Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (28 page)

“Disoriented,” Mrs. Arnold said. She stood up. “Alienation,” she said. “Reality.” Before the doctor could stop her she walked to the door and opened it. “Reality,” she said, and walked out.

SHIRLEY AND STANLEY
lasted only a year in “the borough of homes.” In October 1943, they moved back to the more congenial Village, taking a second-floor apartment at 36 Grove Street for $900 a year, around the corner from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous former residence at 75½ Bedford Street. Other than increased rationing—coffee, meat, cheese, and canned goods were now added to the list—the war had changed Greenwich Village very little. The Grove Street apartment, in a redbrick town house, was “a nice big old place” with three fireplaces, Stanley
told Kenneth Burke, with whom he had begun to correspond regularly. They were just around the corner from Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow’s close friend, whose apartment was a social center for the
Partisan Review
crowd, including the critics Harold Rosenberg and Alfred Kazin.

Washington Square Park by Berenice Abbott, 1935, not long before Jackson and Hyman moved to Grove Street.

Laurence’s birth did not put a damper on Shirley and Stanley’s social style; their parties sometimes went on all night. Philip Hamburger, one of Stanley’s
New Yorker
colleagues, recalled seeing Laurence’s crib piled so high with guests’ coats that he had trouble locating the baby. Jesse Zel Lurie was astonished when Shirley served “hideously green mashed potatoes” for dinner, tinted with food coloring. The regular kind bored her, she explained.
New Yorker
reporter Andy Logan would remember a Thanksgiving meal at the Hymans’ attended by half a dozen of the magazine’s young staff, to which she contributed a bottle of cheap white wine. Shirley was holding Laurence in one arm and “rustling up dinner with the other, audibly daring the gravy to lump.” (It didn’t.) The very genteel Shawn was “pleased but alarmed” to hear about the dinner. “I don’t believe this sort of thing ever happened at
The New Yorker
before,” he said to Logan.

Some of the guests who visited the Hymans over the years, including Walter Bernstein, remember Shirley as notoriously lax about standards of hygiene. “The baby’s diaper was always full,” Bernstein recalls. If Shirley had ever tried to conform to Geraldine’s expectations for her as a housekeeper, she now abandoned any such pretense. Later, in Vermont, her neighbors would gossip about her sloppy habits. But her casual style was the norm in the Village. Bellow would joke that if there were a magazine called
Bad Housekeeping
, Isaac Rosenfeld’s wife could have been the editor.

One frequent visitor to the Grove Street apartment was Ralph Ellison, who had quickly become close to both Jackson and Hyman after their initial contact in New Hampshire. Despite the similar intellectual interests of the two men, their personalities were a study in contrasts. Always known for his fastidious clothing and manners, Ellison was surprised, at their first meeting, when Hyman appeared “hatless and wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt, lugging his ever-present briefcase.” Their writing styles, too, were sharply different. Hyman’s first
Negro Quarterly
piece began with a typically bold salvo: “The thing to do with a book like
Tap Roots
is to get the worst things said first. In many respects it is a bad book and a cheap book.” Ellison agonized over every word, so cautious and at times indecisive that, despite his enormous talent, he would famously struggle with bringing his works to completion. “Where Ralph tended to be self-conscious, solemn, ideological, and ponderous, Hyman was direct, engaging, and smart,” writes Ellison’s biographer Arnold Rampersad.

The pair quickly became partners in an intellectual endeavor that would be crucial to both of them. Around this time, Hyman and Ellison both began to read deeply in the myth-ritual criticism written by the classicists and folklorists of the previous generation known as the Cambridge School: Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Lord Raglan, and of course Frazer. According to these theorists, myth should be understood not as a corrupted version of history (a theory known as “euhemerism”), but as a narrative that derives from ritual and purports to explain it. As Hyman would later write, “Myth is neither a record of historical fact nor an explanation of nature. It is the spoken correlative
of a ritual, the story which the rite enacts or once enacted.” The implications of this theory were far-reaching, with potential consequences for the study of not only religion but also literature. More than a decade later, Hyman would create Myth, Ritual, and Literature, a brilliant and original course tracing the ritual origins of the Old and New Testaments as well as folk songs, ballads, and the blues. It was an intellectual endeavor for which he—with his traditional Jewish education, his atheism, his rigorous literary training, and his love of music—was uniquely suited, and which resonated deeply with the themes of Jackson’s work.

Hyman also introduced Ellison to his mentor Kenneth Burke, who would play an important role in Ellison’s intellectual life as well. After hearing Burke deliver his lecture “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ ” at the third American Writers’ Congress in 1939, Ellison had immersed himself in the critic’s work. When Burke visited New York (he and his wife, Libbie, lived on a farm in rural Andover, New Jersey, with no plumbing or central heating), the three men, along with Jackson, sometimes met for dinner at one of Burke’s favorite spots, the Farmfood vegetarian restaurant on West Fortieth Street. (Burke, who was partial to cheese blintzes and loved to come up with idiosyncratic forms of language, called their dinners there “going a-blintzing.”) Ellison acknowledged Burke’s influence in a letter written in 1945 while he was working on
Invisible Man
, his seminal 1952 novel examining the black experience in America: “I am writing a novel now and perhaps if it is worthwhile it will be my most effective means of saying thanks. Anything else seems to me inadequate and unimaginative.”

Hyman reading the manuscript of
Invisible Man,
c. 1950
.

Reflecting on their friendship many years later, Ellison would credit Hyman as a crucial influence on his fiction. If Ellison was struggling with a project, Hyman often stepped in to encourage him. In 1943, when Ellison was about to ship out to the merchant marine, Hyman urged him first to finish “Flying Home,” the story that would be his breakthrough work. Ellison was “reluctant,” but at Hyman’s insistence, he sat down at the typewriter in the living room on Grove Street and “brought the yarn as close to completion as time permitted, then headed for the North Atlantic.” By the time he returned, it was already in print: Hyman had submitted it to
Cross Section
, an anthology of new writing that also published one of Jackson’s stories, “Behold the Child Among His Newborn Blisses.” For both, it was their first “appearance between hard covers,” Ellison proudly remembered. The influence flowed both ways: Ellison also read Jackson’s and Hyman’s drafts and offered comments. Two years later, when the opening to
Invisible Man
came to Ellison at a friend’s farm in Vermont, he wrote to Hyman immediately to share both his excitement and his anxiety. “This section of the novel is going very well—though God only knows what the hell it’s all about. Of one thing I’m sure, any close symbolic analysis of it [a joking reference to Burke] will reveal how completely crazy I am.” Over the course of his long and often painful effort to write the novel, Ellison would regularly call upon Hyman for guidance, at one point saying that he was “invaluable” during the process. Rampersad and others have suggested that absent Hyman’s influence and encouragement, Ellison might not have written
Invisible Man
.

AS SHIRLEY ENJOYED
her string of successes in 1943, Jeanou was struggling with the new realities of life in Nazi-occupied Paris. In March, she was arrested for Resistance work and spent nearly a year and
a half in prison. Scheduled to be shot or deported—she did not know which—in August 1944, she would be spared by the liberation of Paris. By then, much of her family had been deported to Germany, along with her lover, a Russian national. Shirley learned of Jeanou’s predicament a few months after her release and asked a friend who was still serving in Europe to visit her. He would bring her with him to the Army mess hall so that she could enjoy a meal that included meat. Also scarce were tea, canned milk, chocolate, soap, or stockings, all of which Shirley mailed to Paris at Jeanou’s request.

Meanwhile, Shirley and Stanley were bystanders to the war that roiled the world. “we live quietly, writing books and being in a constant state of chilled horror at our son,” she wrote to Louis Harap in February 1944. “he leers, and talks back (his two words: good, light, but he can make them sound very ugly), and eats with his fingers and looks at his father and snorts contemptuously. he is already so strong that it is wiser to appeal to his good judgment than force. . . . he likes to wrestle, and to walk along the street yelling, and to lift ladies’ skirts on the street, but he is already healthier than any of us ever were.” A few months later, she reported proudly that Laurence was strong enough to lift the kitchen chairs, with “muscles in his back like Joe Louis.” Her father, in a letter, referred to him as “young Samson.” Unfortunately, he also was strong enough to climb out of his crib at night, interrupting her evening writing time.

Although Jackson criticized herself as unproductive, in 1944 she sold a dozen stories, including another four to
The New Yorker
. It was an unusual feat for an up-and-coming writer, especially a woman: only more commercial female writers, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner and Sally Benson, appeared more frequently. Many of Jackson’s
New Yorker
stories would eventually find their way into the somber-toned
Lottery
collection: small domestic incidents, realistically depicted, that take on a darker meaning with the revelation—if only partial—of something sinister in the background. What is unsaid is often more important than what is said. In “A Fine Old Firm,” Mrs. Friedman drops in on her neighbor Mrs. Concord to tell her that their boys are serving together in the Army. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Friedman’s friendly interest
in the Concords is not reciprocated. The conversation ends when Mrs. Friedman offers Mrs. Concord’s son an interview with her husband’s law firm after he returns, only to be told that the boy will be joining the firm in which his grandfather was once a partner, “a fine old firm.” The tension between the Jewish newcomers and the WASP old-timers is so subtly drawn, the anti-Semitism so lightly suggested, that on first reading it may pass over the reader’s head.

“A Fine Old Firm” appeared in
The New Yorker
in March 1944, laid out opposite a full-page ad for a brand of hardware used by the military. D-day came just two months later. By then, most of Stanley’s friends had been drafted: Harap, Ellison, Bernstein, Frank Orenstein, Ben Zimmerman. Shirley and Stanley learned the news of the invasion when
The New York Times
arrived that morning; they ate breakfast with the radio on. When Shirley went out to do her errands, people stopped her on the street to read the newspaper she was holding. In the bakery, the owner, who had four sons overseas, was weeping openly. It was “the most terrible day” of her life to date, Shirley felt at the time.

As a gentile married to a Jew, Shirley was well aware that if she and Stanley had been living in Europe, their whole family would have been deported and murdered. The fight against the Germans felt personal for both of them, as Shirley made clear in an unfinished novel she was working on around this time, tentatively titled
Soldier Leaving
. The main character is Harriet, a young housewife in New York City whose husband, Paul, is preparing to leave for the war. Harriet is Christian, Paul is Jewish, and Billy, their son, is about a year old. Harriet is racked by nightmares in which an unknown menace threatens her and her child. “they were chasing her and she was running down the two flights of stairs and she was carrying billy and the fire was ahead of her and they were chasing her and then the fire had burned away the stairs and she fell still holding billy and when she went up to billy afterwards he was a picture from a magazine, cut and burned and with a caption saying ‘innocent children slaughtered.’ ” Friends warn her that “smart jews are going to get the hell out of this country.”