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…
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/