shirley jackson – Kelley Eskridge

Busy day, and so although there are things to say and stories to share, today, as they say, I got nuthin’. But since I have written before of Shirley Jackson, and since so many high school students find their way here looking for essay content, I thought I would give you this — a few minutes of Act 1 of The Haunting, the 1963 Robert Wise movie based on The Haunting of Hill House.

This clip begins about 8 or 9 minutes into the movie, after Eleanor (Nell) has been invited to come to Hill House to participate in a paranormal study.

The book, and this movie, have long fascinated me. Eleanor’s overwhelming need to escape is so finely balanced against her clear instinct for good and evil, for what is good or not good for her. And yet, knowing that Hill House is not good for her, she enters into it with only minimal hesitation, with a subterranean lightness of being. There’s a sense of power and freedom in crossing the line of no return… and of course that’s where the horror always comes from, the final realization that what we thought was freedom was just a better trap. It’s subtle and brilliant stuff, both in prose and in film.

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.

You can start your own conversation now or anytime â just use the âWant to talk?â link on the sidebar or email me.