Bookforum on Adrienne Rich's Work on Secrets

Clancy Martin takes Adrienne Rich's 1995 book, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (Norton), for a spin in Bookforum's summer issue, illuminating the "importance of secrets to the poetic process of Emily Dickinson," among other things. From this piece:

One method of keeping secrets starts with a funny kind of self-deception—the fact that we hide truths about ourselves from ourselves, all the better to keep those truths from others. Dickinson’s art relied on a rigorous honesty. To write the kind of poetry Dickinson did, Rich says, “she had to be willing to enter chambers of the self in which ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed— / Should startle most—.’” Rich continues: “To relinquish control there, to take those risks, she had to create a relationship to the outer world where she could feel in control.” This is not an easy state to achieve. Rich adds (and here she could just as well be describing herself and the terrible struggle she endured while trying to write her own early poetry as a young married mother): “It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live—split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”

One of the reasons we keep secrets is that we don’t know what other people will accept or reject. We hide, we take the fearful route. Back when I was a secret drinker, I believed that my then-wife would leave me if she knew the truth. Of course, I also feared that if I told the truth, I’d have to change my behavior, which I didn’t want to do. If it’s secret, you still get to do it. If it’s out in the open, someone may decide to stop you. If your secret is hurtful enough, someone might simply stop loving you. So again, with a secret we have a source of control, a way to preserve the status quo.

The paradox is that, in using a secret to try to preserve a relationship, we may very well destroy the intimacy that the relationship is supposed to provide...

Read on at Bookforum.