Shirley Jackson's 'Magic Style'
WOLFF, GEOFFREY
WRITERS^WRITING Shirley Jackson's 'Magic Style' By Geoffrey Wolff 4?l T HAS ALWAYS been a comfort to me to make | stories out of things that happen, things like moving, and kittens, and Christmas...
...Rather they are the life of the novel...
...In none of Miss Jackson's tales that I have read is there an overt suggestion of sexuality...
...And whose best-known story is about a harmonious, happy village that each year chooses by lot a townsman to murder with stones...
...It is, without qualification, the darkest, most sinister novel I have read...
...That "but" is astonishing—wonderful—but of course...
...Mary Katherine Blackwood is mad, a murderer, a witch, and a child...
...It is superficially a ghost story, but really a moonscape, pitted and menacing, of an old woman's fear and bewilderment...
...A family, and within that family one person, is chosen by lot...
...She did this not by writing on several levels?hiding, as Hawthome often did, her "real" intention?but by permitting a character's psychic life to reveal itself through representative gestures...
...It is about a widow who buries her artist husband and moves to a rooming house in a strange city...
...The earth itself, imagined as a provisional substance, "unpredictable and shifty . . . might move under her feet and sink...
...To be told of "The Lottery" is doubdess to suspect it of the worst kind of sham and artifice...
...was that a wire swinging wild...
...The heroine meets her landlady for the first time and is asked: "And what do you do, Mrs...
...her motives for fleeing are lightly sketched or left entirely unrevealed...
...The sidewalk was set only upon earth, might move under her feet and sink, carrying her down and alone into the wet choking ground, and no one to catch her arm or a corner of her coat and hold her back...
...Her sister, Constance, is a beautiful girl, 10 years older than "Menicat," teetering between madness and self-understanding...
...A very early story, "A Cauliflower in Her Hair" (1943), hints, in a kind of premonition of Lolita, at a father's desire for his young daughter's casual school acquaintance and at the child's sophistication...
...Miss Jackson sets many of her stories in rooming houses of strange cities...
...Events are suggestive, as they are in a dream...
...The madness is so tangled with the ordinary that we cannot shrug it away or hide from it...
...In "The Lottery" (1948) the environment is comforting and fruitful...
...By 1965 she had mastered the kind of nutty-serious dialogue that she had tended toward for a long while...
...The menace she feels moves from the general to the singular...
...The plot describes a separation and a reconciliation...
...This barbarism, too, is carried out in both a democratic and civilized manner...
...We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962—not in this volume) is Miss Jackson's most justly famed exploration of the nature of communitas, family unity, guilt and inheritance...
...The secret of her art in this novel is her "comfort" in describing "those things that happen...
...Her stories seem ingenuous, yet they are impacted, implacably written...
...The underlying "meaning" concerns the danger of freedom from the known...
...I dabble in the supernatural...
...It is impossible for me to tell whether Miss Jackson's repression of explicit sexuality was a function of personal nicety oi aesthetic intention, but it is a strange omission...
...It is also, intentionally or not, very sexy...
...The Bus" is a very wierd tale of an aging, hysterical woman left by accident or design at a hostile and deserted crossroad on a rainy night...
...Come Along With Me presents samples of Miss Jackson's work from 1938 to 1965...
...all experience is good for something...
...WRITERS^WRITING Shirley Jackson's 'Magic Style' By Geoffrey Wolff 4?l T HAS ALWAYS been a comfort to me to make | stories out of things that happen, things like moving, and kittens, and Christmas concerts at the grade shool, and broken bicyles...
...To read it is to know that it does not unappropriated join a brutal action to a pastoral setting...
...Magic" is a word so commonly abused to modify "style" that it has lost its minted look...
...There is solace in the gende weather, the green trees, the ordered town—a town that must be the ideal of all in this country who would maintain law and order, who would resurrect the old values...
...Now, three years after Shirley Jackson's death, her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, has edited a collection of her writing (Come Along With Me, Viking, 243 pp., $5.95...
...Magic and witchcraft exist wholely in the mind: The tale does not indulge that impossible mix of the physical and the surreal characteristic of James' The Turn of the Screw...
...Besides the title piece, a lamentably short first section of an unfinished novel, the collection includes 16 stories and three lectures...
...It ends with a brilliant device: The woman is aroused from a nightmare only to repeat it in waking fife...
...In Freud's lexicon, the dream, or nightmare, is an allegory of hidden motives...
...Motorman's many marvelous fines...
...Yet without at all straining for effect or implication, the story manages to substantiate paranoia, to invest objects with supernatural energy...
...Although very short, this story does many things...
...Traffic with spirits...
...The reader is moved beyond his expectations by some manipulation of his understandings that is complex and artful...
...Yet, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and "The Lottery" notwithstanding, Shirley Jackson was not being ghoulishly macabre, or even ironic, when she spoke of her comfort in making stories out of things that happen...
...The story usually concerns itself with how she is affected by the liberation she sought...
...The townspeople suspect gentle Constance of the crime and are unnaturally cruel to the Blackwoods...
...The blatant symbols—poison, the garden, the collective will of the community, the inherited house cleaned by fire—are not things and ideas that stand for something other than themselves...
...Again, the surreal and the precisely detailed, the imagined and the heard, tug at one another, subjecting the story to the most unusual kind of tension...
...Come Along With Me would, I presume, have been a very funny novel...
...Her characteristic manner was to compose a tale of rather ordinary occurences so that it gradually began to radiate menace and corruption...
...Typically, the heroine is described after she has run away...
...The village is imagined as the apotheosis of the concept of community...
...In Miss Jackson's great novel, the nightmare lives on the surface, so terrifying because it seems so ordinary...
...They are invariably about women, and usually about women trying to escape: from their parents or their husbands or the memory of their dead husbands...
...The girl's uncle, Julian, an urbane old man who is the only survivor of Merricat's remarkable crime besides Constance, similarly rocks back and forth from lunacy to wholesome good sense...
...you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words...
...We hear the voice again in my favorite of Mrs...
...Once an old man followed me, but he turned out to be real...
...Seances, messages, psychiatric advice, that kind of thing...
...Friendship and trust and good will are everywhere evident...
...Physical touch is all Miss Jackson leaves unnamed and unexplored...
...We Have Always Lived in the Castle forever verges toward Gothic Romance but never surrenders to it...
...The story seems perfectly true...
...Food is important to the Blackwoods, and gardening, and household neatness and hospitality and good manners and straight talk...
...There it is: the casual voice describing, comfortably, as though it were commonplace, the incredible...
...It is the perversion of these qualities (poison in the family's sugar) that so unnerves us...
...Down below, perhaps no more than two or three feet below, was the devouring earth, unpredictable and shifty...
...The murder six years before, centerpiece of Merricat's narrative, is understood as at once a parable of supernatural power and a real event, heavy with expected consequence...
...A Cauliflower in Her Hair" and the unfinished novel are the best things, aside from "The Lottery," that appear in this valuable collection...
...Starting out for the restaurant, she is ". . . very much aware of the fact that for the first time she moved knowingly and of choice through a free world, that of all her life this alone was the day when she had followed a path she made alone . . ," One paragraph later, as she walks along the street, fear begins to tug at her sleeve: "The loving concern with which she put her feet down one after another on the sidewalk became without perceptible change, terror—was the cement secure...
...Remarkably attuned to ordinary things, the woman finds no comfort in their familiarity...
...Just one thing (often with Miss Jackson it is just one thing): to cultivate this paradise the good citizens must ritually sacrifice one of their number every year...
...A sense of community is won at a price, and communal guilt and fear are seen as more binding than communal love...
...Shirley Jackson's particular genius was to discover the commonplace details that co-exist with poisonous events, and the deadly, supernatural possibilities that agitate the commonplace...
...But if there is still any excuse to couple the two words, Shirley Jackson's effects provide it...
...This is the chattily domestic assurance of a lady whose most celebrated novel is narrated by an 18-year-old girl who poisoned to death her brother, her aunt, her mummy and her daddy at the age of 12...
...One wonders what the 18-year-old murderer looks like, feels like...
...The occasion for her remark was a lecture called "Experience and Fiction" (1958), during which she also said ". . . nothing is ever wasted...
...A series of quite unbelievable crises end in the death of Uncle Julian, the grotesque mob insanity of the villagers, the partial burning of the house, and the complete self-isolation of the sisters in crazed retreat from a hostile world outside their boarded-up windows...
...When he telephones to reason with her, she agrees to meet him for dinner, but insists that for her it shall be no more than one way among many to pass the evening, that she will not return to him...
...Miss Jackson's way, open and straightforward, is much more chilling...
...In "A Day in the Jungle" (1952) a wife has fled her (presumably) ordinary husband to hole up in a hotel, which he locates without difficulty...
...Motorman...
...we are made very alive to its absence...
...Aside from We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the unfinished book exhibits Shirley Jackson's best prose...
...They are also consecutive and measurable as they are in life...
...The three live in a beleagured old mansion...
Vol. 51 • September 1968 • No. 17
