After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  In 1925, David traveled to Amherst to attend his fiftieth college reunion. Millicent received an urgent letter from George Daniel Olds, then president of the college: “I am very sorry indeed to have to write you about your father . . . to be perfectly frank, he is giving a great deal of trouble. Reports come from various sources absolutely trustworthy that he is accosting people, especially ladies, in a rather disagreeable way. I understand of course that he is not responsible for his acts.” President Olds concluded by asking Millicent to come to Amherst and remove her father. Millicent recalled, “The result was that he was shut up over night in the hospital and then taken to the hospital for the mentally ill in Northampton under very humiliating circumstances.”17

  Millicent and Walter had David transferred from the Northampton State Hospital to McLean’s Hospital (known at the time as Waverly), a private facility outside of Boston. “I wanted him to be in a more agreeable place,” Millicent wrote. Arthur Curtiss James set up a special fund to help cover the costs of David’s care. Millicent and Walter spent that summer living in Professor George Herbert Palmer’s house in Cambridge (Palmer, an old family friend of the Todds’, had officiated at Millicent and Walter’s wedding); Walter was teaching a course in the Harvard summer school and Millicent made frequent visits to see David. “I remember him saying to me after one of these visits, ‘What have I ever done to you that you should put me in a place like this?’ and it was so devastating that I would go out onto those lovely grounds and sit under a great tree and try to pull myself together before I started back to Cambridge to see what I could do to get him out of an institution which he felt so humiliated to be in. I took him out in spite of the doctors saying he would do himself injustice if not harm.”18 To Millicent, it seemed as if her father’s “brilliant mind” was still there, but was as clouded as the eclipses he’d long hoped to photograph. And her guilt at institutionalizing David was so significant that it overshadowed her own judgment, as well.

  For Mabel, the 1920s was a decade that roared. Her move to Florida meant a fresh start. Her work on Emily Dickinson was on indefinite hiatus, but she periodically made sure that Millicent knew that the camphorwood chest was secure. Despite her increasing worries about David, Mabel was able to carve out a new existence. She operated in a separate sphere from David, their worlds only occasionally intersecting. Though David wasn’t around, Mabel often seemed to pretend otherwise; she always referred to herself as “Mrs. David Todd” and the many newspaper notices about the events at Mabel’s home refer to it as their home, though they almost never mention David having been there. He wasn’t. From the time he was institutionalized in the spring of 1922, Mabel and David never lived together again.

  Mabel delighted in her grand new home that with the help of the trust that Arthur Curtiss James set up, she was able to decorate as she wished. Millicent wrote, “Matsuba was a center of cultural life in the community.”19 Mabel spent several months each year in Florida; from June to October she went to Maine and lived at the camp she and David had built on her beloved Hog Island.

  Although Mabel’s Florida winters and Maine summers suggest the leisurely life of a retiree, she was anything but. As she had in Amherst and throughout her life, she placed a high premium on industriousness. Despite her age and the stroke she’d suffered, she continued to be energetic and vital, involved in a variety of artistic, civic and environmental endeavors. “Although she is the wife of one of America’s most eminent astronomers, Mrs. David Todd does not shine by reflected glory,” observed an article in the Miami Herald. Another notice in the social pages titled “With the Women of Today” read, “Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of Professor Todd, the noted astronomer, has been one of the most familiar figures on the lecture platform for a quarter of a century. In addition to her lectures she is known as an astronomer, poet, editor and author. The story of Mrs. Todd’s active life reads like a page each from ‘who’s who,’ travel and adventure.”20

  Mabel’s scrapbooks from the 1920s are filled with newspaper notices about her many talks on a range of subjects from world travels to astronomical events. There are articles about her election as president of the local chapter of the Audubon Society and her work to make the Everglades a national park. The scrapbooks are stuffed with programs from concerts, plays and art exhibits she attended and with printed cards announcing the multitude of events she held at her home, including many receptions for local artists.

  One of the artists she encountered was Howard Hilder. Hilder, a British expatriate decamped to the American South, and described by the Miami Herald as “the leading interpreter of the scenic beauty of Florida,” was known for his large murals as well as for smaller oil paintings. He and Mabel hit it off instantly. Soon Mabel was introducing him to prominent collectors, featuring his works in her own home, and creating social opportunities at which he could display, donate or promote his art. He also became her escort to innumerable events. Mabel provided Hilder with studio space on her properties in Florida and on Hog Island. She lent him money, even though she was concerned about David’s increasing debts. Hilder took charge of the cleanup at Matsuba when it was severely damaged by a hurricane in 1927. He drove Mabel to and from her residences each October and June, and he often would help her by closing up the houses at the end of each season.

  Even when they were not together, they maintained an intensive correspondence that lasted from 1919 until 1932, sometimes writing each other every day. They always addressed each other as “My dear old pal” or sometimes, “Hilder of Hog.” From their letters, one can clearly discern a deepening relationship: they move from speaking only about art, sales and logistics to discussing David’s bizarre behavior and the need to keep him institutionalized and Hilder’s relationship with another married woman.

  The nature of Mabel and Howard Hilder’s relationship is not quite clear. At the time, Mabel was writing only the most cursory entries in her daily diary and rarely wrote in her journal. Lines in her letters to Hilder suggest that she wanted to tell him more than she could write. Whether this was a function of her inability to write long passages by hand after her stroke or some hesitation about conveying intimate thoughts on paper after the relationship with Austin is uncertain. They certainly were great cheerleaders for each other—she referred to him as “the Chopin of painters,” and he wrote her: “Your hidden (so far) talents are brilliant even unto purposeness, my dear.”21 He painted several pictures of Matsuba for her, as well as her portrait.

  Millicent was very suspicious of this relationship. In the write-ups from her psychiatric sessions in 1927, Millicent included notes about her belief that Mabel was being ridiculous in thinking of Hilder as one of America’s greatest painters, and that, by catering to him, her mother had stooped to depths she had never before been capable of. She was disgusted by Mabel’s lavish praise of Hilder, appalled that she had loaned him money, and truly horrified that Mabel had somehow used her contacts and wealthy friends to enable Hilder and Jack, his son from a prior marriage, “with their love of whiskey and painted women,” to purchase a tract of land on Hog Island. In a rare moment of true vulnerability, Millicent admitted to her fear and jealousy that her mother had grown closer to Howard Hilder than she was to her: “Doubtless he is much nearer to her than I am,” she wrote, adding that the patterns of her mother’s relationships with men other than David “wakes me up at night and torments me.”22

  “Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door,” wrote Emily Dickinson in the poem Mabel titled “Dawn” (poem 1619 in the Johnson edition). As the 1920s progressed, neither Mabel nor Millicent would clearly know when their dawns would come. But the events of the past two decades had shown Millicent that the doors once open to both her parents were rapidly closing—their legacies were in doubt, her own was still not in focus. In one of her journals she admitted her fears about never finding her own true path, as well as how her filial loyalties tore her apart—and how the cloud of the Dickinsons hung over them all:
<
br />   There is my father, as there is my mother. My father, a curious mixture of doing more than he is given credit for, as well as doing less than he has a right to be. . . . Mamma? She occupies much of my thought, heart, brain, unwittingly pathetic little soul. I never forget her brilliancy, sometimes pointed to dazzle with dismay. Her gifts, her talents, her achievements, the adoration she has from the world, her prolific service. . . . But oh, Mr. Dickinson, the poison of that for my childish soul—and Madam Bianchi still. . . . Cruel past belief.23

  Even though Mabel and Millicent had moved away from Amherst, Amherst’s legacy stayed with them. They found themselves unable to put it all behind them. Mattie Dickinson would not allow it.

  Mattie, now incongruously known as “Madame Bianchi,” following her 1902 marriage to Alexander Bianchi, a Russian captain in the Imperial Horse Guards, had inherited her mother’s and her aunt Lavinia’s papers and homes. The last surviving member of the Dickinson clan, Mattie was facing financial and social pressure because of her husband’s gambling debts and fraud conviction. Literary scholar Elizabeth Horan points out that “the family car, various stocks, property in Atlantic City, the land over which Lavinia and Mrs. Todd had fought, all went to pay off Captain Bianchi’s debts and to settle lawsuits.”24 When none of Mattie’s own literary endeavors yielded any significant income, she decided to release a new volume of her aunt Emily’s poetry, possibly in an effort to rehabilitate her own name and help promote her own career as a writer and poet—and raise some much-needed funds. In 1914 she published The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime by Emily Dickinson. In the preface to this book, Mattie suggested that Emily had sent all the poems to her mother, Sue. While this may be true, in fact, many of the poems in this volume were ones that Mabel and Higginson had previously edited and published. The Single Hound contained a total of 143 poems; altogether Mabel’s original three volumes of Emily’s poetry contained 144. As the editors of the online Emily Dickinson archive point out, Mattie subsequently brought out additional poems in two other volumes that “combined the poems found in the three Todd-Higginson volumes with her own work and published The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. But this appellation proved too hasty: she subsequently found more manuscript material and released two further installments.”25 Those were only the poems that had been previously published in other places or were in Mattie’s possession.

  Mabel and Millicent took issue with Mattie’s work in many ways. As Millicent later explained in Ancestors’ Brocades, “Certain poems in that volume . . . differ more or less from the printed text, some by only a word or two, while others are sufficiently unlike as to constitute two separate versions.” Millicent provided many specific examples of instances in which she believed Mattie had either misread Emily’s manuscripts, or selected an alternative word from among those Emily had suggested but which differed from Mabel and Higginson’s word choice. For instance, Millicent pointed to Mabel’s transcription of the poem “There is another loneliness,” and how the first stanza differed from Mattie’s version published in The Single Hound (1914), which Millicent believed came “from misreading the manuscript”:

  MABEL’S TRANSCRIPTION:

  There is another loneliness

  That many die without,

  Not want of friend occasions it,

  Or circumstance of lot.

  MATTIE’S VERSION:

  There is another loneliness

  That many die without,

  Not want or friend occasions it,

  Or circumstance or lot.26

  One of the clear examples Millicent provided of Mattie having not used the word choice Emily preferred was from the poem “To see her is a picture.” Millicent noted that in the Todds’ interpretation of Emily’s true choice, the third and fourth lines of the poem read:

  To know her, a disparagement

  Of every other boon.

  Whereas in Mattie’s published version in The Single Hound, these lines read:

  To know her an intemperance

  As innocent as June.

  Millicent wrote in Ancestors’ Brocades that while Emily did suggest many alternatives in her original manuscript, she also gave clues about her preference, as evidenced by the appearance and location of word alternatives.27

  Furthermore, Millicent pointed out that some of the poems Mattie published as stand-alone verses were, in fact, fragments of longer poems.28 However, Mattie did keep most of the poems’ original rhyme schemes intact, and unlike Mabel and Higginson, Mattie chose not to title the poems, just as her aunt had declined to do.

  The publisher, Little, Brown (successor to Roberts Brothers), promoted the book with ad copy that might have come directly from Mattie, herself: “A memory sketch of Emily Dickinson, written in the desire to establish her identity beyond misconception of hearsay and portray her as she was.”29

  Critical reaction to the volume was mixed. In The New Republic, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote, “There is, I think, less of human passion in this collection than in the earlier ones,” though she applauded Emily’s creativity and was intrigued by Mattie’s introduction, which was “a suggestive preface of anecdote and reminiscence to prove how little the aunt she loved resembled the poetess as she is ‘taught in colleges.’ . . . The Single Hound,” she concluded, “is as surprising as a cold douche, as acute as the edge of a precipice, as lambent as a meteor cleaving the night.”30 In Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, editor Harriet Monroe wrote:

  The present volume may not increase the measure of her spiritual height and depth, or add new luster to her beauty of soul, to the star-like fidelity of her genius or the lithe nudity of her art. These were established by the two earlier collections, published soon after the poet’s death. But nothing in those precious books is finer than a few poems in this one, which doubtless represents the final effort of her niece and literary executor to extricate Emily Dickinson’s poems from a mass of ragged papers, and preserve them for lovers of her temperamental art.31

  In 1922 the copyright on Mabel’s 1894 Letters of Emily Dickinson expired, which Mattie used to her advantage. In a new volume she rearranged most of the letters so that they appeared chronologically rather than by correspondent, added in letters in her possession that Emily had written to her mother and other family members and wrote an introductory essay and a number of chapters about Emily’s life to go with them. Houghton Mifflin published her book, titled The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, in 1924. That same year, Mattie’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by Little, Brown. Of course, this volume was not truly complete—Mabel still retained over six hundred poems that were stashed away in her camphorwood chest. Mattie wrote, “A high exigence constrains the sole survivor of her family to state her simply and truthfully, in view of a public which has doubtless without intention, misunderstood and exaggerated her seclusion—amassing a really voluminous stock of quite lurid misinformation of irrelevant personalities. She has been taught in colleges as a weird recluse, rehearsed to women’s clubs as a lovelorn sentimentalist.”32 This was clearly a shot over the bow directed at Mabel, renewing the battle to define Emily Dickinson. Millicent, outraged over the public wrong she felt Mattie had done to Mabel, decided to step into the family feud for the first time.

  Predictably, Millicent’s reaction to these publications was to analyze them. In Ancestors’ Brocades she provides a painstaking list of all the errors that Mattie made in her version of Emily’s letters, ranging from simple omissions to outright and sloppy mistakes, including incorrect dates of people’s births and deaths—even Emily’s. Millicent noted, “Bad as such factual mistakes were, at least they were obvious and would sooner or later be noticed. Many of them have been rectified in a later edition. But misrepresentation of personal relationships is a different matter.” Here, Millicent was referring to Mattie’s essay about Emily’s life, in which she characterized her aunt Emily’s relationship with Sue as loving, mutually respectful and genuine. (“The romantic friendship of Aunt Emil
y Dickinson and her ‘Sister Sue’ extended from girlhood until death. The first poem, dated, was sent in 1848, and probably the last word Aunt Emily ever wrote was her reply to a message from my Mother, ‘My answer is an unmitigated Yes, Sue.’”)33 Millicent retorted that in her own mother’s volume of Letters, any mention of Sue was taken out at Austin’s request and “Emily’s relationship to her sister-in-law will repay further investigation.”34 Millicent also pointed out that other than one paragraph on Emily’s childhood, Mattie made no mention of Emily’s relationship to her brother, though Austin and Emily were very close, nor did she include any photos of Austin in the book. Old wounds, it seemed, were still fresh, and their pain spurred Mattie to try to alter the historical record—at least according to Millicent.

  Millicent was also outraged by the “irreparable misrepresentation” of Emily’s “love story.”

  “Not only was the legend of a broken heart revived,” wrote Millicent, “it was fantastically embellished. . . . The fact that the niece does not understand her aunt, though regrettable, does not matter. What does matter is that such a statement betrays Emily, because it is not true . . . to misrepresent her in this is to do her the greatest disservice in the power of a relative to bestow.”35 Of course, coming from the daughter of the woman who launched a different—and perhaps not altogether accurate—image of the poet and marketed it to the world through her talks, Millicent’s remarks must be taken in context.

  “I begged my mother to allow me to refute some of the misstatements in the Life and Letters, arguing that a false impression may become permanent unless it is challenged at once,” Millicent wrote in Ancestors’ Brocades. “She refused. I drew her attention to the fact that no acknowledgment had been made to her early volumes. Mrs. Bianchi’s name on the title-page implied that she herself had collected and edited the letters. Such effrontery left me aghast. That misrepresentation must not be allowed to stand. I asked my mother why she did not protest. She said, ‘Please do not talk about it.’”36 This may be a bit of revisionist history on Millicent’s part, because nowhere in her journals or diaries—or in Mabel’s, for that matter—is there a record of such a discussion. In addition, a letter Millicent wrote to the poet Amy Lowell, who was also at the time considering working on her own volume about Emily Dickinson, and who had been in correspondence with both Mabel and Millicent, shows that in 1924, Mabel was already starting to craft how and when to publicly respond to Mattie. Millicent wrote to Lowell that Mabel had shown her some unpublished Dickinson copies: “They are simply superb! . . . What an orgy we shall have when the said MDB [Mattie] steps out one day!”37