Let him think the worst, Anne thought. After all, it’s true. I have murdered Elliott. It was getting very cold in the room. “I must go to tea at Victoria’s,” she said, and blew out the candle. By the dim light from the hall she picked up the comforter and folded it over her arm. She dropped the key on the floor and left the door open behind her.
“So there I was, all alone,” Roger said, “in the middle of a rough sea, my shirt frozen to my back, not one of my shipmates in sight, when what should I spy but the whaling boat.” He paused expectantly.
Anne pulled the comforter around her shoulders and leaned forward over the fire to warm her hands.
“Would you like some tea?” Victoria said kindly. “Roger, we’re eager to hear your story, but we must get poor Anne warmed up. I’m afraid she got a dreadful chill at the cemetery.”
“I’m feeling much warmer now, thank you,” Anne said, but she didn’t refuse the tea. She wrapped her hands around the warmth of the thin china cup. Roger left his story to jab clumsily at the fire with the poker.
“Now then,” Victoria said when the coals had roared up into new flames, “you may tell us the rest of your story, Roger.”
Roger still squatted by the hearth, holding the poker loosely in his rough, windburned hands.
“There’s nothing else to tell,” he said, looking up at Anne. “The oars were still in the whaling boat. I rowed for shore.” He had gray eyes like Victoria’s. His hair in the firelight was darker than hers and with a reddish cast to it. Almost as dark as Elliott’s. “I walked to an inn and hired a horse. When I got here, they told me you were at the cemetery. I was afraid you’d given up hope and were burying me.”
His smile was more open than Elliott’s, and his eyes more kind. His windburned hands looked strong and full of life, but he held the poker clumsily, as if his hands were cold and he could not get a proper grip on it. Anne took the comforter from around her shoulders and put it across her knees.
“You haven’t eaten a thing since you got home,” Victoria said. “And after all that time in an open boat, I’d think you would be starving.”
Roger put the poker down on the hearth and took the cup of tea his sister gave him in both hands. He held it steadily enough, but he did not drink any. “I ate at the inn where I hired the horse,” he said.
“How did you say you found the horse?” Anne said, as if she had not heard them. She held out a slice of cake to him on a thin china plate.
“I borrowed it from the man at the inn. He gave me some clothes to wear, too. Mine were ruined, and I’d lost my boots in the water. I must have been a sorry sight, knocking at his door late at night. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.” He smiled at Anne, and his eyes were kinder than Elliott’s had ever been. “So did all of you,” he said. “I felt for a moment as if I’d come to my own funeral.”
“No,” Anne said, and smiled back at him, but she watched him steadily as he took the slice of cake, and waited for him to eat it.
The Soul Selects Her Own Society:
Invasion and Repulsion:
A Chronological Reinterpretation Of Two of Emily
Dickinson’s Poems:
A Wellsian Perspective
Until recently it was thought that Emily Dickinson’s poetic output ended in 1886, the year she died. Poems 186B and 272?, however, suggest that not only did she write poems at a later date, but that she was involved in the “great and terrible events”1 at the turn of the century.
The poems in question originally came to light in 1991,2 while Nathan Fleece was working on his doctorate. Fleece, who found the poems3 under a hedge in the Dickinsons’ backyard, classified the poems as belonging to Dickinson’s Early or Only Slightly Eccentric Period, but a recent examination of the works4 has yielded up an entirely different interpretation of the circumstances under which the poems were written.
The sheets of paper on which the poems were written are charred around the edges, and that of Number 272? has a large round hole burnt in it. Martha Hodge-Banks claims that said charring and hole were caused by “a pathetic attempt to age the paper and forgetting to watch the oven,”5* but the large number of dashes makes it clear they were written by Dickinson, as well as the fact that the poems are almost totally indecipherable. Dickinson’s unreadable handwriting has been authenticated by any number of scholars, including Elmo Spencer in Emily Dickinson: Handwriting or Hieroglyphics, and M. P. Cursive, who wrote, “Her a’s look like c’s, her e’s look like 2’s, and the whole thing looks like chicken scratches.”6 The charring seemed to indicate either that the poems had been written while smoking7 or in the midst of some catastrophe, and I began examining the text for clues.
Fleece had deciphered Number 272? as beginning, “I never saw a friend—/I never saw a moom—,” which made no sense at all,8 and on closer examination I saw that the stanza actually read:
“I never saw a fiend—
I never saw a bomb—
And yet of both of them I dreamed—
While in the—dreamless tomb—”
a much more authentic translation, particularly in regard to the rhyme scheme. “Moom” and “tomb” actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as “mat/gate,” “tune/sun,” and “balm/hermaphrodite.”
The second stanza was more difficult, as it occupied the area of the round hole, and the only readable portion was a group of four letters farther down that read “ulla.”9
This was assumed by Fleece to be part of a longer word such as “bullary” (a convocation of popes),10 or possibly “dullard” or “hullabaloo.11
I, however, immediately recognized “ulla” as the word H. G. Wells had reported hearing the dying Martians utter, a sound he described as “a sobbing alternation of two notesu12 …a desolating cry.”
“Ulla” was a clear reference to the 1900 invasion by the Martians, previously thought to have been confined to England, Missouri, and the University of Paris.13 The poem fragment, along with 186B, clearly indicated that the Martians had landed in Amherst and that they had met Emily Dickinson.
At first glance, this seems an improbable scenario due to both the Martians’ and Emily Dickinson’s dispositions. Dickinson was a recluse who didn’t meet anybody, preferring to hide upstairs when neighbors came to call and to float notes down on them.14 Various theories have been advanced for her self-imposed hermitude, including Bright’s Disease, an unhappy love affair, eye trouble, and bad skin. T. L. Mensa suggests the simpler theory that all the rest of the Amherstonians were morons.15
None of these explanations would have made it likely that she would like Martians any better than Amherstates, and there is the added difficulty that, having died in 1886, she would also have been badly decomposed.
The Martians present additional difficulties. The opposite of recluses, they were in the habit of arriving noisily, attracting reporters, and blasting at everybody in the vicinity. There is no record of their having landed in Amherst, though several inhabitants mention unusually loud thunderstorms in their diaries,16 and Louisa May Alcott, in nearby Concord, wrote in her journal, “Wakened suddenly last night by a loud noise to the west. Couldn’t get back to sleep for worrying. Should have had Jo marry Laurie. To Do: Write sequel in which Amy dies. Serve her right for burning manuscript.”
There is also indirect evidence for the landing. Amherst, frequently confused with Lakehurst, was obviously the inspiration for Orson Welles’s setting the radio version of War of the Worlds in New Jersey.17 In addition, a number of the tombstones in West Cemetery are tilted at an angle, and, in some cases, have been knocked down, making it clear that the Martians landed not only in Amherst, but in West Cemetery, very near Dickinson’s grave.
Wells describes the impact of the shell18* as producing “a blinding glare of vivid green light” followed by “such a concussion as I have never heard before or since.” He reports that the surrounding dirt “splashed,” creating a deep pit and exposing drainpipes an
d house foundations. Such an impact in West Cemetery would have uprooted the surrounding coffins and broken them open, and the resultant light and noise clearly would have been enough to “wake the dead,” including the slumbering Dickinson.
That she was thus awakened, and that she considered the event an invasion of her privacy, is made clear in the longer poem, Number 186B, of which the first stanza reads: “I scarce was settled in the grave—When came—unwelcome guests—Who pounded on my coffin lid—Intruders—in the dust—”19
Why the “unwelcome guests” did not hurt her,20 in light of their usual behavior, and how she was able to vanquish them, are less apparent, and we must turn to H. G. Wells’s account of the Martians for answers.
On landing, Wells tells us, the Martians were completely helpless due to Earth’s greater gravity, and remained so until they were able to build their fighting machines. During this period they would have posed no threat to Dickinson except that of company.21* she wrote in 1873.
Secondly, they were basically big heads. Wells describes them as having eyes, a beak, some tentacles, and “a single large tympanic drum” at the back of the head which functioned as an ear. Wells theorized that the Martians were “descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands…at the expense of the body.” He concluded that, without the body’s vulnerability and senses, the brain would become “selfish and cruel” and take up mathematics,22 but Dickinson’s effect on them suggests that the overenhanced development of their neocortexes had turned them instead into poets.
The fact that they picked off people with their heat-rays, sucked human blood, and spewed poisonous black smoke over entire counties, would seem to contraindicate poetic sensibility, but look how poets act. Take Shelley, for instance, who went off and left his first wife to drown herself in the Serpentine so he could marry a woman who wrote monster movies. Or Byron. The only people who had a kind word to say about him were his dogs.23 Take Robert Frost.24
The Martians’ identity as poets is corroborated by the fact that they landed seven shells in Great Britain, three in the Lake District,25 and none at all in Liverpool. It may have determined their decision to land in Amherst.
But they had reckoned without Dickinson’s determination and literary technique, as Number 186B makes clear.26 Stanza Two reads:
“I wrote a letter—to the fiends—
And bade them all be—gone—
In simple words—writ plain and clear—
‘I want to be alone.’”
“Writ plain and clear” is obviously an exaggeration, but it is manifest that Dickinson wrote a note and delivered it to the Martians, as the next line makes even more evident: “They [indecipherable]27 it with an awed dismay—”
Dickinson may have read it aloud or floated the note down to them in their landing pit in her usual fashion, or she may have unscrewed the shell and tossed it in, like a hand grenade.
Whatever the method of delivery, however, the result was “awed dismay” and then retreat, as the next line indicates:
“They—promptly took—their leave—”
It has been argued that Dickinson would have had no access to writing implements in the graveyard, but this fails to take into consideration the Victorian lifestyle. Dickinson’s burial attire was a white dress, and all Victorian dresses had pockets.28*
During the funeral Emily’s sister Lavinia placed two heliotropes in her sister’s hand, whispering that they were for her to take to the Lord. She may also have slipped a pencil and some Post-its into the coffin, or Dickinson, in the habit of writing and distributing notes, may simply have planned ahead.29*
In addition, grave poems30 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 who 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 Muddle 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 cigar34 rose straight up in the air and disappeared.’
It is significant that the poem in question is Number 214, which rhymes35 “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 banishing40 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.
Epiphanies
Chance
On Wednesday Elizabeth’s next-door neighbor came over. It was raining hard, but she had run across the yard without a raincoat or an umbrella, her hands jammed in her cardigan sweater pockets.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “I live next door to you, and I just thought I’d pop in and say hi and see if you were getting settled in.” She reached in one of the sweater pockets and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I wrote down the name of our trash pickup. Your husband asked about it the other day.”
She handed it to her. “Thank you,” Elizabeth said. The young woman reminded her of Tib. Her hair was short and blond and brushed back in wings. Tib had worn hers like that when they were freshmen.
“Isn’t this weather awful?” the young woman said. “It usually doesn’t rain like this in
the fall.”
It had rained all fall when Elizabeth was a freshman. “Where’s your raincoat?” Tib had asked her when she unpacked her clothes and hung them up in the dorm room.
Tib was little and pretty, the kind of girl who probably had dozens of dates, the kind of girl who brought all the right clothes to college. Elizabeth hadn’t known what kind of clothes to bring. The brochure the college had sent the freshmen had said to bring sweaters and skirts for class, a suit for rush, a formal. It hadn’t said anything about a raincoat.
“Do I need one?” Elizabeth had said.
“Well, it’s raining right now if that’s any indication,” Tib had said. “I thought it was starting to let up,” the neighbor said, “but it’s not. And it’s so cold.”
She shivered. Elizabeth saw that her cardigan was damp.
“I can turn the heat up,” Elizabeth said.
“No, I can’t stay. I know you’re trying to get unpacked. I’m sorry you had to move in in all this rain. We usually have beautiful weather here in the fall.” She smiled at Elizabeth. “Why am I telling you that? Your husband told me you went to school here. At the university.”
“It wasn’t a university back then. It was a state college.”
“Oh, right. Has the campus changed a lot?”
Elizabeth went over and looked at the thermostat. It showed the temperature as sixty-eight, but it felt colder. She turned it up to seventy-five. “No,” she said. “It’s just the same.”
“Listen, I can’t stay,” the young woman said. “And you’ve probably got a million things to do. I just came over to say hello and see if you’d like to come over tonight. I’m having a Tupperware party.”
A Tupperware party, Elizabeth thought sadly. No wonder she reminds me of Tib.
“You don’t have to come. And if you come you don’t have to buy anything. It’s not going to be a big party. Just a few friends of mine. I think it would be a good way for you to meet some of the neighbors. I’m really only having the party because I have this friend who’s trying to get started selling Tupperware and…” She stopped and looked anxiously at Elizabeth, holding her arms against her chest for warmth.