Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

And now it's my pleasure to introduce Jerome Charron Mr. Chair and has written 37 novels 37 books over his career including three memoirs of his childhood growing up in the Bronx. Two of those memoirs were named New York Times Books of the year and his novels have also received much acclaim. He has been awarded the Rosenthal award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel darlin bill. And he was a finalist for the 2005 PEN Faulkner Award for the Green Lantern in addition to writing critically acclaimed novels he is a distinguished professor emeritus at the American University of Paris where he has taught film classes and is involved with the Center for writers and translators. Mr. chairmans novels frequently delve into historical moments and well-known historical figures and his new novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is no exception. Having immersed himself in her poetry throughout his life. Mr. Chairman inhabits her voice to give shape to an imagined version of a notoriously private and quiet life. Brenda one apple Dickinson's most recent biographer calls the novel a breathtaking high wire act of ventriloquism.

Now please join me in welcoming Sharon. Please buy a book it doesn't have to be my book but support or support to book shop because it's very important when book shops of this quality. I mean you have to be sustained you know. First of all I just want to suggest the controversy that's gone around this book. I wrote it in Emily Dickinson's voice and the reviews have been split down the middle. People either absolutely adore the book or they absolutely hate it beyond the worst dream that anyone ever had. And those critics who hated say how dare I write in Emily Dickinson's voice What do I know about Emily Dickinson etc. etc. and then you discover that those people who like it the least have never read her letters and don't really know that much about Emily Dickinson's life. I mean she wasn't a wreck loose. She wasn't the old maid of Amherst it's just a lot of bullshit you know.

So we have to try to change the perception of what she was like so I just want to read a short thing that I wrote for a blog explaining why or why I wrote this book. Some readers may be disturbed that I wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson in Emily's own voice because I do assume her voice. I wasn't trying to steal her thunder or her music I simply wanted to imagine my way into the head and heart of Emily Dickinson. I decided to start a novel that Mount Holyoke female seminary even though many scholars and critics of her work do not feel that the time she spent there seven or eight months in one thousand forty eight and forty nine was particularly important to her. I disagree even though she rarely mention Mt. Holyoke in her later letters and was home sick from the minute she arrived to the minute she left. I still feel that this

seminary shaped her in several subterranean ways. It gave her a sense of the devil and allowed Emily to hurl off the straitjacket of established religion. Emily was someone quote unquote without hope who couldn't declare a faith in the Lord. Her religion was much more private much more particular. Slowly slowly she turned towards the gods and devils of creation. Such gods and devils empowered her whenever she was scrunched over a writing desk in Amherst. She suffered a great deal and had to hide her own fierce intelligence this is the thing that we must remember. She was profoundly intelligent much more intelligent than anyone around her including all the males around her. And this is where problems began because those male critics who try to interpret her work didn't understand a word of what she was saying. So she was very much in advance of her time and this is why she really suffered.

OK supplies remember that since women in the 19th century American and 19th century American village weren't supposed to think for themselves and that she had a dual life obedient daughter a loving sister and later a loving aunt. And all the while she smouldered inwardly and was a demon at her desk. That's one of the reasons why each new generation of readers responds to her poetry in such a visceral way. These scrolls on scraps of paper she often wrote on the backs of on will open at the bottom of old recipes were a matter of life and death. We can feel the trembling in the words themselves. Their celebrated use of the dash wasn't some fanciful artifact it was a weapon. As Emily moved from image to image without giving us a chance to breathe. Her words attack us bite our heads off even while they soothe and delight. There has never been another poet like her male or female.

OK just in trying to I'm going to read a very very short section of the book before I do try to remember that. Her father gave her a dog a Newfoundland when she was 19 thinking that if she was alone in the house she should have a dog. The dog was taller than she was and she had this dog for 15 years and she went around the village of Amherst every day wandering through the whole village with her dog Carlo whom she called my mute confederate. OK color was her friend her champion etc. etc.. This is almost never mentioned by scholars or if it is mentioned it's mentioned in two lines. She was not reclusive at this point she didn't wear white dresses and she didn't you know flit around from room to room Kahlo died around the end the time of the end of the Civil War and it's from this point on that she becomes

reclusive she becomes more and more reclusive once her father dies. OK Also we must try to remember that she was not as uncelebrated as we like to think she was in her own town she was quite famous as a poet even though she'd only pro published less than 10 poems in her lifetime and none of these poems with her own name but professors from Amherst College would not Connor do a warning to speak to her and she would speak to none of them. So that you know we have to get rid of certain misconceptions about her life. OK I'm going to read a short passage from the book. And this is about Emily Dickinson's death. OK just before she died and for those of you who have read her poems I really beg you to read her letters because her letters are every bit as glorious as her poems they almost are a kind of novel.

They're beautifully written she wrote three letters to someone called the master and they're among the greatest love letters in all of the English language. OK. Also I had a particular problem with this book because I could not quote from her poems all or all or poems are owned by Harvard University Press. And if I wanted to quote from them I really had to show the book to Harvard. And I really didn't want didn't want to do that so I had to get into her poems without really quoting from them. And I'm sure most of you know the poem that starts with because I could not stop for Deaf deaf kindly stop for me which is about a carriage ride to eternity. OK. So I try to work this poem. Into the very ending of the book without using one particular line I try to make my own little trip to heaven. OK so I'm just

going to read a few short passages and then I'll throw it open to you if you have any questions. This is just before she died now scholars can't agree as to what caused her death. Originally he thought it was Bright's disease and that it was really a problem with her kidneys this is not so. She probably had a stroke. Her father died of a stroke. Her mother was paralyzed had a stroke and for the last two years she was primarily bedridden. OK so she's in bed at this particular point and in her letters there's one it's just one line she's looking outside her window and she sees one of the handyman Dennis Dancing with the cap. OK that's the only line you have in the letters. OK so when I read this Emily you know the handy man dancing with the cow. I said my God this is the way the book yesterday.

One morning in March I woke to an odd commotion that seemed to be some palpable music coming from the rear of the house. Surely I'd gone to heaven since I saw a man a boy really dance with a cow. Cows do not stand on their hind legs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but this coward did. And then with the boy man he wore a red neck a chip and I wondered if he were a fugitive from some circus. The cow was caught in rapture her face was phosphorus. OK so she then asks for the dentist the handyman to be brought up to her room and he comes. I washed up and waited awaited the boy in the bar and he must have arrived with a pair of wings. I listened for his tread on the stairs and heard no sound at all. He was carrying a cap in his hands kneading it like a lump of dough is hands was strong but with fine blue veins that could have come

from some tributary of the Nile. Lord I was shy in front of him. My heart was pumping like the fiercest engine in Massachusetts. I had to speak before I fainted in front of the boy. My dear I said trying to sound like his own lost maiden and how kind of you to come. You are my physic. And Mum I am not aware of such a word. My tonic I said my Rhapsody I saw you dance with the cow and I've begun to bloom on my cheeks a little red. He peered at me as if I were the cow splashes of red mom mixed in with all the with all the paleness but a roaring red if I might say so indeed a roaring red. This Dennis had a razor in his mind. Even if we hadn't conquered Collegeville his treasures were far more natural than mine. I asked him to carry me over to the chair and he did. He covered me in a blanket as he might a doll swept me up in his arms with a lyrical motion

that seemed to defy the air and put me down with such a lightness. I seemed to float into my seat. I was hungry to have him around. Dennis had work to do but after he was gone I seized the cowbell. That or that Vinnie who is her sister had placed them out of bed and rang for the boy in the hall. OK and sometimes when the mood struck him while he was carrying me from the chair Dennis would dance with me in his arms were always made non gently until she thought there was no other such pleasure on earth. I never grew dizzy in Dennis's arms. The cow did not see the room did not spin. I fancied myself Emilie the dancing cow. It was one more name one more nice to put in my treasure box. OK so he doesn't come up anymore and this is how I ended the book which is her ride into eternity. They were no more visits from the boy in the barn. And how could I call for him when I couldn't shake the clapper. And so I decided to visit

the bone with wings I could not trip without wings I could not travel far but I girded myself in my own feeble will and moved with each palpitation of my heart. I wore my dominie gown like a bride who had to season herself my slippers were made of velvet Toulon air. I do not remember bumping into the ground. I floated past Margaret. Who's the woman who works in the house at work in the kitchen while Vinnie her sister slept in a chair. Her snores like a silver trumpet. I tried to touch her hand as a little goodbye but Afghans did not meet in the giddy atmosphere of father's house. I sneezed as I left the kitchen. A sound was sound that could not even wake a pack of field mice and spied the bones open door with its slant of light softened by swirls of dust. I sneezed again. The light of the bomb shimmied like a soft wound that could still Pierce skin and bone. I shed not one drop of blood while my feet were off the ground. I was the conqueror

of all. I had a clarity I did not have when I was housebound with my pencil for a shield centuries unfolded in front of my eyes. OK and then we go to the very end. I'm all a shiver now. I haven't heard any angels sing from within the barn. I wonder if the devil is stationed inside the door with some insidious song to send me howling. But days as she calls her so that's one of her disguise names. But dazing will match his own meter and the shivering stops I'm wearing a bridal gown with my slippers and yellow gloves. The one I'm not certain whose bride I am and that's how I travel in my dimity into but that bone could be Peru. I see nearer and nearer but never near enough. My bridal gown could be in tatters before I arrive. OK so she's on her trip to heaven. And this is the way she does it. Now is there anyone here who has not read a poem by Emily Dickinson. You know be honest you haven't read. You know and I talk you know because she was looking. I mean

you have. OK. Is there anyone who is not so everyone has read a poem by Emily Dickinson. So I was just wondering what your own attitudes about her are. I mean what impressions you have or if there are any questions you'd like to ask me about her about writing the book. I mean I would love to too and yes I think it's true of almost all of us when we discover her poems I mean we're it's it's a kind of shock of recognition that we discover a kind of intimacy with someone whether you're male or female. Well as I as I try to explain I first discovered her in when I was a student in junior high school in a very very tough school in the South Bronx where there were no newspapers there was nothing. I had 10 fights every day walking from home to school. And I discovered I didn't know who heavily Dickinson was but there was a poem that began success is counted sweetest by those who

never succeed. It was a poem about failure. And about you know that it's only the defeated the dying who can understand the sweetness of success and for a boy you know in the wild lands of the Bronx it was a prophetic song. So I really fell in love with her poems from that point on I began to read them you know. And then in preparing this novel I read her letters and that was the real revelation because the letters gave me an entree into her voice and into her music and I what I tried to do was to take this 19th century poet who was very much in advance of her time and try to find a 21st century equivalent for her music. You know and this is what. I try to do. But why does the poem stick with us because it seems to me that she has such a power with language and a juxtaposition. And I would

say it's in the dash because the dash is very violent to Texas from image to image. And it's also in the nouns she makes the nouns work as if they were verbs. OK. So that in this kind of shorthand language that she has. She travels so far saying so little you know. And it's the space that the dash implies that I think is OK so I would think that all of us when we first encounter her are really stricken in some way. I mean I think so. The thing that for example in writing a book so very often you you know there are bloggers and you do videos on YouTube and the video that I did that got the most hits you know was was Emily Dickinson. I mean that's what everyone seemed to want to know what was her sexuality. Well how the hell do I know what her sexuality was. I'm sorry.

The only thing I can say is that she was androgynous. OK. And that as a writer she had to assume the sensibility of a male and a female as most writers do if you speak to to Joyce Carol Oates and you say Well are you a female writer she'll say no. She'll say I assume the identity of a male and a female when I write so that you have to remember in 1900 century Amherst in 19th century New England. Women had very few encounters with men before they were married so most of their real friendships were with other women. And these friendships were often very very intense and they often wrote letters sometimes two three times a week maybe even more. And very often these were love letters so that if you read the letters of Emily Dickinson to her friend Susan Gilbert who would later become her sister in law they are love letters. They talk about kissing and I can't wait to see you. I love you I can't wait to

touch you. I mean but what do they really mean. You know it's difficult to try to interpret them in 21st century terms. We do know that women were very often intimate with other women in terms of friendship. Much more than that and they were frightened they were frightened of sexuality if you read Emily's Letters to Susan. She says well no man will ever touch me I'll never be violated or whatever it is so that we have to examine what 19th century life was like. Yes of course I mean they're all in my head but remember I can't quote them. So you have to remember them and then forget them because if you don't forget them you're plagiarizing you're quoting without knowing that you're quoting so you have to absorb. Yeah thank you. Yeah you have to absorb the poems without really quoting them which is not so easy you know. So. That's the job that you have to do. The foremost critic of

Emily Dickinson Brenda why NAPPA love the book. Now what she understood I mean I don't you know I don't want to quote what she said but she's basically saying that I understood the varieties that she could be very playful she could be mischievous. She could be everything she understood this because she was not only intimate with the poems but intimate with the letters. And most of the attacks have been by people who have never read her letters and really don't understand this mischievous playful sexual side that Emily had they don't want to give Emily any kind of sexuality at all. You have to remember that she had this maiden you know of Amherst had a love affair in her 50s and 40s. She had a love affair with one of her father's friends. And she thought of marrying him. And she couldn't be married because her mother had had a stroke. But she writes very intimate love letters to him

talks about not letting him enter her MOS talks about you know being playful being a kind of Cleopatra So it seems that most critics really want to deny her sexuality. And also the other thing is how dare a man write from a woman's point of view it's all right for women to write from a male's point of view. But it doesn't seem to be alright for man to write for men to write for a woman's point of view. Now I'm not arguing with any of these critics you know they can be right or they could be wrong but then I discovered a friend of mine discovered that the most severe critic talked about how terrible her book was and said well the book you want to read is one called Wild Nights wild nights. Then a friend of mine discovered that this critic was the author of Wild Nights wild nights so you really can't win. You know how can you win. You know well you can see a garden is being very erotic Also you can see the flowers the

sexuality of the flowers but I choose not to look at it that way because I'm not interpret ing that I would say that you have to remember that she was very much a woman who was grounded in her garden she went in and when she was ill I don't know how many of you know that Emily Dickinson lived. For at least a year in Cambridge she visited Cambridge two times during the Civil War and she had a an eye doctor in Boston because she had a real problem with her Irish. She had an illness that is called moon blindness when it applies to horses in other words she was terribly terribly sensitive to light so that she was. And the thing she missed most was not her writing when she was living in in Amherst and couldn't write because of you know because of the sensitivity to her eyes. She missed her garden

and that's the thing that she missed most so it was very very important to her and also you see many gardening images in her palms I mean what what is so spectacular an extraordinary number. Her father was a lawyer. So there are many law terms in her poems and if you examine them I mean there's an incredible variety in her diction. I mean it's stunning. I mean when I go back and read the poems now I mean they're like a kind of strange lightning rod. You know they really draw you to the language. You know it's incredible. And I would say that very often that's a prerequisite for writing is that those peers people who cannot fit into their own cultures often are split in some way often can sort of find a music that allows them some that soothes them in some way and I would say that Emily Dickinson wrote to be sued. She needed to hear that music. It's soothed her in a way

that nothing else could. And you have to also remember her father always. She she had a younger sister live in Europe Vinnie and her father loved these two women but considered them as useless creatures after all if they married they would lose the family name so they would be of no value. And since they couldn't do anything but housework I mean it was very condescending and also he has the greatest American poet living in his own household doesn't know it and when he talks about his son Austin he compares him to Shakespeare. OK. He says My son writes like Shakespeare and doesn't even know that this incredible poet is in his own house you know that's to show you how invisible she was in her own culture. You know she was invisible as most women were in the 19th century. You know you have to understand there's a good reason for this. It's not.

The original homes you know were published without the dash. You know when they were edited by all these preceptors who loved their work and didn't understand anything they were published at the very end of the 19th century. OK. And those poems which are all titled and she never put a title on any poem you can quote from. Now her poems are rediscovered in the one thousand twenty as in the 1930s and 1940s. So they're still under copyright. OK so that's the problem. It's the syntax that's most troubling. So I don't know. You know and Harvard was very generous with me because when I wanted to use an epigram and I wanted to quote in my introduction and the epigram that I used as a as an epigraph for the I mean for the book was again a line from you know I want to quote it directly if I can ever find it.

She says to shut our eyes. Is travel. Now this is you know ordinarily you would say to shut our eyes is to travel. OK. But she says to shut our eyes is trouble. That's an extraordinary I mean it's not simply the imagination she's not saying well you imagine she's saying to shut one's eyes is trouble. This is the spot she's talking about writing about creating. This is what creating is all about. It seems to me. Well there has to be an historical figure that you love I mean in my last novel Journey one on which is about American Revolution which was about the American Revolution I wrote about George Washington and again invented a love life for George Washington during the revolution. And critics again objected. To that. But remember I mean a novel takes on its own parallel life. I mean so in

dealing with historical figures it's not for the sake of history it's trying to sort of deal with someone you absolutely love I mean I loved as a kid I loved George Washington and and also I mean again the critics are so wrong about him. I mean we must not look at him as the first president of the United States that's a relevant because even as the first president it really Alexander Hamilton who was the first president I mean but if you look at him as a warrior if you look at him as the man who really established and saved the country he was a great general Nohant admits that he had no army and also no one seems to remember that by the end of the war one quarter of all his troops were black. And that's completely forgotten. In other words he could not have won the war without his black troops. And if you when I first discovered this I thought this is astounding let me see if I'm going to find it anywhere else.

She's mean Washington in an in in you know in the American Revolution I mean. And without these black troops she could not have had an army. So you know all these sort of historical romances that we have with reality you know really have to be changed so I would say I like to deal with history if I can change history. I'm not an historian you know I want to change it. I want to do it in my own terms. What she's the most contemporary poet we have I mean she's really a poet of the 21st century and her rhythms were not I mean both she and Herman Melville were writers who were really. Not only not understood in their own time I mean for example there's one novel by Melville called the confidence man and we can't even interpret it in the 21st century because it's so splintered. The psychology is so scattered that we know we have to know more about the brain in order to enter Melville's brain so

I mean both of these writers was supp to me and both of them live very underground lives. And both of them you know are writers that remain with us that haunt us in our own time. I spent well it's difficult to say. I mean I spent a great deal of time first of all I mean I really read every one of them homes and. I fell in love with certain lines and I read her letters and I read all the biographies that I could. I read all the psychoanalytical studies of her and her father which were practically useless. I read there were several novels about her told from different points of view. I didn't find them interesting at all but you know OK they were you know so I read whatever I could. There is a line by line log of her life in relation to the times that was very very interesting. And then of course I read about the times you know about

you know what was happening in Cambridge what was happening in Boston what was happening in Amherst. I did read histories of Amherst. Ok then I wrote the book and I had a wonderful editor I have a wonderful editor but you never know what happens to editors these days so we always have to speak of it in the past tense. But he had me rewrite the book three times and I think that. By the third draft it really was a much better book and what's interesting is that he's really Tolstoy and I mean he goes back to the 19th century and wants a kind of clarity whereas I'm really my writing is Jagat and you know and I'm always moving from image to image. So the combination of him and myself together I think was was quite explosive in in terms in terms of this book so I would say that altogether it would be about three years. But the other problem is that you could rewrite the same book your whole life. I mean you know there are

always sentences that you wish you had changed. You know so at some point it becomes a graveyard and you have to go on to something else you just have to leave it alone and also so strange because I was coming up today by train and a line came into my head and that line was the beginning of a storage you know I was thinking of writing a story I'll just tell you one last thing is that said I when I published my my earlier novel called Johnny one eye which is about the American Revolution I met a very interesting man he was a multi-millionaire who made an incredible amount of money in advertising and was completely fed up with it. And he decided he was going to work as a guy as a guidance counselor in a Bronx High School. OK because he wanted to do something that made sense to him. So he wrote me an email and he said look if I buy 50 copies of your book and distributed to my students will you come up to the school. And I said OK

great I mean I grew up in that part of the Bronx Why not. So he says OK I'll arrange for everything. So the day I visited the school there's a chauffeured limousine picks me up takes me there school introduces me to the students and the students were very poignant. You know this was the New York City is famous for three or four special schools. One of those schools is called the Bronx High School of Science. OK. Now this was a satellite school like the Bronx High School of Science. But you didn't have to take a test to get in. Anybody could get in and it was in the worst part of the Bronx so I met with these students and he introduced me to them and you could see how happy he was trying to help and he's gotten students into Harvard into Yale into Dartmouth by simply working with them and trying to. And now he's going to do the same thing with Emily Dickinson. So you see that. I was very touch and

when I go up to the school again and I wanted to write a story about the school but I didn't want to write about this man I didn't want to vamp arise him and put him into the story. So while I was coming up today on the train I suddenly found a way to get into the story without this particular character so it's very perverse lines. You really write when you're dreaming. You know your dreams really do the writing for you. You know it's that the music comes in very very strange fashion and you can't force it. You know there were years I couldn't so I couldn't write it all I was living in Europe I was separated from my own language I didn't hear it. I wasn't interested in learning French I was in love with a woman so I thought I would live there but of course it didn't work out. But the thing is that when the music is there it's there. OK so when people say well how long does it take you to go from one voice to another it takes me three seconds. I started a novel 10 years

ago abandoned it went back to it and picked up the voice as if I had never left it. I think we don't know enough about the brain to realize where this creativity comes from the music was in my head. I didn't have to force it was already there so a 10 year lapse didn't mean anything. I was right back in the world you know. So creativity I would say is India and let me my final comment much you have other questions that I was given some kind of brain scan about five years ago and the woman who gave it gave me the scan said there is so much activity explosion inside your brain that I don't know what it's all about. She said I've never seen you know I she didn't mean this positively she meant to say as if I were hers. But she said there's really there's an explosion inside your head and I don't know what's going on. Well maybe it's a necessary explanation. Are there any other questions that I might answer you sir.

No question yet. You're welcome Atlanta.