Continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/work-by-the-comte-de-lautreamont-donald-barthelme-and-shirley-jackson/
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…
My previous reviews are as shown by link in heading above to a site and its comment stream.
Also in 2011 ‘THE SUMMER PEOPLE’ here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-weird-5/
And in 2022 ‘THE LOTTERY’ here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/986-2/#comment-991
THE TOOTH
“He was wearing a blue suit and he looked tall; she could not focus her eyes any more.”
This is probably one of the most effective anxiety-horror stories ever — pent up and unputdownable. As a woman travels by bus to a dentist in far off New York (why travel so far in such an emergency unless the whole world is tantamount to a dentist-desert as this country is now where I am reading it!) with toothache so painful that it makes her feel ALL TOOTH, and there is many a slip between cup and lip as the stages of reaching her appointment unfolds, while stalked by someone called Jim who seems to dream of places that are not deserts at all!
I felt she was a bodily vehicle for the tooth as the bus was a vehicle for her, and the clincher was that Jim seems to be the same tall man in a blue suit as in THE DAEMON LOVER!
Terrifying! Still is.
I can’t even see my face in the mirror, let alone recognise whether it is still me.
THE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL
“‘And good morning to you, too, Mr Lewis,’ Miss Strangeworth said at last.”
It felt as if she were saying good morning to me at last, indeed, after I had ignored her and her creator for so many years, me now being 76 and Miss Strangeworth 71. But then I read about her and her prize roses in a small community where everyone liked her. Yet she harboured a ‘strangeworth’ of obsessive suspicions as well as varicoloured stationery…
MY LIFE WITH R.H. MACY
A psychologically terrifying initiation for a young lady starting work at Macy’s, full of paperwork and carbon paper in triplicate etc, customers with various paying systems, endless sets of complex numbers and abbreviated codes in alphabetical letters. Seems somehow ever more terrifying in a book containing THE LOTTERY! I noted she laddered her stocking, too. Each reader fighting within ‘their’ own Tontine to comprehend each story separately as well as in each bespoke random order of context?
THE WITCH
“He [the old man in a blue suit] looked down at the little boy and nudged him with an elbow and he and the little boy laughed.”
A mother, and her four year old son called Johnny and her baby daughter, on a train journey, where Johnny accosts her with childish questions and, later, he issues blatant lies, after the stranger, an old man in a blue suit, enters the carriage and verbally abuses Johnny with a tale about when he (the man) was extremely cruel to his own sister. I thought the story should have been called THE WHICH?
WHAT A THOUGHT
Never go astray from using an ashtray, they say…
…especially in the gratuitous decision of sudden murder of one’s husband.
A truly chilling study in boredom and a deadpan depiction to break it. Best to keep to gin rummy, I say, but I say it too late.
AFTERNOON IN LINEN
Everyone dressed in linen, with a sort of Alice-like teatime feel. The little girl, an almost-narrator, is encouraged by her grandmother to read her poems aloud to another lady in the room and her little son who had been showing off his playing of the piano. Is it a coincidence that LIE is embedded in LINEN after NooN?
ELIZABETH
“…one chair, with one book and one ashtray,…”
I wonder what she is going to do with the ashtray, mentioned unnoticeably at least three times in this long, constructively boring story or novelette, one full of rain; it could have been called WALLS THAT NEED TO BE PAINTED or simply RAIN up front, but Maugham already had that title even though titles are free to use, even Elizabeth named after Bowen or Taylor the fiction writers, because this particular Elizabeth is a literary agent for fiction writers, who spends her day thinking of the grey starting in her hair, the men who ever come down the stairs seeming afraid of something , and thinking of her own dress mode at work and when at leisure, whether to tart up her own flat, and the men she can use to further her confused designs, and her elderly parents whom she can snub by telephone, and her sad accommodation with people who leave skis in the hall for others to trip over, a time when people ‘lighted’ cigarettes, as they often did, an elevator in an office block with a gossipy elevator attendant, a place where nobody did any real work what with office politics and virtual partitions in a ‘fearful old building’ that did not act as real walls at all, later explicitly elbowing people on buses, i.e. not as they do today often at arm’s length on a Business Zoom, but in those days holding long romantic luncheons between work sessions, and switching personnel between blousy secretaries, writing business letters that never get fully written, and quibbling over who has the power to hire and fire in the literary agency where their best customer is a ‘minister’ who demands a book of his poems to be published! I nearly used the ashtray on myself after reading this story in a single attritional sitting.
THE BUS
“It had clearly been an old mansion once,… […] … it needs paint and tightening all round and possibly a new roof…”
Miss Harper travels on a pervasively rainy night in a dirty old bus, with a grumpy driver who claims he is not an alarm clock, and other passengers blurred and soft speaking, and someone behind her who says they are running away from home. She is put off in a strange place, not her own home town, and she eventually finds an ex-mansion that seems to have echoes of her own childhood home with prehensile wooden toys…
It is a great scary story with an oblique loop of déjà vu and ‘fairyland colours’, that I am glad I have now read by the skin of my teeth in catching its late bus, astonished that I have not read hardly any Shirley Jackson before. Especially as my own work has been compared recently by an independent source to an amalgam of Lautréamont, Barthelme and Jackson! It has now stirred me to order a copy of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE to read for the first time, too. I’ve not read Barthelme or Lautréamont before, either!
Cross-referenced THE BUS with Barthelme’s ARIA here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/stories-by-donald-barthelme-2/#comment-28161
MEN WITH THEIR BIG SHOES
“…Mrs Anderson, all elbows and red face,…”
An insidious tale of a ‘happy’ young pregnant wife in her new proud house, impulsively employing Mrs A as maid. Is it the men with big shoes that leave stains on the floor or women with their prying eyes who leave worse accretions on the soul?
Whether shoo off or shoo in, this story lingers.
FLOWER GARDEN
“Somehow I always make my blue bowl the center of the room…”
Blue curtains, too. A difficult story of racial relations, but fundamentally nothing has changed since that era. The story of the young Mrs Winning and the older Mrs Winning, the former’s mother in law, of the man who is husband and son, the children, and a woman who moves into the cottage down the road where the younger Mrs Winning had once had an ambition to live and cultivate its flower garden instead of living in the big house with her mother in law, and the younger Mrs W befriends that cottage woman, and their two respective sons become friends, until the woman in the cottage employs a black man with a scythe and his young half-caste son to help cultivate the garden, and the expected repercussions in such a community at such a time ensue….
But I have been trying to fathom the cottage woman’s pervasive blue bowl, seeming to make the story have something to which one can attach the mind as hub. Colours mentioned for various things, even platform shoes, and the blue of the bowl is like silver. The variously coloured flowers, and blue as a neutral area between black and white skin, even though such white derives from pink? A ‘coloured’ and an explicit use of the N word by one of the children. Until a thunderstorm pins down the tulips, a ‘clinging’ in the eponymous cottage garden by a neighbour’s tree branch… Can any of us ever “come back and be one of the nice people again”? The earlier mentioned ‘Queen Anne’s lace’ or ‘garter snake’, notwithstanding!
THE STORY WE USED TO TELL
A most disturbing trapped-behind-the-glass-of-a-painting story in a room with only that painting in it in a dark mansion, a mansion as also depicted in the painting — ‘Y’ and ‘I‘ telling each other this story as young ladies but what is the exact nature of this story of a story and what old man wanted to hold a ball for them each night in such a deserted place? And who is the old woman in it other than Y and I as one, I wonder? Letters stolen from ‘SHiRLEy’ leaving only a little more of the story we used to tell than ‘hers’?
THESE REVIEWS CONTINUE HERE: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/shirley-jackson/