Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (39 page)

Jackson with baby Sarah. Photograph by Ralph Ellison.

THAT THIRD BABY WAS
Sarah Geraldine Hyman, who arrived October 30, 1948, just after Jackson sent off the proofs of her short story collection. Shirley wanted to name the baby Sue, but this time Stanley won: she was named for his grandmother. The family immediately began calling her Sally, which stuck throughout her childhood. (In this book, she is referred to as Sarah, the name she now uses formally.)

Shirley and Stanley had expected another boy, but they were delighted by their second daughter. Though she was a placid, easy baby—“fat and happy,” Shirley wrote to her parents—it was soon clear that she would be the most creative, most intelligent, and ultimately most challenging of the children. (“Three children are enough for you to take care of,” replied Geraldine, who never refrained from offering her opinion about her daughter’s life. “Don’t ever think of any more.”) As a child, Sarah would read Freud and Emerson, along with all of Shirley’s Oz books. She could stay alone in her room all day, reading or drawing; she was
a tomboy who wore Laurence’s old pants and came home with holes in the knees; she refused to comb her hair. (“Her general appearance is of a child barely kept in a state of cleanliness by stubborn determination,” her mother once ruefully described her.) In
Life Among the Savages
, Jackson writes that she rejected “any notion of being a co-operative member of a family, named herself ‘Tiger’ and settled down to an unceasing, and seemingly endless, war against clothes, toothbrushes, all green vegetables, and bed. Her main weapon was chewing gum . . . with which she could perform miracles of construction on her own hair, books, and, once, her father’s typewriter.” As if suspecting even at birth her daughter’s unconventionality, Shirley named as Sarah’s godmother Jeanou—the vivacious intellectual who had done so much to break her out of her parents’ mold—though the two would never meet.

Laura Nowak, whose daughter Alison was one of Sarah’s close friends, remembers her as “mischievous”—at age four, she got up from a nap and wandered down to the village square on her own, where she went into the market and asked Larry Powers for a popsicle before Shirley noticed she was gone. As she grew older, she became captious, and the mischief turned into a desire to provoke. “She always presented herself as different and strange,” Barry, the youngest of the siblings, says. “Anything controversial or offensive or weird or bizarre, she would adopt it and talk loudly about it—in school, in the town, anywhere.” Sarah agrees, though she puts it differently: “I tried to be the most interesting kid.” For years she picked an argument at the dinner table virtually every night: meals ended with either her or Shirley storming upstairs. Once when Sarah was about seven, she asked a question about sex while the whole family was eating out at a restaurant. “If you say that again, I’ll butter your nose,” Stanley warned her. Naturally she repeated it, just to see if he was serious. He was.

In some ways, she was Shirley’s favorite; she was certainly more like Shirley than any of the other children. “sally has always been our sweet baby, the wickedest and funniest of our children, the little odd delightful silly one . . . our family fairy goblin,” Shirley wrote when her daughter was eight. She shared Shirley’s love of cats and her interest in magic and the macabre. Elizabeth Greene, who was Sarah’s camp
counselor one summer and became her close friend, recalls the two of them making a magical charm for a friend who was going through a difficult time. “She had a lot of light, a lot of openness to what lies beyond . . . one foot in the other world,” Greene says. Sarah also was a talented writer who published her first story at age sixteen. When Jackson gathered her thoughts on fiction writing in “Notes for a Young Writer,” Sarah was her intended reader. But she was just as much of an outsider as Shirley had been as a child, and she had more than her share of troubles. At age fifteen, she was kicked out of boarding school; the summer she was sixteen, a few weeks before Shirley died, she attempted suicide. “She had a self-destructive side,” Greene says. That, too, she got from her mother.

“
THERE IS A RIGHTNESS
and a kind of burnished quality about everything you do,” John Farrar wrote to Jackson after he read the manuscript of her short story collection. The success of “The Lottery” had spurred Farrar, Straus to ramp up its efforts on behalf of the new book, which was now to be titled
The Lottery
so as to capitalize on the author’s new notoriety. Pyke Johnson, the publicity director, planned a campaign in which envelopes containing slips of paper would be inserted inside the books, with prizes—stone paperweights, witches’ brooms, cauldrons—awarded to readers whose slips bore a black dot. “I never heard anything so ghoulish in all my life, but if the post office can stand it, I can,” Jackson told him. To her parents, she was more blunt: the publicity campaign was “so excruciating that i will never show my face out of Vermont again.” Fortunately, the postmaster overruled the plan.

The book’s subtitle was not as easily settled. Farrar suggested
Notes from a Modern Book of Witchcraft
. Jackson did not want to abandon the witchcraft theme entirely: she decided to use passages from Glanvill’s
Saducismus Triumphatus
, the seventeenth-century witchcraft chronicle that had first fascinated her in college, as epigraphs to each of the book’s five sections. But she also had another unifying concept in mind. The collection would include several extremely accomplished stories that she had written the previous year but had not yet published (
The New Yorker
turned them all down), which would serve as cornerstones of the book. They all worked along a similar model: an apparently mundane situation—a dinner guest, a visit to the dentist—that takes a Hawthorne-like detour, sharp yet subtle, into the uncanny.

The first, “Like Mother Used to Make,” was probably written around January 1947, and was inspired by an anecdote from her friend Ben Zimmerman’s life. A man named David arrives home from work to prepare for the arrival of his next-door neighbor, Marcia, for dinner. His apartment is a scene of perfect order, with the furniture invitingly arranged, a bowl of flowers, a beautifully set table; he has even baked a pie. Marcia’s apartment, which he enters briefly to leave a note, is the antithesis: so cluttered that it reduces him to despair. Their dinner is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a male coworker of Marcia’s. He thinks David’s apartment is actually hers, and she plays along, sneakily stealing credit for the comfortable atmosphere and even the pie. At the story’s end, David has no choice but to surrender his apartment to Marcia and her friend and retreat to her unpleasant quarters, which he begins, helplessly, to tidy. Like Mrs. Hart in “Men with Their Big Shoes,” the innocent David finds his home invaded by an unsettling, alien presence that he is somehow powerless to ward off.

In an early draft of the story, Marcia’s intrusive coworker is named, innocuously, Mr. Lang. For the
Lottery
collection—now to be subtitled
The Adventures of James Harris
—Jackson changed his name to Mr. Harris. This figure wends his destructive way through the book, disrupting the lives of various characters, nearly all of them women. (David, whose feminine gifts for homemaking and cooking Jackson emphasizes, is a rare male victim.) In the Child Ballad that bears his name, which may have been one of the old English songs Jackson learned from her mother, James Harris is the “Daemon Lover” who seduces a woman by promising to show her “how the lilies grow / On the banks of Italy.” It is not until she is aboard his ship that she discovers he is the devil in disguise, when he reveals that their true destination is the snowy mountain of Hell.

What would happen if James Harris walked the streets of New York? Just as she had with “Elizabeth” and “The Lottery,” Jackson updated the legend. A tall man in a blue suit, he slips in and out of the stories
in the
Lottery
collection, taking on different personas. Sometimes, as in “Like Mother Used to Make,” his presence is sinister but tangential. Elsewhere, he brings women to the point of disintegration—the true theme of the collection.

Just before she began work on these stories, Jackson became preoccupied with a real-life case of a woman’s disappearance. On the afternoon of December 1, 1946, Bennington student Paula Welden headed out for a walk on Vermont’s Long Trail near Glastenbury Mountain, on the outskirts of Bennington proper, and never returned. The case dominated the local paper for weeks. The most likely theory was that she had suffered a hiking accident, but rumors spread that she had been seen in a car with a man. A waitress in western Massachusetts claimed she had served a man accompanied by a girl fitting Welden’s description; when he went up to pay the bill, the girl asked the waitress where she was and how far it was to Bennington. A psychic said that Welden had walked through a covered bridge and along the banks of a river, where she would be found alive inside an old shack. Others suggested that she might have “run away to start a new life.” Search parties combed the area for days, but Paula Welden was never found.

Jackson wrote one story explicitly based on Welden’s disappearance, called “The Missing Girl” (the title came from one of the news articles about the case she carefully saved). But the motif of women who lose their way dominates
The Lottery
—the phrase “she was lost,” or variants of it, is repeated again and again. These women are secretaries a bit past their prime and still unmarried, or mothers stuck at home with their children, longing for companionship yet terrified of their gossiping neighbors. Women and men are depicted as occupying different realities, with men literally driving women insane. “Sometimes,” the narrator of “Got a Letter from Jimmy” reflects as she does the dishes one evening, “sometimes I wonder if men are quite sane, any of them. Maybe they’re all crazy and every other woman knows it but me, and my mother never told me and my roommate just didn’t mention it and all the other wives think I know. . . .” (The original draft, one of her earliest stories, was based closely on an episode in which Hyman, feuding with Walter Bernstein, refused to open a letter from his friend; Jackson
changed the name to Jimmy to match the James Harris theme.) The story ends with the narrator’s fantasy of murdering her husband.

Written within a few months of each other, three of the longer stories function as a kind of trilogy: Hyman jokingly compared it to
The Divine Comedy
. In “Pillar of Salt,” Margaret and Brad, former New Yorkers who now live in New England, return to the city for a brief visit. Slowly, ominously, things start to go wrong. There is a fire in an apartment building near a party they attend; later, walking on a Long Island beach, Margaret discovers a human leg. Gradually it becomes clear that these outward signs of disintegration and alienation mirror her inner state. The story ends with her standing on a street corner, paralyzed, overwhelmed by the prospect of crossing: “she wondered, How do people ever manage to get there, and knew that by wondering, by admitting a doubt, she was lost.”

Margaret’s husband is a stolid presence throughout the story, unable to understand quite what her problem is. But elsewhere in the collection, the woman’s disintegration is linked to romance. James Harris, the daemon lover, comes along to sweep her out of the tawdry tedium of her life—the trips to the dentist, the diapers and dishes—and promises her something better; but the consequences are dire. If she goes with him, she will give up not only her life but her soul. In “The Daemon Lover,” the midpoint of the trilogy, a no-longer-young woman (her marriage license gives her age as thirty, but in truth she is four years older) waits in her apartment for a fiancé—Jamie Harris—who never arrives. Desperate, she goes out in search of him, but as she gradually descends deeper and deeper into hysteria, the reader finally wonders whether he ever existed at all. James Harris is a similarly elusive figure in “The Tooth,” the final story in the trilogy, in which country housewife Clara Spencer travels to New York to visit the dentist and encounters, or believes that she encounters, a mysterious man named Jim. Her mind befogged by drugs and by pain (and possibly by his menacing presence), she has visions of him holding out his arms and calling to her; by the end of the story, she imagines she is running away with him.

Another story makes the dangers of escape even more explicit. In “The Beautiful Stranger,” which Jackson also likely wrote around this
time but did not try to publish, another woman named Margaret (a name Jackson used repeatedly for characters with whom she seemed particularly to identify) greets a man who she thinks is her husband on his return from a business trip and realizes that, Martin Guerre–like, he is literally a different person. Her husband, we learn through gradual hints, was abusive and cruel. The stranger is warm and companionable: he mixes her a martini the way she likes it and laughs with her over dinner. “This is not the man who enjoyed seeing me cry; I need not be afraid,” Margaret tells herself. But one afternoon she goes out on her own to run errands: “I must see something today beyond the faces of my children. . . . No one should be so much alone.” (In
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan writes, “Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling [of loneliness at home] gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets.”) Strangely, she is unable to find her way home. “The evening was very dark, and she could see only the houses going in rows, with more rows beyond them and more rows beyond that, and somewhere a house which was hers, with the beautiful stranger inside, and she lost out here.”

In “Company for Dinner,” an early precursor to this story, a man accidentally walks into the wrong house and believes it to be his. “The Beautiful Stranger” takes that simple irony—people are interchangeable; all marriages are equally dull—and complicates it. The stranger and the husband look identical; only the wife can tell the difference between them. On some level, she knows she is making a deal with the devil, but even the devil—a kind, handsome daemon lover—is preferable to her contemptible husband. (The story was originally titled “Document of Loneliness.”) Yet escaping an unhappy marriage turns out not to be that easy. What appears to be a solution is only a trick: she will lose her way.