the vixen
poet waiting in her den
by Douglas Messerli
Madeleine Olnek (screenwriter and
director) Wild Nights with Emily / 2018
Let me begin by weighing in on the
endless controversy about the importance of poet Emily Dickinson: I believe she
is one of the central figures of US literature, her poetry speaking radically
of love and death in a manner that few male American poets of her time were
able to express. But her subjects—to call them “themes” robs them of their
radical sense of exploration—are multitude, and as Susan Howe has brilliantly
demonstrated in her My Emily Dickinson, her influences and responses to
literature, culture, and history throughout time is immense as they are varying
and always original.
I have much more to say, but this is not an essay on Emily Dickinson’s
poetry, and indeed it may not truly be an essay that very much concerns the
poet or her life. I just feel it important to establish that I do not come to
films about the great American poet lightly—although screenwriter and director
Madeleine Olnek most certainly does, which was one of first things that somewhat rubbed
me wrong about this film.
We begin in the film with a slapstick scene, as Emily (Molly Shannon)
greets her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler) in her room and gently kisses
her on the lips before the two of them suddenly dive behind the couch in a fit
of lesbian passion. It’s not necessarily that Olnek incorrectly deals with
Dickinson’s probable lesbianism that so irritated me but how even that
was pruriently presented to the viewer as if homosexual behavior between two
women of the 19th century consisted primarily of endless kisses with just such
an occasional leap into and behind a bed or couch.
Young girls of the 19th century, moreover, spoke only in full sentences
according to this movie, without any contractions, communing with one another
in voices that appeared at all times to be speaking the kind of poetry that one
imagines needs to be flatly intoned so as not to reveal to the reader/audience
its full emotional richness.
Males in the Dickinson house were clearly all idiots, including those
who regularly visited the poet, who as we know from the long myths concocted by
those—male and female—who were terrified of the true improprieties of such a
female poet who dared to challenge years of patriarchal thought. Col. Thomas
Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman), for example, is represented as an utter
Polonius-like fool, even though in her own writings Dickinson often speaks
kindly of his discussions with her; and she chose to meet with him, despite her
reclusiveness, twice. Certainly, he is no favorite of mine given how he and
Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz) almost destroyed Dickinson’s poetry through their
editorial disruptions of her texts and their erasure of continued poetic and
personal correspondences with Susan in her writings.
But surely there might be some middle-ground in which to explain why
Emily (I resist calling her by her first name since critics often do that to
women simply to diminish their shadow, but I will do so here in order to
distinguish her from the several other Dickinsons who appear throughout) sought
him out other than her desire to be published in The Atlantic Monthly.
I am certain that he was literally made “dizzy” by her conversations
with him, and his attempts at editorial surgery would anger any poet who knows
what she’s doing. Moreover, his constant suggestions that because of its
unconventional forms and styles that she resist publishing her poetry until
readers had grown more daring is like asking someone like Guillaume Apollinaire
or Louis Zukofsky to wait for a few decades before letting their work be read
by the masses. One cannot imagine saying the same words to any male writer. Yet
she still responded to him at one point upon his praising one of her works: "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried
to thank you, my tears would block my tongue." Was Emily too being merely
hypocritical. According to this film she would have had to be.
Apparently Judge Otis Phillips Lords (Al Sutton), with whom some surmise—with very little evidence
since most of their correspondence has been destroyed—that she had a late-life
romance, is easily dismissed by Olnek by portraying him as a doddering old man
who sits in one of their weekly meetings dozing off and describing Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as “Wuthering Jane,” as well as, at one
point, even forgetting the name of the woman to whom he speaking. But once
again, despite the myth of Emily’s reclusiveness, she apparently enjoyed the
man she called “My lovely Salem” for his discussions of Shakespeare’s plays, to
which he brought her as gift Cowden Clarke’s Complete Concordance and
with whom she evidently found delight in their regular literary discussions.
The rumor that Susan Dickinson once entered the room to find Emily in his arms
is explained by this film as simply being a moment where the old fool had lost
his footing in getting up, she rushing to help him.
At one point when Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Robert McCaskill) attends one of Susan Dickinson’s many social events, the
recluse Emily comes racing out of her next-door convent only do discover a
softly mumbling gentlemen pontificating only to himself, so inaudible are his
remarks.
And her brother, the handsome lawyer and
treasurer of Amherst College Austin (Kevin Seal) is presented as an utter bore
who attempts to escape his wife Susan’s social salons by retreating to a back
room with like-minded males or attempting to charm attending women such as the
wife of an Amherst faculty member, Mabel Loomis Todd. According to Olnek, he
has promised in marrying Susan not to sexually “touch her,” but given the three
children the couple had, as Emily later declares, “I guess he didn’t keep his
promise.” Most obviously, he was a complete dolt if for no other reason that he
was unable to perceive, with the daily letters being delivered by his own
children as go-betweens for his wife and his sister, that something more than
recipes and gossip might be going on between the two of them.
Finally, this film often settles to the
lowest depths in its recitation of Emily Dickinson’s poems, at one point near
her death presenting “I died for Beauty – but was scarce / Adjusted to the
tomb” as an absurd face-off with the dead poet reading her lines as moss crawls
up her face in tandem with a dead black soldier. Fortunately, this comes late
in the movie or I surely would have turned it off and ceased further watching.
Given the endless epistles and notes Emily addressed to Susan each day
and, far more importantly, the number of poems and poetic letters dedicated to
her—most of them rubbed away by Mabel Todd out of what she might have described
as judicious censoring for those who might not understand such a close
“friendship,” but in reality perhaps just as much erased out of envy for
Emily’s deep love for the wife of Austin with whom she was having an open
affair—make it evident that the two were involved in some sort of intense
romantic relationship. How sexual that was or how even how much it involved
their bodies can never be known, although certainly one likes to imagine a
lesbian affair.
But in the end, when I almost gave up on Olnek’s film for any attempt to
present an honest historical account of Emily Dickinson’s—even though the
writer/director wraps herself around the permissions of the quoted letters from
Harvard University and other sources, as if that were to verify her obvious
historical aberrations—the film began to grow on me as a much needed tonic for
all the sophomoric mutterings about the belle of Amherst and the tragic
ululations of filmmakers such as Terence Davies who clearly prefers to see her
as a suffering woman in utter loneliness instead of the figure Olnek presents
of a lusty young intellect perfectly happy to jump into any corner with her
childhood friend and brother’s lusty sister.
Surely, it’s better to imagine this
Emily, faced with the downstairs boisterous fucking of Mabel—who’d been hired
to play the piano for the spinster upstairs—as refusing to meet Mabel simply
because the moaning strumpet wouldn’t shut up long enough that she might
intervene in order to tell them to quiet down.
Perhaps a nearly always poker-faced
comedian like Molly Shannon is the perfect one to play an intelligent woman of
the 1870s who was so fed up with the local nabobs and the religious hypocrisy
of the community in which she lived, that she could no longer have any desire
to communicate with anyone but those she dearly loved and with whom she could
express her deep sentiments and humor. Even Susan had been one of those who
discovered their “salvation” in the Calvinist meaning of that word through the
local church, and some of their arguments were surely about the “unsaved”
Emily’s disinterest in organized religion.
Olnek, herself, at moments, represents Emily’s beloved Sue as a kind of
martinet, demanding that Emily produce new poems every day until her
sister-in-law digs her new work out of the back pocket of her simple white
dress, and uncurls them from within lockets and even hairpieces as if being
demanded evidence of her hard work. No one, however, understood her poetry
evidently as Susan did. And that bond alone made her hold her childhood friend
close, desperate for some support in a world of true intellectual complacency
and stasis.
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That the two also enjoyed a private
world that might have shocked the late 19th century less that the coming 20th
century is great fun to imagine. And, if nothing else, Olnek’s work makes clear
just how Higginson and Todd—the latter presented as the real villain of the
piece—among the rows of later Dickinson scholars, struggled to bury the
radicalness of her texts. The most disturbing montage in the entire film is the
last split screen where on one side Susan sits carefully sponging off Emily’s
corpse, while on the other side sits Mabel in the Dickinson living room busily
erasing Sue’s name from the top of numerous of Emily’s letters and poems.
To tie the poet up with an LGBTQ rainbow flag and pretend to “out” her
is far better than winding coils of lilacs around her neck, locking her away in
her Amherst room like a madwoman in the attic, and whispering to those who dare
to mention her name just how lovely her flower poems were, being as she was,
obviously, a student of botany.
In Olek’s vision, we see none of Emily
Dickinson’s renowned gardens, instead watching her mostly dig up holes into
which buries flowers instead of planting them. According to her sister Livina
(Jackie Monahan) when she found a hatch of new-born kittens without a mother,
she took them in to drown them and place their bodies in a bottle of
formaldehyde, suggesting this Emily was more like a member of the Addams Family
that the renowned Dickinsons.
Even if she has little to do perhaps
with the real poet, I think I like this Emily better than the vision most
people have kept of her to protect them from her wild imagination or from
accidentally revealing through her poetry her wild visions of love, life, and
dying.
Los Angeles, August 22, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (August 2022).
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