Danse Macabre Read online

  "Shortly thereafter, she states, on a trip to New York, she saw at the 125th Street station, a grotesque house--one so evil-looking, one that made such a somber impression, that she had nightmares about it long afterward. In response to her curiosity, a New York friend investigated and found that the house, intact from the front, was merely a shell since a fire had gutted the structure. . . . In the meantime, she was searching newspapers, magazines, and books for pictures of suitably haunted-looking houses; and at last she discovered a magazine picture of a house that seemed just right. It looked very muck like the hideous building she had seen in New York: '. . . it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one.' The picture identified the house as being in a California town; consequently, hoping her mother in California might be able to acquire some information about the house, she wrote asking for help. As it happened, her mother was not only familiar with the house but provided the startling information that Miss Jackson's great-grandfather had built it."7

  Heh-heh-heh, as the Crypt-Keeper used to say.

  On its simplest level, Hill House follows the plan of those Psychic Society investigators of whom Miss Jackson had read: it is a tale of four ghost-busters who gather in a house of ill repute. It recounts their adventures there, and culminates with a scary, mystifying climax. The ghost-busters--Eleanor, Theo, and Luke--have come together under the auspices of one Dr. Montague, an anthropologist whose hobby is investigating psychic phenomena. Luke, a young wise-guy type of fellow (memorably played by Russ Tamblyn in Robert Wise's sensitive film version of the book), is there as a representative of the owner, his aunt; he regards the whole thing as a lark . . . at least at first.

  Eleanor and Theo have been invited for different reasons. Montague has combed the back files of several psychic societies, and has sent invitations to a fairly large number of people who have been involved with "abnormal" events in the past--the invitations, of course, suggest that these "special" people might enjoy summering with Montague at Hill House. Eleanor and Theo are the only two to respond, each for her own reasons. Theo, who has demonstrated a fairly convincing ability with the Rhine cards, is on the outs with her current lover (in the film, Theo--played by Claire Bloom--is presented as a lesbian with a letch for Eleanor; in Jackson's novel there is the barest whiff that Theo's sexual preferences may not be 100 percent AC).

  But it is Eleanor, on whose house stones fell when she was a little girl, that the novel is vitally concerned with, and it is the character of Eleanor and Shirley Jackson's depiction of it that elevates The Haunting of Hill House into the ranks of the great supernatural novels--indeed, it seems to me that it and James's The Turn of the Screw are the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years (although we might add two long novellas: Machen's "The Great God Pan" and Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness").

  "Nearly all the characters of the new American gothic are narcissistic . . . weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality."

  Try this shoe on Eleanor, and we find it fits perfectly. She is obsessively concerned with herself, and in Hill House she finds a huge and monstrous mirror reflecting back her own distorted face. She is a woman who has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and her family life. When we are inside her mind (which is almost constantly, with the exception of the first chapter and the last), we may find ourselves thinking of that old Oriental custom of foot binding--only it is not Eleanor's feet that have been bound; it is that part of her mind where the ability to live any sort of independent life must begin.

  "It is true that Eleanor's characterization is one of the finest in Miss Jackson's works," Lenemaja Friedman writes. "It is second only to that of Merricat in the later novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There are many facets to Eleanor's personality: she can be gay, charming, and witty when she feels wanted; she is generous and willing to give of herself. At the same time, she resents Theo's selfishness and is ready to accuse Theo of trickery when they discover the sign on the wall. For many years, Eleanor has been filled with frustration and hate: she has come to hate her mother and then finally her sister and brother-in-law for taking advantage of her more submissive and passive nature. She struggles to overcome the guilt she feels for the death of her mother.

  "Although one comes to know her quite well, she remains mysterious. The mystery is a product of Eleanor's uncertainty and her mental and emotional changes, which are difficult to fathom. She is insecure and, therefore, unstable in her relationships with others and her relationship to the house. She feels the irresistible force of the spirits and longs, finally, to submit to them. When she does decide not to leave Hill House, one must assume she is slipping into madness."8

  Hill House, then, is the microcosm where universal forces collide, and in his piece on The Sundial (published in 1958, a year before The Haunting of Hill House), John G. Park goes on to speak of "the voyage . . . [the] attempt to flee . . . an attempt to escape . . . cloying authoritarianism . . ."

  This is, in fact, the place where Eleanor's own voyage begins, and also the motive for that voyage. She is shy, withdrawn, and submissive. The mother has died, and Eleanor has judged and found herself guilty of negligence--perhaps even murder. She has remained firmly under the thumb of her married sister following her mother's death, and early on there's a bitter argument over whether Eleanor will be allowed to go to Hill House at all. And Eleanor, who is thirty-two, habitually claims to be two years older.

  She does manage to get out, practically stealing the car which she has helped to purchase. The jailbreak is on, Eleanor's attempt to escape what Park calls "cloying authoritarianism." The journey will lead her to Hill House, and as Eleanor herself thinks--with a growing, feverish intensity as the story progresses--"journeys end in lovers meeting."

  Her narcissism is perhaps most strikingly established by a fantasy she indulges in while still on the way to Hill House. She stops the car, full of "disbelief and wonder" at the sight of a gate flanked by ruined stone pillars in the middle of a long line of oleanders. Eleanor recalls that oleanders are poisonous . . . and then:

  Will I, she thought, will I get out of my car and go between the ruined gates and then, once I am in the magic oleander square, find that I have wandered into a fairyland, protected poisonously from the eyes of people passing? Once I have stepped between the magic gateposts, will I find myself through the protective barrier, the spell broken? I will go into a sweet garden, with fountains and low benches and roses trained over arbors, and find one path--jeweled, perhaps, with rubies and emeralds, soft enough for a king's daughter to walk upon with her little sandaled feet--and it will lead me directly to the palace which lies under a spell. I will walk up low stone steps past stone lions guarding and into a courtyard where a fountain plays and the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return. . . . And we shall live happily ever after.

  The depth of this sudden fantasy is meant to startle us, and it does. It suggests a personality to which fantasizing has become a way of life . . . and what happens to Eleanor at Hill House comes uncomfortably close to fulfilling this strange fantasy-dream. Perhaps even the happily-ever-after part, although I suspect Shirley Jackson would doubt that.

  More than anything, the passage indicates the unsettling, perhaps mad depths of Eleanor's narcissism--weird home movies play constantly inside her head, movies of which she is the star and the sole moving force--movies which are the exact opposite of her real life, in fact. Her imagination is restless, fertile . . . and perhaps dangerous. Later, the stone lions she has imagined in the passage quoted turn up as ornamental bookends in the totally fictional apartment she has imagined for Theo's benefit.

  In Eleanor's life, that turning-inward which Park and Malin associate with the new American gothic is a constant thing. Shortly after the enchanted castle fantasy, Eleanor stops for lunch and overhears a mother explaining to a waitress why her little girl will not drink her milk. "She wants her
cup of stars," the mother says. "It has stars in the bottom, and she always drinks her milk from it at home. She calls it her cup of stars because she can see the stars while she drinks her milk."

  Eleanor immediately turns this into herself: "Indeed yes, Eleanor thought; indeed, so do I; a cup of stars, of course." Like Narcissus himself, she is quite unable to deal with the outside world in any other way than as a reflection of her inner world. The weather in both places is always the same.

  But leave Eleanor for the time being, making her way toward Hill House "which always waits at the end of the day." We'll beat her there, if that's okay with you.

  I said that The House Next Door forms a provenance in its entirety; the provenance of Hill House is established in classic ghost-story fashion by Dr. Montague in just eleven pages. The story is told (of course!) by the fire with drinks in hand. The salient points: Hill House was built by an unreconstructed Puritan named Hugh Crain. His young wife died moments before she would have seen Hill House for the first time. His second wife died of a fall--cause unknown. His two little girls remained in Hill House until the death of Crain's third wife (nothing there--that wife died in Europe), and were then sent to a cousin. They spent the rest of their lives quarreling over ownership of the mansion. Later, the older sister returns to Hill House with a companion, a young girl from the village.

  The companion becomes particularly important because it is in her that Hill House seems most specifically to mirror Eleanor's own life. Eleanor too was a companion, during her mother's long terminal illness. Following the death of old Miss Crain, there are stories of neglect; "of a doctor called too late," Montague says, "of the old lady lying neglected upstairs while the younger woman dallied in the garden with some village lout . . ."

  More bitter feeling followed the death of the old Miss Crain. There was a court case over ownership between the companion and the young Miss Crain. The companion finally wins . . . and shortly after commits suicide by hanging herself in the turret. Later tenants have been . . . well, uncomfortable in Hill House. We have hints that some have been more than uncomfortable; that some of them may actually have fled from Hill House, screaming in terror.

  "Essentially," Montague says, "the evil is in the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, and it is a place of contained ill will." And the central question that The Haunting of Hill House poses for the reader is whether or not Montague is right. He prefaces his story with several classical references to what we've been calling the Bad Place--the Hebraic for haunted, as in haunted house, tsaraas, meaning "leprous"; Homer's phrase for it, aidao domos, meaning a house of Hades. "I need not remind you," Montague says, ". . . that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden--perhaps sacred--is as old as the mind of man."

  As in The House Next Door, the one thing we can be sure of is that there are no actual ghosts in Hill House. None of the four characters come upon the shade of the companion flapping up the hall with a rope burn around her ectoplasmic neck. This is well enough, however--Montague himself says that in all the records of psychic phenomena, one cannot find any case where a ghost actually hurt a person. What they do if they are malign, he suggests, is work on the mind.

  One thing we do know about Hill House is that it is all wrong. It is no one thing we can put our finger on; it's everything. Stepping into Hill House is like stepping into the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself.

  No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair. . . . The face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.

  And even more chilling, more to the point:

  Eleanor shook herself, turning to see the room complete. It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions, so that the walls seemed always in one direction a fraction longer than the eye could endure, and in another direction a fraction less than the barest tolerable length; this is where they want me to sleep, Eleanor thought incredulously; what nightmares are waiting, shadowed, in those high corners--what breath of mindless fear will drift across my mouth . . . and shook herself again. Really, she told herself, really, Eleanor.

  We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically, had he lived long enough to read it. It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of non-Euclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle's three corners might equal more or less than 180deg. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.

  Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "Canavan's Back Yard," where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary backyard is much longer than it seems--it runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant's The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff.

  But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I think--certainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn't show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stained-glass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet. There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the corners equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180deg.

  As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level--which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson's concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a low-watt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stained-glass window . . . or a decorative urn . . . or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other. Being in Hill House is like lying in bed in the dark on the night you went three drinks beyond your capacity . . . and feeling the bed begin to spin slowly around and around. . . .

  Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voice--this, along with The Turn of the Screw, may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is "ambiguous and low-key and restrained") these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and unpleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like.

  Hill House is evil; we'll accept Montague's postulate. But how responsible is Hill House for the phenomena that follow? There are knockings in the night--huge thunderings, rather, which terrify both Theo and Eleanor. Luke and Professor Montague attempt to track down a barking dog and get lost within a stone's throw of the house--shades of Canavan the bookdealer (Brennan's story predates The Haunting of Hill House) and Charles Grant's strange little town of Oxrun, Connecticut. Theo's clothes are splattered with some foul red substance ("red paint," Eleanor says . . . but her terror suggests a more sinister substance) that later disappears. And written in the
same red substance, first in the hall and then over the wardrobe where the ruined clothes have been hung are these words: COME HOME, ELEANOR . . . HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.

  Here, in this writing, is where the lives of Eleanor and of this evil house, this Bad Place, become inextricably entwined. The house has singled her out. The house has chosen her . . . or is it the other way around? Either way, Eleanor's idea that "journeys end in lovers meeting" becomes ever more ominous.

  Theo, who has some telepathic ability, begins to suspect more and more that Eleanor herself is responsible for most of the manifestations. A land of low-key tension has built up between the two women, ostensibly over Luke, with whom Eleanor has begun to fall in love, but it probably springs more deeply from Theo's intuition that not everything which is happening in Hill House is of Hill House.

  We know there has been an incident of telekinesis in Eleanor's past; at the age of twelve, stones fell from the ceilings "and pattered madly on the roof." She denies--hysterically denies--that she had anything at all to do with the incident of the stones, focusing instead on the embarrassment it caused her, the unwanted (she says it was unwanted, anyway) attention that it brought upon her. Her denials have an odd effect upon the reader, one of increasing weight in light of the fact that most of the afferent phenomena which the four of them experience in Hill House could be ascribed either to poltergeists or to telekinetic phenomena.

  "They never even told me what was going on," Eleanor says urgently even after the conversation has moved on from the episode of the stones--no one is even really listening to her, but in the closed circle of her own narcissistic world, it seems to her that this strange, long-ago phenomenon must be all they can think of (as it is all she can think of--the outer weather must reflect the inner weather). "My mother said it was the neighbors, they were always against us because she wouldn't mix with them. My mother--"