By Paul Carrier
A novel about a famous - and very real - person runs the risk of distorting the subject’s personality or character in some inexcusable way, to tell a more compelling story than the facts warrant.
That risk is stronger still if, as in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an author uses fanciful incidents and fictional characters to complement the actual relationships and events that have been documented by the poet's biographers.
Charyn’s audacious but compelling novel puts Dickinson, her family, and even her dog Carlo in contact with products of Charyn’s imagination - a blond, blue-eyed handyman who figures prominently in her “secret life;” an authoritarian vice principal at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which Dickinson attends; a rum-soaked tutor at Amherst College, where her brother is a student.
Not to worry.
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, which is narrated by Dickinson herself, pulls the famed recluse into the limelight and makes us appreciate her all the more because she is, in the end, so very human. If that requires breaking with the established facts from time to time to brush the dust from Dickinson's shoulders, so be it.
Charyn provides a rounded view of a brilliant poet who also is a passionate, lively and complex woman. Here, she is far more vibrant than the stereotype of the lonely “spinster” who rarely left the confines of her home in Amherst, Mass.
Dickinson’s shyness and self-imposed isolation reveal only part of her persona, and a portion of her story. Her brother Austin, for example, often spoke of her as his “wild sister.”
In her letters, Dickinson “wears a hundred masks,” Charyn writes in an author’s note, “playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil as she delights and often disturbs us, just as I hope my Emily will both delight and disturb the reader and take her roaring music right into the twenty-first century.”
Even as a poet, and perhaps especially in her attitude toward poetry, Dickinson was anything but timid. Charyn’s Dickinson speaks of how she “scribbled out the lightning inside my head.”
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry,” she once wrote. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Dickinson did, in fact, seclude herself at her family’s Amherst home during the latter part of her life. In the novel, she comes to refer to herself as “the Queen Recluse.”
From 1860 until her death in 1886, she “left the property only rarely, and received few visitors,” notes the New York Public Library Literature Companion. Her schooling behind her, Dickinson “retired to her home; later, dressing only in white, she rarely came down from her room to meet her guests,” Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia tells us.
As such citations suggest, Dickinson’s seemingly eccentric obsession with privacy in her later years has come to define the entirety of her existence in the public mind. Yet her seclusion did not fully take hold until 1860, the year she turned 30.
What of the first half of her life? How did she behave then? Charyn does not ignore Dickinson’s reclusive period, but he gives us the younger woman as well, someone who is adventurous, free-spirited and rebellious.
“Carlo rules me now,” Charyn's Dickinson says of her beloved Newfoundland at one point before her self-imposed exile. “I fly with him across the village in wind or snow as Carlo chases whatever rodents are around.”
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is a work of fiction, but one that captures what I suspect was the essence of its celebrated subject, and liberates her from the exile of her room. Charyn's Dickinson overflows with intelligence and independence, charm and spirit. We see her as she probably was, and that is a great gift.
