Mabel Loomis Todd died in 1932 at the age of 76. Her name today is not widely known, yet this fascinating woman left an amazingly blunt and explicitly sensual written record of her life and times. So intriguing and unusual is Todd's legacy that the historian Peter Gay initiated his sweeping work The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud with a case study of Todd whose "sexual self-portrait is exceptional in copiousness and candor, not even George Sand descended, or rose, to such instructive detail."
Though they never met in person, Todd maintained a friendly correspondence with the reclusive Emily Dickinson. Practically unknown in her own lifetime, Dickinson would come to be recognized as one of the most notable poets in American literature. Her posthumous renown is due largely to the dedication of Todd and another admirer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Together they edited the great poet's mostly unpublished oeuvre after her death.
These are just three of a number of extraordinary personages whose lives are depicted in Christopher Benfy's A Summer of Hummingbirds, a charming and beautifully limned narrative of the world of art, literature, politics, culture, and religion in 19th-Century America. It was a turbulent time, when for many, the delicate image of the hummingbird took on a kind of iconic status: "For Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, hummingbirds were images of freedom in a world of captivity." They were often a subject of landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade's artistic renderings. And they had significance too for Emily Dickinson.
Photo courtesy wikimedia.org.
Especially in the years after the American Civil War -- in a nation stunned and reeling amidst the carnage that had been wrought by what is recognized as the first modern war -- these ethereal avian creatures with whirring wings and lambent patterns of flight seemed to take on an even deeper symbolic significance in the imaginations of poets and artists.
In late September of 1882, Dickinson would compose a poem as a gift for Mabel Loomis Todd, who had just presented the poet with "a painting of Indian pipes, a white woodland plant common in New England." The poem entitled "A Route of Evanescence" became Dickinson's "signature poem." The poet would send "it to more correspondents, seven in all, than any other poem." And on occasion she signed it simply "Humming-Bird."
Benfy's delightfully rambling study is chockablock with gossipy information and memorable anecdotes. Ten years before the start of the Civil War, in 1851, one of the sparks that ignited the murderous conflagration was contributed by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her wildly famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin graphically portrayed the horrors of the American South's institution of slavery and effectively dispersed slavery's ghastly images throughout the world. British writer George Sand was moved to call Stowe's influential work "the Iliad of the Blacks." Years later, at a White House reception, Stowe met Abraham Lincoln who said to her: "So, you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"
Stowe was not the only member of her family to have been embroiled in the abolitionist cause. Her brother, the eloquent and dynamic preacher Henry Ward Beecher, had sent crates of rifles -- known as "Beecher's Bibles" -- to the antislavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas," a geographically limited but bitterly violent conflict that presaged the immense national slaughter that commenced in 1861.
. Stowe's son Fred achieved the rank of captain in the Army of the Potomac and was wounded in battle. Fred Stowe would become a profoundly disturbed alcoholic. In desperation to escape the drink he decided to embark on a long sea voyage as a merchant mariner. "Fred went ashore in San Francisco. He was thirty-one years old, a former student at Harvard Medical School and a veteran of Bull Run and Gettysburg. He was the oldest surviving son of the most famous writer in the United States. He stepped off the ship and vanished into thin air. He was never heard from again."
The title of Benfy's book refers to the summer of 1882 in Amherst, Mass. and the pulsating atmosphere that vibrated about the alluring and vivacious Mabel Loomis Todd. Although she was a married woman, she became involved in a lengthy affair with Austin Dickinson, already a married man and the brother of chaste Emily. But Todd's escapades are not the only dalliance elaborated upon by the author. The married Rev. Beecher himself would be accused of extramarital philandering, a shocking scandal that became the subject of a highly publicized trial. And then there was the matter of Harriet Beecher Stowe's revealing book about Lord Byron's incestuous union with his half-sister. A lot happens between the covers of Benfy's chronicle.
Others like Henry James, Mark Twain, and Victoria Woodhull -- the irrepressible suffragette and the first woman to run for president of the United States -- enliven the pages of this splendid work. Benfy has composed what amounts to an evocative literary bouquet of vignettes that recall the dreams and hopes, as well as the shenanigans and tragedies, of those whose .names still resonate in the lexicon of art and history.