Shirley Jackson - The Sundial, Hangsaman, and The Bird's Nest

Oh, this has been a difficult bunch of books to keep quiet about.  And I haven't really managed it, looking back, but I could have been much less restrained.  Now that Shiny New Books is unveiled, I can finally start linking to my Century of Books reviews - and I have to kick off with the Penguin Classics reprints of Shirley Jackson's novels. (Incidentally, they tick two dates on my Century of Books list.)

Best among them is The Sundial.  If I didn't already have a Shirley Jackson title in my 50 Books You Must Read list, then this would be on it.  Annoyingly (and these are the sorts of things I keep quiet from Shiny New Books, but can't hide from you, dear friends) I'd spent a mini fortune on a copy of The Sundial three years ago, back when it was very scarce... and yet hadn't got around to reading it until the reprints came out.  Oops.

So this is what I'll do with my links to SNB reviews.  A little bit of intro, and then the first line or two of the review, to hook you in... click on the link to read my review of Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, and The Sundial.

"You can more or less divide readers’ familiarity with Shirley Jackson’s works into separate levels"...

Raising Demons - Shirley Jackson

Raising Demons is the 1957 sequel to Shirley Jackson's hilariously wonderful memoir/novel about being a wife and mother, Life Among the Savages (1953).  I paid a steepish amount for a hideous paperback (pictured), and thus managed to secure Raising Demons, saving it for a treat - and I read it whilst recently beleaguered with a cold.  It is an absurd indictment of the publishing industry that these books are so difficult to find, especially on this side of the ocean.  They are brilliant, and deserve to be classics (please, some publisher or other, please!)  I don't often laugh out loud while reading, but with Raising Demons (as with Life Among the Savages before it) I sat in the corner giggling away to myself, getting curious and worried glances from my housemates.

I went back and read what I wrote about Life Among the Savages (you can do the same thing if you click here) and basically everything I said for that book is true of this one.  Funny, warm, happy, funny, clever, and did I mention funny?  But I shan't be lazy; I shall write a new review for this book, and not just send you back to that review...

Despite my enthusiasm for Life Among the Savages, I'm well aware that Shirley Jackson is much more likely to make you think of Gothic, creepy, psychological novels - like the excellent We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  She does that sort of thing incredibly well.  But she also excels at this sort of gentle, family-orientated, self-deprecating writing - a genre which many would dismiss, I'm sure, but which I (and many of you) adore.

By the time Raising Demons starts there are six in the family, plus attendant animals, and they have outgrown the house which was so amusingly bought at the beginning of Life Among the Savages - and so they start hunting for a new house.  Or, rather, everyone tells them which house they should choose - the one with the wonky gatepost, converted into four self-contained flats.  Despite insisting that they don't want to move, nor rent their house, they find themselves sending all their belongings into storage, and converting the flats into one house.  It is here that they live out their ordinary, hilarious lives.

Jackson has a talent for two types of humour at once: the knowing grin we grant to the recognisable, and laughter at the bizarre and unexpected.  These initially seem like opposite sides of the coin; that authors would have to pick one or the other - but Jackson manages both at once, by taking the everyday, identifiable dynamics of the family home... and exaggerating them.  And then putting them in a pattern, so that events pile on events, creating a surreal outcome.  Yet one which seems entirely possible - had, perhaps, happened to Jackson herself.

Having written about illustrative quotations yesterday, I should provide excellently evocative ones today, shouldn't I?  I liked this one, about the mother preparing her son for his first Little League game - obviously rather more nervous than he is:

As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game.  "It's only a game, fella," I said.  "Don't try to go to sleep; read or something if you're nervous.  Would you like some aspirin?"

"I forgot to tell you," Laurie said, yawning.  "He's pitching Georgie tomorrow.  Not me."

"What?"  I thought, and then said heartily, "I mean, he's the manager, after all.  I know you'll play your best in any position."

"I could go to sleep now if you'd just turn out the light," Laurie said patiently.  "I'm really quite tired."

I called Dot later, about twelve o'clock, because I was pretty sure she'd still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o'clock.  She said she wasn't the least bit nervous, because of course it didn't really matter except for the kids' sake, and she hoped the best team would win.  I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said her husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something.  I said that even if Laurie wasn't pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn't one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the centre of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged.  She said she thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

That also gives an example of my favourite technique in the book.  It's simple, but I find it endlessly amusing: it is what Jackson doesn't write.  So much of Raising Demons is left to the reader's imagination.  Not much is needed, to be honest - any reader is likely to deduce that the mother is distrait, and the son calm.  Jackson isn't trying to be super-subtle with that point.  But I love that it is never quite spelt out - and that other characters thus often miss what is so obvious to the amused reader.  Here's an example in that vein:

By the Saturday before Labor Day a decided atmosphere of cool restraint had taken over our house, because on Thursday my husband had received a letter from an old school friend of his named Sylvia, saying that she and another girl were driving through New England on a vacation and would just adore stopping by for the weekend to renew old friendships.  My husband gave me the letter to read, and I held it very carefully by the edges and said that it was positively touching, the way he kept up with his old friends, and did Sylvia always use pale lavender paper with this kind of rosy ink and what was that I smelled - perfume?  My husband said Sylvia was a grand girl.  I said I was sure of it.  My husband said Sylvia had always been one of the nicest people he knew.  I said I hadn't a doubt.  My husband said that he was positive that I was going to love Sylvia on sight.  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself in time.

My husband laughed self-consciously.  "I remember," he said, and then his voice trailed off and he laughed again.

"Yes?" I asked politely.

"Nothing," he said.

Lovely!  I really can't recommend this book, and Life Among the Savages, enough.  It's such a shame they're so difficult to find - but I promise they are worth the hunt to anybody who likes Provincial Lady-esque books.  (Hopefully you'll find a nicer copy than mine - I quite like the other image featured, yours for $500.)  Like the PL et al, I know I'll be returning to this family time and again.  I'm rather bereft that only two were written... and on the hunt for other, potentially similar, books.  And more on that before too long...

The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson

Back in June, I posted Shirley Jackson's most famous short story 'The Lottery' and promised that, sooner or later, I'd write about her collection The Lottery and Other Stories.  Well, six months later I'm finally going to write a post about it, but I have a feeling that it won't quite qualify as a review.  But I'm not one of those bloggers who gets myself in a tizzy over whether or not to use the word 'review', so shall we move on?

If you haven't read 'The Lottery', I suggest you click on the link above and acquaint yourself.  It won't take long, and it will leave quite an impression.  Enough of an impression that some people (naming no names) have been wary of reading anything more by Jackson.  I, however, love me some Shirley - her gothicy, psychological novels We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House as well as her Provincial Ladyesque Life Among the Savages.  Where in this broad spectrum, pondered I, would her other short stories fall?

A whole new territory, it turns out.  After 'The Lottery' (you should go and read it before I accidentally give the game away) I expected Jackson's stories all to pivot around shocking twists, with menacing backdrops of small town life.  As it happens, all the other stories collected here are rather different from 'The Lottery'.  Where that story is a masterclass in structure, building in tension until a revelatory climax, Jackson's other stories are much more nebulously structured.  They rarely have an end, and often don't have a beginning - instead they are slices of life, and significant experiences rather than momentous, er, moments.  Going through the other short story writers I've read, in my head, the nearest I can think of are Alice Munro and Kate Chopin - much shorter than Munro's stories, but with that balance of interrogation and eventual mystery.

Jackson's stories, though, still lean towards the familiar themes of claustrophobic. small town life.  A few deal with racism.  In one of the longer stories, 'Flower Garden', a friendship between young mothers unravels owning to differing views about letting their children play with a black boy.  In turn, one of the mothers (a newcomer) is gradually ostracised by the community.

[Mrs. MacLane] stared at the blue bowl, and said slowly, "When I first came, everyone was so nice, and they seemed to like Davey and me and want to help us."

That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste.

Jackson often quietly questions the codes which hold together communities, and the hypocrisy within society.  The same theme is visited more subtly in a much shorter story - 'After You, My Dear Alphonse' - which demonstrates how brilliantly Jackson follows that first rule of writing: show, don't tell.  She never has the here's-the-moral-we-learnt moment, but rather shows normal people and lets them reveal their own dark natures.  Dark, but not evil - her characters are always understandable, if not quite sympathetic.

My favourite story here, aside from 'The Lottery', is probably 'The Daemon Lover' - a mysterious, haunting story of a bride wandering door-to-door on her wedding day, trying to find her groom.  It gives one a prolonged shudder, rather than a sudden shock, and the atmosphere laced through it is Jackson at her best.  Flicking through at random, 'The Tooth' is almost hallucinatory; 'Of Course' is witty and wise; 'Charles' is actually an excerpt from Life Among the Savages and has that wry, warm tone; 'Afternoon in Linen' shows a slightly more jarring childhood moment. There are twenty-six stories in The Lottery and other stories and, as often with short story collections, it's difficult to pinpoint a unifying theme.  But I think I may have spotted one... and it's not just the curious repetition of the name 'James Harris' throughout, to which this Wikipedia entry lends a clue.

A lot of perceptive critics have noted the domestic claustrophobia of Jackson's two most famous novels, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House - a Gothic influence that is absent from almost all these stories.  But Jackson has broadened this theme into the more widely felt one of entrapment.  People in these stories are so often trapped - in sad situations, in unwelcoming towns, or in their own unmovable prejudices.  Even within the way the stories are written, denying the characters a big moment of narrative climax, finishing in the middle of ongoing scenarios rather than ending neatly, the characters are trapped in unfinalised tales, unable to escape.  If this is more often sad or staid than scary, then that only emphasises Jackson's impressive sensitivity - and versatility.

Life Among the Savages - Shirley Jackson

I already knew that I loved Shirley Jackson - I did from the time I was about a chapter into We Have Always Lived in the Castle back in 2006, courtesy of Lisa - but now I love her for a whole new reason. Whilst at home in Somerset I indulged by reading her 'memoir' part numero uno Life Among The Savages and fell completely in love with it. Think Provincial Lady transferred to America (Vermont, I think) in the mid-1950s, with no servants. It's havoc, but it's brilliant.

I had Shirley Jackson in a box. Not literally, that would be creepy - but it isn't too far away from the sort of thing I'd expect from Jackson territory. The three novels I've read by her (We Have Always Lived in the Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; The Bird's Nest) and the odd short story (very odd short story) had led me to expect Gothicky, creepy, interesting angle on mental illness sort of stories from Jackson. When I started Life Among The Savages, in which Jackson wittily documents the day-to-day life of a wife and mother, I had to adjust how I responded to her. It's odd that certain paragraphs can go either way... this one, for example, is wry and whimsical in context. But read it with your Jackson-in-horror-mode hat on, and it feels rather different...

There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.

Anyone who has read The Haunting of Hill House will know how easily Jackson could have turned this into something terrifying - but there is nothing remotely creepy about this book. The narrator - a version of Shirley Jackson, no doubt, but only a version - evinces none of Jackson's neuroses or agoraphobia; instead she is a housewife and mother in the self-deprecating, amused mould of the Provincial Lady.

She starts off the book with two children, Laurie and Jannie. About halfway through the book Sally comes along:

Sentimental people keep insisting that women go on to have a third baby because they love babies, and cynical people seem to maintain that a woman with two healthy, active children around the house will do anything for ten quiet days in the hospital; my own position is somewhat between the two, but I acknowledge that it leans towards the latter.

Obviously I don't have children, and very few of my friends have reached that stage of their lives, so I'm new to the world of child-anecdotes. Maybe I wouldn't have loved this so much if I'd spent ten years hearing people recount the adorable things their children do, but I've got to say I laughed out loud a lot whilst reading Life Among the Savages. More at the narrator's reaction to things, to be honest - like taking children to see a Santa Claus who promises rather too much to Laurie and Jannie; learning to drive with an instructor who is 'undisguisedly amused at meeting anyone who could not drive a car'; coping with the influence of a teacher who tells Jannie that more or less everything is either 'vulgar' or 'unwomanly'. And her husband is there all the time too, loving and affectionate and just as inept as his wife. Having said that, what comes off the page is as happy a family as I've encountered in fact or fiction - and her husband is rather more helpful and on-board than the Provincial Lady's Robert.

I can't really quote any of the choicest bits because the anecdotes tend to blend into one another, taking up many pages - they're built up so that the family becomes recognisable, rather than a series of one-liners. Apparently it was all published separately before, but you can't see the joins. Having said that, the first section of the book is my favourite, perhaps because it includes their hilarious attempts to rent a house (everyone is determined that they should buy instead) - a similar section was my favourite part of D.E. Stevenson's comparable Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, so perhaps this betrays my adoration of people looking at properties - yes, Kirstie and Phil are basically my surrogate parents. Or would be, if I knew them.

Oh, and if you're not sold on the book yet, there's a delightfully contemptuous and pitying cat called Ninki. Loved her.

While I haven't read anything in this line of books which is as good as the Provincial Lady, Life Among the Savages is certainly one of the closest runners-up. I thought it was incredibly funny as well as being quite sweet. I'm not sure it quite deserves to be called a memoir, as Jackson is incredibly selective about which side of her personality gets filtered into the book, but that's her prerogative, and the result sure beats any number of angsty misery memoirs. It's sunny, funny, and... er, runny. In that it's made me run off to buy Jackson's other memoir, Raising Demons.


Books to get Stuck into:

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment - D.E. Stevenson: the first half of this book is brilliant, and owes a huge amount to the Provincial Lady. The second half is fun, but not as good... however, it's worth it for the first half alone.

Provincial Daughter - R.M. Dashwood: although Provincial Lady is the better book, this sequel by E.M. Delafield's real-life daughter is much closer to Jackson's book in date of publication, and it's delightful to hear from 'Vicky' all grown up.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

28. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

Well done to those who correctly guessed We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the image I shared the other day - and well done to those with the foresight to have bought the book already. As well as being my favourite ever book title (doesn't it make you want to read the book, without reading a word more about it?) this is a quite brilliant novel. Initially published in 1962, this great image is from the new Penguin reprint in the UK. I first read the novel in 2006, I think, and re-read it yesterday, just to make sure it was still great... a second read removed some of the suspense, of course, because the questions were no longer unanswered - but it actually brought a new dimension to the tale, too, as I shall explain...

I'm going to do my best to write about this book sans-spoilers, since it has so many wonderful twists and turns. I'm going to give away much less than most reviews do, so if you want to try We Have Always Lived in the Castle from the same starting point I did, perhaps don't follow the links at the bottom...

The opening paragraph gives a few important bits of information:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

The first chapter shows Mary Katherine - also known as Merricat - walking through the local town, seeing the trip like a board game; she 'misses turns' if she crosses the street, for example. 'The people of the village have always hated us.' What a stunning first chapter Shirley Jackson has written - without knowing why the Blackwood family are pariahs, we feel such tension, such awkwardness and fear as Merricat makes her way through the village. And she is the victim of childish chants:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Once home, she is not in a world of normality. Merricat believes she can protect her family and her house through nailing books to trees, burying marbles on the land, and storing away words - melody, Gloucester, Pegasus - which, so long as they aren't spoken aloud, will prevent danger. Because the novel is from Merricat's first person perspective, these superstitions are spoken without any defensiveness or recognition of a lack of logic. Which transports the reader into a surreal, unsettling viewpoint... Constance is more normal, though agoraphobic, unable to move beyond the perimetres of Blackwood land. Uncle Julian, the other remaining Blackwood, is obsessively creating a history of what happened to the family, especially the night they died. He is also mentally disintegrating, every bit as unsettling as Merricat's bizarre internal logic. Oh, and then there's the rather wonderful cat, Jonas, the only truly sane member of the family.

Though a short novel, Jackson packs a huge amount in. Not only the readers' curiosity to discover what happened to the rest of the Blackwood family, but also a consuming tension in the atmosphere of the novel. This was Jackson's last novel, and (of the three I've read) the best - suffering from agoraphobia herself whilst writing it, she perfectly creates the joint security and terror of the home. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Gothic from the title onwards, but Jackson also writes a fascinating psychological study - this slim book has everything, and on re-reading is all the more impressive, for the clues and presentiments scattered throughout. The pace quickens, the events escalate, but the tone never eases and Merricat's unique angle on the world never lessens.

When I first read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I hadn't heard of either the book or the author - it was in a postal book group, sent by Lisa from Bluestalking Reader. I feel a bit bad including it in a 'books you might not have heard of' list, since it's been all over the blogosphere since then, but just maybe you've missed one of the following reviews (I've only included blogs I know and like - a search reveals dozens and dozens more! Search via Fyrefly's Blog Search Engine, linked to the left, under People To See):

Books Please (spoiler-free)
The Bookling
Read-Warbler
The Asylum
A Striped Armchair
Books and Cooks
Things Mean A Lot

Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy, and Bess...

Those with a more encyclopediac knowledge of nursery rhymes than I might automatically finish the blog post title with:

...all went together to find a bird's nest.
They found a bird's nest with five eggs in it.
Each took one and left four in it.

I told you I'd get excited about being able to click on the quotation function. This could be a case of Picasa 3 all over again, where I get giddy with excitement for a fortnight, then forget all about it. (It's just a button I press on the making-a-blog-post screen...)
This is all a long preamble to talking about Shirley Jackon's The Bird's Nest (1954). Today's post might be of more interest to American readers of Stuck-in-a-Book, since there seem to be a lot more copies available Stateside than in old Blighty. I had to read it in the Bodleian. Shirley Jackson is known to me as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (which I wrote about briefly here) and the brilliant We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I'll write about in October when the new Penguin paperback comes out in the UK. Having been very impressed by these chilling novels - very Gothic, not horror - I was really intrigued to see what Jackson's pen made of multiple personality disorder. Or dissociative identity disorder, depending upon which guide you use.

For this is the central concept of The Bird's Nest, which takes its title from that nursery rhyme. The novel starts with Elizabeth - reticent, uncharismatic, a little moody - who is experiencing headaches, insomnia, and occasional black-outs. With the help of Dr. Wright, it quickly becomes apparent that Elizabeth is only one personality amongst many - and the others become increasingly dominant. There is sweet, gentle Beth; feisty, selfish Betsy; airs-and-graces Bess. Much of the novel is from the perspective of Dr. Wright, debating his dealings with these personas, and pondering how to bring them all together into one being. (Lizzie, if you will. Or Elspeth or Eliza or Liz or Betty or Bette... what a versatile name Elizabeth is.) Other chapters are from the perspective of one of the four personalities - but towards the end of the novel these chop and change so quickly that it's more or less a hotpot of different points of view. A film was made in 1957 (called Lizzie) and I've no idea how the actress, Eleanor Parker, managed to portray all these transformations.

And that's a problem Shirley Jackson encounters occasionally. It's difficult enough to keep one protagonist consistent throughout a novel - four incarnations must be a nightmare. The most obviously shifting is Beth, who starts as an ideal of Elizabeth, kind and sweet - by the end she weeps at the slightest provocation, and forever moans that nobody likes her. Betsy, contrarily, becomes much more likeable as the novel progresses. But these changes do not materially affect the novel - nor diminish the fact that, though inaccurate, The Bird's Nest is impressively prescient about multiple personality disorder. The condition was not officially medically recognised until 1980 - this novel was published in 1954. It is a bit fanciful about the interaction of the various personalities, but the patient's symptoms do match many of those discussed in the Wikipedia article on the subject... so, unless the person who created that article used The Bird's Nest as their sole source text, I'm quite impressed.

The Bird's Nest isn't in the same league as We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The writing isn't as pacy, the atmosphere not so intense, the characters not so well drawn - but it is still an eerie, involving, and unusual book which doesn't shame Jackson's oeuvre. Probably not good enough to bring back into print on its own merits, but as a fascinating example of the beginnings of a genre, and as a novel from a writer showing promise of her later brilliance, I can recommend The Bird's Nest.

Back!

I am back from a lovely long weekend in Northern Ireland, and have so many blogs to catch up with... give me a few days. Today was taken up with work and a driving lesson, in which I was 'introduced' to roundabouts and dual carriageways. All the fun of the fair.

The wedding I attended was beautiful and wonderful, a great time had by all - my much-loved friend Emily has now become Mrs. Sam, and is off enjoying a honeymoon in a place I only managed to establish began with M. Whilst in Northern Ireland, I and a group of other college friends took the opportunity to wander around, including a trip to Giant's Causeway. Amazing. I've stolen this picture from a friend, since I didn't take my camera.

Somehow, I also found time to read three and a half books. I'll start by telling you about The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and will move onto the others as and when.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson was one of my favourite books on 2006, currently a hmm-maybe for the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About - so I was surprised and pleased when Clare-the-Archivist was reading a Shirley Jackson at work. She did do English at The Other Place, but I suppose that needn't completely bar her from a good taste in books. The Haunting of Hill House was duly borrowed...

I am quite a difficult creature. There is a very fine line between Gothic-y novels (which I love) and horror novels (which I hate) and perhaps it's impossible for the naked eye to identify which books would fall into which category. Shirley Jackson is definitely the former. The Haunting of Hill House wasn't as good as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but was still very impressive. Dr. Montague wishes to investigate the paranormal reputation of Hill House, and invites Luke (the larcenous heir), Eleanor (downtrodden, lonely girl) and Theo (lighthearted, witty woman) to stay there with him. Everything about the house is off-putting - for example, every angle in it is a degree or two off, to confuse the mind into expecting windows to look out where they won't, and cause imbalance. Objects are moved around; doors are knocked on in the middle of the night, but only heard by some. But the house exacts a more powerful effect on one of the four...

Outside of fiction, I find this sort of paranormal stuff nonsense at best, and damaging at worst, but in the hands of Jackson it becomes more like a Gothic detective novel - answers need to be sought; characters explored and undercurrents plumbed. Start with We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but check out The Haunting of Hill House for a tale which is chilling without sacrificing character or panache.