Readers personalize Dickinson because they can. She’s a prism. Both her work and her mysterious life are supertexts yielding boundless interpretations. My professor was a happy and relatively triumphant man, so his Dickinson had bravado and gusto. Miss Crosswell was a Baptist frigate, and so was her Dickinson. Well-adjusted feminists find Dickinson to have been a well-adjusted feminist. Sexist men mock her, or label her as mad. She’s been diagnosed with most of the major psychiatric disorders by those who have them. The politically minded note how she virtually ignored the Civil War in her backyard. Marxists reduce her to an example of the self-indulgence of the landed bourgeoisie. My gay friends’ Dickinson was definitely gay. Recent reading, in tune with our pill-popping, fun-at-all-costs era, stress the beatific Dickinson and downplay the gloomy one. Look at those happy letters she wrote! Here we have it documented that she went outside a couple times that year! Too much was made of what was merely a fashionable elegiac streak.

And here I was, customizing her, too. Initially, I’d read her, as I said, as somehow Southern, providing my emerging religious unease with a delicate but protective grid of words and imagery. My Dickinson, like me, wrote from a desperate compulsion. My Dickinson feared intercourse, be it spiritual, social, or physical. My Dickinson was misunderstood, a little arrogant, and bound for a hard-to-define glory. My Dickinson had tremendous death anxiety but still longed for its arrival.

In college, a smiling professor wrote on my papers that I had completely missed all of Dickinson’s felicity, rightly accusing me of projecting a personal misery onto her, and perhaps onto the whole world. The professor had a point; moments of extreme joy abound in her work, right beside moments of abysmal bleakness. I don’t want to simplify her complex oeuvre into two piles labeled HAPPY and SAD, but regarding mood, Dickinson was a two-trick pony, without much capacity for the spectrum between. I think by now you know where this is headed: I was exhibiting a tendency to behave hyperbolically, spiraling from strings of cocky, inspired, and money-blowing “best” days to spurts of homebodyish, withdrawn, and fatigued “worst” days. It seems that my psychological inheritance from a bloodline of religious mania, dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and suicide was shaping up to be a touch of the old manic depression. Yes, now my Dickinson was bipolar, too.

***

In this condition, I brought her with me to graduate school in Florida, the same Florida whose “venereal soil” Wallace Stevens felt bound to curse good-bye; the same Florida about which Flannery O’Connor wrote “[It ] is not a noble state…but it is an important one.” This mutant peninsula has none of the—albeit often stultifying—landed-gentry coherence of other Southern states. The bottom tip of Florida is its own exotic, urban-tropic world; the middle is an oversized, fluorescent attraction-land; the northern middle seems like a Georgia runoff; gray Tallahassee is a standard-issue capital city; the Panhandle is, well, a more tan-conscious Alabama. Florida’s a vacation place to which children flock to have their dreams fulfilled by corporate funworlds, to which teens flock to mimic TV spring break rituals, to which the “active” flock to “encounter” nature, to which the elderly flock to die hedonism-lite deaths, and to which celebrities and the wealthy come to roost atop their lot. Somehow, that the doomed family in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is bound for Florida seems to implicate them further. This is Disney-Dixie.

X.J. Kennedy’s Emily Dickinson in Southern California, a witty and gripping blend of homage and satire, plays with the idea of plopping Dickinson down into a culture of indulgence and excess. The frontispiece is a woodcut by Michael McCurdy featuring a grim Dickinson trying to read by candlelight amidst hotels, freeways, surfboards, and throngs in thongs. Similarly, I often wonder what Dickinson, who returns again and again in her poetry to the idea of an unattainable Paradise, would have made of Florida, this land of literal Souvenirdom. Would it have reinforced her idea that “Earth is Heaven—/Whether Heaven is Heaven or not”? Or would she have asked, “What difference, after all, Thou mak’st/Thou supercilious Sun?”

When my schooling ended, a beautiful young woman wanted to marry me, baggage and all. And I had to devise a way to pay the bills while I wrote the novel that would save the world. Because I could not stop for community college, it kindly stopped for me.

***

I live and teach in Gainesville, a college town in North Central Florida. Soon this place will be another Anywhere. In the last five years, dozens of independent businesses have disappeared, and corporate-franchise encroachment and sprawl are madcap—a Hooters/Starbucks/Burger King condo-plex just opened in the middle of downtown. The rest of town abounds with plastic-pastoral subdivisions and that architectural neurosis, the Apartment Complex. These brand-name biospheres are quickly colonized when the khaki onslaught of university students arrives each year, treating the town like temporary office space. If one chooses to live a life of more spontaneous stimulation, one can dwell in the neighborhoods that provoked Newsweek to describe Gainesville as “hard-scrabble.” I don’t know which is less deserving of romanticism. In the prefab communities, you suffer the tedium of monoculture and the parade of aggressive dog-walkers. In the hood, you suffer, well, the hood. Just the stretch from my house to the nearest mini-grocery is a gauntlet of anarchist graffiti, heartbreaking litter, and equal-opportunity savagery. I’ve been robbed twice (once during the writing of this article and once by a crackhead named, of all things, Bill Gates), and my neighbors (themselves all drug-addled) have been robbed and beaten. My bikes, stereos, and porch furniture are pilfered with seasonal regularity. The haggard prostitutes on my jogging route regularly flash me. The streets vibrate with angry mechanical music that roars from cars steered with one clenched hand.

Despite Gainesville’s contributions to the world—Tom Petty and Joaquin Phoenix are from here, Bo Diddley is in and out—the town’s two best places for independent concerts have closed up. The independent bookstores have either disappeared or are hurting. Strangely, the fifty-eight thousand students—this number includes the forty-five thousand or so who attend the state university—don’t cry out for a college radio station. The remaining “culture” of sports bars and booty clubs apparently meets the community’s needs. Still, there is a good old, skanky fresh-market, some lovely country roads, and lots of leafy territory. Many folks manage to live beautiful, bookish lives here. Gainesville is home to the anything-to-escape-the-sadness glory of Harry Crews as well as the wise, dodgy swagger of Padgett Powell, who penned the very Dickinsonian line, “Life is missing things, not getting them.” One even hears Dickinson in the rural mythmaking of the poet Lola Haskins, whose “window looks about to speak” on the evenings she thinks she “shall go mad.” Jon Loomis, another poet, lived here awhile; his book features an account of a hospital patient groaning “Emmmily Diiickinsonnnn” through the night. The current poet laureate, Billy Collins, gave a reading here recently; I held the door for him at the local overpriced Italian restaurant, still forgiving him for his fetishistic “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.” Little of this highfalutin’ lit-cult reaches my students.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Read the whole article on one page

Tweet

Related Posts

• No related posts...