by Julie Dobrow
The battles with Harvard left her personally scarred; she could never quite get over them or leave them behind. Having Emily’s papers divided between two institutions had certainly not been Millicent’s wish, nor her intent. The twisted and complicated machinations that led to the papers’ dispersal led Millicent to think of it all as the reviving of an ancient feud. Using language that might seem overly dramatic but that reflected what she deeply felt, she described the disputes over Emily’s papers as battles that perpetuated her own “lifetime of suffering because of the Dickinsons [and] what they did to my family, taking it on the chin always.”58
The saga divided Emily’s manuscripts between Harvard and Amherst, and left a fraught legacy whose resonances linger many decades later. But in the end, Millicent still firmly and uncompromisingly held on to her principles. She had managed to keep her promise to Mabel and publish all the Emily Dickinson materials in the camphorwood chest. She had done all she could to enable scholarship. She had not taken a penny in exchange for the treasures she held. And finally, she had delivered her Dickinson manuscripts back to Emily’s home, where she felt they truly belonged.
MILLICENT WITH L. QUINCY MUMFORD, DIRECTOR OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ALTHOUGH MOST OF HER COLLECTION ENDED UP ELSEWHERE, MILLICENT DONATED THREE EMILY DICKINSON POEM MANUSCRIPTS TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IN 1956.
CHAPTER 15
SEEKING CLOSURE AND MEANING (1960–1968)
“To finish the unfinished work of others has been a sacred trust”
“Piles of papers, preliminary sorting on every chair in every room,” Millicent wrote anxiously in November 1960. “I woke at 4 and tackled the first pile, which took me almost an hour . . . these residual piles and basketfuls of clippings, and mementoes, the thousands of books, the trunkfuls of materials saved by mamma and through the decades, honored by me.” The task was overwhelming. “Yesterday my diaries were placed on the open shelves, opposite me, more than 70 years of them, and nearly 50 of mamma’s.”1 Fortunately, Millicent had the very able help of Gladys McKenzie, the archivist-cum-personal assistant whom she had hired to assist her with the complicated jobs before her.
Millicent had worked with Gladys since 1958, and she had quickly become reliant on her clear thinking and organizational skills. Gladys helped her sort through the mountains of papers and photos, recorded lists and notes, assisted in transcribing her journals and diaries and in turning scribbles into neatly typed pages. She aided Millicent in her ongoing negotiations about where the papers would ultimately be housed. Despite her dependence on Gladys, Millicent never made much effort to get to know her. Indeed, she continued to refer to her as “Mrs. Mackenzie” in her journals, seemingly not recognizing that she was consistently misspelling her name. But Millicent’s lack of care about someone with whom she worked so closely did not go unnoticed; in a folder innocuously labeled “notes,” McKenzie left behind a few thoughts about her boss for future researchers to contemplate: “She is neither tolerant nor very generous; interested only in herself and family and reading about the growth and development of her soul. Besides it didn’t grow, just as petty and mean about certain things at end of life as earlier.”2
Ever the list maker, Millicent typed up endless inventories of what she thought needed to be accomplished. There was emptying Walter’s room and getting all of his papers a home and finding someone to write his biography; there was the need to catalog all of her parents’ papers; there were the boxes of things being shipped to Amherst College for the “David and Mabel Todd Room”; there were thousands of books to be appraised and for which she had to find repositories. There was also the need to put her own papers in order and place them somewhere. She made innumerable registers of what was to go where, and since her arrangements changed with some frequency, made more lists. She placed paintings with the Mead Gallery at Amherst College and with the Concord Antiquarian Society; much of Mabel’s original art went to the Botanical Museum at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. She gave artifacts to the Amherst Historical Society, to the Peabody Museum at Yale, and to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. She sent books to many different libraries. But there were still the tens of thousands of papers—letters, articles, drafts of books and articles, drafts of drafts, medical documents, legal documents, scrapbooks, the diaries and journals of three generations of Wilder women and their men. Millicent wrote ruefully, “It is obvious that I shall not live to finish. The question is, how to manage so that I achieve the serenity to write at least some chapters in my own life story.”3
Just as she had believed that Emily Dickinson’s papers ultimately belonged all together and belonged in Amherst, Millicent also believed that her family’s papers should reside there as well. This was part of the package deal she made with the Amherst College Board of Trustees. But by early 1960, President Cole “released” her from this agreement, should she wish to find another home for her extensive family papers and artifacts. Disappointed, Millicent felt Amherst’s decision not to set up a “museum room” for her parents’ expedition artifacts and allocate sufficient space for them was in some way a lack of validation of her father’s “almost forty years” of service as a professor there. “So my mother’s dream, and my goal, to carry out her dream, has disappeared,” she wrote.4 In her frustration, she began to realize that Amherst’s library was not set up to receive or preserve her voluminous collection.
At the same time, Millicent was busily corresponding with Yale professor Richard Sewall, at work on his seminal biography of Emily Dickinson. Sewall was well aware of Millicent’s dilemmas, and he knew what a large collection of papers she had. Unlike Amherst College, Yale was prepared to process and house large document collections. Sterling Library had been acquiring rare books and collections of personal papers since 1924; plans to open the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library were under way while Millicent was desperately trying to find a suitable repository. Sewall suggested to Millicent that Yale might be a better home for her papers than Amherst.
In consultation with librarians James Babb and Howard Gotlieb at Yale, Sewall met with Judith Schiff, a new librarian in the historical manuscripts division. After getting to know her, Sewall made a suggestion: “There is a woman in Washington D.C. named Mrs. Bingham. I think she’ll like you. I would like you to go speak with her.” Judy Schiff was dispatched to the nation’s capital, where, on November 19, 1963, she spent three hours with Millicent. Sewall’s intuition was correct: Millicent did like Schiff. She liked what Schiff said about the new state-of-the-art archival facilities at Yale. She liked Schiff’s familiarity with the nineteenth-century families that had intersected with her own. She liked that Schiff seemed to understand her urge to keep all of her family papers together. She was also very taken with Schiff’s understanding that even some odd documents, like canceled checks, might one day have relevance in telling the story of the Bingham/Todd families. “She must be an unusual administrator,” Millicent mused. “At present, the impression she creates is one of quiet competence in doing what has to be done.” For her part, Schiff felt she connected with Millicent because of their shared interests in the century past, and she thought Millicent, herself, “dressed and spoke like someone who came from another era.”5
Because she trusted Judy Schiff and thought that Richard Sewall would be the only person to do justice to the story of Emily Dickinson and present a thoughtful portrait of Mabel that properly credited her work (while not delving too heavily into the story of Mabel and Austin), Millicent decided to leave her vast collection of family papers to Yale. Toward the very end of her life, she said, “Richard Sewall is my reason for having given to Yale the archives of my family on both sides dating back to the 18th century.”6
Yale agreed to take over Amherst College’s payments for rental of a separate space in Millicent’s building in which the sorting of documents could continue, and also to pay Gladys McKenzie’s salary for the duration of time it took to do this work. Gladys would also prepare a “scope note” for Yal
e, summarizing the approximately thirty-three thousand documents that had already been cataloged and shipped to Amherst, which would be transferred to Yale. Once the documents began arriving in New Haven, Gladys would be on site to assist the librarians with any questions and provide Millicent with regular updates (even writing her in 1968 about how progress on the Beinecke Library construction had been stalled by some environmentally oriented Yale students positioning themselves in front of a tree that was to be bulldozed). James Babb wrote to Millicent, “Be assured that . . . [Sewall] and I are thrilled that your wonderful archives will in time be the property of Yale University. May I also reassure you that we shall do our very best by and with them.”7 The remaining papers began to be shipped to Yale in 1964, and kept coming through June 1968.
In the early 1960s, Millicent noted in her journal that she had spoken with one of her oldest friends, Marta Milinowski. “When I told her that I had been sorting things in Amherst her only remark was, ‘Still?’” Sorting things, and trying to sort things out, were the major preoccupations of most of Millicent’s adult life, and continued to be in her final years.
In a 1959 interview, Millicent admitted that, approaching her ninth decade alone, she felt frightened and overwhelmed, “wallowing in unfinished business.”
“The drive has taken on added pressure,” she said, “a sense of urgency because there is not much time left.”8 Indeed, the last decade of Millicent’s life became a race against a ticking clock, amplified, perhaps, by rapidly changing times.
As she watched the unrest of the 1960s unfold, Millicent regularly commented on her distrust of President John F. Kennedy (“an untested Democratic president at this time of the gravest danger that has threatened us in our lifetime, maybe ever,” she wrote of the Cuban Missile Crisis). She fulminated about the building war in Vietnam (“the number of those killed . . . has the gruesome tone of a scoreboard for a game”) and race riots across the country (“the anarchy in Chicago seems uncontrollable”).9 Despite her concerns about news of the day Millicent was more focused on the past. Even after finding permanent homes for her family’s papers, Millicent felt that there was still unfinished business to resolve. Despite or maybe because of her unresolved feelings and what she referred to as the complication of her parents’ “many faults and built-in tragedies,” she was determined to find appropriate and lasting ways to pay tribute to each of her parents and to Walter. “To finish the unfinished work of others has been a sacred trust since my twenties when I tried to present the greatness of one of my teachers, Mrs. Stearns,” she wrote in her eightieth year. “The editing of other people’s writing as well as the care of other people’s treasures is that to which I have given my life . . . it is the deposit left within.”10
When Mabel died on her beloved Hog Island, Millicent knew that preserving the island permanently would be a meaningful tribute to her mother. However, it would take many decades to ensure the island’s conservation. In 1936, Millicent had established the Audubon Nature Camp for Adult Leaders—quite prescient when viewed through the lens of twenty-first-century standards. The idea that teachers needed an understanding of environmental issues to teach children about ecology was a radical notion in 1936. Teachers and “adult leaders” would come to Hog Island in groups for two-week stays during the summer. During that time, naturalists, ornithologists and other scientists would instruct campers about the ecology of the island. “The main objective was, if teachers of nature study to children can be sufficiently enthused with the subject, then children’s instinctive, inborn interest in birds and beasts or flowers can be salvaged. That interest will not die but will be fostered and encouraged . . . such camps will help to shield us from the reproach of future generations.”11
MILLICENT (RIGHT) WITH RACHEL CARSON AT THE HOG ISLAND AUDUBON CAMP DEDICATION CEREMONY, 1960.
Millicent leased the camp to the Audubon Society for one dollar a year, in return for their payment of taxes and her periodic occupancy of one of the cabins. As Millicent entered the final period of her life, she was keen to ensure that the camp and Audubon stewardship of Hog Island would continue in perpetuity. Apart from her own mortality, Millicent began to feel greater urgency about making permanent arrangements for Hog Island when she read the work of Rachel Carson.
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist by training and a writer by proclivity. She brought these passions together, along with her ardent belief in the need for conservation, in a series of books, essays and articles published in national periodicals such as The New Yorker, Nature, and Collier’s. Her 1951 book, The Sea around Us, was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than eighty weeks and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Around this time, Carson became interested in the use of pesticides and what they might be doing to the environment. Millicent increasingly believed Carson’s work was important; indeed, it came to define the American environmental movement after Carson’s untimely death in 1964. Drawn together by their interests and by their common stories (each had mothers who had had strokes but “wouldn’t admit it . . . the same old story”), the two women trained in science turned writers became friends. When Millicent arranged for the Audubon Society to take full ownership of Hog Island and held a dedication ceremony in August of 1960, Rachel Carson was one of the invited guests. Carson even mentioned the event in her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring: “In the summer of 1960 conservationists from many states converged on a peaceful Maine island to witness its presentation to the National Audubon Society by its owner, Millicent Todd Bingham. The focus that day was on the preservation of the natural landscape and of the intricate web of life whose inter-woven strands lead from microbes to men.” To Millicent, Carson wrote, “Ever since I left you yesterday I have been thinking of how full your heart must be, and of the thoughts that must fill your mind—thoughts of the past, and of the future as your dreams for the Island are fulfilled. There should be for you a deep satisfaction in having been able to make such an abiding contribution to preserving not only the tangible beauty of the island, but the things that are ‘eternal.’”12
Millicent paid tribute to her mother in her remarks at the dedication ceremony and with the placement of a large boulder in the middle of the island that bears the inscription:
The Todd Wildlife Sanctuary presented to the
National Audubon Society by Millicent Todd Bingham,
in memory of her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd,
who, fifty years ago, saved this island wilderness and
thus shaped its destiny as a perpetual preserve.
Privately, Millicent realized her efforts to pass along Hog Island to the Audubon Society were part of a complicated obligation she felt she owed Mabel. “As I felt responsible for [my parents’] conduct in my childhood, so now, in my old age, I am feeling responsible for the record they leave behind,” she penned in notes for the autobiography she never wrote. Elsewhere in this file, she jotted down on a scrap of paper, “Hog Island Mamma’s project, the camp for adults, mine.”13
Similarly, Millicent worked to ensure that the tract of land Mabel had purchased in 1909 in Pelham, just outside of Amherst, would continue in a conservation trust. Millicent first suggested this to Amherst College’s president Charles Cole in 1946 and her gifts to Amherst a decade later included the land. But the actual creation of a preserve didn’t occur until 1961. Throughout that time, Millicent had been in close touch with Cole, and then his successor, Calvin Plimpton, about her intent for the land and what it should be called. On May 21, 1961, the Mabel Loomis Todd Forest was dedicated. The program commemorating the event noted, “Although both Mrs. Bingham and her mother are perhaps better known for their dedicated efforts as editors of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, their contributions to conservation have been extensive . . . with the presentation of the Mabel Loomis Todd Forest the long range hopes and plans of mother and daughter are now realized.”14
Millicent’s determination to preserve both Hog Island and Pelham Knob was ultimatel
y an effort in land preservation and conservation, but it was also an effort to do what she thought Mabel would have wanted done. Amazingly, in an unpublished manuscript from 1936, Millicent wrote, “The problem of conservation has been brought to public attention very often of late, in books and articles, over the radio . . . but in spite of all the activity, however, the general public is not yet aware of what it is all about. . . . They are . . . results following causes which we, ourselves, have set in motion—destruction of forests, overgrazing, marsh drainage, and so on.”15 Years before anyone uttered the term “climate change,” Millicent seemed aware of how human development can have far-ranging environmental consequences. Though she understood the ecological imperatives of conservation, she was also cognizant that her efforts to preserve the land were motivated by wanting to complete Mabel’s unfinished task.
Millicent fulfilled her desire to find some way of ensuring Walter’s contributions to the field of psychology were recognized and memorialized in less complicated ways. Walter’s papers were divided between the Pentagon and Carnegie Mellon University. After his death, Millicent gave money to establish a yearly Bingham Lecture on an aspect of industrial psychology. She prepared a bibliography of his books and articles, and gave his library to the University of Oslo. She identified Lewis R. Frazier, an industrial psychologist who had worked with Walter at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, as the perfect person to write Walter’s story, although he never did.
Memorializing her father was more difficult. Millicent was conscious of the many ways in which her father had been broken. “He did important work as a young man,” she wrote, “and that has been overlooked because of the extravagances of his later years. A matter-of-fact account of his achievements is needed also as a back-drop for the tragedy which not only broke the back of his career, piled on top of a succession of cloudy eclipses, it broke his heart.”16 Millicent attempted to find someone to write a biography of David several times, unsuccessfully.