|
 "...I have
always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was
afraid and take it whole and work from there...I delight in what I fear."
-from an unsent letter to poet Howard Nemerov by Shirley Jackson
My last column discussed
how the emotion of horror has cut across genres of story-telling, frequently producing something more lasting than
fright, something we could justifiably call literature. Near the end I encroached on the terrain of the ghost story,
a timely topic with the movie version of Toni Morrison's Beloved just leaving the theaters and a new movie based on Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting
of Hill House
due next summer. That these films should appear so close in time seems appropriate since Beloved may have eclipsed Jackson's work
as this century's most complex, most completely satisfying literary novel with ghosts. Still, Jackson is a fine
writer and Hill
House
a fine novel, and I would like to discuss Shirley Jackson and her novel, in particular the first chapter, before
what might be a frightful movie scares away potential new readers.
Shirley Jackson was born in 1919 and died in 1965 of heart failure. In her lifetime, she published a collection
of short stories, The
Lottery,
or The
Adventures of James Harris,
and several novels including, The
Road through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial and We
Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Jackson met her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, while both attended Syracuse University. Immediately after
graduating in 1940, they married; their life with their four children provided the basis for her best-selling family
chronicles, Raising
Demons
and Life
Among the Savages.
Two posthumous collections have also appeared: Come
Along with Me,
edited by Hyman, and Just
an Ordinary Day,
edited by her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, and her daughter, Sarah Hyman Stewart.
Like many writers of her generation, Jackson first published short stories. Her first professionally published
story appeared in The
New Republic shortly
after she graduated from college. In the next few years, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle and American
Mercury
also purchased stories by her, one of which, "Come Along With Me in Ireland," was chosen for Best American Short Stories, 1944. Today, Jackson is probably
best remembered for "The Lottery," which may be the quintessential twentieth-century American short story,
its questioning of mindless tradition and ritual stemming directly from a unique national trait. Published in The New Yorker, "The Lottery" became
the most discussed, controversial and reviled story that magazine had printed, and eventually one of the most anthologized
stories in American literature. (One of Jackson's lectures concerned readers' reactions to "The Lottery":
In Come
Along With Me,
it is titled, "Biography of a Story"; the last three editions of the anthology, The Story and Its Writer, include it under the title,
"The Morning of June 28, 1948, and The Lottery". If you are interested in an author's reaction to sudden
notoriety, I would recommend reading that lecture.)
Much of Jackson's short work generates a disquiet and a narrative suspense along the lines of some mysteries; less
frequently, her stories move over into the supernatural. No one would consider Jackson a genre writer, though,
if only because her short work appeared in the prestigious magazines, and her novels were reviewed by the top critics
of her time. Yet, she had read some genre writing. In an introduction to one of her stories, David Hartwell, an
editor in the field of science fiction, fantasy and horror, writes, "[Shirley Jackson] told me in conversation
in 1962 that she had a complete run of Unknown magazine. 'It's the best,' she said": Unknown was a pulp magazine
from the late 1930s and early 1940s that published much of the best fantasy of its time, including horror stories
by writers who distanced themselves from the antiquarianism of their predecessors, focusing on what was frightening
in modern life. How much this may have influenced Jackson is impossible to say, but her own interest in demonology,
witchcraft and the occult - she owned over five hundred volumes on these subjects - probably spurred her to the
occasional supernatural tale. Though Jackson rarely delved into the supernatural, when she did, as in "The
Bus," "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts," and The Haunting of Hill House, she did so with conviction:
"No live organism
can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed,
by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood
so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors
were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever
walked there, walked alone."
-- first paragraph of The
Haunting of Hill House
The first thing one notices about The
Haunting of Hill House
is its length. In a day of books seemingly designed to enhance bicep curls, Jackson's slender novel feels almost
insubstantial. This stems from the short story writer's economy of means and effects, an economy especially evident
in the first chapter: everything that happens later is prepared for by and resonates off what we learn in chapter
one.
The first paragraph establishes the tone and mood of the novel. The next few introduce John Montague, doctor of
philosophy, with a degree in anthropology and a passionate interest in the supernatural. Dr. Montague's discovery
of Hill
House
and its reputation has given him the purpose, "derived from the methods of the intrepid nineteenth-century
ghost hunters ... to go and live in Hill
House
and see what happened there." Having rented the mansion, he culled names from reports of "supernatural
manifestations," and sent out a dozen invitations for the summer. Two people decided to join him: Theodora,
an elegant, artistic, independent woman who only goes by her first name, and Eleanor Vance, whose mother's recent
death after years of illness has freed her from her home. Theodora once demonstrated powerful psychic capabilities
in a scientific study. Eleanor, her mother and sister, once experienced poltergeist activity when their house was
pounded by a rain of rocks. Completing the group is Luke Sanderson, the owner's wastrel nephew, there to look after
his aunt's interests.
Once past these paragraphs, we mostly see events from Eleanor's perspective and Jackson begins to place scenes
that tell us about Eleanor. We meet Eleanor right after she has decided to accept Dr. Montague's invitation. She
has lived with her sister and brother-in-law since her mother's death, and they object to her meeting someone she
doesn't know, in a distant place she's never been; mostly, though, they are concerned that their vacation plans
for the car they co-own with Eleanor will be disrupted. On the day arranged for meeting Dr. Montague, Eleanor sneaks
away.
Entering the pay parking garage where her car is stored, Eleanor walks into an old woman, knocking the old woman's
groceries from her arms. The old woman curses Eleanor, since the tomatoes, bread and cheesecake smashed on the
ground were to be her dinner. Eleanor's feelings of guilt spur her to a graciousness that mollifies the old woman
and wins her over. When Eleanor sends her home in a taxi, the old woman promises to pray for her, and the thought
of someone praying for her cheers Eleanor.
Finally on the road, Eleanor is invigorated by the prospect of adventure and looks forward to reaching Hill House, "where I am expected and
where I am being given shelter and room and board and a small token salary in consideration of forsaking my commitments
and involvements in the city and running away to see the world." This sentence is a key to understanding Eleanor:
after years of servitude to her mother, she wants to renounce responsibility even as she desires both freedom and
security; she wants a home.
Most of Eleanor's thoughts along the route take the form of Disney-ized fairy tales, romantic daydreams minus the
darkness of traditional fairy tales. Seeing a house with stone lions in front, she imagines owning it, cleaning
the lions daily, and being served by "a little dainty old lady." Ruined stone pillars on either side
of a drive become a gateway to a fairyland with a palace and fountains where she was once a princess, long away
and now gaily welcomed back. Dr. Montague's directions to Hill House become infallible, Route 39, "that magic thread of road
Dr. Montague had chosen for her, out of all the roads in the world, to bring her safely to him and to Hill House."
And all along her drive, a tune nags at her, a tune with the lyric, "journey's end in lover's meeting,"
a recurring phrase in the novel that brings us to wonder who will be that lover.
Her romantic frame of mind continues when Eleanor watches a family at lunch. Their daughter, still quite young,
refuses to drink her milk. Her mother explains to the waitress that, "She wants her 'cup of stars',"
a cup with stars on the bottom that she can look at as she drinks. "[I]ndeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of
course," Eleanor thinks. Eleanor approves of the girl's stand in the face of adult coaxing, and when her mother
decides she does not have to drink her milk without her cup, Eleanor secretly shares the girl's triumph.
Eleanor elicits our sympathy because her mother subjected her to a household tyranny continued by her bullying,
self-righteous and intrusive sister and brother-in-law, because she handles the fierce old woman with good grace,
and because the cup of stars represents anyone's hope for a better life. But each episode carries disquieting overtones.
If her family treats her like a sixteen-year-old, Eleanor behaves like one: she neither stands up to her sister
nor takes responsibility for herself by claiming her rights to the car; instead she sneaks out of the house and
takes the car, fearful that at any moment she will be caught, certain she will abandon her trip if she is. With
the old woman, Eleanor smiles, "in convulsive apology," and we recognize a reflexive action from a lifetime
habit. And when Eleanor confers on Dr. Montague's directions an almost divine guidance of her destiny, she is essentially
looking to transfer to Dr. Montague the power her mother and sister held over her.
I momentarily skipped noting the episode with the little girl because the implications of that scene are more complex.
The little girl and her mother have the kind of relationship Eleanor yearned for with her mother - note her daydream
of "the little dainty old lady." Yet, if the little girl represents a life lost and a more supportive
family than Eleanor had, she also represents an attitude that translates into petulance and resentment in Eleanor's
later thoughts and behavior: though never admitted, we suspect the worst when Eleanor confesses that, though normally
a light sleeper, she slept through her mother's death. But accepting the little girl on this level means reconsidering
the old woman in the garage. If the little girl is an idealized Eleanor then the old woman, who seems momentarily
like a fairy godmother blessing Eleanor's journey, may represent Eleanor's future, a future of loneliness and parsimony
caused by the financial circumstances Jackson also sketches early on.
These darker overtones aside, we wish Eleanor well even while fearing the worst for her. Only on turning the final
page do we look back and see how subtly Jackson foreshadowed Eleanor's fate from the very beginning. Once the parameters
are established within the first twenty pages, the rest of the novel shows how romantic expectations dissipate,
"under conditions of absolute reality". The progress of the novel is the progress of Eleanor's transferal
of power over her: First, Dr. Montague's infallibility is called into question. Next, Luke is revealed as a playboy
rather than a prince. Finally, the free, lovely and sophisticated Theodora, who is all that Eleanor would wish
to be, who might have been sister or even soulmate, abandons Eleanor, repulsed by the weight of Eleanor's neediness.
After that, Eleanor can only turn to Hill
House:
"journey's end in lovers meeting."
I am aware of few twentieth-century American novels on a level with The Haunting of Hill House. Most novel-length ghost stories are lightweight, at best entertainments
for dark and stormy nights. Some novels with ghosts, like Peter Straub's Ghost Story, have shown literary sensibility; some, like William Kennedy's
Ironweed, have used ghosts as metaphors
for their characters' memories; but few have tried to rehabilitate the old fashioned ghost story for contemporary
audiences. Only Toni Morrison has produced anything of a similar kind, and only Beloved exceeds the accomplishment of The Haunting of Hill House. Both Jackson and Toni Morrison mold the ghost story to express
their concerns about what it is to be a woman, letting the presence of ghosts deepen the ambiguity and uncertainty
of a woman's place in the world. While this was a common tactic of women writers in the nineteenth-century and
around the turn of this century - for instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
- it fell out of favor. It is a testament to the potential of the ghost story and to the power of Jackson and Morrison
as writers that they so successfully revived that tradition.
A Final
Note:
We often complain about how poorly Hollywood does by our favorite books. The film based on The Haunting of Hill House is an exception. Directed by
Robert Wise (The
Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles) and titled, The Haunting, it is among the rare motion pictures that successfully evokes
both fear and sympathy. Wise was editor on Citizen
Kane and
first directed under producer Val Lewton (The
Cat People, The Leopard Man, I Walked with a Zombie);
you can see flashes of both in Wise's choices of angle and shot, of what to show and what not to show in this black
and white film. Essentially, Wise uses the cinematic equivalent of Jackson's writerly economy. The movie stars
Julie Harris as Eleanor and Claire Bloom as Theodora. Dr. Montague is played by Richard Johnson (perhaps a little
young for the role, this film came out just before Hollywood tried to turn him into a second Sean Connery), and
Luke by Russ Tamblyn. They all perform well, and in particular Harris and Bloom make the movie well worth renting.
*****
Information for this column was found in these books:
The Haunting
of Hill House,
by Shirley Jackson, Penguin, 1984
Come Along
with Me,
by Shirley Jackson, 1979
One Ordinary
Day, by
Shirley Jackson, 1998
The Dark Descent,
edited by David G. Hartwell, TOR, 1987
Private
Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson,
by Judy Oppenheimer, Putnam, c1988 Shirley Jackson, by Lenemaja Friedman, Twayne Publishers, 1975
Copyright © 1999 Randy Money
All Rights Reserved
|