Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (27 page)

The cartoons, however, are dominated by concerns about work, rather than infidelity. Sometimes Shirley is sympathetic to the demands made on her husband. In one drawing, Stanley, reading standing up, leans on a pile of books as high as his chest. “[The editor] says to send them back immediately if I can’t have a review ready by tomorrow noon,” the caption reads. Others bring into relief the dilemma that Shirley was just starting to confront—a dilemma that would persist for the rest of her life. An early drawing depicts a muscular woman, looking disgruntled, dragging her husband off by his hair as another couple look on worriedly. “I understand she’s trying to have both a marriage and a career,” one says to the other.

AT THE TIME
of Laurence’s birth, Jackson was suffering through one of the longest dry spells of her professional life. Her husband’s new staff position at
The New Yorker
made it no easier for her to break into that prestigious publication. Despite Pindyck’s efforts, she did not publish a single story in 1942. But on Christmas Eve, she received the news that fiction editor Gus Lobrano had finally taken two of her stories: “After You, My Dear Alphonse” and “Afternoon in Linen.” The accompanying
check, minus the agency fee, was for $252—the equivalent of nearly two months of Hyman’s salary. Jackson and Pindyck celebrated modestly with a meal at Hamburger Hearth, a diner on Madison Avenue, at which Jackson formally agreed to let Pindyck represent her. “We’re going to be hitched!” Pindyck wrote to her happily afterward, enclosing the contract. In fact, Pindyck was the first of a string of agents with whom Jackson sometimes had contentious relations before she settled down with the venerable firm of Brandt & Brandt in the early fifties. She and Pindyck wouldn’t make it to their third anniversary.

Jackson’s
New Yorker
success inaugurated a year of fecundity. By the end of 1943, she had sold a total of eight stories, including two more to
The New Yorker
—the same number as John Cheever, one of the most prolific contributors, sold in his first year of writing fiction for the magazine. Jackson also published in
Charm
, a new magazine for young working women, and
House and Garden
, earning around $800 for the year. Hyman’s salary, before bonuses, was $1820. Their days of worrying about scurvy were over. “now that we are making a lot of money we are living fine. we even saw a movie not long ago,” she told Harap.

Jackson’s new productivity had partly to do with the change in her household routine: with Hyman working all day at the
New Yorker
office, she no longer had to fight for her turn at the typewriter. Of course, she also had a baby to take care of! But while Jackson sometimes complained about the mental calisthenics required to be at once a housewife and a writer—the “nagging thoughts” about finishing the laundry or preparing lunch that often interrupted her creative work—she also seems to have derived imaginative energy from the constraints. Writing in the interstices—the hours between morning kindergarten and lunch, while a baby napped, or after the children had gone to bed—demanded a discipline that suited her. She was constantly thinking of stories while cooking, cleaning, or doing just about anything else. “All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories,” she said in one of her lectures. Even later, when the children were older and she had more time, Jackson would never be the kind of writer who sat at the typewriter all day. Her
writing did not begin when she sat down at her desk, any more than it ended when she got up: “a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.”

Practical demands notwithstanding, giving birth to Laurence seems to have unlocked Jackson creatively. Her new burst of productivity began only a few months after he was born—a period when many mothers (and fathers) are still woozy with sleep deprivation. It can be no accident that both of her first two
New Yorker
stories center on a child.

Jackson’s new confidence was marked by a visible shift in her writing habits: she began typing all her drafts on yellow paper, which became her signature. This was more than a superficial change. Just as some writers find it crucial to use a certain type of notebook or a favorite pen, Jackson’s yellow paper became integral to her self-image as a writer. “A book is a comfortable stack of pages of yellow copy paper, with typed words on them, a familiar and fitted country in which I am perfectly at home,” she once wrote. Bound between hard covers, her books felt foreign; on her beloved yellow paper, they belonged to her alone. Just as she had once adopted his habit of typing in all lowercase letters, Hyman began sharing her yellow paper.

“In the country of the story the writer is king,” Jackson would say in a lecture she gave in later years on the techniques of fiction writing. “He makes all the rules, with only the reservation that he must not ask more than a reader can reasonably grant.” This confidence came to her slowly, as she used these early stories—many made it into magazines, while others went into the drawer—to perfect her strategies. One of the most dangerous pitfalls for beginning writers, she would eventually conclude, is that “their stories are, far too often, just simply not very interesting.” The writer’s challenge is to reach out and grab the attention of even the most distracted or lazy reader: no story will be interesting “unless the writer, using all his skill and craft, sets himself out deliberately to make it so.” She called this technique “garlic in fiction”: the use of adjectives, images, or symbols, “sparingly and with great care . . . to accent and emphasize.”

Already Jackson was honing the efficiency of style that would be
one of her defining characteristics as a writer. She was learning, as she later advised others, to let a story “move as naturally and easily as possible, without side trips into unnecessary spots of beauty.” Uninteresting details must be made interesting: rather than describing a chair as hard and straight, the writer might show the protagonist holding on to it for balance in a moment of weakness. She perfected dialogue, one of the most difficult things to get right. “It is not enough to let your characters talk as people usually talk because the way people usually talk is extremely dull. . . . Your characters will start all their conversations in the middle unless you have a very good reason for their telling each other good morning and how are you.” Repetition and consistency would be key in her work: “a character who says habitually, with one of those silly little laughs, ‘Well, that’s the story of my life,’ is not ever going to turn around and say, with a silly little laugh, ‘Well, that’s my life story.’ ”

All these techniques are visible in Jackson’s first
New Yorker
story. “Alphonse,” like some of the socially conscious stories that Stanley admired, gently but pointedly pokes fun at the racism typical of the American middle class—a theme that would recur regularly in Jackson’s early fiction. Mrs. Wilson (Jackson often gave especially ordinary names to her most treacherous characters) is taken aback when her son Johnny brings home his friend Boyd, who is black. She never says anything outwardly racist, but her attitude toward the child is evident in her condescending assumptions about the boy’s appetite (“There’s plenty of food here for you to have all you want”) and his family (“I guess all of you want to make just as much of yourselves as you can”). Boyd innocently parries her at every turn, but eventually declines to accept the Wilson family’s old clothing, provoking an outburst from Mrs. Wilson about his ingratitude. Still, the story ends cheerfully: the boys continue happily with their game, unaware of the true intent behind Mrs. Wilson’s remarks. The dialogue is tuned with marvelous subtlety—Jackson had finally gotten the
New Yorker
tone just right. But what is truly new in this story is her empathy with Boyd. Ralph Ellison noted it admiringly in a letter to Hyman: “Unlike most
New Yorker
stories in which Negroes appear, ‘Alphonse’ succeeds in being ‘about’
the Negro child almost as much as it is about the cheap liberalism of the white kid’s mother,” he wrote.

In “Afternoon in Linen,” a girl named Harriet, embarrassed when her grandmother demands that she read her poetry aloud in front of a guest and her young son, humiliates her grandmother in revenge. (Another poetry-writing child named Harriet, a partial surrogate for Jackson, would appear a few years later in
The Road Through the Wall
.) Its docile-sounding title notwithstanding, the story is a savage snapshot of children’s gleeful cruelty to others. Jackson was presenting the world from the true perspective of a child: not through the gauzy veil of the usual women’s-magazine fare, but unvarnished, its brutality on full display. The technique suited her wonderfully.

At the time, the
New Yorker
fiction department was experiencing a transition. Lobrano, a college friend of E. B. White’s who had previously been an editor at
Town and Country
, took over the department from Katharine White in 1938, when the Whites left Manhattan for Maine. A tall, well-mannered Southern gentleman, Lobrano seems to have been a little too outdoorsy for the
New Yorker
offices, preferring to play badminton at his home in Westchester or to fish at his family’s lodge in the Adirondacks, which was decorated, in the classic style, with a moose head over the fireplace. Favored contributors were invited to join him there to enjoy the rustic atmosphere. Jackson was already familiar with country living from her stay in New Hampshire. But Lobrano doesn’t ever seem to have invited her to visit the lodge. It was a male-bonding activity from which she was excluded.

Badminton and fishing could do only so much to soothe the nerves of
New Yorker
writers who had begun to chafe at the magazine’s notoriously stringent editing. In an obvious reference to Lionel Trilling’s critique the previous year, Shaw complained to Lobrano in 1943 about “the patronizing sniffing of critics when they call my stories ‘New Yorker’ stories, meaning thereby something pallid and cold that is inexplicably used to pad out the space between cartoons and the Talk of the Town. . . . You’re overworking your famous urbanity and objectivity to a point where too much of your stuff has a high, even gloss, whether it’s on the subject of death, disaster, love, anything.” Lobrano sweetened the
deal by offering the magazine’s top writers a “first-reading agreement,” which entitled regular contributors to an annual bonus if they agreed to show him anything they wrote before offering it elsewhere, as well as a bonus if they managed to sell more than a certain number of stories to the magazine each year. And gradually he and Katharine White, who continued to edit fiction part-time after moving to Maine and is generally credited with shaping the magazine’s literary vision, grew more open to fiction that did not fit the
New Yorker
mold: by the end of the decade, they would publish stories by J. D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov in addition to, of course, “The Lottery.”

The department’s evolution, however, was slow. And the fact that Jackson had gotten two stories into
The New Yorker
was no guarantee that Lobrano would take others. Her next seven were rejected—not always politely. “Pretty formula[ic] and unconvincing . . . my suspicion is that Miss Jackson is a good deal better when she stays close to reality,” Lobrano wrote in response to “Company for Dinner,” about a man who accidentally comes home to the wrong house; neither he nor his wife initially notices the difference. “[She] seems to have not much flair for whimsy or fantasy.” Jackson must have found this critique frustrating, since the majority of the stories she had submitted were realistic. In “Little Old Lady in Great Need,” the most accomplished of this group (it would find its way to
Mademoiselle
), an elderly lady manages to swindle a butcher out of his own dinner, lecturing her great-granddaughter all the while on how to act like a lady. (Some of her lines—“A lady does not permit herself to show anger in public,” for instance—sound like particularly choice tidbits from Geraldine.) But it was a little more one-dimensional than the magazine’s usual work.

Jackson finally made it back into
The New Yorker
with “Come Dance with Me in Ireland,” which appeared in May 1943. Again the subject is the essential hypocrisy of human beings and their mindless cruelty to one another. An elderly man selling shoelaces shows up at Mrs. Archer’s apartment building one day; he looks faint, so she invites him in to sit down. She and her friends are as superficially courteous as Mrs. Wilson in “Alphonse”; they are also just as thoughtless, wondering openly whether the man is drunk and speaking of him rudely in the third
person. The old man gets the last word: he announces proudly that he once knew Yeats, quoting, “Come out of charity, come dance with me in Ireland.” The women’s so-called charity is nothing of the kind. But the man’s reproach likely goes over their heads: they are only dimly aware of who Yeats is.

Even in these early years, cruelty and alienation were the dominant themes of Jackson’s fiction. A cashier in a liquor store behaves generously toward a blind man and his wife, only to discover himself the victim of a scam (“On the House”). A sad old man, strolling through the park on a sunny day, tries to impress others by lying about his connections to celebrities (“It Isn’t the Money I Mind”). In “Colloquy,” one of the most evocative pieces, a woman visits a psychiatrist who, unnervingly, is unable to empathize with her distress. He speaks of “international crisis” and “cultural patterns” when all she wants to know is whether she is going crazy. By the end of the story, she is reduced to parroting his words back to him, giving them a new meaning:

“What is going to help?” Mrs. Arnold said. “Is everyone really crazy but me?”

“Mrs. Arnold,” the doctor said severely, “I want you to get hold of yourself. In a disoriented world like ours today, alienation from reality frequently—”