Dear friends,
I turned in revisions to my book manuscript—an experimental biography of Anne Frank, for those who haven’t been following my journey here—at around 6 p.m. on October 6. I had dinner with my family and went to bed early.
I woke up on October 7 and opened Instagram. (No, I’m not proud.) The first image I saw was of bodies on an Israeli highway. My mind initially could not process it. Are they camels? I thought.
Since then, just about everyone I know has been struggling to deal with the horror in their own way. My mother, who normally watches nothing but the Tennis Channel, is glued to cable news. My husband has thrown himself into his work, amplifying the voices of ordinary Gazans who oppose Hamas, which you can see here:
And our eight-year-old daughter came home from school, where her classmates had evidently been talking about the war, and asked, “Is it true that there are people in the world who want me dead?”
As the news about antisemitism in the United States grows more and more anxiety-provoking—especially on college campuses, including the one where I teach—my text threads have lit up with messages from friends I haven’t heard from in years, wanting to talk, have coffee, have lunch. We all seem to need personal connection.
And one thing I’m hearing from my friends over and over is: I can’t read.
Even under ordinary conditions, our attention spans are atrophying, thanks to a diet of social media—basically ultra-processed food for our brains.1 We can’t stop doomscrolling, even though it only makes us feel worse. But I had to read: I had committed to
to lead a group read of The Haunting of Hill House, one of my favorite novels, starting October 10.I took a deep breath and dove back in. Although I’ve read the novel many times, each day I saw things I had previously overlooked. And a dynamic group of commenters soon began chiming in, answering questions I posed and filling in details I hadn’t mentioned.
One of those commenters soon asked the question that was probably on everyone’s mind. Is it “frivolous,” he wondered, to spend time and energy on a ghost story while the world is on fire?
I don’t think it is, I told him. On a superficial level, it’s healthy to take a break from the news and have a little entertainment. But more seriously, I believe that literature is always useful, because its most primary function is to deepen our understanding of the world around us and of the human condition.
A friend quoted to me these lines from Brecht:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
As Hannah Aizenman wrote in The New Yorker, people tend to read the lines as “a token of hope, a testament to the human spirit’s eternal resilience.” But they also articulate “the stultifying effects of crisis on the imagination.” If, during dark times, all we talk about is the dark times, we will soon regress to clichés and propaganda. Those who bring the news do essential work, but we must also look elsewhere: outward, upward.
One term for what literature gives us is “psychic nourishment.” If doomscrolling amounts to Cheetos for the brain, art is soul food. We need it to grow as human beings, to keep our minds open and questioning so that we can fulfill our purpose.
My own art diet over the past few weeks has been far from balanced. I’m trying to practice intuitive eating for the spirit, letting my mind guide me to whatever attracts it. One morning I woke up with this song by Stephen Sanchez in my head and listened to it on repeat for days, for no other reason than that it’s beautiful. I devoured A Good House for Children, a gorgeous new novel about women, art, child-rearing, and creating a home, after reading a review that aptly described it as “feminist gothic.”
(Pro tip: when the doomscrolling habit is hard to break, I sometimes find it easier to read via the Kindle app on my phone—a “lighter lift” than a physical book. You can check out e-books from the library and they appear instantly.)
I’ve also decided to dive more deeply into both Israeli and Arab writing. Apparently I’m not the only one: when I tried to request a novel by Isabella Hammad from the Brooklyn Public Library, all the copies were already on hold, which seems like a good sign. My friend Gal Beckerman published a useful reading list in The Atlantic that covers history, journalism, and fiction. I also loved Gal’s recent interview with Israeli writer Etgar Keret.
I’m interested in your recommendations: fiction, nonfiction, Israeli, Arab, other. What are your favorites? Which writers or specific texts are most essential? I’ll follow up in this space.
As it turned out, The Haunting of Hill House wasn’t as far afield from the news cycle as I had imagined. Months ago, Henry Eliot, host of the On the Road with Penguin Classics podcast, invited me to travel with him to Vermont to visit places important in Jackson’s life. We scheduled the trip for mid-October. A few days beforehand, Henry sent me the itinerary. To my delight and astonishment, he had managed to finagle us a tour of the Everett Mansion, the estate in Bennington that I believe was an inspiration for Hill House. The mansion, looking appropriately spooky, was among the photos Jackson kept taped to her wall as she worked on the novel.
Originally built by Edward Everett, a wealthy glass bottle manufacturer, the house has a long and complicated history. After Everett’s first wife died under mysterious circumstances, he married another woman. The daughters from his first marriage later challenged the second wife’s inheritance in a court case nicknamed “The Battle for the Bennington Millions.” From 1952 until 1974, the building served as the novitiate of the Holy Cross Monastery. More recently, it was part of the campus of Southern Vermont College, which went bankrupt in 2019; the chief financial officer committed suicide in 2021 after being convicted of embezzling funds from the college. Since then, it’s been empty.
There are stories about a woman in white glimpsed in the halls of the mansion as well as in the woods. Students at the college kept records of their ghostly encounters, and an episode of SyFy’s “Ghost Hunters” was filmed there. While I was working on my book, my husband and I house-sat nearby, and I had my own uncanny experience on the grounds. But I hadn’t seen the inside.
Together with Lucy Little, our audio engineer, Henry and I arrived at the mansion on a gray, drizzly fall morning and were greeted by the caretaker, a no-nonsense Vermonter not entirely unlike Mr. Dudley. I’ll let you listen to the podcast to learn what we found there, but suffice to say that I left more convinced than ever that the mansion inspired Hill House. It has a similarly convoluted setup, with many rooms leading into multiple others, and other similar details: a veranda that wraps around the building, children’s faces decorating the light fixtures, even a tower room.
But the most disturbing part, for me, came after the tour. When we first arrived, the caretaker mentioned that after the college closed, the building had been used briefly by a summer camp, but it “didn’t work out.” At the end of our visit, I pressed him on what had happened.
During the summer of 2020—the first Covid summer—Moshe Perlstein, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from New Jersey, rented out the place for a summer camp. As the caretaker told it, the camp staff didn’t “keep a leash” on the kids, who allegedly ran around disturbing the neighbors. (The mansion is set on many acres, but there are houses on nearby streets.) Neighbors also complained about noise from the camp, which held outdoor singing events in a large tent on the grounds.
The town sued the rabbi, alleging that the presence of a large number of out-of-state children risked spreading Covid. The campers tested negative for the virus, and the organizers promised they would stay on the grounds. Then the noise complaints started. Perlstein met with representatives from the town and agreed to install air-conditioning in the gym, at his own cost, so that the camp could move the programs indoors. He also promised not to use the PA system between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Apparently the camp and the town managed to coexist for the remaining weeks of the program.
When the property went up for auction the following year, Perlstein bid on it. The town sprang into action. The caretaker told me that locals created a GoFundMe so that they could contribute to prevent Perlstein’s organization from buying it. “The whole town banded together to keep them out,” he said. The property was ultimately purchased by Southwestern Vermont Hospital Corporation, which is working with a real estate company to renovate the house and grounds into a luxury resort.
“The people of the village have always hated us,” Jackson wrote in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Henry and I had spent much of the previous day walking around North Bennington and talking about Jackson’s feelings of isolation there, as well as the ostracism she and her family experienced.2 Her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was Jewish; Jackson, in her private life, went by the identifiably Jewish name Mrs. Hyman. In the late 1950s, Jackson sought to oust a popular local schoolteacher who was abusing the children in her classroom, including one of the Hyman daughters. The teacher’s supporters far outnumbered those who wanted her fired, and she ultimately suffered no consequences. The family had previously experienced harassment, but in the aftermath of the controversy, it grew more vicious. The Hyman children remember finding garbage dumped in their yard and swastikas soaped on their windows.
The people of the village have always hated us. In Kiev, in Odessa, in Warsaw, in Kishinev, in Hebron, in Jedwabne, in Kielce. The line echoed in my mind as I stood in the empty back hall of the mansion that might have inspired Hill House, listening to the caretaker tell this story and looking out at the surrounding mountains, lush with autumn foliage, but holding darkness within.
As ever,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I know there’s a case that ultra-processed food has its place and that it’s elitist (and problematic in other ways) to suggest otherwise. This post by Virginia Sole-Smith explains the issues well. But it doesn’t make me feel good when I eat it, so I do try to avoid it.
That episode hasn’t been released yet—it’s part of Season Four.
Moving and heavy connections. Thanks for sharing this.
I've chanced upon your book about Holocaust literature and it seems like you are the greatest expert of them all who might answer this question.