Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (19 page)

In early August 1939, nearly six years to the day after they set sail for New York, the Jacksons arrived in San Francisco. Two years after the Nanking massacre, in which Japanese troops committed murder and mass rape in the Chinese capital, the city, fearful that Japanese aggression would soon reach the West Coast, was gripped by anti-Japanese hysteria. Chinese merchants displayed signs reading “We Are Chinese,” and Shirley’s uncle Clifford, who took her and Barry sightseeing, wouldn’t allow either of them to enter a Japanese-owned business. When Barry offered a piece of Japanese candy to a Chinese beggar child, the boy, insulted, slapped it out of his hand. More interested in curios than politics, Shirley, who had recently taken to wearing a charm bracelet with skull ornaments, was thrilled to find a hand-carved miniature skull, “the most delicate and intricate little thing,” for only a quarter.

She was overjoyed to be back in her native city. “i’d forgotten, hadn’t i? i mean, about fog and about hills and about oceans and things? because it’s wonderful.” The only drawback was having to deal with her grandmother, who had found an apartment for the Jacksons to stay in, perched on a hill beside the Presidio, “very practical . . . with a garage and a radio and a piano and lots of ashtrays,” but only two beds for the four of them. “she has been concentrating for two weeks on making mary baker eddy and god think of a place for barry to sleep,” Shirley wrote with her customary irony about Christian Science.

Stanley, who had never been farther west than Chicago, complained sourly that Shirley’s letters sounded like a “movie-travelogue.” He must have been deeply envious of both her adventures and her freedom. His
writing was proceeding at a remarkable clip—by the end of July, he had written nearly six chapters of his book—but he was burning out. Until then, he had been “solidly chaste and completely faithful” for the entire summer, but it was “not from lack of trying,” as he told her. Now he renewed his efforts.

At the same time, tensions between Shirley and her parents, likely exacerbated by the enforced proximity of the transcontinental car ride, were on the verge of exploding. That summer Geraldine and Shirley had enjoyed a rapprochement of sorts: they had even begun sitting on Shirley’s bed together in the evenings, talking and smoking cigarettes. Before leaving Rochester, they attended a luncheon at which the menu was composed entirely of Shirley’s least favorite foods: cold tomato soup, cottage cheese salad, cauliflower. Geraldine couldn’t help but get a kick out of Shirley’s discomfort: when lobster was served as the main course (“a form of fish, i believe . . . [it] makes me sick”), she took one look at her seafood-averse daughter’s face and “indulged in a fit of coughing which left her with a very red face and nearly crying.” But afterward Geraldine took Shirley out for a sandwich and the two of them laughed together about the incident.

Now their truce disintegrated.
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck’s masterpiece about the plight of migrants to California in the wake of the Depression, had appeared a few months earlier. Stanley stayed up all night reading it and judged it “one of the finest modern novels,” despite its commercial appeal. Shirley’s antiproletarian father forbade her to read the novel, but she did so anyway. He found out and they argued, with Leslie, a corporation executive and staunch conservative, fulminating against the “dirty Reds” who were overrunning California. Shirley meekly ventured that Communists might not be as bad as he thought they were, which resulted only in his refusing to speak to her for the rest of the day.

That night, over dinner with some old family friends, Leslie took advantage of a lull in conversation to announce, “My daughter’s one of those Reds.” Everyone turned to stare at Shirley, who sat silently, “a little drunk and . . . mad and sort of ashamed.” The rest of the table got into the fun, asking her to sing the Internationale. Looking around for
a supportive face, Shirley saw her mother and brother both laughing at her; her father sat silently. In desperation, she knocked over her glass of champagne, creating a distraction. Later, she worried that her father might be angry enough to forbid her to return to Syracuse. “stanley, please help me,” she implored.

Stanley did not do well when confronted with emotional scenes. Not only was he unable to reassure her—the best he could do was to call Leslie “a first-class bigot and a thoroughly stupid old fathead”—but he had something devastating to tell her. In a previous letter he had admitted to sleeping with an ex-flame named Martha, who had already stoked Shirley’s jealousy the previous summer. Now he had gone to bed with the cute redhead upstairs—and had somehow neglected to use a condom. He was terrified that the girl might become pregnant. Still, always mindful of his work, he enclosed in the same letter a few more chapters of the book for Shirley to comment on and asked for her advice regarding whether to publish it now or add another section. “see that you love me despite my ridiculous transcendental groin (oh the flesh is so weak, and the spirit generally willing into the bargain) and that you tell me so regularly,” he concluded.

Shirley initially responded with fury. “i’ve read your letter four times and still all i can get out of it is that you’re probably a father by now,” she wrote.

instead of slapping your wrist i ought to kick you in the face you bastard. sometimes you get a little beyond your abilities and when that happens . . . you generally try to solve things your own way and someone gets hurt. it’s usually me. by which i mean that when you fuck a lady you don’t know very well you do it with [a] condom and if you don’t you damn well don’t fuck her.

But she didn’t send this letter. How could she have? Stanley had already made it clear that her recriminations were useless. The more she expressed her jealousy, the less he paid attention. Instead, she waited a few days and wrote another letter. This one was solely about the book: she did not allow herself a single word about the incident with the
redhead. It was neither the first time nor the last that she would swallow her rage at his infidelity.

The following week Shirley became so sick she was admitted to the hospital. At first the doctors thought it was mumps, then diphtheria; the final diagnosis was a virulent throat infection. Unable to eat or drink, she lost fifteen pounds over the next few weeks. The mental stress of Stanley’s repeated infidelity was compounded by her betrayal by her parents. After publicly mocking her, Leslie had left for Rochester, leaving Geraldine and Barry—who had laughed right along—to wait in San Francisco until Shirley recovered, a process that involved daily visits to the doctor for painful injections. So inept was Geraldine as a nurse that, trying to irrigate Shirley’s throat, she inadvertently made her swallow a large quantity of hydrogen peroxide, making her even sicker. More poisonous than the peroxide, though, was the belittling and the criticism to which Geraldine had subjected Shirley all her life—priming her to accept a relationship with a man who treated her disrespectfully and shamed her for legitimate and rational desires.

“guess what started it. you and your goddamned ideas,” Shirley wrote to Stanley. She was joking—the night she became sick she had gone on a roller coaster, something he had always dared her to do. Still, the metaphorical connection is too rich to ignore. Only days after choking back the words she so dearly wished to say to him, she fell ill with a swollen throat! In a moment of feverish delirium, she thought she saw him enter her hospital room, only to walk out. “you wouldn’t stay . . . just closed the door and went away and i could hear your footsteps going down the hall.”

Shirley’s illness showed Stanley that he was more dependent on her than either of them had thought. He was taken aback by the depth of his concern. “i was half certain that you were dead,” he scolded after she failed to send an update on her condition promptly enough. He consoled himself by buying a turntable and records, so that they would “have some music for when we set up housekeeping.” On his list were symphonies by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Schubert; Bach concerti; Sibelius’s
Finlandia
, and miscellaneous Debussy and Wagner, as well as one concession to the pop music of the day: jazz trumpeter
Ziggy Elman’s “And the Angels Sing,” featuring a klezmer-style solo. Stanley, who admitted that he “never knew, liked, or understood music” before meeting Shirley, was proud to have become a music lover “on the professional scale.” But he still couldn’t tell the difference between two notes on the piano “unless they are half a kilometer or more apart.”

Shirley returned from California bearing a hand-carved wooden chess set as a gift for Stanley. In return he had bought her a complete book of Hogarth’s drawings, bound in leather and weighing ten pounds, “the most beautiful book ever printed. . . . the only way i can get it back is to marry her.” The two would maintain the custom of buying each other extravagant gifts into their marriage. But if Shirley’s illness had initially shocked Stanley into fidelity, he quickly succumbed to yet another “stupidity,” as he put it in a letter to Jay: going to bed with a close friend of Shirley’s while she was in the next room, “quite drunk, shouting obscene remarks of an uncomplimentary tenor.”

Shirley’s reaction frightened Stanley so badly that he wrote to Walter for advice. He was worried, he confessed, that she was mentally unstable. Walter approached the situation calmly and sensibly: Stanley should write down Shirley’s symptoms, he suggested, and try to figure out what, if anything, triggered her “attacks.” “If it’s all you say it is,” he warned, “it isn’t anything to play around with.” But Walter also refused to downplay Stanley’s responsibility for Shirley’s behavior. “A whole lot depends, I think, on your attitude towards her,” he wrote. “If you will sacrifice some of your ‘integrity’ and think of the possible effect on her before you do or even say anything, it might help and will undoubtedly calm her down a lot and make her feel happier and more secure.” It was good advice. But Stanley did not heed it—not then, and not in the years to come.

SHIRLEY HAD CAPPED OFF
her successful run in the
Syracusan
the previous spring by being elected fiction editor. But shortly after she assumed the post, the other editors decided the magazine should stop publishing stories. “Print them yourself,” a friend suggested when she complained.

Thus was born
Spectre
, the “official magazine of the Syracuse University English Club,” which Shirley and Stanley launched together that
fall. The masthead listed Shirley as editor, Stanley as managing editor, June Mirken on the editorial staff, and Florence Shapiro as an illustrator. Florence joined at Stanley’s insistence, but Shirley, who had not forgotten their old enmity, managed to kick her off the publication after the first issue. Stanley also did the magazine’s p.r., proudly collecting all the press clippings that mentioned it. Later he would maintain files of both his and Shirley’s reviews.

“We called the magazine
Spectre
for obvious reasons,” Shirley and Stanley wrote coyly in their first editorial. The name might have been an homage to William Blake—the front page bore his lines “My Spectre before me night and day / Like a wild beast guards my way”—but it was more likely a veiled reference to Marx’s warning in
The Communist Manifesto
of the “spectre haunting Europe.” (In case anyone missed the reference, an essay in the second issue cited the Marx quote—in a literary context, of course.) They presented it as primarily a literary magazine, but it was not exactly apolitical. Under the heading “We the Editor,” Shirley and Stanley opened each issue with an editorial dedicated to a pressing political or social issue. Though the advent of war in Europe would have seemed to be the foremost topic of concern, they used their first editorial to explain the magazine’s philosophy. “We haven’t any editorial policy except printing what’s good,” they insisted. “We like experimental forms and we like traditional forms.” With “so much that was more important going on outside,” some might think it was a bad time to start a literary magazine. But even college literature should reflect reality, they argued, and “it is a good time to start a magazine when people are thinking.”

The first issue was written almost entirely by Shirley, Stanley, and their friends. June Mirken contributed a story, “Sorority Girl,” about the subtle but pervasive anti-Semitism on campus. Ben Zimmerman, one of Stanley’s fraternity brothers, wrote a story about a lynching. Walter Bernstein, under the pseudonym “Myron R. Pleschet,” sent in an essay comparing Goya and Daumier. Stanley wrote an essay called “The Need for a New Poetic Form,” about the question that had been preoccupying him for several years now: how poetry could better reach the masses, with Auden and Fearing as the primary exemplars. And
Shirley contributed a short story, “Call Me Ishmael” (the title was Stanley’s), in which a girl and her mother have vastly different responses to a vagrant woman they encounter on a street corner. Printed, unusually for her, entirely in lowercase, the story revolves rather abstractly around the question of what is real versus what derives meaning solely from other people. The mother, a Geraldine figure, primarily understands the world based on the reactions of others; only the girl is capable of authentic human response. The story is cerebral and a little pedantic, but it still has the quality of strangeness that so often characterizes Shirley’s writing—the sense that reality, though still recognizable, appears as if distorted in a mirror.

By the time the second issue appeared that winter, Shirley and Stanley had succeeded in making
Spectre
something of a cause. The first issue had featured a drawing of a nude man, done in a stocky socialist realist style. To generate controversy, Shirley and Stanley goaded the magazine’s faculty adviser into objecting to the nudity, which gave them an opening for a cri de coeur about censorship. “If you want to have nude bodies in a campus publication, without corrupting public morals, they have to be female bodies,” Shirley and Stanley wrote, deploying the irony that was already a trademark of both their styles. The “censorship” of the art gave them an excuse to broaden their argument to the current political climate. Earl Browder had been banned from speaking at various colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth (where Walter got into trouble for protesting Browder’s disinvitation). Regardless of one’s political beliefs, the editors insisted, this constituted an insult to intellectual freedom. And the censorship of
Spectre
, they argued somewhat grandiosely, stemmed from a similar impulse. “Censorship, or Repression, or Dictatorship, or Reaction, or whatever you want to call it . . . is the stuff Fascism fattens on.”