Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (54 page)

As she finished the Betsy section, believing the book was close to complete, her headache returned. While cooking, she cut her fingers repeatedly and was unable to type. On New Year’s Eve 1953, she was plagued by the smell of chlorine in the tap water, which was so unbearable that she could not wash, brush her teeth, or do dishes; only she could detect it. One day she was convinced she had appendicitis; the
next, heart failure. She suffered from internal pains, coughing spells, dizziness to the point of blacking out. After a long session of work, she was as exhausted as if she had given birth. The more deeply she immersed herself in the book, the worse her symptoms got. On her worst days, she wondered if she was dying. All the illness vanished entirely every time she decided that she would give up the book.

She went to the grocery store to buy coffee and the grocer said to her, obscurely, “It is time that this was ended.” She followed him back to her house, leaving notes on trees and telephone poles for her friends to come and find her. She was surprised to see that the house was made entirely of straw, with walls, furniture, ceiling woven in intricate patterns. “My home is not straw,” she said to the grocer. “You have forgotten our relationship,” he responded pleasantly. Just then her friends arrived to take her away, but the grocer told them not to interfere: she was his wife. “I am not,” she said, shocked, but he took their marriage certificate out of his pocket and showed it to her. “This is not true,” she said, over and over, but her friends did not believe her. “The written word is so important,” the grocer—her husband—told her, amused. “Do you see how true it actually is?”

He went to the fireplace, selected a log, and gave it to her. It fit perfectly in her hand, and she enjoyed the feel of it for a moment before swinging it against the side of his head. When he fell to the floor, she reached into his pocket for the marriage certificate and found only a blank sheet of yellow manuscript paper, signed with her name. “A blank story,” she thought, “like a blank check.” She ran from the house, but there he was again, waiting for her on the corner. She turned and ran in another direction, two small boys chasing her. As she ran, she tore up the piece of paper, strewing the scraps behind her, a trail for the boys to follow
.

“i am tangling with things in [
The Bird’s Nest
] which are potentially explosive (and thus things in myself potentially explosive),” Jackson wrote in a lengthy note composed midnovel, in late 1953 or early 1954, apparently in an effort to record and analyze her symptoms. She knew
that she would not have chosen the subject of multiple personality had she not found it, even unconsciously, “a vehicle for existing emotions.”

On one level, the “explosive” material clearly touched on her own feelings about her mother. All of Jackson’s heroines are essentially motherless, or at least victims of mothers who are not good enough. Harriet Merriam in
The Road Through the Wall
is bullied and manipulated by her superficial, gossiping mother; in
Hangsaman
, Natalie Waite’s mother cannot intercede in her daughter’s destructive relationship with her father or protect her from harm at their garden party; in
The Sundial
, Maryjane Halloran is a victim of her domineering mother-in-law, and her own daughter Fancy suffers as a result. Eleanor Vance in
Hill House
is an orphan, as are Merricat and Constance in
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. Elizabeth would be the first of Jackson’s characters to commit matricide; the act also takes place in her last two completed novels.

This does not mean that Jackson actually wished to kill her mother, any more than the frequent appearance of sexual molestation in her fiction means that she was literally molested. But it is clear that, even from California, Geraldine managed to insert herself into her daughter’s life in a way that Jackson resented, criticizing her appearance and offering unsolicited advice on household help, clothing, furniture, and other domestic matters. Her letters to Jackson are masterpieces of passive-aggression, disguising harsh critiques beneath a veneer of sweetness. She needled Jackson constantly about her weight: “How about you and your extra pounds? . . . You will look and feel so much better without them,” she wrote to her daughter shortly after
Lottery
was published, less than six months after Sarah’s birth. “We’re so proud of your achievements—we want to be proud of the way you look too. And really dear—you don’t do a thing to make yourself attractive,” she wrote the following year. Even in the household stories, which Geraldine preferred to Jackson’s serious fiction, she found plenty to criticize. “Dear, you are getting in a rut,” she wrote after reading one of her stories in
Woman’s Home Companion
. “Your stories are getting a little repetitious and why oh why do you dwell on the complete lack of system and order in your household. . . . Please don’t spoil your wonderful gift
for writing by writing any more about your helter skelter way of living.” And it rankled Jackson that she and Hyman still occasionally had to ask her parents for loans during their dry spells—as they did in the spring of 1953, before her payments for
Savages
came in. But she suffered the sniping without complaint. Killing off Geraldine’s fictional counterparts was the only way she could silence that disapproving voice.

The nightmares she suffered, however, were not about Geraldine. They were about Stanley, and about marriage in general. “all my ailments seem to come from him,” she wrote in an anguished diary entry, her words riddled with typos. The first dream—which she transformed, with surprisingly few alterations, into the posthumously published story “The Rock”—was a variation on the daemon lover theme: the tall mysterious man, the journey over the water, the knowledge that he will deceive her. What was new was the element of resistance: even asleep, knowing that she was dreaming, she attempted to fend him off, whereas the women in her earlier stories—Clara in “The Tooth,” the unnamed bride in “The Daemon Lover,” and others—welcome James Harris’s advances. But on some level, as Jackson realized in the second dream, she wanted to be trapped. Because to be married, to bind one’s life to another person, is to be entrapped; and she wanted to be married. Or did she? Was her marriage just a house of straw, her husband a stranger? And if so, how could she get out of it, and what would be left of her if she did?

Then there was the question of multiple personality: what it meant in the culture, and what it meant to Jackson in particular—Jackson, who embraced “that compound of creatures I call Me”; who teased interviewers by playing up either her housewife persona or her witchy tendencies, but always kept the writer under wraps, hidden from view. In
The Bird’s Nest
, when Elizabeth is “cured,” after the trauma is exhumed and the personalities are subdued, nothing is left of the person she once was. She is reborn as a new creation, an “empty vessel” to be filled by Dr. Wright and Aunt Morgen, who act in the role of parents. Toward the end of the novel, the doctor quotes another nursery rhyme: “There once were two cats of Kilkenny / Each thought there was one cat too many / So they fought and they fit / And they scratched and they bit /
Till . . . instead of two cats there weren’t any.” Is that what must always happen when two—or more—personalities are at war? Would one of Jackson’s personalities—the writer, the housewife, or the witch—eventually have to subdue the others, or would they destroy one another, annihilated by their own conflict? And what would be the consequences for her marriage? “
The written word is so important. . . . Do you see how true it actually is?
”

EVEN THOUGH
THE BIRD’S NEST
got better reviews than either of Jackson’s two previous novels, critics—again predominantly male—largely failed to understand her intentions. Reviewers admired her skill in creating a suspenseful story and adroitly managing all four personalities, as well as her measured, often humorous tone. But they tended to play up the book’s macabre aspects rather than its understanding of the human psyche, many comparing it to Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. “I can think of no other living writer who can match Shirley Jackson’s gift for velvet-padded shock,” wrote a reviewer in the
Roanoke Times
, comparing her to Roald Dahl for her adeptness in “thrusting civilized horror on the reader.” Another wrote, rather alarmingly, that “anybody who gives away much of the plot of Miss Jackson’s stories should be burned in oil.” Dan Wickenden, in the
New York Herald Tribune
, noted the author’s own dual personalities: “Shirley Jackson the housewife and mother has once more yielded to Shirley Jackson the literary necromancer, who writes novels not much like any others since the form was invented.” The “two Miss Jacksons,” he continued, had little in common other than their writing talent and their sense of humor. In England, the
Spectator
’s critic called the book “more gripping than a detective story,” which must have pleased Jackson, with her love of mystery novels.

Only a few critics recognized that Elizabeth’s troubles might not be as unusual as they appeared. “Most men are at least two people. . . . So it is quite appropriate that women, who are twice as complicated as men, should be allowed a four-part disharmony,” wrote Sterling North, one of the few critics who had disparaged
Savages
, in his column, now calling Jackson “one of the wisest, wittiest, and most compassionate writers of her time.” North concluded his review with “a brief aside to
lovers and husbands: If you do not realize that your girl, too, is many women, in fact a miniature harem, you are probably unworthy of your plural monogamy.” Florence Zetlin, a freelancer for a small Virginia paper who was one of the few women to review the novel, noted that “the most horrifying of all experiences are those that lie deep within the human psyche and cause man to fear himself.” But a number of critics were confused by the shifting between the personalities; others found all the psychology talk too clinical.
New York Times
critic Orville Prescott judged the novel’s plot “too bizarre for the necessary suspension of disbelief” and wondered if psychiatry was a fruitful subject for fiction at all.

Jackson was distressed at the reviewers’ emphasis on Elizabeth’s insanity, which many of them mistook for schizophrenia. The misunderstanding was heightened with the movie version, titled
Lizzie
(1957), which starred Eleanor Parker (now best known for playing the Baroness Schraeder in
The Sound of Music
) as Elizabeth and the comic actress Joan Blondell as Aunt Morgen. (Blondell described her character as “an old souse, a diz-whiz girl who nips the booze but underneath has the traditional heart of gold.”) Jackson was thrilled to have sold a book to the movies for the first time, but she willingly gave up the right to have a say on the film: it was “arty and pretentious,” she said, “to go all over-sensitive at the prospect of changing a plot or a word,” and “if I faint dead away when I see [the film] I will keep it to myself.” Nonetheless, she found it more unnerving than she expected to have her characters come to life on the screen in a way utterly different from how she had imagined them. “Abbott and Costello meet a multiple personality” was her assessment of the film. Elizabeth, transformed into “Lizzie” (a character that does not exist in the novel), becomes a drunken slut; Aunt Morgen is bawdy and flirtatious; and the doctor cures his patient with an incoherent combination of Rorschach inkblots, Freudian analysis, and Jungian therapy. The film was rushed to open ahead of
The Three Faces of Eve
. But while
Eve
went on to win an Academy Award, critics were lukewarm on
Lizzie
. The
Newsweek
reviewer offered an apt summary: “Major mental muddle melodramatized.”

Jackson would always insist—as she did to a reporter who profiled
her for
The Knickerbocker News—
that Elizabeth was not clinically insane; the diagnosis was actually “hysteria,” the all-purpose female malady of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “they made [Elizabeth] into a lunatic, which she can’t be, by definition,” she complained of the film. If Elizabeth was a lunatic, so was Jackson. So were virtually all the other women of her generation.

*
A document describing this dream and the two others that follow is tucked between the pages of a file containing Jackson’s notes and drafts for
The Bird’s Nest
. This, as well as a reference made to the dreams in a memo describing her psychological breakdown, strongly suggests that it dates from the same time. Jackson describes the dreams at length; I have paraphrased, staying as close as possible to the original phrasing. All dialogue is verbatim.

13.

DOMESTIC
DISTURBANCES

RAISING DEMONS
,
1954–1957

“One who raises demons . . . must deal with them.”

—
The Bird’s Nest

J
ACKSON HAD PREDICTED THAT ONCE SHE FINISHED
THE
Bird’s Nest
—“fiendish book”—she would “sleep for a year.” In fact, she was forced to embark immediately upon a new project: a short chapter book for the Random House Landmark young-adult history and biography series, a recent initiative spearheaded by Bennett Cerf. The other authors in the series were of a high caliber—former
New Republic
editor Bruce Bliven contributed a book about the American Revolution; Sterling North wrote a biography of Lincoln—and the gig was cushy: the books tended to earn significant royalties, and Jackson’s would be no exception. In March 1953, Cerf proposed that Jackson contribute a history of the Salem witch trials, and she eagerly accepted: she already had “enough of a library on the subject to get the material easily.” Even though she was likely unaware of the extent to which she was personally implicated—the FBI closed its file on her husband the previous year, shortly after the Hymans returned to Bennington—she was further
energized by the persecution of American Communists undertaken by Joseph McCarthy, the senator who lent his name to an entire era. Now, because of her problems writing
The Bird’s Nest
, the children’s book was overdue. Amazingly, despite her condition. she managed to write it in about a month “by a kind of dogged grinding out.”