Jill McCorkle | February 2017

Emily Dickinson—in a letter to her literary mentor and correspondent Thomas Higginson—wrote: “Nature is a Haunted House—but Art, a house that tries to be haunted.” Her great appreciation for and curiosity about nature and the unending possibilities presented there needed to be captured and compressed in a way that mirrored those complexities. How could art simulate nature? There is time and texture/senses and emotions/the presence of that thing/the knowledge, the love, the meaning, just up ahead and around the corner. Claudia Emerson’s beautiful collection The Opposite House references Dickinson’s poem “There’s been a death in the opposite house, / As lately as Today— / I know it, by the numb look / Such Houses have—alway—”

Today, I think my key words are Haunted and House—as I make an attempt to explore the components of both in ways both literal and figurative. As writers we often feel that we are on the outside looking in, much like Dickinson’s narrator, and yet, I believe that we also are rarely divorced from that part within ourselves looking out on the world in search of answers and meaning. I think that every lecture I have ever given has included my belief that we will never be as smart as our subconscious, that try as we might, it will always be several steps ahead of us, working to make connections and find logic in places and ways that surprise us. The only real advice I have about writing is to seek the trust and patience to allow it to happen so that THEN you can really get down to work, revising as you take that broadest sweep of nature and squeeze it into paragraphs.

House—a physical structure—something easily described.

Haunt—to remain, stay, linger, worry—an intangible element that fills a space.

Most of us have had that dream where we discover a whole new part of our house that we never knew was there. According to Jung, houses in dreams represent the self and so such a dream means you are discovering something about yourself you didn’t know before—different floors represent various levels of human consciousness. Some might say that the state of the house is representative of your current emotional state. You can read through the list of rooms outlined as dream symbols if you like from the attic of repressed thoughts and hidden memories to the confusing basement filled with things you need to sort through. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf wrote: “There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.”

On the page just the movement from room to room—crossing a threshold—can create tension and suspense. There’s the door that has never been opened—is it the Lady or the Tiger? Or if you’re on Let’s Make a Deal, a car or a basket of turnips. Choice/Decision/Surprise. In the old fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” the young wife is told never to open that door at the far end of the hall. There is nothing more intriguing than the forbidden. And of course she can’t resist and opens the door to see all the other young wives before her strangled and hanging on the wall. The forbidden provides immediate suspense from Eve to Pandora/Lot’s wife/Orpheus and so on.

In “A Rose For Emily,” Faulkner wrote in the voice of the town: “Already, we knew that there was one room in that region above the stairs which no one had seen in forty years.” We have already been introduced to Miss Emily’s house “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.” And of course when that door is finally opened—the surprise awaits us. If you don’t know this story, read it, for many reasons—the point of view as well as the lack of chronological order are worth the study.

This gothic introduction might call to mind others—“We came to Miss Havisham’s house which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred.” And in similar fashion, Carson McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café: “The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white.”

I once had an argument with a friend while we were out on a walk. It was getting dark and we were walking through a neighborhood where many of the houses resembled one another—’60s split levels and ranches, with matching window configurations and sidewalks leading up to their doors. But with darkness, they seemed to come to life in very different ways. Some remained dark with all curtains drawn, some were fully lit with no blinds at all, others clearly tracked the life within—the light over the kitchen sink, another in what must be a bedroom upstairs.

Sometimes you might see someone in half dress run past, or a kid staring into the blue flickering glow of a television or bent over homework at the kitchen table. Sometimes you witnessed something that the person within assumed to be completely private—a tug at the crotch of his pants or a finger up the nose. This is where my friend said it was rude to look, a violation of their privacy. She said this when I commented on the child watching an episode of Boy Meets World and picking his nose with great abandonment, the kind of action that would have prompted my grandmother in my own childhood to ask if I needed a shovel. The memory of her voice coupled with the image of the child had made me laugh out loud, which started the whole debate in the first place. I said I thought it was more like theatre—like a scene out of Hitchcock’s Rear Window—if you don’t wish to be seen, pull the shades, close the drapes.

Our stance as observer is an ongoing exploration of the objective or dramatic point of view. I hear snippets of voice and sound; I observe pantomimed gestures and embraces, animated hands that could be quick with fury and agitation or with exhilaration and excitement. The man, still in his suit jacket, has his back to the window and so I’m not sure. What I do know though is that something has happened—something tangible in the physical world has taken place or some lightning bolt of a thought has entered his mind. The key to the information I need is in the recipient of this conversation and it is hard not to wait to watch this person enter from the adjoining room, also lit but behind drapes. And then here she comes, moving quickly into the window scene (what was she doing in that room I can’t see?) and she’s laughing. Whew—it’s a raise or a promotion. He sold his book! He won the lottery! The charges against him have been dropped. In that paragraph of a moment, they are lucky. The darkness of the house next door reminds us that it won’t always be that way.

Whatever is within my realm of seeing and hearing and witnessing as I pass through public streets, is mine to observe. We observe something solid that can be described factually—a well-kept colonial or a ramshackle shed—a manicured lawn or a tangle of weeds—a dirt yard swept clean or a secret garden just behind the gate. Southern exposure, big oak tree, stack of newspapers at the end of the drive, tricycle visible in the open door of that cluttered garage. These facts are then easily washed through and over with all of the many possibilities of the stories there, both present and past. We are curious to know what is behind those doors and windows. Charlie Rich sang all about it—When we get behind closed doors—In that case “she makes him glad that he’s a man” but of course we know that that isn’t how that story would always turn out. There is always the other/opposite version. For instance, George Jones and Tammy Wynette sang about their Two Story House—he has his story and she has hers.

I have often told my students that if you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can’t possibly live long enough to write all of the potential stories you will glimpse along the way.

I think when writing a story or a novel, it is always important—at least in revision—to think about the narrative stance. Are you on the outside looking in or are you inside looking out. Are you inside waiting for the knock? Alarmed by the knock? Disappointed the knock never comes or are you walking the steps up to that strange dark door? That brightly lit door? That door you thought you would never darken again? That door you have dreamed about returning to for years? Certainly there would be much to know about a person in either place and a whole lot of mystery and intrigue around what the future will bring.

Take the famous opening of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca—“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”… and then “there was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns of the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls” and “the house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in its ruins.”

Or Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and after all, how few days go to make up a century… I am no longer young and my heart through wearing years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken, the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow….”

Or Steinbeck in East of Eden: “The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it—the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight, there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table where a book was moved.”

Windows and doors are endlessly fascinating—the whole story completely changed by the point of view. Are you inside looking out or outside looking in? Think for instance what Joyce does at the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel’s vision within the room, the focus on his wife’s singular expression of the grief that will always haunt her—and thus now will haunt him, shifting to the window where the snow is “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Or Virginia Woolf: “With my cheek leant upon the window pane, I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massive wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us.”

Marcia Norman’s play Night Mother is anchored by the visible bedroom door on stage. The daughter informs her mother very early on that in a couple of hours she is going to go into her room and kill herself. And then what had been witty banter between the two is suddenly weighted in suspense and dread. There are clocks visibly ticking. We see the threshold, the before and the after, and once we are aware of that threshold, nothing can be as it was.

I am someone drawn to houses. I like to look at floor plans, see how people decorate—color and fabric choice and furniture and picture placement—all somehow connected to who they are. You can walk into a house and within minutes might register how it makes you feel. Is it warm and comfortable or cold and uncomfortable? Could you curl up and take a nap or do you feel the need to keep looking over your shoulder. If you’re putting this house down on paper, all of those elements become important, details that might suggest both past and future.

In my hometown there is a house that throughout my childhood we referred to as the murder-suicide house and it’s one I have used in fiction on more than one occasion. As a child I was afraid to ride by it on my bicycle and also really needed to. It remained empty for a long time and as I rode by, I glanced quickly, just long enough to make sure there was no one within looking back at me. I could imagine that story from either side of the window.

I also knew that the beautiful mansion that housed the Methodist Youth Center had once been privately owned and I loved to go there on Sunday nights—partly to sneak away from Baptist Training Union—a dismal organization with a depressing event called Snack and Yak where they served stale sandwiches and conducted Bible drills. There were several of us who, when the rear-end of whatever parents car had deposited us there disappeared, hightailed it over to the Methodist Church just two blocks away and into that amazing mansion, rooms like what you would find in a museum or court house if you could ignore the black paint on the walls and the clunking of billiards from the enormous pool table, the jukebox playing CCR and Three Dog Night, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting in from the terrace. This of course was very different from Snak and Yak and we had heard that at the Episcopal Church they were dancing and playing spin the bottle but it was too far to walk and get back in time to be waiting curbside at First Baptist for whatever parent was assigned to haul us home. So we dashed over to the old mansion that now was the Methodist Youth Center. I could imagine what this home once looked like—the curved wooden staircase and stained glass window, the black and white tiles of the bathroom and kitchen, the huge old radiators that were dwarfed by the twenty foot ceilings. There had also been a suicide years before in that house, or so I had been told, a young man who had leapt from an upstairs window and I remember tracing windows to ground and wondering which one, wondering what the circumstances were that led him there. So many stories, so much potential in the history of that one place, until the Methodist Church could no longer afford to heat it and it slowly deteriorated and then was razed. And yet, people still refer to where it once was, pointing as if it might suddenly rise up from the ground again.

My mother has dementia and when she was still able to get out, and her cousin Vista—who also had dementia—was still alive, I would take them to get a hot dog and go for a ride. Every time they would ask about going home; they would tell me my mother lived on the corner of 2^nd and Chippewa. They had grown up just blocks from one another, neither house still standing. In fact, the corner where my mother had grown up had long been empty and then filled with a prefab building that had been a laundromat and a grocery story and a store front church that now is also closed. Still, I rode up and down their street, both of them with their faces pressed to the glass searching. “I know it’s here somewhere,” Vista kept saying. “Just go one more time and go real slow.”

So many works of fiction begin in just this way—going home or leaving home—someone haunted by the memory of a particular place. I dreamed I went to Manderley—past and present—the juxtaposition of before and after all we really need to provide suspense. There’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” or The Haunting of Hill House or The House of the Seven Gables or Bleak House. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle or Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping. Wuthering Heights and so on.

Perhaps—as in the dream world—what we are drawn to reflects some part of ourselves. I am often drawn to those windows above businesses—the little bit of a curtain or a flower pot—I always imagine what might be happening up there—a hidden life—a nice comfortable dwelling easily camaflouged to all who pass by. It makes me think of the Elizabeth Bishop poem, “Filling Station”—oh but it is dirty! This little filling station…. And then we learn that there is a dirty dog on a wicker sofa “quite comfy” there are comic books and a doily and a plant. In the final stanza, she begins. Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant. And then the last line: somebody loves us all. For me the use of comfy and love—those abstract feelings bring life to the list of descriptions. Emphasis on comfy.

I am drawn to those tucked away places because they do feel secretive and somehow removed from the rest of the world. Likewise, I love the tiny cottages of fairy tales—the rough stones and thatched roofs, the little wisps of smoke rising from their chimneys. They appear safe and comfortable which of course is not always the case at all. There are evil step mothers planning how to get rid of children, witches with an eye for baking and eating children, woodcutters who have been ordered to cut out a young girls heart and so on. And yet, before I can acknowledge the possibility of any horror, I have to work my way through a feeling of comfort. Is that me looking out from within? Is that me remembering without even knowing I am doing so the first times I saw those little cottages, the letters on the page all running together in total nonsense but the glossy color picture of a little cottage in the woods being my focus while what I probably really was focused on was the voice of the grown up reading to me—the comfort of being able to either look at the little house or just close my eyes and listen. Though I desired to know what all those words and letters meant, there was also a kind of comfort in trusting that I didn’t have to know, that the person reading to me knew and I didn’t have to worry about any of it, that I was not yet responsible for it. I think my attraction to those idyllic little cottages is just that. For me, they represent something simple and contained and comfortable and solid. A place where you know all that you need to know, no closets for something to jump out of. In the dream theory, this level of comfort would connect us to that very first home prebirth.

My other fantasy house is the one in It’s a Wonderful Life—that great big, rambling place in need of love and attention. I totally bought into the Frank Capra romance of how you can take what everyone else considers an eyesore and turn it into a home. Edward Hopper’s painting Railroad Crossing does it for me and in fact, there is a home near where I live that was long deserted and looked just like it, the tracks just a short distance from the front yard. I watched with great envy as the for sale sign went away and then painters came and curtains in the windows. A porch light turned on, a rocking chair facing the tracks. They were living my fantasy. And then they painted the window casings a different color and the front door yet another color and instead of one beautiful bird house, there were seven and then a chain link fence and a couple of goats and several old cars. It was all I could do not to run up and beg them to stop.

I think if you are drawn to filling stations and seemingly vacant houses with an eye for windows and doors ajar, Hopper is an artist that immediately comes to mind. The more famous painting—House by the Railroad—is one Mark Strand wrote about: “Standing apart, a relic of another time, the house is a piece of doomed architecture, a place with a history we cannot know. It has been passed by and the grandeur of its containment doubles as an image of refusal…. It defines with the simplest, most straight forward means, an attitude of resistance, of hierarchal disregard, and at the same time a dignified submission to the inevitable comfort in all the potential presented there.” At the end of that book, Strand wrote: “It is as if we were spectators at an event we were unable to name; we feel the presence of what is hidden, of what surely exists but is not revealed.” You could say we are haunted by their meaning. That these houses are haunted by their history—or in the case of the one I once coveted, a taste for décor and upkeep that doesn’t mesh with my own.

The fantasy of salvaging an old house and bringing it back to life is probably not unlike that of the adolescent girl missionary thing determined to tame and save that bad boyfriend and turn him around. Thanks to things like This Old House and Home Depot, and hopefully the wisdom that comes with age, the odds are much better in transforming and saving the house.

I think what attracts me to those houses by the tracks is the sensation of movement. Either you glimpse the structure as you pass it by OR you are somewhere behind one of the windows watching the train pass. Sometimes you allow yourself to imagine both and the friction between the two. I’ve always been completely astonished to know that Emerson’s grandfather and his family stood in their second floor windows of the house known as The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts and watched the Battle of Lexington taking place on that bridge well within their view. Talk about a reality show.

Writing a poem or story or novel is not unlike building or refurbishing a house; great attention must be applied to the physical structure. You want to gather the right materials—sifting through straw and sticks to find those bricks. You have to space the support so that it doesn’t tip over or fall apart; you have to plumb and wire, sand and polish. Sound structure is key but that is only half of it. Now there is the search for what haunts it. And so you think of what is invisible to the eye, the history behind this door or that staircase.

Perhaps when people say write what you know it is as much about locating a comfortable position for the telling. Location, location, location.

I teach at Bennington College twice a year and have done this off and on for over twenty years. The music department there, a big beautiful ivy covered stone building called Jennings Hall, is one of those buildings you pass and feel that someone is watching you from an upper window. I felt this way even before I heard rumors that it was haunted and that Shirley Jackson had used it for her model for The Haunting of Hill House. “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; 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.”

I’ve been in the house several times over the years, always perched between the awe of the beautiful structure and that kind of quiet observance that usually settles whenever anyone tells a good ghost story. About fifteen years ago, we had one of the faculty graduate dinners there. It was a beautiful late afternoon in June and the whole large room was bathed in that kind of perfect light that always makes you feel like it’s all too good to be true—it’s like the light of a movie or a painting. In real time, you are aware of how fleeting this light.

I was at that dinner and I was struck by a visiting writer and his wife. It hit me that that was the truest most loyal and selfless love I had ever witnessed. Neither was posed—both so comfortable in their skin. I remember doing one of those notes to self—this is what it looks like. There’s the golden marriage—that perfect capsule of love. And all around there were glasses clinking and toasts made and laughter and then the glow had passed and the event ended. And yet, I went away feeling I had seen something really important and thought that as crazy as it might sound, I was going to write him a letter and say what a joy to meet and hear him but more so to have observed this union. I remember thinking but what if I’m wrong—devil on left shoulder says: oh they are good—no marriage is that perfect, no person so selfless and loving but the angel on the right kept saying: I believe—there are pure and golden examples out there and you did see it. I was going to write the letter. If it was all as I had imagined, they would be delighted and I might get a nice thank you in return. If I had totally missed the boat, then they might look at one another and have that come to Jesus moment: he might say, we can’t go on fooling people the way we’ve been doing. It’s not fair and if we have fooled someone as sharp and astute as her (my imagination said this of course) then, we’re fooling everyone and we should either feel enormous shame or quit our day jobs and hit Broadway.

I wrote my letter to them many times. When I was driving or walking or just as I was falling asleep but before I could put pen to paper, I heard that he had died. And so I thought I would write to her alone to tell about this moment, and I did the same thing, carrying all those words and sentences around in my pockets for several months and then heard the startling news that she had died as well. I had a moment and I missed it and so all these years since, when I have passed by Jennings Hall, I have felt the eyes of the ghosts of the house that many have felt off and on for years, and I also feel the haunting of my own regret as well as the haunting of that beautiful perfect June evening where I glimpsed what I thought surely was the purest most balanced love I had ever seen, the kind we should all be seeking in life. Somehow over the years, that moment there in that dining room, green mountains outside the windows, golden light washing over us, has come to symbolize every letter I meant to write and didn’t, every word I wanted to say but hadn’t. I never pass by that building—and I do many times every year—without feeling haunted by my own failures. If I were to try and take that emotion and squeeze it into a short story, then obviously I would have to do more with my story—what was going on in my own life that I was so fixed on the couple in my presence or perhaps I would explore their story—would I look for that human flaw that surely must have existed? I could ask the light to freeze and stay a little bit longer, time slowed and yet still providing the sensation of movement.

As writers, such hauntings are what keep us in business.                        

Jill McCorkle is the author of six novels (most recent: Life After Life) and four story collections. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and four of her short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories and one essay in Best American Essays. She has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, NC State, and currently she teaches in the Bennington College Writing Seminars.