Joyce Carol Oates contemplates Emily Dickinson

"I'm nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too?"

That familiar question, posed by Emily Dickinson in one of her immortal poems, has been ringing in my ears since childhood.

But when I heard it articulated last week in a reading at the Vineyard Playhouse on the isle of Martha's Vineyard, the question provoked an unusual response: It drew a laugh.

That's because it was articulated by Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than 50 novels plus dozens of short stories, plays, articles and critical studies. Oates is hardly a "nobody." Nor are many of the summer residents of the Vineyard, whose numbers include everyone from David McCullough, Diane Sawyer and Mia Farrow to the Clintons and the Obamas.

Oates was on the Vineyard to attend a reading of her play, Wild Nights, named after another Emily Dickinson poem. This surreal little black comedy, in the style of Edward Albee, tells the story of Harold and Madelyn Krim, an affluent suburban couple who rent an Emily Dickinson robot to replenish their emotionally impoverished lives. The robotic Emily's presence turns their world upside down, producing dramatic (and traumatic) results.

The Emily Dickinson robot, once activated, moves with robotic stiffness and speaks in an electronic voice. But soon she springs to life. She bakes cakes for her hosts (who are starved for spiritual nourishment) and starts composing poems. Pretty soon Madelyn is writing poetry too. But Harold has other, darker designs.

Suffering underneath

In a question-and-answer session following the reading, Oates discussed her fascination with literary figures. Her collection of short stories (also entitled Wild Nights) includes fictionalized accounts of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, as well as Emily Dickinson.

"It's hard-wired into our psyche that we yearn for these icons," she said, "but we don't really want to know the suffering human being that lies behind them."

Oates's interest in Emily Dickinson is especially intriguing. Both Dickinson and Oates are women of small stature; they even resemble one another, with oval faces and hair parted severely in the middle. Both have struggled against significant scorn as writers. Dickinson wasn't taken seriously as a poet in her lifetime— only 12 of her 1,775 poems were published while she lived. Instead she was known as a gardener, baker and caregiver who nursed the sick members of her family. (No wonder she was preoccupied with death!)

As for Oates, she's a highly controversial writer who seems to draw criticism of an intensity that I find rather bewildering. Janet Maslin's recent New York Times review of Oates's recent book, A Widow's Story, attacked Oates for having written an homage to her recently deceased husband, Ray Smith— not because of the writing but because Oates had remarried before the book was published. Indeed, many of Oates's critics are women. As if women artists haven't faced enough obstacles over the centuries.

Yet against heavy odds, both Dickinson and Oates became towering figures, thanks to their strength, their tenacity and their determination to write at any cost.

Celebrity obsession

Oates said that Wild Nights!— the play— concerns our obsession with celebrities and our attempt to assimilate them into our lives (she's written about Marilyn Monroe, Mike Tyson and others, as well). For Oates, Emily Dickinson is a kind of celebrity, too. "She represents something mysterious, elusive," she said, adding: "I've read her poetry every day all my life."

As we prepared for the reading of Wild Nights! at the Playhouse (which I had the challenge of directing), we faced the issue of how to fill an evening with a one-act play that ran only 55 minutes. We came upon the idea of assembling a collection of our favorite Emily Dickinson poems, to be read by the cast together with Joyce Carol Oates as a "first act."

One after the other, these beautiful brief poems fell upon eager listening ears in that hushed theater, resonating into the summer night— poems about ambition, success, love, nature, beauty, loss, death and immortality. The poems that Oates read, notably, reflected on what it means to be a writer: "Fame is a fickle food," "They shut me up in prose," "The poets light but lamps/Themselves, go out."

Ultimately, the reading of Oates's unusual play provided more than Gothic entertainment and thought provocation. It rekindled an appreciation of some of the most beautiful poetry ever written— at least on our shores.

"An artist is one thing," said Oates. "The creative work is another. They are separate. Emily Dickinson wrote for posterity. So do I."♦


To read a rejoinder by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a related comment by Tom Purdom, click here.