Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (17 page)

The cycle of infidelity, fury, and forgiveness would repeat over and over, each time resolving with Shirley’s restoration of Stanley to the role in which he mattered most to her: her creative sounding board and the arbiter of her talent. “o mightiest among men,” she addressed him just a few weeks after one of his betrayals (tongue only partly in cheek), lamenting that she hadn’t been able to continue with the novel she had been writing, because Young had brutally damaged her self-confidence.

worst of it is, i can see damn well myself that it’s good, but this constant belittling has made me feel that perhaps i may be kidding myself. . . . is she telling the truth? is there anything in the world that can prove to her (and to me, now) that i
can
write? sure, i’m a sap for trying to write a novel, but . . . it’s a
good
novel.

Stanley tried to be supportive, but since Shirley refused to show him the novel-in-progress, there wasn’t much he could say. “i think you are potentially the greatest writer in the world, [and] wish you had something to write about,” he wrote back. In response, Shirley tried to break up with him again. With his usual equanimity—on the back of her breakup letter, he composed a to-do list—Stanley paid no attention. Jeanou told Shirley she was being rash. “Pride is nice,” she wrote from Paris. “I think that love is nicer.” Upon their return to Syracuse, Shirley and Stanley were once again inseparable.

“
HAVE YOU PERFORMED
any incantations lately?” Stanley’s friend Jay Williams greeted Shirley at a party in the fall of 1938. Jay and Stanley had met the previous summer at Camp Copake, the Borscht Belt resort Walter’s family frequented, where Jay, an actor, musician, and Communist, was on the social staff, teaching fencing and staging theatrical performances. Later he became involved with the Group Theatre, the influential New York drama collective, and eventually wrote a successful series of children’s books. Charismatic and charming, he had a penchant for saying and doing outrageous things that appealed to both Shirley and Stanley. At their first encounter, he told Shirley nonchalantly that his backpack contained a dead baby that he planned to roast over a campfire.

By the time Stanley introduced her to Jay, Shirley had been studying the occult for several years. Her interest likely began with
The Golden Bough
and the paper she wrote about witchcraft while at the University of Rochester. During the previous summer at home, she acquired a pack of tarot cards and began to learn how to use them, a skill with which she
would entertain friends throughout her life. (At least once, she dressed up as a gypsy and read tarot at a Bennington College fair, to the students’ delight.) Together she and Elizabeth Young pored over Émile Grillot de Givry’s
Witchcraft, Magic, and Alchemy
, a richly illustrated compendium of occult iconography, including demonology, folklore about witches and sorcerers, and detailed instructions for summoning spirits. And she begged Young, who was working in the English department at the University of Rochester and had privileged access to the library, to steal a rare copy of Joseph Glanvill’s
Saducismus Triumphatus
, a book about witchcraft dating from the 1680s that has been credited with influencing Cotton Mather’s justification of the Salem witch trials. Young declined; Shirley would have to study the book in the library.

Jackson began seriously studying witchcraft during her college years.

Glanvill, a clergyman with a sideline in the occult, intended his book as a treatise to prove the existence of witches. While skeptics might declare that what appeared to be supernatural power was in fact only trickery, Glanvill attempted to give evidence that witches were real, including accounts of witches’ sabbaths: meetings to which they flew naked on brooms, where they would eat and drink with the devil. He described famous hauntings and possessions such as the Drummer of Tedworth, an episode in which an Englishman reported hearing a loud drumming noise
on the outside of his house. (In one of the early supernatural manifestations in
The Haunting of Hill House
, a ghostly presence pounds similarly on the characters’ bedroom doors.) Shirley would later use quotations from Glanvill’s book as epigraphs to each section of
The Lottery
.

Jay Williams, too, was deeply interested in magic: he had made Stanley a protective talisman, “an intricate thing with names of evil gods all over it” and other words that Shirley, despite her studies, did not recognize. Staunch atheist though he was, Stanley was superstitious enough to keep the talisman among his treasured possessions. At Jay’s second meeting with Shirley, he promised to perform a black mass in which he would make the devil appear in the form of a beautiful woman riding on a tiger. Shirley was pleased by the idea. “May I ask it for anything I want?” she asked Jay. “Anything you want,” he replied, “only you must be prepared to pay a price.” She said that she was willing to pay any price other than giving up Stanley, and Jay frowned. “No price is too great for the devil,” he said.

A few days later, she and Stanley went to Jay’s apartment, “filled with books, and a typewriter, and a great many knives.” Jay took down from the wall a drum that made “a soft crumbling sound,” and as they drank wine and talked, he began to tap it lightly. Suddenly Shirley noticed that “the drum was talking louder.” “Repeat after me,” Jay instructed them, and then he spoke a word that sounded like “Mamaloi.” “Mamaloi,” Shirley and Stanley repeated. Drumming louder, Jay began to chant “unintelligible words in a strange language,” first softly, then louder and louder. He began to point to a far corner of the room, “gesturing and calling, and the drum shouting,” but Shirley did not dare turn her head to see what he was pointing at. She held on to Stanley’s arm tight with both hands and began to cry. Later Stanley laughed at her for being frightened. Ever rational, he said that Jay’s drumming had probably had a hypnotic effect on her and she needed to get over being afraid of ghosts, which, he told her, “are created by malignant and unknowing minds for the terrible entertainment of foolish and even less knowing minds.” But Shirley sensed that Jay had access to “all the borderline evil and darkness in the world.” (Stanley would eventually prove to be more afraid of the occult than he had let on.)

Shirley would later make bold, if often facetious, claims about her own occult powers, from the jacket copy on her first novel—“perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch”—to the rumor that she had caused the publisher Alfred A. Knopf to break his leg in a skiing accident. But now, only twenty-one years old, she was frightened of the possibilities the occult opened up. Owing to her Christian Science background, it was not a stretch for her to believe that another reality, beyond the material world, might exist. Glanvill, too, suggested that witchcraft was not the only aspect of the human psyche that remained mysterious to the rational mind. “We are in the Dark as to
one another’s
Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their design, even to
sagacious Inquisitors
,” he wrote in one of the passages from
Saducismus Triumphatus
that Shirley would quote in
The Lottery
.

Shirley’s fear may be an indication that she believed witchcraft was possible: one cannot fear something that does not exist. Or it could be a sign of the lack of agency she felt in her own life and her corresponding longing for a way to harness power. Shirley was unable to control her mother, who now could add Stanley to her list of dissatisfactions with her daughter. And Shirley could not control Stanley—a man who was her ideal counterpart in so many ways, but who tormented her with his criticism and his unfaithfulness. What if there was a way to tap into a secret power, to exert control over things that seemed uncontrollable? Shirley would hardly be alone in desiring such magic.

Some months after the episode at the party, Jay Williams took Shirley out to dinner to give her some friendly advice. “You mustn’t be so timid with Stanley,” he told her. “You let him categorize you and your emotions and your reactions just like he does his own. . . . Logic is an essentially bad thing. It proves things that can’t be proved.” As if to emphasize the point, he gave her a little book of black magic, “full of antique formulas,” so that she could conjure the devil herself. Shirley wrapped it up in silk so that it could not come into physical contact with any of her other possessions and put it away safely.

EVEN IN THE ISOLATIONIST-LEANING
United States, it was clear by the fall of 1938 that Europe was on the cusp of a cataclysm. “Everybody here is talking of war,” Jeanou wrote from Paris just before Germany, France, Italy, and Great Britain signed the Munich agreement giving the Sudetenland to Germany. Stanley, back in New York before the start of his junior year, felt “the next world war buzzing all around me”: men his age were being conscripted in Europe, while he sat at home “scratching my abdomen lovingly and reading degenerate poetry.” It would be only a matter of time, he worried, until he was drafted. In Times Square, watching Communist artists drawing political art on a street corner, he recognized Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA, who had run for president in 1936 on the slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” “Hello, comrade,” Stanley greeted him, and was pleased when Browder greeted him back.

His efforts at writing fiction unsuccessful, Stanley now turned to poetry as an outlet for his ideology. He was mainly interested in writers whose political bent suited him, especially W. H. Auden, who would soon embark on a reading tour of American colleges. On a visit to Dartmouth, the poet slept on Walter Bernstein’s floor: “we stayed up most of the night talking and he is really a good guy,” Walter reported. Stanley also admired Kenneth Fearing, who had become as well-known for his unorthodox writing process as for his poetry of the Depression. His method was to bring a new poem to each weekly meeting of a labor organization he belonged to, “composed mainly of semi-illiterate immigrant workers living on the East side of New York,” Stanley wrote in an essay. “He reads his work to them, writes down all their criticisms, comments, and suggestions, and then takes the poem back and rewrites it until it satisfies them.” Perhaps more than the poetry itself, Stanley admired Fearing’s efforts to bring poetry to the masses. “No living and vital art is possible unless it is in touch with the people,” he argued, echoing Kenneth Burke’s remarks several years earlier at the first American Writers’ Congress. At the same time, he also loved the
very different work of E. E. Cummings, whose formal experimentation he found “truly liberating.”

Stanley and Shirley both made a few efforts at blank verse, but they were more interested in ways they could experiment within the strictures of poetic form. Stanley wrote only a handful of poems—creative writing held his attention far less than critical thinking—but one in particular is memorable. Titled “Love Sonnet After Munich” and likely written in the fall of 1938, it is a sonnet using the acrostic “Shirley Jackson” (her name conveniently fourteen letters long). In addition to that formal constraint, Stanley wrote the sonnet in “analyzed rhyme,” a complicated scheme in which vowel and consonant sounds are arranged in an alternating pattern to give the effect of rhyme without actually rhyming. Here is the first stanza:

Should bombers come, you would be by my side,

Holding your hand in mine, your muscles numb

In fear, your temples hot with frightened blood,

Rivalling the warmth they knew in gayer time.

“i don’t use old eyetalian forms because they are old eyetalian forms, but because i am looking for a form strong enough to handle modern poetry, critically good and intelligible to workers,” Stanley defended himself to Jay Williams. But it is clear that the form was mainly what interested him; the poem’s subject matter—lovers who die together in war—is hackneyed.

Shirley’s efforts were more successful. Her “Letter to a Soldier,” an effort at Steinbeckian working-class realism, took the form of a traditional sonnet, with one small twist:

My dear,

   It’s lonely now that you are gone,

And I grow sick of women and of rain.

We all feel strange at being left alone

And wonder when the Spring will come again.

I have enough to eat, but I have found

The seeds you planted will not grow this year—

The rain has gone too deep into the ground

For anything to grow. Will you be here