Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (49 page)

Baumgarten delighted Jackson at once by demanding $5000 from Farrar, Straus for her next novel. Eventually she was also able to work out a compromise between Jackson and Mayes regarding her debt to
Good Housekeeping
: Mayes wanted her to promise to repay $100 a month, but Baumgarten got him to agree to accept 10 percent of Jackson’s earnings on each magazine sale, up to a total of $2900. Despite this considerable sacrifice on Jackson’s part, Mayes maintained a grudge against her for years: she was effectively barred from the pages of
Good Housekeeping
as long as he remained editor.

After the stream of
Good Housekeeping
income went dry, the Hymans could no longer afford the Westport house. But for the time being they were stuck there: Shirley was pregnant again. (The headline of the newspaper story about her was “ ‘Shirley Jackson’ Is Westport Mother-to-Be.”) In August, Shirley’s doctor abruptly informed her that he had miscalculated her late-fall due date; he now believed the baby would arrive in September. After that month came and went with no signs of labor, he suggested that she be prepared to wait another month. By mid-November, there was still no baby. Shirley made light of the situation in
Savages
, depicting the children’s surprise when she came down to the kitchen each morning: “You’re
still
here?” they would ask. But the uncertainty was frustrating for everyone. Stanley asked Ralph Ellison, who had time on his hands while waiting for the galleys of
Invisible Man
, to stay in Westport so that he could be on hand to drive Shirley to the hospital. Ellison came up in early November and wound up spending the better part of the month with the Hymans. “The damn baby wouldn’t show up,” he later recalled. Shirley took castor oil, to no avail; finally she went to the hospital anyway. Barry Edgar Hyman, Shirley’s fourth and final child, arrived on November 21, 1951, putting
the children temporarily ahead in the book–child sweepstakes. Ellison, appropriately, was his godfather.

When Shirley came home from the hospital, she handed the baby to six-year-old Joanne and said, “This one’s for you.” Nearly from birth, Barry showed a “quiet determination” that marked him as the most serious and self-directed of the Hyman children. Sarah believes that Stanley preferred Laurence and Joanne, but she and Barry were Shirley’s favorites: “Barry was always good.” While he was still a baby, the family began calling him “Mr. Beekman,” because his perpetually earnest expression was reminiscent of “a small worried businessman, very sober and thoughtful.” By age five, he could sing twelve-bar blues; at six, he began taking percussion lessons at the college and writing his own compositions; at twelve he picked up the guitar, which he has played ever since. (He is now a professional musician.) Starting in elementary school, he became the only one of the four to receive all As on his report cards. Sarah remembers that at seven, Barry was regularly winning the family poker game and could carry on “a rational conversation” with Stanley: “He could sit there and talk about Louis Pasteur.” “barry is unbearable; he now thinks he knows everything,” Shirley wrote to her parents when he turned nine, an age at which his pastimes included doing algebra problems for fun. When John Glenn, amid great fanfare, became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, in February 1962, ten-year-old Barry, caught up in the general hoopla, insisted on getting up at dawn to watch the rocket launch on television. He also had a strong moral compass: when the family ate in a restaurant, Barry always instructed the waiter not to bring any side dishes that he did not like, even if they came with the meal, because the sight of wasted food disturbed him so deeply.

As a toddler, Barry was extremely attached to his mother: he dashed after the car, screaming, if Shirley tried to so much as run an errand without him. (In
Demons
, Jackson gave this trait a positive spin: he cried, she wrote, because he loved riding in the car so much that he could not bear to see anyone drive away without him.) But he quickly became the most self-sufficient of the siblings, showing something of the early independence Stanley manifested as a child. Laurence, nine years older,
built a tree house for Barry and Sarah to play in and would sometimes appear to give him and his friends a baseball lesson, but he was often away at camp or playing gigs with his band. Like the rest of the siblings, Barry found his own group of friends in North Bennington and wandered freely around the village. At age seven, he went off on his own to visit his uncle and aunt in New Jersey—Stanley’s brother, Arthur, and his wife, Bunny—for two weeks. When he was twelve, he befriended the son of the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at Bennington, and went with the Caros to England for a summer vacation.

As a joke, Laurence liked to call gentle-natured Barry “Killer”—“the least accurate nickname possible.” Barry was a frail child who suffered from repeated bouts of pneumonia and asthma; he spent the week before
Savages
was published in the hospital, inside an oxygen tent. The other siblings always believed that Shirley favored Barry: perhaps because he was ill so often, or because his separation anxiety had been so pronounced, or simply because he was the easiest to get along with. Laurence and Sarah would both get into serious trouble; Joanne, as soon as she hit adolescence, exasperated her mother by being precisely the kind of typical teenager, obsessed with boys and clothes and cosmetics, that Shirley had never been. But Barry was “quiet and unobtrusive,” one of his babysitters remembers; he stayed out of the way. Shirley “loved Barry because he was a teddy bear. . . . He understood everything he was told and he wasn’t always saying, ‘What does that mean?’ ” Sarah remembers. “Which [Joanne] did because she really didn’t know, and I did because I wanted to get at it deeper. Laurence was too proud to ask questions. He’d just listen and nod.”

Savages
ends with Shirley bringing Barry home from the hospital. In a draft, her joy at having a new baby is inscribed in every detail of the scene. She toned down her emotion in the final version, which focuses on the reactions of the older children as they crowd curiously around the bundle. “I guess it will be nice for you, though,” nine-year-old Laurie concludes. “Something to keep you busy now
we’re
all grown up.” It’s a laugh line, and a funny one. But Barry was indeed the last child at home after Laurence headed off to college and Joanne and Sarah went to boarding school. When his mother died, he was only thirteen.

BECAUSE JACKSON DELIBERATELY
obscured the setting,
Savages
feels as though it could take place anywhere in Sidestreet, U.S.A. In fact, this celebration of the household was written during a period when the Hymans had no permanent home. Jackson started it in North Bennington, wrote much of it in Westport, and finished it in a series of rented houses back in North Bennington before finally settling into 66 Main Street, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In early 1952, finally ready to give up on what Stanley called “the sordid Westport experiment,” the Hymans decided to return to North Bennington. After a few years away, the problems with the village—the school, the locals—no longer seemed as bad; certainly the episode with the “sweet-faced old lady” had made Westport no better. And Lewis Jones, the president with whom Stanley had clashed, had since left the college, reopening the possibility of a teaching job. But the question of where to live was not easily answered. Very few houses were available in the area, to buy or to rent. There was not much time to decide—the Westport house had been sold, and the Hymans were to be evicted as of May 1. (The FBI investigation may well have played a role in encouraging the Hymans’ landlord to drive them out.) By early April, they were so desperate that Stanley asked Kenneth Burke if they could rent a barn on his property in rural Andover, New Jersey: “Shirley, no friend of the outhouse or the water pump, has made her peace with the idea.”

Sparing Shirley and Stanley a reprise of New Hampshire, their Bennington friends Paul and Helen Feeley found them a cottage to rent temporarily in the Orchard, the campus faculty-housing enclave. “I feel ten years younger with a roof over my head,” Shirley sighed. The house, which belonged to music professor Paul Boepple and his family, came with an electric mixer, a newfangled Bendix washing machine, and a dishwasher (Shirley’s first). “You had to wash the dishes before you put them in,” remembers Joanne. “She quickly trained us to do it.” On the piano sat a gigantic bronze bust of Beethoven, which was so heavy it could not be moved. “beethoven sits there . . . and glares over my shoulder while i work,” Shirley complained. The house was also small: they had to put
almost all their belongings into storage. Shirley and Stanley would not see their own books for another year and a half.

Still, the Feeleys were nearby, as were the Nemerovs and the Durands, a husband and wife who were the local family doctors. Shirley loved the apple blossoms that were just beginning to come out on the trees, and the fact that the children were right near their friends: “there is a constant pack of kids all ages wandering around. . . . even sally can just run wild.” Laurence fell right back in with his old group of boys—the Cub Scouts organized a picnic in his honor to welcome him back—and joined a baseball team. Joanne discovered horseback riding, which she loved. Shirley and Stanley gave a big housewarming party for all their old friends as soon as they got back. “Been away a spell, you folks, I guess,” the grocer greeted her.

Alas, the Orchard was not as idyllic as it appeared. The house had only a single desk that Stanley often covered with his coin collection, so Shirley sometimes had to take her typewriter outside to find room to work. Over the summer a pack of teenagers from town burglarized a number of the cottages, stealing television sets and typewriters. A suitable house elsewhere came on the market, but the Hymans did not have enough money for the down payment. Shirley had long since spent the $2000 advance she had received for
Savages
; she was due nothing else until publication, still nearly a year away. She finally managed to sell another story to
The New Yorker
, her first since “The Lottery”—a comic account of a visit to the house by a group of foreign exchange students. And she gave a lecture and reading at the Bread Loaf School for English, along with Robert Frost, Katherine Anne Porter, and Allen Tate. The following year, Stanley would be reinstated at Bennington, where he would remain on the faculty until his death. But for the time being, they were living on his
New Yorker
drawing account and her magazine sales, with no hope of seeing a substantial sum of money until she could get a contract for a new novel.

By the time the Boepples returned, in August 1952, the Hymans still had not found anywhere to live. In desperation, Shirley packed up and moved the family to a local inn: “picturesque, ancient, expensive, catering largely to parents of college students and old ladies who want to spend two
weeks sketching the covered bridges.” Ten days later, they were finally visited by a stroke of good fortune. The psychologist Erich Fromm, the well-known author who taught at Bennington, had taken his ailing wife to Mexico; their house was available for a year’s lease. It was a brand-new ranch—not exactly Shirley’s taste—in a fairly remote location several miles from campus, on the other side of the Walloomsac River, accessible, in true old Vermont style, via a covered bridge. It was a good thing Shirley had learned to drive—otherwise, the children would have had no way to get to school. But the house was modern, with four bedrooms and a picture window in the study, where Shirley liked to sit and listen to the owls calling outside.

The fact that the house belonged to Fromm also intrigued her. To her amazement, he had left all his files and notebooks out in plain view in the wing of the house he had used as his office. Even though she was sorely tempted to peek, she packed them up and put them discreetly in the attic. She and Stanley were both amused that the couch Fromm used for analysis was “inexplicably” double. In typically contrarian fashion, Stanley would use Fromm’s library to write a polemic against his theories for
Partisan Review
.

They could hardly have chosen a more auspicious place for Jackson to begin the book that would become
The Bird’s Nest
(1954). A psychology professor at Bennington had pointed her toward Morton Prince’s
The Dissociation of a Personality
(1906), a lengthy case history of a young woman whom Prince diagnoses as suffering from what was once commonly known as multiple-personality disorder. He prefers to call it dissociated or “
disintegrated
personality, for each secondary personality is a part only of a normal whole self.” Each personality, however, has “a distinctly different character . . . manifested by different trains of thought, by different views, beliefs, ideals, and temperament, and by different acquisitions, tastes, habits, experiences, and memories.” Other personalities might have no awareness or memory of what their “host” did while another personality was in control. Prince’s patient is astonished, for instance, to discover letters, to herself and to others, that she has no memory of writing. The fictional possibilities of the story were obvious. Many details from
the life of Prince’s patient would ultimately find their way into
The Bird’s Nest
, although Jackson invested them with an emotional charge that was lacking in Prince’s dry, academic text.

She initially tried to write the book in the style of a case study: its working title was
The Elizabeth Case
. Jackson named the Dr. Prince character Dr. Wright; she called the patient Elizabeth, the same name she had used in her story about a literary agent who is in league with the devil. The choice was apt: Prince’s patient, unable to think of another explanation for her odd behavior, worries that she is possessed, and Dr. Wright also resorts to demonic possession as a figure of speech to describe Elizabeth’s most intractable personality. As she had done in
Hangsaman
, in which the voice inside Natalie’s head evolves from being a literal demon to the manifestation of her psychic breakdown, Jackson once again looked to psychology to explain phenomena that appeared to be supernatural. Eventually, in
Hill House
, she would employ this technique to perfection.