The Best of Connie Willis (13 page)
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Authors: Connie Willis
In addition, grave poems
30
are a well-known part of literary tradition. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the throes of grief after the death of his beloved Elizabeth Siddell, entwined poems in her auburn hair as she lay in her coffin.
31
However the writing implements came to be there, Dickinson obviously made prompt and effective use of them. She scribbled down several stanzas and sent them to the Martians, who were so distressed at them that they decided to abort their mission and return to Mars.
The exact cause of this deadly effect has been much debated, with
several theories being advanced. Wells was convinced that microbes killed the Martians landed in England, who had no defense against Earth’s bacteria, but such bacteria would have taken several weeks to infect the Martians, and it was obviously Dickinson’s poems which caused them to leave, not dysentery.
Spencer suggests that her illegible handwriting led the Martians to misread her message and take it as some sort of ultimatum. A. Huyfen argues that the advanced Martians, being good at punctuation, were appalled by her profligate use of dashes and random capitalizing of letters. S. W. Lubbock proposes the theory that they were unnerved by the fact that all of her poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
32
It seems obvious, however, that the most logical theory is that the Martians were wounded to the heart by Dickinson’s use of near-rhymes, which all advanced civilizations rightly abhor. Number 186B contains two particularly egregious examples: “gone/alone” and “guests/dust,” and the burnt hole in 272? may indicate something even worse.
The near-rhyme theory is corroborated by H. G. Wells’s account of the damage done to London, a city in which Tennyson ruled supreme, and by an account of a near-landing in Ong, Nebraska, recorded by Muriel Addleson:
We were having our weekly meeting of the Ong Ladies Literary Society when there was a dreadful noise outside, a rushing sound, like something falling off the Grange Hall. Henrietta Muddie was reading Emily Dickinson’s “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,” out loud, and we all raced to the window but couldn’t see anything except a lot of dust
,
33
so Henrietta started reading
again and there was a big whoosh, and a big round metal thing like a cigar
34
rose straight up in the air and disappeared
.
It is significant that the poem in question is Number 214, which rhymes
35
“pearl” and “alcohol.”
36
Dickinson saved Amherst from Martian invasion and then, as she says in the final two lines of 186B, “rearranged” her “grassy bed— / And Turned—and went To sleep.” She does not explain how the poems got from the cemetery to the hedge, and we may never know for sure,
37
as we may never know whether she was being indomitably brave or merely crabby.
What we do know is that these poems, along with a number of her other poems,
38
document a heretofore unguessed-at Martian invasion. Poems 186B and 272?, therefore, should be reassigned to the Very Late or Deconstructionist Period, not only to give them their proper place as Dickinson’s last and most significant poems, but also so that the full symbolism intended by Dickinson can be seen in their titles. The properly placed poems will be Numbers 1775 and 1776, respectively, a clear Dickinsonian reference to the Fourth of July
39
, and to the second Independence
Day she brought about by banishing
40
the Martians from Amherst.
NOTE: It is unfortunate that Wells didn’t know about the deadly effect of near-rhymes. He could have grabbed a copy of the
Poems
, taken it to the landing pit, read a few choice lines of “The Bustle in a House,” and saved everybody a lot of trouble.
1
For a full account, see H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds
, Oxford University Press, 1898.
2
The details of the discovery are recounted in
Desperation and Discovery: The Unusual Number of Lost Manuscripts Located by Doctoral Candidates
, by J. Marple, Reading Railway Press, 1993.
3
Actually a poem and a poem fragment consisting of a four-line stanza and a single word fragment
*
from the middle of the second stanza.
*
Or word. See later on in this paper.
4
While I was working on
my
dissertation.
5
Dr. Banks’s assertion that “the paper was manufactured in 1990 and the ink was from a Flair tip pen” is merely airy speculation.
*
*
See “Carbon Dating Doesn’t Prove Anything,” by Jeremiah Habakkuk, in
Creation Science for Fun and Profit
, Golden Slippers Press, 1974.
6
The pathetic nature of her handwriting is also addressed in
Impetus to Reform: Emily Dickinson’s Effect on the Palmer Method
, and in “Depth, Dolts, and Teeth: An Alternate Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Death Poems,” in which it is argued that Number 712 actually begins, “Because I could not stoop for darts,” and recounts an arthritic evening at the local pub.
7
Dickinson is not known to have smoked, except during her Late or Downright Peculiar Period.
8
Of course, neither does “How pomp surpassing ermine.” Or “A dew sufficed itself.”
9
Or possibly “ciee.” Or “vole.”
10
Unlikely, considering her Calvinist upbringing.
11
Or the Australian city Ulladulla. Dickinson’s poems are full of references to Australia. W. G. Mathilda has theorized from this that “the great love of Dickinson’s life was neither Higginson nor Judge Lord, but Mel Gibson.” See
Emily Dickinson: The Billabong Connection
, by C. Dundee, Outback Press, 1985.
12
See Rod McKuen.
13
Where Jules Verne was working on
his
doctorate.
14
The notes contained charming, often enigmatic sentiments such as, “Which shall it be—Geraniums or Tulips?” and “Go away—and Shut the door When—you Leave.”
15
See
Halfwits and Imbeciles: Poetic Evidence of Emily Dickinson’s Opinion of Her Neighbors
, by I. Smart, Intelligentsia Press, 1991.
16
Virtually everyone in Amherst kept a diary, containing entries such as “Always knew she’d turn out to be a great poet,” and “Full moon last night. Caught a glimpse of her out in her garden planting peas. Completely deranged.”
17
The inability of people to tell Orson Welles and H. G. Wells apart lends credence to Dickinson’s opinion of humanity. (See
Footnote 15
.)
18
Not the one at the beginning of the story, which everybody knows about, the one that practically landed on him in the middle of the book which everybody missed because they’d already turned off the radio and were out running up and down the streets screaming, “The end is here! The Martians are coming!”
*
*
Thus proving again that Emily was right in her assessment of the populace.
19
See
Sound, Fury, and Frogs: Emily Dickinson’s Seminal Influence on William Faulkner
, by W. Snopes, Yoknapatawpha Press, 1955.
20
She was, of course, already dead, which meant the damage they could inflict was probably minimal.
21
Which she considered a considerable threat. “If the butcher boy should come now, I would jump into the flour barrel,”
*
she wrote in 1873.
*
If she was in the habit of doing this, it may account for her always appearing in white.
22
Particularly nonlinear differential equations.
23
See
Lord Byron’s Don Juan: The Mastiff as Muse
by C. Harold.
24
He didn’t like people, either. See “Mending Wall,”
The Complete Works
, Random House. Frost preferred barbed wire fences with spikes on top to walls.
25
See “Semiotic Subterfuge in Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’: A Dialectic Approach,” by N. Compos Mentis, Postmodern Press, 1984.
26
Sort of.
27
The word is either “read” or “heard” or possibly “pacemaker.”
28
Also pleats, tucks, ruching, flounces, frills, ruffles, and passementerie.
*
*
See
Pockets as Political Statement: The Role of Clothing in Early Victorian Feminism
, by E. and C. Pankhurst, Angry Women’s Press, 1978.
29
A good writer is never without pencil and paper.
*
*
Or laptop.
30
See “Posthumous Poems” in
Literary Theories That Don’t Hold Water
by H. Houdini.
31
Two years later, no longer quite so grief-stricken and thinking of all that lovely money, he dug her up and got them back.
*
*
I told you poets behaved badly.
32
Try it. No, really. “Be-e-e-cause I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me-e-e.” See?
*
*
Not all of Dickinson’s poems can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
**
Numbers 2, 18, and 1411 can be sung to “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”
**
Could her choice of tunes be a coded reference to the unfortunate Martian landing in Texas? See “The Night of the Cooters” by Howard Waldrop.
33
Normal to Ong, Nebraska.
34
See Freud.
35
Sort of.
36
The near-rhyme theory also explains why Dickinson responded with such fierceness when Thomas Wentworth Higginson changed “pearl” to “jewel.” She knew, as he could not, that the fate of the world might someday rest on her inability to rhyme.
37
For an intriguing possibility, see “The Literary Litterbug: Emily Dickinson’s Note-Dropping as a Response to Thoreau’s Environmentalism,” by P. Walden,
Transcendentalist Review
, 1990.
38
Number 187’s “awful rivet” is clearly a reference to the Martian cylinder. Number 258’s “There’s a certain slant of light” echoes Wells’s “blinding glare of vivid green light,” and its “affliction / Sent us of the air” obviously refers to the landing. Such allusions indicate that as many as fifty-five
*
of the poems were written at a later date than originally supposed, and that the entire chronology and numbering system of the poems needs to be reconsidered.
*
Significantly enough, the age Emily Dickinson was when she died.
39
A holiday Dickinson did not celebrate because of its social nature, although she was spotted in 1881 lighting a cherry bomb on Mabel Dodd’s porch and running away.
*
*
Which may be why the Martian landing attracted so little attention. The Amherstodes may have assumed it was Em up to her old tricks again.
40
There is compelling evidence that the Martians, thwarted in New England, went to Long Island. This theory will be the subject of my next paper,
*
“The Green Light at the End of Daisy’s Dock: Evidence of Martian Invasion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
.”
*
I’m up for tenure.
People are always surprised and disturbed by Emily Dickinson’s “reclusive” lifestyle and come up with all sorts of theories to explain her staying in her room, doing her gardening at night, and vanishing upstairs whenever visitors came to call: depression, a skin condition that wouldn’t let her out in the sun, lupus, a love affair that ended badly and that she never got over, agoraphobia, epilepsy, etc.
I, however, find her behavior completely understandable. She lived in
Amherst, Massachusetts
, for God’s sake.
She had a mind that could connect buggy rides with death, books with sailing ships, and winter light with “the weight of cathedral tunes.” She could write lines like “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” and “Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell,” and “And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.” She was funny, ironic, and
very
smart, and she was stuck in a small town where people’s top concerns were bread baking and antimacassar crocheting, where they liked poems that rhymed and had opinions on everything and everybody—and breathlessly repeated them to everybody else. “Did you
hear
what that Dickinson girl
said
?”
