by Julie Dobrow
Millicent returned to Harvard to continue work toward her doctorate. She threw herself into her studies, working fifteen-hour days, trying to shut everything and everyone else out. Years later she told an interviewer, “It was a great solace to me because I had had a very devastating experience in France. I can’t say much about it but we were all living on such an idealistic plane, and there was a soldier . . . I believed in him. . . . It was a very awful experience. So I just plunged into hard work as hard as I possibly could.”29
But even work couldn’t shut out the experience with Joe or her feelings for him. Not completely. And not ever. Almost forty years later, Millicent reflected, “The sense of utter annihilation, the return to Cambridge to finish the work I had started—all feeling was dead.”30 The failed romance with Joe made Millicent even more entrenched in her beliefs about morality and keener than ever to do what she could to right the injustices she perceived done to herself and to her parents. Ultimately, this life-changing incident paved the path for Millicent to doggedly pursue her work on Emily Dickinson. She would later suggest to a psychiatrist, “I espoused Emily’s cause largely, I think, to right a wrong.” And the erstwhile relationship with Joe convinced Millicent of the ambivalence of Emily’s views of love, something that would significantly color Millicent’s subsequent writings about the poet and her work. Millicent clearly related to Emily’s bittersweet views on love as embodied in the poem Higginson and Mabel titled “Bequest”—poem 644 in the later Johnson edition:
You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capricious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.31
Even during the time she spent with her mother shortly after the scene in Muskogee, Millicent still could not bring herself to tell Mabel the truth about Joe. There are few other events in the course of their relationship that so clearly demonstrate how their efforts to protect each other from difficult truths in fact prevented them from ever having a full and honest relationship. Eventually, Millicent wrote to Mabel: “I hardly know how to tell you, because I can’t bear the thought of making you grieve. But my engagement to Joe is broken. It is final and can never be remedied. I do not want you to feel badly. It is best this way. Sometime when I can I will explain. I cannot write about it. Somehow you and I . . . we will get something good out of these terrible experiences. It is not all loss.”32
Joe did send a letter to Millicent after the incident in Muskogee. In it, he wrote, “Can’t you be happy, Millicent? To know that you had forgiven me and that you were happy would mean very much. . . . Sincerely, Joe Thomas.”
Millicent was flabbergasted. “I am numb tonight,” she wrote in her diary. “A letter from Joe. . . . He signed himself ‘Sincerely’? . . . I sat in the room in the geography lab and tried to read; I am absolutely aware of failure, complete failure. . . . It is perfectly ghastly.”33 The formal salutation spoke volumes to Millicent.
As 1919 drew to a close, an old acquaintance resurfaced in Millicent’s life. Walter Van Dyke Bingham, the academic psychologist whom she’d initially met—and rejected as a potential suitor—years earlier, once again sought a romantic relationship with Millicent. She wrote in her journal that she thought she perhaps should not see Walter Van Dyke Bingham (she insisted on writing his full name each time she referred to him) because her heart still belonged to Joe. “Of course I must tell him I am not free at present. I have got to wait. I shall not go into details with him—that would be a desecration. Oh Joe, my darling, my adored—shall I go through life alone without you?”34
Early in December of 1920, the Miami newspapers told of a fabulous wedding held at Matsuba, the home of Professor David Peck Todd and Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd. It was the “beautiful tropical wedding” with the service at St. Stephens and the party at “the house made for a wedding reception” that Mabel had outlined in her letters to Millicent in France. The house was resplendent with ferns and exotic flowers. Guests arrived from faraway places. The wedding announcement cards were from Shreve, Crump and Low. And the name of the groom was Walter Van Dyke Bingham.
CHAPTER 11
FIGHTING TO DEFINE EMILY DICKINSON (1920–1929)
“May I accomplish all I can”
“Once again the far southern tip of Florida and Boston are in friendly accord,” noted an article in the Boston Transcript in December 1920. “This winter . . . the fair southern town of Coconut Grove, one of the most beautiful and choicest of Florida resorts was the scene of the marriage of Miss Millicent Todd and Professor Walter Van Dyke Bingham. Miss Todd is the daughter of Professor David Todd, for over 35 years Professor of Astronomy and Navigator and Director of the Observatory of Amherst College, and his wife, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, all of them with intimate connection in Boston.” The article continued, “On Saturday, the 4th of December, the wedding occurred, surrounded by all the tropical wealth of southern Florida . . . a mass of superb blossoms making of the house, ‘Matsuba,’ which Professor and Mrs. Todd have built there, a veritable bower of beauty.”1
Millicent’s scrapbook from her wedding is large, perhaps six inches thick, its binding now cracking. It contains the formal invitation and subsequent printed announcement from Shreve, Crump and Low that Mabel had so desired. There are wedding notices from several newspapers in Massachusetts, Florida and Pittsburgh (where Walter was working at the time), and also, typical of Millicent, a set of lists: those who were invited, wedding gifts received, music she wanted played. There are also notes from many friends. Quite a number of people expressed surprise at the announcement of the nuptials. “My dear Bingham,” wrote a former colleague of Walter’s, “I see the great event has finally happened. At last you have found ‘her.’ Astonishing!” There’s also a telegram to Walter saying, “Your surprising letter just received and I hasten to wish you all possible joy and happiness.” One friend of Millicent’s commented, “My dear Millicent, the news of your engagement was a complete surprise to me!”2
MILLICENT WAS MARRIED IN MATSUBA, MABEL’S GRAND NEW HOME IN FLORIDA.
There are fewer than a dozen photos in the entire album. Among them are elegant photos of Mabel’s home, Matsuba (a Japanese word for a pinecone pattern found on trees and on red koi, which Mabel found particularly aesthetically appealing). In one shot, a stylishly dressed Mabel sits, hair elegantly coiffed atop her head, with Millicent standing beside her in her bridal gown and veil, hand on her mother’s shoulder, looking unexpectedly dowdy. They appear to be gazing intently at each other, but they do not smile. Perhaps most surprising, there are no photos of Millicent and her groom together.
Many years later, Millicent recalled why she decided to finally accept his marriage proposal. “I had received a death-blow,” she wrote. “I felt that emotion would never be revived. There was nothing but work—hard work—for me. And of course, anxiety. . . . And so, working as I never worked before, I entered my forties. During the summer of 1920 Walter Bingham came to the island. . . . He told me that he still loved me and wanted me to marry him. I told him that I could not respond—that I was emotionally dead. He said he didn’t care.”3
For Millicent, Walter was her salvation from the disappointment and despair Joe’s rejection had caused. Walter and Millicent were the same age and he really did have a PhD from the University of Chicago. At the time he proposed, Walter was in the middle of developing his theories of industrial psychology (theories that would become seminal in the field) and had a position in the Division of Cooperative Research at what was then called the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later known as Carnegie Mellon University). Walter was safe, Walter was sure. Even though Walter knew she did not return his love, he wanted to marry her, nonetheless. Millicent even hoped that perhaps she and Walter could begin a family. It was a relief; she would not be alone. Perhaps even then she
sensed what she would recount in a 1959 interview: “Walter Bingham assumed from the very beginning my responsibilities and my burdens.”4 And so, as she later wrote: “Without announcing our engagement, we set the date for our marriage”—just four months hence.5
After one month of marriage, Millicent wrote in a new journal, “I am married, the incredible, much-thought about, much postponed, great big wonderful thing has happened.” Only she wasn’t finding it so wonderful. While she wrote of Walter’s devotion and willingness to help take on the increasing burden of caring for her parents, Millicent still had doubts. At first it was just little things—his table manners were awful, or he was “too meticulous” in his grooming. Just two months into the marriage, she learned that Walter had had several prior sexual relationships. Given her extreme Puritan values and how sensitized and intolerant she was about sex outside of marriage, Millicent found this unforgivable. She admitted in her journal that though she was “not infatuated” with Walter, “love means self-sacrifice and permanences.”6 Many years later she reflected, “My ability to respond to Walter’s love in kind, was gone—dead forever.” Though she would learn to respect him, and certainly appreciated all that he did for her parents, it would always be “love, yes, but not the dazzling, frightening intensity of which I was capable.”7
A RARE PHOTOGRAPH OF MILLICENT AND WALTER TOGETHER.
There would be no children, and in later life she pondered whether not marrying Walter when he first proposed in 1913 had been her greatest mistake:
As for a child? Did I not think of that? Did I ever consider my duty to my family? The line ends in me. Did I ever consider my biological reason for existence? . . . Had Walter and I married then, and had a family, who knows, the tension might have been released. My mother might not have had a stroke; my father might not have been broken. . . . And as for me, I might have had ties that bound me tighter than those to my mother. Children, they say, do.8
In the middle of 1922, there was a small crisis in their young marriage. “I intend to talk to Walter about his sex standards,” Millicent wrote. Though she didn’t dare to record her thoughts in her bound journals, Millicent did write out a series of notes on individual pieces of paper that she saved. All of them focused on the issue of his fidelity. “Suspicion . . . what are the suspicions founded on? . . . Your lying to me was a great blow, it simply put you down on the level with the common herd.”9
Millicent’s fears about Walter’s “sex standards” and her recognition that there was no great physical chemistry between them were not the only problems in their marriage. Millicent was disappointed in Walter’s lack of connection to the world of academia—he had held several adjunct academic positions over the years but never managed to get a full-time professorial appointment. Millicent was also dismayed that even with a master’s degree from Harvard and a PhD from the University of Chicago, Walter was still not affiliated with a similarly prestigious institution. (“And how I HATE to have him put down as coming from Stevens in the Harvard Catalog. All our friends are getting top notch recognition,” she wrote privately during the time that Walter had an adjunct instructorship at the Stevens Institute of Technology.)10 She was extremely concerned about Walter’s general lack of ambition and inability to bring in money. While her mantra was “May I accomplish all I can,” his productivity and work ethic were quite different.
Walter’s position at the Carnegie Institute of Technology was abruptly terminated in 1923, the same year Millicent completed and defended her doctoral dissertation. It was becoming increasingly clear to Millicent that she would have to be the main provider not only for her parents but also for Walter and herself.
When Walter became the director of the Personnel Research Federation of New York, it meant moving from Pittsburgh. At first, she was pleased. They had moved into a large apartment on Washington Place, in Greenwich Village. Millicent picked up part-time teaching jobs in geography at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia, worked on translating the Principles of Human Geography by Paul Vidal de la Blache from French to English and wrote several articles about the geography of Peru, which were published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and elsewhere.
But Millicent soon found that she didn’t like New York’s pace or crowds or dirt; the city sounds kept her up at night—as did her incessant worries about Walter and about her parents. Millicent was so troubled that in 1927 she did something extremely unusual for the day—she sought psychiatric help.
As with everything else in her life, Millicent took notes and meticulously documented her psychiatric sessions, although she did not type up her notes or even use the doctor’s first name. There were clear themes emerging from her work with Dr. MacPherson: how she loved Walter but felt no passion, how she longed for Walter to be financially stable so that he could “operate on all cylinders,” but feared he never would. There were Millicent’s concerns about her obsessive need for “productivity” and her “acquisitiveness” (by which she meant her inability to throw anything out). She also discussed the very long and growing list of genuine and psychosomatic ailments that resulted from her anxieties.
There were the issues with her parents: her recognition of her mother’s affair with Austin Dickinson; how it made her feel as if the entire town of Amherst had been against her mother and herself; and her revulsion that this relationship occurred outside of marriage. There was also Millicent’s own “false sense of loyalty” to her parents and her fear that this would derail her own work and life’s purpose. She despaired that Mabel had squandered so many of her talents and would only be remembered for her work on Emily Dickinson, something of which Millicent was acutely aware, even then.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Walter lost his job at the Federation. He took out loans and borrowed money from Millicent in a vain attempt to keep the organization afloat. She wrote, “My concern about Walter is not only financial. It is even more that he does not seem to have a sense of what his own services are worth, or getting anything like a fair wage for his grueling work. . . . But it is awfully hard for me to sit and take it, as it is, when I disapprove and resent the situation so.” However, Millicent added, “my own affairs would cause me no end of worry if Walter’s were not so much worse.”11
Millicent’s own affairs had much to do with those of her parents. David’s odd and erratic behavior was becoming more acute. In 1920 he launched a series of “experiments” attempting to “signal Mars” from a balloon. An article in the Kansas City Star quoted David as saying, “If there are human beings on Mars . . . I have no doubt that they have been sending us messages for years and are still wondering at our stupidity in replying.”12
Not surprisingly, the press evinced more than a little skepticism, while the scientific community and David’s former colleagues largely ignored him. David launched other projects that he didn’t complete, and on which he spent unreasonable sums of money. One of these was a movie about the Everglades, for which he had “put mortgages on the Florida house up to the hilt,” according to Millicent, who attempted to pay off her father’s debts and save the house when the bank was ready to foreclose on it. Millicent retained many folders’ worth of papers delineating the bills David left unpaid, which she, Walter or Mabel had to somehow cover. David sometimes sent Millicent on errands that made her question his sanity. He would ask her to fetch something from a person who turned out not to exist. He told her to find friends he wished to see, only to send her to incorrect or nonexistent addresses. “I got very tired from all of those wild goose chases,”13 she noted.
In 1922, David decided to go South America to set up a giant telescope in the mountains of Chile, to observe Mars more closely. Millicent and Walter went to see him off at the New York port from which he was scheduled to depart. But David failed to show up. At that point Millicent and Walter had David evaluated by a psychiatrist, and “the result was that he was placed in Bloomingdale [Insane Asylum] in White Plains, where he stayed for a year or two.”14
The
decision to institutionalize David was wrenching for both Millicent and Mabel. Mabel captured some of this in her journal: “Last spring in Coconut Grove my dear David grew queerer and queerer . . . I can’t write of it, it’s too heartbreaking. But we found him in New York . . . he was found to be suffering from ‘circular insanity’ and immediate treatment was insisted on.”15
STARTING IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, DAVID PECK TODD TURNED HIS ATTENTION TO TRYING TO SIGNAL THE INTELLIGENT LIFE HE BELIEVED EXISTED ON MARS. SOME OF HIS EFFORTS INVOLVED ASCENTS IN HOT AIR BALLOONS WITH EQUIPMENT HE INVENTED TO SEND AND RECEIVE SIGNALS FROM MARS. 1909.
Millicent recalled, “I shall never forget my first visit to him there in Bloomingdale. . . . He was lying on a settee out under a tree with dark glasses on and he would hardly speak. The tragedy of his life then became clear—I had a glimpse of it but I knew very little at that early date as to what the trouble would be.”16
For the rest of his life, David Todd would be in and out of mental institutions, nursing homes, and other care facilities. He escaped or disappeared from some facilities, causing Walter to go off in search of him. Even the most secure and well-staffed facilities still had problems with David: once Millicent was asked to stop sending her father stamps, because David had been sending out letters with “very inappropriate messages”; another time David was caught contacting potential investors about his various “fanciful and extravagant schemes,” only to have them back out when they realized they were visiting a patient at a mental institution. David often prevailed on Millicent to have him released because he was so miserable, and she often felt guilty enough to do so—until the next incident of his “asocial” behavior or “failing mental capacity” precipitated another stay at a different institution.