! But such was my mother. How stupid to have ever imagined that I could understand her, or her me. We inhabited—except for our industriousness—a different world.”39
Indeed, Millicent grew up seeing both of her parents perpetually engaged with an enormous number of ventures. Millicent recalled in 1958, “I think this is the most characteristic thing about my mother—that with her beauty and with her charm—she was [still] a very hard worker. I never saw her sit down without a book in her lap.” She also recollected how her parents were always beginning the next project before the current one was done: “It was just a whirl of work in every room in our house. There was a room devoted to this or that or the other subject.”40 Millicent believed her many lists and scrapbooks were some measure and record of how she had spent her time. She believed she had inherited the Puritanical “idle-hands-do-the-Devil’s-work” emphasis on perpetual labor—and on product rather than process.
Millicent felt that for her mother, “Everything was easy! She was complimented and praised and admired without trying. . . . If one accomplishment didn’t fit an occasion, there was always another to fall back on.”41 Millicent, on the other hand, though talented in many areas, worked very hard for everything she achieved and envied Mabel’s ability to take pleasure from her talents.
Millicent also came to resent a certain affected performance-like quality to Mabel’s everyday interactions. “Walking along the street together in silence, someone approaches. My mother begins to talk to me in an interested manner, but without any significance in her remarks. I cannot remember the time when I did not know that it was for the sake of the effect on the passer-by. And how I hated it! She worked hard over her music, her singing and playing. But when she performed before people it was the effect which mattered. . . . I only knew that she was different with an audience, even with an audience of one, not a member of her family. And I writhed against her showing off.”42
Although at various times in her adult life Millicent would profess that she knew nothing of the relationship between Mabel and Austin, it’s very clear that she did. Millicent’s diaries and journals from childhood note “Mr. Dickinson’s” visits to her home and carriage rides she took with her mother and “Mr. Dickinson,” and make occasional mention of other members of the Dickinson family.
In her “Reminiscences” from 1927, Millicent remembered the time that Austin Dickinson spent in her home, how austere and aristocratic he seemed to her, how he was the “terrible center of the universe, though why he was such I could not have said.” She recalled having watched Austin and her mother walk through a meadow one day, and another day, wrote of a ride she and Mabel had taken with him: “I was sitting between Mamma and Mr. Dickinson. I felt them lean together behind me. What transpired I do not know. I could have been borne rigid to a burning pyre before I would have turned my eyes. . . . Unaware they thought me!” Later that year she recalled, “I began at so early an age to suffer within myself, because of the ever-growing weight of mystifying complexities which surrounded me as in a mesh, that I began also at an early age to be oblivious to usually accepted sources of annoyance and legitimate excuses for fear.”43
In a 1959 interview Millicent said, “Mr. Dickinson was a very magnificent looking man. . . . I never addressed him and he never said anything to me that I can remember except ‘Hello Child.’. . . He was a presence—an omnipresence I may say—and a constant visitor every day at our house.”44
That wasn’t all Millicent remembered seeing or thinking about during her early years. “I remember a reception at the President’s house—it must have been in the ’90s—when I saw her left hand bare and her right with the engagement and wedding rings which Mr. Dickinson had given her. . . . I felt sickened by such a sens
e of shame, such a chaotic, profound, devastating, nauseating emotion, all the more corroding because it could not be expressed, either in words or even to my own mind. . . . I knew without knowing for I had not been told, and never knew what the rings were actually a symbol of.”45
Millicent also suffered from the ways in which her mother and Austin’s relationship was perceived in Amherst, which were not so much articulated as implied. “I was a repository . . . of the disapproval and moral condemnation of the community. No tangible effulgence spilled over to me, that was theirs and theirs only—but there was disapproval enough to supply all. I did not bask in exaltation but in wonder and dumb unhappiness—a monster which oppressed me, an unhappiness I did not recognize nor understand.”46 In her adult years, Millicent admitted to being puzzled as a child as she came to realize that her mother was frowned on—if not actively censured—by some portion of Amherst society. She recalled that this feeling seemed to emanate from Sue and Mattie Dickinson, whom she suggested were “a race apart. They walked about the village streets scattering venom as they walked . . . half the town seemed to agree with their vitriol.”47
Millicent summarized her strange emotional state due to Mabel and Austin’s affair in a 1932 “Reminiscence”:
As a child it was bewilderment, which with adolescence turned to disapproval, which called forth, however, a still fiercer loyalty, though silent, before the world. Disapproval of her coquetry, of her manner of dressing, so different from that of other Amherst mothers, of her giving talks, which also they did not do, of her exaggeration, of her dancing—and of some deeper thing which underlay all those things which I could name, or could have, had I ever been required to articulate on the subject—egged on, as I now think of it, by my grandmother from whom the disapproval doubtless emanated in the first place.48
Indeed, elsewhere—even in some of her journals—Millicent noted that Molly’s disapproval of her daughter’s relationship with Austin Dickinson filtered its way to Millicent, encapsulated best in one phrase that read, “Grandma has poisoned my thought of Mamma.”
Even though there were so many ways in which Millicent sought to distance herself from Mabel, so many times that Millicent harbored quiet resentments of Mabel and found her anywhere from mildly objectionable to downright immoral, Millicent still loved her mother dearly. She felt extremely protective of her and inordinately responsible for her. This would take many forms throughout the years. Above all, Millicent felt unstinting loyalty to both of her flawed parents. “It must be that the keynote of my character was loyalty—blind, unquestioning—for no questions were ever asked of anybody. . . . I stored all things in my heart and pondered them there.”49
In later life, Millicent often claimed that as a child she accepted things that she observed unquestioningly. She once wrote that she was “the solemn little child with great eyes, whose earliest remembrance is of bewilderment and wonder.”50 The emotional turbulence she experienced through her mother’s unorthodox relationship with Austin Dickinson affected her deeply starting from childhood when she observed things that seemed not quite right. These unsettled feelings would reverberate throughout her life, often in ways she repressed, sometimes in ways she could not easily articulate. Despite her “bewilderment and wonder” as a child, through inclination and training, Millicent learned to approach the world in a systematic and meticulous way. These traits would become key in both her personal and professional life, coming into sharpest focus when she chose to embrace the editing of Emily’s poetry and letters. The little girl who took the temperature every morning and methodically recorded it in a notebook became the woman who did the very same thing.
CHAPTER 6
EMBRACING EMILY’S POEMS (1886–1897)
“Emily wrote in the strangest hand ever seen”
Change was in the air in the mid-1880s. Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president in an era of Republican-dominated politics. America’s four-year economic depression ended but residual anxieties culminated in a general strike and the Hay-market Riots in May of 1886. Racial and ethnic tensions plaguing the nation boiled over in anti-Chinese riots in Seattle and in the murder of twenty African Americans in Mississippi. For many Americans, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor in the fall of 1886 was meant to symbolize a hope and unity by welcoming immigrants, but to some it represented policies that were creating economic, labor and ethnic unrest.
But it was perhaps some of the issues not making the pages of national news that troubled Mabel the most. She, too, was living through a period of unrest, her circumstances a precarious balance that could easily be toppled.
What she perceived as the chilling presence of Sue Dickinson continued to make Mabel uncomfortable as she and David settled in to their rented house on Lessey Street in 1885. Mabel was learning to live a double life, though the whispers around Amherst did not abate. Sue assiduously avoided Mabel, including leaving the First Congregational Church after Mabel began singing as part of a quartet there, and forbidding her daughter Mattie from attending parties that Mabel chaperoned. Polly Longsworth suggests that Sue also “became intensely, almost obsessively absorbed in Ned’s and Mattie’s lives, as if this compensated her for loss of control of Austin and absolved her from the humiliation Mabel inflicted.”1
EMILY DICKINSON, CIRCA 1848. IN 2012 ANOTHER POSSIBLE PHOTO OF EMILY SURFACED, BUT THIS DAGUERREOTYPE WAS THE FIRST—AND POSSIBLY ONLY—VERIFIABLE IMAGE OF HER.
Sue’s actions, recorded through letters Ned wrote to his sister and (perhaps less reliably) through Mabel’s diaries and journals, reveal a woman focusing on her two living children and continuing to make her home a haven for the arts. But this did not relieve the building pressures. In January of 1885, when Austin “positively forbid anything being done [at The Evergreens] . . . mother began to pull off the paper” from the walls, Ned told Mattie in a letter. This fit of pique demonstrated the simmering fury Sue fought to control.2
Sue was bedridden for most of the winter and spring of 1885 with a mysterious illness treated with small doses of arsenic. David was away frequently, and Grandma Wilder was there to care for Millicent. Combined, these circumstances left Mabel and Austin free to pursue their relationship. Austin continued to bring Mabel to The Homestead to sing and play piano for Lavinia and Emily. Life, for the moment, had settled into a routine, if a temporary and discomforting one, with festering tensions ever present just below the surface.
Mabel lived life reactively. Though very much in love, she and Austin were still not able to openly declare their affection or plan their life together. In May of 1885 she wrote in her journal, “I am destined to live greatly—principally—in emotions. Sometimes I positively sigh to live for awhile just a serene, constituted commonplace life.”3
At the same time, Mabel, David and Austin were busily planning a new Queen Anne–style cottage for the Todds on land that Austin had given them, across the meadow from The Evergreens. This would be the first home that Mabel ever owned and, as someone who had grown up in a series of rented properties and who aspired to enter a different class, she was thrilled at the prospect. Austin took charge of siting and landscaping the new house, as well as cutting a road between his home and the new property; David supervised its construction; and Mabel took over the bookkeeping responsibilities, planned the décor and decided upon a name for the new house. Mabel originally wanted to call the house “Birchbank,” but settled on “The Dell.” “Austin suggested it as being on the whole best [name],” Mabel later wrote.4 They moved into their new home in 1887, before it was entirely completed.
But even a new home could not quell Mabel’s increasing bitterness that her love for Austin had to remain hidden. “Is it true that the soul expands in misfortune and unhappiness, and finds god in it?” she queried in her journal. “I hope so! I want this—and still I am tired of suffering.”5
Mabel was not the only one silently suffering. Emily Dickinson’s health had started deteriorating.
> After enduring decades of poor health, Emily truly began to decline in 1886. Years earlier she never completed school at Mount Holyoke and suffered from various respiratory, eye and “nerve” ailments throughout early adulthood. Her illnesses continued and worsened in later years. In an extended remembrance, her cousin Clara Newman Turner, who lived with Austin and Sue for a number of years before Mabel’s arrival in Amherst, wrote that following Gib Dickinson’s tragic death, Emily “had a chill . . . and was taken home unconscious” and had similar “attacks” during the next two years.6 Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall notes that Emily never fully recovered. Sue Dickinson, who penned Emily’s obituary in the Springfield Republican, wrote that Emily had been an invalid from 1884 to 1886.7
Mabel had long been aware of Emily’s seclusion, if not her infirmities. She’d written in her journal in 1882, “no one has seen her in all those years except her own family. She is very brilliant and strong, but became disgusted with society & declared she would leave it when she was quite young.” (Sewall wrote of Emily making deliberate decisions to withdraw from religious life in Amherst; it’s not clear whether this issue was one Austin raised with Mabel, leading her to conclude as she did about Emily’s “disgust” with society.) In 1885, Mabel chided Molly for not responding to a note from the Dickinson sisters—Mabel had introduced her parents to Vinnie and told them about Emily—suggesting, “She and her sister live, in great measure, in their correspondence.” While there is no record in Mabel’s private writings nor in Mabel’s and Austin’s letters of the period indicating his growing concerns over Emily’s declining health, Mabel noted briefly in her diary on May 13, 1886, that Emily was sick, and on the subsequent day that Austin was “terribly oppressed.”8 Emily died the next day, perhaps due to complications from Bright’s disease. This turned out to be a watershed moment for Mabel, and ultimately, for Millicent, too.