Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (24 page)

Trilling had a point, but his judgment suffered from a certain snobbery about
The New Yorker
’s populist appeal, and his focus on the socially conscious stories is a little strange: with the exception of Shaw’s recurring theme of anti-Semitism and the occasional comment on racial prejudice, the stories were largely amoral, more about the decadence of the upper middle classes than anything else. Hyman, writing in
The New Republic
, rose to his employer’s defense. “It is worth noting that
The New Yorker
, allegedly a ‘humor’ magazine, prints a higher percentage of good serious stories than any of the heavy literature magazines,” he fired back at Trilling. He acknowledged the limitations of the short form and the magazine’s lack of interest in experimental writing, but
declared most of the fiction to be “excellent,” if of a clearly identifiable type: “tight, objective sketches with a strong undercurrent of emotion, aimed at capturing a mood, a feeling or a situation.” And some pieces transcended the form. He singled out E. B. White’s “The Door,” a small masterpiece of paranoia; Thurber’s haunting depiction of loneliness in “One Is a Wanderer”; and a very different story by the unknown writer Alex Gaby called “An Action Photo Has Been Taken,” which Hyman aptly described as “one of the punchiest and most horrible stories about chauvinism against the Negro ever written.” Unlike Trilling, he saw the magazine’s social consciousness—admittedly limited—as a point in its favor.

The stories Hyman praised, however, were not the ones he advised Jackson to imitate. His fondness for the “wow ending” was more in sync with the magazine’s typical contributors—commercial writers such as Shaw, O’Hara, or Sally Benson, whose semiautobiographical stories were made into the movie
Meet Me in St. Louis
—than with the “quiet, impressionistic” Thurber/White style he admired so much. Perhaps he didn’t think Jackson was capable of the more sophisticated style of writing. More likely, he simply believed it was more practical to swim with the mainstream rather than against the tide, considering that they were both still struggling to get published.

The war ultimately proved a more fertile source of inspiration than the gossip of their Syracuse days. One night Jackson tried another story drawn closely from life, about their friend Seymour Goldberg’s experience in a bar with a Nazi sympathizer, but Hyman thought it “just didn’t click.” Undeterred, Jackson started over. By midnight she had produced an entirely new story: “a very good slick funny piece,” in Hyman’s opinion, “that looked as though rewriting would make it commercial.” It described a young woman having lunch with her batty Aunt Agatha, who announces that she is planning to take in a Viennese war refugee, the son of her hairdresser. The plan falls apart when the young cousin who lives with the aunt acts out bizarrely: he builds a machine to imitate the sounds of bombs and takes to chanting, in German, “We will kill you.”

Hyman’s involvement with Jackson’s stories had previously been
minimal—he suggested titles or made small changes. Now he set to work, toying with the piece for the next few days until they both were satisfied. The writer and the critic again worked in symbiosis. Aunt Agatha became Aunt Cassandra. He realized that bombs had never been dropped on Vienna, so they changed the boy’s country of origin to Holland. He even typed up the revised copy. Together they sent it off to Frances Pindyck, the agent Walter Bernstein had recommended, who agreed to shop it around.

SHIRLEY AND STANLEY
always kept their door open to anyone who wanted to drop by in the afternoon, and usually someone did. Evenings were spent with a rotating group of friends and neighbors who came over to drink cheap wine and listen to music. Once unable to appreciate music, Stanley had turned to record collecting with all the fervor he had once devoted to curating his arsenal of chewing gum. In addition to jazz and the blues, he was starting to branch out into folk music: Appalachian ballads, as well as the work of leftist singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives, a former peace demonstrator newly drafted into the Army. Stanley was ahead of his time: the visitors with whom he shared these records often had no idea what to make of them.

The constant parade of visitors may have meant only that after a long autumn virtually on their own in the woods, Shirley and Stanley were eager for company. But it could also have been a sign that they did not care to spend much time alone together. There were moments of lightheartedness: one night at the Greeks, they challenged each other, along with Goldberg, to identify the brands of four random cigarettes by smoking them blindfolded. (Only Shirley got a perfect score.) They joked about the future baby, nicknaming it “Simon Hyman.” A doctor in Syracuse said Shirley was “probably but not certainly pregnant”; he advised her to eat sensibly and drink milk, but not to bother quitting smoking, which was common advice at the time. But Shirley’s journal mentions often how unhappy they were together. Most of their conversations she found “too dull to record.” A comic piece Stanley was trying to write about growing a beard owed all its merit to jokes he had stolen
from her. One afternoon Goldberg gave Shirley a drawing lesson. Stanley praised her work, but later he criticized her ability to appreciate fine art, an argument that ended with her in tears. “he was more interested in telling me what was good than in knowing why i didn’t realize it was good, and got me finally after a few hours into a state of helplessness where i felt the whole world was standing around pointing at me and calling me names.” They went to bed “furiously angry” and stayed that way into the next day, “until time worked its wonders and we made friends again. thought that sort of stuff was passing,” she wrote sadly.

The return to Syracuse also triggered a relapse of Stanley’s old habits. In mid-February, Shirley went to Rochester for a few days to keep Geraldine company while Leslie was away. It was one of her last trips there: Leslie would soon be transferred back to California, where the Jacksons spent the rest of their lives. Stanley was invited but refused to go along: he claimed he was too busy, but he still felt justifiably little fondness for Geraldine. Shirley left Syracuse with all her usual anxiety about what Stanley might do while she was out of town. Almost as soon as she left, Stanley ran into her old nemesis Florence Shapiro. A few days later he invited Florence over for an evening, buying a half gallon of Sauternes in preparation. But after a few hours of talking and playing records, all through which Florence claimed the wine was “mild as water,” she became violently ill. Stanley put her in the shower and stood her in front of an open window to sober her up, then gave her coffee and took her home. That seems to have been the extent of their encounter.

In a repeat of their previous pattern, Stanley showed Shirley his account of the episode in his diary as soon as she returned. She was not amused, though she feigned nonchalance. “if i had to marry a guy who fancies himself as a gay dog, i can hardly expect him to be housebroken so quick,” she scolded herself lightly in the diary she shared with him. But it stung her that he had chosen Florence, of all people, for his attentions. Shirley deemed her “coarse and vulgar,” but couldn’t hide her jealousy. “whatever i say i can’t deny that she has a beautiful body and after all i am too fat.”

Her more private writings show just how much distress the incident caused her. At home in Rochester, she kept a toy stuffed cat that Stanley
had given her while they were in college. They named it Meadelux, in homage to the boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis, and Shirley’s letters to Stanley from Rochester often included an amusing reference to how Meadelux was doing. Now, in a sketch that remains unpublished, she depicted a woman in despair, trying to resist calling her husband (who happens to be named Stanley) on the telephone, and pouring out her heart instead to a stuffed cat named Meadelux. As her anxiety mounts into a full-blown panic attack, she fears that she will lose her mind:

it got quieter and quieter and things in the room got bigger and bigger. she grabbed the pillow beside her and held onto it with both arms. it got bigger and bigger as she held on to it.

o boy, she said. here i go, meadelux.

What happens next—a “madness of crying and tenseness and fear and hatred and remembering and seeing again”—must have been something like the “attacks” several years earlier that had frightened Stanley so badly that he had asked Walter Bernstein what to do. Once again, he had failed to follow Bernstein’s advice—to think about the effect on Shirley before he acted out with another woman—and once again his behavior had sent Shirley into a state of psychological crisis, “the only thought in her one of fear of him and knowing nothing to hold on to but a pillow and a sawdust cat. . . . and then the worst of all, the realization that it was only beginning, that what was past was not past but a foundation for what was coming.” The horror was not only Stanley’s behavior; it was that she could not hope it would ever improve.

he said he’d take care of me, meadelux, she said. he told me he’d take care of me and he didn’t. . . .

he would do it again, as it had been again and again and again, as it had been and would be and her hating it and loathing him and herself and everything of their life together and everything they had and wanted and loved together and everything nice that had been would go and turn into cheapness and horror while stanley sat at a dinner and talked with another girl and left her
alone and silent and afraid and only hearing stanley’s voice saying cruel words. . . .

i am a psychopathic case, she said, and i am going to go insane.

The woman in the story tries to talk herself away from the edge. “i am very hysterical, she said severely to meadelux. when i am logical, she went on, and i can certainly be logical if i want to, i know just how foolish this all is, and i think that i will leave stanley, and yet i know that i won’t leave stanley.” In the end, the fear of being on her own was greater than her rage at Stanley’s infidelity. “it isn’t jealousy . . . it’s [being] hurt and being left alone.”

Aside from the occasional date with Michael Palmer when she was at home during college vacations, Shirley had never taken advantage of her open relationship with Stanley. As she put it rather bitterly in another story written around this time, “why should i be [unfaithful]? he wouldn’t care if i were.” Worse, she feared that her own infidelity might condemn her to another round of the same torturous cycle: if she was unfaithful to Stanley, then he would have no compunction about being unfaithful to her again. But now she decided to try it: out of anger, or impatience, or desperation. Stanley had an acquaintance named Jerry who was constantly complaining about his own romantic troubles. Shirley’s journal is oblique, but it’s fairly clear what happened:

poor little boy. heard something about his ethel, was astonished to find out how unenthusiastic i was, kept calling him armand. afterwards he talked about many people we used to know. . . . stanley finally threw jerry out, which was good, because he was getting back to ethel.

“no more,” she wrote after this account. “journal finished.”

The typewritten journal ends there. But Shirley wasn’t finished. There was the not insignificant matter of her pregnancy. What on earth would happen, she wondered, when a baby came into this relationship? Stanley had bought her a spiral notebook to use for drawing cartoons; on one of its pages, she scribbled a diary entry that reveals how deep the
fissures in the marriage were. “If it’s sex I can’t do anything about it,” the entry reads in part. “He forced me God help me and for so long I didn’t dare say anything and only get out of it when I could and now I’m so afraid to have him touch me.”

Sex clearly wasn’t the only problem in their relationship, but it was an important one. Is Shirley saying that Stanley raped her? It would go some way toward explaining, among other things, the episode at the garden party in
Hangsaman
when Natalie is a victim of sexual violence. The scene may function as a stand-in for an encounter early in their relationship in which Stanley somehow forced or simply pressured Shirley into sex. A letter she sent to him during their first summer apart refers, seemingly half in jest, to “my rape.” Natalie’s violation at the garden party takes place in a gap in the text—just as Shirley’s journal entry about Jerry omits a description of their sexual encounter, indicated only by the evocative word “afterwards.” Janna Malamud Smith, who grew up with the Hyman children during the years her father, Bernard Malamud, taught at Bennington College, writes chillingly in her memoir that the teenaged Sarah Hyman once told her—“explaining to me a view she attributed to her father”—that there was no such thing as rape: “However adamant, female protest was simply foreplay. Women wanted to be forced, and ultimately their excitement made them receptive, no matter what their claim.”

There are other indications that Shirley did not relish sex in the same way that Stanley did. She never answered any of his sexually explicit letters in kind. While visiting her parents the previous summer, she wrote to him wishing he could come for just a few minutes—not to “get fucked,” she made a point of saying, “but just [to] hold onto you.” Now she worried it had all been a mistake.

We should never have gotten married and I keep thinking that now we are we have to make the best of it—but doesn’t a man ever get ashamed to think that the only way he can look like a man before his wife is to say cruel things to her until she cries. . . .

Tantrums and hatred and disgust—what a married life—

The possibility of divorce had not yet entered Shirley’s mind. Her best hope—for companionship, for fulfillment, for love—was the child she was carrying. “Maybe when I have my baby,” the journal entry concludes, “I can talk to it and it will love me and it won’t grow up mean.” In motherhood, perhaps she would find the stability she longed for.

6.