I've been re-reading an oldy, but a goody - Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
It's a shame that it tends to get shelved and marketed as a horror novel. That virtually guarantees that it will be absent from High School reading lists and book-discussion groups. Even the 1963 Robert Wise film adaptation, The Haunting, is simply billed as "horror" and - as it is now an outdated horror film - it fails to receive even that slim appreciation. The execrable 1999 remake by Jan De Bont shows what horror is assumed to be now - all special effects, blood, and barely a thought in any head involved.
It's a shame, because the eponymous Hill House is a horror. The book itself draws you in, and, with a highly-unreliable pov, keeps you, like the house- or, more properly, The House - off-balance, yet with the illusion of comfortable landmarks that you couldn't possibly mistake. It works on several levels: as horror fiction, a good, creepy haunted-house story, as psychological horror, a psychological study, a sociological insight, even a bit of historical effluvia. Jackson was one of those rare people who could write mental and emotional imbalance from within her own mental and emotional imbalance, and a mind, many-layered, provides a new read for me every time. The Book is The House in the sense that there is always some new, disturbing thing that is there to find, and something you felt sure was there . . . apparently wasn't.
Now, I've said Hill House is a horror - but it's not De Bont's live statues or growling sculptures, still less overt, hideous spectral figures emerging from doors and paintings. There is some possible paranormal activity - a cold spot outside the nursery, bangings and voices and laughter in the night, a sudden, bright, daylit picnic, complete with parents, children and puppy outside the summerhouse in the dead of night, a half-seen movement of something. There's the typical house history - one of the few indisputably factual things established about The House in-story - of death, incipient madness, family strife and tenants vacating before the lease is up.
And yet, ("and yet . . ." by the way, is a recurring theme in the haunting) it's never definitely haunted. Hauntings usually mean ghosts, but ghosts are few and far between in Hill House. Even the ghostly phenomena are experienced only by one, or, perhaps, two of the group and described by our limited-third-person narrator, who follows the mind of our ostensible heroine, increasingly shown to be unreliable and quite possibly mentally disturbed. We begin to realize that the ugliness and cruelty she sees in her fellows is largely a product of displacement of her own hatred, yet, without that insight, we have had only reliance on her viewpoint to guide us; couldn't much of the eerie, unwholesome feeling of the house, it's Romance capital "e" Evil be that same mind's displacement? The oppressiveness of the environment is easily explained, early on, by one of the characters - it's a Victorian mansion. It was meant to be wallowed in, buried in, hidden in - that was the aesthetic of its architecture and interior design; all velvet curtains, purple plush, and tassels. Victorian sensibilities and taboos explain much of the history of incipient madness, as well - the social conventions of censure piled on an already-censorious New England mindset. The House's peculiar traits - doors that close of themselves, a seemingly-inexplicable inability to find one's way around The House, are all byproducts of that same Victorian sensibility and lurking madness - Hugh Crain designed his own mansion, as many New England millionaires did, and did so with his peculiar, bitterly-humorous disgust for his fellow men; the doors are all slightly off-center so that the vibrations of approaching feet could cause them swing shut; all angles in The House's walls are slightly obtuse or acute, so that the simple movement through the maze of windowless rooms-within-rooms found in grand homes of the era result in complete disorientation, aided by the same slight unevenness designed into floors and stairs - the central staircase, for example, has the steps canted just a few degrees toward the central shaft. Early on, even the romantic notions of peculiar angles hiding secret passages are quashed by the lead investigator. As I noted, the history of the Crain family and Hill House, in all its inanity and sadness and small scandal, is right there in the open, court records and county records; there's no secret of the family or The House to find to lay the ghost. It's simply a solid, huge, rambling Victorian pile set in New England's hill country - obstinately stolid and unmystical.
That, you see, is the key to The House and it's horror. It is completely real. Completely and totally unmystical and plodding. Consciously so, in fact. As I said, there is the ostensible heroine of the story, but the humans in the book form a background ensemble, really. The real - and realest - character in the story is Hill House. It lives. It is haunted, in its own way. It is cruel. It was born bad, to use the lead investigator's term. Yes, it is a simple thing, an everyday object, bigger than a breadbox, found about the house, because it is a house. It has experienced and been formed in madness and hate and disappointed love and repressed passion and death and suicide and bitterness - that's all. But what makes a person, but the sum of experiences, location, ancestry? What would a human being look like, who'd had that parentage and life? There's no place in the story that you can say "Okay, now that's a haunted house," with certainty, just as, the narrator relates, there is no way for the eye to pick out the point at which the handsome and ornate elements of The House come together to make it "vile" and "hideous" - it is simply an unhappy concatenation of angles and design, just as The House's personality is an unhappy concatenation of design, events and personalities . . . just as a bad person's personality is. Hill House is haunted - stolidly, unromantically, self-containedly haunted. It is evil - mundanely, idiotically, pointlessly and prosaically evil.
The narrator describes:
"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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
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| Robert Wise's version of Hill House - not quite it; the place is now a hotel, I understand |
Hill House is haunted, viciously haunted, with nothing less than absolute reality - the everyday evil of self. So much of the book is simply everyday human interaction, and the constant refrain between the sparse moments of creeping terror - banging on doors, screams in the night - is "I can't stand waiting for The House to make its move." Yet, it is in the silence that it is making its move. It's little displays of shadow and sound, cold spots and creeping visions, all a carnival barker's trick to keep the inhabitants enthralled, to hold them in place for the banality of self-confrontation. A cruel, laughing, mad mirror, it drags the inner eye back to self, refuses to allow even a moment's hope, calling it self-deception, and turns the mind ever inward, ever more to self, ever more isolated. It gives you absolute reality, and lets the blast of self-awareness complete the work, blighting the mind with despair. "This is what you are," it says, and leaves hanging the thought for its victims to fill in ". . and what you always will be."
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"This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed."
