by Julie Dobrow
By the early 1960s, Millicent felt she had accomplished most of the things she had promised Mabel. She’d succeeded in getting the long-hidden Emily Dickinson materials published, and, through her own books, credited Mabel with the work she had done on Dickinson’s poems while excoriating the Dickinson women—Vinnie, Sue and Mattie—for their behavior and for the “incorrect” versions of Emily they had promulgated. Millicent had managed to place most of Mabel’s “curios,” papers and paintings, and she had ensured the continued preservation of Hog Island and Pelham Knob. But there was one remaining task she knew Mabel had wished her to accomplish that Millicent was still loath to take on: publishing Austin’s and Mabel’s letters to each other. Throughout the battles with Harvard, Millicent feared someone would expose Mabel and Austin’s illicit relationship; when Amherst professor George Whicher wrote a review of Millicent’s books in 1945, she was alarmed at his elliptical allusion to the affair. Millicent knew that she would be mortified should the information in Mabel’s journals and diaries go public; she was well aware of the power of the letters between Mabel and Austin, which she had held on to for years—even though she long denied reading them or fully understanding their import.
Millicent was also cognizant that the story of Mabel and Austin was “basic to an understanding of Emily Dickinson—who through the years suffered vicariously for Austin, and directly through Sue’s ‘ingenious cruelties.’” But the topic deeply unsettled her own conscience. “The day has gone when people think of a great passion, extra-curricular though it may be, as sin. But so it still seems to me. And it was my mother who sinned. . . . I knew that because it seemed to me so wrong, I could not touch it. I gave up the idea of a biography, acknowledged the fact that the relationship had existed, but, as throughout the previous half century, buried it, together with all recognition of the feud, deep within.” And yet, she knew the story would somehow have to be told. She worried that if she didn’t maintain some control over it, Mabel’s story would be “besmirched” by so-called scholars and “others [who] will let loose in the same vein.”17
“Other unfulfilled obligations still resting upon me include those to my mother’s diaries covering nearly seventy years, and to her journals,” Millicent wrote in her journal. Millicent knew she was not the right person to do anything other than preserve these documents: “How is it possible for me to present a great passion which ennobled two people which was to me sin? That is my limitation. I am not fit to write about it. But here are the documents, left in my charge, the journals and diaries and letters, and the authorization, implicit from my mother, explicit from Austin, to print them.” She felt somewhat reassured, though, once she figured out where to safely place these documents. “By a provision of my will they are to be entrusted to the care of Richard [Sewall], and to his judgment. He will decide who is capable of writing her life, which will require the services of as ‘multi-aptitude’ a person (Walter’s description of her), as herself. But that is a book the writing of which is inevitable, sooner or later. It will be safe in Richard’s hands.”18
Millicent’s trust was not misplaced. Indeed, Sewall would not delve deeply into the Mabel/Austin letters in his 1974 biography of Emily Dickinson. However, in the preface he wrote for Polly Longsworth’s book, published a decade later, which did recount the love letters in great detail, Sewall stated, “Veteran novel readers will rub their eyes to remind themselves that this really happened. And since it happened close to Emily Dickinson, it is important.” Separately, in an unpublished tribute to Millicent, whom Sewall had gotten to know quite well, he wrote, “She was as fair-minded and just as it was possible for an intensely loyal daughter to be. She urged me constantly to ‘get the other side of the story,’ guided me to the sources, and, in turning over the family archive for my use, gave me a free hand to do with it as I would. What she wanted was to have all the truth told.”19
Though she never quite allowed herself to dig into it very deeply, Millicent knew the obligations she felt to memorialize her parents and control how their stories were presented were duties she took on with a conflicted heart, with neither nostalgia nor joy. The weight of her filial debts hung on her heavily, for she was acutely, painfully aware of how flawed her parents had been. “In place of a sense of the joy of life I had a sense of responsibility, not only for my own conduct, but for the justification of that of my parents as well,” she explained. More than that, Millicent came to believe that her duty to deal with her parents and their problems truly prevented her from having a fulfilling life with Walter:
For almost twenty years after I married him it was responsibility, and anxiety for their physical safety. For my father, whether to keep him confined and endure his desperate unhappiness and his reproaches to me as the cause of it or arrange for his comparative freedom and agonize over what he might do next. For my mother, partially paralyzed, but intrepid and gallant in her Florida home which became a center of social life and musical life, I was always anxious about the hangers on who benefitted from her susceptibility to art and beauty and feared lest her financial resources . . . would not hold out.20
In her final years, Millicent spent significant time reading over her own diaries and journals, as well as reading Mabel’s. But for Millicent this wasn’t simply a passing indulgence; it was a painful and time-consuming obsession.
“What are these drives, so compelling that they warp people’s lives?” she pondered in 1963. “To carry out my mother’s wishes, to right her wrongs, was mine, which took the place of the wish to comfort and encourage Walter, which faded into second place in comparison.” Millicent spent hour upon hour, day after day, rereading her own diaries, the first volume of which she had begun in 1887—seventy-six years’ worth of the minutiae of her life. “I had thought that, being my daily companion, to which I turned each day before I went to sleep, they would contain a record of my inner life. Certainly there was no one to talk to about it.” But what Millicent found were the listings of her life, and not its meaning. Even her own companion journals, which offered more insight into her thoughts and dreams, did not yield quite the road map to her mind and heart, nor the level of self-awareness and analysis, that Millicent sought in the last years of her life. She also spent enormous amounts of time reading through Mabel’s diaries and journals, and her notebook “Millicent’s Life,” which she said, “gives me clues as to why, as a child, I felt as I did.”21
In a remarkable decade-by-decade recap written in 1959, Millicent elucidated what she believed to be the major events of her life, as gleaned from reading her diaries and journals, and reflected on their meanings. And yet even here, as she looked back from the perch of old age, Millicent’s understanding of what drove her own life was still limited. She continued to point to “the Puritan point-of-view,” as the polestar that guided her. It explained her reticence, her thriftiness and her morality. Millicent returned time and again to the “inheritance of my forebears,” as a way of understanding herself and her place in the world. It was a convenient explanation that enabled Millicent to grasp her ideas and behaviors without delving more deeply into the other relational and personal issues that had shaped them.
In addition to her diaries and journals, Millicent was a lifelong, inveterate list maker. One of the many running lists she compiled was her “typed list of MTB’s illnesses.” Over the years she’d experienced many medical issues, the most serious of which were her bout with diphtheria and subsequent heart problems in 1908, and the type 3 pneumonia that nearly proved fatal in 1937. As an adult, she was excessively concerned with her health. There is a large file at Yale of her frequent letters to and responses from doctors about her real and imagined medical issues. As she reached her eighty-fifth year, Millicent was still well enough to travel to Hog Island and to Amherst one last time. But throughout her last years, while Millicent continued to read newspapers and comment on the news in her diaries (“the weight of the President’s crookedness plus the hideous slaughter in Vietnam . . . leaves
little hope that the man is not bent on self-destruction,” she wrote of Lyndon Johnson), she did not delineate her own physical decline in the type of detail she had earlier devoted to both her actual and her psychosomatic infirmities.22
By 1965, Millicent finalized her will. She made clear not only where the remaining items in her possession would go but also how she wished her remaining funds to be dispersed. This included gifts to environmental and educational organizations, establishing the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Fellowship in Psychology, and, in a nod to her mother and an acknowledgment of the importance of their shared lineage, to the Mary Mattoon chapter of the DAR in Amherst. Her last effort to take care of her parents was to leave money to Wildwood Cemetery.
After Walter’s death, Millicent had had some correspondence with the Green Mountain Marble Corporation in Vermont about his headstone. At the time, she let them know what she wanted on her own headstone, since she had no relatives to carry out her wishes. She queried about the possibility of making “a simple headstone of black slate” for a “marker at my family lot at Amherst, Mass. With a few lines indicating my place of burial in Arlington National Cemetery.”23 The company wrote back saying they didn’t make any headstones out of slate, and apparently Millicent never followed up on finding anyone who did, for there is no such marker at Wildwood. Millicent’s profound ambivalence carried on through the end, her intent to permanently connect and yet distance herself from her parents, signposted in slate, unrealized.
Millicent carefully listed the people she wished notified by telegram when she passed away (Walter’s surviving brother and nephew), and the people she wanted notified by mail (the list included President Calvin Plimpton at Amherst College, the presidents of Vassar and Dickinson Colleges, and Richard Sewall at Yale). She meticulously specified the music she desired played at her funeral, to be held in the Washington Cathedral (including the adagio from Beethoven’s first quartet, Bach’s Suite #3 and the Kyrie of Mozart’s unfinished Mass).
In 1964, Millicent observed, “it is curious how my life has been dedicated to the cause of the dead—Mrs. Stearns, Grandpa . . . my mother, even a brief memoir of Walter. But chiefly to carrying out the wishes of mother, to set the record straight about Emily Dickinson. . . . Tributes to the dead, in deference to the truth. Should not the final one be to myself—who have so short a time to wait? It would be in line with my life-order.” Indeed, this is precisely what she did. Millicent carefully wrote her own obituary. Published in the Washington Star, it’s not surprising that Millicent’s abbreviated version of her life led with:
Mrs. Millicent Todd Bingham, a teacher, geographer, and author who compiled hundreds of previously unknown poems of Emily Dickinson, died Sunday after a long illness at her home. She was the daughter of David Todd, a member of the Amherst College faculty for almost 50 years, and Mabel Loomis Todd. Her mother was an author and the first editor of Emily Dickinson’s works. During the 1890s, Mrs. Todd worked without compensation on the poetry, but she locked the manuscripts in a chest when a lawsuit estranged the Dickinson and Todd Families. In 1929 she gave her daughter the key and charged her to prepare the material for publication.
After situating herself squarely as her parents’ daughter (and perhaps mistakenly giving her father credit for ten years more than he actually served as a faculty member at Amherst) and setting up her life’s main work as a continuation of Mabel’s, Millicent’s obituary recounts her own educational, travel, geographic and literary accomplishments. It’s also notable—and typical—in the obituary she prepared for herself, both that Millicent chose to emphasize Walter’s achievements and that she was “a descendant of John Alden and of the New England clergyman Jonathan Edwards.”24
Her obituary in the New York Times also included snippets of other things Millicent had written about her life. “‘I grew up with a feeling of wonder at the mysteries of nature, earth, sea and sky,’ she said once. ‘My father studied the stars on summer nights through a telescope, my mother studied flowers, mushrooms and trees, and I followed the birds.’” In the rest of this obituary, it’s clear that Millicent also followed her parents in many other ways—on expeditions and with work on Emily Dickinson.25
It is typical and significant that the wording Millicent selected for her own tombstone, beside Walter’s at Arlington National Cemetery, presents simply her name and dates, adding only “Wife of Lt. Col. W V Bingham, USA.” It is only the back of the stone that contains the phrase, “Army Education Corps, France, 1918–1919,” a phrase she didn’t need as a requirement for burial at Arlington, since she was a veteran’s spouse.26 When she died on December 1, 1968, these final instructions were put into place, memorializing her forever as she saw herself—in relation to other people, a link in the chain of a Puritan tradition, last in the line of Wilder women, someone who let other people’s work and stories take precedence over her own.
MILLICENT MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO BE BURIED BESIDE WALTER IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM HER PARENTS AND AMHERST.
“I wish I had all day to write about the profound emotions that have swept over me during the last twenty-four hours,” wrote Millicent on a cold spring day in March 1960. NASA had launched Pioneer V, a space probe designed to investigate interplanetary space between Earth and Venus. “With my mind full of these fairy tales, and what it would all have meant to my father, I went out into the moonlit night, dazzlingly bright reflected from the snow.” The day of the launch coincided with an eclipse. “It was almost uncanny that at 2:30, ten minutes before totality began, I waked.” Millicent went to a window and stared up at the cloudless sky, noting the reddish-orange glow of the moon and the street lamps’ contrasting greenish beam, both of them throwing light on the snowy ground. It was a clear eclipse, unlike any she had seen.
The next morning, she took Mabel’s Total Eclipses of the Sun from her bookshelf. This made her think of her parents—how David’s eyes “were fixed on the heavens night after night, observing celestial events which he had predicted,” and how Mabel’s focus was always elsewhere—the next project, the next book, the next talk, Austin. “How small must have seemed the conflict of human emotions,” she wrote. “The essential nobility of . . . character . . . is emerging, like the bright limb of the moon, from shadow, the shadow of the cloud that shrouded [them] and made me lose them . . . from view in misunderstanding.”27
CHAPTER 16
UNPACKING THE CAMPHORWOOD CHEST
When Mabel and Millicent opened the camphorwood chest in 1929, they released far more than just the last of Emily Dickinson’s unpublished poems and letters. They also unsealed evidence of Mabel’s passion for Austin and the betrayal and vindictiveness she believed perpetrated by the Dickinson women, as well as Millicent’s often-repressed memories and conflicted feelings about her parents, and the consequent compromises in her own life.
All these ghosts haunted Emily’s legacy. The love and the animosity between members of the Todd and Dickinson families affected the dispersal of Dickinson’s poetry and letters; the legal battles over copyright and ownership lasted for years. Arguably, they’ve never quite disappeared. Since Millicent’s death in 1968, opening the camphorwood chest has fueled debates over the editorial decisions she and Mabel made, and fired disputes about who has the right to define Emily Dickinson’s persona and personal life.
Today, Emily Dickinson lives on in many modes—literary, biographical, visual and fictional. She’s been brought to life on stage and screen. New elucidations of her life and work are born and grow in online communities worldwide. The appropriation of the so-called Belle of Amherst has taken on a life of its own.
But none of this would have happened without the contributions of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham. The key to their influence on Emily Dickinson’s legacy lies in the drama and tragedy of their own lives and their complicated relationship with each other.
How could Mabel feel she knew Emily well enough to be her interpreter when she never actually
met her face-to-face? In contrast to the fictional confrontation depicted in the 2016 film A Quiet Passion, Dickinson biographers ranging from Polly Longsworth to Lyndall Gordon, websites including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Britannica.com and Wikipedia are all definitive: “Todd never met Emily Dickinson.” As Longsworth points out, despite Mabel’s early suggestion in an 1882 journal entry that “I know I shall see her. No one has seen her in all these years except her own family,” in fact, Mabel never even laid eyes upon the poet until after her death, if then. Mabel even admitted under oath at the 1898 trial that she had never met nor spoken with Emily.
But clearly, Mabel believed that she did know Emily, and knew her fairly well. There are tantalizing, if secondary, suggestions that she did. Historian Sharon Nancy White suggests, “it would probably be a mistake to dismiss Mabel’s respect and fondness for Emily Dickinson as mere posturing,” pointing out the exchanges of notes and art in various forms as well as contemporaneous references in Mabel’s diary to her “dear friend.” Literary analyst James Guthrie references a note Emily wrote to Mabel on July 19, 1884, several months after the death of Judge Lord, which, he believes “assumed some knowledge on Todd’s part of her [Emily’s] involvement with the judge.” On the evening of Emily’s death Mabel noted in her diary she had spent “a sad, sad near hour” trying to comfort Austin, before going to bed, herself, “full of grief.” Each of these instances might well suggest that despite never having met, Mabel and Emily did, indeed, form a bond.1
And Millicent? In 1965 she wrote to Charles Green at the Jones Library in Amherst, “How very thoughtful of you to send me the notices of the sale of Emily Dickinson’s house! My early childhood was spent largely in that house, so I have a special affection for it.”2 But it is difficult to believe that Millicent actually spent much of her childhood at The Homestead. After all, the majority of Millicent’s early years were spent living with her grandparents. Emily died when Millicent was only six, and, given the tensions that arose during the Mabel/Austin relationship, it seems unlikely she would have spent much time at the Dickinson family home. If she did spend time there, it is plausible she might have encountered Emily, either because her father—of whom Vinnie was quite fond—brought her there, or the same way other neighboring children did when the reclusive poet gave them baked treats lowered from her bedroom window in a basket.