FICTION

THE DIARY OF EMILY DICKINSON by Jamie Fuller. (Mercury House: $18; 209 pp.) More embroidery on the enigma queen! Here is a fictional diary, beginning in March, 1867, and ending in April, 1868, discovered by a workman during reconstruction of the Dickinson home in Amherst, Mass. The diary entries are quite short, each accompanied by an author explanation and the actual poem or letter that was supposedly inspired by the life. All have the same measured, reverential, patient (there must be a scream in there somewhere) tone. While the diary is true to Dickinson’s voice, the author takes certain liberties with the real-life riddles of Dickinson’s life. For example, Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, is positively identified as the subject of the master poems; Susan Gilbert is portrayed, rather than as an object of Dickinson’s affections, as little more than the socialite wife of her brother Austin; and Emily’s father, Edward Dickinson, emerges as almost the most important figure in her universe. It is hard, as a reader cement-shoed in the world of fact and sometimes conjecture, to suspend disbelief. One wonders if she actually did read such-and-such that day in the paper, if so-and-so did come to visit and then that poem was written. Fuller writes in the Prologue that Dickinson will always remain an enigma, and “no doubt this was her intent.” But later, in Dickinson’s own words (in a fictional diary entry, that is) she writes, “Riddle is not my aim.” I believe the second voice. What’s frustrating about this diary is that it wraps yet another riddle around a somewhat frustrating enigma.