Isabel Bolton

Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.

The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.

By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.

It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.

Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.

Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.

Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:

Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.

With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”

Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,

Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.

Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.

When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.

They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.

Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,

… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”

News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:

Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.

The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.

Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”

Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.

Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.

None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.

Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.

Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.

Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.

After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.

James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.

Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.

When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.

The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:

My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled
With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough
Too much extortionate trust has been expelled
For aught but apprehension to invade me now

Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:

If to these fonts and springs
That joyed my soul
When I was young
I could return
To be made whole again,
I would discover
Mint and fern
And cresses green
And flowers fresh and fair —
But should I dip my hand
Into the candid stream
What flower or leaf or fern
Would I recover there?

Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.

She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:

From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.

In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”

Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:

“You have never had a funeral in your house.”
No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare.
“We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.

To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”

The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.

Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:

They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.

By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.

Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).

Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.

It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.

“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”

“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:

That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.

“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.

Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,

… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.

When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.