Virginia, Emily and The Secret

Lately I’ve been jonesing on Emily Dickinson. It started when I mistakenly chose Jerome Charyn‘s novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson which had been mistakenly shelved in the nonfiction section of the library which lead me to believe it was White Heat:The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple, a book I’ve been wanting to read since a customer recommended it. Yes, I know there’s big difference in the titles, but I was in a hurry, saw Emily’s name, my heart leaped a mile and the book leaped to meet it. As it turned out, there are no accidents. I was meant to be privy to Emily's secret life, though I must warn you -- this is one of those books you either love madly or hate with the same ardor. I love it madly.

At first I found myself a bit confused though. Why was the quintessential wordsmith, the poet of Amherst, tossing around such common words (and I mean that in the lowest sense)as ain’t? And why was she frequenting unseemly places and falling in love with unseemly men? For a brief moment I thought of jumping ship, but the part about the insane asylum grabbed me by the ankles and anchored me back to the pages, thank God. And so I read on and with reading came a glimmer of enlightenment. Aha! – the light bulb dangled above my head as in a cartoon, brightly lit. The novel is not meant to be excruciatingly biographical! Charyn has created a dream sequence based on a scholarly study of Emily’s work, particularly the Master Letters. Emily, he contends, was a woman ahead of her time, a woman so 21st century it’s no wonder nobody “got” her, even her own family. Her father, with whom she lived for years as an adult, waxed poetic over his mediocre son Austin and kept his praise for Emily, a literary genius, confined to her ability to bake bread and black cake. Go figure.

So having read this book I now realize that I need to explode the myth – forget the whole Belle of Amherst thing, read some recent scholarship, and then reread Charyn’s book from a more educated perspective. So book by book, I am piling up a formidable task. At the rate I’m going I think I’ll be hanging out with Emily at least until Christmas. I also am now addicted to the astonishingly creative and interactive Facebook page for The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. AND I got on You-Tube, typed in Emily’s name and went on a tour of the cemetery in which she’s buried as well as a tour of the famous house the Dickinson family inhabited in Amherst, Massachusetts, and heard a lovely song written as a tribute to her. But the thing that struck me most was the short film about the house (The Poet In Her Bedroom) in which the narrator tells a story about Emily and her niece entering Emily’s bedroom one day. Emily closed the door and, using an imaginary key, pretended to lock it behind them.

When she had finished she said, “Mattie, here’s freedom.”

Immediately I made the obvious leap to Virginia Woolfe’s classic A Room of One’s Own, but for me the the key, as much as the room, is the amulet, the magical protective charm. Though I don’t lock the door of my office – I don’t even close it because most of the time I’m the only one here -- in my mind I think I actually do turn the key. In this small space I sell books, write this blog, write a novel when I have a chance, think, ponder, obsess, and worry. In this small space resides my heart, my soul, everything I am.

Some years ago an Episcopal priest asked me if I had ever taken the Meyers-Briggs personality test. I said I had not, but had often wondered what the outcome would be. He told me he gives the test, but in my case he could already predict the outcome.

“You’re an introvert masquerading as an extrovert.”

If you met me you would not jump to that conclusion. I’m outgoing, talkative, vivacious and – um, talkative, VERY talkative. And yet, there is only so much talking I can do. So much interaction. So much laughing. And then I need to go away again, to close the door of this small room and figuratively lock it behind me. Emily and Virginia crossed centuries with their secret. And now here in the 21st century I, too, share it.