=Books recently read=

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn. You have to give Jerome Charyn credit for chutzpa, if nuthin' else. He had to know going in that he was going to get a lot of grief for daring to play ventriloquist for Emily Dickinson. He faced several significant if all but insurmountable challenges. 

First, he's a man and Dickinson is a feminist icon. How dare he! Let him write about Melville or Whitman, Thoreau or Emerson. There are plenty of dead white males whose graves he can rob. Why molest her where she molders? Leave our Emily to rest in peace! 

Second, just about every Dickinson fan has their own cherished image of the Belle of Amherst. The more detailed a portrait Charyn paints, the more personal his vision tinged, the less likely it's going to match the one held by most readers, the more likely it's going to seem a monstrous sacrilege.

Third, if he's to avoid restricting his narrative to an interior monologue, he has to somehow concoct a plot featuring a woman who famously seldom crossed the threshold of her own front door. How do you invent events from this singularly uneventful life?

Last, but not least, there's the difficulty of aping one of the most distinctive voices in all of American literature.

Well, no way was Charyn going to please everyone with "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" and for sure he didn't. Many of the objections center around the very nature of Emily's "secret life."  That is to say how Charyn resolves the issue of nothing ever happening in Dickinson's life. What he invents is a series of ahistorical "romances" which he has Emily relate throughout the course of the novel and which make up it's chief subject matter. There are uncomfortably long stretches where Charyn's narrative sounds more than a bit like a corny historical bodice ripper, complete with dashing rogues, unlikely coincidences, opportune fainting spells, chivalric rescues, overheated scenes of near-sex and enough purple speeches to paint something really big purple. 

Charyn's Emily too often sounds like a cat in heat. As a young student, she falls for the school's illiterate, tattooed handyman, who reappears throughout the novel as a pickpocket, an army deserter, and a circus clown. She falls in love with a tutor, a preacher, and an oddlot assortment of would-be mentors, at least one old enough to be her father. If the Wild Bunch had passed through town, she would have fallen in love with Marlon Brando, too. Principally, though, she is in love with Daddy, a paradoxical figure in Dickinson's life, powerful and doting, paternal and patronizing, from whom Emily was never able to part—in real life and even more so in this particular fiction. Her dreams, as Charyn imagines them, turning borderline necrophiliac after Daddy Dickinson's death.

For good measure, Charyn also has Emily getting the hots for women. She has a long-running thing for her sister-in-law but also for various other female acquaintances. She often speculates that if only she'd been born with beard and chest hair she'd sweep this or that young filly right off her feet. Is he under the misapprehension that this nod to lesbianism and cross-gendering proves him a feminist?

His ultimate aim, I guess, is to run counter to the image of Emily D. as some virginal, schoolmarmish figure from our grade school days. And it's true. The Emily Dickinson we were taught in school and the image that prevails to this day in the common imagination is of a prim and proper Massachusetts lady who wrote a lot about flowers and insects and birds. How sweet! While the real Emily Dickinson was probably closer to Poe, a creature of repressed and morbid sexuality and polymorphous perversity, revealed in  her poetry by an obsession with death and the random routine cruelty of life. 

But if a darker grimmer compensatory portrait need be painted I much prefer the one painted by Camille Paglia in her stupendously rich book Sexual Personae. Paglia convincingly argues that Dickinson was America's female counterpart to the Marquis de Sade, the Countess Bathory of Amherst. After reading Paglia's essay, based on a close literary reading of the poems and an equally close reading of Dickinson's actual life, you'll never see Emily D. the same again. In fact, you'll probably come away more than a little scared of her.

Only towards the end of the novel, where Emily, over fifty and in steep decline, her death looming like a fat red tick on the horizon sucking away the last rays of light and life, does Charyn offer the much-needed rationale for the flight of his fancy. Talking about herself in the third-person, Emily describes "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 of air, who survived and conquered through invention alone."

So we are left to understand that all her various infatuations, crushes, and near-sex fantasies were all in her imagination. And who's to say they couldn't have been? Not Emily herself, not anymore. I don't doubt that everyone has fantasies that don't match-or even run directly counter to—their  public personas. But does that mean fiction writers should ransack willy-nilly the graves of the long-departed famous and cram their now empty skulls with the ghosts of thoughts they theoretically could have had? Should Abe Lincoln, to take a recent example, really be a vampire hunter? How many years after death is it acceptable to hijack someone else's life?

The problem here is that Charyn doesn't seem to be writing fiction as alternate history but as interpretive history. His reinvention of Emily would be more acceptable as the former, if she were being used as a character in what was clearly a plot of someone else's devising. Like turning Jane Austen into a detective. But Charyn is offering us an interpretation of Emily's life and the experiment he makes of trying on her skin has a bit too much of the Anthony Perkins in it for my taste.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't have it's charm. Chief and foremost among them, strangely enough, is the job that Charyn does capturing Emily's distinctive voice. You would think this would be where most authors meet their Waterloo. But Charyn pulls it off. He captures Dickinson's distinctive cadences and diction, her idiosyncratic play with words. There are even whole stretches where you can almost forget that this isn't really Emily Dickinson speaking directly from the pages, where you're so focussed on the dummy you don't see Charyn looming up behind her, manipulating her mouth, speaking for her through his own stiff, barely moving lips.

But then you do and the whole illusion falls apart. The language begins to seem stilted, overly precious, cloying, preposterously baroque and you suddenly find yourself sick and tired of Charyn's Emily.

In the end, that's what makes this novel as disappointing as it is entertaining, as disillusioning as it is occasionally illuminating. That the voice sure sounds like Emily but what it's saying sounds off, sounds like some lecherous guy in drag. I really hate to say it, but I wish this book had been written by a woman—a Jeanette Winterson, perhaps, a Carol Maso or even a Margaret Atwood. Mary Gaitskill would have had the necessary perversity, I think. 

Anyway, in the meantime, we still have Camille Paglia's essay, which limns closer to the truth, I think, by which I mean the image of Emily Dickinson I cherish—a kind of grown-up Wednesday Adams, morose, taciturn, perversely playful with a streak of sadism and a dash of masochism. The kind of girl who doesn't always rescue the bird from the snake, but watches with a grim little smile, knowing that the snake has to eat sometimes, too.