A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  PRAISE FOR JEROME CHARYN

  “One of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon

  “One of our finest writers. . . . Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit, . . . his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem

  “Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.” —Tom Bissell

  “Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

  “A fearless writer. . . . Brave and brazen.” —Andrew Delbanco, New York Review of Books

  “Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker

  “Both a serious writer and an immensely approachable one, always witty and readable and . . . interesting.” —Washington Post

  “Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday

  PRAISE FOR The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel

  “Daring.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Audacious. . . . Seductive. . . . Charyn has never written more powerfully. . . . A poignant, delicately rendered vision.” —New York Review of Books

  “Through a perceptive reading of Dickinson’s verse and correspondence, [Charyn’s] re-created her wild mind in all its erudition, playfulness and nervous energy.” —Washington Post

  “Compellingly drawn. . . . I admire Charyn’s achievement in lifting the veil of a heretofore mysterious figure.” —Los Angeles Times

  “In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination.” —Booklist (starred review)

  “In his breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism, Jerome Charyn pulls off the nearly impossible: in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson he imagines an Emily Dickinson of mischievousness, brilliance, desire, and wit (all which she possessed) and then boldly sets her amidst a throng of historical, fictional, and surprising characters just as hard to forget as she is. This is a bold book, but we’d expect no less of this amazing novelist.” —Brenda Wineapple, author of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  The poet (left) and one of her possible muses, circa 1859 Used by kind permission of a private collector

  First published in the United States in 2016 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2016 by Jerome Charyn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Cover images courtesy of The Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College Archives & Special Collections

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-934137-99-4

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  ONE: Zero at the Bone

  TWO: The Two Emilys—and the Earl

  THREE: Daemon Dog

  FOUR: Judith Shakespeare and Margaret Maher

  FIVE: Ballerinas in a Box

  SIX: Phantom Lady

  SEVEN: Within a Magic Prison

  EIGHT: Nothing

  NINE: Cleopatra’s Company

  TEN: The Witch’s Hour

  CODA: Sam Carlo

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions

  Index

  Author’s Note

  I COULDN’T LET GO. I’d spent two years writing a novel about her, vampirizing her letters and poems, sucking the blood out of her bones, like some hunter of lost souls. I’d rifled through every book about her I could find—biographies, psychoanalytic studies of her crippled, wounded self, tales of her martyrdom in the nineteenth century, studies of her iconic white dress, accounts of her agoraphobia, etc. I shut my eyes, blinked, and wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (2010), like a boy galloping on a blind horse. I never believed much in her spinsterhood and shriveled sexuality. Yet she was a spinster in a way, a spinner of words. Spiders were also known as spinsters, and like a spider, she spun her meticulous webs, trapping words until she gathered them in a Lexicon that had no equal.

  She falls in love with a handyman at Mount Holyoke in my novel. Perhaps she dreams him up in the snow outside her window, a blond creature with a tattoo on his arm of a red heart pierced with a blue arrow—that tattoo is every bit as extravagant and outrageous as her poems. Tom the Handyman could be a phantom and a whisper of her own art. He’s also a burglar and a thief, an appropriate accomplice for a woman who burgled the English language; he will rescue her in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she roams around half-blind, and she will discover him again hiding in a circus near the end of her life—Dickinson loved the circus, with its rash of red.

  The poet was also in love with Susan Gilbert, as her own letters reveal. And Sue remains the most enigmatic character in the novel—volatile, brooding, dark. “She was our Vesuvius, who rained hot lava down upon our heads,” as Dickinson says in my Secret Life. There are rides to eternity throughout Dickinson’s poems, and I wrote about her own last ride as a voyage to her dead father’s barn, wearing a bridal gown, all done up in tulle, but she never gets there—discontinuity has always been her habit.

  And thus I travel in my Dimity and tulle, but that barn could be in Peru. I seem nearer and nearer, but never near enough. My bridal gown could be in tatters before I arrive.

  As Dickinson teaches us, endings have no end. She was a master of quantum mechanics long before that science was ever born. “People like us, who believe in physics, know the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” Einstein once said, and he could have been talking about Emily Dickinson. She was always at the ragged edge of time.

  And there wasn’t a bit of closure, even after I finished my novel. I knew less and less the more I learned about her. There was no way to shove her aside. Her poems never heal the essential wound of reading her. Even the tales of her life were tantalizing, since they reveal so little. She was an agoraphobic who could dance anywhere on her toes, a reclusive nun who wrote the sexiest love letters, a mermaid who swam in her own interior sea, a shy mouse who could pillage and plunder in her poems. All her life she was a Loaded Gun.

  And while writing a novel about Lincoln, in Lincoln’s voice, dealing with his staccato courtship of Mary Todd—another nineteenth-century belle who was much too complicated and whimsical for her era—and with all the brutal turns of the Civil War, I dreamt of Dickinson, who wrote some of her finest poems during the years this “still Man” inhabited the White House like a gaunt ghost. And I had to write
about Dickinson again, to capture her voice—not as a novelist, but as a hunter in her own field of words.

  We all owe a debt of gratitude to Martha Nell Smith for establishing the Dickinson Electronic Archives and for her own careful scrutiny of Dickinson’s texts. I would like to thank Margaret Dakin, archivist of the Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College, for allowing me to sift through Emily’s secrets, those wondrous fragments in which she herself smashed the illusion of time and left little eternities for us all to share; I couldn’t have written this book without these late fragments and letter-poems.

  I would like to thank Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, who helped me roam through Edward Dickinson’s “head-quarters” at the Homestead and to wander into that “Pearl Jail” where his daughter once slept and wrote and hoarded that Lexicon of hers. I would also like to thank Dickinson scholars Polly Longsworth, Christopher Benfey, and Marta Werner, who, with poet Susan Howe, were my partners in crime, helping me unsnarl some of the ravelments of Dickinson’s mind. And I’d like to thank poet and public health physician Norbert Hirschhorn, poet Susan Snively, graphologist Susanne Shapiro, and daguerreotype collector Sam Carlo for their own perceptions about Emily Dickinson. Most of all, I’d like to thank prima ballerina Allegra Kent, who shared her reminiscences of Joseph Cornell with me while I watched her dance toward her own “Blue Peninsula.”

  Symbols Used in the Text

  A Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

  Fr R. W. Franklin, editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, 1998

  HCL Harvard College Library

  J Thomas H. Johnson, editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1958

  PF Prose fragments from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1958, 1986

  A LOADED GUN

  Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century

  Young Emily, circa 1847

  Courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

  ONE

  Zero at the Bone

  1

  WHEN JULIE HARRIS DIED at eighty-seven of congestive heart failure on August 24, 2013, she was remembered most of all as an “unprepossessing anti-diva,” who had a waiflike, invisible presence outside the roles she played, according to her obituary in The New York Times. Though she would inhabit Mary Lincoln, Joan of Arc, and Sally Bowles on Broadway, she continued to haunt the nation as “shy Miss Emily” for almost forty years. In his obit, Bruce Weber marveled at her portrait of Dickinson as a “fiercely observed, proudly literary and deeply self-conscious near-agoraphobe.” Harris had played her to the hilt.

  Dressed in white, like a nurse or a nun, the anti-diva appeared at the Longacre Theatre in 1976, as the Belle of Amherst, in William Luce’s play. She won her fifth Tony Award and would repeat her performance in a public television special that seemed to enchant most spectators. She went on tour year after year, until Julie Harris became Emily Dickinson.

  Such was Harris’ mimetic power and the ferocity of her talent. She was like a hologram of the poet visiting us from the past. The Belle of Amherst presents the poet with a persona that is often funny and capricious as quicksilver. Harris was gnomic and red-haired, like Dickinson herself, and one could feel the patter of the poet’s footsteps while Julie Harris was onstage. “I first fell in love with Emily Dickinson when I read her letters,” the anti-diva once wrote. “It’s like listening to her heart.”

  Luce has her sit on a low chest, “excited. Her mind is running on one track only—publication.” She’s lured one of the most eminent essayists and literary critics of her time, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, into the house. But she’s no Scheherazade.

  “I’ve been waiting to hear from your own lips what you’re planning for my poems. I have them right here.”

  She’s ready to show him her entire stash, poems not even her sister knew about. And it’s a pity that Higginson can’t sing his own lines, else we might have had a bit of fireworks, or a wonderful comic moment. But Luce doesn’t give us a single hair of Higginson’s actual visit to her father’s house, the Homestead, in 1870. Dickinson descended the stairs with two day lilies in her hand. In a letter to his wife, written that very night of his visit to Amherst, Higginson offers us one of the few genuine glimpses of Dickinson we have, without the least bit of embellishment.

  A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face . . . with no good feature—in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice—& added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what to say—but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously—& deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her—but readily recommencing.[Letter 342a]

  It was the most critical encounter of her life—or at least that portion of her life we can glean from letters that still survive. She’d been waiting to meet Colonel Higginson for eight years. She had first written to him in 1862, pretending she was a neophyte—an unborn poet—while her letters and poems had a bewildering mastery. Yet she pretended to be his pupil, seeking his advice, sending him four of her poems like soft, seductive bombs. “Mr. Higginson, /Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” [Letter 260] She didn’t even sign her poems, but hid her name inside a little card. The colonel was bewitched. He wrote her right away. Dickinson replied, “I made no verse—but one or two—until this winter—Sir—” Meanwhile she’d been assembling her poems into little packets, stitched together by her own hand—close to five hundred poems, if not more. He called her poetry “spasmodic,” but she hadn’t really come to him for advice. She needed his intelligence, having had so few correspondents with his stature and scope. She was vampirizing the colonel, sucking at the blood inside his head.

  Luce’s Emily dreams on her feet about all the future editions of her poems. “And I would prefer morocco-bound.” Higginson speaks, but we don’t hear his voice, of course, in this “One-Woman Play.” What he says unsettles her. “But my meter is new, experimental,” she tells him with a decidedly twentieth-century tick. She recites to the audience:

  A great Hope fell

  You heard no noise

  The Ruin was within . . .[J1123]

  And she vanishes into her bedroom, the heart ripped right out of her. She keeps sending him poems. “But always, from his polite replies, I get the uneasy feeling that they end up in some dusty drawer in his office.”

  And we’re back to Emily Dickinson, the baker of black cake and victim of unrequited love. “But I’ll have you know, plain or not, I had more than one suitor. And they were all married. And older than I. But there was really only one.” She’s been pining half her life for a particular “Christ-like man,” the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she’d heard preach in Philadelphia when she was twenty-four. “His voice haunted me. I couldn’t break off the enchantment, even after I returned to Amherst.” She only met the preacher twice, but he became her mysterious “Master,” to whom she addressed three funny, sad, heartbreaking letters that may never have been sent. All we have are the rough drafts.

  Master.

  If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was’nt shot—you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.[Letter 233]

  I’ve got a cough as big as a thimble—but I don’t care for that—I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that don’t hurt me much.[If you] Her master stabs her more.[Letter 248]

  Critics have been puzzling over these letters ever since they were first discovered. For Luce, Wadsworth has become the lesion around which she wrote her poems, the source of her sadness and ecstasy. She also admits that one man, Judge Otis P. Lord did propose to her, and glosses right over this proposal. But Judge Lord was much more material in Emily’s life than any Christ-
like man. And few readers in 1976 realized that Emily Dickinson had a fling with one of her father’s old friends—or even knew that he existed. Lord was considered a lion in Massachusetts, a judge of the superior court. His blue eyes blazed like bullets, and no one could return his stare. But the judge was in her thrall. She wrapped herself around him like a sexual snake. How many spectators in the audience—male or female—could have tolerated the image of Julie Harris pretending to glide over Judge Lord’s erection with the blade of her hand?

  . . . to lie so near your longing—to touch it as I passed, for I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms through the happy night . . .[Letter 562, about 1878]

  Instead we have a very different erection—the subterranean kind—as Luce’s Emily recites to us her encounter with a garter snake with its “spotted shaft” that’s like “a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun.”

  But never met this Fellow

  Attended, or alone

  Without a tighter breathing

  And Zero at the Bone—[J986]

  And that very last line defeats the whole panorama and spectacle of a play about a harmless maiden aunt who happened to write poetry. Neither the poems that weave through the monologue without much of a “Whip lash,” nor the monologue itself, provide a key to Emily Dickinson’s art. We don’t see her demonic side. She flirts with the audience, but Luce’s Dickinson is never “Zero at the Bone”—she has too much of the reasonableness that Luce has pumped into the play. We’d never learn from Luce that her favorite creature was the spider, or that she loved to spin her webs with the silver thread of her Lexicon, and capture her prey—words or young widows and married men.

  But it isn’t Luce’s fault. The Dickinson he offers us had been around for eighty-six years, ever since she was first published in 1890, half the deviltry of her language and punctuation rubbed out, some of it by Higginson himself, who thought he was doing Dickinson a favor by presenting her as a lovelorn recluse and village savant. She was half-forgotten by the turn of the century, a poet whose ragged lines had the registers of a spinster who pined away. But a war developed among Dickinson’s heirs. Her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, had a cache of letters and poems (she’d been Higginson’s co-editor and was the first to transcribe Dickinson’s manuscripts). Emily’s sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, had another cache. And their daughters, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bingham, would become involved in the battle—whole new gatherings of poems suddenly appeared like “a Bomb, abroad.” [Fr360] But the myth of the recluse remained, the half-cracked poetess who had to renounce her love. Few of us had read her letters. We knew her by a little “menagerie” of poems, memorized in high school. We’d never heard of Judge Lord, and we wouldn’t have believed the tale of our Emily romping around on the family sofa with a man her father’s age. We could only imagine the Queen Recluse in a virginal white dress.