In Rough Country

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the novel’s opening, suspenseful chapter, Merricat must make her way from the Blackwood manor house at the edge of the village into town, as the intermediary between the remaining Blackwoods and the outer world: “Fridays and Tuesdays were terrible days, because I had to go into the village. Someone had to go to the library, and the grocery; Constance never went past her own garden, and Uncle Julian could not.” Here is no Grover’s Corners as in Thornton Wilder’s sentimental classic of small town America, Our Town: this is a New En gland town of “dirty little houses on the main highway”—a place of unmitigated “ugliness” and “rot” where dwell individuals poised to “come at [Merricat] like a flock of taloned hawks—birds descending, striking, gashing with razor claws.” Hostility toward the Blackwoods seems to have predated the Blackwood poisoning scandal:

  The people of the village have always hated us…The blight on the village never came from the Blackwoods; the villagers belonged here and the village was the only proper place for them.

  I always thought about rot when I came toward the row of stores; I thought about burning black painful rot that ate away from inside, hurting dreadfully. I wished it on the village.

  Merricat’s fantasies are childish, alarmingly sadistic: “I am walking on their bodies.”—“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”—“I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries…stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves.” Such unmitigated hatred, out of all proportion to any source within We Have Always Lived in the Castle, suggests a savage Swiftian indignation that passes beyond social satire of the kind written by Jackson’s older contemporaries Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, into the realm of psychopathological caricature. (Jackson’s difficulties with her fellow citizens in North Bennington, Vermont, are well documented in Judy Oppenheimer’s harrowing biography Private Demons, 1988: the suggestion is that Jackson and her husband, the flamboyant “Jewish-intellectual” cultural critic Stanley Edgar Hyman aroused resentment, if not outright anti-Semitism, in their more conventional Christian neighbors.) The animosity of the villagers for the Blackwoods suggests the priggish racism of Jackson’s subtly modulated short story “Flower Garden”—in which a newcomer to a New England village unwisely befriends a resident black man—and the barbaric behavior of the villagers of Jackson’s most famous story “The Lottery” in which a yearly ritual of scapegoating and stoning to death is enacted by lottery. Here, in a place said to closely resemble the North Bennington of Shirley Jackson’s day, a dirge-like tune of unknown origin prevails from generation to generation, unquestioned by the brainless local citizenry:

  Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.

  In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a jeering chant follows in Merricat’s wake when she ventures into town:

  Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?

  Oh, no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.

  In the village, life is crude, cruel, noisy and ugly; in the Blackwood manor house, life is quiet, sequestered, governed by the daily custom and ritual of mealtimes, above all inward—“Almost all of our life was lived toward the back of the house, or the lawn and the garden where no one else ever came…The rooms we used together were the back ones.” The Blackwood house isn’t haunted in quite the way that Hill House is haunted (“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within…”), but its former, now deceased inhabitants emerge in portentous times, in Merricat’s sleep, calling her name—to warn her? To torment her? By degrees we discover the secret of the Blackwood house—the poisonings, by arsenic, six years before, of the entire family except Constance, then twenty-two years old, Merricat, then twelve, and their Uncle Julian. Constance, who’d prepared the meal that day, and took care to wash out the sugar bowl before police arrived, was accused of the poisonings, tried and acquitted, for lack of sufficient evidence; Merricat was sent away for the duration of the trial, then brought back to live with Constance and her uncle in their diminished household. (Julian, who has never recovered from the trauma of being poisoned, persists in believing that Merricat died in the “orphanage”—despite the fact that he and his niece inhabit the same house.) Merricat’s uncle is preoccupied with writing up his account of the poisonings:

  In some ways, a piece of extraordinarily good fortune for me. I am a survivor of the most sensational poisoning case of the century. I have all the newspaper clippings. I knew the victims, the accused, intimately, as only a relative living in the house could know them. I have exhaustive notes on all that happened. I have never been well since.

  Why no one seems to suspect—as the reader does, immediately—that the unstable Merricat, not the amiable Constance, is the poisoner is one of the curiosities of the novel, as it’s a mystery why Constance is so indulgent of Merricat, who contributes nothing to the household. Certainly there’s little subterfuge in Merricat’s teasing of others, in alluding to various kinds of poisons; her tormenting of her cousin Charles contains a transparent threat:

  “The Amanita phalloides,” I said to [Charles], “holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles…The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting…Death occurs between five and ten days after eating.”

  Constance’s mild reproach: “Silly Merricat.”

  In much of Shirley Jackson’s fiction food is fetishized to an extraordinary degree; ironic then, that the Blackwood family should be poisoned by one of their own, out of a family-heirloom sugar bowl. That the food-fetish has its erotic component is suggested by the means of poison—Amanita phalloides—and by the way Merricat so totally depends upon her older sister as a food provider, as if she were an unweaned infant and not a “great child” grown into an adult. Sexual attraction per se is virtually nonexistent in Jackson’s fiction: the single sexual episode in all of her work appears to be a molestation of some kind, short of rape, that occurs in an early scene of Hangsaman—“Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me?”—but the episode isn’t described, and is never acknowledged by the afflicted young woman, who gradually succumbs to schizophrenia. Nowhere in Jackson’s work is food more elaborately fetishized than in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which the three remaining members of a once-aristocratic family have virtually nothing to do but inhabit their blighted house and “eat the year away” in meals which the older sister prepares for them, three times a day, like clockwork; as in a Gothic parody of the comical self-portraits Shirley Jackson created for the women’s magazine market in the 1950s, in such best-selling books as Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1956)—a housewife-mother’s frustrations transformed, as by a deft twist of the wrist, into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but lighthearted comedy. (It’s ironic to note that Shirley Jackson died at the age of forty-nine, shortly after the publication of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, of amphetamine addiction, alcoholism and morbid obesity; negligent of her health for years, she is said to have spoken openly of not expecting to live to be fifty, and in the final months of her life suffered from agoraphobia so extreme she couldn’t leave her squalid bedroom—as if in mimicry of the agoraphobic sisters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)

  As Merricat has uneasily sensed, “change” is imminent, and will bring with it the invasion of the Blackwood household. Without having been invited, the sisters’ boorish cousin Charles arrives, intent upon stealing their deceased father’s money, which he believes to be in a safe; he dares to take Mr. Blackwood’s position at the head of the dining room table—“He even looks like f
ather,” Constance says. Unwisely Charles threatens his young cousin Merricat: “I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do with you…But whatever I do, you’ll remember it.” It’s a measure of Constance’s desperation that though Charles is not a very attractive man, she appears drawn to him, as a way into a possible new life, a prospect terrifying to Merricat. Yet, the slightest wish on Constance’s part for something other than her stultifying robot-life, and Merricat reacts threateningly, for the sisters’ secret is the intimate bond between them, that sets them apart from all of the world. Throughout the novel there is the prevailing threat of the murderous Merricat whose fantasy life is obsessed with rituals of power, dominance, and revenge: “Bow your heads to our beloved Mary Katherine…or you will be dead.”

  The hideous arsenic deaths constitute the secret heart of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as unspecified sexual acts appear to be at the heart of The Turn of the Screw: the taboo yet irresistible subject upon which all thinking, all speech, all actions turn. The sisters are linked forever by the deaths of their family, as in a quasi-spiritual-incestuous bond by which each holds the other in thrall. Food-shopping (by Merricat), food-preparation (by Constance), and food-consumption (by both) is the sacred, or erotic ritual that binds them, even after the house has been partly demolished by fire and they are living in its ruins:

  “It is a very happy place, though.” Constance was bringing breakfast to the table: scrambled eggs and toasted biscuits and blackberry jam she had made some golden summer. “We ought to bring in as much food as we can,” she said…

  “I will go on my winged horse and bring you cinnamon and thyme, emeralds and clove, cloth of gold and cabbages.”

  Witchcraft is a primitive attempt at science; an attempt to assert power by the powerless. Traditionally witchcraft, like voodoo, and spiritualism, has been the province of marginal individuals of whom most are women and girls. In Shirley Jackson’s novel of multiple personalities, The Bird’s Nest, the afflicted young heroine’s psychiatrist—aptly named Dr. Wright—tries to explicate the bizarre psychic phenomena he has been trying to “cure”:

  “Each life, I think…asks the devouring of other lives for its own continuance; the radical aspect of ritual sacrifice, the performance of a group, its great step ahead, was in organization; sharing the victim was so eminently practical. [The Magic of Shirley Jackson]

  The doctor spoke slowly, in a measured voice…: “The human creature at odds with its environment…must change either its own protective coloration, or the shape of the world in which it lives. Equipped with no magic device beyond…intelligence…the human creature finds it tempting to endeavor to control its surroundings through manipulated symbols of sorcery, arbitrarily chosen, and frequently ineffectual.”

  Shirley Jackson is rarely so explicit in her thematic intentions: it’s as if her literary-critic/English professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman were lecturing to her, in a manner that sounds like mild self-parody even as it helps to illuminate both the tangled Bird’s Nest and the ruined Castle.

  After Merricat sets a fire in the Blackwood house in the hope of expelling her detested cousin Charles, the yet more detested villagers swarm onto the private property. Some are firemen who seem sincere in their responsibility of putting out the fire but most want to see the Blackwood house destroyed: “Why not let it burn?”—“Let it burn!” The jeering rhyme is heard:

  Merricat, said Constance, would you like a cup of tea?

  Merricat, said Constance, would you like to go to sleep?

  O no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.

  Radical change has swept upon the Blackwoods through the agency of Merricat, ironically. The fire she sets causes the death of Uncle Julian, the sisters are forced to flee into the woods, villagers enter the private residence and vandalize it. Yet, when the sisters return, in a tenderly elegiac scene, they discover that though most of the rooms are uninhabitable, all they require—a kitchen, primarily, where Constance can continue to prepare meals for Merricat—has been left intact. As if by magic the old house has been transformed: “Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.” Against all expectations the Blackwood sisters are happy in their private paradise “on the moon.”

  “I love you, Constance,” I said.

  “I love you too, Merricat,” Constance said.

  Constance has succumbed to Merricat entirely: the “good” sister has yielded to the “evil” sister. Constance even berates herself for being “wicked”—“I should never have reminded you of why they all died”—in this way acknowledging her complicity in the deaths. Now we understand why Constance never accused Merricat of the poisonings or made any attempt to defend herself against accusations that she was the murderer for, in her heart, she was and is the Blackwoods’ murderer, and not Merricat; that is, not only Merricat. Her acknowledgment tacitly guarantees the sisters’ permanent expulsion from the world of normal people—a world in which the psychologically damaged Merricat could not survive. We Have Always Lived in the Castle ends on an unexpectedly idyllic note like a fairy-tale romance in which lovers have found each other and even the villagers, repentant of their cruelty, pay the Blackwood sisters homage by bringing food-offerings to them, left at the ruins of their doorstep: “Sometimes they brought bacon, home-cured, or fruit, or their own preserves…Mostly they brought roasted chicken; sometimes a cake or a pie, frequently cookies, sometimes a potato salad or coleslaw…Sometimes pots of baked beans or macaroni.” Here is the very Eros of food, an astonishing wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the agoraphobic is not pitied but revered, idolized; the destruction of her house isn’t death to her, but a new life protected by magic: “My new magical safeguards were the lock on the front door, and the boards over the windows, and the barricades along the sides of the house.” Repeatedly as in a rapture Merricat cries “Oh, Constance, we are so happy.” The sisters’ jokes are slyly food-oriented, of course:

  “I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.”

  “I doubt if I could cook one,” said Constance.

  “AS YOU ARE GROOVED, SO YOU ARE GRIEVED”: THE ART AND THE CRAFT OF BERNARD MALAMUD

  In this illuminating biography of Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis, the first full-length biography of Malamud to be published, a story is told how, when Malamud was in his late fifties, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for The Fixer, 1966) and twice National Book Award winner (for The Magic Barrel, 1959, and The Fixer), at the height of his reputation and yet assailed by self-doubt, Malamud remarked to a friend that he regretted not having known the love of several beautiful women. Knowing the writer’s lifelong preoccupation with routines, schedules, and the devoting of every possible hour to his work, his companion replied that such love affairs would have taken up a good deal of Malamud’s time: “Which of your books would you have given up for these loves?” Malamud was silent for a moment and then said, “None.”

  The Yeatsian conundrum—“perfection of the life, or of the work?”—carries with it an overtone of (unconscious?) megalomania: for who, counting even William Butler Yeats, is likely to achieve “perfection” in either life or work; rather more, the writer might hope to perform as brilliantly in both as he is capable, or simply to perform at all, with a modicum of success in both quarters. Yet, to the desperately ambitious Malamud, as he emerges in Philip Davis’s sympathetic yet persuasively “objective” portrait of the artist, such paradoxical questions were of the utmost importance, for to Malamud writing was not merely “writing” but carried with it an element of the visionary and the magical:

  “The more I see of artists the more I think of the great talent in the frail self.” How many “nebbishes”—weak, spineless people—look good, [Malamud said] because of “this marvelous book of magic in them.” What Malamud wanted…was to “look good as a man,” to use some of his magical talent as an artist to “improve as a person.” It “goes with the theory I have of the person as ‘stuff’: ‘stuff’” was the raw material of one’s life, and se
lf-will could be deployed to shape that stuff and form it creatively not just in writing but in living…“I think that art would be richer if the self were.”

  The writer Jay Cantor, a student in Malamud’s writing class at Harvard in the mid-1960s, vividly recalls:

  Malamud was a short man, with a close-clipped greying mustache, wearing often a grey cloth cap and a somewhat grey and restrained manner. He was surrounded then, and always, by an air that was both melancholy and decisive, as if he were weighed down by the guidance of a special Talmud only he knew about that said he must move, speak, act, in a certain way, whether it gave him pleasure or not.

  More comically, Malamud’s daughter Janna Malamud Smith, in her unsparing and oddly tone-deaf memoir My Father Is a Book (2006)—surely the most chilling of titles!—recalls how, when the Malamuds were living in Oregon and Malamud was teaching at Oregon State University at Corvallis, then as now not the most distinguished of American universities, as a little girl she would overhear her father talking to himself while shaving: “Someday I’m going to win.” There is a Woody Allen–esque irony to the fact that, when Malamud received the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, he was at last “allowed” to teach literature at this university best known for its agricultural school. (Malamud soon quit Oregon and returned to the East, where he would teach intermittently at more prestigious Bennington College for much of his academic life.) And even Malamud’s publisher, the gratingly corrosive Roger Straus (of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) would one day sneer at the possibility of a biography of Malamud: “I think it’s ridiculous. There was nothing there; as a life it was unexciting. Saul Bellow was filet mignon, Malamud was hamburger.” (In droll Yiddish it would sound better: with such friends, who needs enemies?)