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  THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON

  THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON

  A Novel

  Jerome Charyn

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2010 by Jerome Charyn

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Charyn, Jerome.

  The secret life of Emily Dickinson: a novel /

  Jerome Charyn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06856-6

  Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Fiction.

  2. Women poets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H33S43 2010

  813'.54—dc22

  2009038977

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  TO GEORGES AND ANNE BORCHARDT,

  for their friendship and devotion.

  AND TO ROBERT WEIL,

  for helping me discover the book

  I really wanted to write.

  To shut our eyes is Travel.

  —EMILY DICKINSON, 1870

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1 HOLYOKE

  2 CARLO & CURRER BELL

  3 SISTER SUE & THE LOST SOULS

  4 THE VAMPYRE OF CAMBRIDGEPORT

  5 QUEEN RECLUSE

  6 JUMBO

  7 THE BOY IN THE BARN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SHE WAS THE FIRST POET I HAD EVER READ, AND I WAS HOOKED and hypnotized from the start, because in her writing she broke every rule. Words had their own chain reaction, their own fire. She could stun, delight, and kill “with Dirks of Melody.” I never quite recovered from reading her. I, too, wanted to create “[a] perfect—paralyzing Bliss,” to have my sentences explode “like a Maelstrom, with a notch.”

  It was the old maid of Amherst who lent me a little of her own courage to risk becoming a writer. “A Wounded Deer—leaps highest,” she wrote, and I wanted to leap with Emily.

  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.

  But I wasn’t interested in writing a novel about a recluse and a saint. I soon discovered that Dickinson was terrifying in her variety; she could be bitchy, petulant, and seductive, and also a mournful, masochistic mouse in love with a mystery man she called “Master,” and to whom she would have sacrificed all. “I’ve got a cough as big as a thimble—but I dont care for that—I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that dont hurt me much. Her master stabs her more,” she writes in a letter that was probably never sent. Whatever her turmoil, she was pleasuring herself with her own words. “Master” could have been any of half a dozen married men she secretly adored, or no one at all. We do know that she had some kind of serious flirtation near the end of her life with a widower, Judge Otis Phillips Lord, that she even considered marrying him, but was constantly holding him off. “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

  Her brother Austin often spoke of Emily as his “wild sister.” And she was wild in her own way. She had a ferocious intelligence that must have frightened her at times, and frightened those around her, including her own father, Edward Dickinson, who once served as a congressman from Massachusetts. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor and writer she clung to as her “Preceptor,” dismissed Edward Dickinson as “thin dry & speechless.” Yet this speechless man is at the center of my novel. Their curious connection served as a kind of courtship. He loved Emily, feared her, and kept her a child, while she danced around him like some local Scheherazade. “I do not cross my father’s ground to any House or town,” she loved to recite. But she crossed her father’s ground many a time in her poems and in her fiercely imagined life.

  Her real Preceptor, however, wasn’t likely Higginson but her sister-in-law, who remained Emily’s surest reader. “Sister Sue” was also a very complicated creature, who had a whole tribe of Dickinsons to deal with. Emily likened her to Mount Vesuvius and the Gulf Stream. Susan loved to smolder, and Emily stayed in her spell for thirty years.

  She seldom spoke of the eight or nine months she spent at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847–48, yet this first “break” with Amherst was an important one and helped crystallize some of her longings. It is at Mount Holyoke where the book begins as she becomes embroiled with her Tutors and fellow seminarians, who are trapped in a religious awakening she manages to resist. Though the novel clings to the line of Emily’s life, I have also included several fictional characters, such as Miss Rebecca Winslow, the vice principal at Holyoke, who will introduce her to the art of poetry; Zilpah Marsh, a seminarian, who conspires against Emily; Tom, the handyman at Holyoke, who hypnotizes her with the tattoo on his arm; and Brainard Rowe, a Tutor at Amherst College, who courts her when she’s nineteen.

  The novel 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.

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM FOR its graciousness in allowing me a private tour through the Homestead, and for the privilege of standing quietly in Emily’s room and looking out her west window to the Evergreens of Austin and Sister Sue; it was my first long glance from the window that emboldened me to feel her very own “Slant of light.”

  I have followed the line of Emily’s life wherever I could, but I have also taken liberties within that line. There was no Lunatic Asylum in Northampton until 1858, but I have pretended that there was. I “kidnapped” the fire that nearly ravaged Amherst in 1879 and moved it to 1883 for the sake of my story. The Dickinsons lived on North Pleasant Street from 1840 to 1855. But North Pleasant had another name—West Street—while Emily lived there, according to one of her biographers, Alfred Habbeger. And this is the name I have used.

  New York and Paris

  April 2009

  PART ONE

  Holyoke

  Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

  South Hadley, 1848

  1.

  TOM THE HANDYMAN IS WADING IN THE SNOW OUTSIDE MY window in boots a burglar might wear. I cannot see the Tattoo on his arm. It is of a red heart pierced by a blue arrow if memory serves, & if it does not, then I will let Imagination run to folly. But I dreamt of that arm bared, so help me God, dreamt of it many a time. We are not permitted to talk to Tom. Mistress Lyon calls him our own Beast of Burden. She is unkind. Tom the Handyman is no more a beast than I am.

  If he lights our stove or repairs the windowsill or bevels the bottom of our door, our vice principal, Rebecca Winslow, has to be in the room with him, & we poor girls have to run to Seminary Hall so that we will be far from Temptation. But I wonder who is the tempter here, Tom or we? There are close to three hundred of us—if you count
the Misses Lyon and Winslow, & our seven Tutors, & Tom, the only male at Mt Holyoke. Heavens, I’d as lief call him Sultan Tom & ourselves his Harem. But Mistress would expel me in a wink dare I whisper that. And Tom is a sultan who depends on crumbs. He lives in the shed behind our domicile, a place so dark & solitary that a cow would die of loneliness were it trapped inside. He cannot come to the table when we dine, but must feed on whatever scraps are left. My room-mate, Cousin Lavinia, sneers at him, says Tom reeks of sweat. She is a Senior & cannot stop thinking of her suitors. Lavinia has hordes of them, the sons of merchant princes & potentates or boys from Amherst College who would love to sneak onto the grounds & serenade their Lavinia, but could not get past Tom & so have sent her half a mountain of Valentines. She is positively engorged with them.

  “Cousin,” says she, after cursing Tom, “how many notes from Cupid have you received so far?”

  “None.”

  “That’s a pity, because I’d opine that a girl hasn’t lived at all until she has a hundred beaux.”

  There never was a show-off like Emily Lavinia Norcross. But I’d start a war between our families if I bludgeoned her.

  Mistress Lyon summoned us to the assembly hall. She stared at us all, the perpetrators and the innocent parties. “I forbid you to send off those foolish notes. I will not tolerate such frivolities. We do not celebrate Valentine’s Day at Holyoke.” And she promised to dispatch Miss Rebecca to the Post Office to discover if anyone dared challenge her decree. But she did not interfere with the Valentines that kept arriving like missiles, as if any letter that had already been franked were a sacred thing. She wanted our election, and would suffer nothing less. The girls of Mt Holyoke had to avail themselves to be the little brides of Christ, & said brides did not scribble Valentines harum-scarum to the boys of Amherst. The sign of our election was a dreamy gaze into the atmosphere & strict attention to our calisthenics. But I was consigned to Hell, though I had never received nor sent one paltry Valentine. And Lavinia, with her half mountain, was a member of the elect who had discovered God in Mistress Lyon’s sitting room, had prostrated herself & prayed. But my mind would always drift during Devotions, & I’d think of Tom’s Tattoo. Tom had become my Calvary.

  Lord, I do not know what love is, yet I am in love with Tom, if love be a blue arrow & a heart that can burn through skin and bone. Tom and I have never spoken. How could we? Mistress Lyon would have him hurled across the grounds if ever he dared address a bride of Christ. Still, I watch him in the snow, sinking into perilous terrain, rising in his burglar’s boots only to sink again & again, as if in the grip of some bad angel who would not leave Poor Tom alone. I pity him caught in the cold without a cup of beef tea. And how can a sinner such as myself help the Handyman? Soon he will start to sneeze & have a monstrous coughing fit & I will wonder if Tom is weak in the lung.

  Holyoke does not believe in hired help. We girls make our own beds & have our individual chores. I am the corporal in charge of knives—no, the animal trainer, since knives are part of my menagerie, like tigers & tigresses, though I never call them such. I distribute the knives during meals & wash them in our sink. Mistress does most of the cooking, & until recently had her own pair of burglar’s boots. But she can no longer do the heaviest chores. Her ailing back will not permit her to collect the trash or repair stovepipes & pump handles. So Tom is on the premises by sufferance alone & Mistress pretends not to see him as much as she can. Pointless to send him notes. Tom does not belong to the population of readers. And no one amongst the faculty will deign converse with our Handyman. Miss Rebecca has taught herself to instruct Tom with a form of sign language & a few gruff shouts. If she wants him to repair the water pump, she performs a little pantomime. She gurgles for a moment, weaves around Tom as if she were a well, then stiffens into pipe or pump handle, & before she’s done, the Handyman has grabbed his tool box & disappeared into that spidery land below the sink.

  But there are no Tutors in the snow to interfere with Tom as he rises and sinks like a burglar. I do not have an inkling of why he is out in that little Siberian winter beside Holyoke Hall. The wind is fierce & there is such a howling that the Lord Himself would take cover, though Mistress Lyon might call me a blasphemer for having said so. She, I’m sure, would declare that God can traverse the snow without tall boots. But that still does not explain Tom’s leaping about. Is our Tom constructing his own crooked path for the butcher & grocer? But why would they cross Siberia when there is an open passage to the front gate that Tom shovels every morning at six? Harum-scarum, it is the mystery of Holyoke Hall.

  Then I catch the melody of Tom’s design. He is not on a meandering march. He is searching in the snow. He sinks again, & I fear that Siberia has swallowed him until he rises up with a creature in his arms, a baby deer frozen with fright, looking like an ornament on some cradle & not a live thing. It must have wandered far from its family & panicked in the snow. Lord, I cannot see its eyes. But Tom the Handyman keeps the stunned little doe above his head & tosses it into the air as you would a sack. And what seems like an act of consummate cruelty isn’t cruel at all. The little doe unlocks its legs and starts to leap. What a silent ballet before my eyes! A baby deer gliding above the snow, conquering our little Siberia in half a dozen leaps, & disappearing into the forest, while Tom watches until the doe is safe.

  2.

  THE FEMALE PRAYER CIRCLE MEETS ONCE A MONTH IN LYON’S sitting room. The Circle consists of local duchesses & dowagers who behave like benevolent crones toward our seminary. Holyoke was founded on their largesse & that of their dead husbands. They look sinister sometimes in their black vails, yet they have been known to feed chocolate and caramel to Holyoke girls. They arrive in their chaises & Tom has to tether the horses. He stands on guard while Miss Rebecca offers the coachmen hot cider & leads the duchesses in their black capes to Lyon’s door. We cannot help but hear the turmoil & the ecstasy as our benefactors labor for the Lord. They shout & thump & sing in raspy voices that sound like the melancholic croaking of frogs. But God has every sort of angel, young & old, sweet or brittle as the duchesses of Monson and Belchertown.

  I must confess that I look forward to their croaking—it soothes a homesick girl. But there is a price to pay. Mistress Lyon is filled with impossible fervor. I fear that her meetings with the duchesses will cost me my scalp. She summons to her sitting room all the “unsaved,” girls who have not declared themselves as Christians & hence cannot become worthy wives or teachers & missionaries. There are twenty-five of us. We kneel in front of her desk & are not supposed to glance at Lyon while she herself is caught in rapture of the Lord. But like little burglars we steal looks at her in the bonnet she wears—it billows round her head, white as a mast. Her face has gone to leather, & looks but half alive. Yet her blue eyes are pierced with God, & her long nose quivers as she addresses us in a voice weakened by years of hard work, a web of spit forming upon her mouth.

  “My dear little daughters, this house belongs to God. It was built by His direction, and we must be worthy of Him. Can none of you profess your faith?”

  When we do not answer, Lyon leans back in her brocaded shawl. “Is this how we thank Our Savior? Clarissa Brown and Maude Munison, will you not rise up out of human depravity and rescue your soul from eternal damnation?”

  “Mistress,” says Clarissa, who doesn’t have the least bit of backbone, “I will, I will.”

  But when Maude does not rise up and leap into the lap of God, Lyon shakes her head. “Hellfire and no hope for Miss Maude Munison.”

  And thus she goes down her little list, interrogating us all, as if we were prisoners of war, locked in the dungeon of Mt Holyoke. “Sarah Cowper, I know your father well. Is he squandering his tuition money on a no-hoper?”

  And Sarah, the Cicero of our class, says, “I do not yet belong to Christ, but I am trying to feel God.”

  “Then is there hope, Sarah?”

  “Yes, Mistress…for myself and Father’s tuition.”

  Mist
ress frowns, her blue eyes very brittle. “Hold thy tongue, young lady! You must not tempt God with talk of tuition. You will write an essay for me, Cowper, on the corrosiveness of humor misspent.”

  And she continues down the list while she bludgeons us with pictures of our lost souls wading through eternity until we are as stunned & helpless as that little doe in Siberia. Sixteen of us still without hope. Finally she gets to the last name on the list.

  “Miss Emily Dickinson, your father might be the earl of Amherst, but Squire Dickinson has no sway here. He has not confessed his faith, but will his daughter reveal her love of God?”

  I feel like a winter leaf buffeted about in Lyon’s own storm. But I do not tremble in front of her and our little class of sinners. 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 I bake. He loves to have me near, so I can play the piano, or read him passages from Revelation in the library, or tell him for the hundredth time about the particular boot Lord Byron had to wear on his clubfoot, & he complains that he will have to kidnap me from Holyoke one day soon or starve to death. But he’s mighty slow for a kidnapper. I keep waiting to hear the sound of his chaise & the bells on the reins of Henry the Horse.

  “Mistress, my father is a most religious man,” I declare in my mousy voice.

  She strains to listen. We must shout in her presence. She has gone deaf in her service to the Lord.

  “Daughter, I cannot hear you.”

  And so I shout like a horn, but my horn is meager and not made of fine metal.