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 this book, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
1
ELIZABETH
“; Elizabeth’s office allowed of no concealment, and so she came to work of a Monday morning to find that directly to the left of her desk, and within reaching distance of her left elbow as she typed, the wall had been taken away and the innermost skeleton of the building exposed.”
The truly amazing scenes that open this novel — where has it been all my life? — contain the above ‘elbow’ trigger supreme, amidst a description of the listing or subsiding Museum building where 23 year old Elizabeth Richmond works as a clerk, with expressions such as ‘banking curve’ with regard to the tilted or canted exhibits, to which description I can do no justice here! But is this architectural difficulty connected with later references to E’s backache and migraine, after having dinner, a dinner considered important by her mannish aunt with whom E stays after her mother died, so important it is only the dinner’s subsequent brandy that loosens the aunt’s tongue in conversation after which she calls E KIDDO!
If one ‘elbow’ moment was not enough, there was yet another…
“Now, let’s see, this shaft down the building ought to pass somewhere close to Miss Richmond’s left elbow; will it, I wonder, trouble Miss Richmond to find one wall gone?”
Seriously, this material is a staggering example of Shirley Jackson fiction. Whether it is evaluated ultimately to be good or bad fiction, remains to be seen.
I have read so far up to…
“She did not hear Aunt Morgen pass down the hall, nor perceive Aunt Morgen’s belated conscientious glance in through her doorway; she did not hear Aunt Morgen whisper, ‘You all right, kiddo?’”
“There was still a gaping hole in her room at the museum, and it stayed just beyond her left elbow all day.”
Another section where Shirley Jackson gaslights Elizabeth Bowen, or vice versa, or should I say Aunt Morgen does this to her niece and ward, Elizabeth, both by pretending E walked out in the middle of the night, and, later, at the Arrows’ house she makes something more of E’s headache and its ability to shock as an autonomous being! Or so I imagined. Mr and Mrs Arrow are themselves characters to cherish! And E is gaslit a third time by her aunt when with Dr Ryan, who then prescribes E a session with Dr. Wright, a psychoanalyst, before Dr R proceeds to pinch Aunt M’s bottom, unless, I, too, am being gaslit by this actual text and I imagined it all! In truth, I suspect the strange threatening anonymous letters E is receiving at work are connected to the aunt’s use of the word ‘dirty’ that is also used in the letters! Who knows? Anyway, below are just two examples, out of many, of precious moments in this text……
“; the chair in which Elizabeth sat was soft and deep and upholstered in a kind of cloudy orange, her feet lay on a carpet in which a scarlet key design ran in and out and around a geometric floral affair in green and brown, and the wallpaper, pervading and emphasizing the room, and somehow the Arrows, presented the inadvertent viewer with alternate squares of blue and green, relieved almost haphazardly by touches of black.”
“The headache began, somehow, at the back of her head and progressed, creeping and fearful, down her back; Elizabeth thought of it as a live thing moving down her backbone,…”
End of Chapter 1.
2
DOCTOR WRIGHT
“What is your name?”
“Elizabeth R.”
A stream of monologue or a literary-characterful report by Dr W upon the case of his patient ER, where the thorny use of hypnosis is grappled with between them, and the use of a metaphor involving ‘water main’, even ‘sewer’ and the eventual mask within a mask that is as shocking here as it would be anywhere else alongside the more docile ER usually shown by both her waking self (R1) and hypnotised self (R2). I, as the reviewer (D2), am perhaps also hypnotised so far by this chapter, although initially I was relieved that Dr W is not one of the flash practitioners who provide games of bingo in the patients’ waiting-room.
I have read up to: “…and heaven help me, I have seen it a thousand times since.”
nullimmortalis Edit
“‘…R2 unusually charming.’ She wore a dress I had not seen before, I recall, of a somewhat lighter blue than was usual for Miss R.”
R1, R2 or R3, respectively Elizabeth R (even at one point an explicitly mentioned ‘Elizabeth Rex’ (as Lilibet?)), Beth and Betsy, this is the nasty end of Elizabeth Bowen’s shadowy third syndrome, a step even beyond Blatty, and Dr Wright becomes Dr Wrong even to himself before he bows out from the battle that he tells us about (so reliably?) in this long attritional section of his monologue that ends Chapter 2. Possibly the most horrific of fictional ideas in the whole canon of the horror genre. Be warned. Especially of the bird’s nest and the wise old man of Thessaly. But, and it is a big but, Aunt Morgen called her niece KIDDO when in her cups and used the word ‘dirty’ that appeared in the anonymous letters earlier. I have not yet discounted exterior gaslighting as the source of the three struggling identities within one young woman’s body, one such identity so unutterably evil and in seeming cahoots with the nicest one of the other identities. Or vice versa?
Note: This was a novel first published in 1954, a year or so after Lilibet became Elizabeth R.
nullimmortalis Edit
3
BETSY
“…I woke up in the morning that day and the sun was shining and the blanket on my bed was blue. There was a green dress hanging on the bottom of my bed and I thought it would look funny with the blue blanket but it didn’t.”
B, as I shall now call her, runs away on a bus randomly to New York. A masterstroke-by-fiction of dual duels with (or by) a shadowy third, and with a strange old woman in a nearby bus-seat, and half-memories in the head about someone called Robin, who has been mentioned much earlier, but only once, concerning an unwritten letter by her mother, now, today, invoking a ‘Hill House’ type picnic or maroon-party, as it turned out, literally in another Hanging Rock type den (“had she found refuge in a knee?”)
Searching for a mother I thought we had been told was dead, mixed in her mind with an inexplicable man on a ledge outside the Drewe Hotel where B stays in echo of someone else’s past. And reference to Abigail’s shop, “…perhaps only a red hat”
I have read so far in this chapter up to: “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for you.”
PS Is Robin from the Bird’s Nest?
Robin’s Nest: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075569/
“….wondering how the key to an unknown hotel room would ever explain itself inside the pocketbook to Elizabeth’s chaste white handkerchief,…”
A struggle between naivety and evil within the same brain. Or a haunting that would make most ghost story lovers truly grow white with fear for the first time? As B importunes a random man to buy her a meal and then turns against him, calling him Robin. Then a search for ‘her’ so-called mother in deliberate but random searches for ‘pink walls ‘ with a sea view and finds “a mural of orange fish against a black sea” instead. I don’t know why I thought of the leaning museum when I learnt today of the prized dictionary being torn to pieces.
“‘Lizzie Richmond. I brought her with me, and she wants to get out, but she can’t.’ […] (‘Darling Robin,’ she said aloud, ‘call me Lisbeth.’)”
“…leaving the chaos inside, and dropped the libertine key into Elizabeth’s chaste pocketbook…”
A tour de force of confusion, paranoia, naive accosting of strangers and competing fictidentities. And Bess, Lizbeth, as well as all the other names, soon be Lilibet? Even, as written here, ‘Miss Something Else’? Seeking a fictimother via a rose room and wall with a mural of fishes, a pink dress, a battle over a hotel key and a slip of paper, from pocketbook to phone book search, a stranger’s wife’s birthday, she sees Robin everywhere until ‘she’ is eventually rescued to a pure white hospital and a small doctor who comes from home whom she does not recognise… Even another mention of the ‘man on the ledge’ which this time reminds me of the leaning museum. And so ends Chapter 3.
“…and she laughed that she still had her pocketbook, because all the time the strap had been firmly hooked over her elbow.”
4
DOCTOR WRIGHT
“‘Elizabeth Beth brillig; o borogrove’ and then Beth said primly, ‘Do you know that I have never seen you before, doctor?’”
I wonder if ‘borogove’ was misspelt on purpose, or simply a typo? Making it Wrong by adding an R.
The resumption of fine-tuning of the receiver known as Elizabeth R, through the reliable or unreliable eyes of Dr W.
I have read up to:
“Without enthusiasm, I added R4 to my notes,…”
“Betsy reported with mirth that Bess was not able to understand the peculiar fascination the window of the sporting-goods shop held for her; she knew only that several times she had strayed unconsciously toward it, and had found herself gazing raptly at a display of tennis rackets, fishing rods, and golf clubs.”
I don’t know what that proved about Bess, but this chapter grows more flaccid, in a way, with Dr W’s ‘Frankenstein’ mix of E’s four streams in his ever more embroiled mind. As he tries to shepherd Beth, in his real-time review, to the fore to inherit E’s gestalt. Ever to be foiled…
“‘Fiddle-dee-dee,’ said Betsy, ‘fiddle-dee-dee. The mouse has married the bumblebee.’”
Money and inheritance, a pencil, Aunt M in the wings.
Interesting that Betsy is left-handed the others not. Perhaps to represent Jackson’s own more flaccid pencil moving when in the role of the female Count Frankenstein scribe…
“‘I have done this before,’ she whispered, gazing in horror at her writing hand, ‘my hand is moving by itself.’”
“Or else you are trying to frighten me, Doctor, and I promise you that I am not going to think better of you for these cruel tricks.”
Doctor who? He even gets embroiled in the pencilled communications to each other between the four parts of E, including the pencilled duels between Betsy and Bess, where one wants to eat the other from the inside, and I wonder if one of the discrete girls within one girl can write a note as if from the Doctor, whether indeed she wrote this whole novel! As “a kind of written ventriloquism”, one witnesses the ultimate in authorial as well as narrative unreliability, making this section one of the most significant items in the canon of all literature. Witnessing the pencilled exchanges is one of the uncanniest reading experiences I have had the ‘pleasure’ to entertain.
Read up to: “…most effective if one just happens to have four warring personalities, and one pencil.”
“it was heavy with wooden lace and startling turrets,”
The ugly architecture of Aunt M’s house and of Aunt M herself, making an Aunt Museum!? Dr W arrives, amidst these powerful descriptions, for a mutually ranting interview with her about E and E’s inner changelings…and Dr W himself, does he have his own Wrong changeling within, too, as he begins to believe he may actually be the catalyst for evil!—after a repeated elbow trigger…
“I sat myself down timidly upon a chair covered over with orange peacocks and found at my elbow a shivering creation composed entirely of wire and bright metals; as I breathed this airy creature moved… […] …touched briefly by the aerial creature at my elbow,… […] …everything in this house seemed to have an air of seizing at a person,…”
depriving him even of his pipe.
“…a person better qualified would better understand”, as Aunt M clumsily states, prior to the outburst about her own “whole rotten misbegotten sodden flodden ambergodden life,…”
E enters as Bess, claiming self-healing.
And, in this universally wild section of the book, Dr Wrong, I assume, sees…
“…a painting which may have been black polka dots on a red background, or a red field filled with black holes—“
5
AUNT MORGEN
“I don’t care if there are twenty of you, what you all boil down to is still my niece Elizabeth,…[…] Morgen looked away from Bess’ hand, sickened at seeing the thing released and capering off in pursuit of its own mad ends;”
And alongside mention of the ‘digging in her elbows’, a struggle ensues with E’s discrete arm (“….caught her right arm and held it, pulling and straining against its strength.”) Yet, eventually a flaccid chapter that possibly makes the rest of the novel less a candidate of becoming a classic one. A novel like its own canted museum.
A mad chapter of mud and money, and the wooden Nigerian statuette that snatches at things. One even suspects all the main characters have their own changelings within them. All destined for the explicitly named ‘loony bin’. And Beth in the bath. And a ‘blue pill’? The mud in the refrigerator, the money of the momentous inheritance hanging over them all, “and we can shove the mud off your mother’s last resting place and dig up enough of it to put you in,…” And nursery rhymes galore, making the reader mad enough to dare belittle the value of the novel that contains such nonsense. Especially the bramble bush rhyme.
“…and I am going to close my eyes now and you will never see me again.”
6
THE NAMING OF AN HEIRESS
A quieter coda that is as tantalisingly oblique as necessary to exonerate the prior excesses of sELf. And E is put into a ‘blue bib’ and has her fulsome hair radically cut by “the pretty young woman dressed in blue, who came forward through the fragrant dimness to speak to her.” Which perhaps links with the later conundrum of the blue gazelles…
When revisiting the museum she saw the statue of the General outside… “and he still rested his head on his hand and his elbows on a white stone table, and he studied still in his white stone book,…”
But what of the painting of the jewelled princess within the museum and no sign of the missing wall or subsidence. Until, later, Aunt M has her own elbow moment when she expresses an insecurity of the future now that E has her inheritance…
“‘Look,’ she [Aunt M] said, and stopped, and put her elbows down on the table, and lighted a cigarette, and fussed with the ashtray,…” and asked a straight question, as straight as the Arrows to whom they later attend as dinner party guests, Aunt M escorted by Dr W, if I am not mistaken. And after the previous chapter’s mad call to arms in outlandish elbow fights — elbow as EL for erstwhile Elizabeth and a bow for the arrows… and Victoria Morgen is born…
“…walked on with them, arm in arm, and laughing.”