The Paris Review

Johanna Fateman began her 1997 fanzine, Artaud-Mania, by professing, “Dear Diary, I am writing to you because confessional writing is the self-effacing form most suited to the abject position of the fan.” Until then, the twenty-two-year-old Fateman hadn’t confessed much in her work; her earlier zines (including the series Snarla, cowritten in the early nineties with fellow high school misfit Miranda July) never had the insular or solipsistic feel typical of many of that era’s photocopied missives. What’s more, the syphilitic and schizophrenic Artaud, an enfant terrible of French arts and letters, was an unlikely idol for the feminist punk scene that Fateman had been a part of and was reacting against—post–Riot Grrrl publications that rarely ventured beyond subjects like the DIY music scene, grassroots organizing, and personal politics. Her appreciation for Artaud came through artists and writers like Nancy Spero and Kathy Acker. Like them, she was inspired by his fierce articulation of what Spero once termed a “sense of victimhood”; Fateman put it more bluntly when she wrote approvingly that Artaud was a “crazy bitch with male authority.”

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Last month, Everyman’s Library published a pocket-size volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, edited by poet and professor Emily Fragos. Dickinson’s missives are the only prose she ever wrote, and they make an intriguing complement to her veiled, often mysterious verse. I recently corresponded with Fragos about the portrait of Dickinson that emerges from this collection of her lifelong, ardent epistles.

Most discussions of Dickinson begin with her April 1862 letter to Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in which she famously asks, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” By this point, she was already thirty-two and an accomplished, if private, poet. What were her earlier letters like?

You find a vivacious, brilliant, very witty young woman who had a multitude of friends, both men and women, whom she adored. She traveled, entertained, played music, and was a star at school. Everyone she wrote to already knew she was a gifted and unique individual.

So the reclusive-spinster stereotype is not accurate, at least not when she was young.

Right, we don’t see a recluse wearing all white, living apart from others, and penning mysterious poetry. We meet a loving, studying, working, tired, joyful, sometimes upset person who takes part in the running of a busy household and who is the caregiver, without respite, for her bedridden mother. We glimpse the personality traits that will deepen with the years, especially the intensity of her feelings.

But the gift of the early letters are the details that demystify Dickinson, reminding us that she was a real person living in a real place at a real time in history. The poems have such an eternal and modern feel to them that it’s easy to forget that Dickinson lived in the nineteenth century, in the middle of the Civil War. In the letters, we read how it’s hotter then hell in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. People dropped like flies, and there were always tons of flies, literally, stuck to the walls in the heat. There were needy soldiers who sometimes came knocking on the door of the Dickinson homestead. When she writes so ecstatically about the oncoming spring and the flowers in bloom—which she calls the “beautiful children of Spring”—it is partly because she has survived another New England winter.

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