Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (52 page)

Next to
The Sundial
, published four years later,
The Bird’s Nest
is Jackson’s most overtly comic novel: at one point Aunt Morgen sets out four coffee cups, “one for each of you,” and there is a tour-de-force set piece in which she watches dumbly as each of the personalities, in turn, takes a bath. The inadvertently amusing Dr. Wright, who narrates two of the sections, is one of Jackson’s most skilled creations. Calm and avuncular, Dr. Wright is a less sympathetic predecessor of Dr. Montague, the psychic investigator in
Hill House
: a man of science, somewhat deficient of imagination, who believes that he is trying to do
the best for his patient but unconsciously acts in his own interest rather than in hers. Imagining himself as Prince Charming coming to the aid of Beth, a maiden in distress, he sees Elizabeth ultimately as “a vessel emptied” that his job is to fill. The multiple puns embedded in his name are no accident: Dr. Wright explicitly, though misguidedly, connects his role with that of the author; and on a page of notes for the novel Jackson scrawled DR WRITE. “I daresay a good writer is much the same as a good doctor,” he pronounces early on, “honest, decent, self-respecting men, with no use for fads or foibles, going on trying to make our sensible best of the material we get, and all of it no better and no worse than human nature, and who can quarrel with that for durable cloth?” (An early version of this character was even more pompous and verbose; Jackson may have realized that such a powerful voice in the book could not be entirely unsympathetic.) Jackson’s aim in her writing, of course, was hardly to make the “sensible best” of her material, a moralistic cliché that sounds like a positive version of her teenage resolution to “seek out the good in others.”

Jackson’s publishers recognized
The Bird’s Nest
as a tremendous leap forward from
Hangsaman
. “You have written a simply beautiful and wonderful novel. I might even say a perfect novel,” Roger Straus wrote. But they promoted the book as “a psychological horror story,” which annoyed her. “it’s really more like
moby dick
, penetrating to the depths of the human heart, and whatnot,” she told her parents. That verbal shrug shows that Jackson wasn’t entirely serious about the comparison—or that she couldn’t allow herself to make it without an accompanying self-deprecation. But, like Melville’s novel,
The Bird’s Nest
offers an intimate study of a character under extreme psychic stress. In its exploration of the original trauma that provoked Elizabeth’s disintegration, the book foreshadows the themes that Jackson would explore with profound pathos in her late novels: the longing for home, particularly for the care—maternal or sisterly—to be found there; and the tragedy of losing a mother, or of being rejected by her.

Elizabeth’s splintering, as we are meant to understand it, is an exaggerated form of a universal condition: Who, Aunt Morgen wonders late
in the novel, does not have “a chameleon personality,” starting the day wise and calm and ending it in a more cynical mood? This was the condition of the American housewife in the 1950s, pressured by the media and the commercial culture to deny her personal and intellectual interests and subsume her identity into her husband’s—to fill in “Occupation: Housewife” on the census form and be glad to be doing so. This pressure, Betty Friedan wrote less than a decade after
The Bird’s Nest
appeared, forced American women to “deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen.” Women of the 1950s, as Friedan put it, were “virtual schizophrenics.”

AS JACKSON TURNED HER
focus to
The Bird’s Nest
in the fall of 1953, Hyman resumed teaching at Bennington. After a successful visit to Smith and Amherst the previous spring, he was “hungry to go back to teaching,” as he told his old friend Kenneth Burke, still an important figure in the Bennington literature department. Frederick Burkhardt, a professor of philosophy, was now the president of the college, a post he would keep until 1957, when he became president of the American Council of Learned Societies. By the time Jackson and Hyman moved back to Bennington, Hyman had already gotten to know Burkhardt through the regular poker game, which he continued to join whenever he and Jackson visited their Vermont friends. He and Burkhardt shared an interest in Charles Darwin—Burkhardt would later edit Darwin’s correspondence—and in horse racing; Burkhardt would sometimes drive out to Saratoga Springs with Jackson and Hyman for a day at the races.

Hyman was now in a much stronger professional position than he had been during his first, unsuccessful teaching stint: he had published one book (with Knopf, no less) and was under contract for another, and he had finally managed to get two long pieces into
The New Yorker
. In the spring of 1953, the literature faculty unanimously voted for his reappointment, with a starting salary of $4,700. “I assume that all this is due to your devious efforts on my behalf,” he wrote to Burke in thanks.

For the first time, Hyman was able to teach what he truly wanted to teach. His syllabi stand out for their rigor and their creativity. For the first semester of the department’s introductory course in literature—which he taught nearly every year—he assigned
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
,
Stephen Hero
,
Dubliners
, and part of
Ulysses
, as well as Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
, the first half of
Invisible Man
, Thoreau’s
Walden
and
Life Without Principle
, and more. (He required the students to read
Portrait of the Artist
in its entirety before the first class; they would then reread it together during the term.) For an advanced course called Form in the Novel, he had the students alternate readings from two major works: on Mondays they studied
Moby-Dick
, on Thursdays, Shakespeare. The same pattern was repeated the following semester with the
Odyssey
and
Ulysses
.

The course for which Hyman was best known was Myth, Ritual, and Literature, which he began teaching (as “Folk Literature and Folklore”) in 1953 and established in its enduring form in 1956. The course originated with his discovery, in his twenties, of the work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the classics scholar who was one of the first to explore the implications of the myth-ritual theory for literary study. Harrison’s book
Themis
“changed my life,” Hyman once wrote, recalling chauvinistically that it made him acknowledge for the first time “the existence, and thus the possibility, of an absolutely first-rate analytic mind in a woman.” The theory is based on the assumption that myth originated as the “spoken correlative” of ritual—“the story which the rite enacts or once enacted”—and not as a record of historical fact or as an explanation of natural phenomena: myth “arises out of the ritual, and not vice versa.” Harrison argued that the Greek gods themselves evolved from ritual and social custom: a god is “the projection of collective emotion, the reaction of man on his fellow man.” Beneath the legends of Olympus lay an older, nearly forgotten Greek religion, organized around a version of the primal death-and-rebirth rituals that James Frazer would later explore in great detail in
The Golden Bough
. Harrison found evidence for her theory throughout Greek poetry and drama: the hymn of the Kouretes (ritual male dancers who venerated the goddess Rhea)
discovered on Crete; the Dionysiac theater; the works of Hesiod, Ovid, and Virgil; and much more. As Hyman would write, she “found Greece marble and left it living flesh.”

By the time Hyman began teaching the course, he had been reading deeply in the field for at least five years, probably more. The roots of his interest extended all the way back to his childhood in Brooklyn, to his Orthodox Jewish upbringing and his early skepticism about religion. As a child and young adult, he had sought a rational understanding of the world through natural science, which led to his later interest in Darwin. His immersion in Marxism further ingrained his skepticism; when he first read
The Golden Bough
, likely at Syracuse after meeting Jackson, he became convinced that modern religion was not divinely inspired, but based in ancient harvest rituals. When he read
Themis
, it all fell into place. Harrison’s contribution, as she herself saw it, was nothing less than to shake the foundations of Western religion: with
her book, “a hand was laid upon their ark,” she proudly wrote. If every foundational Western myth—the Creation story in Genesis, Jonah and the whale, the Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more—could be traced back to primal ritual, then the worshippers who lined the pews of churches and synagogues were fundamentally no different from the primitives in Frazer who burned their gods in effigy and conducted magical ceremonies to ensure a plentiful harvest. At the same time, if the greatest works of Western literature, from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare, were also founded upon such rituals, to read them is to be powerfully connected with a lost world. The theory was so all-encompassing as to constitute an almost religious epiphany. “That’s what Stanley found so appealing about it—that it was true in a higher, transcendental sense,” says Phoebe Pettingell, who took Myth, Ritual, and Literature with Hyman before they were married and edited his posthumously published articles on the subject. One of Hyman’s colleagues said he described his conversion to the views of Harrison and the other Cambridge School ritualists as “a kind of Pauline rapture . . . all the nonsense turned luminous.”

Jane Ellen Harrison, author of
Themis.
Portrait by Augustus John.

Hyman never would publish a book about the subject, although the Frazer section of
The Tangled Bank
touches upon it. Instead, he poured his years of study into the course, which in itself could be said to constitute his greatest intellectual achievement. The idea was to examine the relationships among various “expressive aspects of culture”—the Old and New Testaments, early English and Scottish ballads, Greek tragedy, the blues—by tracing the ritual origins of each. “Its formal beauty as an arrangement of readings was considerable,” remembers Jean McMahon Humez, who took Myth, Rit, and Lit (as it was nicknamed) in the early sixties. In keeping with Hyman’s love of order, everything was divided neatly in half—the week, the semester, the year. Mondays were for studying primary materials, while Thursdays were dedicated to criticism: part of Hyman’s aim was to teach the students how to read literary theory. He required them to have read the Bible through by the first class; if they hadn’t finished it, he told them sternly to drop the course. For the rest of the semester, they would study it book by book. In addition to the usual analytical papers, students were required to
complete a creative work: artists could submit paintings; creative writers, stories.

The course was much more than a brilliant syllabus. “The life of that course was in Stanley’s performance of it,” says Humez. Although he was a talented teacher, it never came effortlessly: he once confessed to Nicholas Delbanco, a younger colleague, that “before each class, invariably, I have my routine: I take a piss, check my fly, wish I were dead, and begin.” Eventually, after the course became the most popular in the college, sessions were held in the Barn, the biggest lecture hall on campus, with stadium-style seating. Hyman, dressed in a shabby tweed jacket, Birkenstock sandals, and socks, would pace up and down the aisles, his eyes twinkling. (In his later years, his student Barbara Fisher says, he looked a little like Toulouse-Lautrec: short and stout, with a heavy beard.) After Hyman’s death in 1970, Walter Lehrman, a professor at the University of Akron and his close friend, was asked to teach it for a year, but he felt inadequate to Hyman’s breadth of knowledge. The course would not outlive its creator.

Myth, Rit, and Lit established Hyman as a major figure in a literary powerhouse that included the writers Howard Nemerov and later Bernard Malamud as well as scholars Wallace Fowlie, Francis Golffing, and Harold Kaplan. (Burke was a more sporadic presence: he taught one course every other year.) “He was a very large figure on a very little campus,” remembers Anna Fels, whose father, William Fels, succeeded Burkhardt as president in 1957. Colleagues spoke of Hyman’s intellect with awe. Fowlie called him “an almost legendary figure, [like] one of his own mythic heroes surrounded by mystery, revealing only what he wished to reveal.” Claude Fredericks, who joined the faculty in 1960, was initially terrified of “big black-bearded Stanley, flushed and fat,” but was soon won over by his congeniality. “A man who is capable of inspiring a myth has verified his life in a way that transcends what is said about him,” wrote Kaplan, who taught at Bennington from 1949 until 1972. Hyman was also a well-liked administrator, known for his collegiality. Golffing called him “one of the most patient and courteous listeners I have ever known.” At meetings or lectures on campus, “he dominated the scene with the forcefulness and whimsicality of his
speech,” said Fowlie; when he was absent, “we found ourselves wondering what he would say or think, what he would approve or denounce.”