A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn (review)

When Jerome Charyn undertakes to write about Emily Dickinson, multiple possibilities emerge for so versatile a writer. If not for subtitles, a reader might easily mistake the genres of two books, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel (2010) and now A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21^st Century. Charyn's motive for trying again to capture the poet, this time in a sequence of non-fictional explorations, can be readily grasped by everyone captivated by Emily Dickinson: "I knew less and less the more I learned about her," "I couldn't let go." Charyn brings to this writing a scorn for familiar distortions of his subject, openness to possibilities, a resourceful approach to inquiry, and a determination to let both poetry and poet confront us with contradictions: "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." In keeping with these contradictions, we have a book that comes to us recommended by both Oprah Winfrey and Phi Beta Kappa – intended for general readers but anchored in current scholarship and of engaging interest to the poet's many admirers.

Although the book's aim is to introduce a Dickinson for our still-new century, readers of this journal will find nothing revolutionary in Charyn's dismissal of William Luce's characterization in The Belle of Amherst nor in yet another rediscovery of the "loaded gun" of poetic genius well remembered from Adrienne Rich and other feminist scholars. Yet few writers have so brilliantly captured that explosive, threatening, uncontrollable force. Charyn's Emily Dickinson menaces. He describes her as "like a monster in her lair," "seductive, spiteful, cruel, with the reckless anger and eruptions of a volcano," "a woman with volcanic powers–whose lightning rhythms and ragged rhymes seem to mirror our postapocalyptic age," and "an enchantress, whose intellect and imagination had utterly isolated her." In his version of the familiar story about Thomas Wentworth Higginson's first visit to the Homestead, "a gentle soul who swore he loved danger walked right into Emily Dickinson's lair and met the Satanic, catlike sibyl."

Higginson doesn't play a major role in this book, nor do other figures typically foregrounded by Dickinson's biographers. Although Charyn acknowledges Edward Dickinson as the dominant force in his daughter's life, the father stands out on these pages chiefly as a beater of horses. Austin is remembered for his wig. Susan, though perhaps the strongest romantic force among many in her sister-in-law's life, was "a greater riddle than Emily or Kate . . . a 'dead spot.'" The attachments on which Charyn projects his closest focus have left least evidence for biographers. Emily Norcross Dickinson receives sympathetic attention for her reticence, her domestic skills, her complicated relationship with her namesake daughter, and the muteness that reflected her own sufferings as daughter, wife, and mother. Charyn distills her life story into a general indictment of nineteenth-century marriage from a woman's perspective. "Emily Sr.," he writes, "suffered the way most other women suffered in nineteenth-century New England, however rich or poor. If she wanted to marry, she had to leave her parents' home like a vagabond in a bridal gown, shelve herself inside her husband's surname, learn to live with this man who was little more than a stranger, no matter what courtship rites were followed, and become subservient to this stranger's kin and to all his sexual needs and desires." Yet her daughters, having dodged this fate, are represented as their father's domestic pets. Speaking of pets, though, Charyn treats us to a delightful chapter focused on Carlo, the "walking mountain," Dickinson's "Daemon Dog" who provided her with companionship, protection, and a buffer for...