she has followed her instructions to the letter

Near the end of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, 1951, the character Natalie follows her friend into a dark forest where she realises that this good companion has been employed all along by a presence that somehow wants to abduct her. “She has done as she was told then, Natalie thought; she has brought me here with friendship and without force, she has followed her instructions to the letter and will probably be commended.” What is the presence? Earlier on the bus the two friends guessed that the other passengers might be agents of “them,” but the conversation is so ambiguous that it’s possible for the reader to understand “them” as something fairly routine: a power of convention that wants to repress an imaginative high school student; that sort of they. Now, though, when Natalie anticipates the presence in the woods, it is as if she is expecting a murderer. It is not the powers of society, it is a phenomenal force that draws her specifically away from society in order to approach her. Its strength does not seem to be located anywhere outside her belief in it: not in any institution or animal physicality.

Hangsaman is always discussed as if that event is a manifestation of the trauma that was repressed after a sexual assault in chapter one. Why is it necessary for trauma be shaped like a magical serial killer? This seems like a key question in Jackson and the answer must lie unanswerably outside the books as well as inside them. If you can say why Natalie’s family ignores the evidence of the assault then you might know why Eleanor in the Haunting of Hill House, 1959, has to steal a car, drive away, and be mentally possessed by an unfamiliar structure, why it is necessary for the structure to seem (supernaturally) familiar to her; why, in other words, the exposition of her character has to happen there, and not in the home where she has spent eleven years caring for her dying mother. All of Hill House can be read as a return to the last fifty pages of the earlier book.

(I think that by publishing Hangsaman Jackson found the other story.)

When I started writing this post I was wondering how Jackson might have changed her work if she had been able to read Elfriede Jelinek. Specifically I wondered if she might have lost the magazine archness veneering her sarcasm, if she might have looked at Otto, Gretl, and the twins in Wonderful Wonderful Times / Die Ausgesperrten, 1980 and recognised her own cynicism towards families, the conviction of Natalie’s father that his desires are best and that his disdain for his wife is justified, the wretchedly obedient self-hatred of the wife herself which Jackson makes as unpitiable as possible, for both authors will prickle at benevolence. I was disturbed by what I interpreted as the author’s voluntary or habitual defanging of herself. In Jelinek’s translated sentences play and anger are the same thing: the sentences are negatively energised, the play is jeering, whereas Jackson’s play is play apart, in a place where people have time to sit comfortably every now and then, writing calm, wry statements about the little things in life: a leisure place, and as such it exists apart from the anger or panic or disgust that supply the sentences with their meanings. But there is always something theoretical to appeal to in Jelinek when the characters act on that sarcasm: there are patriarchal mores or the denialism of postwar Austria; there is no ghost they. Jackson is unsealed, more careless, she hides (Jelinek exposes); she is (idea) not writing Hangsaman to reveal a fictionalised sexual assault but to conceal one, as if some wound, not necessarily sexual, has already happened and now it needs obfuscation to hide it away.

a house of her own, located approximately

Shirley Jackson's second daughter Sally, who is about three years old, tells her parents that she owns a house in the middle of a river -- the river runs near their home -- it is the site of her alternate habitation, she says, the middle of this river, "Sally now had a house of her own, located approximately and damply in the middle of the river near our house," writes her mother, though no house there is visible to the parents, and the daughter does not try to sleep in the river-house at night, nor does she react towards this imaginary house with any of the behaviours she might have learnt from her parents; she does not check the gutters for leaks or leaves, she does not install furniture, she does not check the window frames for gaps

Ownership of this river-house and ownership of the solid house are two separate states that do not demand the same kinds of manners, and yet this identical language can be used for each one, I own a house there (said by her parents as they look at their solid house) and I own a house there (said by Sally as she refers to the middle of the river), and the girl not lying, you wouldn't say that about her, though what she announces isn't true, but the words that hang in the grey shadows cast by Shirley Jackson's sentences (She is a child, that's how children talk, you know what they're like, they have these imaginations, are the words that do not need to be written because they write themselves and the other words write them), will cover the distance between a lie and the proposition that the child has offered to her family -- that she owns a house in the middle of the river "in which," writes her mother, "a number of small children Sally's age lived in utter happiness upon lollipops and corn on the cob."

If sentence frameworks were somehow mono-meaningful and physically restrictive (growing or slipping their tentacles into the fleshy world and puppeteering or gripping violently) then her explanation would bind her to the same manners that her parents use when they express their ownership of their solid home, buying furniture, checking the heater when the water goes cold, or, otherwise reverse that and say that, by speaking, she would have forced her parents to behave the way she does, neglecting the heater, forgetting the leaves in the gutter, and so on.

Otherwise the two groups of people would not be able to say I have a house in the middle of the river as well as I have a house by this road: the words would be inconceivable. And when I remember that Geoffrey Hill in his Oxford lecture War and Poetry stated that "words are warps of signification embodying passions," then I see that Sally is freed by her passions into this nonrestrictive field of warps as are we all but socially less free as we pass the ages of seven and nine and eleven and the adults gradually forget to shout, "She has such a wonderful imagination, isn't she sweet," if we tell them we live in the middle of a river with a group of friends our own age, eating lollipops; they no longer feel so dominant and therefore no longer counsel themselves into helplessness when confronted with our imaginations, in short they tell us to shut up.

Sally does not let the words make any heavy demand on her, they are her small wands, she waves them and has an effect on her mother, who takes a typewriter and types the words, "Sally now had a house of her own, located approximately and damply in the middle of the river." The meaning of the words "to have a house" will change for the child from one utterance to another, she imposes this change on the minds of her mother and father, who hear her and understand that she is in and not-in a certain state, which they also, now that they have heard her speak, can't avoid inhabiting, writing "approximately and damply" of a house that is not approximate and damp because it is not there.

"In my river," Sally remarked once, chillingly, "we sleep in wet beds, and hear our mothers calling us," -- giving me a sudden terrifying picture of my own face, leaning over the water, wavering, and my voice far away and echoing.

a few vain attempts at imposing our own angular order on things

So sometimes I think I have seen the same thought running through the heads of two different authors, I look at one work and see a similarity to another work, or I believe that I do, a brilliance discharges in my brain, I seeth, I connecteth, I build for myself in my own head an electrical maze or web that might be somewhat like the one inside the skull of the conspiracy theorist I overheard the other day who was explaining the effect upon the world of J. Edgar Hoover's initials (not his behaviour, only his initials, which begin and end that other name, Jahweh), this seated and excited man who lifted his arms as he began to explain everything he had realised about the connections between one phenomenon and another phenomenon, 1. the initials, 2. that part of the world that is not the initials (We all like to talk, says Javier Marías in his long work, Your Face Tomorrow: the one thing we love to do is talk.)

I run through that maze (and what do I mean by I here, an old question I know but it bothers me that "I run" must suggest to you that I have planned to run and then carried out my plan by running when I do not recall making those particular plans, the running was instant and devised in my mental musculature by forces that do not seem to be me, or are only me insofar as they inhabit a similar space, whatever that is, but moving on before you die of boredom, let's get to the end of this -- ) and believe in that coincidence, even though I know that in a fortnight I could have read the second text for the first time and failed to observe any connection, and that the road I follow from one to the other is less strong than the leg of a fly, the first thing does not inevitably lead to the second but only when the mental wind is blowing right, and one week's connecting bridge is next week's sheer cliff with a strict and repressive face, the stones across the river come and go, these intuitive and fallible connections -- these connections that feel like serendipity can be -- fog -- above what, over what? -- the future: I don't know -- this object I've detected might never have existed although how is that possible -- which leads me to say that as I was reading Shirley Jackson's autobiographical book Life Among The Savages to see if she was going to explain anything about her novels, I noticed that she paid attention to the idiosyncrasies of children's-language, and my mind said to me, "Christina Stead," clearly; after that I noted Christina Stead's presence whenever one of Jackson's children appeared on the page, even though there is no other relationship between Life Among the Savages and The Man Who Loved Children, even the children-characters themselves are not depicted in similar ways, the tones of the two books are different, the intentions of the authors are not the same, every other aspect of the books says, "They are not alike, they share nothing."

Jackson in Life is very wry, the children are grist or corn for her motherhood memoir, and she repeats their conversations as does one who is surrounded by eccentrics, and who wants to prove to a stranger, in this case the reader, that the report of these eccentrics is true, and that the reporter is neither lying nor exaggerating. These people (she implies), how do I deal with them? I'm patient, I say, yes dear, I feel helpless sometimes but I go on. She will cope but they will continue to be strange, and that is the relationship of child to adult in this book.

(There will be this vale inside them; their alien concerns are impenetrable but she can work with them if she is careful or learns certain formulae; they are like the models of all other people, large or small, mostly blank but usually manageable, willing to withdraw the evidence of themselves from public display if you push and twist them a little, the conspiracy theorist falling silent when the speaker whose question time he had hijacked finally decided to cut him off, the audience around him signalling its desires). In Stead the parents do not cope and the adults are not little castles of normality for the children to besiege though when you notice how Henny Pollit, the mother, addresses the child Louie when they go shopping -- like one who is surrounded by eccentrics, yes child, no child, I'm being patient -- you could confidently suggest that if she had been hired to write a memoir it might have the same tone as Jackson's: here I am, a castle of normality, coping with weirdos, helpless in the face of fate but rolling my eyes and shrugging gamely.

(The despair that people remember when they read The Man would not make it into the Henny memoir, this is light and wry, recall, that's the expectation, and the discord in the Pollit house, terrifying, crimson, the violence of harpies and dragons, might be expressed like this line in the Jackson: "After a few vain attempts at imposing our own angular order on things with a consequent out-of-jointness and shrieking disharmony that set our teeth on edge, we gave in to the old furniture and let things settle where they would." That kind of settling for things, in Stead's book, is the sign to the reader that the family is sinking into a terrifying slum ; in Jackson it is cosiness, the disorder is warm, the mother is affectionate.)

would suit one another

This transience in the Heike, the characters pass but the story remains, the reader's transience proves the permanence of the story, we are unbearably destroyed, it unbearably retains itself, meanwhile warning itself that it will pass too. That is its lesson, which it is avoiding.

In Shirley Jackson's Sundial the people are refusing to change and not even refusing, they don't know that change would be possible, they have never thought about it, the proud and crimson notion of self-critique has never occurred to them, and even the end of the world and the death of every other human being is not changing them; the apocalypse won't complete their selfishness, the awesome dynamite of the air leaves them placid.

If they were made immortal somehow by the disaster then they would not change either (because the author has made them changeless), and if you transferred Murasaki Shikibu's characters from the Genji to the modern age they would still refer to people by their titles and by their descriptions (because she has made them that way), the names on their own feel too bare to these Heian souls even though the moderner tells them it is fine, it is a habit now, nobody minds, look you can call me Hiroko, I don't care, I'm wearing a Pokémon hat, but it would be the nature of a name to be ashamed of having been said, when they did it, the word "Hiroko" sounding filthy; they are like polite children who have been required to shout "fuck" and the Shining Prince shines red for he is blushing, he is bringing the old age back in a sluice of blood.

So, stasis in the Shirley Jackson, stasis implied, and in the Heike it is transience implied; the emphasis is on the characters' fortunes, not their behaviour, and those fortunes change. But in The Sundial Shirley Jackson is staring at her people's behaviour and introducing their changed fortune (the end of the world, the destruction of all human life, the firestorm) only as a sort of sarcastic counterpoint.

The reader scans the two books, the reader searches for new lessons since lessons seem to be hinted at or stated in the styles of each, the reader notices that the matriarch of The Sundial and Kiyomori in the Heike are very close to one another personality-wise, they are both stubborn, and the old woman on her deathbed would be calling for Yoritomo's head too, and Kiyomori, if he had been facing the end of the world, would be putting measures in place to assure his ongoing dominance in the new world, as the matriarch does, sorting out her crown and a golden dress, and if the author Shirley Jackson does not respond to her actions by calling her "profoundly sinful" (like the anonymous authors of the Heike regarding Kiyomori) then it is only because she, the writer, has moved into a phase of authorial repose that you could refer to as a cynical shrug. And what small touch or nudge would need to have occurred before she could have written those words, "profoundly sinful," instead of the ones she chose (native to her blood, the words she chose), what rotation on the axis of events, what refounding of cities or nations, the reconstitution of her childhood, the distribution of her feelings in a new direction, pushed there by some event that never in this plane occurred?

The reader looks at Kiyomori, looks at Mrs Halloran, and realises, "Those two would suit one another." This is the moment of inspiration and they announce, I will write a fanfic.

Conjunction! Kiyomori and Mrs Halloran! The fanfic writer pursues that conjunction, the conjunction is the point, the permutations of that conjunction, kinks, romance, murder, or whatever else, the conjunction being an intensifying agent or otherwise species of excitement-food, quick stab to the braincells that then suffer the ancestral memory of their freedom as single-celled organisms millennia ago traversing the nourishing slimes, this conjunction is the vehicle of change, therefore of transience -- the situation, as it has existed up to this point, ends -- the situation before in which Mrs Halloran and Kiyomori were not united and no connection between the Sundial and the Heike seemed possible ends, as, suddenly (genuinely suddenly, I say from experience, since it occurred to me as I was writing that last part of the sentence, "would suit one another" -- okay -- idea!) the connection is possible and likely and even demanded by the thought and why not, in this world where a thought can make anything seem mandatory, pretty much anything; and call that inspiration, call this Georg Trakl's "sweet corpse" at a different register, call it a ruthless magnetism.

oodle ardle wardle doodle

A character performs a small action and becomes memorable, the rest of this character's behaviour could be anything but the detail sometimes drives itself into my memory, the man Essex in Shirley Jackson for example, touching the older woman's elbow, or a number of characters in The Tale of the Heike, which I read in a translation by Royall Tyler who lives in rural NSW and if he had made his translation at home would have done so with the magpies going, "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle," outside the kitchen window or the study window or wherever he works. I am not the man's interior designer but I know what magpies sound like though that bit of euphony was not invented from life but borrowed from a poem.

There might be a more convincing way to write magpie noises but for now I will borrow, so that anyone who has read the poem may identify those words with magpies immediately and submit to their memories of a depressing piece of verse, a very helpless submission, if they have it, and I will tap into the power or habit of their minds and inflict upon them this memory which seems fair enough if my aim is to fill them for one moment with a nebulous magpie-impression, which it might be, I haven't seriously examined my intentions in this regard, and why should we specify real ones when literary ones will do well enough very quickly while I go on to the next thing, which will be the Heike? Human characters suffer in the magpie-poem, they age, the magpies are detached Fates having a good time in a tree, or a bad time, or some sort of enigmatic time, and like this Europe encounters the southern hemisphere in those mono-aural and Nornish idea-birds, which would possibly not have occupied the same position in a piece of poetic art if the poem had been written by someone else from somewhere else; by correlation an Australasian Heike would have had less ritual suicide since it is not a local habit in that region, nor is listening to magpies a local habit in Japan thanks to lack of opportunity which in this instance means lack of magpies, though you will note, however, that the phrase "lack of opportunity" does not always means that magpies are lacking but sometimes something else. This could be the only time in your life that you read the phrase "lack of opportunity" and understand that it means also "lack of magpies." That is speculation and I will add that Japan is not deprived of birds in general. There are many crows there, a lot of them, having witnessed some myself, one specific group of about four or five walking on an asphalt path and staring with alert head-movements at the grass or at their feet, which were doubtless sharp-nailed and craggy-black, and in them mites, mites by the toenails, mites between the scaly armours, and on those mites other mites, and so on down in dizzying seclusion, inside a middle-sized industrial city to the left or west of the Pacific Ocean.

It is also true to say that the magpies possibly would not have occupied that position in the poem if another person from the poet's own country had written it, therefore see that people are like nations with a new culture in each, along with warfares, petty battles, and other terrors, and that they live by planting their flags, now magpie-this, now magpie-that.

Speaking of flags, I had one Year 5 teacher who showed us a scar across the top of his scalp, a scar that had been made, he said, by a magpie, but we had been reading a book about a boy who put an ice cream bucket on his head to protect himself from magpies while he climbed a windmill which makes me wonder now if the story might have been an attempt to make the head-scar relevant to our learning processes. Yet we used to cover our heads with softball gloves when we went under the magpie nesting tree by the decaying netball courts with their rotting soft edges so we all knew that genuine magpie scars were an entirely feasible development of our skins as well as his.

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.

anything to get her own way

"Aunt Fanny is a ghost," was what I thought when she appeared in the book, because she was standing in a corner and talking to a pair of characters who were holding their conversation without answering her, "she is a ghost who doesn't know she's dead, that's why she keeps talking to the living," but Aunt Fanny is alive. And The Sundial is seeded with hints that there is more to the characters than they're allowed to show in their milieu, where nobody listens to them or asks them to elaborate themselves even when they might be trying to tell them that they like them or love them, or even when the little girl keeps informing people that she can't wait to inherit the house from her grandmother and subsequently (the reader can guess it was her) leaves the grandmother figure from her dollhouse on the sundial with pins through it. Maybe she is a murderer by the end of the book but nobody notices. Shirley Jackson I think is doing us the honour, if that's the word, of testing us so that we can prove to ourselves that we're more observant than the characters, whose uncaring habit of ignoring one another is so profound. We receive no reward for it, just the question. Tested again and again. (We are the standard that the characters will never be able to learn from or try themselves against, we are the observant ones, denied them who need us most. They want to be happy, "Aunt Fanny specifically promised us happiness," but they doubt that it will ever happen, "Aunt Fanny will promise anything to get her own way." Any book is a tragedy for its characters. They need us so badly and we never can reach them.) And that terrible dread throughout the book, a sort of dreary tension, waiting with these people who will never flex.

Will you be a little flexible, will you remember that Aunt Fanny mentioned Italian lessons so many pages ago and that must be why she gives her new friend a nickname out of comedia del arte, Captain Scarabombardon?

It is a cold still surface tickled with hints, very austere and doubting us, a challenge.

She didn't like to give interviews when she was alive, Shirley Jackson, nor did she like to talk about her work or what it meant, and she extends the aura of those feelings over her characters, she does not dive into them, she writes about them as if it would not be polite to let the reader know them too well. They hide behind the stereotypes and depths peek out. She is the chill that assails them. Like little iceberg-characters: you look at the tip and guess. Those moments when they drop some remark that lifts them away from their stereotypes; the arch young man has feelings that go deeper than archness. He makes a comment, the others brush past it, the author herself rushes on, she does not dwell, the scene ends. She doesn't often approach her characters closely, she surrounds them with a huge cast that keeps her withdrawing from one to the other, she hands one a line of speech then moves away to someone else, and the longest interior monologue, which belongs to a scared woman stuck in a fog, is there for the sake of suspense, not because we're supposed to love the woman from now on, or know her. The suspense is resolved and the author returns her to a light and well-populated chatter-arena. She's armoured herself with distractions, Jackson. The characters are hopeless and we can't hope for anything from her either, alone, allone, she's testing them too, they fail, they fail, not having our advantage: we know we are reading a deliberate piece of engineering with a purpose behind it: if I look at my hands I can see the book.

withouten any compaignye

At the beginning of Lilith the world is not discovered yet, we need to break into the world or wake up to it, George MacDonald serious with religious joy, and so there is the Everyman Mr Vane going through the mirror for us all, therefore hope, the book ends with a hopeful tone from the author, but in The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (which I read a short time afterwards -- hence the mention -- the primary heart's-blood connection between books on this blog is not country of origin or sex of author but the fact that I have read them -- in the zoo they make their cries to one another --) in Jackson's book there is all surface and no hope; nobody breaks through into anything even though the world is due to end, there will be fire, the wind will scatter branches, the windows will need to be sealed with the backs of wardrobes. But Jackson has the desperate attitude of Mikhail Zoshchenko who gives his people nothing to be aside from selfish and petty. These people in the Jackson are not materially poor like Zoshchenko's people but they don't have any other model to follow and so they are all selfish because this is how the author (you assume) feels that people are, incurably and forever: the story extrapolates that forever.

Jackson is somewhat like the characters herself but not quite, she pays attention to them but her attention is cool and covert and she is not sympathetic even towards Aunt Fanny, sad and brittle, who is bullied by the rest of the cast.

Nobody listens to Aunt Fanny until one day when her dead father appears and tells her how to save them from Armageddon. The characters are only a short distance from stereotypes (so they are distanced from any illusion of being real people, you cannot feel that you are touching them); you could sum them up quickly as the arch young man or the domineering matriarch or the vapid wife -- they are ideas about people -- the arch young man's dialogue is typically arch, and the domineering matriarch domineers and the vapid wife mulls through the book eating chocolate and talking about the last movie she saw, which was the story of a doctor saving a tribe in a jungle. She spends days talking to different people about the acting and the romance but she never realises that her own tribe is sick in a different way, and so she can't do anything to heal them, she can't say, "We are sick." That the people are lonely and sick like this is Jackson's main point I think.

Aunt Fanny's dead father is preceded by warmth, warm marble arms and human statues; she panics, the living are not this warm. There is a confusion of warmth and fear. The arch young man in a roundabout way lets the domineering matriarch know that he loves her or likes her; she is thinking about her house. Shirley Jackson writes a huge house, as usual, overlooking a village, as usual, and people in the house, then the sundial on the lawn with "What is this world?" written across the disc, which is Chaucer, The Knight's Tale:

What is this world? What asketh men to have?
Now with his love, now in his cold grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.

Allone is the book's key word, the word that opens the rest, all lone, all one, the characters are a collection of ones, and even after Armageddon when they are going to live in a beautiful garden, the domineering older woman is going to ensure that she is allone: she orders a crown and a gold dress to make sure that nobody in Eden mistakes her for anyone else. Shirley Jackson believes that they will not change even after the world has ended, nothing will convert them, for, "you," says a little girl on page one hundred and thirty-two, "all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different. But I don't suppose people get changed any by just a new world." They will accept the end of the world, they will not accept the ends of themselves, their selfish selves, they will not sprout into new selves, they will not change. The tone of the book is dread but what are they dreading? The same state they ensure, which is loneliness. Or the contact that would end it. O prevailing chill of stasis. This chill the same chill I've felt in all of the Jackson books I've read, this bitter ice that clenches itself around the characters and stops them ever moving too far in mind or limb. She writes about houses and her characters do not move.

if I know one thing better than another

Meanwhile Holbrook Jackson talks about book collectors, and bookworms, and people who love to bind their books, and people who love to assemble libraries of books they never read, and impoverished people who spend their money on books instead of food, and people who will decorate a wall with false bookshelves, but this Bibliomania of his was published initially in 1930 and when I'd finished it I realised that he hadn't mentioned lists of books, which today are everywhere, and then I wondered if I should say to myself, "That's proof the book is old, people didn't publish book lists back then, they didn't make a big thing of them," or if I should say, "They did exist and he forgot them," but instead I wavered and said: "In this respect I am not adequately informed about the habits of bookpersons; I do not know," which only confirms the usefulness of knowledgeable books like Holbrook Jackson's.

1001 Books to Read Before You Die, is one of the lists I'm thinking of, and then there's the ones you see on blogs or just online: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, and Reading Challenges (the Cat Book Challenge, the Daphne du Maurier Challenge, the Scandinavian Reading Challenge, the Modern Library Reading Challenge, the Essay Reading Challenge, the Art History Reading Challenge, the Read Your Name Challenge for which "the challenge is to read your name in book title first letters, ultimately spelling out your name," and more)* until it seems that if the world was made for nothing more than the production of a book as Mallarmé said, then books were made for the making of lists of books, and that, faced with the great spreading-out of viewpoints that books represent, the reaction is to apply a focus, as we try to make the sun more useful by putting it through a magnifying glass and setting an ant on fire.

A search for focus, for accuracy, for measurement -- huge measurements if the list is a Great Literature canon, and measurement on the micro scale if it's one of those personal canons, like the one Junot Díaz gave to his Oscar Wao, although from the point of view of a person, which is the point of view we all have, I think it's the other way around, and the macro foreground is the personal canon, acquired with our own labour, and the background, the more minor thing, is the Great Literature canon, which exists somewhere like a cloud on a mountain (glance up and there it is, the cloth on the rock, and this, say the Capetonians, came about after a pirate had a smoking competition with the devil -- and likewise the Great Books canon is assembled out of other people's huff-and-puffing work), and phantom university professors might flit by your shoulders shrieking at you if you haven't read Candide (Nick Hornby suffers from that vision) but I think you can neglect the cultural canon in ways you can't neglect the personal canon, the personal canon nestling close to the heart, discovered by you, and the other one existing mystically, outside, like the neighbourhood outside your window, into which you step, but in which you do not live (as John Berger would like you to live) -- no, you live inside your house, among your furniture. Lord of the Rings is part of Wao's furniture; he's furnished the house himself, he puts his books in order solemnly, setting up this secret name or hieroglyph, on which he might meditate as Berger meditates on one of his landscape paintings: "It is only its shortcomings that fascinate me. In these I can see the possibilities of a more accurate metaphor: I can feel all that has escaped me."

The painting is a disguised arrow, pointing to the landscape he has seen and to the idea of himself seeing it, it is the painting not of a tree or a hill but of his viewpoint and contained in that painting invisibly is John Berger, sitting in nature with a paintbrush and possibly a folding chair, both eyes open. "John Berger is not blind," says the painting. "In case you thought he was."**

The private canon, pointing to the personality of the owner, is charged with meaning when the owner looks at it, although other people might grin. "Lord of the Rings? Then he's just a run of the mill fantasy geek," an ignorant boy, this Wao kid, suckled on the obvious. "He hasn't even bothered to go searching for unusual fantasy novels, he's just grabbed the big fat blatant one."

-- the world says, staring at the Wao bookshelves. "I like fantasy," it adds, "but eclectic fantasy please, I like to dig a little, you know what I mean? I have taste. I like Lud-in-the-Mist. Hope Mirrlees. Older than Tolkien. Nineteen twenty-six!" I stare at people's bookshelves, and I feel closer to them when I see a book I know, although I wonder what they think of it; something different to me probably, and so we are apart after all.

The personal canon or the desert island book list is another face for yourself, built by yourself, not the one nature happens to have given you, no, I'll do my own, and stick it together out of the debris I've come across, Wao might say, this fortress and this signboard, yes, Lord of the Rings here and the Dragonlance novels there -- and these are scraps that I will solder together, selecting and discarding (only the first two Dragonlance trilogies, not the later books), and with them I will build a cyborg part, or addendum, which will reach out into the world like a tentacle, directed by myself but not made of flesh, my new hand, waving to strangers and saying, "Hello, I'm here," or, as I watch, picking up a pin that was too small for my natural fingers. If Holbrook Jackson's people had met Nell from The Haunting of Hill House they would have wanted to cure her with books: if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me, he quotes from Eugene Field, and better a library than a monstrous house.

The reader knows that Nell hears the Bibliomania people calling to her, because her excuse, when she tries to explain to Dr Montague why she has been running out of her room at night in a haunted house, is, "I came down to the library to get a book" -- which she offers up as proof of absolute sanity.







* Examples: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, a page of Reading Challenges, and 1001 Books to Read Before you Die.

** Of course this means that if you own a realistic painting, a landscape or a portrait, then there is an invisible painter sitting on your table or standing on the kitchen counter, or hovering around whatever room the painting is in, exchanging a constant gaze with the artwork, staring ferociously at your wall, and you walk through this person, or put plates through them, or something like that, every time you move in front of the painting. My aunt has two photographers eyeballing walls in her dining room.

small seeking sounds, feeling the edges

In this post I am going to give away the endings to The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both by Shirley Jackson.







I walked home today, past the 99c Store, past the vacant lots where the stunted mesquite trees grow here and there like ferns, past the broken plastic, the blue dumpsters, the men with shopping trolleys who hook their stomachs over the sides of the blue dumpsters, the Mexicans on wooden stools who crush aluminium cans under a set of pine trees, and I came in, and sat down at the computer, and when I saw a Venn diagram online I began to picture one of Henry James' books as a large circle with small circles pressing against the outside and overlapping slightly in each place, and the book itself was the large circle and the subjects of his metaphors, allusions, etc, the spectre of the judgmental anonymous they who make Lady Agnes wonder if her house is mentionable, were the smaller circles, all coming in from the outside, like spermatozoa to a huge egg, always reminding it of themselves, as metaphors do, and intersecting with it everywhere so that it was trapped, in danger of leaking.

But The Haunting of Hill House was simpler, and it was a pair of circles overlapping in the middle, normally Venn-wise, and one of the circles was the character Nell or Eleanor, and the other was Hill House itself, and by the end of the book Nell is living completely in the overlap at the centre, which represents a point of extreme solitude, this upright I with its sharp angles top and bottom and no space inside to lie down or be comfortable -- she is always standing and always alone.

I've read House recently, and one of Shirley Jackson's other books, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and in both cases the story ended in a unification between two parties, like this, and in both cases the unification is preceded by violence, in both cases the outside world seems hostile, and yet the mood of each ending is different. Nell and Hill House make a cold marriage, despairing and cruel, but in Castle the two sisters have decided that they love one another so much that they want to stay together until they die, walling themselves off from the rest of the world, which comes to them and leaves baskets of eggs on the doorstep, or calls out to them in an angry voice then goes away frustrated when they don't reply, treating them like totemic witches or madwomen.

This is an idyllic ending, I think, because life for both of them was going to be so disastrous otherwise that staying together in the kitchen of their burnt-out mansion, deep in love and eating jam, is the best thing that could have happened to them, and may we all have such good relationships with our siblings, even when they are mass poisoners and leave arsenic in the sugar bowl.

But it is a creepy ending, some say (I've been skimming online reviews), this closed-off partnership between unusual sisters, one mad, one gentle, but love between unusual people is the same happy ending whose nonachievement we cry about in Phantom of the Opera and King Kong, so sad, we say, so sad, he was such a tragic figure, yet when it happens in Castle, it's creepy. People don't know what they want, I swear.

Nell is lonely, but she was not born lonely, as Hill House was born lonely, "by itself against its hills," and she was not built warped, as the house was built warped. She learnt to be lonely during the years she spent caring for her sick mother. Nell "had no friends," says Jackson, and although for a while she thinks she might have made some this idea turns out to be a failed hope, she is too self-critical and shy to make friends, she reacts awkwardly when Theodora tries to praise her or paint her toenails, and this Hill House adventure, which was going to be the liberation of a brand new Nell ("I have at last taken a step," she thinks as she is driving to the house, believing that she is breaking free, more steps will follow, the rest of her life is approaching) instead confirms that she does not have a knack for togetherness, she is natively alone, and through a procedure of supernatural hauntings and social missteps she inches closer into an intimacy with the lonely house and its freezing doorway and its eerie cherubs and its vanishing black dog and the bodiless booming noise in the hallway: "the crashing came again, and Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake."

She wavers, as humans waver, but the house does not. The house never relinquishes its malevolence. It does not change mood. It is itself, like a character in Peake going to the Cool Room. Like a Peake character it has a massive presence. Jackson's other characters are thin when you compare them to the house; her Dr Montague is the stock figure of a professor, and Luke is not much more than a gesture in the direction of a flippant young man. He's a piece of wood with the word BANTER nailed on the front. If Swelter or Countess Gertrude appeared among Jackson's characters, they would dominate them as firmly as the house does. These characters are thin because they are tools, the author's tools, and once they have helped her to unite Nell with the house she flicks them away in two sentences.

Hill House is "not kind" she tells us, but it loves Nell better than the author loves Dr Montague.

Nell is unable to make friends without discarding the loneliness that has become her essence or her armour. She won't or can't discard it. Yet she wants friends, she wants to be part of the group, and at the same time she wants her own house, she wants to live behind a set of walls, isolated and private, she wants togetherness and isolation one after the other, a problem that the house may have solved for her when it brings her into itself at the end of the book, and she becomes a haunting spirit, inhabiting that Venn diagram overlap. "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality," Jackson says in the first line of the book, and Nell has to go mad before the house can eat her up, she hears a voice inside her head, she talks to statues, and what has ruined her sanity? She has realised that she is alone.

Perhaps now she is no longer being pulled in two directions, perhaps she has become inhuman in her inner harmony, entering a nirvana of ghosthood. The sisters at the end of Castle have reached a sunnier unity. Never again will they have to choose between their home and the outside world. Constance will not be tempted by the idea of boyfriends. This is the acme of a decisive ending -- all problems are solved. But Jackson has made the situation terrible. All problems are solved, but now nobody can escape the solution. The solution is insoluble.

Nell wants what the monsters outside my bedroom door wanted, she wants to come in and be part of things, as I did too when I was starting school, confronted with other children in the playground who had it in their power to say, "Go away, we don't want you." Spare us from, "Go away, we don't want you," but Nell is never spared. She buckles under the nightmare of all children. It is friendship or death with her in the end, this huge and crucial value put on friends by a person who never has any. "Good bye," she says to her associates, not friends, on the second last page, "Good bye, good bye," though it is the last time that she will ever say good bye to anybody, because if any of them visit the house after this then she will be trying to come in to their rooms, banging and rattling, or laughing, or doing some other terrifying thing -- "pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in" -- and what was a child like me supposed to do when adults are capable of behaving like that?

Away she drives to Hill House as if off to adulthood, free from her mother at last, and failure finds her quickly, she is tempted, she succumbs, and no wonder I didn't want her in my room: go away, lonely silent Nell, says my seven-year-old self, go away.