After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet by Julie Dobrow (review)

Vivian Pollak

The 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 (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 , 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

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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 , 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

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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,

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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. As a child, she was frequently farmed out to her maternal grandparents, who adored her, but their love did not compensate for what Millicent experienced as her mother’s neglect, an effect compounded by Mabel’s scandalous behavior with Austin Dickinson. Millicent was deeply damaged by her mother’s open marriage. She felt stigmatized in Amherst, dreaded the glare of hostile eyes, and when, at the age of forty, she married the academic psychologist Walter Van Dyke Bingham, she told him that she was emotionally dead. Even then, she could not forget a youth whom she had fancied when she was a teenager, when “boys were as remote from me as a Japanese Buddha . . . .They were a race apart, but I could worship from afar” (104). Mainly, though, Millicent could not forget one Joe Thomas, her “darling . . . [her] adored,” who wounded her so deeply that she never got over it. Many years after her marriage to Walter Bingham, in a gorgeous society wedding orchestrated by Mabel that caught the attention of the Miami Herald, the Transcript, and the New York Times, Millicent recalled why she decided to accept his marriage proposal. “I had received a death-blow,” she wrote. “I felt that emotion would never be revived. There was nothing but work — hard work — for me. And of course, anxiety. . . . And so, working as I had never worked before, I entered my forties. During the summer of 1920 Walter Bingham came to the island [Hog Island, Maine, where Mabel had a summer home]. . . . He told me that he still

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loved me and wanted me to marry him. I told him that I could not respond — that I was emotionally dead. He said he didn’t care” (226). Millicent’s failed romance with Joe Thomas, the subject of chapter 10, is the book’s climax. During World War I, Millicent was at loose ends. She had been elected president of her freshman class at Vassar and done well academically, but after she graduated in 1902, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. In the next decade and a half, she traveled to Peru and other far-flung places with her parents, covering “four continents and more than thirty countries” (190–91), and I was intrigued by Dobrow’s description of a stop in the Philippines, where they met Governor-General William Howard Taft, “who so impressed Mabel that she entered in her journal her conviction that he would one day be president of the United States” (197). Dealing with some health issues of her own (among them appendicitis, diphtheria, a violent strep infection), in 1913 Millicent moved back to Amherst to care for her mother, who had suffered a stroke that temporarily paralyzed her right side. Thinking back on this event, which she recalled as radically transformative, Millicent wrote, “Everything in the world changed then . . . . It was Mamma’s stroke that sealed the doom” (205). Long before I reached chapter 10 — “’Sincerely, Joe Thomas’ (1918–1919)” — I had stopped feeling guilty about succumbing to the guilty pleasures of Dobrow’s narrative, some of it only tangentially related to one of the book’s big claims, 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 [Emily Dickinson’s] poetry and letters, and how and why they edited her work as they did” (369). Millicent, who had taught French at Vassar and Wellesley, was thrilled when she had the opportunity to travel to France not as an appendage to her parents but as her own person, and it was on this mission that she met Joe Thomas, who persuaded her that he was a graduate of the University of Chicago from a wealthy and distinguished family. Along with five thousand American women, she went to France “to support American troops, assist at hospitals for the wounded and provide educational programs for soldiers” (211). She sailed for France in April 1918 and in June, “Sergeant Joe C. Thomas, crippled by shrapnel wounds in his knee and exposed to mustard gas, causing him crushing headaches and affecting his lungs, was brought to Base Hospital 27. He and Millicent began to talk and quickly felt a connection” (213). He told her that his father was “a man of great wealth from his success in the oil fields, he was also a physician by training, a surgeon general in the Army. He reported that his grandfather had been a famous Confederate general in the Civil War” (213). She thought he was the most powerful

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man she had ever met, and it was all Gatsbyesque, until even Millicent began to have doubts. Joe didn’t talk like a University of Chicago graduate, his grammar was imperfect, he was unaccountably late for appointments, there were rumors that he was married, there were rumors about French girls. Etc. And then her parents’ friend, the fabulously wealthy Arthur Curtiss James, hired a detective who discovered that no one had ever heard of his supposed athletic accomplishments (“captain of the football team and an All-American baseball player),” no one had ever heard of his illustrious father, and no one at Vassar had ever heard of the dear dead sister with whom he had shared so many fond memories — in fact she was alive and living with her parents in Joe’s hometown, Muskogee, Oklahoma. Joe, who had given Millicent an engagement ring she wore on a chain around her neck, was just an Okie from Muskogee, he was part of the common herd (218). Even after receiving the awful news, however, Millicent was unwilling to believe that Joe had told her the big lie, so desperate was she to believe that he truly loved her. And so she fled back across the ocean in undignified pursuit of Joseph C. Thomas, to an Army hospital in Denver, and then to Muskogee where, finally, in her hotel room, she confronted him. The scene that followed was too awful for words. After Emily does not seem to me to deliver on its biggest claim: “In knowing more about Mabel and Millicent we can better interpret not only Emily Dickinson’s poetry but also the image of the poet they helped to create and promote” (369). I can’t honestly say that I learned anything about how to interpret Dickinson’s poetry from reading it, and I can’t say that I learned anything significant about the image of the poet they helped to create and promote. Rather, After Emily situates the Todds in a richly documented, beautifully written, and persuasive family romance that underscores Mabel Loomis Todd’s ability to inflict damage on others, together with her daughter’s inner strength. There’s an unusually helpful index and among the many illustrations, one stands out: a picture of Millicent on a rare occasion (after both of her parents and husband had died) when she gave herself permission to be happy (324). Vivian Pollak Washington University in St. Louis

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