The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel

Jerome Charyn's "Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" is tremendously moving and atmospheric. I've read extensively through the three volumes of her personal correspondence, and (to my admittedly lit-crit-untrained eye) he has largely captured her eccentricities, cadences, and most of all, her hypnotically musical way of writing. I can think of little that compares with Dickinson's "prose" style, except perhaps the high cadences of the Authorized Version of the Bible or the Arabic of the Qur'an. Like these works, Dickinson's prose style is less "prose" than it is a near-blank verse poetic style--rhythmic, and when read aloud, musical.Charyn captures both Dickinson's language and her complexities. He freely intertwines fact with fiction, which is why I think reading this book as some kind of strict historical fiction/quasi-biography is a huge mistake. This isn't a biography or even a biographical novel. It's more akin to what Shakespeare's great Roman tragedies were: dramatic reworkings of sources that were themselves somewhat embellished (the layering of Shakespeare's Coriolanus to Plutarch's Caius Martius to the "real" Caius Martius, for example). A more contemporary example might be Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, which is largely autobiographical but (as I understand it) interpolates some fictive situations or twists--new layers to a real story. Like The House on Mango Street, Charyn's Secret Life is also told in a loose vignette style.Out of the raw material of Dickinson's tempestuous life in the Amherst teapot, Charyn casts her as a somewhat reclusive spinster whose bottled-up passions are always at a boil and ready to burst. The story is relatively straightforward, and usually centers on Dickinson's interaction with one or two people at a time. Like Dickinson, Charyn has a mastery of the small, pithy sarcasm: "There was never a show-off like Emily Lavinia Norcross," she says to us in the first-person, "But I'd start a war between our families if I bludgeoned her."Charyn's Dickinson is also a warm, acutely human observer: "I find Mother in the kitchen, reading a recipe. There is a delight on her face I seldom see. Perhaps the clarity of measuring cups soothes her. She looks up in wonder, her mind still caught in a world of ingredients." My own mother has a deep and abiding love of cooking and recipes--so perhaps that is why this passage struck me powerfully, but a world of meaning is crammed into this brief set of sentences. Charyn, like Dickinson, has the gift of packing mountains of meaning into molehills of sentences.The ending (mild spoiler: Dickinson dies at the book's end) is an immensely moving fugue, as Dickinson walks almost like a ghost through a maelstrom of faces, voices, and memories that have filled the book from literally its first page. As the final chapters unfold, Charyn's Dickinson speaks with consistently powerful, forceful images (a dancing cow, for example), but it is clear the division between her lively imagination and reality is blurring and collapsing. The result is some of the most moving prose I've read in a work of modern fiction.Coming off of a reading of Alfred Habegger's magnificent  My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson , I found this book to be a satisfying, intriguing, and even emotional read for anyone who loves the work of one of the greatest poetic voices in the history of American literature.

If I were to meet Monsieur Charyn in person, I should feel compelled to curtsy and thank him profusely for his quite wonderful and engaging book ... I'm in the Facebook group by the same name (as his book title). I am a "former" college librarian and a published poet, having written since the age of 14 (I started in 1973). I do consider myself to be more than a bit of an Emily scholar, as well. I have read more than a few of the books written about her - many were speculative and judgmental for the most part, it seemed. Yet Jerome Charyn managed to (pardon the pun) "uncover" the Belle of Amherst as I might have imagined her to be - not as some poor little eccentric recluse, but a woman light years ahead of her time (and she still is), someone who knew better than to waste precious time on "societal expectations". Most people only know her writing from what we read in school - and most of those were her poems about death ... but she was so much more than that! Thank goodness, the author gained access to her manuscripts and discovered Emily waiting between the pages, between the pauses ... I did get to see a microfilm of her original, borrowed from another library, in the late 1970's. I've written more than a few poems inspired by and/or about Emily - two of my personal favorites are "Rebel Without a Pause" which describes her in a much more intelligent and intriguing way, a woman who chose a life of the mind over a life of dull and meaningless tasks - this was an existence so precious to her, for she knew very well how brief life truly is. My other favorite is "Taking Off Billy Collins' Prose" - it was penned in defense of my literary heroine's honor, of course. My older brother bought her collected poems for me in 1983 and I have since gathered many other books about her, as well as her letters, various critical essays and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on. I also won a booklet with some of her recipes from the Emily Dickinson museum. My next purchase from my "Emily wish list" will be "Gorgeous Nothings", her "envelope poems". I can barely wait ... or perhaps I should quote from Emily's poem "I sing to use the waiting"?

Did not feel this was genuinely Emily Dickinson's story - having read her poetry I have a certain gestalt for Emily and did not feel this was captured in the book. It is an engaging story and easy to read but found myself not really 'buying' it. I appreciate the author's attempt to create her story but I don't believe a man can truly capture what it is like to be a woman. For example the 'Diary of a Geisha' was clearly not written by a woman.