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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/stories-by-shirley-jackson-2/
Gradual alphabetical list of my Jackson reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/
Previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
PART TWO continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/the-haunting-of-hill-house-shirley-jackson/
My other reviews of Shirley Jackson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-shirley-jackson/
My reviews of older and classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this novel my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
FOUR
2 & 3
“With her eyes almost closed she could see Theodora only as a mass of colour sitting on the floor.”
A crucial scene, perhaps. I shall concentrate on it despite possible spoilers. E and T alone together. A potential afternoon nap recommended by Dr M, for who knows what the night might bring? A calm before the storm?
T says to E: “I dislike being with women of no colour.”
I mentioned red shoes and toes earlier in my review for no reason at all, now, as disturbingly to E, T paints E’s toes red to make her colourful, too, while E dozes! A squabble later between them about this.
T: “‘I’m an idiot. Just something frightened me for a minute.’ She stood up and stretched.”
4, 5 & 6
“‘If I had a passion for doors,’ he said, ‘or gilded clocks, or miniatures; if I wanted a Turkish corner of my own, I would very likely regard Hill House as a fairyland of beauty.’”
Here is more entitled leisure …
“‘If she wants to leave before dark she has to clear away in the morning,’ Theodora said without interest. ‘I’m certainly not going to do it.’”
And ends with brandy at 4 a.m. for all 4.
In between are some of the most frightening scenes in literature — if you let them. If you remember them.
Aide Memoires…
“‘Hill House, Hill House, Hill House,’”… someone imitates HH whispering its own name, as if scolding me for calling it a mansion! No more shall I do so.
Black Michael & Clarissa Harlowe.
“‘Bang’ is the best word for it; it sounds like something children do, not mothers knocking against the wall…’”
“…wondering what secret terror had been tapped in the others,…”
And not forgetting the intense cold spot outside the nursery.
6
FIVE
1
‘Now I know why people scream, because I think I’m going to,’
This is where we face, as readers, refrains and repeated incantations of ‘bang’ and knockings on the wall and invasive coldnesses, pervaded by recurrent descriptions as we are enfolded by the book’s text, just as Eleanor is by hugging the house itself. And who wrote the chalk message, come morning, on the wall? Even though, I think we are told who did it.
And this expresses my own feeling exactly in reading this book…
“…we were frightened, certainly, and found the experience unpleasant while it was going on, and yet I cannot remember that I felt in any physical danger;”
No, not ‘unpleasant’, pleasantly unpleasant, more like.
“‘I could say,’ Eleanor put in, smiling, ‘ “All three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real.” ’”
How many quotation marks I need to insulate what I quote? There is indeed a difference between ghosts and poltergeists. And I think of Eleanor’s childhood ‘stones’ now built to become this house?
“…she wanted to sing and to shout and to fling her arms and move in great emphatic, possessing circles around the rooms of Hill House;”
Stones and Hill House: A stillhouse to distil hellishness and loutishness? Or shoutlines, houselines, even holinesses?
2
“The light reflected from the stained-glass window on the stair landing and made shattered fragments of blue and orange and green on the dark wood of the hall.”
This section seemed at first to be a gentle intermission in what I might once have called a MAROON PARTY at the house, although ‘mansion’ would have been a more assonant word here than house in this context , and just as I tripped over myself in so saying, the above colours seemed to become a single different colour, one that was more lethal and liquid, indeed, all over T’s bedroom door and clothes, indeed desecrating T’s bedroom with another worded message, causing E and T to plan sharing a bedroom and clothes as twins or cousins. While we await the arrival of Dr M’s wife ‘the day after tomorrow’, as he put it, while still plugging on with his READING RICHARDSON, now with ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, having presumably leapfrogged ‘Clarissa Harlowe’?
SIX
1 & 2
“; I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings;”
Some serious thoughts by E in interface with Luke about the nature of humanity and ‘the pathways to the heart’, evoking more of these characters’ personalities than heretofore, while L announces an impossible truth, i.e. he never had a mother. The unearthing of Hugh Crain’s scrapbook for his daughter is a dark eye-opener on how he gaslit her with the threat of Hell. No wonder HH seems to behave as possessing — or being possessed by — more Hell than Heaven. On Leap Year Day today.
SEVEN
1 & 2
“; books are frequently very good carriers, you know.”
Planchettes, too, words being the carriers of ghosts? Whether automatic writing or deliberate. The arrival of the breezy and officious Mrs M (wife of Dr M), with headmaster Arthur Parker as chauffeur, causes an off-putting glitch for the still nervous Luke and the two girls in the flow of events, but this woman and her toady are worth their weight in gold if they are mere spear-carriers, I say. We shall see what the words do write henceforth. I noted amongst the lady’s luggage there was a blue suitcas
3
“Planchette felt very strongly about a nun, John. Perhaps something of the sort—a dark, vague figure,…’”
A comic intermission? As Mrs M refers to ‘planchette’ as a christian name of someone she knows, and Merrigot summoned for Arthur or for Nell, and there is pencil talk of walled-in nuns, or even perhaps Lewis’s Monk? Or a plangent echo of the author herself…
“…what I want in all this world is peace, a quiet spot to lie and think, a quiet spot up among the flowers where I can dream and tell myself sweet stories.”
4
Mrs M:
“…the beings in this house are only waiting for an opportunity to tell their stories and free themselves from the burden of their sorrow.”
But the opposing view — “if I ever saw a place that had no use for perfect love, it’s Hill House” — prevails with the house structure’s convulsions that have now invented sound-blocking headphones for our Nell with loud discordant Stockhausen from within them…
“; how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head? I am disappearing inch by inch into this house,..”
Did Nell invent these convulsion that the others felt, too, or did the splinter group of Mrs M and Arthur in other rooms with the gauche stories of Mrs M? Mrs M perfect wife to Dr M except, seemingly, for this one vice to trigger such strong hauntings with her dear Planchette of platitudes.
EIGHT
1, 2 & 3
“, but Hill House is not for ever, you know.”
Or is it? Eleanor’s silent monologue as narration without being a first person singular. Self-evidently a famous passage of literature-as-truth, without my having read it before. But nobody reads books any more, so how can any of its words be for ever? E’s determination to leave here and go home with T to T’s home, to quell E’s apartness, but there are ghosts even involved outside HH as she is followed by a non-existent couple: Luke and Theo, laughing together, while they were setting up their own maroon party elsewhere. And still E did not receive the message. Luke’s earlier talk of Pan and the house being all globes and “Little soft glass hands, curving out to you, beckoning——“, or was that him at all saying that? His talk of smashing globes when he finally inherited ownership of HH. The twosomes, that of Theo and Luke budding, but, in contrast, why did not Dr M and his wife share a room while she was here visiting at HH? Surely E was not to be remaindered with Arthur? Or abandoned here alone to become herself a ghost of it? But, I have noted for future reference: “…the fluted iridescent candy jar at Theo’s elbow.”
Nine
“; I dare you to open your door and come out to see me dancing in the hall of Hill House.”
This is the perfect and most poignant climax to the maroon party as the cinematic scene of the hanging iron stairway at last apotheosises Theo and Thee as concomitant with my sense of this book’s mansion as tantamount to a prehensile Hanging Rock.
“Theodora was wearing Eleanor’s red sweater. […] ‘We never had our picnic,’…”
END
My past review of the Joan Lindsay novel: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/picnic-at-hanging-rock-joan-lindsay/
COLLOQUY
“‘International crisis,’ Mrs Arnold said. ‘Patterns.’”
A highly prescient or prophetic vignette of our complicated times today seen as a form of insanity. So many quotable quotes in it and I am surprised nobody is now quoting them as wise homilies. The only far-fetched item in it is Mrs Arnold having her cigarette coolly lighted by her doctor while she is consulting him.
THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGER
“We need things together. Things we like, both of us. Small delicate pretty things. Ivory.”
He is not Very I upon returning to his wife and a strained marriage from a business trip and to his two small children, as seen through his wife’s eyes and the sense of her own fading I. A renewal or is it a wishful alternate world? Haunting? Damn yes. No way to explain how it is so utterly haunting as a unique ghost story. But the colours ‘purple and blue and gold’ help by reminding me of what I said about the colours in ‘Flower Garden’ above.
DOROTHY AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE SAILORS
“Remembering what my grandmother had told me, that I was always safe if I didn’t lose my head,…”
A well written but take it or leave it tale of two near adolescent girls in interface with the perceived threat of sailors in the harbour of San Francisco. Or is there more to it than meets the I? Is the man a Captain or a mere Marine, a shrivelled God or a full-imagined Wizard of Oz? Who the Wicked Witch of the West? And who is Uncle Oliver?
Cross-referenced with ‘I Bought A Little City’ here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/donald-barthelme/#comment-1585
ALL SHE SAID WAS YES
In many ways, merely a workmanlike story about an adolescent girl’s apparent skills in prediction of dark events to neighbours and even to her own parents, only interesting in the vying between the colours red and blue in the text. I think blue won!
OF COURSE
“Of course not”
Mrs Tylor which is, of course, Taylor without an a, watches her neighbour Mrs Harris and her small son move in next door. And with Mrs T having a daughter about the same age, she is relived they look like ‘nice’ people, until they get talking about Mr Harris who is hiding away while the removal is going on. It is a story not to write home about. Noturally.
THE RENEGADE
This story was like “cooking doughnuts” equivalent as Mrs Nash doing it, but Mrs Walpole is downtrodden by a new country life and its duties with two kids, and by the housewifely routines and an unresponsive husband, they having just moved here to a close community that sort of ambushes her in a ‘friendly’ way about the Walpole dog called Lady — heaven forfend! — killing chickens in the area: Remedies? — tie a dead chicken round Lady’s neck or shoot Lady or, as the Walpole kids come home with the methods of a dog-collar with the spikes pointing inward not outward. Seems to have moral, but the reader can actually smell the fresh doughnuts with no means to reach them… and the title now seems to imply the neighbourhood was angered and enraged with Lady, not friendly at all.
FAMILY TREASURES
This is a deeply syntactical work, satisfyingly al dente as a Henry James text, about a loner girl called Anne at a ‘university’ that seems more like a girls’ boarding school, with dormitories, and Anne’s mother has died and Anne, airbrushed by the other girls, becomes a kleptomaniac where various items in the dormitories go missing …. well, the repercussions are as complex as the prose, and the ending lingers like the best of short stories that should be included in such anthologies as THESE.
“Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
[…] An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost…”
— Dylan Thomas
A VISIT (for Dylan Thomas)
“from the limits of sight to the limits of sight”
This is explicitly a ‘lovely house’ with Jackson’s pastel colors, as Margaret visits this large country house, Carla’s home, on holiday from school where they are friends, and mirrors within mirrors, reflections within reflections, a fan room, and the house within the near-moat of a river, nests within nests of tiles and tapestries, a memory-sourced design of a house-embroidering mother and an officious father and Carla’s older handsome brother who comes, too, later, promising the girls a boating trip that never transpires, along with his friend a ‘black captain’ making the foursome, but the latter male counterpart figure ends up pointing out the accretive entropy in the niches and weaves of what we had, until now, assumed to be an optimally atmospheric Gothic house with all the sweet or creepy cosy trimmings you can imagine of dances, and a tower with a sort of Mrs Rochester in it, an old aunt who casts hindsight glances of aspersion that the sooner the young men went away again, the better, so, gradually, what I assumed to be a lovely house designed by Jackson to contrast with the initially forbidding and ugly Hill House (was that written earlier or later?) makes me look back at my life and while reading of what must be a near-ghost story to reflect the near-moat, and the mischievous angles and initial panoply of pale colours matching the mother with her needlepoint house…. Gorgeously and incrementally ghostly. The ‘Margaret’ / Jackson tile on the floor now with a crack or a tile missing that sets off the spiritual structure with an optimal gestalt of imperfection, whilst before the whole place was TOO perfect. A classic nerve-needling story of romantic innuendo that is unmissable, and now I can safely say, while also climbing in my ghost to some other haunted tower, I have indeed not missed making my own visit to it!
AFTER YOU, MY DEAR ALPHONSE
A story as a short slice of life of two boys as friends playing at tanks with pieces of wood to kill Japanese soldiers, one boy white and the other black, and the assumptions of the white boy’s mother as to the charity needed for the black one’s family. The boys’ recitative game embodied in the title is the perfect foil to such prejudices.
THE GOOD WIFE
“— at least Smitty hasn’t married yet, but we never counted her.”
Smitty was never smitten, I guess. While her old school friend, Mr Benjamin’s wife Helen – is she mad or is he? Or both? The husband as her deadpan captor, with her in a sort of locked room Yellow Wallpaper scenario, and he in cahoots with servants, telling his wife about letters received addressed to her, but not letting her have the letters themselves. Tantalising truths as gaslighting? She wears a blue bed-jacket most of the time. The Good Wife ironically as Weighted Wifehood. Genevieve, the name of the servant, meaning ‘woman of the family.’ And so we ponder on.
THE DUMMY
Two ladies, Mrs Straw and Mrs Wilkins, in a show restaurant, watch a ventriloquist where the dummy seems to get out of hand. Literally. Sinistral, I guess.
Some strange characters in a believable atmosphere as a place of entertainment. Weird and uncanny, too. A ménage à trois sort of ventriloquism, one of them in a low-cut green dress.
LOUISA, PLEASE COME HOME
“…I had to push and elbow down the counter and finally grab the raincoat I wanted right out of the hands of some old monster…”
A tan raincoat as elbow trigger supreme in a place called Crain, an item of wearing that could be the double for an old blue overcoat later when worn by a different girl, as Louisa Tether runs away with a return train ticket from home and her sister’s wedding and her loving parents who spend the rest of their lives hoping she will return, yes, Louisa running away, indeed, with cool mannered plans to be hidden in plain behaviours and considered garb while the tan raincoat seems to be just such a catalyst until she sheds it and … well, if I tell you what happens, it will spoil this ever-lingering monologue for you. Have you ever thought you are the same person today as you were yesterday? My own plainly worded monologue starts here.
A FINE OLD FIRM
A Jackson story that is an open-ended tranche of life, loose ends left untied. This one is about two lady neighbour who, unknowingly till now, have sons who are friends in the army elsewhere, and the cross-referring of the son’s letters and their future careers in the law… and one’s speculation as to what happens next is halted by hindsight of one mother’s older daughter also being present at their discussions and their mending of stockings, and the mess of loose ends left by such sewing on the floor. Sew, what!
THIS REVIEW CONTINUES HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/6629-2/