A Season of Smoke and Scarlatina
The Secret Life Of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn (Norton, 2010)
Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo
In the mid-1990s, New York University libraries drew on the papers and printed books in its Jerome Charyn collection for an intriguing exhibit. With Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn, NYU spotlighted Charyn’s characteristic handling of his many and diverse subjects.1 Author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction, short stories, graphic novels, essays and reviews, Charyn revels in complexity. His portraits of people and places run deep; his interpretations of their histories, real and fictional, follow risky routes. Blending verifiable fact with emotional and psychological truths, accessed by him through great heart and imagination, Charyn creates worlds within worlds; like an archeologist, he sets forth to uncover entire civilizations teeming below the most benign exteriors.
One of the best examples is his recent rendering of Emily Dickinson, the beloved 19th-century New England poet. With The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn goes far beyond accepted scholarship, however mythologized. His Dickinson is dearer, closer and more real than any painted in the standard biographies. She emerges from her own box of phantoms, animated by hunger, rage and disappointment. Her greatest passion is for people; her poems, the strongest card in her suit. Charyn’s Dickinson yearns for attention from, in her eyes, a few worthy contenders. In his novel, she is a lonely lightning rod held captive in the desert.2
In a 2007 interview with in Book Forum’s Kera Bolonik (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2081 Feb./March 2008), Charyn discussed the evolution of his 2008 novel, Johnny One-Eye, set during the American Revolution. The novel’s protagonist is George Washington’s bastard son. Charyn explained that Johnny One-Eye is something of an alter-ego for him:
“As a child, I was wishing that I was an orphan, that my father wasn’t my father. As horribly cruel as it is to say that, cruelty is sometimes your strongest weapon. Imagining George Washington as your father, that you are the bastard child of this extraordinary man, empowered me in writing it. I could find all the juice–the hostility, the anger–that was necessary to keep the story alive.”
Charyn gives readers a satisfying serving of “juice” in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Here, she inhabits a number of identities challenging the image of a “mouse” who baked black cake for family and neighbors, scribbled poems with a pen kept dangling from her pocket, took refuge in her garden, and raised eyebrows with her odd behavior. Charyn ignites a profound metamorphosis in her as she changes from father’s “Dolly” living in the family’s Amherst home to the devil’s handmaiden boarding at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. As she matures, Dickinson adopts many guises, among them: the ghost of Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë pen name); Daisy the flower girl; a “kicking kangaroo”; a mourning Jumbo the circus elephant; the Queen Recluse; Antony to a line of cruel Cleopatras; and King Solomon. She roams Amherst’s streets and alleys after dark, searching for her lovers: an illiterate Mount Holyoke handyman she calls the Blond Assassin, and a rum-ruined rogue “Tutor from Mars” (actually, Yale) she calls her Domingo.
By day, she develops crushes on men and women we know from Dickinson biographies: father Edward, minister Charles Wadsworth, author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor Samuel Bowles, volatile sister-in-law Susan, author/editor Mabel Loomis Todd, and Judge Otis Lord. Thirsting for them as she does for her tattooed handyman and Domingo, she resents their desertions: father to his political career; Wadsworth to his preaching; Higginson to his criticism of her poems; Bowles to his family; Susan to her jealousy; and Lord to his rapacious niece.
Edward’s and Susan’s betrayals recur in different forms, best symbolized by his obsession with smoke and fires and her nursing of scarlatina (scarlet fever) patients. Dickinson cannot draw them with her “feathers” and “plumage.” They find heat elsewhere, and she cannot survive his indifference and her “siroccos.” Another masterful image, handyman Tom’s tattoo, reflects Dickinson’s emotional state. At first, she conventionally identifies the tattoo as a sign of love. Then, Tom tells her the design brands an orphan whose heart is blue and broken by pain.
Like Tom, two other fictional characters haunt Dickinson, a charity student at Holyoke named Zilpah Marsh, and the yellow-gloved Holyoke vice principal, Miss Rebecca Winslow. As one of society’s outcasts, Zilpah is free to be as dangerous as she desires, while as the daughter of an Amherst squire, Dickinson must live out her fantasies in visions and dreams. As Dickinson’s alter ego, Zilpah reveals a conflict quite evident in Dickinson’s letters; the poet believed in her scribblings but doubted the sanctity of her soul. Was she really Squire Dickinson’s good little daughter or a devil in disguise? Repeatedly vanquished by death–Edward, her mother, her young nephew Gib–Dickinson seized the promise of immortality. But the only relief she seems to find in Amherst comes from two loyal companions who never withdraw their support: sister Lavinia (who protects her poems) and her Newfoundland Carlo (who protects her person).
In Johnny One-Eye, a vivid Revolutionary-Era America grounds the riveting adventure. In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, the stolid Christian world of mid 19th-century Amherst is a chimera. Literally blinded by light, Dickinson suffered from an eye disorder acute during her most prolific period, a time when her box of phantoms erupted into words with wings. Charyn’s excavation of Dickinson’s phantoms is as startling as Dickinson’s poems, which invite readers to consider worlds contained on the head of a pin. Alive to the magic of her poetry, Charyn weaves a Dickinson mythology equal to his subject.
1 Author of more than 40 books, including a cult-status detective series featuring New York City policeman Isaac Sidel and three memoirs of his own Bronx childhood (The Dark Lady from Belorusse, The Black Swan and Bronx Boy), Charyn gave his personal papers to New York University libraries. Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn was held from October 31, 1995-February 1, 1996.
2 In addition to William Luce’s outstanding 1976 play The Belle of Amherst (available on DVD), other fascinating takes on the poet’s life and work include Dickinson scholar Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White; Joyce Carol Oates’s 2008 Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway; two delightful children’s books (The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires, illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, and Emily by Michaed Bedard, illustrated by Barbara Cooney); and biographer Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 Lives like Loaded Guns: Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds.
For spring 2010, the New York Botanical Garden has staged a lovely evocation of Dickinson as gardener. For more information, go to: www.nybg.org
