A Wicked Laugh

I've been reading ghost stories. When Library of America did their beautiful new volume of Shirley Jackson this year, I had to buy it, as I would anyway, but then I found I had to read it, and in preference to the volumes of Emerson, Twain, etc. I got the same day. Hadn't really read Jackson since childhood, nor had I planned to do so again. Then Penguin did a lovely new design for the paperback of We Have Always Lived in the Castle a year or so ago. My dear R., on a visit to Seattle, saw it and had to have it, which nearly made me think I did to. Then, not long ago, remembering another friend, I was reminded of the book again, and read through the opening chapters for the first time in years. Finally, the Library of America, and then I simply had to read Shirley Jackson.

There was another factor as well. We'd discussed a summer reading series at the bookstore where I work. The idea was to have one reader a week, read aloud one or more short stories by single author, each Saturday, for a month running. The readers were all to be scheduled employees, all volunteer, the whole business done with a minimum of publicity or fuss. A comparatively inexpensive undertaking then, easily promoted as a single event, rather than five discreet ones. Spread out across a month o' Saturdays, the idea was that this might be the first of a regular series. It was also to be something of an experiment with the regular staff of booksellers, as we'd planned to have a mix of experienced performers and newcomers. While our first design came to nothing, under the pressures of conventions, commitments elsewhere, and our annual inventory in June, the kernel of the idea has survived. Now we're discussing something for the Fall. October, and Halloween, present us with a new possibility. So, ghosts, thrills, chills, and scary stories for grown-ups.

So, you see, Shirley Jackson.

I started reading her short stories then with this proposed series somewhere in mind. Avoiding her little masterpiece of horror, "The Lottery," as being over-familiar to most graduates of American middle schools, I still found rich pickings. Many of her stories seem to me perfectly suitable, both in terms of sustained atmosphere and length, for public reading. Some of her best stories, while not traditional ghost or horror stories, have much the same sense of impending violence or dissolution, the same tension and economy of effect as the greatest of the more traditional, Victorian ghost stories. I now have at least two I should very much like to hear aloud, though interestingly enough, I think I should prefer either or both read by a woman, which would also leave me well out of it, though that had not been my original intention.

I also allowed myself to reread Jackson's other famous short novel, and another old favorite, The Haunting of Hill House, despite its length disqualifying it as a potential selection for our still potential series. (When I got sick recently, I felt myself entitled to an indulgence in reading, when I could, just for pure pleasure, and not surprisingly returned to Shirley Jackson.) I'm glad I read the novel again. I was amazed at how much more amusing and caustic it was than I'd either remembered or appreciated at first reading, all those years ago. What I may well have read before as just a ghost story, is actually a very subtle and sharply timed comedy as well. It is also strikingly modern, both in psychology and structure, and far more playfully written than the story I remembered. While it is indeed, as the title telegraphs with such easy, even sly familiarity, the story of a haunted house, it is also something of a satire of the genre. Ghosts, of themselves, don't much interest Jackson. She's entirely respectful of the reader's need to be spooked, and she quite good at it. She employs many of the usual conventions: an isolated cast of innocents and "experts" lost in the house's eerie silences, subject to sudden chills, confronted by inexplicably shut doors and lost hallways, called by disembodied voices, etc., and her disciplined employment of these effects is admirable, even masterful. Shirley Jackson never mocks her ghosts. Neither does she abuse her characters, or her readers for that matter, for their curiosity. She is however rather wickedly amused by the seriousness with which we take ourselves as we step across the threshold, and she just can't help but smile.

(I should dearly love to have Shirley Jackson's review of the enormously popular hokum, "reality" and scripted, that now crowds the television schedule with whispering mediums, stumbling paranormal investigators and kid psychics. What fun she might have had with such nonsense! Alas, whatever mischief she might make must now be made from "the other side.")

Her own curiosity about the supernatural, to the extent that she admits any, is all to do with the unique opportunity the inexplicable provides for putting people, and women in particular into peril not so much by what may come at them from out of the dark as but what may call them into it. As both a writer and a moralist, she is less concerned with innocence or evil, sanity or madness, than with the fragility of the personalities and explanations we create and accrue in order to allow for our curiosity in these matters without actually risking our volition, and our lives. A risky business, as Jackson rightly sees it, less dangerous for what may or may not go on about us, than because of the morbid fascination, or blunt passivity with which we insist on standing in the midst of, or even stepping directly into, the mystery. We will insist that that such things must mean something, have a purpose, or fulfil some personal destiny, or even just prove the working out of Fate. Jackson, in all her writing, including her less violent, domestic humor, seems to reject this as hubris. One does certain obviously foolish, inexplicable things: go to a haunted house, steal a car, marry a murderer, have children. However admirable, or even noble one's intentions or faith in either a loving God or a perfectible universe, much, she tells, is likely to go wrong, in even the best of circumstances. And, as in all the greatest ghost stories, and the most sophisticated philosophy, there may ultimately be no adequate explanation of why this is so. Not in this life, anyway, or necessarily, it seems, in the next.

In the novel, the inexplicable is granted in the title, and by the first rattled doorknob, so its not that then that threatens her visitors to Hill House -- who cares if that was a dog or a shadow that was chased into the garden? -- so much as the need to pursue these things to some conclusion, however perilous, and she's just as earnest in her consequences as she is diverting in her invention. As was, remember, Swift. With Shirley jackson, things will not end well. Might as well enjoy ourselves. I'd forgotten just how dark the joke can be.

Perhaps also, I'd been too recently influenced by watching and rewatching Robert Wise's otherwise excellent film adaptation during the intervening years. As is so often the case in film-adaptations, what was left to the actors, often in voice-overs, to suggest on screen, the author could do with considerably greater subtlety in the novel. The changes in mood, for instance, that might seem abrupt in a close-up, are both more smoothly handled and better motivated in Jackson's playfully subtle manipulations of her characters' quick and sometimes contradictory emotions. It's in the contradictions, and how we reconcile them, that the novelist takes up her true subject. In the novel The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson's heroine, Eleanor Vance, is a more subtle creature than even the great actress Julie Harris might ever have made her in a movie; smarter certainly, sharper edged, even dangerous. In much of the movie, despite the grand acting and the counterpoint of voice-overs, too much happens to the woman rather than in her. In fact, the author's Eleanor, is nearly the equal, in both complexity and dark humor, of Jackson's brilliant 18 year old narrator in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood. I can think of few characters in literature who can elicit quite the mix of affection, fright and loathing Jackson invested in that girl.

And I'd also forgotten the satiric, almost clownish element in the story of Hill House, in the persons of the professor's silly spiritualist wife, and her boorish flunky, the middle-aged headmaster of a boy's school -- the latter, as I remember it, wholly absent from the film. (Just as well, perhaps, as he's far the weakest portrait, and the least amusing. The wife's transformation into something of a skeptic in the movie, seems now to me a less fortunate choice, as in the book she lends the pointlessly exacting investigative proceedings a certain ballast of necessary seriousness, by speaking with all the empty authority -- and naivete --of the more traditional, mediumistic hobbyist.) Not that the official voices of either scientific investigation or common sense or even refinement and sensitivity, to rather crudely reduce the support characters each to a function, fair any better ultimately than the clowns, or dear, demented Eleanor, for that matter. Jackson is unsparing of all expertise, and no knowledge, even of ourselves, is much protection, or comfort, in the face of the inevitable end of all things, even us. In the end, only the house may get what it wants, though even that's doubtful. (How would we know?!)

No wonder, as a youngster, I may not have fully appreciated Shirley Jackson. I still thought I knew something then. No wonder the novel has proved so superior to the classic 1963 film. Horror movies, movies in general, can't quite convey the pleasurable terrors of Shirley Jackson's chilly, bemused agnosticism.

I think the right reader might though, on a frosty October night. Wouldn't take but maybe an hour. If we turn the lights down in the bookstore, and listen very carefullly, we might even hear a strangely familiar, wicked little laugh at the end.

My final astonishment at Shirley Jackson's talent then is twofold. First that she accomplished so many classic tales in so short a life -- dead at 49 -- and second that she did these things with such economy. Read "The Lottery" again, as an adult. Look for one wasted word.

On now, I think, to Edith Wharton's ghost stories.