skygiants

Okay, I'm going to start by ssaying that I'm glad to have read the new Shirley Jackson biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life -- it's extremely thorough, consistently interesting and has a great deal of respect for its subject -- but also, I have some bones to pick with it. I'm sorry, Ruth Franklin, you did a lot of work and I'm glad you're so fond of Shirley Jackson! I am too! I learned a great deal from your book, thanks for writing it!

...and now, the beef:

- Ruth Franklin really wants there to be two villains in Jackson's story, her mother Geraldine and her husband Stanley Hyman, and ... I'm absolutely not saying these two people were great people or treated Jackson wonderfully (Hyman especially not) but I feel like Jackson's relationship with Geraldine in particular seems more complicated than Franklin wants to make it, even from the snippets of letters that are included in the book

- and while Ruth Franklin is certainly dedicated to the Feminist Take and the Horror of Housewifery and, like, I sympathize, also it feels a little ... reductive? ... to imply that so much of Shirley Jackson's incomparably weird fiction can be boiled down to mother issues/husband issues

- on a related note, the biography spends a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson's (and also her husband Stanley Hyman's) weight, and -- I mean, it's relevant, Shirley Jackson eventually had health problems of which she died, but it feels like we're getting updates on her size about once a chapter and I don't care that much and I kept getting slightly weirded out by the fact that Franklin cared that much

- meanwhile, Franklin teases in a very early chapter insights derived from Shirley's year-long correspondence with a kindred spirit housewife who wrote her a fan letter, and then when we finally get there spends a chapter discussing this VERY INTENSE letter-writing relationship which the housewife eventually dropped for Reasons Unknown, and doesn't even present a theory as to why or show us any text from the last letter that she read but never responded to? MORE TIME ON THIS, LESS TIME ON LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE HOUSES THAT SHIRLEY'S GRANDFATHER EVER BUILT

- ok so Franklin quotes this page from Jackson's college diary:

my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them, then i wanted to write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them, and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend was away and i was all alone

and Franklin's analysis:

although characters who may be lesbians appear more than once in her fiction, Jackson -- typically for her era and her class -- evinced a personal horror of lesbianism. It's possible that the relatively extreme way in which she would later disparage lesbians reflects some repression on her part, especially considering that she and Hyman had several close male friends who were homosexual. But that is conjecture only. Jackson never spoke of experiencing sexual desire for women. When she refers to herself and Jeanou as lesbians in that piece, at a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity.

Okay, look: I have not done extensive research into Jackson's life. I am not going to try to argue with Franklin about whether or not Shirley Jackson was queer. It's for sure possible to read the above as 'this man sent me away because [he thought] i was a lesbian'. But are you seriously really going to try to tell me that when Shirley 'Introducing Dreamy Gay Theodora' Jackson wrote 'everyone thought we were lesbians' she didn't know what the word meant? Because I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU, RUTH FRANKLIN.

(Also, she talks about how Jackson 'evinced a personal horror of lesbianism' but ... where's the citation? This doesn't come up again in-text until four hundred pages later in the biography, when Jackson is stressing about the first draft of Castle and whether she's accidentally writing the sisters as gay -- do they hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters? if the alliance between [merricat] and constance is unholy then my book is unholy and i am writing something terrible, in my own terms, because my own identity is gone and the word is only something that means something else -- and again! it seems! that there is something significantly more complicated going on there than 'yikes, lesbians!' Also it seems hypothetically relevant that this was all being discussed in the correspondence with the housewife who eventually dropped her for Reasons Unknown! ANYWAY!)

...all that said, I appreciate Franklin for including these extensive quotes in the book to give me something to fight with her about; good scholarship even if I'm dubious about the analysis!

I also appreciate her description of Shirley Jackson's unfinished children's book: a portal fantasy about two kids who reluctantly go to the birthday party of a girl they don't much like, only to find out that she is a.) a portal fantasy princess and b.) now they have to go on a fantasy adventure to rescue her from peril. I'm so sad she never finished it, I would really love to read Shirley Jackson's Twelve Kingdoms.

Despite the title, I had high hopes for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. The point of the anthology is to feature women who wrote suspense about women, with a focus on authors who were well-known between the 1940s and 1970s, but have currently faded from the public imagination. This is a good goal and I laud it, so well done, Sarah Weinman!

Unfortunately, I was not as excited by Sarah Weinman's introductions -- they're all either really unnecessarily spoilery, really unnecessarily dramatic, or just flat-out misguided -- while not shedding enough of a light on the authors behind them to make me feel like it was worth getting spoiled for. So that was frustrating! The stories themselves are also kind of a mixed bag. On the other hand, there are definitely a few gems, and some authors I will certainly be bookmarking for further investigation.

OK, so by story, we have:

1. "The Heroine," Patricia Highsmith

Sarah Weinman makes a big deal about how writing about women instead of gentlemanly sociopaths is THE ROAD NOT TAKEN for Patricia Highsmith, which is probably true, but this predictable entry into the 'whoops, the governess might kill us all!' genre is not an example of much of a loss.

2. "A Nice Place to Stay," Nedra Tyre

A woman who's never had a home finds jail isn't so bad? This is one of those where the twist felt much more SHOCKING!!! than believable.

3. "Louisa, Please Come Home," Shirley Jackson

I mean, Shirley Jackson can hella write. So this story from the POV of a clever runaway teenager is probably not the best Shirley Jackson ever, but that doesn't make it not a fun story.

4. "Lavender Lady," Barbara Callahan

I found this one maybe funnier than I was supposed to because it is basically just songfic?? I am sorry, I am incapable of taking any story that has mediocre lyrics sprinkled at regular intervals through the text to ILLUMINATE THE CHARACTER'S TRAGEDY very ... seriously ....

5. "Sugar and Spice," Vera Caspary

Although the premise of this was frustrating in the way stories about women motivated by jealous of each other often frustrating -- plain-but-rich cousin and poor-but-beautiful cousin hate each other and are constantly competing, usually over men, until one of them MURDERS a guy!!! BUT WHICH? -- it was actually one of my favorites in the collection anyway, because Nancy the plain-but-rich cousin is incredibly charismatic and interesting (she has no artistic talent, but she's brilliant at critique! she's a patron of the arts! she cheerfully calls herself a vipress!) The format is also kind of great, in that it's a double frame story; the narrator is Mike Jordan, who is not really involved in the murder at all but has been sort of alternately hanging out with different cousins for most of his life and therefore observed all the drama, but he's telling the story to the actual narrator, who is a completely random woman who is totally uninvolved and just has a phone that Mike wants to borrow! And then at the end, once he's finished telling her this whole long dramatic story, she's like, "OK, yes, murder whatever, what I'm taking away here is that NANCY IS GREAT, MARRY HER IMMEDIATELY." I am with you, random narrator woman. You and I, we understand each other. Anyway, I will definitely be looking for more of Vera Caspary's work.

6. "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," Helen Nielsen

Any story that starts out with a woman asking her husband not to put her on a pedestal because it's NOT A GOOD PLACE TO BE is probably a story that I'm going to like, and this is not an exception. Basically a critique of the virgin/whore dichotomy disguised as a murder story. Another author I will be looking up!

7. "Everybody Needs a Mink," Dorothy B. Hughes

I'm not sure ... how this is a suspense story ...? Like, a lower-middle-class housewife goes to a store and a nice old man mysteriously buys her a mink, and her family are all "that's weird!" and then that's it, the story is basically over. OK! That's nice!

8. "The Purple Shroud," Joyce Harrington

This one is set among ARTSY HIPPIES and feels ... very seventies. A douchebag husband gets murdered and it's fine.

9. "The Stranger in the Car," Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding came through for me again; I thought this was one of the best stories in the collection. A nice middle-class man attempts to cope with his teenage daughter's potential date-rape-and-blackmail situation, which soon escalates into a potential murder situation, and fails utterly. In the end his wife comes home and is like "oh, honey, you should have just told me straightaway and let me take care of it instead of worrying your sweet little head about it!"

10. "The Splintered Monday," Charlotte Armstrong

This one was fun! A cranky old lady feels like she's being tiptoed around by her hypochondriac sister's family after said sister's death, and, in the process of insisting that she is a GROWN ADULT and does NOT NEED TO BE CODDLED, good lord, people, accidentally reveals that one of them is a murderer, OOPS.

11. "Lost Generation," Dorothy Salisbury Davis

This story was very good -- it's about racism and vigilante justice gone wrong in a small town -- but there were almost zero women in it so I'm not a hundred percent sure why it's in this collection of stories by women and about women, specifically.

12. "The People Across the Canyon," Margaret Millar

And this one was actually sci-fi, I think? I'M CONFUSED. A little girl gets obsessed with the new neighbors and her parents get annoyed and then maybe someone gets sucked into a mirror dimension, I don't know.

13. "Mortmain," Miriam Allen Deford

We've already hit 'secretly murderous governess' on the domestic suspense bingo board, so now it's time for 'secretly murderous nurse!' Deford pulls it off pretty well, though, and the ending did genuinely give me the creeps.

14. "A Case of Maximum Need," Celia Fremlin

THIS STORY MAYBE STRETCHES THE BOUNDS OF PLAUSIBILITY A LITTLE. I've been trying not to spoil the suspense stories too much, but ...

( I'm just going to go ahead and spoil this one, because WTF? )

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/409329.html

At the recommendation of my friend Rahul over at Blotter Paper, I read my first two Shirley Jackson books over the past month or so: The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I have lots of thoughts, obviously, but my strongest and most envious thought is that Shirley Jackson is one of the best writer of first sentences and paragraphs that I have ever come across.

Look at the opening of We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantaganet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

DOES THIS OR DOES THIS NOT make you instantly want to know everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family? It does me! (Everything else about Mary Katherine Blackwood and her sister Constance and her dead family is not that hard to guess in terms of the facts of what went down just from that first paragraph, but it's the way that it plays out that's so creepy.)

Then there is the first sentence of The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I liked The Haunting of Hill House a lot - it's the kind of book that features four people in a situation together and starting to like and trust each other and then the psychological horror turning everything wrong, which is probably the kind of that gets me worst - but to be honest, the rest of the book, however excellent, couldn't quite live up to that sentence.

-- although seriously, the book is really good. The heart of it is the relationship between Eleanor, who's lived her whole life without doing anything for herself until she gets the invitation to participate in a psychic experiment, and Theodora, a lighthearted lesbian artist who pretty much only ever does things for herself. Eleanor is the POV character, and the horror is horrible because of how much hope it dangles at first.

Anyway, the thing is, I honestly can't do that kind of opening at all. I always feel like the beginnings of my stories are the weakest part.

. . . well, and the endings. Actually there are a lot of weak parts, ah well. But I've never had that gift of launching in and grabbing the reader's attention with a stunning start; I usually just kind of fumble my way in to what I want to talk about. What about you guys? Do you find brilliant openings jumping into your head, or is an opening just a chore to get through to the meat of the story?