Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (13 page)

Stanley in Brooklyn, dressed as a pirate for Halloween, age twelve.

Moe and Lulu’s marriage was nearly a casualty of those difficult years. In the spring of 1932, when Stanley was twelve, his parents temporarily separated, which put even more financial and emotional strain on the family. In childish, awkward script, Stanley wrote pathetic letters to Moe imploring his father to come home. “Mom has periodical attacks of asthma and crying. Chiefly crying. . . . We need you very, very much,” he pleaded. Stanley worried that his mother would commit suicide. “She walks about all day, her eyes red with crying, muttering, ‘My life is blighted, my life is blighted!’ She says that she will not let you
in, but I can easily persuade her about that.” He reported that they were moving into a three-room flat “to make both ends meet. . . . If you come back, we can live cheaper and everything will be all right again.”

Moe did come back. He had run off with an underage girl; his brother Harry hired a private detective to track them down and persuaded Moe to come home. It was not the only occasion on which he was unfaithful. During a period when Lulu’s sister Becky was living with the family, Lulu once discovered the two of them in the bathroom together in the middle of the night, Becky performing oral sex. Stanley likely did not learn about that until much later. But Moe’s abandonment of the family embittered Stanley’s relationship with his father. Moe’s philandering also set an unfortunate example for his son.

Moe’s disappearance gave Stanley a taste of what it was like to be the man of the house. During the separation, at a time of soaring unemployment, he managed to find his first job, sorting files at a local store for ten cents an hour. “At least I do part of your work,” he told his father proudly. His level of independence was unequaled among his peers. As a young teenager, he was permitted to travel alone to Chicago, staying with relatives, to see the 1933 World’s Fair. His earnings also allowed him to indulge on a small scale his passion for collecting, starting early on with stamps, coins (which he would collect seriously as an adult), and chewing gum, of which he would eventually accumulate more than 150 varieties. (He avowed himself to be “perhaps the greatest chewing gum collector on earth,” admitting also that he was probably the only one.) Eventually his collections would include records, coins, and, most important, books: Stanley and Shirley amassed a library amounting to some 25,000 volumes, which lined virtually every wall in their house. “He knew where each one was, who wrote it, where it was in the house, what color the binding was, and pretty much everything in it,” Sarah Hyman recalls. “And he could quote and quote and quote.”

Stanley also kept an extensive system of files on any subject of interest, clipping articles and making comprehensive notes on anything he read. Shirley would sometimes tease him about his love of order: everything on his desk—books, pens, ashtray—had to be lined up just right
before he could work. Bernard Malamud liked to repeat a funny, if probably apocryphal, story in which a middle-aged Stanley fell asleep in his study and awoke stark naked. After a long search, he finally located his underwear, socks, and eyeglasses neatly stowed in his filing cabinet under U, S, and E.

The discipline Stanley developed as a boy surely helped him cope with his parents’ chaotic marriage. It may also have been a way of subconsciously siding with his mother—she of the fanatically clean ashtrays—against his brash, dismissive father. But it would become an eventual source of conflict with his wife, whose creative mind thrived amid the chaos of her own desk and who had no qualms about leaving a sink full of dishes or a floor unswept if she needed to get back to her typewriter.

IN THE FALL OF
1932, as fifteen-year-old Shirley settled into her junior year at Burlingame High, Stanley, at the precocious age of thirteen, enrolled as a freshman at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School. Originally founded by Dutch settlers in the eighteenth century and rebuilt in the early 1900s, the school occupied a campus on Flatbush Avenue that was modeled after Oxford, with elegant ivy-covered buildings decorated with gargoyles and other carvings. In addition to Malamud, among its famous alumni were actresses Mae West and Barbara Stanwyck, novelist Mickey Spillane, real estate tycoon Samuel LeFrak, and singers Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand.

As Brooklyn’s population surged in the Depression years, Erasmus Hall expanded accordingly. By the time Stanley enrolled, the school was so crowded that its five thousand students had to attend in three shifts, the earliest starting at six in the morning. The school was competitive, the best Brooklyn had to offer, but Stanley nonetheless found his education insufficient. He wrote an editorial for the school newspaper comparing Erasmus to the mythical bed of Procrustes: since standards were set according to the average student, anyone else had to be “either cut down or stretched out” to fit. There were strategies to help less-bright students, Stanley complained, but “the plight of the unfortunate over-intelligent student has been completely disregarded.”

Moaning about how his own brilliance disadvantaged him was not a recipe for popularity. Stanley was initially as isolated in high school as Shirley would be in Rochester: “miserably lonely, reading prodigiously, hating everyone, and wishing I had enough courage to talk to girls.” One day a boy he recognized from class sat down next to him in the locker room. Stanley, trying to make conversation as he best knew how, asked his classmate if he read Poe. “No, I read very well, thank you,” came the reply. Stanley responded huffily that he didn’t think puns were very clever. “I don’t either,” said the other boy, “but they’re something I can’t help, like a harelip.”

That was Stanley’s first encounter with Walter Bernstein, who grew up in Crown Heights and would become a celebrated screenwriter best known for
The Front
(1976). Even Stanley later acknowledged that as a child he had been “dreadfully serious,” overly convinced of his own importance, and too deeply influenced by his father’s Spartanism to regard fun as “anything other than the good right hand of sin.” But “under Walter’s tutelage,” he later recalled, “slowly and carefully, I learned to laugh, the way a child learns to walk.” A movie buff from early on, Walter enjoyed having the early shift at school because it meant that he could catch an afternoon film before heading home: given twenty-five cents for lunch money, he spent a dime on daytime admission to the Astor Theatre in Times Square and fifteen cents on candy. Walter even snuck out of his own bar mitzvah celebration to go to the movies; he emerged from the theater to find police cars racing up and down Eastern Parkway, his parents frantic.

Walter also brought some levity into Stanley’s reading program, including the fantasy books Shirley already loved: Lewis Carroll, the Oz books, even A. A. Milne—all of which Stanley had previously derided as “childish.” Walter enjoyed British humor, including the works of P. G. Wodehouse, and introduced Stanley to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Together with a few other friends—including Frank Orenstein, who went to college with Stanley and would become another lifelong friend—they would write a parody called
Punafore
(
Or the Class That Loved Its Jailor
) for the senior class play.

By spring of their junior year, Stanley and Walter were coauthoring
theater reviews in the school newspaper, calling their column “The Prompter’s Box.” Walter would remember it mainly as a way of getting free tickets to Broadway plays. But Stanley took the role of critic seriously. A few months later, he wrote to the director of the Yale School of Drama to announce his intention to “enter the fold of drama critisism [sic].” The fact that college was still more than a year away did not dissuade him from asking this prominent stranger for advice regarding which college courses would be most useful in his future career.

With criticism, Stanley found the outlet for his intelligence that he had always desired. “He was born to be a critic,” Walter says. Stanley’s early attempts were not always successful, but he threw himself into writing with all his usual gusto. “I have read, and written, bad reviews in my time, but this certainly caps them all,” Walter commented on a draft of one of Stanley’s pieces. “You use ten words where three would do and you’re obviously unfair for the sake of being nasty.” But if his style and critical taste were not yet fully developed, Stanley’s characteristic tone was already audible. A review of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1928), written when Stanley was fifteen, criticized the book’s language as “lyric and exquisite in some places, and matter-of-fact and mechanical in others” and scoffed at the ending, in which Wilder explores a metaphysics of the meaning of life, as utterly nonsensical: “Come, come, Mr. Wilder, other people through the ages have loved, and never fell down canyons.” His confidence in his own judgment, at such an early age, is nothing short of stunning.

Upon his graduation, in 1936, Stanley’s yearbook quote was “Intentions charged with power.” One of the stars of his class, elected for two years in a row to the honor society, he was voted “Boy most likely to be serviceable to Erasmus.” At a time when private colleges and universities around the country implemented quotas limiting the enrollment of Jewish students, both he and Walter, unusually, had their choice of schools. Walter, headed to Dartmouth, urged Stanley to join him so that they could stay together. But Syracuse had just established one of the first undergraduate journalism programs, and Stanley had already decided that he was going to become a critic.

STANLEY’S SEXUAL AWAKENING TOOK
place just after his fifteenth birthday. During the summer before his junior year of high school, he persuaded his parents to send him alone to a vacation resort in New Jersey, in a town appropriately called Mount Freedom. There Stanley encountered a man named Julie, a former burlesque comedian who was “as picturesque and checkered a person” as he had ever known. Stanley idolized Julie, largely because of his success with women, and regarded him as a role model.

Up to this point, Stanley’s sexual experience amounted to “an infrequent and shamefaced masturbation.” His dates thus far had been chaste. Julie, who was flamboyantly sexual, loosened his inhibitions. “He spoke of sex as though it were a perfectly normal, casual, and rather amusing form of activity, and I found myself more and more attracted to this concept,” Stanley recalled. Julie was also at the center of a circle of theater people whom Stanley described as “the most real and least affected group of people I had ever known.” One day, while Julie and his girlfriend were visiting Stanley in his room, they all decided to go swimming. Stanley asked the girl to leave so that he could change, but Julie told her to stay. His forehead bathed in sweat, Stanley took off his clothes without turning his back. Though he was not yet overweight, as he would later become, he had the build of a teenager who spent most of his time reading, with the thick glasses to go with it. But the incident cured him of physical embarrassment. “I have never been ashamed of my body since,” he said afterward.

Despite his general strictness, Moe never insisted that Stanley adhere to a curfew: “It was my father’s theory that it was no one’s goddam business what I did or what time I got home, least of all his.” This gave Stanley plenty of opportunity to put Julie’s lessons into practice. At the start of his senior year of high school, he met Henrietta, a girl several years older who worked as a photographer’s model. “She was not unintelligent,” Stanley would later say, deploying the double negative intentionally, “but was as close to being illiterate as a person who has gone through high school can be.” She was the first true anti-intellectual he
had ever known, with an open distaste for art, literature, and music. Stanley did not mind. Walter Bernstein, who had an unrequited crush on Henrietta, remembered her as “exotic.” Stanley, well aware of his friend’s feelings, phoned Walter one afternoon to report that he was in bed with her—“showing off,” Walter said. Stanley’s competitive streak could make him cruel.

A comic sketch that Stanley wrote in high school, in the voices of a boy and a girl who give drastically different accounts of a date, offers an amusing yet telling glimpse of his attitude toward sex. The boy, wanting to preserve the girl’s innocence, musters a supreme effort in his attempt not to “defile” her (“She sat there in an old red kimono, and it kept slipping open . . . the little innocent never noticed it at all”). Meanwhile, the girl bemoans her date’s failure to respond to her efforts at seduction: “I wiggled, and looked at him, and opened that goddam kimono a little more, and he just sat like a wet dishrag.” Even as a teenager, Stanley had no patience for the social conventions that insisted on women’s purity in the face of men’s aggression. If the sketch sounds more like a fantasy than like anything that might actually happen to a high school student, it nonetheless shows that he already suspected—or at least hoped—that women were just as interested in sex as men.