Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (41 page)

Jackson’s new teeth were a necessity rather than a luxury, because she was suddenly in demand as a lecturer. Bennington suffered a minor crisis in June 1949, when several faculty members resigned to protest the expulsion of Miriam Marx after a series of rules violations. Apparently she had been warned that another offense would lead to expulsion, but since her graduation was only six weeks away, some of the faculty saw the punishment as unnecessarily cruel. The poet Stanley Kunitz, Marx’s counselor, was one of the professors to resign; another was James T. Jackson, who taught a course in the short story. A series of guest lecturers took over the course, including Jackson. She was initially nervous, asking Wallace Fowlie how it was done: “What do you say first? And then
what
do you teach?” But she turned out to be a gifted teacher. “the girls and i talk very seriously about the Art of Writing and then they ask me very timidly where they can sell their stories and i tell them there’s nothing to it,” she told her parents. One of the students recalled that she gave her first public reading of “The Lottery” in the class.

The experience inaugurated in Jackson a love of lecturing that would continue throughout her life. Her shyness and anxiety vanished when she took the stage, and she talked fluidly and engagingly about writing, often from just a few pages of notes, using many examples from her fiction. That summer, Jackson was invited to read at the Cummington School of the Arts, in the Berkshires; Hyman, annoyed by the attention being paid to her, grumbled that she went on “interminably.” John and Margaret Farrar also invited her to a new conference they had started at Marlboro College, a tiny school on the site of a former farm in nearby Marlboro, Vermont, outside Brattleboro. The First Annual Marlboro College Fiction Writers’ Conference included
New Yorker
writer Peter DeVries and novelists Charles Jackson and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
(Hyman was invited, too, but only after he sent the Farrars a peeved letter asking why he had been excluded.) After her one brief stint at Bennington, Jackson would never teach formally again, but she found she loved the intimate atmosphere of writers’ conferences: she participated in the Marlboro conference for several years before moving on to the Suffield Writer-Reader Conference in Suffield, Connecticut, and the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Eventually these conferences would also serve as havens where she was able to be celebrated for her writing, far from Hyman’s critical gaze. But for now they went together: Hyman lectured on “Fiction and Folk Material,” and Jackson conducted a master class in fiction writing. Afterward, Margaret Farrar complimented her on her “modesty” and the “supreme skill of her stories.” She and Hyman both “had a fine time being writers for two days,” Jackson reported.

Wasn’t she always a writer? That remark illustrates how acutely Jackson felt the push and pull of her writer and housewife personas after
The Lottery
was published. She was, at last, an established fiction writer with a real income, an income that even allowed her to hire a housekeeper to do light cleaning and prepare breakfast and lunch for the children, so that she could work uninterrupted in the mornings. But there was still plenty of housekeeping: all the little chores, as she put it, that “no one but me ever remembers to do—things like keeping the toys together, and filling the cigarette box, and about five hundred small things like that.” Considering that many of Jackson’s friends and neighbors would later comment on the messiness of her house, it may seem odd that the housewife aspect of her persona took up so much of her mental energy. But even if she wasn’t naturally gifted at housekeeping, she was keenly aware that it was expected of her. As Friedan would make abundantly clear in
The Feminine Mystique
, women in the postwar period were told to be “perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house; their only fight to get and keep their husbands.” The ideal woman of the era was one who could proudly put “Housewife” in the spot for “Occupation” on her census form. “Our readers are housewives, full time,” the editor of a women’s magazine—likely one of the ones Jackson wrote for—told Friedan. “They are not
interested in national or international affairs. They are only interested in the family and the home.”

Housekeeping was also a source of tension in her marriage. Jackson never made any pretense of being a flawless housekeeper, “trim and competent.” She inevitably found herself as she does in the essay “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again”—with the dishpan heaped high, inventing stories to distract herself through the task. The orderly house was a fantasy, not a standard she strived to uphold. But unlike her, Hyman was compulsively tidy—everything on his desk had to be perfectly lined up before he could begin work. She would later move to a separate room to write (and eventually to sleep as well) because she liked to tape photographs or drawings that inspired her on the wall at random, while he could not tolerate even a picture hanging crookedly. Jackson jokes in an unpublished fragment that “any kind of problem can be solved by putting it in a box and putting the box away.” Surely some of the obsession with housekeeping in Jackson’s writing stems from the desire metaphorically to put things away—anxieties, fears, all the messes of life—and her corresponding inability to do so.

In fact, though Jackson strived for some order in the home, she feared too much of it. She loved rooms that were filled with books and cats and color and sunlight, even if there were papers strewn on the floor or clothing draped over the chairs. More often than not, housekeeping done too perfectly in one of her stories is a sign that something is amiss. In “Pillar of Salt,” the distraught protagonist deliberately unmakes her bed (which she made “before going out to breakfast, like any good housewife”) and then remakes it, “taking a long time over the corners and smoothing out every wrinkle,” in an effort to calm her unsettled mind. In a piece published in
Vogue
in 1949, Jackson lamented modern innovations such as plastic for bringing an artificial sterility into the home and eliminating “anything natural or real—the honest touch of dirt, the use of wood or stone for practical endurance, the unclean standard of air we have been breathing for so long.” Artificiality in the environment, she argued, would bring about artificial emotions as well. “A woman’s house no longer loves her, as a good family house should love its housewife. . . . No one cares any more about the deeper personality
that comes with solid, unshakable affection, with the sympathy of personalities that grow together through attention and loving care and laborious painstaking work.” She ended the piece with a Stepford-like vision of the future: “Soon, in our charmingly fabricated living rooms, our glittering kitchens, where no food ever either perishes or is eaten, we women will find ourselves completely useless, an anachronism like the horse and buggy, or a failed invention like the zeppelin. And we deserve it, too.” A little chaos was good for the soul.

But the
idea
of the house—what is required to make and keep a home, and what it means when a home is destroyed—is important in just about all of Jackson’s novels. Already as a child, she had responded to the moods of houses: “even the bookends have personalities,” she once wrote of her bedroom in Rochester. The relationship between a person’s surroundings and his or her mental state was one she understood well. “The crack in the kitchen linoleum is a danger to the structure: the well spaced coolness of the sheets on the line is a sensual presentation of security,” she writes in the early story “Homecoming.” Later, in
The Haunting of Hill House
, the mood of the house will have a devastating effect on some who set foot in it.

At times, Jackson chafed at the dual role. In a piece called “Fame,” she satirically reports on a phone call she received from a woman writing a gossip column for the North Bennington newspaper. The call comes just a few days before
The Road Through the Wall
is to be published, but every time Jackson tries to get in a word about her book, the caller steers her back to domestic details. When the story appears, it doesn’t mention the book—only that “Mrs. Stanley Hyman” was “visiting Mr. and Mrs. Farrarstraus of New York City this weekend.” Jackson was exaggerating for comic effect, as she so often did in these pieces. The actual column, which she saved in her
Road Through the Wall
scrapbook, did include the title of the novel, though it identified the author by her married name. Still, her news looks out of place among the other items in the gossip column, such as “William Barber of Main street is quite ill with the grip [sic]” and “The Baptist church choir will rehearse Thursday evening at 7:30.”

On the one hand, as she showed in “Fame,” Jackson wanted her
neighbors to know that she was different—that her life was bigger than the confines of North Bennington. At the same time, she feared their scrutiny and their gossip. In the story “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” the snobbish Mrs. Spencer—another Geraldine figure—maintains a bizarre vendetta against the Oberons, a new family in town whose casual, friendly way of life offends her buttoned-up sensibilities. Mrs. Spencer’s behavior is never anything other than correct; her “kitchen [is] immaculate, dinner preparing invisibly, her table set and lovely in a quiet stillness of shining glass and white damask.” The Oberons (their name alludes to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
) are more like the Hymans: “Children being fed all kinds of things. . . . Grown-ups laughing and drinking and probably never getting anything to eat until all hours. People trampling through the house, wrinkling rugs, upsetting ashtrays, pressing into the kitchen to help make a salad, dropping cigarettes, putting glasses down on polished furniture, making noise.” To Mrs. Spencer, this behavior is “vulgar and untidy and nasty.” But everyone else in town is charmed by the Oberons. By the end of the story, Mrs. Spencer is the one who finds herself ostracized, wandering lost on a dark night, trying to follow the dreamlike sounds of laughter and singing that reach her from the Oberons’ distant house.

If Jackson’s story makes it clear that her sympathies are with the Oberons, she worried nonetheless about the disapproval of neighbors like Mrs. Spencer. After four years in North Bennington, she was still a newcomer in a village where most of the locals had grown up together, attending the same school and settling down to the same kind of lifestyle—a working-class job for the husband, a life at home for the wife. The woman in
The Road Through the Wall
who is scorned by the others for imagining herself to be “something more than a housewife” will be brutally punished for her pretensions. Jackson may have feared a similar kind of cosmic retribution. Who was she, after all, to call herself a writer?

And news of “The Lottery” was making its way back to North Bennington, whether or not the locals read the story. (If the postmaster may not actually have had to give Jackson the largest box in the post office, as she would later claim, he could hardly have failed to notice the piles of
extra mail pouring in.) Before “The Lottery” came out, Jackson joked to a friend that her “literary reputation here in North Bennington” was well established: “I am now constantly being approached to Write Things for People, like the Girl Scouts, and the Home Talent Show, and the Fireman’s Benefit. . . . I am now town writer. Fame is a great thing.” But now she really was town writer, in a way the locals appreciated far less. “The general consensus was that this outsider came in, lived in the town for a few years, and then wrote some nasty story making them all look bad and uncivilized,” Barry Hyman says.

In the wake of her second book’s publication—the reviews, the interviews, the fuss about witchcraft—Shirley’s anxiety flared up. “you can imagine how i feel, in the middle of all this. sort of small, and scared. . . . naturally, i’m having a wonderful time being fussed over, and i love it, but i feel like an awful fool most of the time,” she confessed to her parents. During the summer of 1949, she may have experienced her first brush with agoraphobia. She declined to commit to another Bennington course: “no more teaching . . . i’d rather stay home.” Even staying at home wasn’t safe enough anymore—not in this town where she had never felt at home, where she had always sensed her neighbors’ resentment beneath the small talk. In “The Summer People,” written a few months after “The Lottery,” a couple who have been vacationing peacefully for years at their small-town summer home discover that the locals turn on them when they decide for the first time to stay past Labor Day. The grocer declines to deliver their food; the kerosene man says he doesn’t have enough to replenish their supply; their car is tampered with and their telephone lines are cut. The message is clear: strangers will be tolerated only as long as they respect their boundaries.

The inconveniences of life in North Bennington were beginning to outweigh the benefits. The increase in publicity meant that Jackson had to make more frequent trips into New York, a five-hour train ride away. The local school was inadequate to their needs: Laurence, now seven years old, was at the top of his class, and Jackson worried that he was being insufficiently challenged. Even the big old house was starting to feel crowded, especially with their latest addition, a three-year-old shepherd mix named Toby, “the biggest dog in town” at close to a hundred pounds.

With Hyman no longer teaching at Bennington, there was no reason to stay. Jackson and Hyman considered moving to a few different towns in Connecticut, as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts. But their plans shifted from hypothetical to urgent when their landlord, as if enacting a scene from “The Summer People,” announced that he wanted them out by December 1. One of Hyman’s
New Yorker
colleagues, who lived in the posh suburb of Westport, Connecticut, stepped in to help them find a house to their liking. It was just outside Westport in a town called Saugatuck: a Victorian on Indian Hill Road with five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an acre of land, with woods facing the back. Hyman would be able to commute easily by train to the
New Yorker
offices.