Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (29 page)

The war appears in Jackson’s stories primarily as a backdrop to the human dramas: the wives (loyal and less so) left behind, the children
taken aback by the sudden reappearance of a father who has been serving in the Army. In “Henrietta,” an unpublished early story, a teacher mistakes the ravings of a refugee student as paranoid delusions, but to the reader it’s obvious that she’s having flashbacks to a concentration camp. In “The Gift,” a soldier home on leave asks a department store clerk to help her pick out a present for his girlfriend, who turns out to be a figment of his imagination. Jackson was especially interested in the consequences for women left on their own when their husbands went to war. In “Trial by Combat,” a young woman staying in a rooming house while her husband is overseas discovers that an elderly neighbor is stealing from her, but decides not to confront the thief: not speaking up becomes as deliberate an act as provoking a confrontation. In “As High as the Sky,” a mother inspects her two young daughters as they sit together on the couch, anxious that their father, seeing them for the first time in years, will be presented with a model tableau of family life. “Homecoming” emphasizes a wife’s anticipation of her husband’s return and the pleasure she takes in the necessary housekeeping duties. “This is the part of the house he never saw, that no one knows about,” she muses before her open linen closet. “The laundry when it comes back, the wash on the line fresh from the tubs. . . . Women with homes live so closely with substances, bread, soap, and buttons.”

Only one of these early stories gives a sense of what Jackson’s writing meant to her. In “When Things Get Dark,” a young woman named Mrs. Garden receives a letter from Mrs. Hope (the names even more symbolic than usual), an elderly lady she met on a bus a few days earlier. The cryptic letter offers vague support: “When things get dark, remember there are always friends thinking of you and wishing you well.” As it happens, Mrs. Garden is in need of friendly advice: she recently discovered that she is unexpectedly pregnant—her husband, too, is overseas—and is debating what to do about it. But when she seeks out Mrs. Hope for counsel, the older woman doesn’t even remember meeting her. Writing letters, it turns out, is just the way she passes the time; she has no special interest in Mrs. Garden. She has even written to Hitler: “when he first started killing and rampaging . . . I said for him to look into his heart and find love.” Mrs. Garden is the first of Mrs.
Hope’s addressees to contact her, and she is pleased to learn that she is “doing some good.” But Mrs. Garden is so distressed by Mrs. Hope’s indifference to her that she flees the room. “Wait a minute,” Mrs. Hope calls, handing her the letter. “You don’t want to forget this. . . . Keep it near you, to read when things get dark.”

Fourteen years later, Jackson would write a story that was almost an exact counterpoint to “When Things Get Dark.” Never published during her lifetime—it appeared posthumously as “The Possibility of Evil”—it also features an old woman who writes letters, this time maliciously, spilling secrets and sowing dissent among neighbors. The letters in “When Things Get Dark,” on the other hand, are well intended—little beacons of hope sent into the night—yet useless. If Jackson saw her own stories as idle letters cast into the dark and wondered whether they could do any good, she was relieved at last to be publishing her writing and earning a living from it. “after a while you get to feeling like there’s something you got to do and say before you float away just floating like on air,” she wrote in an unpublished essay. “and you try to tell them and all that comes out is god god life life.”

AS A RESULT OF HYMAN
’s
New Yorker
gig and his prolific freelance book reviewing, he quickly became known in New York publishing circles as something of a wunderkind. But the novelty of writing Comments every week soon faded. To his enduring frustration, the magazine’s editors were uninterested in his attempts to write anything longer. At the age of twenty-four, he determined the time was right to undertake a full-length work of literary criticism.

Instead of focusing on a certain writer or movement, Hyman decided, he would criticize the critics themselves. As he eventually formulated it, the idea was to examine “the acts of criticism to which men from Plato and Aristotle through Coleridge to [contemporary critics] . . . have been led by their varying reactions to the subject matter, successes, and failures of the most important writings—the Bible, Shakespeare, the finest English poetry, etc.” There would be chapters on Edmund Wilson, Yvor Winters, T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, and Kenneth Burke,
among others, each representing a particular mode of literary criticism: evaluative, biographical, psychological, Marxist, and so on. The book was a direct outgrowth of the ideas Hyman had been developing as early as college, when he first realized that a work of art could be interpreted in a virtually limitless number of ways, on a spectrum ranging from political to personal. He floated his idea for the book to Burke, who was enthusiastic, if sardonic. “The general outline suggests richly ironic possibilities. I.e., you can squeeze each critic successively into a bin that is too narrow for him—and then in your wind-up you can give them all hell for being so restricted,” Burke told him.

In the fall of 1941, Scott Mabon, an editor at the distinguished publishing firm Alfred A. Knopf, had contacted Hyman after hearing he might be at work on a book. Mabon wasn’t interested in the biography of abolitionist Wendell Phillips that Hyman proposed, but he praised Hyman’s review of
Mildred Pierce
, a recent Knopf novel by James M. Cain. This was quite a compliment, considering that Hyman had panned it. A year later, after requesting a review copy of another Knopf book, Hyman was floored to receive a letter from Alfred A. Knopf himself, inviting him and Jackson to lunch at the Knopfs’ Tudor country house in Purchase, New York. Jackson, too, received a personal note in which the publisher congratulated her on “Alphonse,” calling it “a swell little piece” and expressing the hope that she would someday become a Knopf author.

Knopf, who had founded his publishing firm in 1915 at the age of twenty-three, was as well-known for his brusque demeanor and flamboyant taste in clothing (a
New Yorker
profile described him as “bold and piratical”) as for his roster of Nobel Prize winners: Knut Hamsun, Sigrid Undset, Thomas Mann. In early 1943, Jackson and Hyman spent a pleasant afternoon at his estate, “eating squab and drinking god-knows-what”—Knopf’s cork-lined wine cellar was the stuff of legend. But they left mystified, as Knopf had said nothing about publishing either of them.

Their mystification did not last long. That August, a few months after his rejection by the draft board, Hyman signed a contract with Knopf that gave him an advance of $500 and a laughably optimistic deadline of
December 30, 1944, less than a year and a half away. The book’s working title was
The Critical Method
. In January 1944, he resigned from
The New Yorker
to work on it full-time, although he continued to write Notes and Comments. His ambitious plan was to spend the first six months of the year reading and taking notes on several hundred books of criticism and the last six months writing. “he seems to be writing hard, all day long,” Jackson reported.

Jackson supported Hyman’s efforts: the morning he began work on the book, she placed a rose on his desk and cooked him a special breakfast of chicken livers. But she felt pressure to complete a book of her own. “did stanley tell you i am writing a novel? i decided that i might as well, just to keep stanley from sounding too superior about his old book,” she wrote to a friend in May 1944. Pascal (Pat) Covici, who joined Viking in 1938 after founding his own publishing firm with partner Donald Friede, had been impressed enough by her
New Yorker
stories to offer her a contract for an as yet unwritten work of fiction. Covici’s list already included John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and Lionel Trilling, among many others. Years earlier, he had been responsible for bringing to press
The Well of Loneliness
, the lesbian novel Jackson had admired in college, in defiance of the libel suit brought against the book.

Eventually Jackson would grow fond of Covici, to whom she dedicated her last completed novel,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. But she quickly regretted signing that contract. Her novel about the Jewish soldier leaving for the Army would not progress; she managed only around thirty-five pages. She tried something entirely different: a refashioning of a witchcraft story from Glanvill’s
Saducismus Triumphatus
, the seventeenth-century account of witchcraft trials that she had once hoped her friend Elizabeth Young would steal from the University of Rochester library. One of the cases Glanvill documents involves Elizabeth Style, an alleged witch who is accused of bewitching and torturing a young girl named Elizabeth Hill. When brought to trial, Style confessed that the devil had appeared to her ten years earlier in the shape of a handsome man and as a black dog. “He promised her Money, and that she should Live gallantly, and have the Pleasure of the World
for 12 Years, if she would with her Blood sign his Paper, which was to give her soul to him. . . . When she hath a desire to do harm, she calls the Spirit by the name of Robin, to whom when he appeareth, she useth these words, O Satan give me my purpose!” One of Style’s accomplices would come to repent of her choice: “He promised her, when she made her Contract with him, that she should want nothing, but ever since she hath wanted all things.”

In Jackson’s version, called simply “Elizabeth,” Elizabeth Style, in a sly joke, is a literary agent who works for a man named Robert Shax. (Shax, a name Shirley would later use for a number of her favorite cats, is the name of a king of demons.) When the story takes place, he and Elizabeth have worked together for nearly eleven years. Their agency is unsuccessful, and Elizabeth spends her days shaking money out of potential clients and stealing their ideas for her own manuscript-in-progress. Shax is married, and he and Elizabeth have been conducting a long-term affair that she hopes, fruitlessly, will end with him leaving his wife. Instead, one day he brings her an unwelcome surprise: without consulting her, he has hired a new secretary, a buxom young blonde named Daphne Hill. Elizabeth insults and torments the girl, then fires her while Shax is out of the office for the afternoon. The story sputters to a halt soon afterward: Jackson was unable to bring the plot to a satisfying conclusion. Novel writing would almost always come with difficulty for her. Her stories, especially as she became more and more practiced, often required little revision, other than normalizing the capitalization and, sometimes, changing names—especially if she had used real-life models. But her novels were painful processes, full of false starts and dead ends.

Instead, Jackson decided to put together a book of stories. It would be called
The Intoxicated
, after her story about the man at a party who encounters a teenage girl prophesying the apocalypse, and would feature just about all her published and unpublished material to date. Harap was critical: the scope of her stories was “limited,” he wrote, urging her to work on a novel instead. Shirley found his comments patronizing. “if you think a ‘full career as a writer’ comes with the length of a novel you are more ambitious for me than i am for myself,” she shot back. But Covici,
already an esteemed and (to Jackson) intimidating editor, insisted that she abide by their agreement. In early 1945, she submitted what she had of “Elizabeth.” Unimpressed, he offered to release her from her contract. Fran Pindyck, Shirley’s agent, offered the novel to an editor at Knopf, since the firm had previously asked to see her work, but he, too, thought it was unready for publication. Jackson put it aside. She would eventually publish part of it as a short story in the
Lottery
collection.

A distraction from her failed novels arrived from an unexpected source. Burke had recently mentioned to Hyman that Bennington College, a progressive new women’s school in Vermont, was looking for young instructors, having lost several to war service. “can’t you just see stanley teaching a seminar in a girl’s college?” Jackson laughed, perhaps not altogether enthusiastically. Over dinner in New York, Burke formally introduced Hyman to Bennington’s president, Lewis Webster Jones, a former economist and professed “illiterate in the arts” who now found himself in an unlikely new role. Founded only a dozen years earlier, the college offered a famously experimental curriculum with an emphasis on faculty who—like Burke—made up for in brilliance what they lacked in advanced degrees. Now Jones was looking for a critic who could teach introductory courses in literary theory, joining a department that included Burke as well as drama critic Francis Fergusson and poet Theodore Roethke.

After visiting the college, situated on 140 hilltop acres just outside the rural town of North Bennington, in southern Vermont, Jackson and Hyman came away delighted. Even though her city shoes were inadequate to the ice, Jackson was amazed by the surrounding mountains covered with clean white snow—a dramatic contrast to the sooty sludge of Greenwich Village in the winter. The idea of raising children in Vermont, where they could see “real cows,” also appealed to her. Perhaps here, in the country again, she would find her long sought stability, the balm for her restlessness. In the spring of 1945, Hyman joined the Bennington College faculty.

7.

SIDESTREET, U.S.A.

BENNINGTON,
THE ROAD THROUGH
THE WALL
,
1945–1948

“It’s such an old house,” Mrs. MacLane said, looking up at the dark ceiling. “I love old houses; they feel so secure and warm, as though lots of people had been perfectly satisfied with them and they
knew
how useful they were. You don’t get that feeling with a new house.”