The Sister - A Novel Of Emily Dickinson
by Paola Kaufmann,
translated from the Spanish by William Rowlandson
ISBN 1585679518, Overlook Press, New York, 2006, 280 pp., $24.95.
It is difficult enough to write a biography of a poet, though many have successfully done so. Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford’s
landmark biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, gave us a fascinating portrait of the woman and a cogent understanding of the poet. Similarly, Alison Lurie, in Familiar Spirits, her joint memoir of poet James Merrill and his lover David Jackson, beautifully caught the poet and his lover, and the lifelong obsession with the Ouija board that so deeply informed Merrill’s poetry. But often books about poets fall flat, and, if interesting at all, are only so to other poets.
Then there is the genre of fiction about real poets. Novelist Frederick Prokosch, in The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968) writes a wild journal, deeply homoerotic, of Byron’s last year. And, as regards Dickinson herself, there was the execrable 1974 Anne Edwards novel -- I was 23 when I read it and I still remember how ludicrous it was -- The Hesitant Heart, which insisted that the great love and bedmate of the vestal poet’s life was Judge Otis Lord, a friend and correspondent of Dickinson whom Edwards insisted was the object of the passionate poem, “Wild Nights.”
The Sister, however, works. A slimmish 270 pages, the novel imagines the Dickinson household, and Emily especially, as seen through the eyes of Lavinia, Emily’s youngest sister. Vinnie, as she is referred to by herself and others in this first person narrative, is the pretty, raven-haired, flighty, impulsive, curious daughter of the staid Dickinson family. Vinnie makes the household seem a bit constrictive, in spite of its somewhat austere physical comforts and the family’s affluence.
Mr Dickinson is an autocratic lawyer who runs every aspect of his home. Mrs Dickinson is meek, timid, virtually unknowable to her family and the reader. Vinnie records having seen her mother smile only once in her life, at a concert where Jenny Lind sang.
When the novel opens Vinnie lives alone with her servant, Maggie. It is 10 years after Emily’s death, and both parents had already died. Vinnie reflects:
“Father, Mother, you are all stones in this cemetery. I can almost see my own inscription… Vinnie Dickinson, or perhaps only: the sister of Emily Dickinson. If I am only remembered as that, I’ll die happy, I promise you.”
for by this time, the dead sister is a famous poet,
the reclusive Belle of Amherst. The hundreds of fragments of idio-syncratic verse, abounding in slant rhyme and cadences which both echo and mock conventional Victorian verse in their rhythms, have
been edited and published.
Emily, or “Emilie” as Vinnie spells it when she is referring to the much loved sister rather than the poet, is eccentric, as we all knew, but only as time passes and the Bright’s disease that finally killed her
grows more severe, does her behavior start to seem neurotic.
The secrecy, the hiding, the seclusion, the eavesdropping, and the insistence on white clothing all begin early and initially seem innocuous enough. She does not appear to be truly agoraphobic, as she insists upon thrusting the breads and cookies she adored baking on favored guests, often in person.
Emily grew more reclusive as the adulterous affair her brother Austin had for many years with Mabel Loomis Todd became common knowledge. This was especially embittering to "Emilie" because of her intimate friendship with her brother’s wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, an early confidante and champion of Emily’s poetry.
The flagrant affair makes both sisters glad that they never opted for marriage. Neither sister is completely without sexual urges: Vinnie, as a lithe, attractive teenager, goes into the woods with her boy friend Joseph Lyman, a local Amherst childhood friend and neighbor who later
jilts her for a southern woman, and has a discreetly described erotic
encounter. Years later, in a fit of pique provoked by an act of needless cruelty directed toward her by Emily, Vinnie exacts revenge by telling her spinsterly sister about her one sexual encounter. Later, when after several years of correspondence, Emily at last does become betrothed to the now-widowed Otis Lord, (who dies before they can marry) there is this exchange between the sisters:
“Vin,” she said.
"Hmm?
“Intercourse. Does it hurt?”
The novel abounds in humorous moments such as this. The Dickinsons are dysfunctional, as all our families are, but not sinister, not especially dark -- just…weird. Most chapters begin with a poet epigraph, but, tellingly, first with De Quincey, than several by Mrs. Browning, and only later with quotations from Dickinson.
Death, so pervasive in Dickinson’s work, is more a matter of metaphysical speculation than of grim, depressive fear, although the entire family is eventually devastated by the death of Sue and Austin’s adored young son Gilbert. This incident convinced the ailing Emilie that physicians were useless, and she vowed never to consult another.
Despite how little we actually know about Dickinson, so private a woman was she, this little novel seems remarkably informative, about the woman, the poet, her family, her times. All of this is peculiarly more convincing than most of the verbose biographies, all all backed up bythe family’s many letters. Certain incidents in the book are true, certain are imagined; I have been able in family letters to find no record, nor a mention in any biography, of the litigation about property between The Todds and Vinnie Dickinson that occurs toward the end of the book.
The novel suggests, as do all other accounts, that Emily never actually met the beautiful Mabel Loomis Todd, but they did have an epistolary relationship. Surely it grieved Emily that she had befriended the woman who slept with her best friend’s husband, when that best friend’s husband was her own adored brother. The affair caused a rift between the two sisters-in-law; Sue, once Emily’s favorite critic of her work, was displaced by Mabel, who along with Vinnie initially, edited and published the poems posthumously.
What makes this fictional account of a life so mysterious as to enthrall is not, perhaps, fact but rather verisimilitude. This is what Emily Dickinson’s life should have been like; whether it actually was like this is lost to time, and curiously irrelevant. The Vinnie we meet, though no poetic savant, has an innate understanding that the scraps her sister hides and sometimes consents to publish are important. Although outwardly more conventional than her contemporary Whitman’s poems -- and do we not breed conventionality into women, the better to protect a patriarchal culture? -- there is an immediately recognizable iconoclastic freshness, a new approach to words, a skewed insistence of rhythm, that is as new as his was at the time.
There is in the book one fictitious poem by Vinnie Dickinson herself,
marvelously in keeping with the character Kaufmann gives us, and as superbly translated by Rowlandson, a Borges and Lezama Lima scholar, as the novel’s prose is.
Sadly, there will be no further novels by Paola Kauffman. A biologist by profession, and the author of one other novel, the equally award-winning The Lake, Kaufmann died in September 2006 at 37, shortly after a diagnosis of brain cancer. But The Sister will provide her with an eminently well-deserved immortality, even as poetry did the same for Emily Dickinson.
by Mitchell Geller