The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  Or a number you keep seeing—on an apartment door, on a taxi, on an airline flight.

  You might recognize that last one. It’s from possibly the scariest Twilight Zone episode I ever saw. The woman on the far side of the lake is of course from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The ball of yarn and the white dress are from Kit Reed’s “The Wait,” and the deserted deck is from Between Two Worlds, the movie the heroine of “Death on the Nile” kept talking about when she was trying to frighten Lissa.

  I saw that movie on TV when I was a teenager, and loved it (and not just because it was set in the London Blitz), but I had no idea what it was called or who was in it, so I had no chance of finding it again till I had the bright idea of asking at a science-fiction convention. (Science-fiction fans know everything.)

  But even though I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, it had stuck with me all those years, just as “The Wait” and the Twilight Zone episode have stayed with me, just as the movie The Others and Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and Daphne DuMaurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now!” have, in spite of the fact that there’s not a machete or a drop of blood in any of them.

  Or maybe because of that. I’ve always thought that slasher-type horror had the same problem as Victorian interior decoration, with all its cushions, knickknacks, whatnot cabinets, and ottomans, and its penchant for putting tassels and fringes and ruffles and lace on everything. They’re both wildly cluttered—one with tea cozies and doilies, the other with severed heads and psychopaths—so crowded that the terror can’t figure out a way to maneuver its way through.

  But I also think it’s because the stuff we have in our heads is way scarier than anything H. P. Lovecraft or a WetaWorks special effects team can invent. The movie Alien was absolutely terrifying right up to the moment you saw the monster, and I’ve always thought the best thing that ever happened to Jaws was that they couldn’t get the mechanical sharks to work. They kept sinking and/or exploding when they hit the water, and that’s why they had to resort to the buoys, which were far more frightening, and the shadowy, undefined “something” under the water.

  It’s that undefined something we’re really afraid of—the flicker of movement we don’t quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can’t quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we’re not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we’re going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can’t quite put our finger on and can only guess at.

  That’s why death is the scariest thing of all. Nobody living has ever caught sight of it, and in spite of centuries’ worth of claims of hauntings and messages from beyond the grave, nobody has ever come back to tell us what it was like. And we not only can’t imagine what it’s like, we can’t even imagine how to imagine it.

  But we keep trying. So we tell ghost stories about somebody coming to get your liver, and go to slasher movies, and read zombie novels, though none of them are really scary. What’s really scary is looking up at the clock on the wall of the railway station and seeing that it has no hands.

  Or realizing that you’ve seen the people in the ship’s lounge before—right before they were killed by a bomb.

  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 she was involved in the “great and terrible events”1 of 1897.

  The poems in question originally came to light in 19912, 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 that the poems had been written either 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 notes12 … a desolating cry.”

  “Ulla” was a clear reference to the 1897 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 and 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

  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 vant 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 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 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 July39, 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.

  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.”