A quick take on Nature’s people

Thanks to a couple of friends who I’ve talked to plenty of times about my Hog Island writing project and who still need to ask for basic details.  I’ll admit, I hate to make a pest of myself by dominating the conversation, but knowing the basic premise of this narrative might just go a ways toward promoting how interesting this darned story is. 

With that in mind, I present an abstract of my upcoming book, Nature’s people: The Hog Island story from Mabel Loomis Todd to Audubon. *

***

A quick take on Nature’s people

Mabel Loomis Todd entered into the Emily Dickinson legend through a friendship with her brother’s family.  As a new faculty wife, Mabel was welcomed into the Amherst community through soirees held at the home of the college treasurer and important-man-on-campus, William Austin Dickinson.  His wife Susan’s hospitality offered young Mrs. Todd a venue for companionship, engagement in the arts, and extended after dinner conversation.  Austin Dickinson’s participation in family activities was limited, but over time his friendship with Mabel grew.  

Mrs. Todd was quite taken, and taken in, by the Dickinsons.  But all was not right at the Evergreens, Austin & Susan’s home located just through the hedge from his parents’ homestead, then the residence of Emily and their sister Lavinia.  Story in town was that Susan’s friendships burned hot and bright for a time but then cooled.  The same could be said about her marriage with Austin, who subsequently spent many hours talking at his old home to sisters about life and his unhappiness.  

About a year after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst, her friendship with Austin had crossed what they lovingly referred to as their ‘Rubicon.’  Their affair, an open secret in town, would end only with Austin’s death thirteen years later.  David Todd, the new college astronomer and husband, tacitly approved of the pair’s intimacy because he was sincerely fond of them both and had a bit of a reputation himself.  Their only child, Millicent, grew up in that household.  Susan Dickinson was aware as well, and as story has it, did not make her husband’s time at home all that comfortable. 

Austin and Mabel celebrated their love as ‘of the ages.’  Surely sister Emily knew about them, though she never wrote about it, unless metaphorically in her poems and letters.  Emily’s own legend, in fact, has her in love with a married man herself, so perhaps she knew something about loving a man she could not have.  Mrs. Todd, by the way, did write about it.  A lot.  (See Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel:  The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.) 

Following Emily Dickinson’s death and discovery of an unknown wealth of poetry, sister Lavinia ultimately turned to Mabel Todd to make sense out of the cache of paper scraps, written-on envelopes, and sewn-together, recopied poetry.  It was tedious work at a time of high family tension.  Within the next few years, Mabel Todd would publish three editions of Emily’s poetry and one volume of collected letters.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Besides their entanglements with the Dickinsons, Mabel and David Todd enjoyed full and engaging lives together.  Both were popular lecturers who often spoke of their travels on astronomical expeditions to far corners of an Earth linked, at the time, only by extended ocean voyages.  Besides Emily, Mrs. Todd spoke and wrote about mysterious destinations most of her audience could only dream about:  Japan, northern Africa, high in the Andes, Indonesia, Russia just as the World War broke out.  It should be noted too, that her voluminous personal written record of journals and diaries provides such in-depth personal insight into a woman of her era that it has been used in period case studies.  (See Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud.) 

By midlife Mabel Todd made a one more move that would broaden her personal legacy beyond the humanities.  Big into trees, she bought half of a mostly wilderness island in Maine.  She bought a second standing forest about that time, too, that one near Amherst, just to preserve the dignity of the stand.  Besides saving the trees on Hog Island, the Todds would make a summer camp there that the family enjoyed for over fifty years.  Upon the death of Mrs. Todd and the advent of Millicent Todd Bingham as island owner, Audubon entered the picture with a summer camp for adult leaders that has for decades impacted global environmental education while engaging the bodies, minds, and hearts of myriad Nature’s people.  

I am one.  

Tom Schaefer

Lake Cumberland 

23 February 2014

*No need to camp out at your local booksellers yet.  I figure if all goes well the earliest the book could see print is summer 2016.   Who knows?

Today’s elder idea:  Give me your answer, fill in a form / Mine for evermore. /  Will you still need me, will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four? 

Sir Paul McCartney

image:  ‘Lobster House’ c. 1915:  From the Todd family archive photo collection at Yale University.  Used without permission here, but I’ll get all the paperwork straight before this one makes it into the book.