I just read the post from Venetian Vampire in response to your blog on Oct. 20 about Shirley Jackson. I have always been drawn to her writing and wonder if you care to comment further about her. Thanks either way.
I think Jackson is a wonderful writer. I admire greatly her spareness of language, and the simplicity with which she describes complex, fragile moments between human beings. And she wrote some very shocking things for a mainstream middle-class white woman of her time — “The Lottery” was an absolute scandal, go read the Wikipedia article about it.
I think The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece, and I also like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although that book seems to be more of a particular taste (sort of like artichokes or anchovies, I suppose). It fascinates and delights me that she wrote stories that were so unabashedly strange and frightening and shocking without having to get all bohemian about it. She lived an apparently satisfying life with her husband and kids and all the responsibilities of a 1940’s/50’s wife and mother, and then she went into her room and wrote Hill House… I would love to have had dinner with this woman.
And you know what else I love about Jackson? She was funny. I’m currently reading her essay collection Life Among the Savages, and there ought to be a tea-snorting warning on the book.
Those essays did for me what perhaps these days blogs do for us: they made Jackson human for me. They showed me the woman behind the marvelous creepy words I have loved for so long. I don’t always like what I learn about artists as people: but I like the sound of Jackson, I like the way she feels in her essays. I like her curiosity and her amusement at the wackiness of the world, and her clear love for her husband and children, and her bemusement at the response to her work.
Maybe it’s naive to say that I think she was a cool person, but I do; and maybe it’s evidence of my own lack of literary rigor that it matters to me, but it does. I would still love her work if I didn’t know anything about her: but knowing a bit of her personal life, and liking what I know, enriches the reading experience somehow for me. I don’t know if it works that way for others, but it’s always been like that for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the person behind the words.
I remember reading Hill House for the first time: the absolute confidence of Jackson’s prose, the small details of Eleanor’s life that told me everything about the howling wind that must live inside her, how glad I was when she escaped in the car and made her bid for freedom… and then the absolute horror of watching it all play out. Theo’s lesbian history revealed with nothing ever said about it, masterful writing. That Jackson is brave enough as a writer to show us the haunting but not the ghost. The effortless way she takes us into people’s heads. And the book scared the bejeepers out of me. That was a great afternoon.
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My favorite word with Jackson’s writing is “uncanny”, just a subtle subliminal feeling that the perfectly solid floor was about to shift under my feet. The first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House is the almost perfect mood and universe setting one I’ve read. Did you know that her biographer thinks she might have had a brief fling with Dylan Thomas on her back porch during a dinner party at her house? The woman was full of surprises.
Full of surprises, indeed. I’m reading Just an Ordinary Day, a posthumously-published collection of her earliest work. Sarah and Laurence Jackson write in the intro: “Several years ago, a carton of cobwebbed files discovered in a Vermont barn more than a quarter century after our mother’s death arrived without notice in the mail.”
As preface, they decided to use a text by Jackson reflecting on all she could “remember clearly about being sixteen.” One of the things she remembered was that she “decided one evening that since there were no books in the world fit to read, [she] would write one.” In the space of a page, she describes the experience of writing a mystery novel that would surprise even the author. It was a disaster. She ends by saying:
“I do not remember what character eventually came out of the hat with blood on his hands, but I do remember that I decided never to read another mystery story and never to write another mystery story, never, as a matter of fact, to write anything ever again. I had already decided finally that I was never going to be married and certainly would never have any children. It may have been about that time that I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.”
Aren’t we all glad Shirley Jackson took her words back?
Karina, I am glad. I think Jackson was infinitely curious about her neighbors, and snoopy too, so she couldn’t resist speculating about them. Good writers make writing look easy. If youv’e ever tried it, you know it’s not.