Danse Macabre (48 page)

In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree, she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?

"I am doing this all by myself now, at last: this is me," Eleanor thinks—but of course it is impossible for her to believe otherwise in the context of the new American gothic. Her last thought before her death is not of Hill House, but of herself.

The novel ends with a reprise of the first paragraph, closing the loop and completing the circuit . . . and leaving us with an unpleasant surmise: if Hill House was not haunted before, it certainly is now. Jackson finishes by telling us that whatever walked in Hill House walked alone.

For Eleanor Vance, that would be business as usual.

4

A novel that makes a neat bridge away from the Bad Place (and perhaps it's time we got away from these haunted houses before we come down with a terminal case of the creeps) is Ira Levin's
Rosemary's Baby
(1967). I used to be fond of telling people, at the time Roman Polanski's film version came out, that it was one of those rare cases where if you had read the book you didn't have to see the movie, and if you had seen the movie, you didn't have to read the book.

That is not really the truth (it never is), but Polanski's film version is remarkably true to Levin's novel, and both men seem to share an ironic turn of humor. I don't believe anyone else could have made Levin's remarkable little novel quite so well . . . and by the way, while it is remarkable for Hollywood to remain so faithful to a novel (one sometimes thinks that major movie companies pay staggering sums for books just so they can tell their authors all the parts of them that don't work—surely some of the most expensive ego-tripping in the history of American arts and letters), it is not remarkable in Levin's case. Every novel he has was ever written* has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores. This fact alone has made Levin almost invulnerable to the depredations of the story-changers, those subvertors who are more concerned with visual effect than with a coherent storyline. Levin's books are constructed as neatly as an elegant house of cards; pull one plot twist, and everything comes tumbling down. As a result, moviemakers have been pretty much forced to show us what Levin built.

About the film Levin himself says, "I've always felt that the film of
Rosemary's Baby
is the single most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to come out of Hollywood. Not only does it incorporate whole chunks of the book's dialogue, it even follows the colors of clothing (where I mentioned them) and the layout of the apartment. And perhaps more importantly, Polanski's directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides happily, I think, with my own writing style.

"There was a reason for his fidelity to the book, incidentally . . . . His screenplay was the first adaptation he had written of someone else's material; his earlier films had all been originals. I think he didn't know it was permitted—nay, almost mandatory—to make changes. I remember him calling me from Hollywood to ask in which issue of the
New Yorker Guy
had seen the shirt advertised. To my chagrin I had to admit I'd faked it; I had assumed any issue of the
New
Yorker
would have a handsome shirt advertised in it. But the correct issue for the time of the scene didn't."

Levin has written two horror novels—
Rosemary's Baby
and
The Stepford Wlives—
and while both shine with the exquisite plotting that is Levin's trademark, probably neither is quite as effective as his first book, which is unfortunately not much read these days.
A Kiss Before
Dying
is a gritty suspense story told with great élan—rarity enough, but what is even more rare is that the book (written while Levin was in his early twenties) contains surprises which really surprise . . . and it is rela *In case you're one of the five or six readers of popular fiction in America who has missed them, they are
A
Kiss Before Dying
,
Rosemary's Baby
,
This Perfect Day, The Stepford Wives
, and
The Boys from Brazil
. He has written two Broadway plays,
Veronica' Room
and the immensely successful
Deathtrap
. Less known is a modest but chillingly effective made-for-TV movie called
Dr. Cook's Garden
, starring Bing Crosby in a wonderfully adroit performance.

Postively impervious to that awful, dreadful goblin of a reader, he or she WHO TURNS TO THE LAST THREE PAGES TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT.

Do you do this nasty, unworthy trick? Yes, you! I'm talking to you! Don't slink away and grin into your hand! Own up to it! Have you ever stood in a bookshop, glanced furtively around, and turned to the end of an Agatha Christie to see who did it, and how? Have you ever turned to the end of a horror novel to see if the hero made it out of the darkness and into the light? If you have ever done this, I have three simple words which I feel it is my duty to convey: SHAME ON YOU! It is low to mark your place in a book by folding down the corner of the page where you left Off; TURNING TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT is even lower. If you have this habit, I urge you to break it . . . break it at once! *

Well, enough of this digression. All I intended to say about
A Kiss Before Dying
is that the book's biggest surprise—the real screeching bombshell—is neatly tucked away about one hundred pages into the story. If you should happen upon this moment while thumbing randomly through the book, it means nothing to you. If you have read everything faithfully up to that point, it means . . . everything. The only other writer I can think of offhand who had that wonderful ability to totally ambush the reader was the late Cornell Woolrich (who also wrote under the name of William Irish), but Woolrich did not have Levin's dry wit. Levin speaks affectionately of Woolrich as an influence on his own career, mentioning
Phantom Lady
and
The Bride Wore Black
as particular favorites.

Levin's wit is probably a better place to start with
Rosemary's Baby
than his ability to plot a story. His output of novels has been relatively small—it averages out to one every five years or so—but it's interesting to note that one of the five,
The Stepford Wives
, works best as outright satire (William Goldman, the novelist-screenwriter who adapted that book for the screen, knew it; you will remember that earlier on we mentioned "Oh Frank, you're the best, you're the champ"), almost as farce, and
Rosemary's Baby
is a kind of socioreligious satire. We might also mention
The Boys from Brazil
, Levin's most recent novel, when we speak of his wit. The title itself is a pun, and although the book deals (even if only peripherally) with subjects such as the German death

*I have always wanted to publish a novel with the last thirty pages simply left out. The reader would be mailed these final pages by the publisher upon receipt of a satisfactory summary of everything that had happened in the story up to that point. That would certainly put a spoke in the wheels of those people who TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT CAME OUT.

camps and the so-called "scientific experiments" that were carried out there (some of the "scientific experiments," we will recall, included trying to impregnate women with the sperm of dogs and administering lethal doses of poison to identical twins in order to see if they would expire in a similar span of time), it vibrates with its own nervous wit and seems to parody those Martin-Bormann-is-alive-and-well-and-livingin-Paraguay books that are apparently going to be with us even unto the end of the world.

I am not suggesting that Ira Levin is either Jackie Vernon or George Orwell masquerading in a fright wig—nothing so simple or simplistic. I am suggesting that the books he has written achieve suspense without turning into humorless thudding tracts (two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are
Damon
, by C. Terry Cline, and
The Exorcist
, by William Peter Blatty—Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent . . . forever, if we are lucky).

Levin is one of the few writers who has returned more than once to the field of horror and the supernatural and who seems unafraid of the fact that much of the material the genre deals with is utterly foolish—and at that, he has done better than many critics, who visit the genre the way rich white ladies once visited the children of New England factory slaves on Thanksgiving with food baskets and on Easter with chocolate eggs and bunnies. These slumming critics, unaware both of their own infuriating elitism and their total ignorance of what popular fiction does and what it is about, are able to see the foolishness spawned as a by-product of the bubbling potions, the pointy black hats, and all the other clanking huggermugger trappings of the supernatural tale, but are unable to see—or refuse to see—the strong and universal archetypes that underlie the best of them.

The foolishness is there, all right; this is Rosemary's first look at the child she has given birth to:

His eyes were golden-yellow, all golden-yellow, with neither whites nor irises; all golden-yellow, with vertical black-slit pupils.

She looked at him.

He looked at her, golden-yellowly, and then at the swaying upside-down crucifix. She looked at them watching her and knife-in-hand screamed at them, "
What have you
done to his eyes?
"

They stirred and looked to Roman.

"He has His Father's eyes," he said.

We have lived and suffered with Rosemary Woodhouse for two hundred and nine pages up to this point, and Roman Castevet's response to her question seems almost like the punchline of a long, involved shaggydog story—one of the ones that ends with something like, "My, that's a long way to tip a Rari," or "Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear." Besides yellow eyes, Rosemary's baby turns out to have claws ("They're very nice," Roman tells Rosemary, ". . . very tiny and pearly. The mitts are only so He doesn't scratch Himself . . ."), and a tail, and the buds of horns. While I was teaching the book at the University of Maine to an undergraduate class entitled Themes in Horror and the Supernatural, one of my students mused that ten years later Rosemary's baby would be the only kid on his Little League team who needed a custom-tailored baseball cap.

Basically, Rosemary has given birth to the comic-book version of Satan, the L'il Imp we were all familiar with as children and who sometimes put in an appearance in the motion picture cartoons, arguing with a L'il Angel over the main character's head. Levin broadens the satire by giving us a Satanist coven comprised almost entirely of old people; they argue constantly in their waspy voices about how the baby should be cared for. The fact that Laura-Louise and Minnie Castevet are much too old to care for a baby somehow adds the final macabre touch, and Rosemary's first tentative bonding to her baby comes when she tells LauraLouise that she is rocking "Andy" much too fast, and that the wheels of his bassinette need to be oiled. Levin's accomplishment is that such satire does not deflate the horror of his story but actually enhances it.
Rosemary's Baby
is a splendid confirmation of the idea that humor and horror lie side by side, and that to deny one is to deny the other. It is a fact Joseph Heller makes splendid use of in
Catch-22
and which Stanley Elkin used in
The Living End
(which might have been subtitled "Job in the Afterlife").

Besides satire, Levin laces his novel with veins of irony ("It's good for your blood, dearie," the Old Witch in the E.C. comics used to say). Early on, the Castevets invite Guy and Rosemary over for dinner; Rosemary accepts, on the condition that it won't be too much trouble.

"Honey, if it was trouble I wouldn't ask you," Mrs. Castevet said. "Believe me, I'm as selfish as the day is long."

Rosemary smiled. "That isn't what Terry told me," she said.

"Well," Mrs. Castevet said with a pleased smile, "Terry didn't know what she was talking about."

The irony is that everything Minnie Castevet says here is the literal truth; she really is as selfish as the day is long, and Terry—who ends up either being murdered or committing suicide when she discovers that she is to be or has been used as an incubator for Satan's child—really didn't know what she was talking about. But she found out. Oh yes. Heh-heh-heh. My wife, raised in the Catholic church, claims that the book is also a religious comedy with its own shaggy-dog punchline.
Rosemary's Baby
, she claims, only proves what the Catholic church has said about mixed marriages all along—they just don't work. This particular bit of comedy grows richer, perhaps, when we add the fact of Levin's own Jewishness against the Christian backdrop of custom used by the Satanist coven. Seen in this light, the book becomes a kind of you-don't-have-to-beJewish-to-love-Levy's view of the battle of good and evil. Before leaving the idea of religion and talking a bit about the feelings of paranoia which really seem to lie central to the book, let me suggest that while Levin's tongue is in his cheek part of the time, that is no reason for us to expect it to be there all of the time.
Rosemary's
Baby
was written and published at the time the God-is-dead tempest was whirling around in the teapot of the sixties, and the book deals with questions of faith in an unpretentious but thoughtful and intriguing way.

We might say that the major theme of
Rosemary's Baby
deals with urban paranoia (as opposed to the small-town or rural paranoia we will see in Jack Finney's
The Body Snatchers
), but that an important minor theme could be stated along these lines: The weakening of religious conviction is an opening wedge for the devil, both in the macrocosm (questions of world faith) and in the microcosm (the cycle of Rosemary's faith as she goes from belief as Rosemary Reilly, to unbelief as Rosemary Woodhouse, to belief again as the mother of her infernal Child). I'm not suggesting that Ira Levin believes this Puritanical thesis—although he may, for all I know. I am suggesting, however, that it makes a nice fulcrum on which to turn his plot, and that he plays fair with the idea and explores most of its implications. In the religious pilgrim's progress that Rosemary goes through, Levin gives us a seriocomic allegory of faith. Rosemary and Guy begin as typical young marrieds; Rosemary is practicing birth control as a matter of course in spite of her rigid Catholic upbringing, and both of them have decided they will have children only when they—not God—decide they are ready. After Terry's suicide (or was it murder?), Rosemary has a dream in which she is being scolded by an old parochial school teacher, Sister Agnes, for bricking up the school windows and getting them disqualified from a beautiful-school contest. But mingling with the dream are real voices from the Castevet apartment next door, and it is Minnie Castevet, speaking through the mouth of Sister Agnes in Rosemary's dream, that we are listening to: