Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet by Julie Dobrow (Review)

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet by Julie Dobrow (review) Vivian Pollak The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 28, Number 1, 2019, pp. 63-68 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/edj.2019.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/727751 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Book Review VIVIAN POLLAK Julie Dobrow. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Great- est Poet. W. W. Norton: 2018. 384 pp. $27.95. Millicent Todd Bingham led a difficult life. Her mother was a thrill-seeker, while her father was a philanderer. She was “an insecure, repressed and brilliant little girl who grew into an insecure, repressed and brilliant woman” (365). With loving attention to Millicent’s plight, Julie Dobrow fills in gaps in an oft-told tale of illicit romance and erotic intrigue. After Emily is richly documented and makes the preservation of documents central to its story. Building on Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (1984), in which Millicent figures only tangentially, After Emily features Millicent as the star player in an absorbing drama of family and literary life, one in which Millicent’s burdensome mission and “sacred trust” was “to set the record straight” (316, 338). Although Millicent eventually “eradicated certain documents so painful she wished to expunge them from the record of her life” (367), she zealously guarded the Dickinson manuscripts she had inherited from her mother, and after much travail she donated most of them to Amherst College, her father’s alma mater, despite the intense pressure to which she was subjected to favor Harvard — see chapter 2, “Battling Over Emily’s Papers (1946–1959),” and passim. In brief, Millicent’s mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, believed that she deserved to be not only compensated but honored for her editing work on Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters and more generally for having inaugurated and contributed immeasurably to the poet’s everlasting fame. Others saw it differently, including the poet’s sister Lavinia, who successfully sued Mabel and her husband David (Millicent’s father), for “misrepresentation and fraud” (175), Lavinia having changed her mind about a small strip of land she had assigned to both Todds © 2019 The Johns Hopkins University Press 63 The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 for their friendship and for their work (mostly Mabel’s) on editing the poet’s manuscripts. After this sensational falling out with Lavinia and other members of the Dickinson family, including Austin’s wife Susan, Mabel kept the Emily Dickinson manuscripts in her possession but did not consider herself a document thief because she felt that she was entitled to be compensated for her work, that the disputed land was hers because Austin Dickinson had given it to her, and — now here’s the tricky part — she viewed herself as Austin’s true wife and heir, ergo she was part of the Dickinson family. In her dreams, that’s exactly what she was, “Mabel Loomis Dickinson.” Overall, the elasticity of Mabel’s conception of family served her well, but it damaged Millicent, whose relationship with her mother was, to say the least, complicated. Moreover, Millicent’s father David Peck Todd, a distinguished astronomer and director of the Amherst College Observatory, shared Mabel’s liberal interpretation of emotional reality. As Dobrow recounts in chapter 7, “Losing Austin, Finding Mabel (1895– 1905),” Austin Dickinson’s death in 1895 was a turning point for fifteen-year-old Millicent, who later wrote that the day Austin died “put an end, among other things, to my childhood” (162). Dobrow explains, “Mabel’s prolonged state of mourning and insistence on wearing black, as an ersatz widow, caused people around Amherst to whisper even more. (Mabel, for her part, wrote, ‘the whole town weeps for him but I am the only mourner.’)” Dobrow further explains that after Austin’s death, “Mabel, slowly but with certainty, began to shift her dependence on Austin into reliance on Millicent,” who assisted her in both her public and private lives (162–63). On Mabel’s multiple public agendas, and her editing work with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and on her own, see, for example, chapter 2 in my book Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference (2017). On Mabel’s bitter rivalry with Austin Dickinson’s wife Susan, see Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010). By now there is a voluminous literature on the subject of the Dickinson-Todd feuds and their legal and literary consequences, including two important articles by Elizabeth Horan which were published in The Emily Dickinson Journal in 1996 and 2001, both of which Dobrow cites, as she does other discussions of the copyright issues that remained a thorn in Millicent’s side for the rest of her life (she died in 1968 at the age of eighty-eight). Unlike her high-spirited, highly sexed and sexy mother, Millicent Todd Bingham, a depressive, was unable to experience sexual pleasure and “envied Mabel’s ability to take pleasure from her talents” (107). The woman who emerges in this narrative never grew up, in that she never freed herself from Mabel’s 64 Book Reviews burdensome legacy. Millicent’s father was a problem too. Increasingly erratic, David lost his job at Amherst College in 1917; he and Mabel never lived together after the spring of 1922, when he was institutionalized at Bloomingdale’s Asylum in White Plains, New York (230, 233). Other institutionalizations and tortuous living arrangements followed. Given Mabel’s self-protective behavior, and her houses in Florida and Maine, it was Millicent who was responsible for his care, and it was Millicent who received a call from the President of the college in 1925, asking her to remove David from the campus. He was attending his fiftieth college reunion but also “giving a great deal of trouble . accosting people,” especially women (232). Did David Peck Todd lose his mind and his self-control because he was in the last stage of syphilitic dementia? Dobrow drops this bombshell on p. 266, quoting a speculation in a 2004 article in The Journal for the History of Astronomy, and there she lets it lie. If David had syphilis, when did he contract it and did Mabel know about it? Was her turn to Austin in 1881 influenced by David’s “low” sexual habits? Apparently not, since Mabel continued to have sexual intercourse with David while she was Austin’s mistress. Why, then, does Dobrow drop this suggestion and let it go? The answer, I think, is that while she feels compelled to offer an explanation for David’s erratic behavior, which included an attempt to seduce Millicent (266), she does not want to divert readers from her story, which is mainly Millicent’s. In his tragic unraveling, David becomes just another person at whose hands Millicent suffers. In an “Afterword” called “Sorting through the Clutter,” a title that aptly summarizes the book’s theme, we hear about Millicent’s problems in obsessive detail, which is appropriate because Millicent was an obsessive. By page 250, after Millicent has partially recovered from life-threatening pneumonia, we learn that “Millicent was a hypochondriac,” and I began to wonder how many times one person’s heart could be broken, how many times her body and her psychological integrity could be challenged. I also began to wish that Millicent would stop berating herself for real and imagined faults, and I found myself wondering whether Dobrow would be telling a different story had she relied less on Millicent’s record of her psychotherapy sessions, on her voluminous journals and diaries, and on a series of taped interviews she did in 1959 with Donald J. Sutherland, who is otherwise unidentified. From time to time, we hear about Millicent’s friends, but who these people were I am still not sure, because the book’s focus is on Millicent’s inwardness and her solitary compulsion to right her mother’s wrongs. Consciously, she was righting the wrongs done to her mother; unconsciously, 65 The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 she was righting the wrongs done to her by her mother. There’s a suggestion that Millicent was sexually attracted to women in her youth, but it’s not pursued. From an early age, Millicent was a caretaker, tending dutifully to her parents and their legacy. Despite her 1923 PhD from Harvard — the first Harvard granted to a woman in geography — the task of curating her parents’ messy legacy (especially her mother’s) became all-consuming. Unlike her brilliant, beautiful, and boundlessly energetic mother, Millicent was not emotionally resilient. She felt that she was not good with people, and perhaps she wasn’t, although she was kind to me when I was a graduate student, intent on historicizing Dickinson before second- wave feminism had normalized the questions I was asking about Dickinson’s development and the arc of her career. Biographers such as Thomas Johnson were writing off Emily Dickinson’s comic Valentine poems as conventional, and I was looking for other examples of the genre. Millicent Todd Bingham responded quickly, sending me a handwritten card I still have somewhere, in which she said she didn’t know anything about comic Valentine poems and wishing me good luck. I felt buoyed up by her rapid response (I waited a lot, in those days of my impatient youth) and am sorry to learn that Millicent Todd Bingham’s early life scarred her so deeply.

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