by Julie Dobrow
During college my interest in Emily Dickinson intensified. I frequently walked by the two Dickinson homes in Amherst and wondered about the lives of those who had lived there. I did some research about Helen Hunt Jackson, poet, former Amherst resident and childhood Dickinson friend. I knew that she had encouraged Emily to share her poetic gift with the world, and yet Emily still demurred. I didn’t know why, which only increased my curiosity. I wondered what had happened, after Emily. How was it that all of these iconic poems came to be published? I began to read biographies of her, which, in turn, introduced me to Mabel.
Fast-forward to the time, now a number of years ago, when my interest in nineteenth-century Amherst residents led me to read Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel. The more I investigated, the more there seemed to be to Mabel, beyond her work on Emily Dickinson’s poems and aside from her relationship with Austin. I also learned a little about Millicent, whose work on Dickinson seemed largely undocumented and whose life story was virtually unknown. When I sought out Polly Longsworth she suggested to me that the best untold story was probably the one about several generations of “Wilder women.” So in a sense, Emily Dickinson had led me to Mabel and Millicent.
Writing this book has meant learning to sift through the clutter of two intensively collected lives. Upon ascertaining that there were over seven hundred boxes of primary source material in Yale’s Sterling Library, my first reaction was unmitigated joy: what a dream for a biographer to have two subjects who so meticulously—some would say, obsessively—documented their lives! My second reaction, upon starting to read through the well-crafted finding guide to this enormous collection, was panic: How do you start to wade through the hundreds of thousands of pages and try to make sense of someone’s life? I had a span of almost a century’s worth of both Mabel’s and Millicent’s reminiscences to go through. That Mabel wrote about her memories following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and Millicent, her thoughts following John F. Kennedy’s, gives a sense of the breadth of the time period their lives covered.
Real history can often be found in the small details. Millicent had written in the preface to Emily Dickinson’s Home, her contextualization of Emily’s life, that she had been encouraged to realize that there “are no trivia.” I came to agree with her.
I began by reading through all of Mabel’s diaries and journals on microfilm. I did this because that was the only part of the collection I could get on interlibrary loan from Yale, but it turned out to be a very good strategy. I learned about Mabel through her own interpretations of her life, chronologically. Along the way, I needed to discover how to interpret the visual symbols she used (marking her sexual activity and menstrual cycle); how to understand her euphemisms (“a caller in the afternoon on the upstairs porch”); indeed, how to read her handwriting—penmanship that changed at different points in her life and altered radically after her 1913 stroke and paralysis required her to learn to write with her left hand. Historian Peter Gay once joked, “If you can’t read it, it didn’t happen,” but I have worked to decipher writing that was compromised or illegible or faded from view, to try to understand what happened in Mabel’s and Millicent’s lives.
Reading Mabel’s outlines of her talks and how they changed over time, or learning the differences between what she wrote in her diaries and her journal helped me understand this woman beyond the written record of her life. Seeing how Millicent laboriously thought through letters, wrote drafts and then wordsmithed them, how she wrote out pages of imaginary conversations she didn’t dare to have in real life, or how she made list upon list upon list (and seemingly saved them all), gave me invaluable insights into an insecure, repressed and brilliant little girl who grew into an insecure, repressed and brilliant woman.
Once, I was sitting in the reading room of the Archives and Special Collections of Amherst College’s Frost Library, reading Mabel’s booklet Witchcraft in New England. Suddenly, with an epiphanal flash, I knew—knew for certain—why Mabel had become so obsessed with the witches of Salem. It was actually two chance phrases in the text that I thought I had read before that caught my eye: “The proceedings against ‘witches’ were instigated by all sorts of personal grudges and pique, and free rein was given to all maliciousness,” and “the borderland of two worlds.”1
Indeed, I had read these phrases before. They were in Mabel’s journals. She’d written of “personal grudges, pique and maliciousness” in describing the ways she thought Sue Dickinson was treating her; “the borderland of two worlds” was a phrase she’d piloted when pondering where Austin had “gone” after he died. Suddenly, as I read what Mabel wrote in 1906 about the witches of New England, I knew that her interest in this topic was not merely academic—it was deeply and intensely personal. She had felt as persecuted and marginalized as the “witches” surely did; she had felt wronged by a judicial system meant to guarantee fairness; she, too, had wondered whether the dead are still in some way with us. I connected with her inner life through these words.
Getting to know Mabel and Millicent so intimately has also, inevitably, meant that I have had emotional moments along the way. When I came upon an envelope containing a lock of both Mabel’s and Austin’s hair, I held them in my hands and shivered, marveling at Mabel’s impulse to preserve these bits of themselves, together. When I tracked down several tapes of interviews Millicent had recorded and heard her voice, almost a half century after she died, it was simultaneously eerie and yet oddly familiar, because I had long had the sense of hearing her whisper in my ear. Her voice sounded exactly as I’d imagined it would.
There was the time that I knew that Austin was going to die before Mabel did. He was becoming weaker daily, irreparably ill. Her pitiful diary and journal entries show that while in some ways she realized he would not recover, in others, she was in complete denial. And then came the day of August 16, 1895. Mabel wrote of her utter devastation; I sat there in the library, tears streaming down my face. A librarian came up to me and asked whether I was okay. “Austin died!” was all I managed to blurt out.
There was the moment I was sitting in the reading room at Yale, poring through Millicent’s journals from France documenting her slow and painful realization that in fact, Joe Thomas was lying to her—and had been lying all along. Still, she continued to refute and justify what she saw. She didn’t even wish to believe herself. “Millicent!” I wanted to shout right there in the library. “For someone so brilliant, you are so dense sometimes!”
And of course, there was the time that I read in Mabel’s fall 1932 diary that she would write about the experience of seeing the last eclipse “tomorrow.” But with the omniscience that comes from being a historical storyteller looking back, I already knew that there would be no more tomorrows for Mabel. When I walked out of the library, entranced, the snow on the ground was startling because I’d been lost in an October of long ago. Darkness had already fallen and it felt like I was in another world. I was.
I often found myself wondering about Mabel’s and Millicent’s acquisitiveness and their propensity for seemingly never throwing out a single scrap of paper. Mabel once explained her paper hoarding by saying, “My good friend Austin Dickinson asked me to save everything, all the papers and magazines entire, in which he was intensely interested. Of course being naturally a miser in personal reminiscences and relics I should have saved them anyway, but with the added incentive of his interest my collection became very valuable in time.”2 Millicent, more practical than her mother but perhaps no less sentimental, felt it was her duty to keep everyone’s papers, books and artifacts, even though she increasingly realized—and even discussed with her psychiatrist—that holding on to all these materials was going to be a problem for her. But she never fully acknowledged the reasons she felt bound to her filial obligations or analyzed the enormous and long-standing conflicts that drove her to fulfill her parents’ wishes, all the while resenting the impulse she so keenly felt.
Yet reading through their immense archives and
paper trail enabled me to view Mabel and Millicent with the gift of a biographer’s hindsight. And it’s enabled me to see them as real and full human beings—damaged, flawed, complex. Millicent knew that it was difficult for her to leave behind an accurate record of her parents because she saw each of them as imperfect. But Millicent was imperfect, as well: she clearly eradicated certain documents so painful she wished to expunge them from the record of her life—the letter from Arthur Curtiss James in which he revealed the results of his investigation into Joe Thomas, alluded to in her journals but removed from her correspondence, for instance.
Yet there were some documents, anguishing to Millicent, which she chose to leave in plain sight. Despite her own complicated emotions on the subject, Millicent opted not to destroy the undeniable and lengthy record of Mabel and Austin’s love. She just didn’t want it to be published during her own lifetime.
As I slowly worked my way through their papers, I sometimes found that I had to alter theories I’d had about Mabel and Millicent. In particular, my understanding of their close but burdened relationship evolved. The convoluted push and pull between them, which changed over time, always contained elements of love and respect, disapproval and disappointment. And their relationship remained unresolved. The more I read, the better I could understand its nuances.
As I’ve researched and written this book, I have often found myself wondering what Mabel and Millicent would have thought of it. Of course, I cannot know for sure. Sometimes I’ve thought that Mabel would be delighted to be known as someone other than Emily’s editor or Austin’s lover. I’ve thought that Millicent, who believed she was simply “an intermediary” between the contents of the camphorwood chest and the world, would approve of the work I have done to present both her and her mother through a large number of their writings. Millicent believed that all of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters should be made public. I hope this philosophy would extend to her belief about her own and her mother’s works. I also hope Millicent would realize that biographers are not simply intermediaries of lives; they are also interpreters of them.
Mabel would have wanted her papers and Austin’s to be joined, to be in Amherst. They are not. Millicent would have wanted all her family’s papers and artifacts to be together and to be on display in one place. They are not, either. Mabel’s grave is perhaps 150 yards from Austin’s; Mabel and Millicent are buried 396 miles apart. Emily Dickinson lies with her parents and sister in a different cemetery in Amherst, less than a mile away but forever separated from some of those whom she most loved and those who would be most responsible for bringing her work to the world. But their stories are inextricably linked.
Mabel’s and David’s gravesites can be found just off a dirt road in the woods; Austin and his family are in a clearing down the hill. Their graves are approximately the same distance apart as their homes were. Each time I go to Wildwood, I’m struck by the ways in which their families made statements in death about lives that were so interconnected, both through the symbolism of what is written and depicted on their stones (or in Austin’s case, boulder), and through their spatial separation from one another.
More recently, I went to Arlington National Cemetery. Despite the excellent website directions, finding one tombstone amid more than a quarter of a million graves that all look essentially the same is no small task. Eventually, I found Millicent’s grave, next to Walter’s, within a seemingly unending grid of white stones on a green manicured hillside. So far from the parents with whom she had such difficult relationships, so distant from Amherst, scene of so much tumult that bound her to her past. Typical, I thought, that Millicent’s ultimate choice was to situate herself in near anonymity, in such an orderly and predictable cemetery—and in so doing, to differentiate herself from Mabel. I placed the pebble I’d saved from the grounds of Wildwood on top of her grave. I’d like to think she appreciated the gesture.
I’ve also, of course, been to West Cemetery, to pay homage to Emily Dickinson. It’s now become part of the routine I follow on many of my trips to Amherst. Because just as Emily first led me to Mabel and Millicent, Mabel and Millicent have led me back to Emily.
With this book, I’ve tried to add to the voluminous literature about Emily Dickinson through illuminating the lives of the two women who helped to bring her poetry to the world. Since I first conceptualized this project, I’ve believed that in understanding Mabel’s and Millicent’s lives, we come to understand more about how and why they were receptive to the vast undertaking of editing her poetry and letters, and how and why they edited her work as they did. In knowing more about Mabel and Millicent we can better interpret not only Emily Dickinson’s poetry but also the image of the poet that they helped to create, curate and promote. It seems ironic that despite their own considerable efforts to make sure that the life and work of Emily Dickinson was not forgotten, their own lives and work have largely been overlooked.
Toward the end of her life, Millicent knew that she was running out of time to write her own biography. “Who will tell my story?” she lamented on a scrap of paper she left behind in the file labeled simply, “notes for autobiography.” The moment I read that plaintive question, I knew the answer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though I first found out about Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham many years ago, I had no thought of writing a book about them. When the idea began percolating I learned that their enormous archives resided at Yale, where my daughter was about to begin college. Kismet, it seemed. But deciding to take on a project like this was still daunting and it took something else.
I am grateful for the time I had leading an alumni event in California in August 2009. A continent away from the usual spaces in which I worked and lived, in a moment of suspended animation, almost, I crystallized the idea for this book, affirmed its importance and made the decision to start doing the writing that was most important to me. Mabel and Millicent have been present in my life ever since.
I’ve been the beneficiary of many important Dickinson scholars’ research. My first debt of gratitude goes to Polly Longsworth, whose influential work on Mabel’s and Austin’s love letters initially interested me in this topic. Polly later brought me through The Homestead and The Evergreens and showed me things few people get to see. She also, importantly, suggested that the best way to understand this story was to look at multiple generations of Wilder women.
Marta Werner, a remarkably perceptive Dickinson scholar, has been so gracious with her thoughts, insights and collegiality; she is my “go-to” person on all Emily questions and she’s welcomed me warmly into this world. Vivian Pollak asked questions that got me thinking in different directions, and her books helped me understand the context and substance of Emily’s work.
The writing of many other Dickinson researchers has significantly informed my own. The seminal biography by Richard Sewall, along with the scholarship of Martha Ackmann, Christopher Benfey, Jen Bervin, Jane Eberwein, Judith Farr, Ralph Franklin, Lyndall Gordon, James Guthrie, Alfred Habegger, Ellen Louise Hart, Susan Howe, Virginia Jackson, Thomas Johnson, Jay Leyda, Marietta Messmer, Cristanne Miller, Martha Nell Smith, Barton Levi St. Armand, Helen Vendler, Brenda Wineapple and Cynthia Wolff have been particularly formative.
Historical biography is not possible without the very considerable resources provided by libraries. I’ve been fortunate to work in some of the finest ones, with some of the most innovative and able archivists and librarians. Special thanks to Jim Gerencser in the Archives and Special Collections at Dickinson College, Lugene Bruno and Angela Todd in the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, Kit Fluker of the Manuscripts and Archives division of the New York Public Library and Timothy Engels at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Leslie Morris, curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, kindly gave me an afternoon and a private tour of their Dickinson Room; her insights helped shape my understanding of how Harvard acquired its Dic
kinson holdings.
I spent a lot of time at libraries in Amherst, at Yale, and in my home library at Tufts University. I’m indebted to Susan Brady, Dianne Brown, Chao Chen, Connie Reik, Laurie Sabol and Chris Stauber of the Tisch Library at Tufts, who spent hours answering my questions and helping me locate sources. Ann Marie Ferraro, who bartered on my behalf with her interlibrary loan colleagues at Yale and enabled me to spend more time with the microfilms of Mabel’s diaries and journals than was probably permissible by the customs governing such exchanges, deserves and has my special thanks.
Kate Boyle, Cyndi Harbeson and Tevis Kimball in Special Collections at the Jones Library in Amherst are very knowledgeable about all things Dickinson; they have been responsive, thoughtful and creative in their assistance. Mike Kelly, director of Amherst College’s Archives and Special Collections, helped me with access and informed me with conversation and his own very astute blog. Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, and Brooke Steinhauser, program director, have been extremely generous with their time and resources. They’ve brought me through Emily’s house when no other people were there so I could close my eyes and imagine scenes that took place in those rooms, so many years ago.
The Manuscripts and Archives division of Yale’s Sterling Library has often been my home away from home. I’ve gotten to know and depend on its incredibly able staff and sincerely thank all with whom I’ve worked for their interest, help and excellent support over several years: Jessica Becker, Brian Canning, Genevieve Coyle, Dika Goloweiko-Nussberg, Katherine Isham, William Massa, Kristin McDonald, Stephen Ross and Claryn Spies. Special thanks to Christine Weideman, director of Manuscripts and Archives, who arranged for me to speak at Yale; Bill Landis, who was very helpful in copyright sleuthing; Michael Frost, whose extra detective work helped to solve a mystery; Mark Bailey of the Yale Music Library, who converted Millicent’s reel-to-reel tapes to digital copies I could listen to; and most especially Judith Schiff, who was responsible for the Bingham/Todd collection coming to Yale in the first place. Judy’s memories and stories continue to serve as inspiration for this book. Half a century ago she understood and respected Millicent’s sensibility to preserve her family’s enormous trove of papers.