Stories by Shirley Jackson (4)
Continued from here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/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…
GOT A LETTER FROM JIMMY
”Oh God, she thought, I said silly. I said silly twice. That finishes it.”
I wonder if the wife is more insanely furious about something than her husband, when they both pussy-foot around opening the eponymous letter. You better finish it yourself, and not depend on me telling you about it, even though I may have left it unread, except for that short passage above that was reported to me by someone else equally as mad about it as me.
PARANOIA
A story of a small man, like many dapper men, going home with a candy box under his ARM for his wife’s birthday. But one ELBOW trigger follows another ELBOW trigger, that accompanies a stalking or blatant pursuance by a man in a light hat, from taxi to bus to subway to souvenir shop, with several examples of the dapper man’s ARM, one being tugged half in half out, and on one occasion he is upon his KNEE, where all these hinges as to what identity he himself is when reaching his wife makes a disarmingly disturbing story. His head’s electric bulb moment?
LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE
This is possibly the saddest story I have ever read. About a single man in his own apartment, who is meticulous with civilised cutlery he has built up for dinner parties, although it seems it is only Marcia in the next door apartment (an apartment far more scruffy than his) who comes, now and again, to eat a meal cooked by him, including, this evening, with only his third ever cooked fruit pie, a cherry one that seems too sour for him but optimally sour for her. There is also much to relish about the Jacksonish multi-coloured accoutrements in his living quarters. Why is it all so sad? Visit the scene via this story and see for yourself. You may be induced to stay there forever. SOUR: so you are?
Jack The Ripper
It seems as if the title is the supremest spoiler ever. And if it indeed turns out to be such, it is all a bit ‘meh’. But what of all those men in the bar to whom our protagonist appeals about the 17 year old girl he had just witnessed drunk and comatose upon the pavement outside, ‘unattractive’ but ‘thin and lovely’ when laid out? Is this the first trigger for him to adopt the career already implanted as the title, a sudden brain surge he was not even expecting to possess him, none of which would explain the knife he carried with him so un-omnisciently? I blame the freehold author. The man was not even a narrator, reliable or not.
THE MAN IN THE WOODS
This is a remarkable deadpan story, with shades of Laura Carrington stories, or vice versa, a dead pan of onions and meat with an appetising smell, trees that crowd in upon a stone house, and the eponymous man called Christopher arriving through dark and endless trees from a random endless walk with an adopted cat, to be sort of welcomed by two ladies in green robes, and their cat Grimalkin that almost fights with Christopher’s cat. Is he going to be allowed to shelter overnight? — a suspenseful theme, while the man, who is the real host called Mr Oakes, sharpens a knife as if threatening Christopher, when the ladies prepare a deadpan feast. But is it more a question of Christopher being the man now duly in line to deal with the house and the garden’s roses and whatever else? The whole purpose of his trek through the woods, a purpose until now hidden in plain sight? Is there an inadvertent clue vaguely for what purpose Mr Oakes is going to use the knife at the river, when the two ladies’ names are joined up — Cissy (aka Circe) and Phyllis to CissyPhyllis? But what of the measurements on the white-washed wall? The story thankfully defeats the reader in the end.
SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
I recall studying this book by William Empson when I was a student of Stylistics under Anne Cluysenaar in the 1960s. This story with its title is probably the most plainly inscrutable one you will ever read, so one naturally seeks for ambiguities to help it have a pay-off. The story of a student boy who picks up the Empson book every time he visits a certain bookshop, a shop having several individual overhead lights with on-off switches at each shelf, a sort of basement which is otherwise cold and gloomy, and stairs leading down to it where, seemingly, there is always one extra step you don’t expect when reaching the bottom. The shopkeeper is also attending to other customers, a man and woman, and the man evidently wants fine books with fine covers and fine authors to read or as, I suspect, simply to furnish his front room. The probably penniless student, to the knowledge of the shopkeeper, always replaces the Empson on the shelf having acted as if he is inspecting it to buy it, yet certain that nobody will buy it and he can continue reading it next time he visits, and thus he leaves. And there we have it, as the inevitable ending follows the student’s departure from the bookshop. I switch off the light above the story, minding my step thereafter in the darkness.
THE HONEYMOON OF MRS SMITH
“She had worn her best dark-blue dress to be married in, and Mr Smith had worn a dark-blue suit so that they looked unnervingly alike….”
Blue is the darkest colour of all in Jackson. Helen Bertram has become Mrs Smith, a spear carrier by dint of name, like many of Jackson’s well-named spear carriers, and visited by another called Mrs Jones, after Mrs S had been out shopping fending off innuendo and so-called assistance for having married a potentially notorious Mr S, so who is Mr S? The complex Henry James prose loosens a bit as we realise what Mr S may be. It is a chilling and attritional task to read to the end where the word ‘rest’ takes on a multitude of meanings.
TRIAL BY COMBAT
I simply love this story, a perfect gem. Where has it been all my life? Elizabeth Bowen plus Shirley Jackson, a simple tale of tension between ladies living in near identical rooms in an apartment block with understated compelling suspense regarding kleptomania of knickknacks and politeness with undercurrents, and the devastating ending that is even more understated. It was the aspirin that finally killed me! Not forgetting the blue housecoat hung up.
HOME
“the disgusting wet cold”
A run of the mill ghost story of a feudal-acting woman having taken over a large house in a small village community, with a bridge near the creek which she is warned nobody ever travelled when it was raining. So of course she ignored them and ended up immersed in wet cold bathos. To tell you more could not possibly spoil this story because, in my book, it is hardly worth reading in the first place. Be warned.
THE VILLAGER
An extremely subtle story, in danger of becoming too subtle to mean anything, that ends with aching shoulders. One woman had found herself disguising herself as another woman (the latter who is currently absent) while exploring the latter’s apartment for furniture to buy, a story all about missed opportunities of a dancing career and broken marriages, and the fact you can’t escape yourself by becoming someone else. Or vice versa. But who, in the process, over-stretched their whole body en pointe?
COME DANCE WITH ME IN IRELAND
Three ladies on the ground floor of an apartment, one with a baby, the other two visiting her from elsewhere in the block. The outside buzzer goes that rings the ground floor apartment when strangers or salesmen call, and this is a poor hungry old man selling shoelaces. Echoless, even though after they feel sorry for him and feed increasing amounts of an eggy fry-up to him, he echoes aspects of the poet Yeats (whom he once knew, he claims) before he rudely leaves. I loved the deadpan pointlessness. I blame the sherry they gave him. Or the fact that soon I will be too old to do up my own review shoelaces. Or accidentally knot them one to the other.
PILLAR OF SALT
Stories as often oblique and dark palliators now reach their end. I seem, by random chance, to have left the best until last. An almost direct experience of the holiday of a seasoned husband and wife, Brad and Margaret., visiting New York from New Hampshire, innocents abroad, but their ideals of a city break gradually takes various turns of alarms, confusions and even the imposing city buildings are in entropy as well as the panic and meltdown of Margaret, conveyed by dense attritional paragraphing that effectively plunges the reader into her various emotions, towards an ‘elbow’ moment that helps bring matters to a frighteningly open-ended close. And this final story makes even my reviewing methods crazily credible….
“We’ve been playing anagrams.”
END