Tale of a Ghostly House
RUBENSTEIN, J. S.
Tale of a Ghostly House The Haunting of Hill House By Shirley Jackson Viking. 246 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by J. S. Rubenstein THERE IS SOMETHING indefinably comic about the title of Shirley Jackson's...
...For years he had envied continental investigators of the supernatural...
...It was Dr...
...The second guest, Theodora, on the other hand, was just Theodora...
...Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts...
...Montague gently but firmly tells her she will have to leave—for her own good, of course...
...The second night of Mrs...
...who discovered the scholarly potential of Hill House...
...The purpose of their stay, the letters stated clearly, was to observe and explore the various unsavory stories which had been circulated about the house for most of its eighty years of existence...
...She imagines she will meet some romantic adventure at Hill House...
...There is something denuding and shameful about the splotching about of her name, but the shame is in a way pleasurable...
...The sum of these minor eccentricities is impressive, but perhaps even more disturbing is Hill House's perfect state of preservation...
...This is appropriate, for the book's situation is not wholly different from that of a boys' novel: Several people arrange to spend some time in a reportedly haunted house...
...None of the villagers will speak about Hill House...
...Somehow, one feels cheated...
...Montague, alas) who has conceived the dangerous experiment that is to become the central event...
...Montague was forced to engage assistants...
...The surviving members of the party return to the outside world: Hill House remains "as it stood . . . for eighty years and might stand for eighty more...
...She climbs the winding iron staircase that leads up and around inside the tower wall to the ledge where the suicide had taken place, but fortunately the others soon arrive, and after some coaxing she is led back down the stairs by Luke...
...her mother had blamed the neighbors for the shower of stones, and Eleanor had blamed her sister...
...Eleanor Vance, who had been invited because a rain of stones had fallen upon her house when she was 12, was "thirty-two years old when she came to Hill House...
...I liked it...
...They tell each other bad brave jokes about the Dracula family and determine to wear bright-colored clothes to cut the gloom...
...bravely, wittily: Eleanor asks whom she is to thank "for a lovely time...
...Eleanor had slipped at graduation exercises and she once wrote poetry...
...This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking...
...There is even the early scene in which a child's innocence touches the doomed figure, and a depiction of the local peasantry at their ritual games—here, flirting over bad coffee in the Hillsdale diner...
...Before she finally gets into her car she momentarily breaks down, but quickly recovers...
...She remembers to wave as she starts out...
...For Eleanor alone of Dr...
...Hill House, the fruit of a dubious sensibility, had been so contrived that its every proportion is slightly wrong: The floors tilt just a wee bit, what seem to be right angles are actually acute, and the floor-plan, like Hell's, is laid out in concentric circles...
...Luke and Theodora demonstrate a growing fondness for each other...
...An overpowering fear had once kept her out: A former owner of Hill House had hanged herself there...
...Eleanor protests that "it's the only time anything's ever happened to me...
...He combed the records of the psychic societies, the back files of sensational newpapers, the reports of parapsychologists, and assembled a list of names of people who had, in one way or another, at one time or another, no matter how briefly or dubiously, been involved in abnormal events...
...except for the couple who maintains it, no one will even venture up the long dirt road that leads to the place...
...The following day passes in dull fashion...
...Everything about the place is calculated to instil a conventional Holly-woodish sort of fear...
...Montague's party the prospect of Hill House offered something more than a lark...
...Theodora, about whom an insistent, vague aura of lesbianism floats, has apparently had quite a variety of objects...
...She is naturally disappointed that her husband can offer no more satisfactory proof of the spirituality of Hill House than the vague statement that there have been "certain manifestations," and is confident that her sympathetic presence will improve things...
...Montague extending an invitation to spend all or a part of a summer at a comfortable country house, old, but perfectly equipped...
...When he had then crossed off the names of those who seemed to him publicity-seekers, of subnormal intelligence, or unsuitable because of a clear tendency to take the center of the stage, he had a list of perhaps a dozen names...
...The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister...
...of these, only two arrived on the appointed date...
...America afforded little of interest...
...Montague arrives for a weekend respite from her yoga lessons...
...In Hill House, so small a detail as her new red shoes is significant, for they are an attribute of her newly discovered personality, "an Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends...
...Montague's visit Eleanor is awakened by someone calling her name...
...Like all her work, it conveys an impression of meticulous care...
...Why am I doing this...
...Her bedroom is "chillingly wrong in all its dimensions" and decorated wholly in blue...
...A devotee of the occult, she converses, by means of a gadget called "the planchette," with the souls of the departed...
...the crude letters say to come home...
...She goes downstairs to the library, which occupies the whole of the round tower...
...The main complaint, I suppose, is that one expects more...
...Reviewed by J. S. Rubenstein THERE IS SOMETHING indefinably comic about the title of Shirley Jackson's new novel...
...A delicious comic relief intervenes when Mrs...
...she does...
...The good-bves begin politely...
...Montague and Luke Sanderson, a nephew of the owner of Hill House and its prospective heir...
...On the way up from the city a snatch of verse had insinuated itself into Eleanor's mind...
...Although it had been mostly unoccupied for 40 years, there are none of the comforting signs of everyday hauntedness...
...Doctor Montague works on his notes...
...at Hill House its tag, after eluding her the whole day, suddenly comes forth : "Journeys end in lovers meeting...
...Everyone starts after her, fearing the worst, and she instinctively runs back to the library...
...Montague's invitation came, her life had been wholly defined by duties and relationships, her most recent residence a cot in the child's bedroom of her sister's house...
...John Montague, an anthropologist whose "true vocation" was the "analysis of supernatural phenomena...
...Over the next week or so she has love affairs of a sort with both Theodora and Luke, but the pity of both affairs is their explicit innocence...
...The convention at work is that of the Transylvanien horror movie—but in burlesque...
...This is not wholly to condemn, however...
...sudden "disgusting" cold, chalked handwriting on the wall, bloodied clothing—they seem more and more directed at Eleanor's discomfiture...
...Her sketches were signed 'Theo' and on her apartment door and the window of her shop and her telephone listing and her pale stationery and the bottom of the lovely photograph of her which stood on the mantel, the name was only Theodora—Theodora was not at all like Eleanor...
...his subjects, for whom we should feel pity and fear, are then introduced...
...Rounding out the cozy little party were Dr...
...Theodora is dispatched upstairs to pack her clothes and Luke around to the stable to fetch the car...
...As against genuinely infested places like Bromlev Rectory in England, where evil could be measured with a thermometer...
...and Eleanor, once more outside of things, desperately hangs on to the conviction that only at Hill House is there meaning for her...
...they equip themselves with suitable clothing and flashlights...
...In The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson dodges the difficult task of presenting the real terrors of Eleanor's existence by the comfortable device of bringing onto the scene an ingeniously elaborated variety of spook paraphernalia...
...Only her name appears in the handwriting on the wall...
...In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly...
...A brief long-range shot is the final scene...
...The scene dissolves into a brief history of the mad scientist (Dr...
...So much of the book is devoted to the rattling of chains that one never gets close enough to Eleanor for her death to appear more than a senseless event...
...and ultimately one of the cast—the least lovable—proves unfit to continue the adventure...
...with what she perceives as "quick cleverness" she jams hard on the gas pedal and turns toward the great tree in the center of the drive...
...Miss Jackson, like Kafka, is a master of the grotesquely funny situation, and in this book is some of her most frightening comic writing...
...they kill us for their sport" — does not make for good fiction...
...Why am I doing this...
...All the tiny inheritance she got upon her mother's death (for which she blames herself) was spent on new clothes...
...Curiously, she seems to enjoy the terror: This, too, gives her dimension...
...and, in her way...
...The terror of the place is still too much ; she goes back up the stairs, bangs about the hall in parody of the principle nocturnal phenomena, and wakes up the whole household...
...After dark, the original members of the party experience the most energetic onslaught of "phenomena" yet directed against them...
...She had been asked because of her ability to identify correctly playing cards held up in another room...
...But the doctor sensibly demurs...
...Eleanor, we are told, had "no one to love...
...She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends...
...She is determined to spend her first night in the nursery, the den of whatever it is that walks in Hill House...
...When Hill House begins to parade its stunts—nocturnal noises...
...I have quoted at some length from the early pages of the book in despair at contriving any other method of conveying an idea of the preciosity with which the scene is set...
...The opening impression, like the background to the list of credits, is a distant, somehow foreboding, presentation of the locus of the story...
...Montague shells peas with the cook and holds forth on "throwing young people together promiscuously...
...each has some experience with the spooks of the place...
...Luke even tells her she is a fine person and he a poor motherless boy...
...Whisper it, declaim it, put it forth in the most sepulchral tones possible, and it still bears the same unfrightening tone as, say, Jerry Todd and the Haunted House...
...Of the dozen people invited, four replied...
...Luke's aunt had insisted as a condition of her renting the house that a member of the family be present: Luke, who had "the best education, the best clothes, the best taste, and the worst companions of anyone she had ever known," was expendable...
...Before Dr...
...There is glass in all the windows, a well-tended lawn, and even a kitchen garden which still produces tomatoes...
...Montague, apart from the mustiness of her room, has a good sleep...
...From his list he first eliminated the names of people who were dead...
...The next morning Dr...
...Gloucester's thesis — "like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods...
...Eleanor Vance, the first to arrive, found "the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased ; get away from here at once...
...Why don't they stop me...
...After careful inquiries about Hill House, he arranged to spend the summer there, with notepads for the recording of awesome phenomena and the complete works of master printer Samuel Richardson as a soporific...
...Her thoughts of immediate departure are dispelled when Theodora comes on the scene...
...Each of these people, then, received a letter from Dr...
...So pathetic a creature is naturally fair game for any kind of malevolence...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
