by Julie Dobrow
The Judge has given his decision against me in the law-suit. It seems incredible, in the face of five witnesses on my side, and none but herself on Vinnie’s. The whole town is amazed, and aroused, and it has brought out more expressions of sympathy from heretofore neutral people. Nothing but the Spanish war equals it in their minds for interest. That such a perversion of justice is possible speaks ill for Massachusetts, but it was perfectly clear to me from the outset that the judge leaned to Vinnie.32
Days later Mabel wrote of how “the wicked injustice of the judge’s verdict kills me daily,” She then had a series of “bladder attacks” that she knew were brought on by the ruling and that left her in agony. She was especially pained when she heard that a professor at Harvard Law School, Austin’s alma mater, was using her trial as an example of how a case where all of the evidence seems to be compelling and weighted in one way can ultimately have a ruling go against it.
Mabel and David, convinced that they had been publicly wronged and humiliated, decided to appeal the verdict to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Their argument hinged on two main points: first, that Vinnie’s testimony had been contradicted not only by Mabel and David but also by the testimony of their other witnesses—Mr. Spaulding, Mr. Hills and Miss Seelye. They refuted each contradiction and misstatement Vinnie made in her testimony, pointed out that the deed was never about constructing a building on the property as Vinnie suggested, and reiterated that it had been Austin’s wish to give them the land because “Mrs. Todd’s work on the poems had not been properly compensated.” Second, they argued, each of these witnesses were people who should be believed by virtue of their professional attainment or position in the community. Their brief concluded by asking the court to consider whether “a long-time professor of Amherst College, known and distinguished throughout the world for his attainments as an astronomer, and his wife, almost as widely known as himself, have conspired together to defraud this plaintiff . . . in order to obtain this paltry strip of land worth five or six hundred dollars. This imputation wounds more deeply than any pecuniary loss would do.” Finally, their attorneys argued, if a signed deed could so easily be undone, “truly . . . a deed furnishes a very insecure title.”33
Vinnie’s lawyers, on the other hand, suggested to the appeals court that because this case had been decided by a judge who had been present to see and hear each witness and who had made a ruling based on all of the evidence before him, that the ruling should stand.
The arguments were made on September 20, 1898. One of the six justices hearing the case was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would later be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices’ verdict came back on November 21 and upheld the finding of the lower court. In the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judgment, Judge Marcus Knowlton, writing on behalf of the unanimous ruling, noted, “the judge who sees and hears the witnesses has a great advantage in the search for truth over those who can only read their written or printed words. For this reason it has long been established that upon appeal of a decree of a judge in equity upon questions of fact arising on oral testimony heard before him, his decision will not be reversed unless it is plainly wrong. . . . The trial judge might have been able to tell from the appearance of the defendant whether she was really ignorant of this matter or not. . . . In the present case there was testimony at the trial on which the court could properly find for the plaintiff.”34
Mabel was in Chicago giving a series of talks about Emily Dickinson when the ruling came in. She was devastated, and wrote in her diary, “My heart is broken. . . . The Supreme Court sustains the lower court verdict, and it seems as if I could not live. How can a lie be endorsed and re-endorsed, and the real truth put in the wrong! I am perfectly crushed. What would my love think now of the treachery of his sister?”35
Mabel later told Millicent her theory, that the entire suit had been brought about as result of Sue’s pressure on Vinnie: “Vinnie despised Sue, whose father had died in the gutter or poor house, as Vinnie said, and who looked at everybody with her nose in the air. . . . The reason Vinnie sued me was because Sue found out about the land—Sue was awful to her, and Vinnie was afraid.” Mabel added, “Perjury always kills.”36
It is not surprising that Mabel held this view. Ned Dickinson became ill and died suddenly three weeks after the original trial was over (though for some reason the date on his tombstone is incorrectly listed as the year before). Vinnie, herself, died just nine months after the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision. And the strip of land that had been the ostensible focal point of the trial? It soon ceased to exist, as well: Vinnie sold it to a developer on July 1, 1899, less than a year after the verdict.
At the end of 1898, Mabel wrote a long entry in her journal about how glad she was to see the year end: “This wretched old year! This wicked, cruel, unjust, perjured old year! Glad indeed am I to see the last of him. And I still believe that the new one will be kinder. That lawsuit has blackened every sunny day, has hurt the quality of every bit of work I have accomplished, has squeezed my heart, creased my forehead, and given me unspeakable pain in every breath I draw. It is horrible beyond words, and I hate to mention it in writing, but I must to begin to put it from once the way it actually was, and then leave it forever.”37
In retrospect, Mabel remembered this time a bit differently: “It [the trial] didn’t have the effect of a gnat’s wing on me. I went on being the Queen of Amherst and manipulated it as I wanted to,” she said in 1931.38
Many years after the trial had reached its denouement, Millicent wrote, “The story of the lawsuit is not drama; it is melodrama. On the face of it, it is incredible. To the end of her life my mother never understood it.”39
Despite her inability to understand what had happened, immediately after the trial, Mabel could think of only one way of dealing with the hurt and betrayal she felt. She took all of the remaining copied but unpublished Emily Dickinson letters and poems in her possession—655 poems—as well as other Dickinson papers, and put them carefully away in a camphorwood chest. She locked it, placed it in storage and did not speak of it or its contents for three decades, leaving Millicent to wonder what was in the chest and why her mother was so uncharacteristically silent about it.
CHAPTER 9
TRAVELING AND TRAVAILS (1899–1917)
“Cloudy eclipses”
Though the unpublished Emily Dickinson poems remained locked away, out of sight in the camphorwood chest, they were far from being out of Mabel’s mind. Each of the momentous activities and events that occurred in the next twenty years helped to shape how Mabel, and then Millicent, dealt with their most important professional work to come, and reinforced their complicated bonds with each other. Mabel’s longing for Austin was ceaseless and her desire to become known as a writer, unrelenting; Millicent’s thwarted search for personal and professional fulfillment grew through a series of events that made her wonder if she’d ever find her true path. The upheavals that each of them experienced during this period of their lives refined their understanding of Emily’s poetry. Seeing new cultures would enrich their abilities to find human universals in diversity; experiencing loss deepened their perspectives on life. Both Mabel and Millicent would reflect that in the pause from active editing of Emily’s poetry and letters, their life experiences made them better understand the nuance and brilliance of her work.
In the first decade and a half of the new century, Mabel and Millicent would travel (to four continents and more than thirty countries), earn new professional opportunities and endure personal turmoil. These years brought both life-changing technological improvements—electricity, more rapid transit, the telephone, and moving pictures—and major events overseas that catapulted nations into the First World War. On New Year’s Day 1900, when Millicent wrote, “This doesn’t seem the least bit like the beginning of a new year, and what a controversy we do have over whether it is the beginning of a new century as well,”1 she could not have foreseen just w
here their lives would go in the near and foreseeable future.
The summer after her freshman year at Vassar in 1899, Millicent traveled through Europe with her good friend Elizabeth Sawyer. Millicent’s first year at college had been extremely successful academically, but while she was elected president of the freshman class and seemed to enjoy some popularity, her diaries show her still feeling awkward and uncertain in most social situations—and acutely aware of how this contrasted with her mother. She was still pining for Alden Clark and unwilling or unable to let herself look elsewhere for romance. By the end of the spring semester, Millicent was ready for a change of scene. Her journey with Elizabeth took her across England, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and France. It was the first time she had traveled abroad, and Millicent was enchanted by the art, the music and the history.
That summer Mabel was also ready for a change of scene after a year of trying to put all things Dickinson behind her. “The lawsuit still hurts my feelings indescribably, but I have had so many expressions of splendid friendship about it that I ought to feel better.” Reflecting on Vinnie’s death at the end of August 1899 she added, “And I am glad that it is Vinnie and not I who had to go into eternity with perjury on her soul. I think probably hers had shrunk so that there was nothing left to go anywhere when she died.”2
Though her Emily Dickinson work remained on hiatus, Mabel continued to write articles and give talks, traveling throughout the east coast and into the Midwest and South. She also returned to some old projects, like painting, and launched new projects, including her local civic work, and she began traveling even more widely.
MABEL (TOP) AND MILLICENT (BOTTOM) AS THEY APPROACHED NEW DIRECTIONS IN THEIR LIVES.
Mabel had already gone on two expeditions with David to Japan before 1900, and when the opportunity arose to go to Tripoli (then part of the Ottoman Empire) that year, Mabel was thrilled. She later wrote, “If science acquaints us with strange bedfellows, eclipse paths are responsible for enticing their followers into remote and untraveled ways which are extremely likely to prove mines of heretofore unsuspected wealth, in landscape, ethnology, picturesque history and customs, and all the charm of unspoiled humanity.”3
But like the two Japan expeditions, the expedition to Tripoli ultimately advanced Mabel’s aspirations far more than David’s. Once again, the clouds thwarted David’s attempts to get clear photographs of the eclipse. But Mabel’s 1912, book Tripoli the Mysterious, might well be the literary highlight of her writing. She was at the apex of her descriptive powers and included riveting anecdotes about her adventures and observations.
Even though her book garnered good reviews (“a fascinating book . . . told in an unusually entertaining style,” heralded the American Review of Reviews), it was hardly the literary masterpiece for which Mabel yearned, and it would not fulfill her ambition of being remembered as a great writer.
Upon their return to Amherst in September, Mabel kept her life in a state of almost perpetual motion. She gave interviews and talks and wrote articles about the expedition to Tripoli. She worked on getting Observatory House furnished with the “new accumulations” from the most recent trip. Her civic work, her music and her art provided her with a dizzying array of undertakings.
Though today we think of 1900 as the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time there was much debate about whether the new century actually commenced on January 1, 1901. Mabel was a 1901 believer, and so on December 31, 1900, she permitted herself an extended reflection in her journal, looking within, looking back, and trying, somehow, to look forward. “Tomorrow will begin a new year—a new century. I wish I could start all over too. And yet I have achieved some things which I should be sorry to ignore.” She wrote of how she was quite certain that the “truly great” advances in the twentieth century would be in telepathy and psychic forces. This would be good, she suggested, because it might connect her to Austin.4 Much as she wished to move on, there was no denying that Mabel’s life was still tied inextricably to the Dickinsons: her pain in the loss of Austin, the ongoing perceived injustices at the hands of Sue and Mattie, and the knowledge that there were still many more unpublished poems of Emily’s hiding in the camphorwood chest.
In 1901, Mabel, David and Millicent departed for an eclipse expedition to what was at the time called the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). They crossed the Atlantic, sailed through the Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean and on to Asia. Traveling through Singapore and Malaysia, they stopped in Singkep to attempt another eclipse viewing, unsuccessfully, and then traveled on to the Philippines (encountering Governor-General William Howard Taft, who so impressed Mabel that she entered in her journal her conviction that he would one day be president of the United States), to China and finally back to Japan before heading home.
For David, the journey was yet another in a seemingly endless series of professional disappointments. For Mabel, it provided needed distraction from Amherst and more opportunities to further her writing and public speaking career. For Millicent, it proved a rare chance to bond with her parents: “It all seems unreal to me, just as if I were living a languid dream. Two weeks ago I was studying at college, and here I am . . . seeing sights I never dreamed of before. It has been so nice to be able to talk to my father and mother and really get to know them a little in their enforced leisure.”5
The year 1904 also marked Mabel and David’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and Mabel threw a big party to commemorate the occasion. There was, however, no heartfelt reflection in her journal, only a cursory description of the event. But that same year on the anniversary of Austin’s death, Mabel wrote, “I cried for two hours.” She had her palm read the day before, and while she didn’t record what she’d been told, she did comment, “Curiously, this is the saddest anniversary of my life.”6
MILLICENT, MABEL, AND DAVID ON THE 1907 EXPEDITION IN PERU; MABEL PARLAYED MANY OF THESE EXPERIENCES INTO TALKS SHE GAVE BEFORE AUDIENCES AROUND THE COUNTRY AND MILLICENT FOUND THE TOPIC FOR HER DOCTORAL DISSERTATION.
The following year, 1905, didn’t start out promisingly, either. Though Mabel was earning money from the speaking engagements that seemed to keep coming (“I’m answering the telephone every three minutes”), she noted that it still didn’t cover their “enormous expenses.” Molly and Eben were getting frail, and Millicent, at home and unsure of what her next steps would be, was diagnosed with an inflamed appendix that had to be removed. But once everyone’s health stabilized, David, Mabel and Millicent packed up and prepared to depart on the SS Arctic in late July, bound for another Tripoli eclipse expedition. “Twice the alliterative delight of ‘an eclipse trip to Tripoli’ has been ours,” Mabel observed in Tripoli the Mysterious, commenting on the “coincidence unique in astronomical annals” of an eclipse track crossing the same exact path as a previous one.7
For the first time in his career, David Todd experienced and photographed a cloudless eclipse. Encouraged by this success, he planned another expedition to South America for the following year.
Millicent recorded this journey in great detail in a journal she later typed up (150 pages worth), but didn’t realize then that the most significant part of the journey was Peru’s rugged and contrasting geography, which would become the topic of her 1923 doctoral dissertation “An Investigation of Geographic Controls in Peru.” It also became the subject of her book Peru: A Land of Contrasts, published in 1917. “Any statement regarding Peru implies a contrary statement equally valid,” she wrote. “Contrast is its characteristic quality, true as to the general aspects of the country and ramifying through remote details. It is the obvious point of view from which to study Peru. . . . Contrasts of nature, of people to country, of antiquity to the present—these diverse elements are insistent wherever one turns.”8 The expedition to Peru crystallized Millicent’s interest in geography. She became the first woman to receive a doctorate in this field from Harvard, and thought—for a time—that she had finally found her true professional path.
As many people do, Mabel and Millicent experienced midlife as a period of dealing with loss—of learning to handle transitions and uncertainties about the future, including the end of relationships, the decline of aging and commencement toward mortality. For both Mabel, who was solidly within her midlife years, and Millicent, who had just entered them, the early twentieth century was not only about traveling and exploring the world outside of them but also about plumbing and mapping their interior worlds and sense of self.
Apart from managing to find meaning without Austin, Mabel, who had always been pampered by others, found herself in the role of caregiver for the first time. This was a role from which she not only learned things about herself but would also enable her to better understand Emily Dickinson, who had spent years of her life devoted to the care of her invalid mother.
Mabel dedicated herself to nursing Millicent in 1908 when Millicent became ill with diphtheria along with a virulent strep infection and subsequent endocarditis. “I love her so much that I ought to be able to do well for her,” Mabel wrote, noting her frustration about both her inability to make Millicent well—and about how Millicent’s illness curtailed her own activities. It echoed the ambivalence Mabel felt when caring for Millicent as an infant. Millicent recognized that her illness was not only aggravating for herself but was also exacerbating existing but unspoken tensions between herself and her mother.
Millicent was bedridden and forbidden from even sitting up for four months. When she was finally allowed to get up, she recorded her incremental progress toward recovery, and the ways in which she allowed fiction to play a big part in keeping her mind active. “At present I’m in an interesting laboratory,” she reflected. “Effect of novels on a person as a parallel in his own life for most of events described. Is it better to go fresh to live an open wide life upon unlimited things? Or to learn of joy and sorrow from stories of other people, suffering the unreal till the wish of life is round about your own ankles and can be recognized for what it is?”9 Mabel’s nursing made Millicent keenly realize her own obligation to her parents; she knew the caregiving roles would soon be reversed.