Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (53 page)

Even at Bennington, where close faculty-student relationships were the norm, Hyman surprised his colleagues with the depth of his devotion to his students. Greta Einstein, who graduated in 1956, remembered him as “infinitely giving and enormously responsive, not only to the intellectual needs of his students but to the totality of their persons.” Many others echoed her assessment. Some of the faculty thought he was given to overpraise, but “when we saw what he often drew from them, we felt that it was not error that operated in his judgments but . . . a kind of limitless hope for intelligence and talent,” said Kaplan. When his counselees had difficulties that involved other instructors, Hyman often intervened, helping them to obtain extensions or other special considerations.

As before, Jackson—with ample reason—was intensely jealous of Hyman’s relationships with his students. Often, it seems, she mistook his expressions of fondness for a more intimate connection. Unlike many of his colleagues, Hyman appears to have stuck to his hundred-mile rule; in the few instances in which he became romantically involved with a former student, it seems that nothing sexual took place until after she graduated. But the details of the relationships may have mattered less to Jackson than the attention Hyman bestowed upon these young women—attention she felt she and the children deserved more. Their own family could not compete with “your three hundred beloved babies,” she complained to him in the letter outlining her reasons for wanting a divorce. “time grudged to your wife or your children or your friends is lavishly spent on a student who drops in to borrow a book. perhaps you are right in saying that this is what makes you a good teacher, and you can only do your work well if you love your students, but you must then admit that your children are justified in thinking you are indifferent to whether or not they say goodnight, and your wife is justified in thinking you are indifferent to whether or not she intrudes on your bed.” And she smarted at the “unbridled delight” he was unable to hide every morning when she drove him to the college: “i see how
you change from your usual glum preoccupied personality at home, change during the short space of the ride up to college, into someone eager and happy and excited, almost unable to wait until you can get into the world you love.”

In college, Walter Bernstein and others had sometimes been amazed by Hyman’s obtuse disregard for the connection between his own behavior and Jackson’s mental health. By this point in their marriage, he had long since dropped any claim to an ideological explanation for his infidelity, but the behavior continued nonetheless. It’s not clear whether Hyman failed to understand how hurtful his actions were to Jackson or whether he simply did not care. What is clear is that the flourishing of his teaching corresponded with a steep decline in her mental equilibrium. The problems began almost immediately.

Shirley and two friends were rowing a boat to a tiny island made of rock. Atop it was a house, also made of rock. The landlady let them in. “You came at a bad time,” she told them. “The devil has gotten into the house.” Inside, too, the house was all rock, even the tables and chairs. In front of the fire was a tall man with strange light eyes. He stood up and left the room, smiling
.

“We can drive the devil away,” she told the landlady. They went upstairs to sleep. When she came down for breakfast in the morning, the man with light eyes was there. “I didn’t know you looked like that,” she said to him. He transformed into a big black dog, then into a giant rock, then into a cat, and then back into a man. “Do you want to talk to me?” he asked her. “No,” she said. “Everything you say is a lie.” And she ran upstairs
.

He came again that night. “I will show you where we are going and what I will give you,” he told her. She closed her eyes and saw herself walking down wide black steps toward a big red room with candles burning on the walls and a golden throne at one end. “No matter what I say,” she told him, “I am only dreaming and when I wake up I will not have made any promises to you.” “Come along,” he said, and held out his hand; she took it. “Do we go over the water?” she asked. She was trying to wake up, but she couldn’t. “You’ll see when we start,” he told her. “I didn’t promise anything,” she said as she awoke. “Even dreaming I didn’t promise. I’m sure of it.”
*

Usually, when working on a new novel, Jackson was entirely absorbed in her manuscript, writing quickly and for hours at a time. These bursts of productivity alternated with periods of ennui during which she indulged in escapist activities: mystery novels, television, movies. The stretches of absorption were always accompanied by tension and anxiety, especially when the writing was difficult—and in the beginning the novels were always difficult. But never before like this.

Soon after she began writing
The Bird’s Nest
, in late 1952 or early 1953, Jackson began to feel “a sudden and unusual general fear . . . applied to all things: security, work, general health.” She started drinking heavily, more than ever before. Like the fictional Elizabeth, she began to suffer from headaches that often came on very suddenly. She felt extreme hunger and exhaustion, but also a total loss of interest in either eating or sleeping. More than anything else, she felt irresistibly tempted to give up writing the book, convinced she could find no other relief from her “symptoms,” as she called them. After finishing a very rough draft of the first two sections, she took a break from the novel over the summer, writing some lighter stories and enjoying the success of
Savages
. But once she went back to it, after the move to 66 Main Street, the trouble started up again, worse than before.

Jackson called it “nervous hysteria”: she had crying jags, fits of temper, nightmares, “extravagant worries.” Some of it, she thought, could be explained by her anxiety over whether she and Hyman could afford the new house, as well as the stress of moving. There was also the news, that fall, of the sudden death of Dylan Thomas. After an
alcoholic binge in New York, where he had come for another reading tour arranged by John Malcolm Brinnin, the poet died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwhich Village. After their encounter more than three years earlier, Shirley had not seen him again, but he continued to figure powerfully in her imagination. “A Visit,” dedicated to him, had recently appeared in print.

She was also under enormous pressure from John Farrar and Roger Straus, who were urging her to turn in the book by January 1954 so that it could be ready for publication in June. To meet the deadline, she had to work constantly: no evenings off except an occasional Saturday night bridge game or movie with the kids. Bernice Baumgarten, her dutiful and protective agent, tried to keep her publishers at bay, periodically reassuring them that Jackson was “steaming away” on the book. Indeed she was, sometimes writing up to twenty pages in an evening and ten more the next morning. But she was plagued by false starts. One early draft began with Elizabeth narrating her problems in first person to a therapist—perhaps Jackson found it a little too reminiscent of her friend and former neighbor Salinger’s novel
The Catcher in the Rye
. Another draft, also discarded, was narrated entirely by Dr. Wright, in the manner of a case study. In addition to finding the right voices, Jackson had trouble controlling the appearances of the different personalities in the text—it wasn’t always clear when one shifted to another, and their distinct characters weren’t yet apparent.

In late fall of 1953, Jackson submitted a revised version of the first two sections to Farrar and Straus. She teased her editors by refusing to tell them how the book would end, and challenged them to guess which personality would come out on top. “I’ve always wanted to write a mystery story,” she wrote. “Now I’ve got a beauty.” The new version begins by describing Elizabeth’s troubles in the third person, then shifts to Dr. Wright’s narration. Each personality is defined by its own characteristics: Betsy slams doors and grins like a fiend, Beth smiles gently, Elizabeth is vacant and confused. (Bess does not appear until later in the novel.) Satisfied, Jackson read parts of it at the college, something she had never before done with a work in progress. “it scared them to death,” she reported happily.

Shirley and Stanley received a telegram from a friend in the country offering them a place to stay for the summer. It was a large white farmhouse set alone in the middle of a field, with a few trees behind it and a brook. The teenage son of the owner was on hand to show them around. On the third floor was a locked door. “We don’t go in this room unless we have to,” he told her, but she insisted she wanted to see it. The room was furnished with a single bed, a wooden rocking chair, and a dresser; otherwise it was empty
.

Later, she left Stanley eating dinner and went upstairs to open the locked room. Inside was the same tall man with strange light eyes. He looked at her in a friendly way, and she felt glad to see him, but she knew she should not have anything to do with him. Answering that telegram was a mistake, she realized. It was a ruse, leading her into a trap. But in some way she wanted to be trapped
.

By the time of Jackson’s Bennington reading, she had been walking in her sleep for a month. “I am myself in a state of such extreme tension that I have no patience with anything,” she confessed. As she worked on the third section, in which Betsy seizes control and runs away to New York to search for her mother, her nightmares became so severe that she was afraid to go to bed or to sleep with the lights off. Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night to find herself bending over to check on one of her sleeping children; she wondered whether this had to do with a private joke that the four personalities corresponded to her four children. She began to lose her memory: first just a slight absentmindedness, then forgetting entire conversations; she put objects back in the wrong places and repeatedly addressed Mr. Powers, the grocer, as “Mr. Hyman.” Her speech wandered; her typing became almost impossible to read, littered with misspellings. She worried whether it was safe for her to drive, but continued to do so anyway.

Her writing, too, went poorly. She found the Betsy section “very weak, very tentative, very bad.” She could not focus at all during the day; she would sit at the typewriter for hours but write as little as half a page. Only Dexamyl—in “unhealthy quantities”—allowed her to concentrate at night. In despair, she reread her previous work and wondered
if she would ever write well again; somehow all her talent seemed to have evaporated.

Then suddenly things turned around: she had a new insight. In a single evening, she revamped the Betsy section: “changes vital and exciting, no chance of stopping.” Hyman, too, read it and was pleased. But the symptoms only got worse.

Up to this point in the novel, the reader has not heard Betsy’s internal voice; we have seen her only from the perspective of Dr. Wright—or Dr. Wrong, as she calls him. Jackson’s revision, which was as inspired as she judged it to be, was to transform Betsy from a demon into a frightened child, showing that the doctor truly is wrong about her. In the early draft, she was calm and self-possessed. Now she is a little girl lost, terrified of being discovered, unsure how to act, and bereft without her mother. She mimics the words and expressions of those around her so that she will blend in and not give herself away: “she must on no account be thought strange or different.” When she is anxious, she consoles herself by thinking of her mother. “My mother loves me best,” she repeats like a mantra. But an unpleasant thought intrudes; she tries to push it back, but it will not go away. There is someone else: the callow and disinterested Robin, her mother’s boyfriend, a strange bird who fouls the nest. She doesn’t like him. “Why did Robin run away?” she asks herself, and then remembers: “Because I said I’d tell my mother what we did.”

That is not the only violation, or even the worst one. The worst was when her mother denied her. They were at the beach, the three of them, and Betsy went off to gather seashells. When she came back, she overhead Robin saying to her mother, “I
hate
that child.” And what did her mother say in response? “Had her mother said ‘But she’s my Betsy; I love her’;—had her mother said that? Had she?” Or did she say she preferred Robin? “My mother loves me best, Betsy told herself forlornly, my mother was only teasing about not loving me best . . . my mother loves me better than anyone.”

Now the reader knows what Dr. Wright does not: this is Betsy’s essential moment of trauma, the moment at which her personality was arrested and ceased to develop. We do not know how old she was that day at the beach, but clearly she was quite small—young enough to play
games and gather shells. The trauma is her desertion by her mother. And the bird’s nest, then, represents the childhood home, which Betsy desperately seeks but which holds unspoken terror. On the bus to New York, the woman sitting next to her turns toward her maternally, “as though promising a home, and safety,” but turns out to be deceptive and malevolent. Betsy wanders the streets of New York in search of her mother, going from one apartment building to the next, turned away at each by people who laugh at her. In
The Haunting of Hill House
, motherless Eleanor, too, will seek a home, with consequences even more dire.

What Betsy wants is what every child wants: to be loved more than anyone else. It is something that Shirley herself never had. Not from her own mother, certainly, whose replies to her own cheery letters frequently contained a note of reproach, whose occasional visits to North Bennington were always fraught. Shirley was tense and nervous in her mother’s presence, and the asthma that Geraldine invariably suffered from exposure to the family cats was yet another problem for which her mother blamed her.

Nor did her husband act as though he loved her more than anyone else. Apparently oblivious to Shirley’s distress, Stanley pressured her to finish the novel as quickly as she could: even though he was teaching again, they needed the money for their house payments. He may not have realized how seriously disturbed she was. He was distracted by his own problems—“going crazy,” as she put it, trying to keep up with his students, who seemed to read even faster than he did. When her writing went poorly, the symptoms disappeared. When it went well, she could type for hours as if in a trance, the words “smooth and inevitable and inexorable, with no conscious planning.” Then she would stop suddenly—in the middle of a word, even—in complete exhaustion. She normally wrote in fits and bursts, but this was “a painful exaggeration.”