by Julie Dobrow
At the turn of the nineteenth century if you wanted to reach your dearly departed, there was one place to go. The small hamlet of Lily Dale in upstate New York, organized in 1879, had become widely known as the epicenter of the Spiritualist movement. By this time there were perhaps a million professed Spiritualists in America, with more than seventy newspapers and other vehicles for spreading the word about the movement. Stemming from this Spiritualist impulse, Lily Dale literally became an occultist cottage industry, with house after house owned by mediums who would guarantee visitors a clear connection to the other side.
In 1902 a somewhat skeptical Mabel traveled to Lily Dale, though, truth be told, there was a part of Mabel that desperately believed it was indeed possible to connect with the spirit world. Lily Dale “did not sound attractive to me as a place, only as a curiosity,” she wrote in her journal. “The whole thing seemed to me pitifully cheap.”
After two weeks in Lily Dale where she attended countless séances that she derided as “tricks,” there was one session Mabel simply could not explain. “How, supposing he had desired to cheat me,” she wrote of the medium, “could he have known that it was Austin, and Austin alone I desired? And if by any . . . chicanery he could have found out his name in the few hours between his arrival in Lily Dale and my coming to him, how could he have known that the middle name was the one I called him by? And how could he have imitated that voice! And said the characteristic things with certain reiterated words just as Austin did! It was wonderful to stupefaction.”
She recorded in detail what was said: “You kept me nine months on the Earth after my body was dead—your grief and loving kept me. But I have wanted to speak to you for seven long years.” Mabel added, “he went on with things that kept me breathless for nearly an hour.”
This remarkable encounter “tore my heart strings so that for weeks I walked in a daze. The voice was identical with what I had so longed for years to hear. . . . Some things just could not have been invented. But what does it mean?”36 Mabel could not explain it. It was an experience that stayed with her for the rest of her life.
“I wish my heart were in anything; but I look at myself as from outside somewhere, and long for any real interest to make me care for life again. I probably shall never feel any real zest again, but . . . these delightful experiences are doing me physically and probably mentally good, though my soul is with Austin, only waiting to be awakened in his arms,” wrote Mabel in the late spring of 1896.37 Mabel was writing from the spectacular Volcano House overlooking the caldera of the Kilauea volcano, on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she had traveled with David on the Amherst eclipse expedition to Japan, part of her attempt to live a life without Austin.
Two days before departing, Mabel turned in revisions of the third book of Emily’s poetry. That done, she felt she could depart the country. This long journey lasted from April through the end of October. Though Mabel recorded wondrous natural sights throughout the trip, she also wrote many nostalgic, painful and heart-wrenching entries in a special journal she kept.
This expedition was David’s second attempt to photograph a total eclipse of the sun from a mountaintop in a remote area of Japan. David spent months planning the expedition, as well as gathering, assembling and shipping more than twenty telescopes and cameras with which he would attempt to do what had never been done before—provide a complete photographic record of the eclipse as it passed through the Hokkaido region of northern Japan. David would test his “hi-tech” hybrid lenses and refractors to take nearly five hundred quick photos of the corona. (Quipped Mabel in her book-length account of the expedition, Corona and Coronet, “So who could complain if tubes and valves and pneumatic arrangements and object-glasses and electric devices of every sort strewed the drawing-room and measured their innocent length on every floor throughout the house?”)38
The journey began in New York, where a crowd of journalists, Amherst College alumni and the Amherst Glee Club gave them a rousing send-off. From there they traveled by train to Chicago, where they were met by the president of the Great Northern Railroad, who lent Mabel and David his private car for the trip across the country to San Francisco, “so we are crossing in the greatest possible comfort and every luxury,” Mabel recorded.39
As the trip went on and the Midwestern prairies yielded to the snow-capped Rockies, and the mountains eventually gave way to the verdant Northwest, Mabel could not help but think of Austin: “As I sat there gazing upon the beauteous mountains that could make one’s heart ache, I became sure but strangely conscious that my Austin was distinctly with me, his dear arms were as clearly around me as when we stood together on the Transportation Building at the World Exposition . . . and he held me as if he could not let me go, ever. I believe he never has, and cannot.”40
At the end of April, the expedition team set sail aboard the Coronet, a yacht bound for Hawaii. “Although I had twice crossed the Pacific by steam,” Mabel wrote, “yet its magnificent immensity was almost unappreciated until this voyage in a sailing vessel.” As usual, Mabel was able to stay above deck while others were seasick, and got to observe pods of dolphins and whales, masses of Portuguese man o’ war and great schools of flying fish.
Mabel found Hawaii to be heart-stoppingly beautiful but heartbreaking. Whether it was going for a horseback ride on the beach at Honolulu, observing the lushness of a coffee plantation or seeing a spectacular eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano, it all somehow brought her back to Austin. “Not until this my trip have I thoroughly realized how utterly alone I am in this world. Most persons would say my life is brilliant, and so it is . . . but no soul meets me—my real innermost self as Austin did.”41
Hawaii also brought another Dickinson to Mabel’s mind. She began a chapter of Corona and Coronet with an Emily Dickinson poem to which Mabel added the title, “Hawaiian Volcanoes.” The poem, itself, does not mention Hawaii. In fact, in the third edition of Poems, Mabel had titled this same poem “Reticence.” But so immersed was Mabel in the editing of Emily’s poems that she could not experience anything in her own life without seeing some relevance of Emily’s work, and in turn, filtered the poems through her own life and activities. Her diaries reveal she increasingly connected her own work to Emily’s, just as she believed her life continued to be connected to Austin, even after his death.
At Ka’awaloa, near Kona, the Coronet picked up another passenger: the well-known journalist and actress Kate Field. She was very ill, attempting to get back to Honolulu for treatment. The doctor aboard the Coronet did what he could for her, but she was in the final stages of a deadly pneumonia. Mabel stayed with her, told her that she was not likely to see another sunset, took down a letter she dictated, and pointed out the cliffs of Maui to her as they sailed past. “Where did you say your expedition was going?” the dying woman asked her. “‘The Amherst eclipse expedition,’ I replied, ‘and we go to Japan to observe a total eclipse of the sun August 9.’ ‘The Amherst eclipse expedition,’ she said brightly; and those were her last words on earth.” Mabel also recorded this event in her journal, commenting: “Poor woman! So infinitely alone! My heart ached for her, and I wanted to give her a little love to get to heaven on.”42 She later reflected on the poignant experience in an article she published in the Chicago Times-Herald. As she wrote in her journal, it gave Mabel some comfort to be with Kate Field when she died; she had not been able to be with Austin and now it gave her a little solace to know that she had been able to be there for someone else. In a way, the experience of being with Kate Field as she died began to help Mabel start living again.
“Danger of disenchantment lurks about a return to distant lands whose memory has been for years enshrouded in a rosy atmosphere,” Mabel wrote in Corona and Coronet. But Japan did not disappoint; in fact, Mabel found it more charming and more fascinating than she had almost a decade earlier. They arrived at the port in Yokohama at the end of June. “Japan is changing, and noticeably,” she wrote. “The past had perhaps been canonized, and the
present was different, but there was no disenchantment. The old-time charm exerted its spell as before.”43 Its charm extended to Mabel’s interest in artifacts, including a jinrickisha that she shipped back to Amherst, where riding around in it along the New England country roads made “spectators greatly interested.”
But perhaps the true turning point of the entire trip occurred for her as she looked out on an Ainu fishing village. “I felt a gleam of something more like real peace than I have had before for months—as if Austin’s real self had bade me to be cheerful and really take up life again. I felt as if something may still remain for me of comfort and accomplishment, but always and ever in and for him whom I love with an endless intensity and a near-failing devotion. He is never out of my mind and soul for one single instant. I believe most solemnly that my Austin is actually with me—here in Hokkaido, and looking out for me and loving me. My king and my master!”44
From that point forward, Mabel set her mind to reclaim her life. She decided to “think a great deal about my dear Millicent,” and wrote repeatedly, “my chief interest in life is the success of this expedition.” Knowing David’s track record, of course, there was reason to be concerned. Mabel continuously entered prayers for a clear viewing in her journal. Alas, when the day of the eclipse dawned, it was not to be. Clouds closed in once again and thwarted a view of the eclipse. “Nature knows how to be cruel, or possibly it is mere indifference. But until, in his search for the unknown, man learns to circumvent cloud, I must still feel that she holds every advantage. On that fateful Sunday afternoon the sun, emerging from the partial eclipse, set cheerfully in a clear sky; the next morning dawned cloudless and sparkling.”45
MABEL HUNG A PORTRAIT OF AUSTIN IN HER HOME AND WROTE THAT IT GAVE HER SOME COMFORT TO GAZE UPON HIS IMAGE EACH DAY.
But as usual, Mabel managed to make the best of a bad situation, at least for her own career: she turned the Amherst eclipse expedition into a book, at least a dozen articles published in national magazines and newspapers (including the Nation, the Chicago Herald-Tribune, the Century Magazine and Atlantic Monthly, among others), and a series of lectures that she gave for years afterward.
As they sailed back toward the United States, Mabel wrote: “Last night there were showers all around the horizon and a perfect linear rainbow, brightening as the moon came out from the clouds, until even the secondary bow could be followed. It was an exquisite and mysterious sight, elusive, fairy-like. I once believed in the happy promise of a rainbow, and dried my tears for an hour or two—but it was only an elusive arch of promise, and so I do not believe in them anymore.” She continued, “This last year is aging me before my time. Up to a year ago people always thought I was at least ten years younger than I am. . . . But now I see, when I part my hair, far under the brown, some white hairs, and I am beginning to see a line of pain in my forehead.” She concluded, on the train that this time took the southwest route on the journey back to Amherst, “Austin’s dying has shown me my own soul.”46
When Mabel and David finally reached Amherst on October 24, the leaves were past their colorful autumn apex. Though delighted to be home at last and thrilled to see Millicent and the friends who welcomed them back, Mabel could not help but find her return to Amherst bittersweet: “Ah! But it is Austin’s town, and his oak leaves, and his blue flowers, and his stacked corn—and I miss him and want him and need him beyond even anything I have known before.”47
Mabel went to visit with Vinnie soon after her return. Vinnie didn’t offer any explanation for not having answered any of Mabel’s letters, but she did seem glad to see her. She was glad, as well, to hear that Mabel had purchased some new china for her that would be arriving from Japan. Other than Austin’s absence, nothing seemed amiss.
But, as Millicent later wrote, “It was a different home-coming from any she could have anticipated . . . my mother soon discovered that sinister plans had been brewing in her absence.”48
On November 16, Mabel was served with papers: Lavinia had filed suit against Mabel and David over the strip of land that she had deeded over to them, claiming that her signature had been obtained by misrepresentation and fraud. The tensions that had simmered for years finally erupted, an explosion no less spectacular than the one Mabel had seen in Hawaii. Mabel was blindsided.
CHAPTER 8
SUING THE “QUEEN OF AMHERST” (1897–1898)
“The wicked injustice . . . kills me daily”
An article in the Hartford Courant, headlined “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: The Bitter Trouble They Have Made between the Sister and Friend,” trumpeted, “College and society circles in Amherst and Northampton Massachusetts are agog over a unique lawsuit that involves persons of high social standing. It is an interesting story from the beginning—and the end is not yet in sight.” Even the New York Times weighed in: “The unique poems and letters of the late Emily Dickinson attracted the attention of all literary circles two or three years ago. Out of the editing of these poems and letters has arisen a peculiar lawsuit, in which the editor, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, well-known as an author and lecturer, and wife of the Amherst College Professor of Astronomy, is the defendant.”1
Another well-known Amherst resident would have been mortified had he known that his failure to enact legal documents triggered a case that “attracted as much attention as any that has been before the Northampton court” and was likely to “furnish gossip for afternoon tea in the Connecticut Valley for a long time to come.”2 But Austin Dickinson was no longer alive to see the headlines or the spectacle that was about to unfold.
Twenty-seven years older than Mabel, pragmatic Austin knew that he would die long before her. His intent was to provide for Mabel in death as he had in life, but without fueling a public scandal and subjecting Mabel to more shame. In November of 1887, he drafted a will in which he left The Evergreens and his real and personal property to Sue; his share of the family property, including The Homestead, stocks and bonds to Vinnie; and two paintings to Mabel. He wrote to Mabel that this was “not quite as I wanted it but best for now. I have left all my share of my father’s estate to Vin with the request that she turn it over to you. She has promised to do this, so you are protected in any case.”3
In addition, Austin told Mabel of his intent to “make things a bit more even” in the compensation she was due for editing and publishing Emily’s poetry by giving her a strip of land along the eastern boundary of the Dickinson meadow. The only problem was that he never actually deeded her the land.
THE DELL, THE HOME MABEL AND DAVID BUILT ON LAND GIVEN TO THEM BY AUSTIN. THIS PHOTO SHOWS THE STRIP OF LAND THROUGH DICKINSON MEADOW THAT BECAME THE BASIS OF THE 1897 LAWSUIT.
Why someone trained as an attorney, facile with real estate deals and fully cognizant of the importance of proper documentation to avoid problems in land transactions did not draft the proper legal papers to will Mabel the land is a mystery. In fact, as Dickinson scholar James Guthrie points out, Austin, like his father before him, was a “skilled advocate” for his “clients’ landed interests, and for [his] own.”4 To suggest he wanted to spare Mabel further embarrassment or scandal is perhaps too generous. To think he simply fell ill and ran out of time before executing these legal documents, as Mabel wanted to believe, is also perhaps unrealistic, because for months he was sick but not completely incapacitated. It’s possible that, despite the multiple times Vinnie tried to cut Mabel off from sharing in the royalties from Emily’s poetry, Austin trusted Vinnie would keep her word to him and hand over the property to Mabel after his death. But this, too, seems less than credible, since he knew that Vinnie had consistently failed to behave in an equitable way toward Mabel. Surely the dire medical news he had received for at least a year should have signaled the need to codify transferring the land to Mabel. It is possible that this brilliant man was frozen with regard to this transaction, just as he had been unwilling or unable to extricate himself from his marriage. Austin seemed to be stuck. Whatever his motivation, his failure to act l
eft Mabel in a precarious situation.
Less than two months after Austin died in August 1895, Mabel went to see Vinnie to ask about her share of Austin’s inheritance. Mabel recorded in her diary her disbelief that Vinnie appeared poised to ignore Austin’s request: “She is, as he always told me, utterly slippery and treacherous, but he did not think she would fail to do as he stipulated in this. . . . If he knows, how sorry he must be!”5
After her brother was no longer around to advise her, Vinnie turned to family friend and neighbor Dwight Hills. Hills, a bank president, was well acquainted with the business world, unlike Vinnie. According to Polly Longsworth, Hills “agreed . . . to draw up the necessary papers and secure legal services when she had made up her mind about the meadow, but he declined to tell her what to do, only warning that she should not take any steps without his knowledge.” Vinnie was also acutely aware that Mabel was still in possession of hundreds of Emily’s unpublished poems, and one of Vinnie’s dearest dreams was to see all of Emily’s poetry in print. Moreover, even while tensions with Mabel had become exacerbated, Vinnie was still quite dependent upon both Mabel and David, paying them innumerable late-night visits and welcoming their company. Longsworth writes, “Vinnie would have been forlorn indeed had she cut off her relations with the Todds, who in many ways were more like family to her than the Evergreens’ residents.”6 So, in December of 1895, according to Mabel, Vinnie apparently suggested that if a deed for the strip of land were drafted, she would sign it.