Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (21 page)

last night they dressed me all up with a red skirt like carmen and my hair done high and red red nails and expensive perfume and red carnations in my hair and silver sandals and a couple of drinks, and they took me to the opera. . . . my mother wore white satin and silver fox and diamonds, and we sat in the mezzanine among a lot of other women all looking perfectly beautiful, and we went out during intermission and met everyone my family knows and they all said to me shirley how wonderful that you’re back for a while you’re looking lovely will we see you in june? and then mother would say oh we’re thinking of taking shirley to california with us in june she loves the coast so you know. and then of course the friends would say how perfectly wonderful shirley how lucky you are dear don’t i wish i could go in your place.

A so-called genteel anti-Semitism was the norm in upper-middle-class social milieus such as the one Geraldine and Leslie inhabited, as the best-selling novel (and later hit film)
Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947), the story of a magazine reporter who poses as a Jew, would soon demonstrate. After visiting Shirley and Stanley at home in Greenwich Village early in their marriage, the writer and lifelong anti-Semite Patricia Highsmith commented in her diary: “[T]he Jews disgusting!” Leslie, a staunch conservative who also despised Communists and every other left-wing group, was a longtime member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, an elite, primarily Republican social club that since the late 1800s has hosted a high-powered political retreat every summer at the Bohemian Grove, a 2700-acre campsite in Sonoma County. Geraldine’s prejudice seems to have been social rather than ideological—like Mrs. Merriam, the mother in
The Road Through the Wall
who makes her daughter break off a friendship with a Jewish girl, she simply valued conformity more than anything else. Now, Leslie offered to use his connections in the printing business to help Shirley get some kind of publishing job—on the condition that she wait six months after graduation
to marry Stanley. Alta Williams was the only member of the household who supported Shirley’s decision.

Intermarriage was still unusual in the United States in 1940. Only a year earlier,
The Atlantic Monthly
ran a first-person article by an anonymous Christian woman titled “I Married a Jew.” The author cautioned that intermarriage meant “being barred from certain circles. They can say what they like about Germany, but democratic America is far from wholeheartedly accepting the Jews.” The same week as Shirley and Stanley’s wedding,
The New Yorker
published “Select Clientele,” a story by the Brooklyn-born Jewish writer Irwin Shaw, in which three young people are enjoying themselves on a bike ride in the country when locals call them Jews and throw rocks at them. Shaw’s stories had dealt with anti-Semitism before, but now he brought it home. “The disease was growing stronger in the veins and organs of America,” realizes Sam, the story’s Jewish narrator. “All the time there were more hotels you couldn’t go to, apartment houses right in New York City you couldn’t live in. Sam sold stories to magazines that published advertisements for vacation places that said ‘Distinguished clientele’ or ‘Exclusive clientele’ or ‘Select clientele.’ A hotel advertises that its hotel is exclusive, Sam thought, if it allows in everybody but six million Jews and fifteen million Negroes.” One of those magazines was none other than
The New Yorker
, which continued to carry ads for restricted hotels well into the war years—ads that no doubt appealed to people like the Jacksons. Some of the resorts they visited on their cross-country trip in 1939 may have been restricted.

Florence Shapiro remembers anti-Semitism at Syracuse as being obvious but mostly benign: “Whispering. Silence when I entered a room.” Jewish students were segregated in certain fraternities and sororities, and Shirley was occasionally confronted by classmates who were shocked by her nonchalant attitude toward Stanley’s religion. Despite her traditional upbringing, however, Shirley seemed to be immune to anti-Semitism, as she seemed also immune to racial prejudice. In one of her unpublished college essays, Shirley laughs at another girl’s assumption that Stanley’s Jewishness is the reason she won’t bring
him to a school dance. (In fact, it was simply his antipathy to organized social events.) She became enraged when a boy she knew from Rochester asked her if she was “still messing around with Hyman, mixing races.” Stanley, inured to such remarks, laughed it off.

Shirley identified strongly with Stanley’s sense of himself as an outsider, an identification that would only deepen after they moved to the insular communities in New Hampshire and Vermont where they would later live. Though her family was part of the mainstream social culture, she had always felt like an outsider herself: unappreciated by her mother, not fitting in with the sorority-girl cliques at Brighton High or the University of Rochester, at home only among the bohemians and other misfits. She may also have seen marrying Stanley as the ultimate rebellion against her parents. Her sketch “I Cannot Sing the Old Songs” reads like the scene that ensued when Shirley tried to break the news of their engagement to the Jacksons—or her fantasy of it. The mother in the story cries. The father says that he’s ashamed of his daughter. “What are we going to tell our friends?” he asks the mother. Meanwhile, the daughter struggles to keep from laughing. “Jesus, you poor old man,” she thinks. In fact, Shirley did not invite her parents to her wedding; she told them about it long after the fact, when she was pregnant with her first child, making up a more recent date. For many years, Leslie and Geraldine did not know the date of their daughter and son-in-law’s actual anniversary.

Shirley and Stanley’s friends had assumed for some time that they would get married after graduation—at one point he even gave her, perhaps half in jest, a cheap engagement ring, which she did not wear for long: during a fight one night, she “bounced it off Stan’s skull,” he threw it at her, and the ring disappeared, never to be found again. But she went through her own period of uncertainty. A novel she started in college, provisionally called
Anthony
, takes up the question of what marriage means. Anthony and Paul are roommates and best friends; after Mary becomes Paul’s girlfriend, he wrestles with the question of whether he wants to marry her and lead a traditional life or remain with the far less conventional Anthony (who wears red nail polish as a concession to his
“unfailing sense of the dramatic”). The novel is episodic: scenes told from the perspective of various characters are interspersed with dialogues in which the unnamed author defends her technique to an interlocutor named Stanley, who doesn’t quite understand what she is trying to achieve.

“i’m not made to be free, and have different people always trying to tie me down,” Paul tells Anthony in one version of the scene in which he announces he will marry Mary, which Jackson rewrote half a dozen times. “i’m going to make myself an average, normal, married man, with children, and a home, and mary, and then i’ll hide my head in the haystack of the usual—” Anthony cuts in: “and try to pretend you’re happy.” In each version, Paul leaves the home he has made with Anthony to be with Mary: he cannot imagine not having a wife. Anthony, for his part, is presented as not quite human: wondering at one point whether he is jealous of Mary, he concludes that “jealousy had no part in his life; he was free of human emotions, although chained by needs.” The dilemma is an intriguing one. But the disjointed perspectives of
Anthony
never quite come together, and it’s not entirely clear whether Shirley was deliberately trying to write in the mode of Djuna Barnes or truly couldn’t decide how to tell her story.

In her late novels, Jackson’s female characters are often split versions of herself—most clearly in
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, in which Merricat and Constance represent both wanderer and homebody, one a bundle of barely controlled animosity, the other a calming domestic presence. Here, Paul and Anthony seem to stand for two ways of living—part Stanley and part Shirley. Shirley knew that the conventional kind of marriage offered by men like Al Parsell and Michael Palmer was not what she wanted. Michael knew it, too: he warned her that college would be the happiest time of her life, because only then would she be free from responsibility. “When you get out of college and go to work, you’ll be . . . in some grimy office . . . slaving your damn fool head—yes, that same red head—off for three meals a day. . . . And there, when you’re good and bored, and know that I’m right—which will be after about six weeks—you’ll drop me a line, and I’ll come to you, on my white charge, and sweep you off your feet, and then together we’ll work our damn fool heads off for three meals a day,” he told her.

Shirley did not want a husband who worked in the usual “grimy office”; she already believed that she could only love a man whom she found superior to her in every way. The life she and Stanley could build together, as she imagined it, would be fundamentally different from Michael Palmer’s grim vision of marriage as two people slaving away for three meals a day. They would not have to hide their heads in “the haystack of the usual”; they would be mad bohemians together, fulfilling each other creatively and intellectually. No other man she knew could offer anything like it.

Shirley and Stanley’s wedding was attended only by a small, motley group of friends. Bruce Bliven and Malcolm Cowley, whom Stanley had gotten to know during his summer working on
The New Republic
, were there; so was Tom Glazer, the Jewish-American folksinger who later became famous for the novelty song “On Top of Spaghetti.” Walter Bernstein was not: he had gone to Los Angeles for the summer and would soon be drafted. Stanley’s parents knew about the wedding but did not come. For the next few years, Lulu would write and send gifts to Stanley, but his father made no attempt to contact him. Reconciliation would not take place until several years later, after the birth of Laurence, Stanley and Shirley’s first child. For now, they were on their own.

THE REPUTATION OF GREENWICH VILLAGE
as a mecca for writers, artists, and bohemians of all types was already in decline by the early 1940s. Many of the writers who had made it famous—Djuna Barnes, Mabel Dodge Luhan—had already moved away: to Paris, Taos, or other more romantic destinations. A real estate market analysis done by the major newspapers in 1943 noted that the neighborhood appealed particularly to “business couples.” Bohemianism had even been co-opted as a marketing strategy: ads for the department store Wanamaker’s targeted consumers with a taste for Sibelius and E. E. Cummings. After “Professor Sea Gull,” Joseph Mitchell’s 1942
New Yorker
profile of homeless scribe Joe Gould, mythologized Gould as the supposed creator of an “oral history” of the Village that comprised thousands of overheard conversations and ran to some nine million words, the Minetta Tavern
on Macdougal Street hired Gould to be a “bohemian-in-residence”—in exchange for one free meal a day, he would sit at a table by the window and scribble in his notebooks. In a follow-up piece written more than twenty years later, Mitchell, who by then had become a close friend of both Shirley and Stanley’s, determined that the oral history most likely did not exist.

Still, for a writer there was probably no better place to be. E. E. Cummings was still living in his studio on Patchin Place; Dawn Powell, who wrote a series of novels set in the Village, was another longtime resident. Mary McCarthy lived there briefly in 1936 and 1937, after her divorce from her first husband, enthusiastically embracing the life of a single girl in the city (complete with tiny studio apartment) before settling down temporarily with Philip Rahv and then Edmund Wilson. (Of a dinner party at which she met Lillian Hellman for the first time, she recalled that “[t]he guests at those dinners were mostly Stalinists, which was what smart, successful people in that New York world were.”) Delmore Schwartz would return in 1945, declaring that it was “1919 all over again.”
Partisan Review
made its headquarters on Astor Place; Meyer Schapiro lectured on art at the New School for Social Research on West Twelfth Street; and the headquarters of the Boni Brothers, who published Upton Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, and Thornton Wilder, were on Fifth Avenue near Thirteenth Street. “The city had never looked so bright and frisky before,” commented Alfred Kazin. Jackson’s story “The Villager,” written in 1944, sums up the mood: “When she was twenty-three she had come to New York from a small town upstate because she wanted to be a dancer, and because everyone who wanted to study dancing or sculpture or book-binding had come to Greenwich Village then.”

The neighborhood was largely white but socioeconomically diverse. The wealthiest residents clustered in the handsome brick and brownstone town houses north of Washington Square Park and in the stately apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue. But there was plenty of space for writers and artists in the cheaper outskirts of the neighborhood, where a substantial population of Italian immigrants lived in crowded tenements. Jackson and Hyman took a tiny apartment in a
walk-up building at 215 West Thirteenth Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

In a series of casuals detailing her adventures as a single girl in the city, which she later turned into the popular book
My Sister Eileen
,
New Yorker
writer Ruth McKenney had some fun with the condition of the real estate in the Village’s seedier corners. “Every time a train roared by, some three feet under our wooden floor, all our dishes rattled, vases swayed gently, and startled guests dropped drinks,” she wrote in an essay called “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” subtitled “The housing situation in Greenwich Village and how dismal it is.” A “pleasure-loving robber” steals her radio, a bottle of gin, and four milk bottles she is planning to redeem for a nickel apiece. With the subway crashing by every three minutes, “village urchins” playing on the street, and the sounds of the man upstairs beating his wife or perhaps his mother, the apartment is “a symphony of noise.” When she complains to the landlord about the mold growing in the bathroom, he tells her she should enjoy observing nature.