Special to HEINUS by Prof. Eugenia Ball, PhD. A theory that Jane Austen was poisoned has recently emerged in the British press. If true, her untimely end would not be a surprise. In my research, I’ve uncovered many cases of famous authors being involved in strange death plots and misadventures. This has happened enough times to famous writers that I, myself, the author of the international best seller While Washington Slept Here, have taken steps to ensure my security (I always carry a satellite phone and a 300-day supply of Power Bars). Some curious examples of literary skulduggery follow:
Thomas Gray: This English poet, famous for his poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is supposed to have died on June 30, 1771 and was buried alongside his mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges in England. However, while his poem states that the “paths of glory lead but to the grave,” there is excellent evidence that Gray, enormously popular for his poem, managed to parlay his fame into a three-book deal with Old Nick Publishers of Fire Lane in London and lived on until 1850. At that time Gray moved to New York City, having grown tired of London. My sources indicate he currently lives in a townhouse in Hell’s Kitchen and is said to be active in the city’s lively death metal and soul music scenes. Gray would not answer my phone calls nor respond to several attempts to contact him via seance.
Emily Dickinson: Noted for her desire for solitude, Dickinson is said by some reputable sources to have faked her death on May 15, 1886. Her coffin was actually weighed down with cut flowers, butterfly wings and corn bread. Dickinson booked passage to the Falkland Islands and lived and wrote there for several years before finding it intolerably crowded and noisy. She moved again, this time to Antarctica where she lived in a hut near the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf where she experienced a fertile period and wrote a 10,000-poem cycle on daffodils. She was also secretly visited by Captain Robert Scott, the British polar explorer, during his 1901 Antarctic expedition. They became friends and some experts say it was his dallying with Dickinson instead of getting an early start that led to the mixed results of his 1910 expedition in which he and his entire party perished. Dickinson later found the penguins living near her hut to be too pushy and social and so moved inland to the polar plateau. Her last letter to her publicist and Rolfing consultant, Richard Byrd, complained about the “annoying closeness and chumminess” of the intrusive Antarctic air.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Said to have died in 1940 in Los Angeles due to heart attack, research shows he actually died in 1930 in a freak typewriter accident. Fitzgerald’s tie got caught in the platen while he was writing a short story about dancer Isadora Duncan. Fitzgerald’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, made every effort to keep the death quiet, bringing in Ernest Hemingway, who alternately punched the corpse and then lamented the “poor son of a bitch.” Hemingway was instrumental in convincing the recently retired Wally Pipp to assume Fitzgerald’s identity while Hemingway disposed of the body in the Gulf Stream from his fishing boat Pilar. Pipp frequently appeared in public as Fitzgerald and even picked up Fitzgerald’s prose style, penning the novel Tender is The Night while at the same time managing a double A farm team of the Cincinnati Reds, the Rancho Cucamonga Smugglers. Pipp continued as the public face of Fitzgerald until 1940 when he experienced crippling writer’s block and was unable to finish the final Fitzgerald novel The Last Tycoon. (The novel was later arranged for publication by Edmund Wilson, with additional material by Dorothy Parker and Henry Ford.) Hemingway and Pipp staged the 1940 heart attack and Fitzgerald’s coffin was sent east to Baltimore for burial filled with bootleg gin and an abandoned Hemingway manuscript, For Whom the Fish Head Smells when Dead in the Afternoon as the Buzzer Sounds.
(Jane Austen’s house image by Rudi Riet)
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