Whatever Walked There, Walked Alone

The Haunting of Hill House and Echoes

How would you feel if asked to join a group that would be staying at a haunted house?

There are many reasonable approaches to reaching an answer to this question. You know how you would be meant to feel about this request as a character in a story: Don’t go in the basement. You have an intuition about how you’d answer based on your real-life beliefs about the supernatural, what you knew about the situation, etc. You can also guess how living under a pandemic would shape your answer—my guess is it would urge you toward the free, secluded vacation. Meeting a ghost sounds like a nice break from the constant low-grade anxiety of waiting for something less definable to happen.

It would probably be OK at the haunted house if you didn’t have to be alone.

I’ll be honest with you: I could use a trip to a haunted house right now. I considered taking a week off from the newsletter, because I’ve been exhausted lately, unable to sleep for unclear reasons. Someone on Twitter told me that the earth has been vibrating at a different frequency lately? It could be that, or it could be [gestures around]. But I decided to soldier on and return to Shirley Jackson. Here’s the famous opening 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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

That’s a suitably defiant opening for a writer as bold as Jackson. For one thing, you’re generally not supposed to open novels with abstractions. Jane Austen got away with it in Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”), but it works in that case because Austen follows it with a joke about how such a man is instantly considered the “property” of nearby families with eligible daughters, and then the third line is dialogue. The folksy-yet-impersonal saying ironizes itself, even as it establishes itself as fact, by quickly entering the realm of character.

In contrast, Jackson lets us brood alongside her rather clunky aphorism—why the sterile “live organism” instead of, say, “living thing”? She does give us larks and katydids, but then it’s back to portentous vagary. We don’t yet care about “its hills” or know what “darkness” Hill House holds within. the details we get are of bricks meeting, floors being like floors, doors being shut. Still so little to go on, and yet somehow, we end up fearing whatever walks alone.

I find Shirley Jackson fascinating precisely because she gets away with so much. In her two most widely read novels, Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, there is a constant feeling of Jackson herself peering around the corner at you, wary yet smirking. I can do whatever I want, she seems to whisper, and you’ll eat it up. They’re both tightly constructed novels, and in certain ways conventional—they move linearly through time, are highly readable, and feature contorted archetypes like an Everytown, USA where everyone happens to be aggressively unpleasant. Yet both books hold so much in reserve, to the point where there’s not enough on the page for us to nail down exactly what happened. Fantasy blends into reality, via the interior alchemy of characters who cannot accept that the stories they tell themselves don’t match up with reality. In the end, reality itself is the threat, not the hovering specters that may or may not be real.

There is so much to be said about how Jackson makes all of this work, and right now I don’t have the space or the vitality to do a dissertation on her novels. What I will say is that, as I find myself staring in bafflement at this book, trying to remind myself of what happened, I keep coming back to both that opening paragraph and the novel’s (completely spoiler-free) final lines:

Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

At first glance, that might look exactly the same as the opening. It very nearly is. Jackson added an “itself” in that first clause and cut a “by itself” in the second clause. She also added an “its” before “walls” in the second sentence. It’s very late and I’m very tired, so if I’ve missed other differences, please say so in the comments. But the repetition is intentional and nearly complete, with minor changes that feel rhythmic more than anything.

A lot happens between the utterance and the echo. But also a lot doesn’t. Without spoiling too much, point-of-view character Eleanor Vance begins an arc that she completes in a way that both replicates and frustrates the terrors of Hill House. She doesn’t get to have the kind of adventure she so desperately when she sets out on her journey, fantasizing about knights and princesses, murmuring to herself the mantra “journeys end with lovers meeting.” We begin walking alone, and that’s how we end.

One thing Jackson is able to get away with is withholding from us the feeling of revelation that has become so important to how fiction gets produced and consumed. We know little more about Hill House on the final page than we did on the first. We learn some of the house’s history, and get more exterior and interior description, but ultimately we are left with the understanding that it’s a malevolent place because it’s malevolent. Hill House didn’t experience childhood trauma that warped its relation to future guests—it’s always been this way, and might be this way for another eighty years or more.

What we ultimately know about Eleanor is mostly that she didn’t get the connections she wanted, despite frantic efforts to do so. Secrets are kept. Solitude endures, even at the expense of the reader, who is usually supposed to be made to feel warmly welcome. I wish more stories across media could muster the courage to leave their audiences walking alone.

Until then, I would definitely accept any offer of a free week away at a haunted house.

P.S: Writer Emma Berquist recently joined me on my podcast to talk about The Haunting of Hill House

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Some of us can find our way back, and maybe some of us can’t:

Calvin is back, and progressing rapidly through his own stages of anti-climax:

Panel 1: Desperation (Please take me back!)

Panel 2: Relief (I’ll always take you back)

Panel 3: Lingering Question (So what are we really doing here?)

Panel 4: Dissonance (You think it’s one way; I think it’s another)

I would say Calvin’s mom takes him back too easily, but he’s six years old. That can be easy to forget, even as it remains perhaps the single most important fact about him. Being his mom, she probably knew exactly how far he’d go before getting tired and cranky. The land around Calvin’s house sometimes seems infinite, but that’s the infinitude of a child. I picture it as a few acres of boggy forest behind a subdivision, with at least one good sledding hill.

I love how Watterson handles the epistemic distance between Calvin and his mom in the final panel. Other characters are forever telling Calvin that Hobbes isn’t real, but the assertion never pierces his veil of Calvin-ness. Calvin has no interest in even attempting to integrate the claim that Hobbes isn’t a real tiger. Yet another way in which this is a comic strip about defiance.

A poem

Anna Akhmatova on Sophocles