Book progress

I’ve never attempted to write a book before.  

Well, maybe once when I was in graduate school.  That product was another Hog Island target:  The Epic of Hog:  The Todd-Bingham Family and the Establishment of the Audubon Camp in Maine.  It’s what I needed to do to finish my MHumanities from Wright State in 1985.* 

But that was really just a long paper:  4 chapters in about 125 pages, with a half dozen photographs and notes.  

A book would have 300+ pages with a variety of chapters, extensive explanatory and ‘foot’ notes, and photographs.  That’s where I’m heading, anyway. 

The Dressy Adventuress began in 1981 when I first visited Hog Island.  From within a couple hours of making footfall on the Queen Mary dock, Mrs. Todd’s island story has been brewing with me.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I’ve visited the Sterling Library at Yale at least five times by now, sifting through the Todd Bingham family papers archive trying to find one delightful tidbit that perhaps I overlooked; that one detail that would sweeten the story even more.  

My title, The Epic of Hog, must not be confused with Mabel Todd’s The Epic of Hog.  Mrs. Todd’s Epic is a collection of short ‘sketches’ focusing on the island’s natural history and local folks and places.  

These 27 unpublished, unfinished essays (some handwritten revision is evident) cover topics like the island heronry, hermit crabs, mushrooms, jellyfish, Capt’n Elisha King, Waldoboro, and Iceland moss.  

The amazing thing to me is that nobody has seen these essays for years -- perhaps not since the mid-1960s when Millicent Bingham was still around -- unless they’ve trekked to Yale to peruse the family archive.  

I’ve shared a few of the essays with Friends of Hog Islanders.  My plan is to include the complete Todd Epic of Hog as an appendix in The Dressy Adventuress.  Everybody should get the chance to hear what this stylish New England naturalist had to say about Hog Island a century ago. 

In any case, know that the book is coming along.  I know it’s taken too long to get here, but here I am.  Over the years I’ve immersed myself in Mrs. Todd’s island story, whether or not I was putting pixels to paper.  When I taught this part of the writing process to my junior and senior high school kids, we called it prewriting.  It’s all the stuff you do to get ready to put words in sequence:  reading, thinking, organizing, re-thinking, note taking, filing, securing sources, lining up consultants, et cetera.  It’s all good -- and it has taken a long time.  

As of now, the preface is in good shape (draft complete) with chapter 1 up next.  Here’s the lineup of wanna’ be chapters -- just to whet your whistle: 

1. A capital girl 
2. Of astronomy & Dickinsons
3. Sex in Amherst
4. Sister Emily’s poems and letters
5. Travels & publications
6. Mabel Todd & her Camp Mavooshen
7. Millicent Bingham & Audubon
8. Finishing Mother’s work
9. For the ages

The outline looks pretty filled out at this point, yet will get deep reorganization as the project develops.  Next I want to read a few chapters re:  Mabel’s childhood in Washington DC that appear in Sewell, Gordon, and Millicent Bingham herself.  Then I will sketch out chapter content in web form on a fair-sized piece of drawing paper.  I’m pretty sure the visual will help me see how the thread should run.  At least that’s what I’m thinking right now.   

Then it’s about one chapter a month through the end of winter.  If all goes well, I’ll have a draft to distribute for revision comments and something I could take to an agent or publisher.  Again, never been here, done that, so we’ll see how it goes.  

But take heart, Pilgrim!  The Dressy Adventuress is on the way.  And I must say, there are so many great stories to tell!  I’m really charged to keep it moving.  

I don’t know exactly why and how, but the time is now.  

*  A text version of my Epic of Hog graduate paper will be available at fohi.org before too long.  I’ll announce when it is posted.  (No sooner than January 2012.) 


image:  Mabel Todd in Japan (1896).  Photo from the Yale University Archive. 

Defending Mrs. Todd

Researching Mabel Loomis Todd’s Hog Island story has been a long process and a labor of love.  I remember hearing in graduate school that if one knew the energy and time required to complete the work, most of us would have bailed on the idea of higher education.  I’m not sure I buy that, but the thought does come to mind that this project has taken such a chunk of my life that I am, indeed, amazed. 

At this point in the process I am poring through Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds.  If you are a Dickinson fan, you absolutely need this book in your library.  Gordon has researched deeply and puts forth a detailed time line of events that gives life and breath to Emily’s later years in Amherst.  

The book also puts a magnifying glass on the relationship between Austin Dickinson and his mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd.  Gordon tells the story of how Austin’s marriage to Susan was largely loveless by the time the new Amherst College astronomer, David Peck Todd, brought his young wife to Amherst in 1881.  Over the course of the next couple of years, Austin found love and comfort in the arms of Mabel, as husband David looked on, approvingly, as he engaged in his own set of marital indiscretions.  If it sounds like a version of Peyton Place or The Scarlet Letter, you wouldn’t be too far off.  It’s a pretty juicy story.  

I must admit that since I first made the connection between Emily Dickinson, Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Hog Island back in the early 1980s, I’ve been a fan of Mrs. Todd.  If it weren’t for her purchasing the island at the turn of the last century, Audubon never would have established an ecology camp there and I never would have had the chance to experience it’s abundant life and history.  My life, it would be fair to say, would be diminished.  

But when you get into the Emily Dickinson story as assembled by Lyndall Gordon, Mabel Todd takes on a much darker hue.  She participated in a long-term adulterous affair that ripped the Dickinson family apart so much that by the time Emily neared the end of her life, she recognized that the family would never heal.  She was right, too.   

After Emily died, if you know the story, it was Mabel Loomis Todd who began the arduous task of sifting through the poetry, translating a difficult handwriting, putting Dickinson verse into publishing form.  Emily’s sister, Lavinia, heir to the poems, worked with Mabel to see this work accomplished.  When the family broke into discord once again over copyright and royalty payments, it was Austin who admitted that the Dickinsons were ‘a queer lot.’  

Gordon does not skimp on placing blame on a deceitful Mabel Todd who, in her view, worked for years to disrupt the Dickinson family.  She seems to give Austin a pass on responsibility much more readily than Mrs. Todd.  She recognized the arduous task of working poems and letters into publishable form, but underneath it all, Mabel Todd is held largely responsible for Dickinson family discord. 

I have a hard time disagreeing with the details of the story Lyndall Gordon tells.  

Still, it was Mabel Todd who brought the Dickinson poetry before the general public.  Nobody else did.  Susan had a poem or two of Emily’s published in magazines, but no more than that.  Would someone else have promoted Emily if Mabel Todd did not?  Maybe, but the historical fact is it was Mrs. Todd who accomplished the feat.  

And for that, it seems to me, we Dickinson lovers should be eternally grateful.  

Photo:  Mrs. Todd working on the Dickinson letters on Hog Island (c. 1932).  Source:  Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.