We Have Always Lived in the Castle
1962
Shirley Jackson
I don’t know about you, but part of the physicality j’adore about books includes a strong preference for the edition that I first fell in love with and read over and over. To encounter the book in a newer edition is like running into a friend who’s had drastic plastic surgery. She may look marginally less old from a distance, but the face I knew and cared for is no longer really there. It’s a changed experience. And so it is with Jackson’s Castle; the 1963 Popular Library edition with the absolutely dead-entrancing cover by William Teason is the only one I want to hold in my hand and read.
Jackson’s last novel is, in my eyes, a perfect modern Gothic work and a perfect union of fear and food. Even the title is a feast: we, all of us, have always lived in the Castle of Otranto, and some of us are aware of the fact. Jackson fundamentally understood how closely the dark side of life lies next to the light; and like many skillful purveyors of Gothic, she accepted this fact so completely that her works can be fantastic while having the ring of truth and authenticity. The doors to her nightmares are in our plain sight.
Many gifted Gothic authors begin a story and let the mood creep in on little grey cat feet, drawing us into a character’s world so skillfully that the moment we become aware something isn’t quite right is a bit of a shiveringly-sweet and horrible surprise. Jackson’s talent has no need of quotidian formulae. We cross the threshold of her castle within three sentences, and hear the key turn softly in the lock behind us. Yikes.
Jackson’s life revolved around her writing and the domestic machine; she wrote of her marriage that “[o]ur main exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance.” This may be why her Castle so perfectly wields the routine of household tasks in the revelation of terror. If you haven’t read Raising Demons and Life among the Savages (“. . . a disrespectful memoir of my children”), remedy that lack with all speed.
The preparation and consumption of food abounds in We Have Always Lived in the Castle – the sight and smell and texture, the contemplation of it, the procuring of it in contented circumstances (the garden behind the house) and in ugly ones (the village grocery). Food is life, it is Constance’s way of expressing love, poised against Merricat’s death-and-destruction wish. Every major character at some point reminds us that food can both give life and bestow death, so in this embarrassment of riches, what do we choose? The pancake breakfast that Charles tries to refuse? The embarrassing and revealing tea Constance serves to the last guests ever to dine in the castle? One of the meals donated by a guilty townsperson, as Constance and Merricat lurk in the ruins?
You could decide to go with any of those, but truth to tell, there’s really only one choice for our Gothic dinner: The Fatal Board. Before getting into details of its re-creation, I would like to sing the praises of one bit of prose that occurs as we readers near the revelation of what actually happened, the secret that’s been tantalizing us with perfectly-orchestrated rising tension since the first page. It’s a gem in itself, but also an example of how in Gothic, humor deftly employed can increase our willingness to approach the unbearable, by releasing a bit of the building stress. A guest at the Blackwood home is listening to the story at the dark heart of the novel, and interjects a question about the meal in question:
“What was wrong with Mrs. Blackwood doing her own cooking?”
“Please.” Uncle Julian’s voice had a little shudder in it, and I knew the gesture he was using with it even though he was out of my sight. He would have raised one hand, fingers spread, and he would be smiling at her over his fingers; it was a gallant, Uncle Julian, gesture; I had seen him use it with Constance. “I personally preferred to chance the arsenic,” Uncle Julian said.
Menu
Lamb with Mint Jelly
Spring Potatoes
Constance’s Garden Salad
Dessert: Berries and sugar
Libations: ice water, table wine
Post-dessert: Coffee and Little Rum Cakes
Ambience
Mail the invites inside a copy of the book. Bonus if you can accrue enough copies with the Teason cover. They are old and fragile, and that works.
Linens and silverware; bonus points if the dinnerware has been handed down for at least three generations of an incredibly dysfunctional family.
Goth It Up
Here is a useful diagram of seating arrangements:
1 Clueless Overbearing Patriarchal Figure
2 Passive Aggressive Spouse
3 Mooching Relative
4 Mooching Relative’s Spouse
5 Rotten Little Boy
6 Sociopathic Teenager/Conspicuously Empty Seat
7 Cripplingly Co-dependent Chef/Server’s Seat
For the dessert course, serve individual bowls of fresh berries. A china sugar bowl with a small plastic spider and a silver spoon in it should be offered by the second-most deeply psychotic member of the party, with a tight, disturbing smile: “Sugar?”
Adjourn to the living room. Over coffee and little rum cakes, have your best reader do the honors of Jackson’s endearing short story “Charles.”
Recipes
Lamb with Mint Jelly
Ingredients
Technically, you can go with any lamb, but this recipe is for a 5 lb whole leg of lamb, as an homage to Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” which was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the relative few directed by the Principal Himself.
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons of snipped fresh parsley, basil, and rosemary, or 1 tablespoon of same if dried, mixed with the juice of two lemons and 1 tsp onion salt and 1 tsp black pepper
Fresh slivered garlic. I like Elephant Ear.
Mint Jelly: buy it from a store.
Wash the leg of lamb and, thinking of someone you don’t like, make several deep 1-inch wide cuts in the meat. Rub with olive oil and drizzle the lemon/herbs mixture over the whole including the holes, and put a sliver of garlic into each cut.
Roast on a rack in a 350 degree oven for two and a half hours. Cover with foil and let it rest from its experience for 15 minutes while you make gravy with the drippings. Put the whole leg on a serving platter with the Spring Potatoes and let the Clueless Overbearing Patriarchal Figure carve, giving himself and the Rotten Little Boy the biggest portion, and mean begrudging little portions to everyone else.
Spring Potatoes
Boil the potatoes for 20 minutes and drain well. Drizzle olive oil over them and season with salt and pepper. Spread them evenly on parchment paper on a baking sheet, and put them in the oven for the last 25 minutes of the roasting lamb.
Constance’s Garden Salad
Fresh lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, cucumber, whatever one might pluck reverently from the garden behind the house.
Berries and Sugar
Whatever berries are in season, cleaned and washed. Real sugar, unadulterated by anything but a small plastic spider.
Little Rum Cakes
Ingredients
Rum Cake:
1 box yellow cake mix
1 (3 or 4-ounce) package vanilla instant pudding mix
4 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup rum OR 2 teaspoons rum extract
Rum Sauce:
1 cup sugar
½ cup water
½ cup rum OR 2 tablespoons rum extract
Mix all the cake ingredients until smooth. Pour into mini bundt cake molds or cupcake tins (don’t overfill!) that have been sprayed with nonstick spray, and bake at 350 for 15 – 20 minutes. Cool on a rack for half an hour. If in cupcake form, make some holes in each. Pour rum sauce over and serve with disdain for your guests’ greediness.
Make rum sauce while the cakes bake. Stir water and sugar as it comes to a boil. Be careful. It’s very hot. Remove from heat and add rum or rum extract.
You can also buy wee rum cakes from a number of online stores.
