Then, years after all the clandestine deliveries [Dickinson’s correspondence with the Reverend Wadsworth], her Master showed up at the door. Emily was in the garden with her pail. And Vinnie knew it was the Master, knew it in an instant, as he clutched the bell pull. He didn’t announce himself, but asked for Emily in that deep voice of his, like wind barreling out of a tunnel. . . . And Emily, who’d always fled from intruders and depended upon Vinnie to be her shield, rid herself of the pail and ran to Rev. Wadsworth, her Master, like a child out of breath.
It’s after this scene that Vinnie searches out her sister’s “Snow”—one of Dickinson’s words for her poetry—and discovers it hidden away in Dickinson’s bedroom bureau:
Little sewn booklets in a box, like the magic fans of a courtesan or coquette. And with these fans were scraps of paper and envelopes and fliers with poems scratched onto them in Emily’s own hand.
[Vinnie] began to cry and laugh at this startling treasure, but was too timid to read a line. . . . She couldn’t say why, but she started to dance in Emily’s room. She wanted to cover herself in Emily’s Snow, to feel it against her skin. Perhaps she was the coquette. . . . Vibrations went through her body like the shivering of the Lord.
A Secret History of Emily Dickinson is filled with such luminous, fleeting scenes, as if in mimicry of Dickinson’s account of her own inspiration: “Lines came like lightning, and left like lightning, and I had to write each one down with my pencil stub or lose it forever.”
IT IS COLM TÓIBÍN’S’ INTERPRETATION of Henry James in The Master, that James’s life as an artist was determined by erotic desire not only unexpressed but unacknowledged by James; in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, by contrast, Charyn’s artist-heroine is defined almost entirely by her erotic-romantic desires, not only expressed but “acted-out”—at least, to a degree highly improbable in a well-born young woman of Amherst, Massachusetts, in the early to mid-1800s. For admirers of Dickinson for whom the biographical facts of her much-scrutinized life are sacrosanct, even as interpretations of these facts might widely vary, the liberties taken by Charyn in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson may be distracting: such purely invented characters as the illiterate tattooed Tom the Handyman and the Amherst College tutor Brainard Rowe, as well as Dickinson’s wild-girl alter-ego-poetess Zilpah Marsh, who at one point lives in the root cellar of the Dickinsons’ stately house, are principal in the novel, even as historic figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s controversial first editor, with whom she corresponded for many years, and the flamboyant young woman Mabel Loomis Todd, with whom Emily’s much-revered older brother Austin had an adulterous relationship and who would be Dickinson’s controversial posthumous editor, are relatively undeveloped. Even Dickinson’s charismatic Vesuvius of a sister-in-law Sue, the aggrieved wife of Austin, makes a belated appearance in Dickinson’s life as Charyn recounts it; Dickinson notes in passing, “I fell in love with her when I was but a Boy”—but we see relatively little of the famously volatile sister-in-law. And the much-reiterated appeal of Tom the Handyman—metamorphosed finally as “that blond Assassin in the sunlight” in one of Dickinson’s poems—is difficult to comprehend over a period of so many years—so many picaresque experiences—and hundreds of pages.
A fully realized principal character in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, as he was a principal character in the historic Dickinson’s life, is Dickinson’s father Edward Dickinson, a Christian pillar of the Amherst community and a U.S. congressman. “Squire” Dickinson exudes an air of benevolent despotism in his household of mostly women:
It is only Father who can make me tremble. He has the wrath of God in his wayward eyebrows. But Father suffers a little without me. He swears to Mother that he can only survive on the Indian bread that I bake. He loves to have me near.
The distinguished Mr. Dickinson—“Pa-pa”—enters into the poet’s fever-dreams like the objects of her erotic fascinations, and seems at times identical with them:
Swirling in Father’s arms, I feel like a broken doll. Pa-pa, I want to shout, I am not your favorite feather but a woman with a ferocious will. I do not utter a peep, [Father plunks me under the quilt with the same brutal tenderness that has become his signature.]
Dickinson adores her father even as she has no illusions about his estimate of his “womenfolk”:
He took care of us, but in his own heart he must have felt that we were crippled creatures—mermaids who couldn’t swim. Daughters don’t matter much. I was a cripple to him, in spite of all my Plumage.
Nor does Dickinson’s father evince much interest in her literary inclinations: “Pa-pa did talk Poetry, but only with his horse. The rest of the world was pure Prose.” In a bitter-comic passage that recalls a similar experience of Charlotte Brontë when she’d given her self-centered minister-father a copy of Jane Eyre to read, along with a selection of very good reviews, Dickinson complains:
It tore at me that Father did not know one damn thing about my Treasure. A couple of years ago I gathered up the courage to leave one small booklet of Verses under his door. Lord, I wasn’t looking for praise, but the privilege of having a tiny anthill of my own. Months later I found that booklet shoved back under my door like a misused missile. And never a sound from Pa-Pa, never a syllable. . . . It wouldn’t even have pleasured Pa-pa had he known that half my songs were to him.
Dickinson is then stunned when her father unexpectedly serenades her with lines from her poetry, explaining that it had taken him two years to recover from the experience of reading her poems: “They nearly tore my head off.”
Among the many lyrical vignettes in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson the most memorable have to do with death: the death of Dickinson’s beloved, elderly dog Carlo, and the death of the Squire. Charyn has never written more powerfully and persuasively than in these lovely pages in the section titled “Queen Recluse” that covers the years following 1865 when Dickinson has taken up with masochistic fervor the mantle of “irascible old maid.” Far more significant in Dickinson’s life than her string of romantic infatuations is “The Pup [who] has seen me cry, throw jealous fits, plot against Pa-pa. . . . I cannot recall being lonely in his presence.”
Following Carlo’s death, Dickinson is more easily “terrified.” The wild alter-ego Zilpah dies a suicide in 1873 having scribbled “Zilpah is zero at the bone.” Soon after, the great catastrophe of Dickinson’s life occurs, when she’s forty-three and her father seventy-one—Edward Dickinson’s death of a stroke in Boston. So deeply bereft is Dickinson, she can’t attend his funeral but hides away—“The slumber I had was like a tiny groan in a sea of wakefulness.” An “avalanche of dreams” shakes her intermittently for years.
I moan in the middle of the night. A Monster chases me, with a ruffled, unfamiliar form, yet owning my father’s dark eyes. I cannot bring myself to call him Pa-Pa . . . and so I call him Dark-Eyed Mister, and his horrid, unnatural face begins to smile—or grin, I should confess, since he does not have a regular mouth, but a lipless hole that serves as a mouth. It puzzles the mind. Is this Monster my Pa-Pa, the earl of Amherst, transmogrified by some substation between celestial and terrestrial ground?
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson gains emotional momentum as it moves from the picaresque romps of Dickinson’s youth to the stoicism of her final years. Losses of Carlo, her father, and a beautiful young nephew have the effect of easing Dickinson toward her own death, presaged by the diminution of her “lightning” powers: “My pencil hung on its string at my side like a sick snake, or a pendulum that could sometimes breathe.”
IN HIS WINNINGLY WRITTEN AUTHOR’S NOTE to Johnny One-Eye, Jerome Charyn speaks of his lifelong interest in George Washington and the Revolutionary War era—“I have been writing Johnny One-Eye ever since I was nine, a street kid in the South Bronx.” In his author’s note to The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn acknowledges an even deeper kinship with Dickinson—“She was the first poet I had ever read, and I was hooked a
nd hypnotized from the start. . . . It was the old maid of Amherst who lent me a little of her own courage to risk becoming a writer.” As Jerome Charyn has been an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life from the start of his career in a succession of highly stylized novels—he has written thirty-seven books, including three memoirs—it’s likely that he has imagined “Jerome Charyn” in romantic-mythic terms as well, a precocious naïf:
We had so little in common. She was a country girl, and I was a boy from the Bronx. She had a lineage with powerful roots in America, and I was a mongrel whose heritage was like an unsolved riddle out of Eastern Europe. Yet I could hear the tick of her music in my wakefulness and in my sleep. Suddenly that plain little woman with her bolts of red hair was as familiar to me as the little scars on my own face.
Charyn’s Dickinson is “terrifying in her variety . . . bitchy, petulant, and seductive, and also a mournful, masochistic mouse in love with a mystery man she called ‘Master.’” As biographers and commentators have noted, this “Master” might have been any of a half-dozen men, or no one, as the poetry inspired by “Master” seems to conceal as much as it reveals. Both the historical Dickinson and the poetry she left behind in the little hand-sewn booklets lend themselves to endless speculation, decoding, and mimicry—attempts at appropriation and mimicry, in Charyn’s words:
[A Secret History of Emily Dickinson] will be told entirely in Emily’s voice, with all its modulations and tropes—tropes I learned from her letters, wherein she wears a hundred masks, 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.
Yet the voice Charyn has created for Emily Dickinson doesn’t truly suggest this range of personalities. This Dickinson is forever defined by—if not trapped in—the breathless yearnings of a (female) adolescent as imagined by a (male) novelist: we are led to wonder of the Emily Dickinson who read widely, and purposefully, in all the great poets she could get her hands on, including Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, and “Mr. and Mrs. Browning”—what of the poet who read with an eye for the craft of poetry? It is surely true that lines came like “lightning” to the poet—as to many poets; but it is also true that Dickinson worked and reworked her poems, often over a period of years, as she worked and reworked her brilliantly teasing letters.
Consider the celebrated last letter of Emily Dickinson’s life, written to her Norcross cousins shortly before her death:
Little Cousins,
Called back.
Emily.
Is this a letter, or a poem? Is it—both? One can see by the very spacing of the lines that this seemingly tossed-off farewell isn’t just “lightning” but also conscious, considered craft. And among Dickinson’s extraordinary 1,775 poems and many hundreds of letters this is just one tiny gem. To have created a portrait of Emily Dickinson that accommodated both the girl-adolescent and the canny poet suffused with a wish to make of her craft something beyond the fleeting moment—a portrait that acknowledged the subject’s literary ambition and her not-modest assessment of her own writerly gifts—would have required a different, more spacious vision of Dickinson than Charyn seems to wish to provide here. Could one imagine a portrait of a male poet—Dickinson’s contemporary Walt Whitman, for instance—for whom poetry wasn’t the very center of his life, far more inextricably bound up with his identity than a succession of mere romantic yearnings? It may even have been that, in the tradition of (male) poetry, Emily Dickinson employed her “Master” as a sort of muse: a scaffolding of sorts for her art. How else to interpret such lines of poetry as Dickinson often wrote, leaping from a private subject to a purely contemplative statement:
Oh Life, begun in fluent Blood
And consummated dull!
Achievement contemplating thee—
Feels transitive and cool.
(1130)
There is considerable pathos, however, in Charyn’s warmly imagined tracking of his subject’s doomed attempt to thwart her destiny—to escape her father’s house and, as if incidentally, to escape the very circumstances that made her “Snow”—her brilliant poetry—possible. This is not a portrait of the artist with which we can easily identify, but The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson makes of this questionable thesis a poignant, delicately rendered vision. It’s as if all art is but a strategy to “invent” a bearable life, as Charyn’s Dickinson suggests in this elegiac passage late in the novel:
I would suffer each time Circus season arrived. . . . The nearness of my blond Assassin intoxicated me, and I wasn’t even sure that Tom was a renegade clown in the Circus. But that was the disease of Miss Emily Dickinson. I had to invent what I could not ascertain—no, did not want to ascertain. I was the voluptuary who lived on the thinnest air, who survived and conquered through invention alone.
“AFTER AUSCHWITZ”:
MARTIN AMIS
When the German cultural critic Theodor Adorno famously said, in 1949, that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he could hardly have anticipated the sheer quantity of poetry and prose that was to follow in the wake of the Holocaust, still less its astonishing range and depth. Poetry, fiction, memoir, film—from the elliptical, surpassingly beautiful and original fictions of W. G. Sebald (The Emigrants, Austerlitz) to the brash meta-filmic fantasy of Tarantino’s The Inglourious Basterds; from the starkly narrated The Reader by Bernhard Schlink to The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, flamboyantly narrated by Death; from the densely narrated psychological/historical classic realism of André Schwarz-Bart (The Last of the Just) and Imre Kertész (Fatelessness, The Failure, Kaddish for an Unborn Child) to the Kafkaesque dream-landscapes of Ahren Appelfeld (Badenheim 1939, Tzili, Katerina); from the emotional intensity of Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl to the parable-like austerity of the Polish film Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski. With the passage of time works of art that confront the phenomenon of Nazi Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust have tended to become more circumspect as the generations that had been firsthand witnesses give way to younger generations: recent novels by Susanna Moore (The Lives of Objects) and Ayelet Waldman (Love and Treasure) achieve their considerable emotional power by focusing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration is too blinding to confront directly but rather at a little distance, as in the reflective shield of Athena, which renders the horrific image of Medusa bearable, and the Gorgon to be slain by the hero Perseus.
Such artful circumspection has not been Martin Amis’s strategy in approaching the Holocaust. It is the notorious Polish Nazi death camp Auschwitz that is the partial setting for Amis’s tour de force Time’s Arrow; or The Nature of the Offense (1991) in which the lifetime of a Nazi doctor/experimenter is presented in reverse chronological order, from the instant of his death (as the affably American “Tod Friendly”) to his conception (as the ominously named German “Odilo Unverdorben”), witnessed by a part of himself that seems to be his conscience, or his soul. Nearly a quarter century later in his new and equally risky Nazi novel, The Zone of Interest, Amis has revisited Auschwitz, more specifically the “Zone of Interest,” which contains the Polish death camp and the headquarters and domiciles of its Nazi staffers and assistants, a “dumping ground for 2nd-rate blunderers” as its commandant wryly observes. This is a place to which hapless and doomed Jewish “evacuees” are brought by train to be imprisoned as forced labor and/or gassed and their remains dumped in the euphemistically named but virulent-smelling Spring Meadow. (As the commandant wonders, “If what we’re doing is so good, why does it smell so bad?”) In this hellish place in August 1942 there are several narrators of whom none is quite so eloquent in Nabokovian irony as the unidentified narrator of Time’s Arrow, but each bears witness to the unspeakable in his own way.
Lieutenant Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is the first of the narrators of the Zone of Interest, a mid-level Nazi officer in ch
arge of the Buna-Werke factory and the favored nephew of the high-ranking Nazi Martin Bormann—“The man who controls the appointment book of the Deliverer.” (For some unexplained reason, no one in The Zone of Interest calls Adolf Hitler by his name, only by elevated circumlocutions.) Thomsen’s commitment to the Nazi war effort is haphazard and expedient: “We were obstruktiv Mitlaufere. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet . . . but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us.” Yet, the lieutenant is a self-described Aryan specimen—“six foot three . . . [with] thighs as solid as hewn masts”; he has cobalt blue “arctic eyes” and “Michelangelan” calves. A compulsive womanizer and a sexual braggart, Thomsen is erotically obsessed with the wife of Commandant Paul Doll, the elusive and haughty Hannah who “conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work.” As the Nazi erotic ideal, Hannah is “huge and goddessy”—yet not so easily categorized, as Thomsen discovers through the course of his (mostly futile) pursuit of her.
Camp Commandant Paul Doll is the second narrator, a vainglorious buffoon-Nazi stricken with self-pity for most of the novel at being ill-treated by his wife (who loathes him) and being overworked by his superiors (who disdain him); it is Commandant Doll who must oversee the frequent arrival of the evacuees and their subsequent fates at Auschwitz, a matter of thousands of individuals. Doll laments being caught between the demands of the Economic Administrative Head Office to help “swell the labor strength (for the munitions industries)” even as the Reich Central Security Department “presses for the disposal of as many evacuees as possible, for obvious reasons of self-defense.” He sits through Nazi entertainments calculating “how long it would take to gas the audience.” Amis clearly takes pleasure in throwing his satirical voice into Doll, giving the Nazi’s rants a savagely comic tone as Doll complains of being stuck in the Zone of Interest “offing old ladies and little boys, whilst other [Nazis] gave a luminescent display of valor.” Here is a wickedly funny Monty Python figure in Nazi regalia:
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