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'DARLING, DARLING, HOLD TIGHT TO

ME'

By Diane Johnson

March 4, 1984

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AUSTIN AND MABEL

The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.
Edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Polly Longsworth. Illustrated.
449 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.95.

ALL immortals had relatives and next-door neighbors. We have thought before
now of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd as figures in the life of Emily
Dickinson. It was Mrs. Todd who recognized the genius of Emily's poems, rescued
them from the less than perfectly appreciative Dickinson family, edited them and
persevered in getting them published. Austin was Emily's adored brother. With his
wife, the cold, clever Sue (Emily, after an intense girlhood friendship, had fallen out
with her), he lived next door to the old family homestead where Emily and her
sister Lavinia lived.

When the Todds - Mabel and David - came to Amherst in 1881, so he could take a
job as an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College, Emily was already
a mysterious recluse who was said to wear only white and do her hair in a style
decades outdated. When Mabel Todd was invited to sing at Dickinson musical
evenings, Emily listened delighted at the top of the stairs, and sent poems and
presents to her. The two began a strange friendship, strange because Mabel would
never see Emily except in her coffin. All these - the Dickinson eccentricities, the
personal feuds, the poems, the new Mrs. Todd - were known, in the manner of
small towns, to everyone in Amherst. Another circumstance would soon enliven
the local gossip. When Mabel Todd was 25, she and Austin Dickinson, who was 53
and the town's most influential and generally beloved citizen, fell in love and
embarked on an affair that was to last 13 years, until his death. Their spouses
found out almost immediately. David Todd was compliant; he himself had a roving
eye for women. Sue Dickinson's fury would never be placated. The town gossiped
and more or less took sides.

Mabel Todd had all the attributes of the villainess in a novel of the period - a self-
centered, troublemaking adulteress with a disdain for housework and altogether
too much willingness to display any of her seemingly numberless and genuine
talents - musical, dramatic, literary, artistic. It appears that life does not always
imitate art. If she had been in a novel, Mabel would have had to expect disgrace
and painful death. As it was, she had only to endure a little gossip and disapproval,
and that from by no means everybody, for she had her partisans. And she seems to
have earned the respect and affection of the editors of her writings for her many
talents and activities, and, in the case of her diaries, for accuracy, volubility,
industry, charm and cheerfulness. In fact, she seems to have been a remarkable
woman who wrote, painted, lectured at a nearly professional level, acted, set the
fashions, and was also affectionate and good, remaining devoted to her husband in
her fashion, and to Austin Dickinson with a fervor and singlemindedness that are
inspiring. So are her emotional courage and intellectual curiosity. The slumbrous
Austin is harder to understand; he was a solid citizen and loving father who at 53
felt his life transformed by a passion he had imagined was never to be his, and
which he clung to with determination and a sense of destiny.

So, beyond the interest it has for Dickinson scholars, this tale has a certain
exemplary force, as spectacles of human passion frequently do. And like other
stories of illicit love, it engendered consequences, or at least complications, in the
lives of others. These are recounted in the interesting biographical preface and
abundant annotation to the letters by the editor of this collection, Polly
Longsworth. Mabel Todd had preserved more than one thousand letters, intending
one Diane Johnson is a novelist and the author of the recent biography ''Dashiell
Hammett: A Life.'' day to publish them anonymously, and she later enjoined her
daughter, Millicent, to do so, ''to set the record straight.'' Millicent could not bring
herself to expose her mother's vagaries. ''On the Dickinson side, Austin's widow
Susan, and his surviving child Martha Dickinson Bianchi had equally valid reasons
for wanting to wipe the episode from memory,'' Mrs. Longsworth writes. Members
of both the Dickinson and Todd families wrote biographical works about Emily
Dickinson, and they disputed ownership and other rights to Emily's poems. ''The
time has come to put into place this bizarre record of human passion and tragedy,''
Mrs. Longsworth writes, though here the word tragedy is applied rather lightly to
what is a merely poignant, human and uplifting episode.
Mabel Todd, conscious of the intensity of feeling that informed the letters between
her and Austin Dickinson, believed them ''immortal.'' In fact, where they attempt
to describe passion, and this over a period of years, they are bit repetitious and
abstract. ''Do you know that I would like, after seeing you once more, to go to
sleep, & sleep through the months or years that must be - and, while its minutes
are rolling by, I shall hear the divine whisper that eternity has begun - perpetual
spring. For I have seen you and you are henceforth my world. The sun cannot
shine without you, the birds make no melody. . . .'' That is Austin to Mabel. ''Oh!
oh! how I wish you were here! And how I love you - darling! To be out of sight of
land, with you by my side! It would be next to going to Heaven together, I think,''
Mabel writes to Austin. Then Austin writes to Mabel, ''I found yesterday that I had
not learned all of my love for you - even yet. . . . It seemed to me I could not be
separated from you for a single instant ever - my whole being craved you, so I
could hardly control the action of my mind. The mighty power of this immutable
passion, so gentle at first, holding us now in bands of steel, never stood before me
in such tremendous proportion.''

Not surprisingly, the most interesting parts of their correspondence are those that
recount the details of everyday life - their subterfuges and plans, matters of
housekeeping and family activities. While Mabel is away one summer, it is Austin
who takes out her wool dresses for Lavinia Dickinson to put them up against
moths. We see in their small town a very rich life of lectures, choral singing, sleigh-
riding, musical events and callers. We do not learn much of events that, living next
door to each other, they had no need to recount - the death of Emily, for instance.

The town caught on to their subterfuges and Mabel's mother, on a visit to Amherst
in late 1884, picked up the gossip. She summoned Mabel's father and the two of
them had serious talks with the lovers. In a letter to Mabel, Austin spelled out the
gossip (Mabel's diary confirms at least some of the details as true): ''The charges,
I believe, are that we drive in by-roads - that I am at your house constantly, five or
six times in seven days. That I get there through back ways and hedges - that you
meet me on the grounds - that I stay late at night, after Mr. Todd has retired - that
you neglect your house and family, and are devoted to me. To the very last I agree -
but about this will say nothing.''

Mabel Todd is so interesting that one wishes for more of her. The diary passages
with which Mrs. Longsworth expands and explains the account appear as
fascinating as the letters, whose tone of rapture must have been hard to sustain -
and they may be even more fascinating. The diary presents Mabel in her darker
and more practical moods too and even gives what Mrs. Longsworth calls ''a rare,
trustworthy record of a late-nineteenth century woman's simultaneous intimacies
with two men.'' In it Mabel used a code to keep track of her menstrual periods,
orgasms, with whom (David or Austin) she made love, and how often. Lest we
think theirs was a merely epistolary affair or that the 19th-century bedroom was a
place greatly different from the bedrooms of today, we read in the diary that in 1884
Mabel made love on an average of 20 times a month, eight with her husband, 12
with her lover.

The whole affair is a corrective to our tendency to exaggerate the differences

between ourselves and people of the past. If we did not have the details of Mabel
and Austin's sexual life, what would we have assumed from such phrases as ''our
life together is as white and unspotted as the fresh driven snow'' (Austin to
Mabel)? This sheds considerable light on Victorian rhetoric, if on nothing else.
Similarly, their philosophical position was much more modern than we might have
believed. ''Conventionalism is for those not strong enough to be laws for
themselves, or to conform themselves to the great higher law where all the
harmonies meet,'' Austin wrote. (Or is this, in turn, the conventional rhetoric of
Victorian seduction?)

MABEL would be an unusual woman in any day, for her energy and good nature.
But she also has an exemplary historical function, helping us to remember that
options did exist for women in the 19th century, if only, perhaps, for the determined
and talented. She was, in a way, maddeningly egotistical, but her self-assessments
seem to have been based on facts. On a voyage, when all aboard were seasick, she
was not. ''I was quite the center of attraction for a while, and had nearly all the
gentlemen around me at once,'' she says of an occasion when she wore a dress she
had painted herself (it is today in a museum). The Dickinsons' was not the first
marriage in history to be disrupted by the claims of vitality and sexuality over
sexual reticence and perfect housekeeping. But Mabel, not content with easy
triumphs, put her emotional life as well as her reputation on the line, and, by and
large, was rewarded with an interesting, active life. She deserved it, and so too did
Austin deserve his years of happiness with Mabel. One wishes, almost, that this
volume of their letters was entitled with more dignity. ''Mabel and Austin'' sounds
too much like a situation comedy, but this man and woman were earnestly playing
a deep game of real life.B Gossip Lingers On Polly Longsworth - whose ''Austin
and Mabel'' presents the affair of Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and Mabel
Loomis Todd through their love letters - lived in Amherst, Mass., from 1961 to 1977.
She discovered that ''people raged with Dickinson fever'' and ''talked about Todds
and Dickinsons over the vegetable bins in the supermarket.'' Mrs. Longsworth,
who now lives in Williamsburg, Va., caught the fever. In 1972, she began research
on the letters at the Yale library where the scholar Richard B. Sewall, who was
writing his biography of the poet, ''welcomed me to his 'Emily Dickinson Factory'
(his office) and shared the letters, journals and diaries,'' Mrs. Longsworth said. ''Of
course, what made my book possible is that Mrs. Todd had a sense of self-
importance about her own destiny and saved all the letters.'' - Herbert Mitgang