On Gary Arms's POSY
a review by John Julius Reel
My vocation to write first emerged after college, when I was twenty-one years old. I began a novel about some college friends getting up to mischief. I sent the first few chapters to my father, a newspaper columnist, and he called to say the pages made him burst out laughing many times.
I thought I’d found my path. Not only did I enjoy being alone with my imagination, crafting scenes and sentences, but I could dream of moving multitudes with laughter and tears. It was just a matter of time before I could count myself an author, with readers clambering to buy my books.
I wonder if a clairvoyant had told me back then what my career as an author would look like thirty-seven years later—a couple of books published, it’s true, but only enough readers to fill a mid-sized concert hall, many of whom probably didn’t stick around or stay awake till the end—would I have carried on, or dedicated my time and energy to other pursuits, perhaps gardening or carpentry?
Most likely I would have carried on, in part because I wouldn’t have believed the clairvoyant and in part because a vocation chooses us. Words satisfy me much more than flowers or furniture.
Gary Arms struck a chord with his viral essay “On Not Giving Up: Thoughts on a Lifetime of Writing,” published last October in The Republic of Letters.
“I am 74 years old,” he wrote. “I no longer believe my writer dream will come true.” He started out wanting to be a famous author: “What did I think was going to happen? What really happened?” He writes with wry condescendence about overcoming his early setbacks: “The faithful ego and its unfailing ability to believe in itself. Bless its little heart.” As the years roll on and his dreams keep out of reach, his tone darkens: “What is that famous definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
That idea of insanity runs through his novel Posy: The Woman Who Thought She Was Emily Dickinson (Venefica Publications, 2024), which Arms, in his essay, sums up as being “about two grad students who live in a university town. One is a bisexual alcoholic, and the other is a genius poet, or at least hopes she is.”
The protagonist, Rose Bush, twenty-nine, loathes everything about her life, including her name. She’s a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa’s English Department, where she also teaches, giving her something to despise professionally.
Her fellow PhD candidate and barfly, Freddy, calls her out on her contradictions: “According to you, poems are pretentious, and nobody understands them. Novels are too long. Plays are horrible, especially Shakespeare’s. You hate everything! You hate all literature!” Rose smiles and says, “I like epigrams.” Freddy replies, “You only like them because they are short.” Rose qualifies: “And easy to remember. And mean-spirited.”
The two of them play a game, “Dorothy or Oscar,” in which Rose reels off an epigram and Freddy has to guess if it’s Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde. Rose only enjoys the game when he’s wrong.
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, where her father—“a paid liar”—worked in advertising, Rose once loved books and believed she “would become a great writer like Emily Bronte … or Silvia Plath. She had imagined this is what happens to 19-year-old girls who read novels.” Then academia and the literary world turned her sour, most likely for relegating her to the margins.
Her snobbery and cynicism are challenged by the arrival of Posy Arbor in her living room, looking for a roommate. Her “small stature… leprechaun blood, and … magnificent violet eyes” put Rose under “a dreadful and powerful spell.” Posy goes around “as if the spirit of Emily [Dickinson] had left its grave and found a home inside her heart.” Her passion for poetry pushes Rose to her wit’s end, making her “sick with love.”
Infuriated at Posy’s gushing over Paradise Lost, Rose tells her, “You do know, I hope, that Milton was not only a notorious Puritan, but a male chauvinist pig who forced his daughter to take dictation?”
Posy responds, “If only I could have been his daughter. I would have taken dictation until I dropped!”
Arms skilfully plays the embittered academic and the impassioned autodidact off each other without falling into parody. I kept wondering if Posy was a ghost, or insane (adorably so), or just putting everybody on: “The poems of the True Poets are great birds; they are eagles who love to fly near the Sun,” she proclaims. Meanwhile, Rose is a kind of female Ignatius J. Reilly, who, at the slightest provocation, “felt anger pouring through her entire body. It was a feeling she enjoyed.”
Posy is a love story, a campus novel, and a meditation on the origin of literary art. Gary Arms obviously loves literature, and that love has made him learned. It’s a cliché to say that literature is written by great liars, but Arms gives us a fresh take on the concept. “Do you know what a lie is, a TRUE lie?” Posy asks. “That is the awful power of our love and our hatred of others. By truly lying, by believing our own lies, we change [people]. We alter them forever.” Fiction can do the same.
As Arms reached the novel’s climax, I wondered if he was aware of all he had achieved, how content most readers would be in the palm of his hand. He builds a masterful house of cards with Posy’s “true lies.” Rarely have I felt so invested in a character—wildly eccentric and kind and passionate about people and poetry. She deserved more fulsome treatment. Arms doesn’t give us the pleasure of pulling back the camera, or bringing it in close, or slowing down the frame rate, to allow our hearts to properly break at the final stroke of her narrative arc. He does the hard part—sets us up to accept almost anything—then dashes off his star character’s fate in two meager sentences.
The denouement also depends too much on the potency of Dickinson’s poetry. Using her assistance to conclude the book, perhaps a nod to her as muse, seems overly deferential. I wish he’d imposed himself. It’s his book, after all.
My frustration at the ending speaks to my admiration for the book. Gary Arms has the talent to dream big, no matter his age. I hope he keeps writing, pitching, and publishing, even if that makes him insane.