Customer Reviews

The Dickinsons of Amherst

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This book is so frustrating, I almost don't want to review it, but here's my 60 second review: anyone who loves Emily Dickinson's mind-her temperament, her cognitive style, her insights, her ironical sensibility-will likely find this book wrongheaded-or extraneous. For brevity and to illustrate the objectionable spirit of the book, I'll confine my critique to Barton Levi St. Armand's essay, which is really its heart.

St. Armand begins wooing (his own metaphor) the aged Mary Hampson, latter-day Miss Havisham and final inhabitant of The Evergreens, Austin Dickinson's home. Hampson is not related to the Dickinsons and came into ownership of the home under bizarre and slightly dubious circumstances; clearly she's suffering from paranoid delusions, and her passion for Martha Dickinson Bianchi and against Mabel Todd reflects perhaps a combination of psychosexual obsession, egotism, need for a cause. (I find it ironic that essayist Polly Longsworth goes to the effort of diagnosing Emily Dickinson with avoidant personality disorder and various anxiety disorders, something I'd dispute or at least find in poor taste; but then this obvious nut, Mary Hampson, is portrayed as a grand dame, an artiste.)

In any event, you can imagine the details: she invites and repels various academics; if they please her, they get to plunder her literary treasures. St. Armand wins the courtship, gets the keys to the house, serves as head trustee for the newly formed Martha Dickinson Bianchi trust, and in the process loses any sense of objective vision or irony; he's won the courtship and won't admit the bride is ugly. (This in itself is ironic, since the essay discusses opthamological imagery: strabismus, exophoria, exotropia relative to E.D.) St. Armand is lost! He digs up swamp magnolias to transplant to his garden, seems to think it's charming when Mary Hampson habitually kicks Richard Sewall's (to my thinking subtle, excellent) volumes of biography.

And who is Mary Hampson? "I recall my mother joining me once, and Mary saying to her, `You don't care a damn about Emily Dickinson, do you!' This was a mark of approval rather than of disdain..." he writes. On another occasion, Hampson says, "For me Martha is the greater poet-because I knew her." Then, "...it has suddenly occurred to me that there could be another reason why Sue did not finish the work she had started on Emily. All these pseudoscholars never seem to realize that Susan and Martha had lives of their own' and so could not waste all their time `just sitting around here-a couple of Emily shadows.'" (Ahem-irony there.) I just want to clarify that the final occupant of The Evergreens actually seems contemptuous of Emily Dickinson. She's for the "Dickinsons of the Evergreens."

Why does this matter to the spirit of the book? Because St. Armand finally makes the (absurd) point of comparing, even equating, Mary Hampson's work in preserving the tattered, mildewing remnants of The Evergreens to Emily Dickinson's work as a poet. That the doors of The Evergreens were opened to Jerome Liebling to photograph, before the house finally decomposed or underwent renovation, seems an excellent idea, and many of the luminous photos--tattered Morris wallpaper in lurid tones--are lovely. But I object, finally, to the disingenuous manipulation of imagery in the book, the juxtaposition of tight, bright, white "Emily" photos and the tatters and shreds of the neighboring home. Even the captions are condescending and misleading: "A tear in the William Morris pattern: Susan Dickinson's damaged household"-as if we're beholding the paper she tore with her hands during a domestic argument. No bias here, nope. Finally, the family story of the Dickinsons is only interesting and relevant to the degree that it illuminates and expands meaning in ED's poems, and I think it takes a subtler hand, a slower accretion of detail to accomplish that.

. . . I never once got the impression I was seeing mere replicas of Miss Emily's possessions. On the contrary, the room at the head of the stairs was "full" of her--one could sense her presence!--and we were told by the tour guide that the items of memorabilia were actually things used by her: the narrow bed, the small desk, and, most certainly, that ghostly white dress (her "white election") on the dressmaker's dummy in the corner. I don't know what the reviewer is referring to when he/she complains of Dickinson's artifacts being at Harvard and that the things featured in this marvelous book are merely copies. I have absolutely no doubt that the things I saw in Miss Dickinson's upstairs room, as well as all other things pointed out in the remainder of the house, bore evidence of her. And the the grounds made one feel as if she'd just lately left them... This book features all these beautifully and hauntingly. I have no reason to so much as suspect that I did not see the artifacts of Miss Dickinson's life, and I have no doubt but that those are indeed the very things photographed so lovingly in this gorgeous and haunting book. Perusing it is like visiting the Squire Dickinson house in Amherst all over again, even though I'm miles away from it and cannot now go back again. That makes the book all the more worthy of cherishing. Both photographs and essays come together in a lovely evocation of Miss Emily's life.

I gave this as a gift for a friend who loves Emily Dickinson and she was absolutely thrilled. The pictures are great and the setup really nice. It is quite a wonderful book!

I've not yet read the essays, but the sleek pictures already lack something by way of authenticity, since most of Emily's things are reposited at Harvard and represented, if at all, by facsimiles in her room at the Homestead. I'm not sure why it should make a difference, but I think it does, and we are that much further from Emily's world when her treasured and accustomed artifacts have proxies in their place. So the pictures are nice, but what, really, are they pictures of?