Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (30 page)

—“Flower Garden”

B
ENNINGTON COLLEGE, FOR DECADES CONSIDERED THE
most radical campus in America, was dreamed up by a preacher. Vincent Ravi Booth, appointed pastor of the First Congregational Church in Old Bennington, Vermont, in the summer of 1919, was dismayed to find that his pews were empty come fall—the town’s summer residents had all left for the season. How could he fill the seats? What the area needed, locals told him, was a women’s college. Both Smith and Mount Holyoke, in nearby western Massachusetts, were overcrowded, turning away qualified applicants for lack of dorm space. A similar college in Bennington stood a good chance of success.

Within thirteen years, a coalition of progressive educators and
wealthy Vermonters had realized Booth’s vision. Their ambitious project was to reimagine the education of American women. The first women’s colleges, driven by the need to prove that women and men were intellectual equals, had modeled themselves on men’s colleges. But the traditional curriculum, oriented heavily toward the classics, had begun to feel out-of-date. Bennington, the early planners decided, would be a new kind of college designed especially to meet the needs of modern women, organized around science, history, sociology, languages, fine arts, and philosophy. The emphasis would be on “the actual,” said Robert Devore Leigh, Bennington’s first president: “the changing world which our students are living in.” As John Dewey, the founding father of progressive education, famously opined, education was not
“preparation for life,” but life itself. “It was a wild and wonderful place,” recalls the critic Barbara Fisher, who studied with Hyman at Bennington in the early 1960s. The writer Susan Cheever, also an alumna, has written that the college was “as much a state of mind as it was a place.”

Students on the Bennington College Commons in the 1940s.

The purpose of college, according to Bennington’s first course catalog, was to provide a grounding for education that the student could continue throughout her life. The emphasis was on the independent pursuit of knowledge. There would be no grades, exams, or prizes to serve as motivators; students were evaluated in lengthy written comments. (For those who wanted to continue on to graduate school, the comments would be translated into grades solely for use on a transcript.) The women would spend their first two years exploring a possible major, then move on to self-directed advanced work, supervised personally by a member of the faculty. Each division would offer an introductory course—not a traditional survey, but a sampling of what was “significant, vital and representative in the field,” focusing on modern Western civilization and contemporary American culture. Faculty, too, would learn by doing: initially, they determined their course offerings after meeting each year’s students and discussing their interests. And the winter “non-resident term”—first two months long, later three—gave students the opportunity to pursue internships in their chosen fields; it also got them off campus during the most brutal months of the year.

Most important, intellectual development and character development were considered inseparable. To that end, each student was assigned a faculty counselor who would meet with her weekly to offer advice on her coursework and anything else she might need help with. “Bennington regards education as a sensual and ethical, no less than an intellectual, process,” reads the college’s commencement statement, which has been read aloud at every graduation since 1936. “It seeks to liberate and nurture the individuality, the creative intelligence, and the ethical and aesthetic sensibility of its students, to the end that their richly varied natural endowments will be directed toward self-fulfillment and toward constructive social purposes.” This was extraordinary at a time when some leading educators deliberately discouraged their female
students from developing a critical intelligence they would be unlikely to use in their postcollege lives. Many colleges included a “marriage education” course designed to prepare students to be housewives. As Mills College put it in an infamous slogan adopted in the early 1950s, “We are not educating women to be scholars; we are educating them to be wives and mothers.”

Isolated on a bucolic campus surrounded by mountains, Bennington students enjoyed a level of personal freedom to equal their intellectual freedom. The college’s philosophy with regard to student social life was summed up by Mabel Barbee Lee, the first dean of admissions, in a polemic for
The Atlantic
in April 1930 against “social paternalism” in women’s colleges. At a time when “house mothers” monitored students’ movements in their dorms and strict curfews, known as parietals, were the norm, Lee argued that female students should be “granted browsing privileges in the field of experience.” At Bennington, there were initially only three rules: silence had to be maintained in the library at all times and elsewhere on campus after ten p.m.; no cars could be driven on the road by the student houses after ten p.m.; and a student who planned to be off campus after eleven p.m. had to fill out a slip saying where she could be reached. (Miriam Marx, Groucho Marx’s daughter, was
one of the few students to be expelled in the early years for disciplinary reasons: in addition to other offenses, she loudly drove her car on campus late at night.) Eventually another rule was added prohibiting pets at college, after complaints were made about students bringing puppies, kittens, mice, and even lambs into the dorms. “It was the kind of place where a notice went out to everybody before Parents Weekend saying, ‘Please take your liquor bottles off the windowsill while the parents are here,’ ” remembers Marilyn Seide, Walter Bernstein’s sister, who graduated in 1952. When the writer Kathleen Norris arrived at Bennington in the early 1960s, she was shocked to see one of her classmates openly taking speed during class. Her father, contacting the college out of concern for his daughter after a breakup, was told blithely by a counselor, “We do count [the students], now and then.”

Bennington student houses, c. early 1940s.

The “Bennington girls” attracted by this culture of independence—not exactly the churchgoers Reverend Booth had sought—were known for being “arty, avant-garde, a little unconventional,” as Seide puts it. They also were rich, or at least their parents were: for years Bennington was the most expensive college in America. When Suzanne Stern graduated in 1956, her parents showed up for commencement with a case each of champagne and beluga caviar. Bernard Malamud, who began teaching at Bennington in 1961, noted that the students were “very bright, very perspicacious about literature; it’s something to hear them analyze a story.” But he was initially so dismayed by their casual clothing that he insisted they wear dresses to his creative writing class. In response, Betty Aberlin, who went on to become an actress, showed up in a full-length evening gown, accessorized with cowboy boots. Nonchalance regarding personal appearance was something of a Bennington tradition: the town’s community council scolded the first class of students for wearing “scandalizing attire” off campus, but quickly gave up the fight. Long before it became a political statement to burn one’s bra, Bennington girls were known for going braless; at a time when upper-class young women were brought up according to standards like Geraldine Jackson’s—carefully coiffed, with skirts to the midcalf—they grew their hair long and wore blue jeans. Shirley, writing to Jeanou soon after her arrival, commented approvingly that the students wore no makeup
and dressed in dirty shirts and pants. Their teachers, too, could be casual. The first time Stern encountered Burke, at a poetry reading—“this wild man . . . with his hair flying around like Einstein”—she mistook him for a janitor.

Hyman would have been an unlikely candidate for a job at a traditional college, not least because he did not have an advanced degree. But the Bennington faculty—the term “professor” was not used—were young and dynamic, mainly practitioners in their fields rather than academics; only a few had doctorates. “The idea was to be an actual creator in your field rather than a teacher,” says Fisher. The years Hyman taught at Bennington—from 1945 until 1946, then again from 1953 until 1969—were a golden age for the college, which boasted an astounding collection of thinkers and artists. In addition to Burke and Roethke, the literature faculty included W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz (hired in haste in 1946 when Roethke, in the grip of a manic episode, said he would emerge from his campus house only if Kunitz was brought in to replace him), Howard Nemerov, and later Malamud. Erich Fromm taught psychology; Martha Graham taught dance. In the fifties and sixties, the fine arts division included critic Clement Greenberg, painters Jules Olitski and Paul Feeley, sculptor Anthony Caro, composers Lionel Nowak and Marc Blitzstein, and cellist George Finckel.

These names are virtually all male—unusual for a women’s college. The combination of the predominantly male faculty, the small student body (the college maintained an enrollment of fewer than four hundred students until the mid-1960s), the remote location, and the culture of permissiveness and informality fostered particularly intimate connections between faculty and students. Classes were often conducted in the living rooms of student houses, with the instructor sitting in an armchair and students lounging on couches or the floor. And the weekly counseling sessions encouraged students and their advisers to form close relationships. A faculty member with ten “counselees,” as the students were called, could easily spend more time advising than teaching. Stern remembers Burke, her counselor, knocking on her window in the middle of the night to invite her to go for a walk and “kick around a few notions.” Professors and students often socialized together. “When we
had parties, sometimes I would find a professor on the floor of my closet the next morning,” says Victoria Kirby, a 1962 graduate.

Many women found these relationships deeply nurturing, both personally and intellectually. Others felt they were exploitative. “It was a model for sexist behavior,” says the writer Joan Schenkar, who graduated in 1963. Liaisons between students and faculty—sometimes discreet, sometimes open—were tolerated on campus until the late 1960s, when Edward Bloustein, then the president, cracked down. A guest at a New York cocktail party Kathleen Norris attended referred to Bennington as “the little red whorehouse on the hill.” One faculty member was known for prowling the all-night study room for conquests. Many of the students interviewed for this book had a story to tell about a sexual encounter, often unwanted, with a professor. Sometimes the students were the aggressors. “More than once,” Norris writes in her memoir, “I received an engraved invitation to an on-campus orgy; a more perfect expression of debutante wantonness could not be conceived.” When Phoebe Pettingell, who would become Hyman’s second wife after Jackson’s death, arrived at Bennington in 1965, the art students who lived in one cottage kept a chart on the wall of their stairway ranking the art faculty, with critical ratings and “caricatures of certain body parts.” Those girls, Pettingell says, “collected faculty scalps.”

Hyman would eventually become a dazzling and charismatic teacher. His signature course, Myth, Ritual, and Literature, which he inaugurated in 1956, was for years the most popular class in the college. “He was as brilliant as Shakespeare,” recalls the poet and novelist Sandra Hochman, who studied with Hyman in the late 1950s. But he initially found his responsibilities overwhelming. His course load during his first year included Methods of Literary Criticism, in which he lectured on the critical approaches he was writing about in
The Armed Vision
, and Forms of Literature, for which he assigned two dozen novels by Stendhal, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and others. He described his foray into teaching as “learning something of a Monday to teach it of a Tuesday”: he had to spend “three days a week on campus and the other four from morning to night reading the stuff.” The students found him standoffish, partly because he insisted on addressing them by
their last names, as his college professors had addressed him, but also because he delivered the kind of formal lectures he had enjoyed at Syracuse, which was not the Bennington style. One said his method of argument resembled “the mating combat of male elks.”