Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (42 page)

The only problem was the cost—$200 a month, four times as much as they were paying in North Bennington. Hyman’s income from
The New Yorker
, now around $300 a month, was not sufficient. In spring 1949, Eleanor Kennedy, the MCA agent then representing both him and Jackson, had managed to liberate him from his obligations to Knopf, and he was finally, as he wrote to Jay Williams, “in a position to sign up with someone else and get a whopping advance in four figures, two of them dollars and two of them cents.” He and Williams had been unable to interest a publisher in their anthology of myth and ritual criticism. He wound up signing a contract with Harper & Brothers for his book on Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and Freud, with an advance of only $500 and another wildly optimistic deadline of December 31, 1950. This time Hyman worked an extension clause into the contract—he knew he would need it.

It would be Jackson, in fact, who paid for the house. On the basis of the stories she had already sold to
Good Housekeeping
, the magazine offered her a contract in the fall of 1949 for eight stories a year, with an advance of $1500 each quarter. (While the fee seemed high to her, the magazine paid its male writers more: Charles Jackson received $2500 apiece for similar stories in 1948.) She wasn’t happy with the kind of pieces the magazine required her to write—sentimental fiction about children and homemaking. In “The Wishing Dime,” editor Herbert Mayes’s favorite of her stories, two children are given a dime that they believe to be magical, but it’s obvious to the reader that their wishes come true through a succession of happy accidents. Geraldine, suddenly a literary critic, told her daughter
this work was beneath her. Jackson responded bluntly that it was worth doing for the guaranteed income, which would give her freedom to work on a new novel without having to scramble to place individual stories: “at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today, and since they will buy as much of it as i write, i do one story a month, and spent the rest of the time” on serious work, she explained blithely. By December 1, the Hyman household—Shirley, Stanley, Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, Toby the dog, and half a dozen cats, along with eleven tons of furniture and books (mostly books)—was installed on Indian Hill Road.

10.

THE LOVELY HOUSE

WESTPORT,
HANGSAMAN
, 1950–1951

Upstairs Margaret said abruptly, “I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs,” and when Brad said, “What starts to happen?” she said hysterically, “People starting to come apart.”

—“Pillar of Salt”

“
S
MART NEW YORKERS ARE FLOCKING
”
TO CONNECTICUT’S
Gold Coast,
Life
magazine reported just a few months before the Hymans joined the migration. Less than an hour and a half from the city via the electrified New Haven Railroad or the newly completed high-speed Merritt Parkway, the “quietly luxurious” area was quickly becoming home to an increasing number of high-powered business executives and their Bugbee-style mansions: H. S. Richardson, chairman of Vick Chemical, founded by his grandfather; Chester LaRoche, president of the C.J. LaRoche advertising agency and also of the Fairfield County Hunt Club; printing executive Nelson Macy, of Corlies, Macy & Company; and many others. (In a move only slightly less outrageous than Charles Crocker’s “spite fence,” Richardson, unsatisfied with the rocky shoreline by his house, had sand brought in so that his children and grandchildren could play in comfort.) The businessmen tended to
cluster in and around the most exclusive towns, including Greenwich, Darien, and Fairfield, commuting each day via “club cars” that offered the wealthiest patrons amenities not found in coach class, such as air-conditioning. Though
Life
declined to mention the less savory details, some of these towns were “exclusive” in more ways than wealth. Darien was restricted to WASPs; Jews and African Americans were not permitted to buy real estate there or even visit the beach. In
Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947), the relationship between the main character (who is pretending to be Jewish in order to investigate anti-Semitism) and his girlfriend takes an ugly turn when the couple is invited to a party in Darien and many guests mysteriously decline to attend.

Westport, a former colonial shipping center just west of Fairfield and east of Darien, was the least conservative of the Gold Coast towns, a center for “idea people”—writers, artists, and actors. J. D. Salinger rented a house in Westport at right around the same time as the Hymans—it had formerly belonged to F. Scott Fitzgerald—to use as a writing retreat while he finished
The Catcher in the Rye
. Formed in 1945, the Westport Artists Club already counted 148 members by the time the Hymans arrived, including cartoonists Helen Hokinson and Wood Cowan and sculptor James Fraser, who had designed the buffalo nickel. The Westport Country Playhouse, housed in an old cow barn and tannery, was founded in 1931 by former Broadway producers Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall (also husband and wife) and attracted such actors as Bert Lahr, Ethel Barrymore, and Paul Robeson. Thornton Wilder played the stage manager in his play
Our Town
there in 1946 and returned for the lead role in
The Skin of Our Teeth
two years later.

Despite its wealth and sophistication, Westport was a close-knit community that could be nearly as insular, in its own way, as North Bennington. The Hymans would be criticized by their neighbors for their perceived unfriendliness and lack of interest in participating in town affairs. After another resident accidentally hit Laurence with her car while he was riding his bike, causing serious injuries that necessitated a lawsuit against her insurance company, Jackson and Hyman felt that the neighborhood turned against them. As it turned out, their fears
that their neighbors were gossiping about them were not unfounded. Their stay in Westport would prove to be short-lived.

WHEN THE HYMANS
decamped from North Bennington, their books took up an entire moving truck. Their collection at that point amounted to about seven or eight thousand volumes—only a fraction of what it would ultimately total. Bookcases would soon occupy nearly every available inch of wall space in the Indian Hill Road house, overflowing into stacks and piles. Over the years, their library grew steadily. At one point Stanley attempted to catalog all the books, but even he, with his love of order and his meticulous filing system, could not keep up. After the Hymans returned to North Bennington, eventually they opened up their house’s attic to store their books, which by the early 1960s numbered around twenty thousand. By the end of Shirley’s life, the collection totaled somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand volumes, possibly more.

Shirley and Stanley’s main source of books, aside from the review copies that poured in from
The New Yorker
and elsewhere, was the Seven Bookhunters. This group of men traveled around the country buying books from secondhand bookstores and reselling them, often at a high markup. (There were actually only four bookhunters; the firm’s founder, Louis Scher, chose the number seven because he liked the way it sounded.) Whenever Stanley and Shirley needed an obscure, out-of-print, or otherwise hard-to-obtain title—such as one of the works of myth and ritual criticism Stanley was assiduously collecting—they put in a special request to Scher, a “plump, disarmingly affable, and almost incredibly energetic Frenchman with a large head and a sharp nose.” As Stanley described him in a
New Yorker
profile, Scher was “as familiar with secondhand bookstores from [New York] to San Francisco as a policeman is with his beat.” He dressed for his trade in “a nondescript felt hat, a rumpled shirt and tie, a gray jacket lumpy with possessions, and a pair of morning trousers . . . because they wear like iron and don’t show book dirt.” So absentminded that
he was said to have once wrapped up his own hand in a package of books, he nonetheless had a remarkable memory and was capable of sorting through thousands of books and picking out a few titles that customers had requested.

Scher was apt to be prickly—clients who complained about prices would get “CB,” for “cheap bastard,” stamped in red on their file cards. For his favorites, however, he would do “almost anything,” including finding whatever books they might want “as quickly and as cheaply as possible,” alerting them of new books they might be interested in, allowing “virtually unlimited” credit (which Stanley naturally took advantage of), and performing assorted non-book-related favors, such as bringing them along to baseball games and boxing matches. (He liked to root for the visiting team, “because that keeps things lively.”) Stanley was accorded the ultimate privilege: every year he accompanied Scher on a book-buying trip, sleeping in cheap hotels or on the benches of railway stations, eating and drinking with Scher’s friends along the way, and buying as many as a thousand books.

Though Scher’s interest in books extended only to buying and selling them, he and Stanley would play poker whenever Stanley was in the city, as well as bridge and
belote
, a “vicious French game” that was Scher’s favorite. He also was a fine cook who taught Shirley to make French onion soup and vichyssoise. By the time Sarah was born, in 1948, they were so close that Shirley and Stanley asked Louis to be her godfather; throughout her childhood, he regularly sent her expensive and rare children’s books. When the Hymans moved to Connecticut, Scher and one of his associates came up from New York to help organize their library.

“Life at Castle Jackson is certainly looking up,” Stanley chortled to a friend soon after the move to Westport. The town was “a vast improvement” over North Bennington, Shirley told her mother, and compared with their drafty old place on Prospect Street, the house on Indian Hill Road was “so pleasant, and so comfortable.” But she was already worried that it might be too small: she and Stanley had no choice but to put their desks in the living room, where they also kept the television, and if a baseball game was on in the afternoon, both were tempted to knock
off work early. A memo Shirley wrote to Farrar, Straus regarding her progress on her new novel promised that she would turn in the manuscript “before the World Series.”

The house was especially suitable for the children. Shirley made the entire basement into a playroom, where she installed the heirloom family music box, to which Joanne loved to dance. Though she bemoaned all the unanticipated expenses of a suburban house—it cost $7.50 a week to hire a man to mow the lawn, a job that sedentary Stanley would never bother with himself—she loved the garden, which had forsythia, honeysuckle, rhododendrons, irises, rosebushes, and an apple tree complete with a tree house. When the trees were in bloom, the yard was entirely hidden from the road, “sheltered and private.” Once summer came, they fenced off an area where baby Sarah could safely play and furnished the rest of the yard with a wading pool “big enough for all the neighborhood children,” a log-cabin playhouse, a sandbox, a croquet set, horseshoes, a sprinkler, and a barbecue. They even moved the kitchen table onto the back porch so that the children could eat outside.

They also acquired, for $500, a green two-tone 1940 Buick—“about the same style middle-aged family car that everyone else around here drives.” The car was Shirley’s idea: she wanted to be able to drive Stanley to the train station and take the children to the beach and bring her own groceries home, “just like everyone else.” In a neighborhood where driving was the norm, having a car was a way of fitting in; and after their experience in North Bennington, Shirley feared standing out. But it was also a way to assert her independence from Stanley, who had no interest in driving, never would learn to do it well, and—though he would come to rely on her as his chauffeur—was initially skeptical of Shirley’s efforts. She passed her driving test after two weeks of lessons and was frankly proud of her new skill. “one of the things the driving school taught me was not to listen to people blowing horns and yelling at me; these are of course all inferior drivers who are careless and must be forced to go slowly,” she joked to her parents. Surprisingly, Geraldine was supportive. “There is no reason in the world why you won’t make a good driver,” she wrote, although she added that she hoped Shirley had good insurance. Over
the years Shirley would grow increasingly attached to her cars, especially a series of tiny Morris Minors that she began to acquire in the late 1950s. “She always had one red arm and one white arm, because the car was so small that she had to have her arm out, winter or summer,” Sarah remembers. Driving would later be an important symbol of independence in Jackson’s work: in
Hangsaman
and
The Bird’s Nest
, her second and third novels, her protagonists run away (unsuccessfully) on the bus, but Eleanor will drive herself to Hill House, feeling competent and free—at least until she arrives. In
Come Along with Me
, Jackson’s final unfinished novel, the protagonist—who sets off for a new life after the death of her husband—renames herself Angela Motorman.

In Shirley’s letters from the spring of 1950, she sounds happier and more confident than ever before. Her social life, as always, was full. New Westport friends included
New Yorker
writers Peter DeVries and James Geraghty, along with their families, as well as Salinger, who would come over to play catch with Laurence on the front lawn. Jay Williams and his wife, Bobbie, lived in nearby Redding; Malcolm and Muriel Cowley, who had assisted in the house hunt, were in Sherman. Walter Lehrman, who met Shirley and Stanley in 1945 through a girlfriend at Bennington and who shared Stanley’s interest in folklore and the blues, came up often from New York, as did June Mirken, Ralph Ellison, and Walter Bernstein. One night when Lehrman was visiting, a neighbor stopped by with an old friend of hers from college—Bette Davis. Shirley got out her guitar, and the writers and the actress all sang folk songs together.