Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons (2013).

I knew I would have to get around to her sooner or later.  It was a question of when, not if.  That's because some authors are good at casting long, and influential shadows, and that couldn't be more the case than with the author I've got to talk about here.  She's been on my radar since perhaps as far back as the late 1990s, when I first ran across a mention of her in a children's book of Horror trivia.  That's where I heard mention of a book called The Haunting of Hill House, and its author Shirley Jackson.  Come to think of it, that was the second time I ran into a mention of her, not the first.  That came from yet another trivia book.  This one devoted a two-page section to a 1963 Robert Wise film.  This time is was titled as just The Haunting.  It was one of those chance encounters, looking back on it.  One of those fortunate accidents that life is sometimes kind enough to toss your way when you aren't looking.  I didn't have a clue who Shirley Jackson was when I picked up these two references collections (one of whose title now escapes me, except for the cover art, which depicted an old mausoleum graveyard painted in shades of light, dusky purple, and blood red).  I was just a young, budding fan with a growing fascination in the kind of fiction that goes bump in the night.  It was at a point in my life which is probably familiar to veteran Horror fans.  It's that moment where it seems like you've just discovered a brand new vista opening onto a hitherto unknown world, one whose landscape is both creepy, forbidding, and somehow wonderful and enchanting by turns.

If you're a fan of this sort of genre and (perhaps to your own surprise) you mean it, then looking back I'd have to say how it's always those first, great, influential years, where you're just starting to get your feet wet by dipping your toes into dark waters, that somehow manage to retain the most importance.  That's the point in life where the sample platters from the genre's table that you allow yourself to enjoy can go a long way toward determining just what kind of a Gothic enthusiast you'll grow up to be.  In my case, everything I watched or read back then tended in the same direction.  For whatever reason, I just kept getting drawn back to the what might be called the Classics of the format.  In my case, it first started out with John Bellairs.  Books like The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are what amounted to my introduction to Fear Fiction.  Bellairs was the one who introduced my impressionable young mind to the sense of the Classical Gothic quality that Horror can have at its most sophisticated pitch.  Schwartz and his partner in crime, Stephen Gammell, meanwhile were the one's who gave me my first taste for all the gory details that the genre can sometimes be pretty great at.  The Scary Stories tomes were pretty much my generation's version of the the Tales from the Crypt comic books.  It was all like discovering two halves of the same Creative Idea all at once.  It was the discovery of an entire, Weird world, and for a number of reasons, I was hooked in seconds flat.

If I had to give a reason for why it was so easy for someone like me to find a place amidst the fiction of clanking chains and screams in the darkness, then the best explanation I have is the simplest.  It's because I'd met people who seemed like they kind of understood where I was coming from.  Another way to say it is to claim I'd made some new friends who sounded like they were on the same wavelength as me.  Looking back across the passage of years, what I think I can explain now that I probably couldn't then was that what drew me to Horror must have been some level of subconscious realization that the creators of these books were coming from a place that was at least similar to my own.  You have to have to know what it's like to be scared in order to write like that.  Not just to experience fear, either, but also the frightening sense of powerlessness that comes from being just a kid stuck in a world governed by adults.  One where most of the rules are so difficult to comprehend, and it seems as if the weight of that whole, damned entire world is going to fall on you if you aren't careful.  I'm not talking about anything dire on a personal level, here.  It was never anything like that.  Instead, it's a simple matter of being just five and realizing that it's impossible to get a good night's sleep once your parents have tucked you in, and then made the dumbest choice of their lives by not even leaving you with a simple night light to keep you company, compounding it with trite words of comfort.

Does anyone else remember times like that when you were a kid?  Your parents meant well, yet they could never truly connect with what you were going through in terms of a personal fear factor.  It's disconcerting as hell, and the worst thing about that happening when you're still just a child is that it carries the implication that in terms of handling your fears, you're on your own.  When you're a kid, that's a real mind-bending realization to arrive at in such a young age.  Maybe that's why there might have been this strange yet genuine sense of comfort that came from discovering the work of artists like Schwartz, Gammell, and Bellairs.  On some level, a part of my mind understood that I was running across guys who were no more than a bunch of little kids who still knew damn well what it was like to feel that particular grain of powerlessness that comes with being a scared youngster who can't even turn to the "adults" (so-called) for help.  What made discovering the Horror genre so welcoming (as I can see now) is that it's best described as Art created by people who are, themselves, scared.  That's not meant to be a catch-all description, one person's fear could be another's enthusiasm, or else just a normal part of the wallpaper of life.  It helps to remember that subjectivity has its role to play in the phenomenon I'm talking about.  Yet writers like Bellairs and Schwartz had a knack for zeroing in on the universal fears.

Their works function as both a catalogue and exploration of the things that have both fascinated and frightened them by turns over the course of their lives.  The net result of placing these shared worries down on paper meant they were able to participate in the Horror genre's strangest, yet somehow genuine accomplishment.  They were able to carve out a safe space which, paradoxically, allowed them to examine and in some cases even confront the things that scared them.  Schwartz's now iconic use and recontextualization of world folklore, in particular, offers young readers a great means of exploring tougher themes and subject matter in a way that was surprisingly effective, considering the art style that went along with it.  This creative efficacy was made possible by the fact that one of the points of world folklore is that it is meant to function as a repository of the collective wisdom of humanity.  It's never quite the same thing as moral didacticism, yet the ability to teach a lesson to the audience can be spoken of as part of the natural bells and whistles of the format proper.  As such, it isn't until you return to stories like "Harold" later on, and realize that you've gained an early understanding of real world issues such as bullying and bigotry.  It's just one of the many reasons for why collections like the Scary Stories series have become household items on a level similar to that of the Brothers Grimm (it also doesn't hurt that Schwartz and Gammell are drawing from the same well as their earlier Romantic predecessors).  At least this is as good an explanation I've got for why I became a Horror junkie.

Learning that there are other little big kids out there who went through some of the same fears as you, and needing the format of artistic expression as means of dealing with it, can go a long way toward developing a sense of natural comradery between the writers and their audience.  It's what allowed Schwartz and Bellairs to become my first major influences as a reader.  Pretty soon, things just began to pick up the pace from there, and it didn't take me long to become acquainted with all things Gothic.  Not long after meeting the two authors described above, others soon came along to carry my interests further afield.  Thanks to the efforts of guys like Steven Spielberg and Vincent Price, I was more or less told about writers like Edgar Allan Poe.  It was an old Disney film that alerted me to the efforts of Arthur Conan Doyle, add in a dash of R.L. Stine, Jane Yolen, and Bruce Coville for the middle school years, before graduating up a grade or two to Stephen King, and you've pretty much got my education in all things American Gothic.  At the same time, it's like this is an educational process that's never stopped, really.  Even today, I can't keep from digging further up and in to the realms of Weird Fiction in the hopes of learning more about why I like to read or watch stories of things going bump in the night.  It was somewhere in the middle of all this that I made the acquaintance of Ms. Shirley Jackson.

I got to know her on a gradual level.  It started with catching just a few choice references in a couple of pop culture trivia books.  Yet I guess that must have been enough, because from there I can recall getting curious enough about the exploits of Hill House to the point where I finally bought a copy of the book.  It took a while to get into, and I recall having some difficulty maneuvering along with the kind skewed, almost schizoid narrative voice that Jackson chooses to channel her entire story through.  In fact, if I'm being honest, then the truth is (say sorry) that I needed to find a good audiobook version in order to help me understand what was going on.  With the help of the talented narration of the late and great David Warner, however, the character of Eleanor Vance and her ghostly encounters soon came to life for me in a way that didn't just make the novel intelligible at last, it also sort of made me a Jacksonian for life.  The Robert Wise adaptation is no slouch either, so as I'm concerned.  It was like going all the way back to where it started with John Bellairs, and discovering that the initial contact point where you fell in love with the genre was suddenly able to take its inaugural hints of Gothic sophistication, and somehow elevate those notes into a higher, more adult voice.  The great thing about Jackson's voice in the novel is that she is able to utilize those same notes to deliver a grand narrative.

There's a great deal to be said later on about Jackson's strengths as a literary stylist, and how she's able to make this work to her advantage, yet for now it will be enough to get to know the author herself, first.  What kind of a personality must a writer have in order to create a setting like Hill House, or the Lottery Village in the first place?  According to her most recent biographer, Ruth Franklin, "Some writers are particularly prone to mythmaking. Shirley Jackson was one of them. During her lifetime, she fascinated critics and readers by playing up her interest in magic: the biographical information on her first novel identifies her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” To interviewers, she expounded on her alleged abilities, even claiming that she had used magic to break the leg of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” was an oft quoted line. Roger Straus, her first publisher, would call her “a rather haunted woman.”

"Look more closely, however, and Jackson’s persona is much thornier. She was a talented, determined, ambitious writer in an era when it was still unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. She was a mother of four who tried to keep up the appearance of running a conventional American household, but she and her husband, the writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, were hardly typical residents of their rural Vermont town—not least because Hyman was born and raised Jewish. And she was, indeed, a serious student of the history of witchcraft and magic: not necessarily as a practical method of influencing the world around her (it’s debatable whether she actually practiced magical rituals), but as a way of embracing and channeling female power at a time when women in America often had little control over their lives. “Rather haunted” she was—in more ways than Straus, or perhaps anyone else, realized. Jackson’s brand of literary suspense is part of a vibrant and distinguished tradition that can be traced back to the American Gothic work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (2-3)".  This ability to tap into the Gothic tradition seems to have had a by now pretty familiar sounding point of origin.  Like a lot of the author's mentioned so far, Shirley was a scared child growing up.

Her parents were wealthy New England socialites who decided to relocate to the West Coast of San Francisco and live among the beautiful people.  It's telling that when it comes to the birth and raising of their only daughter, there remains some dispute over whether she was a wanted pregnancy or not.  "It was not", Franklin tells us, "a warm home.  Even if (Geraldine Jackson, sic) had been pleased to have motherhood thrust upon her in her first year of marriage (and by all accounts she was not), Shirley was hardly the child she had imagined. “The pregnancy was very inconvenient,” Joanne Hyman, Jackson’s elder daughter, says. Geraldine had been groomed to be a socialite...“She was a lady, Geraldine was,” Laurence Hyman remembers. And she tried valiantly to shape her daughter in her image. In one of the earliest photographs of Shirley, the little girl wears an immaculate ruffled white party dress, white shoes and socks, and a giant starched bow nearly the size of her head. But it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform to Geraldine’s ambitions for her. “I don’t think Geraldine was malevolent,” recalls Barry Hyman, Jackson’s youngest child. “She was just a deeply conventional woman who was horrified by the idea that her daughter was not going to be deeply conventional.” “Geraldine wanted a pretty little girl, and what she got was a lumpish redhead,” Joanne Hyman says bluntly (23-24)".

Here's where a bit of gear switching is in order.  What Franklin tends to tip-toe around, an earlier biographer such as Judy Oppenheimer chooses to tackle head-on, without mincing words.  That's why the information she passes along in the first ever Jackson biography, Private Demons, seems worth recounting here.  The way Oppenheimer tells it, "Geraldine Jackson was not a tactful woman. Years later, when Shirley was struggling to make sense of her own problems, she told her daughter Joanne a chilling story: when Shirley was an adolescent, Geraldine had informed her she was an unsuccessful abortion. It could have been the simple truth—Geraldine had a tendency to blurt things out around her daughter—or one of Shirley’s intuitive guesses, but one thing was certain. This was the way Geraldine had made her feel, throughout her life. As a beautifully turned-out woman, Geraldine, having resigned herself to maternity, expected at the very least a beautifully turned-out daughter. Fashionable, superficial, and utterly conventional—a miniature version, in fact, of Geraldine Jackson herself, who was a strong adherent of the child-as-jewelry school of parenthood. 

"The fact that the child she gave birth to—exactly nine months and one day after her wedding—turned out to be Shirley seems almost too ironic, one of those quirks of fate second-rate novelists delight in. For Shirley was odd from the start, a restless, high-strung, difficult child; brilliant, messy, torrentially creative, and far from ornamental. “You were always a willful child,’’ Geraldine snapped at her daughter forty-six years after her birth, by mail, and both the sentiment and the misspelling underlined the vast gulf that had always stretched between them. “My most basic beliefs in writing are that the identity is all-important and the word is all- powerful,” Shirley said once. Her mother had managed to malign both in one six-word sentence. A goldfish giving birth to a porpoise, as one of Shirley’s sons described it. But a tenacious goldfish, one who never stopped trying to rearrange her porpoise daughter along more acceptable goldfish lines. Perhaps with a little guile she might have had more luck, but Geraldine was never a subtle woman. Strong-willed, yes; subtle, no. Years after Shirley had left home, married, and given birth to her own children, her mother still sent her corsets in the mail, trying foolishly but persistently to rein in the overgrown creature she had somehow, unbelievably produced. 

"This was no malleable clay, however; Shirley had, as her mother soon recognized, a will surpassing her own. Even as a small child, carefully groomed, her strawberry-blond hair neatly arranged under a large bow, there was a set to the chin, a cool appraisal in the light eyes. Shirley Jackson, born to be a writer, dug her feet in and fought. Eventually she would say no to all of it, to Geraldine’s whole world of proper breeding and grooming and social minutiae, would reject forever the torch of country-club conventionality. She would laugh at it, flout it, rebel against it. But she would carry her mother within her, unexorcised for the rest of her life. Shirley’s children, especially her daughters, grew up acutely aware of the terrible resentment Shirley bore her parents, particularly her mother. “She felt Geraldine had squashed her,” her older daughter said flatly. “Crushed her spirit.”” And yet Geraldine was not a cruel woman, or even an unloving mother—simply vain, foolish, unalterably conventional. No matter how strained the relationship, it was also true that a confused, hopeless love existed between them throughout their lives, right along with the anger, pain, hatred, and lack of forgiveness.  

"Not that it helped. In fact, a complete break between these two utterly unlike women might well have been the best thing that could have happened. Instead they remained entangled for life, even though they were separated by the entire country for the last seventeen years. “Who is looking over my shoulder all the time?” Shirley mused to herself months before her death, wondering at her inability to confront certain parts of herself. It could only have been the worried, disapproving, unrelenting specter of Geraldine Jackson (14-15)".  Remember what I said earlier about encounters with moments of anxiety in childhood?  Those early experiences with an overwhelming sense of otherwise normal enough (I suppose?) fear is one of those things that can determine vital aspects of what will later become the young child's adult character.  This process seems to have ended up as no different when it comes to an author like Shirley.  As a little girl, she seems to have been prone to those same outsized experiences of a terror that seems so personal that it can sometimes be difficult to make the grown-ups around you understand just where it is you're coming from.  I was lucky in that sense.  At least I knew I had parents who care about me.  It's always possible that Shirley never had even that luxury to fall back on.  Whatever fears she might have experienced as a child, she ultimately had to face them alone.

She seems to have survived, which is good news.  Yet it's those vital moments in youth that have a way of molding the outlook that determines one's character in later years.  In that sense, perhaps Oppenheimer got it just a bit wrong.  There was a certain level of malleability in Jackson as a child, yet the crucial thing is that this is something she seems to have realized on some basement level of her mind.  Thus even if she never had much of a clear idea of whatever issues she might have been dealing with as a child, she still had the sense coupled with the necessary amount of tenacity to ensure that whatever molding process she was undergoing as she matured, it would be as much to her own welfare as she could manage.  Feel free to debate how successful she was on that score in the long run all you want.  The point for me is that at least she was able to plant some sort of personal flag for herself at the end of the day.  That's got to matter more than all the trophies you could give in a single lifetime.  The way Shirley managed to handle her own fears was via a process that seems to be a recurring pattern in writers of the Gothic.  Like a lot of kids with artistic talent, Shirl soon developed a knack for reading that quickly translated into a desire for the written word.  Here's where the vital influences came in.

According to Oppenheimer, "There were few books in the Jackson house, although there was one curious collection: (Jackson's grandmother, sic) Mimi owned the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which occasionally read aloud to the children (just the thing to quiet an anxious, impressionable child). But for most books, Shirley had to look outside the home; she became an early, voracious library user (23)".  This is all that space that Oppenheimer devotes to this key bit of biographical detail.  What makes this particular instance of brevity so frustrating for a reader like me is that I'll have to swear Judy passed over a crucial part in the development of the artist's mind, without giving it the proper bit of attention and analytical unpacking that it deserves.  This goes doubly so in the case of an author like Jackson, as it is within the field of Horror fiction that her greatest legacy now resides.  With this in mind, learning that one of her first encounters with the genre came through an early exposure with one of its foundational architects sounds like an essential puzzle piece that shouldn't be just mentioned in passing.  Instead, it is possible to speculate on how this exposure to the works of Poe might have both fueled and helped Jackson's own experiences with fear.  This can be shown with a bit of theoretical, yet reality based supposals.  It's possible to conjecture the effect that Poe's words might have had on her.

It is not, for instance, too great a stretch to imagine Shirley as a little girl first horrified at the tales her Grandmother tells her.  Then, perhaps to her own surprise, that initial sense of terror turns to curiosity, spurred on by nothing more than the inherent artistry contained in Poe's ornate and Arabesque style and narrative description.  From there, a process of mental and Imaginative development begins.  Shirley goes from being curious to, as Oppenheimer likes to say, "voracious".  Entertain conjecture of a portrait of the author as a young girl first begging her Grandmother to read more Poe's stories to her, and then picture Shirley mastering the complexity of the Gothic writer's ornamental prose to be able to read him like a primer.  Thus it is possible to establish a working picture of where a taste for the macabre might have all began for Shirley.  Like with many young fright fans, a lot of her later enthusiasm for the genre could have been grounded in an inherent sense of kinship between kindred souls.  In reading Poe's fiction, she might have soon begun to recognize the telltale signs of yet another fellow little kid who went through something similar to her.  She might have been able to recognize the words of a man who, even as an adult, still knew what it was like to be afraid of the dark.  In that sense, it does not seem so far-fetched to me to theorize that Shirley saw Poe first as a friend, and later as something of a mentor, and maybe even, on some level, a posthumous parental substitute for her own peripatetic household.

Even if this is all just conjecture, what isn't is the net result of early exposure to the modern Horror story at such a young age.  It's here that the commentary of scholar John Tibbets is useful in describing Jackson's ultimate achievement.  He's talking about the books of Peter Straub, yet what he has to say functions so well as a description of what Jackson is up to in her own work, that it's worth utilizing and paraphrasing them here.  Jackson's "frequent implementation in" her "stories of the works of the great 19th-century Gothic practitioners...calls for close attention".  She "not only draws upon them, but...imaginatively transforms them and gives them fresh breath, in effect. Of particular importance here are those 19th-century literary architects of what is recognized as a distinctively American Gothic, whose forms and expressions were congruent with New World attitudes and ideas. Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Herman Melville claim pride of place...Yet, it seems that very little criticism has explored in any detail their connections with" Shirley's "work. Clearly, there is a deeply shared kinship that borders on identity". Jackson's "stories establish" her "not just as their artistic and spiritual heir, but as their standard bearer toward a modern American Gothic (26)".  This is the basic gist of Shirley's fiction, and there's a lot more waiting to be explored.

As you might expect, it's impossible to unpack all of her artistry in the space of just a simple review.  The best this article can do is to lay down an idea of the basic foundations that undergird all of Shirley's writings.  The best description I've ever had on that score comes from the pen of Prof. John Gordon Parks.  He's best described as a now obscure commentator on Jackson's work, yet we'll have plenty of reasons to circle back to him later on in the critique.  For now, his summation of the whole point that Shirley was driving at is enough to go on.  According to Parks, "Shirley Jackson's fiction is part of the American tradition of the gothic romance or tale of terror, and her relation to such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, and Flannery O'Connor, among others, is shown throughout the study. With these authors she shares a dark view of human nature. But through the use of gothic, terror, and the grotesque, Jackson's fiction not only explores the inner experience of contemporary life, but also suggests that the recognition and confrontation of the evil in man may be the first step in transcending it (v)".  I knew that sooner or later I would have to try and find the right entrance way that would allow for the best possible beginners discussion of an author who contains the sort of multitudes described above.  The trick is how do you manage to talk about a writer who is one of the grand architects of the Gothic genre?  Because that's who Shirley is, or at least what she has become, at the end of the day.

She is, in many ways, like the Tigris and Euphrates of the modern Horror story.  Her writings managed to turn her into one of the foundation layers for the genre's modern voice, and my biggest fear these days is that the nature of that voice, and the value it holds for the sophistication of the contemporary Gothic format is in danger of getting lost.  So that I meant I had to try and find the best possible starting point which would allow for the beginnings of an intelligible enough conversation about her words.  It took some bit of digging, yet after a quick search, I think I might have found the best place to start.  It's with an unpublished short story of domestic chills known simply as "Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons".