Notes on THE BELLE OF AMHERST - Opening Friday

I. THE AUTHORS

In The Belle of Amherst, William Luce brings to life the poetry and the person of Emily Dickinson. Lucy  Komisar, an American Reporter Theater Critic, points out that Luce "has a special talent for crafting one-person shows that focus on the lives of accomplished artists." He has also written plays about novelist Charlotte Bronte, writer Baroness Karen Blixen (pen-name Izak Denesen), General Patton, actor John Barrymore, etc.

Although William Luce is technically the author of The Belle of Amherst, he cannot take credit for single-handedly writing this play. At least half of the lines are taken directly from Emily Dickinson's letters and poems. In fact, in his preface to the play, Luce states that Emily Dickinson "was writing for theater as surely as she breathed." It is difficult to imagine that she intended for her poems and letters to be quoted on a stage in front of hundreds of people. On the other hand, she did not hide all of her poems away in a box and dream of posthumous publication. She often sent poems to relatives and friends as part of letters. Such poetic correspondences puzzled and delighted many who received them. Emily says in Act One of the play that her "little notes are becoming collector's items in the village. People compare them to see who has the strangest one." In a way, she was already giving theatrical entertainment to her neighbors in Amherst. To build his play, William Luce consolidates this entertainment into an hour and a half of conversations between Emily and her contemporaries.

When the play first opened in Seattle, Washington in 1976, Julie Harris played Emily Dickinson. William Luce commented that for Julie Harris, "familiarity with Emily resulted from years of dedicated research into her life and works; she also recorded two albums of the letters and poems for Caedmon Records." In The New York Times on Friday, April 39, 1976, Mel Gussow wrote the following: "Rather than present simply a staged reading of her verse, Mr. Luce and Miss Harris (together with Charles Nelson Reilly as director) have attempted a dramatic interpretation. One can question the interpretation, but the reasons behind it are understandable." Every line and scene of the play would not necessarily meet with Dickinson's approval. Yet the play can give people motivation to learn more about Emily Dickinson through her poems.

II.  THE PLOT

The Belle of Amherst does not have a linear plot. In fact, it does not have a traditional plot at all. Therefore the play fits the character of Emily Dickinson. When Emily introduces herself to the audience, she announces "My sister Lavinia says I tend to wander back forth in time." In a similar way, the incidents of the play wander back and forth in time. Act One focuses on events earlier in her life and Act Two focuses on events later in her life. But the conversations that she remembers and tells the audience do not always fall into an orderly timeline. Their thematic connections are more important than their chronological connections. Emily confesses to the audience that she did not know how to tell time until she was older. Perhaps this slower learning was a blessing. Because she did not know the time, she focused on words and people instead of concentrating on events. In Act One, the audience hears a great deal about Emily's love of literature. Emily explains her definition of poetry:

If I read Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Mrs. Browning, Emily Bronte -- oh, what an afternoon for heaven, when Bronte entered there! -- and they make my whole body so cold,  no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. Have  you ever felt that way?  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Not only poems but also individual words bring Emily delight. For instance, she says that "Circumference" and "Phosphorescence" are "words to lift your hat to." Because words are sacred, she does not approve of eliminating any words through censorship. So she announces to Tutor Crowell that she will not cross out the "questionable passages" in her Shakespeare book.

In Act One, Emily also shows us how much she loves people. She asks us: "Do you know that every one of you is, to me, a poem?" Since people are poems, people are sacred as well. She must give each person her full attention and respect. Thus even when she is describing her father's lack of "esthetic sense" concerning the Jenny Lind concert, she still seems to speak of her father with admiration. At the end of Act One, Emily eagerly awaits the "reading" of a new "poem": Thomas Wentworth Higginson. On the outside she is most excited about what he thinks of her poetry. But in her heart she may be more excited about how Higginson will react to her paradoxical personality.

Act Two concentrates less directly on words and poetry. Emily becomes occupied with narrating pivotal conversations, such as the ones with Higginson and with Charles Wadsworth. But a love of poetry continues to function as a subtext underneath the description of events. And when Emily describes her father's death, a poem takes center stage:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befel.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Just as the audience is getting to know Emily more fully, she must part company with us. Just as we are hearing more chapters of her life, the book closes in our faces. But Emily has shown us how much she loves life, so our visit with her is successful. At the end of the play, she quotes the poem "This is my letter to the World." All of the words and remembered events in this play contribute to that letter. This play asks the audience to "Judge tenderly" of Emily Dickinson.

III.  THE CHARACTERS

Emily Dickinson is quite a character. The moment you think you have figured out how her mind works, she says something which seems to contradict everything she has said before. For instance, in this play, especially in the first act, Emily talks a lot about the publication of her poems. The thought of publication consumes her energy when she awaits Higginson's visit at the end of Act One. But then, after Higginson has left, she shows the audience that she is not hurt by his indifference to her poetic style:

My business is to sing! What difference does it make if no  one listens? Perhaps you laugh at me! Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me too! I can't stop for that! Just to have been made alive is so chief a thing, all else inevitably adds. I find ecstasy in living. The mere sense of living is joy enough. Take all away from me, but leave me ecstasy!

Most of this quotation comes directly from Emily Dickinson's letters. It shows that she will continue to write poetry no matter what the critics of her time think about her poems. Moreover, she will continue to be herself no matter who criticizes her personality. She has this determination because of her secret ecstasy in living. Perhaps Higginson would not publish her poems. Perhaps the audience of this play will not go home and read her poems when they leave the theatre. But, audience or no audience, Emily will continue to sing.

The character who the audience gets to know best, besides Emily herself, is her father, "Squire Edward Dickinson." Throughout the play, Emily talks about him more often than she talks about any other character. "Father was the only one in the house to say 'damn.'" This is a curious statement. It suggests that her father had one set of rules for himself, and different rules for everyone else. He was strict and stern and insisted that the temperature in the house always be exactly to his satisfaction. But as she grew older, Emily upset this static climate.

You see this change in the scene in which she has stayed up too late writing. Her father does not rebuke her for staying up so late. In fact, after hearing two of her poems, he decides that he will "cancel the rule" for her! On another occasion, Emily tells us that her mother does not understand her delight in thought and in poetry. But she begins to appreciate her mother more later in her life.

Emily Dickinson admired her brother Austin. She only tells one vivid story about Austin in this play. She yells at him: "How many valentines has my handsome brother received?" and wants him to ask his friends to send her Valentines. But she says that she and Austin have also discussed serious issues. For instance, to the chagrin of their mother, they converse on "the extension of consciousness after death."

After Austin married Emily's close friend Sue, Emily did not have as much communication with either Austin or Sue (Susan Gilbert Dickinson) -- even though they lived in the Evergreens next door to her. Emily began to rely on Helen Hunt Jackson for literary advice and she did not send so many poems to Sue. Yet she became good friends with the children of Austin and Sue. In fact one of them, Martha (Mattie) Dickinson Bianchi, helped to edit an edition of Emily's poems in 1924.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson takes a role of great importance in this play that perhaps he does not deserve. William Luce leads the audience to believe that Emily was so distraught at Higginson's reception of her poems that she "became ill" after she talked with him for the first time. In actuality, Emily Dickinson was disappointed that Higginson did not find literary merit in her work. But she reasoned that he did not find as much fault with her poems as he might have found. Moreover, Emily Dickinson's goal in life was not to publish her poems. She wanted most to have good neighbors, both on earth and in Heaven. She recognized God as an essential part of her life even on earth. She remembers that "When the family went to church, I was never alone. God was sitting right there -- looking into my very soul." Thankfully God was a more frequent visitor than Higginson.

But there is one character who Emily may have wanted to see more often. This is the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. She only spoke with him twice: the first time when she heard him preach in Philadelphia and the last time when they said good-bye. For decades, biographers have argued about whether Charles Wadsworth was the mysterious  "Master" of Dickinson's poems and letters. In this play Luce assumes that Wadsworth was "Master." Perhaps this is a big assumption. But Luce does justice to the paradoxical friendship that Dickinson shared with Wadsworth. She may have been thinking about him when she wrote the lines: "So We must meet apart --/ You there -- I -- here --" (from the poem "I cannot live with You --").

Finally, we the audience act as a character. When Emily first sees us, she becomes frightened. In a letter to this wife, Higginson describes a similar frightened reaction from her on the occasion of their first meeting. She introduced herself to him with lilies, just as she says to us: "This is my introduction. Black cake." Emily opens the door of her house to the audience right away. But she opens the door of her heart more gradually. Sometimes she says to us: "I probably shouldn't tell you this." Clearly Emily Dickinson would not tell just anyone all of these personal anecdotes. Perhaps she hopes that some "Nobodys" are sitting in the audience.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! They'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell your name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog!

IV.  THEMES

Death is one of the most perplexing themes in this play. Sometimes Emily speaks of death as "an old friend" who helps her on "the most arduous of journeys" to Paradise. At other times, Death doesn't seem so friendly. He takes her father away, so that she must keep wondering "where he is." Emily's small nephew Gilbert also dies. Near the end of Act Two, Emily gives the audience a vivid description of Gilbert's death scene:

His last cry in delirium was "Open the door, open the door! They're waiting for me!" Quite used to his commandment, his little aunt obeyed. Who were waiting for him? All we possess we would give to know. All this and more, though is there more, dear friends? More than Love and Death? Tell me its name!

Because he was the one dying, Gilbert seemed to know more about the everlasting than his "old" Aunt Emily does. Gilbert's words introduce two more important themes: childhood and love. These themes are interlocked because Emily Dickinson loves children. Towards the end of the play, she tells the audience that children "keep my imagination keen and alive." In Act One, after she narrates her experiences at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she admits that "I wish we were always children." Perhaps in some ways, fifty-three year-old Emily is still a child herself. She never loses her childlike wonder at nature and at all of God's creations. She never stops asking the unanswerable questions, such as -- will neighbors on earth be neighbors again in Heaven?

One of Emily Dickinson's poems begins: "I sing to use the waiting --." Here she is talking about waiting for her time to depart from this world. Who is Gilbert referring to when he says "They're waiting for me"? Waiting can be related to God's love for his children as He waits for them to return to Heaven. Waiting also plays a part in the love between two people. In the play, Emily describes this kind of waiting when she remembers a conversation with Charles Wadsworth:

Oh, no, say I may wait for you. I waited a long time,  Master. But I can wait more. Till my hazel hair is dappled -- and you carry the cane. Then I can look at my watch, and if the day is too far declined, we can take the chances for heaven!

Emily recognizes the truth that "Love is patient" (The King James Bible) She tries to wait patiently to find out the answers to her hundreds of questions about this world and the next.  Emily's relationship with God gives thematic structure to the play. In Act One, she talks about how Miss Lyon, the "dragon" of Mount Holyoke, showed her that religion was not "very attractive." But she does admit that Miss Lyon "had a pure heart." In Act Two, she discusses many of her fears about God and eternity. She never claims to understand God fully. But she hopes that after death, "if God is willing, perhaps we are neighbors again."

V.  THE SETTING

The geographical setting of this play is Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, grew up there and died there. Since her death in 1886, people have criticized her for remaining always in her house in Amherst. She did not leave her house for the last fifteen years of her life. Biographers have diagnosed her with agoraphobia (fear of society) and other psychological problems. But no one has any proof for these diagnoses. Her poems and her letters suggest that she chose to stay in her house because she found inspiration there. Towards the end of the play, Emily is looking at stereopticon pictures of European scenes that her friends have visited. She says: "Everyone is somewhere, but Emily. Emily is here. Always here." Is Emily looking at the pictures with envy, wanting to be somewhere other than Amherst, Massachusetts? Many people would be envious of world travelers. But Emily Dickinson quickly drops the images of Scotland and Capri in order to quote this poem:

I never saw a Moor --
I never saw the Sea --
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven --
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Chart were given --

This poem sheds light on the other setting in this play: Emily Dickinson's mind. Although she does not change places geographically, her mind is constantly whizzing through time and space. One reviewer of a production of The Belle of Amherst makes a comment about the scenes indicating this movement. Sometimes her meandering mind takes the audience to happy scenes, such as when her father rang the church bell so that the whole town would look at the aurora borealis. At other times sad scenes take center stage. For example, the audience may cry with Emily as she remembers Charles Wadsworth telling her he cannot visit again. But no matter what circumstances she is describing, Emily's imagination is never restricted by the four walls of her house. As she describes in the poem "I dwell in Possibility --," her house is "Superior for Doors" and it has "an Everlasting Roof." What larger setting could you wish for than an everlasting one? Fortunately, she lets the audience into her house of thought and poetry for a few brief moments.