The Secret of Emily Dickinson: A Novel With Poetic License

COME SLOWLY, EDEN. By Laura Benet. Dodd, Mead and Company. $2.50.

THIS novel presenting scenes and episodes from the girlhood and young womanhood of Emily Dickinson was begun by the late Winifred Welles, who lived to write only the first two chapters. Miss Benét, who also has a flair for writing about childhood, has completed her friend’s work. The story begins with Emily as a little girl playing with the future Helen Hunt Jackson under the syringa bushes in the Dickinson yard; it leaves her a poet and confirmed recluse dressed symbolically in white. A part of the novel, though not a disproportionate part, is devoted to her affairs of the heart. Miss Benét has handled this material, which fortunately includes no new revelations, with tact and good judgment. She may fairly claim to have portrayed the poet and her circle without seriously distorting any of the personalities involved. In this respect her fiction is truer than some professed biographies.

It was to heighten and make more graphic the incidents she chose to picture, not to take liberties with Emily Dickinson’s story, that Miss Benét resorted to the novel. Miss Benet has taken considerable pains also to master the idiom of time and place and to describe the New England life of a century ago with reasonable accuracy. Her book succeeds in this respect perhaps as well as Ivanhoe succeeds in being truly medieval. Only readers thoroughly conversant wdth the region and period will notice her inconsequential slips. Others may perhaps be bothered by inability to picture Emily during a game of blindman’s buff mounting to a mantelpiece above the heads of the company in “one squirrel-like leap.” But it is not by such trifling lapses that this work should be judged. The one test of a book about Emily Dickinson, be it novel or biography, is whether the writer has imaginatively grasped the essential character of the poet. If she has not succeeded in that, no amount of picturesque archaeologizing will save the book.

Miss Benét has been handicapped from the start by her outsider’s view of New England Puritanism, which she sees only as hard, bitter, and uncompromising. It was that, no doubt, but it was likewise incandescent at the core with mystical affirmations, and these Miss Benét ignores. She fails to realize that even those New Englanders who in the first half of the nineteenth century were in the act of escaping from the austerities of orthodoxy were fleeing on the wings of the Puritan spirit. Emily Dickinson’s individuality and wit were not at variance with her background; they were the fine flower of it. Nothing could be more mistaken than to read into her mind the attitudes of a later generation which has become rootless and footless. If she was the poet who wrote:

Some keep the Sabbath going to church,
I keep it staying at home,

she was also the girl who felt an almost pentecostal exaltation while listening to a sermon by Professor Park. As Samuel G. Ward put it once for all: “She is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of Puritan descent, pur sang.”

Furthermore Miss Benét does not fully grasp how inward and visionary was the drama of Emily Dickinson’s life. Perhaps only a born New Englander would fully realize it. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who better than any other author has interpreted the character of women bred in the Puritan tradition, likens one of these still natures to a grapevine planted near a well, which sends its roots silently underground to weave themselves in a network around the clear, cold waters.

With uncanny accuracy this image expresses the relation of Emily and her “dearest earthly friend,’ the preacher Charles Wadsworth. When she tried to tell the import of her story in her poems, she was driven to the clumsy expedient of dramatizing it as a lovers’ parting. Miss Benét follows her with less excuse. To externalize the story, to create an ostensible renunciation scene in which Wadsworth is even momentarily and mentally unfaithful, is to thrust it toward the commonplace, to miss the high integrity of it all, the gradualness, the inwardness, the deep intensity. Miss Benet draws a pleasant picture of Emily Dickinson in her relaxed moments, but when it comes to the psychic crisis that made Emily a total poet the novelist’s intuition is not powerful enough. Lifeblood was Emily Dickinson’s element. Miss Benét gives us something consonant with teacups.

GEORGE F. WHICHER