10.31.07
Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
This is one of those books which was under the ‘personal recommendations’ sign at my local bookstore. The cover and title were so interesting I couldn’t resist picking it up, and then the blurb was so teasing (no synopsis or reviews, just a couple of extracts) that I couldn’t quite put it down. It’s a Penguin Deluxe Classics Edition – a bit misleading, as there isn’t as far as I’m aware a non-deluxe edition – published in the USA, but easily available etc etc.
I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, but Jonathan Lethem in his introduction assures us that we will have read several of her stories, including her most famous, “The Lottery”. Well, I hadn’t; but I have now read “The Lottery” and thought it pretty silly and predictable. Fortunately the same cannot be said for We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which was Jackson’s last published novel before her death in 1965.
The cover gives a pretty good impression of the book. Two sisters, Mary Catherine (known as Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, live in a tired old house with their cat and their Uncle Julian. “Everyone else in my family is dead,” Merricat tells us. And “Everyone in the village has always hated us.” The connection between these two facts leads us through the tangled story at the heart of the book.
In some ways the Blackwood sisters are normal, or at least part of a tradition:
There were jars of jam made by great-grandmothers, with labels in thin pale writing, almost unreadable by now, and pickles made by great-aunts and vegetables put up by our grandmother, and even our mother had left behind her six jars of apple jelly. … All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply coloured rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.
In other ways they reveal unusual traits: “I can’t help it when people are frightened,” says Merricat. “I always want to frighten them more.”
It is impossible not to feel sympathy for them when Merricat braves the village to buy provisions or makes a token attempt to mix by having a coffee in Stella’s cafe (”If anyone else came in and sat down at the counter I would leave my coffee without seeming hurried, and leave”). When she does withstand the company of her neighbours, the atmosphere thickens:
“They tell me,” he said, swinging to sit sideways on his stool and look at me directly, “they tell me you’re moving away.”
“No,” I said, because he was waiting.
“Funny,” he said, looking from me to Stella and then back. “I could have sworn someone told me you’d be going soon.”
Jackson brings out slowly a Magnus Mills-ish sense of being an outsider (perhaps inspired by her crippling agoraphobia, which left her housebound for the last years of her life), and we empathise with the Blackwood girls even when Merricat is losing patience with a visiting cousin (”I was thinking of Charles. I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider’s web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly … I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth”). And the questions – why do the villagers hate them, why is everyone else in the family dead – are answered, though the answers are not always surprising and one putative revelation is visible a mile off.
More than that, when we do discover what has happened, we are not offered any explanation or reasoning, and there is not quite enough built in to make it satisfying anyway. However the ending is almost swooningly elegiac, which makes up for a lot. The Blackwood sisters too – obsessive and fearful, persecuted and dangerous, apparently sexually frozen – are characters one could spend a lot of time on, if not with.
susan said,
Wednesday, 31 October 2007 at 2:41 pm
I read this many years ago and still remember liking it. However, I liked “The Lottery” too, although I read it a long time ago too.
Candy Schultz said,
Wednesday, 31 October 2007 at 8:28 pm
I read Shirley Jackson in high school but I recently reread both The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. When I read The Thirteenth Tale it reminded me vaguely of Jackson’s book and I had to reread. It is not nearly as haunting to me at 55 as it was when I was sixteen but worth a second visit. Personally if I was the older sister I would never have sacrificed myself for the crazy one but that’s just me.
John Self said,
Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 4:42 pm
I think she must be generally much better known in the US than in the UK. Both the editions of her books in the bookstore I was in (Castle and The Haunting of Hill House) were imported US editions; I don’t think she’s even in print in the UK at all.
Daniel Lopes said,
Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 8:45 pm
hey, John. great blog! i’m brazilian, came here through Google Blog Search. i was looking for some text on Coetzee, a writer that a love, and here in your blog i found not only comments about him but also about Philip Roth. i’ll be here more times.
if you can read the portuguese, please take a look on my blog, where you can comment in english.
John Self said,
Thursday, 1 November 2007 at 9:00 pm
Thanks Daniel, glad you’ve enjoyed it here so far. I’m afraid I don’t speak a word of Portuguese though! I wonder if those Google translate links really work…?
Daniel Lopes said,
Saturday, 3 November 2007 at 3:54 am
no, no John. forget about it, the Google translations are… well, forget it. by this time, i will simply suggest to you and your readers the reading of two Brazilian contemporary authors – Rubem Fonseca and Milton Hatoum. i bet you’ll love. from the first, take a look on the great “Vast emotions and imperfect thoughts”. from Hatoum, try “The brothers”. both are at sale on Amazon.
i’ll be back here soon.
jem said,
Saturday, 3 November 2007 at 12:36 pm
I’ve got ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ on a to read list.
I’m not sure whether I fancy this one you’ve reviewed or no. I think the cover is mostly putting me off. There is something that reminds me of a comedy horror spoof computer game about it.
John Self said,
Saturday, 3 November 2007 at 1:10 pm
Thanks Daniel. Funny you should mention Milton Hatoum: I’ve been looking at Tales of a Certain Orient in my local bookshop and thinking of getting it. I will definitely investigate further.
Jem, I really like the cover but I know what you mean! Jackson is interesting certainly, and if you get to The Haunting of Hill House, I’d love to know what you make of it.
Candy Schultz said,
Sunday, 4 November 2007 at 5:24 pm
The cover on this one is, in my opinion, terrible and off putting. It does nothing to suggest the crazy eeriness of the story. I can still see the cover I had in hight school and it was the best by far.
nico said,
Wednesday, 7 November 2007 at 7:37 pm
John, thanks so much for your wonderful and inspiring blog. I came across it looking for Nicola Barker’s info. You have an immense archive. I ordered now the Shirley Jackson book. Thanks again!
nico said,
Wednesday, 7 November 2007 at 7:37 pm
Oh!, forgot to tell you that i’m chilean, so more exoticism in your page!
John Self said,
Wednesday, 7 November 2007 at 7:43 pm
Thank you nico! I should have a world map on my blog so I can stick virtual pins in it and keep track of where my visitors are from!
meghandahn said,
Thursday, 22 November 2007 at 1:20 am
Shirley Jackson is one of those writers – like Edna O’Brien and Nadine Gordimer – whose work never ceases to grab me (almost as if by hooks to eye sockets). I don’t put books of hers down; I read them straight through without exception. Something about the way she writes brings me back to my teenaged days. I thought for a time that it was her proclivity for the gothic, but then I changed my mind. I think it has more to do with her particular ability to write through characters that exist slightly askew from normative society. And what’s more teenaged than that?
Really interesting blog – glad I stumbled upon it!
John Self said,
Thursday, 22 November 2007 at 10:24 am
Thanks for visiting, meghan, and hope to see you here again soon. As I mentioned above, Jackson isn’t even in print in the UK, but I think I will have to pick up an import edition of The Haunting of Hill House based on your and Candy’s recommendations for her stuff.
Then again, I haven’t read any Edna O’Brien either and here (in Northern Ireland) she’s not only in print but quite prominently available, so what’s my excuse this time?
By the way I see from your blog you’re currently reading Ondaatje’s Divisadero - please feel free to add your thoughts to my post on the book.
John Self said,
Friday, 27 March 2009 at 4:50 pm
Good news for British Jackson fans: Penguin UK will be issuing this book, along with The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery and other stories in their Modern Classics line in October 2009.