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Original EssaysThe Flight of a Hummingbirdby Christopher Benfey
Novelists often talk about giving their fictional characters the freedom to take the story in their own direction. I think it's exactly the same with historical figures. "Trust the tale," D. H. Lawrence wrote. When I "trusted the tale" of Degas, I knew that sooner or later, I'd find myself — or he'd find himself — enmeshed in the racial tensions of New Orleans. Sure enough, I discovered that Degas, whose mother was from New Orleans, had cousins across the color-line. Similarly, I "trusted" Melville to get me to Japan, sooner or later, by whaleboat if necessary. The "tale" of A Summer of Hummingbirds started out pretty simply, with one of those believe-it-or-not scenarios that I love. But then, like a hummingbird's flight, it zigzagged off in unexpected directions. The origin was this: During the summer of 1882, a painter named Martin Johnson Heade, best known for his paintings of hummingbirds, traveled from his studio in New York City to Amherst, Massachusetts, in pursuit of one of his art students, a beautiful and talented woman named Mabel Loomis Todd. A few weeks later, Mabel Todd was invited to play the piano at the home of Emily Dickinson, on Main Street in Amherst. As a token of her appreciation, Dickinson sent Todd a mysterious poem about a hummingbird that begins with this phrase: "A Route of Evanescence." That was the germ, the gist, the genesis of A Summer of Hummingbirds. Of course, I knew a few other details about these people, facts that gave me the confidence that I had a real "tale" to tell. For example, I knew that right after the little piano recital at Emily Dickinson's house, her Byronic brother, Austin Dickinson, would declare his love for Mabel Loomis Todd. That's just one of the "scandals" that justify my slightly sensationalistic subtitle: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade. The point is that I followed the hummingbirds wherever they took me. Was it a coincidence that Emily Dickinson sent Mabel Todd a poem about a hummingbird right after the visit of the greatest of all hummingbird painters, the Audubon of hummingbirds? I let Heade and Dickinson try to answer that question. I followed Heade to Brazil, where he painted hummingbirds in their habitat during the Civil War. I followed him to Nicaragua, where Mark Twain happened to be traveling as well. Mark Twain admired Heade's work and hung a landscape of Heade's in his own dining room. Mark Twain came to lecture in Amherst, where Harriet Beecher Stowe spent her summers, taking care of her daughter, a morphine addict who was married to the Amherst Episcopal preacher. Harriet Beecher Stowe just happened to be fanatical about hummingbirds. But here I am, getting caught up in the hummingbird's flight again. You follow the tale and you never know where it will take you. Just last fall, my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. We drove up to a little inn in Vermont, very romantic, with the autumn leaves in full dress. On the way back, we stopped at Rudyard Kipling's house up in the hills above Brattleboro. It was a misty, magical morning. There stood the house, part Indian bungalow, part American shingle-style, like a ship (according to Kipling) sailing on the wave of the hills. And there were the tunnels among the rhododendron, where Kipling's children played while he sat in his study writing The Jungle Books and Captains Courageous. Kipling and his pregnant wife had been traveling in Japan when he learned that his bank had gone bankrupt and he'd lost all his money, forcing the young couple to return to Vermont, where his wife was from. And I was feeling that familiar tickling at the back of my mind, the whirring of the hummingbird's wings. Now this is pretty unbelievable, I told myself. Kipling? Here in Vermont? There just might be a book hiding in them there hills.
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Christopher Benfey has written four books about the American Gilded Age: The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Degas in New Orleans, The Great Wave, and, most recently, A Summer of Hummingbirds.
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