Nightshade Must Fall

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (214 pp.)--Shirley Jackson--Viking ($3.95).

Shirley Jackson is a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the seance-fiction writers. By day, amiably disguised as an embattled mother, she devotes her artful talents to the real-life confusions of the four small children (Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons) in her Vermont household. But when shadows fall and the little ones are safely tucked in, Author Jackson pulls down the deadly nightshade and is off. With exquisite subtlety she then explores a dark world (The Lottery, Hangsaman, The Haunting of Hill House} in which the usual brooding old houses, fetishes, poisons, poltergeists and psychotic females take on new dimensions of chill and dementia under her black-magical writing skill and infra-red feminine sensibility.

The deranged but enchanting mentality that Author Jackson has chosen this time belongs to Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood--actual age 18, mental age a precocious twelve. "I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet," she reflects, "and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom." She is a gentle child who promises herself to be kinder to her Uncle Julian. She is already kind enough to Constance and to her enigmatic cat Jonas. But for some reason she is never allowed to touch knives.

With bizarre hints and happenings (when Merricat orders a leg of lamb at the local store, the other customers gasp with horror) Miss Jackson tantalizingly builds up a picture of a household besieged by anger from without and fear from within. Creating a cross-rough of curiosity--backward in time to whatever dreadful event has brought the Black-woods to their present predicament, forward to some nameless but newly foreshadowed disaster in the future--the book manages the ironic miracle of convincing the reader that a house inhabited by a lunatic, a poisoner and a pyromaniac is a world more rich in sympathy, love and subtlety than the real world outside.

When one of the inmates has a chance to free herself and, in a skillful variation on the close of Henry James's Washington Square, refuses to answer the beckoning call of normality, her final turning back to the house somehow seems wise and fitting. "I sat very quietly," Merricat reflects, describing not only a conversation she had with Constance but the kind of communion that exists between them, ";listening to what she had almost said." What Miss Jackson's characters really do and say, however, offers enough diversion even without reading between or behind their lines: Merricat: I wonder if I could eat a child?

Constance: I doubt if I could cook one.

This exchange should provide any reflective reader with some food for thought.

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