.
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 book my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
1
“We always put things back where they belonged.”
…just like Mrs Dudley? And why was I unsurprised that the Carringtons lived in the nicer Hill Road area? Rhetorical questions soon subsumed by the sheer power of this first chapter, where the merratic Mary Katherine Blackwood takes us on a shopping tour of the village of rot and rust and barely suppressed hate towards her and Constance and Uncle Julian cut off in their house beyond the black rock. And what I take to be a snakes and ladders game she plays with invisible dice to get to the village and back again to her house. We learn so much about those in the village and various characters and the Blackwoods’ backstory, suffice to say this is surely one of the greatest opening chapters in the Art of the Insidious that there has ever been. Stylish and disturbing. With quotable sentencess galore that will ever ring in my head. I just need one mention of Mary’s mind world where she lives as a form of escape… “I thought of catching scarlet fish in the rivers on the moon…”
2
“…a happy new arrangement of colors,…”
And an arrangement of paths, too — hidden, forbidden or bidden, that have customarily crossed each other as MK (Mary Kat, Merricat) reaches home with her shopping — leads to one bidden but gauche guest bringing a forbidden guest for tea, only for the latter to pry into the backstory of the (reliable?) narrator MK’s family, a backstory of blackberries that you will know about indelibly, should you have already read this story. And no reason for me to travel forbidden areas here, except mention we get to know more about the unfree threesome living here — “…by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; […] I realized now that this was the third time in one day that the subject had been touched, and three times makes it real” — and this threesome’s dire near-tontine of a backstory, via the studiedly ‘eccentric’ looseness of tongue and the collated written notes of Uncle J in his wheelchair, and the temptation today for MK’s sister C to go back into local inimical society…
“‘There was a spider in it,’ Constance said to the teapot. We used a little rose-covered sugar bowl for the lump sugar for tea.”
I seem to have forgotten to post this below yesterday…
3
“I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry.”
MK is our only narrative contact point as first person singular. Blue is an important negative colour for Jackson, I sense, C dressed in it today, whilst the ancient preserves in the cellar jarred by the past Blackwood women are full of the other competing Jackson colours.
“…the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.”
Doctor comes briefly to visit Uncle J, the latter who later reminisces amid his dementia about the past crucial day of the blackberries, or as he suggests would have been more appropriate: the rarebit. C on the brink of flying this safe nest of a hidden house.
MK dwelling on the relative safety to herself of the attic, the cellar or the moon. Her three magic words chosen today: Melody, Gloucester, Pegasus. I shall dwell on these for a while and later pontificate, as is my wont.
4
“, and I told myself that long thin things would remind me to be kinder to Uncle Julian;”
Uncle J growing more senile? A chapter of such thin things; strange, I thought, the word thing already has thin embedded. And happenstantial patterns in the scenery around the house as MK walks with Jonas the cat who is often seen “running up a storm.” Some patterns deliberate where MK has buried treasure, and father’s notebook supposedly nailed up somewhere, and someone I shall here leave nameless arrives at the house. We seem to be at a pivot or fulcrum. C seems, too, to doubt it but MK says it nevertheless: “The world is full of terrible people.” Since this book was published, I know what I now know about such a sentiment…
5
“Is it true that you can plant a leaf?”
This is a chapter miraculous with its insidious Ivy Compton-Burnett like familial dialogue over meals, and MK’s sense that the house’s security has been broken by the arrival of a character I have not yet named. Don’t forget, Jonas is her cat not this new character with whom there is talk of poisons and their delay in working.
“I saw Jonas in the doorway and Constance by the stove but they had no color.”
‘No color’ seems significant in Jackson fiction as are the colours themselves, and we learn more of MK’s diaphanous moon haven, her winged horse, and UJ’s planned notes or book about what had happened in the past, a task possibly diverted by the arrival of the new character I have not yet named. MK calls this character a ghost, but that does not make it true. A refrain of ‘neatening’ the house, too.
“‘I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four,’ he said, patting his hands together. ‘I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.’”
A book of fiction, my review of it, too.
“…and everything sparkled at us, even the blue dress in the portrait of our mother. […] …pretending that the ceiling was the floor…”
6
“That evening Constance played for us in the drawing room, the tall curve of her harp making shadows against our mother’s portrait and the soft notes falling into the air like petals.”
It as if the character I have not yet named, an intruder from the POV of MK and UJ, but for Constance a welcome saviour, was indeed disrupting the ‘black rock’ shelter and vanish-from-society syndrome of the house, (Cf. Joan Lindsay’s picnic or maroon party later or earlier in literary history) — a character I have not yet named who complains of MK’s fanciful treasures, like the gold chain of her father she hangs from a tree, and MK’s soliloquys to the shangri-la of the moon where she yearns to visit, and UJ’s box of papers, that needs protection, too. Constance believes, meanwhile, along with the character I have not yet named, that they should never, in the first place, have withdrawn into their ‘rock’ but faced the consequences outside in society, the consequences of their dire family history of evilly spiked blackberries, if not rarebit.
7
“ I altered our father’s room very quickly, and almost without noise. […] I looked at the room with pleasure. A demon-ghost would not easily find himself here. […] …and I wondered if he would like my six blue marbles.”
MK changes the whole house, indeed, to make the visitor I have not yet named unwelcome enough to leave. Leaving leaves and branches where books should be and much else to make it seem a ‘crazy house,’ to rid it of what she sees as a ghost and a demon. Whilst the latter undigs what MK has buried including money and UJ confuses the visitor with his own brother instead of the brother’s son, or, like UJ, do I confuse or forget things, too, and MK resorts to the summerhouse where she reconfigures in her mind all the vanished family around the table again, when she was deemed important enough to protect.
And then my hand is forced:
“‘You, too,’ Charles said in that soft voice. ‘I have put up with enough from both of you. One of you fouls my room and goes around burying money and the other one can’t even remember my name.’”
8
“‘Wash your face, Merricat,’ Constance said gently. ‘And comb your hair; we do not want you untidy at table, and your Cousin Charles is already angry with you.’”
This is the mayhem and housefire chapter, the angry release of pent-up local acrimony, and a death, and an admission by the unreliable narrator about a burning pipe in a cracked saucer and what she did to it and what she did all those years ago… those who dream of the moon are said to be lunatic? — even though the whole thing is seen through her eyes, and then through her words the truth of which rhyme with ‘eyes’, I guess.
“; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green;”
9
“Perhaps the village was really a great game board, with the squares neatly marked out, and I had been moved past the square which read ‘Fire; return to Start,’ and was now on the last few squares, with only one move to go to reach home.”
…being what the story started with. The mayhem both mass-deliberate and fire-accidental is a revelation to me where my own ‘mansion without roof’ becomes here a reality as a newly shaped castle.
And within it Jonas the Cat and MK and C try to continue their ‘Picnic’ within a now more literally hanging-by-a-thread ‘black rock’ and within its still safeguarding walls. The cellar and its preserves untouched. Safeguarding against so-called friends as well as foes. Poignancy upon poignancy. This is great literature hidden in plain sight.
“…we would have to neaten the house, although it was not the usual day for neatening the house.”
10
Below is all you need to know of its ending till you read this book…..
“‘They are the children of the strangers,’ I told her. ‘They have no faces.’”
“I am thinking that we are on the moon, but it is not quite as I supposed it would be.”
“Dressed in a tablecloth like a rag doll.”
The six blue marbles and the house with its vines growing like a growth of roof and the boards the residents used to baffle it are all now intrinsic to the house or home itself. And regrets are like leaving tasty picnics outside, as we should for anyone we once harmed or isolated. A fable for our times. But who, in ancient days, sowed the rarebit with poison? — an imperfect question left perfectly unanswered.