Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (18 page)

In time to plant again? The papers said

You would be home by summer. When you come

Bring nothing for the baby. He is dead.

The work will be less hard when you are home

But I’m afraid the season will be late

For growing things. However, I shall wait.

In contrast to Stanley’s acrostic and elaborate rhyme scheme, Shirley’s language and style are simple, in keeping with her subject—an ordinary farming woman writing to her husband at war. In a poem of 119 words, 100 are just one syllable. But together they tell the haunting story of a woman who seems to be writing about her farm, but is actually mourning her lost fertility. There is no Sandburg-style wordplay or linguistic absurdity of the sort she had previously been experimenting with—Stanley had pushed her in a different direction. He wrote proudly to Jay that the line about the baby “knocked the class off its feet.” He was thrilled by her writing, and by her. “shoiley and i go on being happy like anything. . . . that shoiley is ten times nicer than she has ever been, so smart, so beautiful,” he crowed.

Jackson wasn’t certain enough of her poetry to publish it yet. In October 1938 she made her debut in the
Syracusan
, the college literary and humor magazine, which self-consciously styled itself after the still-new literary and humor magazine that was quickly becoming the place for aspiring writers to aspire to. Jackson’s first piece, “Y and I,” was a
New Yorker
–style “casual”—a light memoiristic essay that may or may not be fiction. It describes an apparently simple errand to buy chess pieces that turns into a madcap trip around a department store, in which Y and the narrator startle the very proper saleswomen by pretending to be Nazi spies. The ending dissolves into absurdity: the two girls are flummoxed by directions to the sporting department in the basement and slink home, defeated, to play bridge. The department-store setting is reminiscent of James Gould Cozzens’s novel
Castaway
(1934),
in which a man descends into madness after becoming trapped in a similar store. Stanley was fascinated by the novel and insisted that Shirley read it. But there is no darkness in her story, other than the absurdity, even in 1938, of finding Nazi spies in a small-town department store.

She satirized her experiments in the occult the following month with “Y and I and the Ouija Board,” another lighthearted romp. Here the two girls find themselves in conversation with a smart-talking Ouija board, which turns out to be nursing a grudge against Y for having once dropped it. After delivering a series of wisecracks, it suggests that they all play a hand of bridge (which it wins) and then dictates a recipe for fudge. The contributors’ notes at the start of the issue report that Shirley “would like us to believe that she actually owned this Ouija board, but then she also swears that the Jacksons have a family ghost named Eric the Red who lives in the checkbook.” In “The Smoking Room,” another story likely written around the same time, Jackson took a similarly lighthearted approach to the occult. Here the devil appears to the narrator while she is writing a school paper and asks her to sign a contract selling him her soul, but she outsmarts him into selling her his soul instead. He is finally cowed by the appearance of the dorm mother, who tells him he is a fire hazard and threatens to report him to the dean of women. Nothing in either of these stories suggests that the author had spent much of her summer poring over arcane handbooks of the supernatural, or that she took any of it at all seriously.

IN THE SPRING OF
1939, as the Spanish Civil War ended with victory for Franco’s reign of murderous oppression and Germany peremptorily invaded Czechoslovakia, Shirley was preoccupied with troubles of a more mundane sort: a series of pregnancy scares. Jay Williams gave her various charms to bring on her period, which achieved the desired results. Unwilling to continue relying on magic alone, she acquired a pessary: a type of diaphragm similar to the one immortalized in Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
, in which a character famously leaves her newly acquired birth control device under a park bench. As McCarthy’s novel—which was published in 1963 but takes place in the mid- to late
1930s—makes clear, a woman was technically supposed to either be married or have a health reason for requiring the device, but the rules were not always strictly enforced. “All you need is a straight face, a quick story, and a consciousness that . . . dammit, you can do it,” Shirley counseled a friend. Walter Bernstein and Frank Orenstein, with whom Stanley shared all the details of his sex life, were suitably impressed. “What do you do to get the pessary out, stand Shirley on her head and shake her?” joked the less experienced Walter. When they separated again for the summer break, Stanley held on to the pessary. Shirley, who was headed back to Rochester, probably did not want to risk the possibility that Geraldine, with her propensity for snooping, would discover it. (In
The Group
, the diaphragm’s owner likewise struggles to figure out where to store it safely—surely not in her room at a proper hotel for unmarried women.) Even so, the symbolism of Stanley keeping the token of her sexual liberation could not have been lost on Shirley.

Stanley’s plans for the summer were typically ambitious. That year he and Shirley had studied modern literature with Leonard Brown, the star of the Syracuse English department, whom they both came to idolize. At first Brown offended Shirley by chauvinistically suggesting that Stanley had written one of her term papers for her, which led Stanley to worry that Brown and others saw their intellectual relationship as “one-sided.” “One-sided—when it takes both of us to keep him on his feet,” Shirley snorted. But she came to be as fond of Brown as Stanley was; two decades later, she would dedicate
The Haunting of Hill House
to him. Brown, they would later write, had taught them that the goal of reading and criticizing was “to know and understand, not to like or dislike, and the aim of writing was to get down what you wanted to say, not to gesticulate or impress.” Stanley may not always have followed that precept, but at least he believed in it.

Now Brown encouraged his star student to put his talent for literary criticism to use by writing a handbook of poetic form. As a measure of his extraordinary esteem for Stanley, he promised to lecture from the book-in-progress in the poetry course he was teaching that summer, using the pages as soon as they rolled out of Stanley’s typewriter—but only if Stanley could complete them in time.

The pressure did not dissuade Stanley from making his customary visit to Walter at Dartmouth, where he proudly displayed Shirley’s pessary to anyone who would pay attention. He then spent several weeks in New York, where Shirley managed to join him, staying with Stanley’s YCL friend Jesse Zel Lurie and his wife, Irene, in their apartment on West Tenth Street. The highlight of their New York City sojourn was a visit to the remarkable 1939 World’s Fair, with the slogan “Dawn of a New Day.” There Shirley and Stanley had their first look at the newfangled invention called television, as well as the electric typewriter, the fluorescent lightbulb, and nylon fabric—famously said to be made from coal, air, and water. As the Nazi threat loomed, the fair promoted cultural awareness and diplomacy, with more than sixty countries participating. Many years later, Stanley would write an article for
The New Yorker
about the time capsule that was buried at the fair, which contained writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, a pack of Camels, a Mickey Mouse watch, and other tokens of the era. (The time capsule is scheduled to be unearthed in 6939, five thousand years after it was buried.) By the beginning of July Stanley was back in Syracuse, working at a furious pace on his book, with the goal of completing two chapters each week.

Shirley returned to Rochester to prepare for an adventure to rival her cruise through the Panama Canal six years earlier: a cross-country family road trip culminating in an extended visit to San Francisco, to which she hadn’t returned since the move to Rochester. She was excited about the trip, but anxious about leaving Stanley to his own devices for most of the summer—so much so that she even sent him a sketch she had written during one of their breakups, in which she spilled out into her notebook all her desperation at the thought of losing him. “People don’t just part like that,” it concludes. “They don’t have so much together and then so much apart—He can’t have anything apart from me because he has taken so much from me.” Ever editing herself, she crossed out the word “part” in the first sentence and wrote in “separate”: even at her lowest, her style still mattered. The original title of the piece was “Prayer,” which Shirley removed before sending it to her atheist boyfriend. “i decided i wanted to say something and did,” she told him.

Stanley’s only reaction was aesthetic: he called the sketch “marvelous” and encouraged her to write “more in the same style, a great deal more.” But he was apparently unwilling to hear what she was trying to say. He loved her as much as ever, and told her so in each letter, but he remained unconvinced of monogamy’s merits. Though he was working a punishing schedule on the book, he reserved the hours after ten p.m. to “read or fuck.” What he needed more than anything else, he told her matter-of-factly, was to “look at someone’s face beside my own in the mirror when i get up in the morning.” As usual, he had a few prospects in mind, including a cute redhead in his apartment building and an older woman named Tony, who shared his interest in literary criticism and pressed books upon him.

Stanley’s drudgery was interrupted by a visit to Syracuse by Kenneth Burke, the iconoclastic critic who had already made a name for himself as the author of several major works of literary theory. Though nominally a Marxist sympathizer, he was equally famous for his idiosyncratic approach to literary study: fearing the “assembly line” of academia, he had dropped out of Columbia just before graduating and fled to Greenwich Village to begin his writing career. When Burke arrived at Syracuse that summer, he was fresh from the third and final American Writers’ Congress, where he had delivered “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’ ” a magisterial lecture analyzing the language of
Mein Kampf
. The congress, like many of its attendees, had essentially abandoned its original Communist leaning: Malcolm Cowley reported in
The New Republic
that aside from an address by Edvard Beneš, the former president of Czechoslovakia, “there was not much talk of the political situation; it was an ominous background that was taken for granted.”

Stanley was instantly captivated by Burke’s brilliant conversation. To listen to him, he wrote to Shirley, was “an intellectual thrill of the highest order. . . . the man is really the finest brain and the loosest tongue i have ever seen.” Burke’s absorption in his thoughts was so complete that if he and Stanley were conversing while walking down a hall and Stanley turned to go down the stairway, Burke would keep walking and talking until he ran into the wall: “they used to tell those stories about einstein, and i never believed them.” He was ecstatic when Brown invited him
and Burke to spend an afternoon at Brown’s cottage in Borodino, by Lake Skaneateles. Stanley was relaxing on the dock with a typescript of Burke’s latest opus when a page blew into the water. He was aghast, but Burke only laughed. “Aha, your subconscious is trying to destroy my manuscript!” he said. It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for the rest of Stanley’s life and had an immense impact on both his intellectual development and his career. Cowley, a friend of Burke’s, also gave a talk at Syracuse that summer, but Stanley found him less impressive. “i didn’t realize what a thrill (actual physical thrill) it was to hear burke until i heard cowley, who after all is just an ordinary mortal,” he reported to Shirley. The two men remained friendly—Cowley, along with other
New Republic
colleagues, attended Stanley and Shirley’s wedding the following year—but would never be close.

Shirley must have been glad to hear Stanley more enthusiastic about Burke than about the fetching redhead upstairs. She set off on her cross-country journey—in the days before interstate highways, a weeks-long drive—anxious about the extended period of time before they would see each other again. Her parents’ disapproval notwithstanding, she faithfully wrote to Stanley at each stop, in letters that were so long and rapturous that she sometimes ran out of ink in the middle and had to switch to pencil. By now, the terrible years of drought were over and the atmosphere of the Midwest and the Plains states was more cheerful. “Minnesota comes close to my idea of heaven—it’s all farming country, and very green,” she wrote. “I never knew what hay really smelled like—so sweet.” In South Dakota, she was awed by the grasshoppers—“a foot and a half long . . . with incredibly nasty dispositions”—and by the friendliness of the locals: “I’d forgotten what it was like to sit in a gas station for an hour and talk to other people driving through.” In the Black Hills, she rediscovered her love of mountains, for which, she suddenly realized, she had been “acutely homesick” in the East. The peace she found in nature was a consoling antidote to the din of her anxiety:

Someday . . . I shall have a little house with no sides on top of a mountain. It must be a mountain with pine trees, and little streams and deer and even bees. . . . We stopped on top of one today, and I
went far off by myself and sat and looked, and I didn’t even think about you, my darling. I just remembered all the times at home—even with you—that I’ve wanted something and couldn’t tell what it was. . . . Way deep inside me all the restlessness has gone away, and I could stay here from now on, even without you. I wouldn’t
want
to, but it wouldn’t drive me crazy, or into that desolate, no-insides feeling I’d have anywhere else. I think that my restlessness and nervousness at home is an insane seeking for some overwhelming stability which I find here in this vast quiet.