those who really cannot quite understand as they look round them

Tales for the Bush by Mary Theresa Vidal (1845)

If you were going to be an early Australian novelist and a woman and you were born outside Australia, then a good thing you could do was attach yourself to a religious man, because Caroline Leakey's sister's husband was a Reverend, and Ada Cambridge was married to a Reverend, and so was Mary Theresa Vidal, all of them starting with religious books and growing into less-religious ones: Ada Cambridge writing her hymns, Leakey writing her poems, and Vidal writing Tales from the Bush which considers itself a sermon or series of sermons and sees the reader or congregation leaving the room when it has finished one of its stories.

One day when he was observing how much more comfortable and tidy every thing was about them than in the other cottages, and how much more leisure they seemed to have; Anne colored up and said “Ah sir, it is you, next to God and my poor mother, we've to thank. It is all owing to keeping the Sabbath day.”

Readers go and do likewise.

The short stories begin and end with poems, too, like songs: you sing as you go out and the lesson adheres like that. (Not all of them begin and end with poems but some of them begin with poems but don't end with poems and other ones end with poems and don't begin with poems but the idea of poems or, in other words, silent songs, coming at the opening and shutting of a thing or address, is there.)

You could look at the book as a parasite vine of the new young colony erecting itself up the trellis of ideas that have been established elsewhere: it take its points of view from sermons, it cannibalises the Bible to make sense of a bleakly-ended story called The Little Cousins. "To those who really cannot quite understand as they look round them, why we so often see the good suffer and evil prosper, I would say, read the 73rd Psalm." One cousin is good and the other is indifferent, and the indifferent one has ended the story warm and rich and the good cousin has ended the story crippled, orphaned, living in a Sydney slum, and "poor, with scarcely sufficient to support her, though she worked hard all day, often in pain from her leg and otherwise broken in health."

In one story, therefore, the person who does the right thing receives a "more comfortable and tidy" life than the unrighteous people who live around them, whereas in the other story it is the other way around, and the same uncertainty characterises the rest of the stories in the book, characters either failing or succeeding in a material sense more or less independently of how righteous or unrighteous they are which might well leave the reader with a feeling of vertigo and unmooring or, in short, horror, for if Kitty in Cousins is destined to suffer because she is righteous and her cousin Jane unrighteous then why does Anne in the earlier story not also suffer, or why does Kitty not live a more comfortable and tidy life than Jane?

It is like the short story Podolo by L.P. Hartley in which one character follows the kitten onto the island and wants to die at the end while the other character falls asleep on a boat and goes home. Hartley never explains why the kitten-character should have attached herself so persistently like that to the kitten: she doesn't have a history with pets; the other character might as well have attached himself to the kitten instead and it would have made exactly as much sense. The author leaves you a gap in his explanations where you can intuit an unstated mesmerism. The religious story and the horror story are both haunted. (The force that haunts the religious story does not appear to be God.)

primarily a politician

When I think of the crowdedness of The Sundial, and the overstocking of characters I wonder if it is a sign that Shirley Jackson did not know what to do to feed the plot so she threw more people in to keep the meat-grinder going with introductions and minor permutations, but very minor; Arabella, Julia, Gloria and Maryjane could have been merged somehow I ween or reckon, a nudge and one could have taken on the plot-functions of another, the other could have been dismissed, the initial one could have been written to explain the new behaviour. What if Julia had been eliminated and Maryjane had run away instead? Is Captain Scarabombardon essential? Why did she bring in this mob, why didn't she stop where she began; she began with a small group of well-delineated people in a closed space, a house, the setting for a closet drama, tensions there, etc, but then she draws more people to the house, a woman and her daughters, then another man, then introduces the reader to the people who live in the village outside the grounds of this mansion, and then diverts away into the story of a murder among the townspeople decades ago; everyone who was involved is dead, including the acquitted woman who might have been the murderer and this, although the readers at the time didn't know it and possibly not even Shirley Jackson herself when she inserted the murder-story in the book, was going to be the seed of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published four later in 1962, with two women living in the house instead of one, sisters, one of them accused of the murder, and the townspeople whispering about them as they do in the story Jackson has inserted into The Sundial.

So one book has fed on the other; the Sundial has this first draft in it and so many things about it feel like the first sketch of a story, the jotted flattened characters, the dialogue of the arch young man that could have been lifted from a stock character in a movie, say one of those 1940s comedies with quick to and fro. But then the way he keeps tapping or scratching on his love's defenses without any apparent hope of actually getting in, like a dog with its door nailed shut, this habit that acts like a nail, nailing him into my memory, poor arch young man (whose name is Essex, the sad bastard), stuck with his love and his stereotypical lines, until the stereotypical lines feel like the well-worn social thing he resorts to because appeals for affection do not work.* A sign, not of lack of imagination in the author but of deprivation in the character. So my imagination works on him, I concoct a character for the man, and I had a similar reaction when I had to read L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between in Year 12 English and over the course of six months became fixated on the extremely minor character Denys, the lead woman's brother, who does virtually nothing except offer to play tennis and I resented the young lead woman, the protagonist-boy, and the annoying lover, who were taking valuable page-room away from forgotten Denys and depriving him of any chance to display the personality I had invented for him in private.

I disliked the boy-protagonist even more after I had seen the movie by Joseph Losey, whose scriptwriter Harold Pinter (though I like his Proust adaptation) had parenthesised the plot with future scenes in which the adulted boy-protagonist visits the now-elderly lead woman and engages with her sadly because the thing he saw in that garden shed thanks to her scarred him for life, her betrayal made him frigid forever, moped this mournful stoic as I sat there throwing objects mentally at the screen and invisibly shouting unsympathetic mottoes I had learned from my time in the world, eg, "Build a bridge," though my feelings I believe were more complicated than those phrases suggested, a mixture of my psychological depths which I evidently preferred not to recognise, signalling this absence of recognition with brief abuses.




*If you have read the book and you want to argue that Essex is only being diplomatic not genuinely affectionate ("Essex is primarily a politician," the older woman says) then I agree with you to and I can see all the evidence for it.