Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (32 page)

Mrs. Hart thought of Mrs. Martin, keen-eyed and shrill, watching other people’s groceries (“Two loaves of whole wheat today, Mrs. Hart? Company tonight, maybe?”). “I think she’s such a nice person,” Mrs. Hart said, wanting to add, You tell her I said so.

“I’m not saying she isn’t,” Mrs. Anderson said grimly....

“I wish,” Mrs. Hart began again, a quick fear touching her; her kind neighbors watching her beneath their friendliness, looking out quietly from behind curtains. . . . “I don’t think people ought to talk about other people,” she said desperately.

By the story’s end, Mrs. Hart cannot maintain her sense of self against the onslaught of Mrs. Anderson, who threatens to move into her house and take over her very life. She realizes “with a sudden unalterable conviction that she was lost.”

THE ASSORTMENT OF VISITORS
who often came up to spend the weekend—friends who were likely to be Jewish, homosexual, or African-American—also set Shirley and Stanley apart from the homogeneous community of North Bennington. Barry Hyman speculates that Ralph Ellison, whom Stanley invited to lecture at the college in November 1945
and who visited frequently from then on, might have been the first black person some villagers had ever seen. “As a black man he stuck out in North Bennington but acted as if he didn’t,” Arnold Rampersad, Ellison’s biographer, writes. “Strolling with his camera [Ellison was an avid and talented photographer] about North Bennington, or on the campus grounds, he was a figure few could miss. To many of the townsfolk, clannish and wary of the liberal college ever since it opened in 1931, the fact that he stayed with the Hymans made him almost as sinister as the fact that he was black.”

The important story “Flower Garden,” which Jackson began writing within months of the move and reworked over the next few years, addresses both the ugliness of small-town racism and the deep-seated pressure to conform to local standards. Mrs. Winning (her name, again, no accident) is a no-longer-young woman who married into “the oldest family in town”; she, her husband, and their two small children live with his parents in a big old house that his family has owned for generations, where her mother-in-law sets the rules. Mrs. Winning once hoped to live in the little cottage down the hill, but she has given up this dream, and one day she learns the cottage has been sold. The newcomers, from the city, are Mrs. MacLane, a widow about Mrs. Winning’s age, and her five-year-old son. Curious to get a look at the cottage, Mrs. Winning pays them a visit, and soon the women and their children become friends. Mrs. Winning finds much to admire about the urbane and sophisticated Mrs. MacLane—the colorful sandals she wears, the beautiful blue bowl on her coffee table, and most of all the glorious flower garden she plants on all four sides of her house. The Winning house is dark and austere, and flowers will not grow in the shade of the ancient maple trees around it.

One day while they are out for a walk, Mrs. Winning’s son taunts a biracial child on the street, calling him “nigger,” and Mrs. MacLane’s son joins in. Mrs. Winning is shocked when Mrs. MacLane makes her son apologize, and even more shocked when her new friend suggests that the boy’s father work for her as a gardener. The garden grows beautifully under the man’s care. But Mrs. MacLane’s status in the town begins to wither. The villagers gossip about her relationship with the
“colored man.” Her son is excluded from the other children’s activities. Mrs. Winning finds herself implicated in the gossip and realizes that she must turn against her friend or lose her own standing. She affects innocence when Mrs. MacLane asks if the gardener is the reason for her ostracism. “The nerve of her,” Mrs. Winning thinks defensively, “trying to blame the colored folks.” After a neighbor’s tree limb crashes down into her garden during a storm, Mrs. MacLane and her son move back to the city.

Jackson had explored prejudice before—racism in “After You, My Dear Alphonse,” anti-Semitism in “A Fine Old Firm.” But “Flower Garden,” with symbolism reminiscent of Hawthorne’s parables, is significantly more complex than either of those stories. In an early draft, Jackson told the story from the perspective of the newcomer, a New Yorker named Mrs. Hanson. That version captures well the city woman’s desire to befriend her rather chilly neighbors, to behave in a way that wins their approval. She suffers acutely from their little barbs, no matter how subtle: early in the story, the character who would become Mrs. Winning, here named Mrs. Worthing, gently chides Mrs. Hanson for letting her son dig in the front yard. Her own children have gardens in the back of the house, “where it doesn’t show.” One episode in particular—Mrs. Hanson’s son strays a few blocks away and is returned by a kindly neighbor—sounds suspiciously like Jackson’s experience: more than one of her children tells of being brought back home after wandering into the village on his or her own.

The early draft is dominated by Mrs. Hanson’s emotions: her profound longing to connect with her neighbors and her hurt and anger at being driven back to the city. In her revision, Jackson might have considered that Hanson sounded a little too much like Hyman; she also made the situation more general by not specifying which city the newcomer has arrived from. But the major change is the shift in perspective to Mrs. Winning’s, which allows Jackson to speak for the village, giving an internal glimpse at attitudes normally expressed obliquely, through a glance or a snide remark. She depicts Mrs. Winning’s racism with great subtlety: it is apparent, but not explicit, in her rudeness to the biracial boy, her condescending notice of his good looks (“they’re all beautiful
children”), and her shock at Mrs. MacLane’s offer of work to his father. She comes reluctantly to the realization that she must ostracize Mrs. MacLane. Despite her treachery, by the end of the story the reader feels a kind of pity for the contortions she has suffered through a lifetime of conforming to the Winnings’ expectations. She consoles herself with the thought of her family, “a solid respectable thing,” but it is a false consolation: the cost of this form of respectability is too high. Though she does not realize it, she is every bit as lost as Mrs. Hart.

IN ONE OF SHIRLEY’S CARTOONS
, likely drawn shortly after Laurence was born, she depicts herself bending over the stove to heat a bottle as the baby lies on the floor, screaming. Toys are strewn all around him, a sagging clothesline stretches the length of the room, and one of the cats is reaching into the fishbowl. Stanley peers over the clothesline, commenting, “What he needs is a baby sister.”

Joanne Leslie, the Hymans’ second child, arrived on November 8, 1945, six months after her parents’ move to Bennington. Stanley wanted to name her Jean, after his mother’s sister Jenny, who had recently died; Shirley preferred Anne. They compromised, although not very successfully. The resulting Joanne “seems as arbitrary to the child as it does to everyone else,” Shirley lamented in an undated fragment about her elder daughter—perhaps because Shirley sometimes called her Anne and Stanley called her Jean. “as soon as she could talk she renamed herself toby, which is the name of our dog. now her name changes daily, depending upon her mood and the weather.” In her family writings, Jackson usually referred to her elder daughter as Jannie, another compromise. As a college student, Joanne nicknamed herself Jai, which she kept from then on.

Laurence had always been a rough-and-tumble child, big and strong for his age, fond of pranks, plots, baseball, and cowboys. In “Charles,” her first family story and one of her funniest, Jackson describes him returning home from kindergarten every day with a tale of some outrageous sin that his classmate Charles committed: hitting the teacher, saying dirty words, talking back.She cannot wait to meet Charles’s mother
in person at the next PTA meeting, but when she asks the kindergarten teacher to introduce her, she gets a surprise. “Charles?” the teacher asks. “We don’t have any Charles in the kindergarten.” Laurence had “a thousand bright questions and sly, funny comments to make about everything that was going on,” wrote Catherine Osgood (Kit) Foster, who taught English at Bennington and, with her husband Tom, was a friend of the Hymans. One night after dinner, Stanley tried to teach Laurence to count, using his fingers. Laurence grew tired, but Stanley urged him on, asking how many toes he had. “Only these few,” Laurence answered, looking wearily at his feet. As he grew older, Jackson depicted him as often irritable and impatient with her, eager to be off doing his own thing. Laurence acknowledges the portrait is accurate.

Blue-eyed, curly-haired Joanne was all girl: gentle, a little shy, obedient. In
Savages
, she tends to pipe up with “I’m good, aren’t I?” just as her older brother is being accused of some monstrous misdeed. From an early age, she loved dolls, clothes, and shoes: Jackson describes discovering her one morning dressed for play in an organdy party dress over pink pajama pants. At the age of four, she asked for high heels; at five, she had a knack for tying a scarf smartly around her neck. She occasionally went through phases of whimsy: in an amusing episode in
Savages
, she insists on calling herself “the second Mrs. Ellenoy” and reports on the antics of her seven stepdaughters, all named Martha. But as a teenager, she was the most conventional of the Hyman children, interested in clothes and boys—not terribly different from the kind of daughter of whom Geraldine might have approved. In 1959, when Geraldine and Leslie suggested that one of the children join them in California for a summer, it was Joanne who was chosen to go. (The visit was not a success: Joanne felt that she, too, disappointed Geraldine.) “Jannie is our beauty . . . sweet and popular,” Jackson described her on the cusp of adolescence. She loved her daughter, but her writing shows that she didn’t always know what to do with her. When Sarah arrived—fearfully intelligent, deeply uncanny Sarah—it was soon clear that she was the child with whom Jackson would identify most.

Laurence had begun attending nursery school, which freed up Jackson’s mornings for writing. But the arrival of a new baby meant she once
again had to adjust her schedule. She managed, in part, by giving the children a remarkable amount of autonomy. Laura Nowak once came to the house to pick up Joanne, then around two years old, to play with her daughter. Jackson was writing and didn’t come to the door. Instead, five-year-old Laurence had gotten his sister ready for her outing. “He had a little jacket for her . . . just as efficient as can be,” Nowak says.

Jackson, too, was becoming more efficient as a writer. “She was always working,” says Joanne. “While dinner was cooking, she was sitting there working on plots and stories, making little notes sitting on this tiny stool in the kitchen.” By the time she managed to sit down at the typewriter, the stories were often already half finished. Many of Jackson’s stories—“Flower Garden” was a notable exception—underwent very little revision. Kit Foster told of playing Monopoly one evening with Jackson and Hyman when Jackson abruptly withdrew from the game and went into her study, where she could be heard banging away at her typewriter. Less than an hour later, she emerged with a story that was sent off to her agent the next morning and published with only a change in punctuation.

But Jackson also sought advice from both Foster and Hyman. Although she would be “tense and even impatient” while listening to their comments, “her fine discriminating mind guided her to choose only the best suggestions,” Foster recalled. She was “least tense and most attentive” to Hyman’s remarks, and almost always followed his suggestions, at least in the early days. Once Jackson read them both half a story about two women sharing a house in the suburbs: “The dialogue was excellent, acerbic and even gritty, polite on top but on the edge of storm underneath.” Hyman found the story plotless and insignificant. “What truth about human nature does this story show?” he asked. Jackson could not answer. There was no point in writing a story, he told her, unless it has a general truth in it: “A slice of life, no matter how convincing or moving it is, is not a story.” Jackson abandoned the draft.

WHEN JOANNE WAS BORN,
Jackson and Hyman were in a difficult place financially. Hyman was no longer on
The New Yorker
’s payroll: instead,
the magazine gave him a “drawing account” of $50 weekly, the usual arrangement for nonsalaried staff writers. It was essentially an advance that the writer had to earn back by selling a certain number of articles (or, in Hyman’s case, Comment items and book reviews) to the magazine. Any deficit remaining at the end of the year had to be paid back or—more commonly—was carried over to the next year. This system generated considerable anxiety among the magazine’s writers, who had to do complicated calculations to figure out where they stood. “Half the people here were always in debt,” Joseph Mitchell later recalled, even prominent, well-established figures such as James Thurber and Wolcott Gibbs. At the end of 1944, Hyman’s debit balance was more than $2,646—nearly the equivalent of his starting salary at Bennington. The Hymans’ money problems were serious enough that Hyman managed to beg some of the remainder of his advance from Knopf, despite having turned in only one chapter of the promised book.

Jackson took out her stress on her agent, Fran Pindyck, whom she accused of not working hard enough. Pindyck had sold a dozen of Jackson’s stories in 1944 and only two in 1945—one of which, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” was held by
Story
magazine for nine months before publication (and payment). At the beginning of 1945,
The New Yorker
offered Jackson a first-reading agreement, complete with a $100 bonus, and then failed to take a single one of her stories. (She was in good company—the magazine also rejected all of J. D. Salinger’s submissions that year.) Even when Jackson did get stories into the magazine—“Whistler’s Grandmother” and “It Isn’t the Money I Mind,” two minor pieces sold the previous year, were her only stories to appear there in 1945—her rates were significantly lower than many other writers’. In 1942, for “The Man Who Was Very Homesick for New York,” a story of around 1500 words, Cheever, one of the magazine’s regular contributors, earned $365, or 24 cents per word. For “Whistler’s Grandmother,” a slightly shorter story published three years later, Jackson got $185—only 13 cents per word. The magazine tended to offer lower rates to women writers; in 1948, when Jean Stafford’s first story was accepted, she also received a $100 signing bonus and an initial rate of 18 cents per word, despite having already published two novels, one of them a best
seller. (Cheever’s signing bonus was several hundred dollars.) After the agency extracted its commission, Jackson made less than $500 in 1945—one-third her previous year’s earnings.