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My previous 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…
ONE
1 & 2
“…her friend had cruelly ripped to shreds the volume of Alfred de Musset which had been a birthday present from Theodora, taking particular pains with the page which bore Theodora’s loving, teasing inscription.”
If you want to know about the backstories of the four ghost hunters to this country house — that I shall deem to be a mansion, whether I’m right or wrong in calling it so — it will serve you merely to read the first two sections of the text. Suffice to say I am already captivated by the prospect of these characters and the elegance of their portrayal by the author as the prevailing power, these ghost hunters being the four senses of the mansion’s ‘body verbal’, with me the reader as the fifth. The mansion itself, being the sixth?
3 & 4
‘It’s half my car.’
….the refrain, as Eleanor of the Stones, as I understand her backstory, starts her defiant journey to this book’s mansion called Hill House, a route mapped out under the tutelage of Dr. Montague, defiant, that is, in taking her sister’s half of their precious co-shared car on a winding trip. After inadvertently tripping up an old woman and her shopping, Eleanor enters her own sought-after fairyland of hope as described by some of the most plainly elegant and magical prose ever.
“; she might make her home for ever in East Barrington or Desmond or the incorporated village of Berk;”
I am the Berk, I guess, but I trust she will allow me to follow her, and also meet the folk she meets on the way.
“Now what was here, she wondered, what was here and is gone, or what was going to be here and never came?”
Towards another refrain between the lips of a little girl she meets en route…
‘She wants her cup of stars.’
But later in foul Hillsdale near her journey’s end toward Hill House, a waitress woman there, as if grown from a girl who once had her own singular hopes of a bespoke fairyland, says to our Eleanor…
‘Good luck to you. I hope you find your house.’
Had E defied Dr M by mentioning Hill House in Hillsdale, I wonder?
5
TWO
1
“Hill House, she thought, you’re as hard to get into as heaven.”
Ironic, I say, when you realise that the word ‘hellish’ can be formed from the letters of ‘Hill House’. The relevance of Eleanor Vance’s meeting with caretaker Dudley at the almost prehensile gate and its padlock should hardly be surprising in hindsight, i.e. that — when she sees our mansion for the first time, with its inferred towering shapes and turreted appendages — it seems actually prehensile, as if workers rushed the job in building whatever pronoun is suitable other than ‘it’ turned out to be, where the caretaker and his wife state they will not stay after dark, and Eleanor at last reaches her allotted ‘blue room’ with many fears and regrets that she had come at all, indeed, the first of the four to arrive.
Just as ‘hellish’ is formed from the very reason that the word ‘house’ is used rather than ‘mansion’ when in interface with ‘hill’, there can be no doubt with the easy explicit way the words ‘vile’ and ‘evil’ are deployed in this text regarding whatever place Eleanor has now reached with “somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky,…”
2
“….and beyond all question a blue room. There were blue dimity curtains over the two windows, which looked out over the roof of the verandah on to the lawn, and a blue-figured rug on the floor, and a blue spread on the bed and a blue quilt at the foot. The walls, dark woodwork to shoulder height, were blue-figured paper above, with a design of tiny blue flowers, wreathed and gathered and delicate.”
Reminds me of the all-embracing blue bowl and blue curtains in this author’s ‘Flower Garden’ story reviewed yesterday, and the trope of an inimical figure in a blue suit depicted by two other stories by her as earlier reviewed. And when she meets the more confidently effusive and perhaps Sapphic Theodora, upon the latter’s arrival at this grim mansion, these two girls slightly remind me of Y and I in the Jackson story I reviewed earlier this morning entitled ‘The Story We Used To Tell’, with mirror, window et al. Theodora has a green room, and they discover they are so easy to get on with each other, they surely must be cousins with the same hundred aunts and uncles!
“Anyway, let’s get out of here and go exploring; I would very much like to get this roof off from over my head.”
They venture outside and see where they are to stay in the setting of the overbearing hills that gives the appalling place its name. Hill House, not Mountain Mansion. But I shall still defiantly call it a mansion. And there is a brook…
THREE
1, 2 & 3
“‘Now that I know which of us is me,’ Luke said, ‘let me identify myself further.’”
Luke the young man as a hyperactive member of the family owning HH. Word games as the four meet up, including the bearded instigator, Dr. M, and we gradually get to know them beyond their own mischievous mis-self-casting as “A courtesan, a pilgrim, a princess, and a bullfighter. Hill House has surely never seen our like.”
We gradually get to know HH, too, on the brink of Dr M telling the others (and us) what its backstory has been. All of us urged not to flee from it under darkness. If ‘it’ is the correct pronoun. And the need for…
“Door stops.”
4 & 5
“….warped, by half-remembered spooky stories which belong more properly to a — let me see — a marshmallow roast.”
Yet, we wonder about the potential importance of such an image! As the four participants get to know each other better in front of a cheery fire, as well as helping the reader to know them better, while they have found out nothing about the reader. Who knows how important that may turn out to be.
Matters concerning toes and red shoes, as Eleanor calls herself “individually an I”, and I had no idea this was going to happen when reviewing the same author’s ’Beautiful Stranger’ story earlier this morning HERE. Which now takes on a new relevance of synergy.
But who says the following I have forgotten, as has the Jackson passage with another ‘cup of stars’ recently reviewed having escaped my memory, too.
“; once I had a blue cup with stars painted on the inside; when you looked down into a cup of tea it was full of stars.”
But it is Theodora who touches Eleanor’s hand, not the other way round. As we hear Dr M’s description of HH’s history, viz. Hugh Crain, the two sisters et al. I recommend you reading section 4 full of such details. But I shall mention here Dr M’s reference to reading PAMELA by Samuel Richardson as a soporific; I can confirm I never found it such! His references to Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are well taken, though. Particularly Sterne’s TRISTRAM SHANDY which may or may not have some bearing on this real-time review.
The four of them have different uniform coloured rooms…making Jackson a writer about themed colours as well as ‘ghosts’ etc., as I have already discovered with her stories.
“‘Yellow,’ the doctor said, surprised. ‘Pink,’ Luke said with a dainty gesture of distaste.”
And amidst the omniscient description of differing POVs of various characters, some distantly absent as well those present….
“Around them the house brooded, settling and stirring with a movement that was almost like a shudder.”
FOUR
1
“Does she [Theodora] think I wouldn’t bathe unless she left a full tub for me? […] Eleanor was thinking that it had been a very long time since she had dressed to look like a stray sunbeam, or been so hungry for breakfast, or arisen so aware, so conscious of herself,…”
It’s raining and she has slept like a log, and one wonders if to share the same bath water was fashionable in those days, just as were their leisure and sherry at lunch, with Mrs Dudley skivvying for them, albeit ‘clearing off’ at 10 after breakfast as if HH was a fearful or fearsome place at all times not just at night, and that the glasses belonged on the shelf was a way of life. Like losing the dining-room as well as one’s balance in a titling world, with slight mis-angled angles leading to a gestalt of all these things as a giant tipping-point? Doors shutting whatever the door stops used, or was that Mrs D surreptitiously making sure that things were equally sure. I reviewed ‘The HOUSE of Leaves’ a years or so ago HERE. Which resonates with ‘leaving’ doors open and written signs pinned up so as to get yourself back on course in this seemingly huge dizzy, crazy house at the carnival.
“‘You will never believe this now, of course,’ the doctor said, ‘but three minutes ago these doors were wide open. We left them open so you could find your way. We sat here and watched them swing shut just before you called. Well. Good morning.’”
“‘Stuff yourself very full of kippers,’ Luke said. ‘Then it will be impossible to feel anything at all.”
‘“Actually, the ground floor is laid out in what I might almost call concentric circles of rooms;…”
“‘The linen,’ Mrs Dudley said, ‘belongs in the linen drawers in the dining-room. The silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves.’”
A deerhead belongs on a wall, a smelly Library in a tower,
“Of course the result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole. […] a masterpiece of architectural misdirection.”
And what of the statue “…that figure in the centre, that tall, undraped—good heavens!—masculine one, that’s old Hugh, patting himself on the back because he built Hill House, and his two attendant nymphs are his daughters.”
Were extra doors cut into the kitchen for Mrs D by her husband? Did Dr M give a door a ‘vicious kick’? Or was it Luke? I can’t remember. It is as if this very review itself teeters upon strange angles that the text has created within the reviewer’s mind. Hidden corners not yet turned. A tipping-point not yet reached within the mansion of my roofless head? Aitch Aitch, whispering in my ears. And what of “…your Hill House legs”?
THIS REVIEW CONTINUES HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2024/02/23/the-haunting-of-hill-house-shirley-jackson/