The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson
Bennett, James
"The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson" If the Court made Congress take real responsibility for all the programs it so half-heartedly and half-way undertakes, Congress might become very...
...That is a very decorous description of the liberals' search...
...I shall always remain the same old six pence...
...Purse-lipped, boxer-nosed, walnut-jowelled, she is the archetypal spinster librarian at the Circulation Desk, herself destined 'to circulate no farther than the desk...
...They are searching for explanations that will not threaten the plausibility of liberalism, and for alternatives that are consistent with familiar liberal premises...
...But those places--like the Federal government, New York City, universities - - where liberalism enjoyed clearest sway are suffering something akin to demoralization and desperation...
...The implication that courage" and "'leadership" are the same thing is as in]plausible as the implication that author Kennedy considered his book a comprehensive record of the former...
...Walsh is the author of a highly praised book on Edgar Allan Poe which I have not read...
...Walsh does with Miss Dickinson's "hidden life" in this puffball of a biography...
...Item: He argues that universities are "biased" because their "output" is not ":mutral...
...Lowi wants to save liberalism from any reall painful admissions - - like the admission that conservatives may be right about the limited uses of government...
...Browning's soon forgotten Aurora Leigh...
...But he winds up talking about "'trust," which is not the same thing...
...Walsh is not the first, and no doubt will not be the last, to have the hussy swinging from the chandelier after another lost weekend out at the parson's lakeside retreat...
...You're right, it wouldn't sell...
...If Congress had to fuss with the tiresome application of all the power is distributes, it would reduce that distribution faster than you can s a y , "'Senate, please legislate freight rates for scrap steel...
...Item: He sets out to examine "tolerance...
...Simply because she was painfully unattractive...
...Always good for a snicker or two, poor old Emily has taken her biographical lumps, for if there's anything one recalls from that stone-dry high school literature text sophomores lugged around, it was the innuendo-studded section on the virgin hermit from Amherst...
...So count on the next installment, the one with all the compromising daguerreotypes the family couldn't suppress...
...You've come a long way, baby...
...The Raven, as it turns out, actually being a myna bird purloined from a deranged Russian mystic...
...And neither trust nor tolerance can be guaged las he tries to guage it) by the frequency of meet ings by the Old House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Without explaining what a 'aeutral output" would he, he says that universities have "policies" and therefore are politicized...
...The moment is ripe for a scholarly attempt at treating Emily Dickinson as simply a common girl with an uncommon genius for poetry who just didn't mix well...
...George F. Will The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson By John Evangelist Walsh Simon & Schuster, $7.95 E very happy household harbors at least one skeleton in its closet and the Dickinson's had a whopper - - daughter Emily...
...That explains the poetry...
...And there it sat all those years just begging attention - - much as our little wallflower poet must have done...
...The nation may be suffering vertigo as a result of the stresses of the 1960s...
...Broken mirror or lost lover -they are the two more popular hypotheses set forth by biographers in explaining the sudden turning away from the world...
...But what lumps and what snickers ! Completely ignoring the poetry with the deftness of a selling biographer, Walsh gets down to the nitty gritty of Miss Dickinson's "~hidden life" and what a life it turns out to be...
...Judging by this book, one must conclude that the criticism of liberalism is too vital to be entrusted to liberals...
...Lowi is a liberal and he says the purpose o f his book is to appeal "'to those liberals who are desparately searching for explanations and alternatives for this present plight...
...He does not treat it at all...
...If the Court made Congress take real responsibility for all the programs it so half-heartedly and half-way undertakes, Congress might become very judicious about sticking its thumbs in new pies...
...It's been eighty-five years now since the fragile woman dressed in white was lowered in obscurity into her coffin...
...Even as a high school sophomore you suspected as much...
...Well, seek and ye shall find - - eh, Emily...
...Of the book's eight chapters, half are only tenuously related to Lowi's main theme...
...Enough...
...We know,, for instance, Who will have the last word on The Passover Plot but who will run the gauntlet for a fallen poet...
...But then Mr...
...The others are especially disappointing...
...Miss Dickinson was telling it like it was...
...But Lowi does not even treat conservatism with disdain...
...Perhaps that is just as well, considering that he thinks Louis XIV and Huey Long were both conservatives...
...Yes, you see while her evenings were pretty much given over to adultery (a time-consuming passion, you understand), Miss Dickinson did manage a few afternoons in which to cull from Mrs...
...Until someone really does do Emily proud, Dickinson admirers will have to endure this sort of cocktail talk mini-opus that flings the attic door wide open on the man hungry virgin hermit that stalked the anterooms of Amherst...
...James Bennett James Bennett is a graduate student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University...
...If Lowi wants to challenge liberalism he might give some attention to conservatism...
...Walsh is looking for a blurb for second edition, he's got it: not since The Passover Plot has a mystery been so fascinatingly unravelled after being based on so blatant a hodgepodge of hypothetical conjecture...
...In fact, if the District of Columbia ever does g e t " home rule" it will not be because the arguments in favor of it are especially compelling (which they are not) but rather because Senators and Congressmen are too busy to bother with supervising the District's affairs...
...If Mr...
...Walsh adds a third plagiarism...
...With The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson author John Evangelist Walsh gets in a few more lumps and an occasional snicker or two at his subject's expense...
...But somehow, in between darting behind the moment's most accessible piece of furniture or blending in with the drapes at the tiniest tinkle of the front doorbell, this wildly eccentric recluse managed to jot down some of the finest lines ever written by an American female poet...
...No one treks up to a musty old attic room every night just to write about snakes...
...Or perhaps there was a prince charming in every way but infidelity...
...Called the "Myth" by the local townspeople and known to dress only in white, she would occasionally be glimpsed flitting by her window or heard scurrying down a darkened hallway at the first threat o f visitors...
...One can imagine the prospective doctoral candidate in English beating his head against the blackboard at having missed so golden a literary coup...
...The only known extant portrait was taken at age seventeen and if the daguerreotype doesn't lie {though 'tis cruel to say) one can only wonder what took the retreat to the garret so long...
...The Alternative January, 1972 19 democracy...
...You mean she wasn't up there just writing poems...
...He's done old Emily proud--reciprocated love letters to a married man, a lawyer and an old friend of the family, thought to be a pillar of staid Boston society...
...Where is Gloria Steinem when we need her...
...But one suspects the ad-men would have to do a bit of pruning with that one, much as Mr...
...Item : Lowi laments what he considers the paucity of "leaders" in the Senate, a paucity he attempts to demonstrate with this astonishing observation: ' Note that only one thin volume was required to record all our Profiles in Courage...
...Such non sequiturs have derailed many universities in the last decade...
...Still, one may honestly ask the question: Why the attic assumption...
...My face has not changed," Emily writes as a teenager, nor will it in time to come...
Vol. 5 • January 1972 • No. 4
