Flights of fancy

Symbol of an era, the tiny hummingbird fired the imaginations of 19th-century writers and artists

(KATHERINE STREETER)

A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
By Christopher Benfey
Penguin, 287 pp., illustrated, $25.95

Strange as it may seem, during the decades spanning 1862 to 1882 especially, the hummingbird became a notable American icon, particularly among a tangled cluster of New England-based illuminati. As Christopher Benfey observes in "A Summer of Hummingbirds," a highly engaging and deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes, the tiny, energetic, and brilliantly colored birds were closely associated with an awakened American interest in the tropics. But closer to home, for writer Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, most notably poet Emily Dickinson, hummingbirds were "images of freedom in a world of captivity." In September 1862, when the Boston abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson published "The Life of Birds" in The Atlantic, he began his essay with an extended account of hummingbirds.

Twenty years later, during the summer of 1882, the nature-loving artist Martin Johnson Heade (a Pennsylvania Quaker drawn to New York and New England), who painted more than 100 scenes of hummingbirds, often seen with sensuous orchids, went to Amherst with hopes of courting Mabel Loomis Todd (whom he had recently met in Washington). Todd had already married a brilliant young Amherst astronomer, yet soon after fell madly in love with Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, the most important man in that seemingly sedate college town - launching a highly visible affair that scandalized its citizens until Austin's death, in 1895.

For this and other reasons, much of Benfey's action centers on the Massachusetts town. In September 1882 Mabel Todd sent Emily her subtle painting of Indian pipes, a white woodland plant common in New England. Dickinson responded with one of her finest and most familiar poems, "A Route of Evanescence," accompanied by an explanatory note: "I cannot make an Indian Pipe but please accept a Humming Bird." Todd, who appreciated and actively promoted Dickinson's poetry after her death, liked the poem so much that she set it to music in a yearlong sequence of diary entries published in 1910 as "A Cycle of Sunsets."

Benfey's book comprises a concatenation of startling coincidences. Harriet Beecher Stowe somehow got to know Heade and his art by way of social circles they shared in Newport and Newburyport, whose marshes would become a beloved subject for many of Heade's most serene and admired paintings. Stowe herself evoked hummingbirds often in her prose, and in 1864 made a highly symbolic drawing of one. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known preacher in America during the second half of the 19th century, owned at least two paintings by Heade, which provides Benfey the opportunity to insert an account of the most notorious sex scandal of the Victorian era: Beecher's trial in 1876 for adultery with his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton, wife of Theodore Tilton, his close associate and traveling sales promoter of his published sermons and tracts.

What Benfey adds to that familiar episode is Beecher's little-known affair in 1861 with young Chloe Beach, also one of his parishioners and the wife of Moses Beach, owner and editor of the New York Sun. She gave birth to a daughter very likely fathered by Beecher. What does this have to do with birds? Beecher believed in free love for a specially anointed elite, and called the practice and its covert modus operandi "nest-hiding." The complex story is both bizarre and titillating at times.

Author Mark Twain enters the scene in various ways, most notably because in 1866 he traversed Nicaragua from the Atlantic to the Pacific while Heade, simultaneously, crossed in the opposite direction in search of exotic tropical birds to paint, a follow-up to his pioneering trip to Brazil in 1863-64 in quest of hummingbirds, which could be found there in far greater variety than in North America. Twain is one of the few members of Benfey's dramatis personae unsullied by scandal in this saga. Henry James, as it happens, also makes frequent appearances, mainly by way of aptly chosen epigrams from his work, especially as introductions to the kaleidoscopic array of chapters.

In Benfey's careful reading of poems and texts by Stowe, we learn that to her the hummingbird became symbolic in diverse ways at different times. For Stowe the tiny bird was emblematic of vulnerability as well as freedom. In Dickinson's 1861 poem about the "little tippler," however, the bird is a figure of ecstasy at a time when she had in mind multiple love interests ("Inebriate of air am I / And debauchee of dew").

This study of startling coincidences and convergences culminates with the American artist Joseph Cornell, almost as much of a recluse in New York as Dickinson had been in her father's Amherst home. Cornell became obsessed with Emily's poems, and in one of his distinctively structured boxes, he placed an Ecuadorian stamp featuring a hummingbird. In 1953 Cornell created another, haunting minimalist box as a tribute titled "Toward the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson)." To top off the connectiveness of Benfey's ensemble, he notes that in Cornell's work, "the familiar romantic objects of Beecher and Stowe and Dickinson - birds and flowers and jewels and planets - reappear with a ghostly majesty and strangeness." This book is about exotic and symbolic sensibilities, as well as covert desires by not-so-virtuous Victorians. It reads like a dream sequence, and should not be missed.

Michael Kammen teaches American history and culture at Cornell University and is the author of "A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture."