 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Meg McClellan
 |
olly Ormsby Longsworth ’51 agrees with Robert Frost: you should pick a poet for life. “And you need one who’s big enough to occupy everything,” she said. “One who offers a lot of unanswered questions.”
Emily Dickinson is that poet for Longsworth.
As someone whose passion is the pursuit of unanswered questions, she has made a career of her study of Dickinson. Head of the Board of Governors of the Emily Dickinson Museum and the author of several books about Dickinson and her family, Longsworth is currently working on another biography of the poet.
Though much has been written about Dickinson, few biographers have presented the poet’s life sequentially, something Longsworth hopes to do.
“I don’t think anyone has put Emily together yet in a way that’s totally understandable,” she said.
The famously reclusive Dickinson spent her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830. Although she ventured into the garden and walked the well-worn path to The Evergreens next door—home of her brother, Austin, and his family—she left town only a few times. From 1865 until her death in 1886, Dickinson hardly left The Homestead, the house built by her grandfather. After the death of their father in 1874, Emily and her sister, Lavinia, continued to live at home, where they nursed their mother through the paralysis that afflicted her from 1875 until her death in 1882.
“This house was (Emily’s) second skin,” Longsworth said.
Dickinson wrote approximately 1,800 poems and as many letters while in her bedroom at The Homestead, which, together with The Evergreens, makes up the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Amherst College acquired The Homestead in 1965 and welcomed the occasional visitor to Dickinson’s room when the house was used as a faculty residence. But The Homestead was not fully accessible to the public until the opening of the Emily Dickinson Museum in September of last year. The museum offers tours of both homes, in addition to several public events. Among the many restoration projects planned by the museum are the conservatory, where Dickinson spent a good deal of time, and the hedge of hemlocks in front of The Homestead. Originally intended to obscure the lower half of the house, the hedge has grown so tall as to do the opposite.
Though geographically restricted, Dickinson was well traveled intellectually. Connected to her family, her friends, her town, and the world at large through correspondence and voracious reading, Dickinson did not hesitate to write to anyone whose ideas intrigued her, and her love of learning animated her communications.
A keen observer, she particularly enjoyed the study and the language of flowers, valuing her botany textbook, written by Emma Willard’s sister, Elmira Hart Lincoln, and used in the 1840s by students at Amherst Academy.
Dickinson did not pursue publication of her poems, yet some of the family and friends with whom she shared her work did. Although she knew of these infrequent occasions, she continued to guard her privacy.
“She really hid her trail,” Longsworth said, a tendency that challenges any historian to tell Dickinson’s story. “We’ll never know who it was she loved or why she wore white, for example. I think I’ve figured out why she never published, which seems related to an anxiety disturbance of some sort.”
According to Longsworth, “the clearest evidence of an unidentified trauma” Dickinson might have experienced appeared in the early 1860s and took the form of changes to Dickinson’s handwriting, to the subject matter of her poems, and to the dramatic increase in the number of poems she wrote. Her life-long “peculiarities” and reluctance to leave home had been familiar to her family and friends, but her reclusiveness intensified during the last 20 years of her life.
Although Longsworth does not recall having studied Dickinson’s work while a student at Emma Willard and Smith College, she welcomed the poet’s effect on her when she moved to Amherst in the early 1960s. “I fell head over heels for Dickinson,” she said. Having authored one book for teenagers about cave exploration, Longsworth did not have to search far for the subject of her second book for adolescents, Emily Dickinson: Her Letter to the World (1965).
Later, through her work with the Historical Society, Longsworth developed an interest in its founder, Mabel Loomis Todd, a prominent resident of Amherst with a controversial relationship to the Dickinson family. Married to David Todd, an astronomy professor at Amherst, Mabel fell in love with Emily’s older brother, Austin Dickinson, himself the treasurer of the college. Their love affair lasted from 1883 until Austin’s death in 1895. A source of tension between The Evergreens and The Homestead, Austin and Mabel’s relationship also yielded extensive correspondence.
“The love letters were amazing. So passionate,” Longsworth said. “Mabel’s daughter [Millicent Todd Bingham] had not been able to read them because she couldn’t deal with her mother’s unfaithfulness—‘a great sin,’ she called it. She left everything to Yale, to Richard Sewell for his work.”
Having taken a class taught by Sewell when he was at Amherst in 1972, Longsworth approached him about working together on the story of Austin and Mabel. Though busy with what would become the National Book Award-winning The Life of Emily Dickinson (1975), Sewell welcomed Longsworth to the “Emily Dickinson factory,” giving her a key to the office and full access to all of the Todd-Dickinson papers. “He was the most generous man, so open,” said Longsworth. “And he wrote the introduction to my book, Austin and Mabel (Farrar/Strauss/Giroux, 1984).”
Organizing, deciphering, and reflecting on the letters and diaries surrounding her at Yale’s Sterling Library was a labor of love for Longsworth. With four children and a husband who was president of Hampshire College, Longsworth spent one day a week at Yale. “Every Wednesday I’d get up at 5 a.m., drive to New Haven, and be back at 11 p.m. Those were crazy days.”
Though compelling, the work was not without its challenges, because Austin copied into his own handwriting some of Mabel’s letters to him. Many letters were undated, and most of the material was uncataloged. But Longsworth persisted.
Conducting research is “like having dessert first,” Longsworth said. The attraction is “the same thing that appeals to me about crossword puzzles: you want to straighten it out, to find out what’s going on there. You know something is, and you want to get to the bottom of it.”
Her research enhanced her appreciation of several members of the Dickinson family. Although intrigued by Susan Dickinson, Austin’s wife and Emily’s good friend, Longsworth was also captivated by Austin. “Everyone loved Austin,” she said. “And a lot of men fell in love with Mabel.”
Endowed with “movie-star quality,” Mabel “had her finger in everything. She was a real snob, but she did a lot of things in town. She started the Historical Society and the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She saved trees, she saved forests, she saved mountains. She just lived her passion. And she never threw away a piece of paper that had her name on it.”
Although the clues to understanding Emily Dickinson are harder to uncover than those left behind by Austin Dickinson and Mabel Todd, Longsworth is determined to complete a draft of her “opus,” a Dickinson biography, by next summer. “My editor has been very patient,” she said. “But when
this is done, that’s it. I’m never writing another book.”
Through all the time that she has spent with Dickinson, Longsworth retains respect for the mystery surrounding the poet. “I’ve finally given up and realized that one just has to live with ambivalence,” she said.
“I call it maturity.”
—Meg McClellan is an English instructor at Emma Willard School.
This Serving & Shaping column appeared in the fall 2004 issue of EMMA.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
