Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (33 page)

Pindyck fired back that the low rate of sales wasn’t her fault. Despite how little there was to show for it, she had been aggressively shopping Jackson’s stories all year. Early on, when Jackson tended to become despondent whenever she received a rejection letter, Hyman asked Pindyck to tell her only of her acceptances. If it was unavoidable, he broke the news to her himself: “Be a darling and [tell] Shirl as gently as you can,” Pindyck wrote to Hyman once when
The New Yorker
had passed on yet another of her submissions. This arrangement caused some complications in the office—rejection letters were passed on to authors as a matter of routine—but Pindyck, out of fondness for Jackson, was willing to go to extra trouble for her sake. Now, infuriated by the accusation, she sent Jackson a scathing three-page letter enumerating precisely how many rejections each of her active stories had racked up—one was on its twenty-fourth submission. “Our authors always get such [rejections] and it has been a special effort to keep yours out of the routine for fear that by letting such a letter get through, you might have a moment of unhappiness,” Pindyck wrote acidly. Now, she felt, Jackson had abused her kindness.

Jackson apologized, but their relationship did not recover. A few months later, Pindyck’s assistant informed Jackson that Pindyck, without saying good-bye, had gone to California for “a well-earned rest.” In California, she met and married screenwriter and author Morton Thompson, and a few years later they moved to a farm in Connecticut. She never returned to the agency. After Thompson died suddenly of a heart attack in July 1953, Pindyck shot herself in their bedroom.

In the meantime, Leland Hayward had been purchased by the Music Corporation of America (MCA), and by spring 1946 it was fully incorporated into the larger agency. With Pindyck’s departure, Jackson and Hyman were both handed on to an agent named Jim Bishop, formerly a war correspondent for
Collier’s
. Bishop immediately set to work trying to sell a collection of Jackson’s short stories. Pat Covici at Viking, who had previously been interested in her work, offered an advance of only
$150, with the stipulation—still—that she publish a novel first. Bishop refused and asked for the stories back. His strategy was to insist on a two-book deal, with the short stories to be published first and the novel second. (Then, as now, publishers were reluctant to publish short-story collections, which typically sell far fewer copies than novels.) “In a crisis I can always retreat to the point where I permit the publisher to bring the novel out first, followed by the stories,” he explained to Jackson. He also tried to find out why it had been so long since
The New Yorker
had taken any of her stories. Gus Lobrano, spouting a standard euphemism, reassured him that Jackson was “still very dear to their hearts”; but, as it turned out, another year and a half would go by before she appeared in the magazine again.

Jackson found Bishop’s attitude energizing. “You can bait [publishers] with the news that I am now working on a cheerful novel about a college girl, suitable for serialization in anything printed on slick paper, which I will have in your lap, done up in red and green ribbon, by Christmas Day,” she told him in August 1946. This suggests that she was already thinking about
Hangsaman
—some early attempts at it seem to date from around this time—although “cheerful” is hardly an accurate characterization of the finished book. She may also have returned to
I Know Who I Love
, her novel about a “thin and frightened” young woman named Catharine, writing character descriptions and multiple outlines. “This is to be the story of a strangely haunted woman, whose life becomes a cheap tragedy,” one synopsis begins. Now the focus of the story shifted from Catharine’s early romance with the art student to her marriage to a New Hampshire man. (Jackson modeled the house they live in on the Winchester cabin.)

Catharine feels conflicted between her desire to be an artist and her fear that her talent is insufficient; she also chafes against the conventionality of her husband and the farming community around them. “much grim humor, in country people,” Jackson noted to herself. Catharine begins to dream of the devil, who appears first as a romantic young man and becomes increasingly terrifying. Jackson, too, suffered throughout her life from dreams in which the devil appeared to her in various guises and tried to lure her into his trap; these became more frequent during
periods of psychological stress. (The novel’s title came from a folk song: “I know where I’m going / And I know who’s going with me / I know who I love / And the devil knows who I’ll marry.”) Finally, Catharine has a nervous breakdown. But this subject, too, proved fruitless: Jackson was unable to get past the first section.

Jackson sent Bishop a few more stories, none of which sold. Sometime in the fall of 1946, she finally hit on her subject. As always when the conditions were right, it came quickly. “Shirley has finished five-sixths of her first novel ever to get past the halfway point, and will finish this one, for sure. It is red hot,” Hyman told Jay Williams.
The Road Through the Wall
was ready to go out to publishers in the first week of 1947. “Seventy thousand words, count ’em, seventy thousand,” Hyman crowed. On a visit to New York, he proudly delivered it to Bishop.

Bishop went first to Hiram Haydn at Crown, who rejected the novel. He was not discouraged. “I have never known of so many requests from so many diverse publishers as have asked for a look at your book,” he reported to Jackson. The winning match was made by Tom Foster, Kit Foster’s husband, a local poultry farmer and book reviewer with a sideline as a scout for the new literary house of Farrar, Straus. In early March, Bishop sent Jackson a telegram—Farrar, Straus was interested. The firm offered her a two-book deal: a $1500 advance for both the story collection and the novel, with the novel to appear in early 1948. (For the sake of comparison, in 1946 Cheever received from Random House a generous $4800 for his first novel; in 1949, Farrar, Straus would also offer Flannery O’Connor, a decade younger than Jackson, $1500 for hers.) Bishop’s strategy had failed—the novel would have to come out first after all. Jackson did not seem to mind.

“
MY GOODNESS, HOW YOU WRITE
,” John Farrar, Jackson’s new editor, wrote to her after reading
The Road Through the Wall
. The novel is set, almost in its entirety, on a single block—Pepper Street, clearly modeled on Forest View Avenue, the street in Burlingame where Jackson grew up—and focuses primarily on one girl, Harriet Merriam, and her efforts to fit in. But the interactions among the neighbors on the block
could take place anywhere, including North Bennington, Vermont. The novel’s true setting, as one reviewer would call it, is “Sidestreet, U.S.A.”: anyplace where everyone knows everyone else’s business and passes judgment on anyone who does not conform. In fact, the plot has obvious similarities to “Flower Garden,” which Jackson rewrote just after she finished the first draft of the novel. Harriet, a moody, unattractive girl of fourteen who likes to write poetry, befriends the outsider Marilyn, ostracized because her family is Jewish. The prejudice of the other neighbors—always expressed in the most polite terms, as in “A Fine Old Firm”—is unmistakable. When one family organizes all the children on the block for a reading of Shakespeare’s plays, Marilyn is excluded on the pretense that she will be offended by
The Merchant of Venice
, with its depiction of the usurious Shylock. Finally Harriet’s mother orders her daughter to break off their friendship. “We must expect to set a standard,” she says. “However much we may want to find new friends whom we may value, people who are exciting to us because of new ideas, or because they are
different
, we have to do what is expected of us.”

We have to do what is expected of us
: this is the very definition of conformity. Those words could have been spoken by Geraldine—and perhaps they were. (Mrs. Merriam’s first name is Josephine, with its obvious similarity to Geraldine; this character is one of the cruelest in the novel, her gossip by far the most poisonous.) They could also have been spoken by Mrs. Winning in “Flower Garden,” or Mrs. Winning’s mother-in-law, or the other villagers who condemn the outsider Mrs. MacLane for her kindness to a black man. Another subplot in the novel deals with racism: Harriet exhibits the knee-jerk hostility to the Chinese typical of that place and time, and is shocked when a friend does not.
The Road Through the Wall
had its roots in Burlingame, California, but it could not fully bloom until Jackson experienced the impact of that stifling mind-set as an adult.

One of the ironies of Jackson’s fiction is the essential role that women play in enforcing the standards of the community—standards that hurt them most. The psychological intrigues that dominate their lives have the power to bring down the neighborhood.
The Road Through the Wall
, like “Flower Garden” and the majority of Jackson’s stories, exists almost entirely in the world of women and children: nearly all the action on the street takes place after the men have gone off to work. The fact that these works are dominated by women does not necessarily make them feminist, a term with which Jackson did not identify. Still, the way she portrays certain of her characters’ attitudes strikingly anticipates the movement to come: one neighbor, who regards herself as “something more than a housewife,” is scorned by the others for putting on airs. But no escape is possible from the hothouse of hostility in which these women live. Things start to fall apart not long after Harriet’s rejection of Marilyn, and the pace of disintegration continues until the novel’s calamitous conclusion.

Friendships between girls or women are central to much of Jackson’s work, and here she is a particularly close observer of the small secrets and rituals by which these intimacies are created: in one scene Harriet and Marilyn write their hopes for the future on slips of paper and bury them by the town creek. Elements of this friendship are reminiscent of Shirley’s friendship with Jeanou, including their not-to-be-kept vow to meet in Paris on Bastille Day 1938. A best friend can function as a kind of double, particularly for a girl, and when the writing on the slips is revealed, later in the novel, it is hard to know which was written by Marilyn and which by Harriet. One reads, “In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.” The other: “I will be a famous actress or maybe a painter and everyone will be afraid of me and do what I say.” Both girls, also, contain elements of teenage Shirley—Marilyn loves the commedia dell’arte, Harriet agonizes over her weight. And their hopes for the future are in some ways expressive of her own hopes. What is witchcraft, after all, but the desire to generate fear in others and instill their obedience?

The note Jackson sent with the revised book read, simply, “Herewith the baby.” Farrar was delighted; Roger Straus, his partner, congratulated
her on “a magnificent job.” The novel includes more than a dozen characters, but Jackson’s control over the material is superb. She parcels out scenes rhythmically, careful to maintain the book’s taut atmosphere. (Notes in her drafts show that Jackson, likely at Farrar’s suggestion, counted the number of pages in each chapter and took care to balance them.) Every description is calculated for what it reveals, both about the character to whom it refers and the person whose attitude it represents. When Helen Williams, the girl who is Marilyn’s chief tormentor, moves away, Marilyn notices the poor quality of the family’s furniture and regrets how easily she had been intimidated: “Helen dressed every morning for school in front of that grimy dresser, ate breakfast at that slatternly table . . . no one whose life was bounded by things like that was invulnerable.” Jackson was beginning to explore the technique of using houses and their furnishings as expressions of psychological states. One unfortunate family lives in “a recent regrettable pink stucco with the abortive front porch [that was] unhappily popular in late suburban developments.” As always in these descriptions, she has a knack for the unexpected word: tropical fish in a mural swim “insanely,” and the apple trees on Pepper Street produce “wry unpalatable fruit.” In “Notes for a Young Writer,” a lecture on writing fiction composed as advice to her daughter Sarah, Jackson would relish the “grotesque effect” of the “absolutely wrong word”: “ ‘I will always love you,’ he giggled.”

Compared with Jackson’s masterly late novels,
The Road Through the Wall
, unsurprisingly, is a slighter work. But it is marvelously written, with the careful attention to structure, the precision of detail, and the bite of brilliant irony that would always define her style. There are wonderful moments of humor, as when one of the neighborhood girls, hoping to decorate her living room with high-class art, accidentally orders a set of pornographic photographs. And there is this astonishing aperçu from the novel’s prologue: “No man owns a house because he really wants a house, any more than he marries because he favors monogamy.” Both house and marriage are valued for the status they confer upon their possessor rather than for their intrinsic worth. In a novel that encompasses adultery, murder, and suicide, this may be the darkest line.

WHEN FARRAR, STRAUS BOUGHT
The Road Through the Wall
, the firm was still in its first year of business. Roger Straus, a would-be publisher in search of a partner, had teamed up with John Farrar—recently ousted from Farrar & Rinehart, his first endeavor—to create Farrar, Straus and Company. The two men had entirely different temperaments. Straus, who hailed from the New York German-Jewish elite (his grandfather had been a cabinet secretary; his grandmother was a Guggenheim), was known for both his business savvy and his skill at handling difficult authors. “He seemed to possess countless sensitive social tentacles,” writes Boris Kachka in
Hothouse
, his history of the company. Straus also had what Kachka delicately terms “a keenly developed sense of quid pro quo—or, as [Straus] took to calling it, ‘You blow me, I’ll blow you.’ ”