Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (55 page)

Shirley Jackson and her children in the dining room at 66 Main Street. Photograph by Erich Hartmann, 1956.

The Witchcraft of Salem Village
has a somewhat stilted tone—writing for older children doesn’t seem to have come naturally to Jackson. (She would eventually write two charming and engaging picture books,
Nine Magic Wishes
and
Famous Sally
.) But what’s striking about
Witchcraft
, its lackluster style notwithstanding, is Jackson’s attention not only
to the phenomenon of witch hunting, but also to the social context in which it flourished. The witch trials, as she demonstrates, did not come out of nowhere: they were the product of the specific circumstances of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in general and Salem Village in particular. Likewise, the women who were targeted were not accidental victims, but social outcasts or others outside the mainstream. Her emphasis on these themes, novel at the time, anticipates a number of more recent treatments of the witch trials. As for the McCarthyism connection, which no contemporaneous reader could have failed to see, Jackson herself thought it was too obvious even to mention. “The main trouble will lie in making the book
not
a comment on the present day; the parallels are uncomfortably close,” she observed.

In 1692, when the witchcraft frenzy began, the entire Massachusetts colony was “disturbed and uneasy,” Jackson writes. The new English governor had revoked the colony’s charter, rumors of war with France were in the air, taxes were punitive, and the colonists were even under attack by pirates. Daily life in the village was difficult, requiring hard labor and adherence to strict rules: no dancing, no toys for the children (seen as possible tools for witches), and two lengthy church services every Sunday. This community under stress was fertile ground for the preachings of Cotton Mather and other clergy who warned about the devil’s personal impact on people’s lives. Even the villagers’ weekly routine facilitated the spread of rumors, because residents who lived on the outskirts did not have time to go home between morning and afternoon church services and normally spent that period visiting their neighbors, spreading news and gossip.

As Jackson tells it—her account, though novelistic, sticks closely to the historical facts—the trouble began when a group of village girls, including the daughter of minister Samuel Parris, began spending time with Tituba, the Parris household’s West Indian slave, who read their palms and told them about witchcraft. Soon they began to behave strangely: falling suddenly into fits, seeing nightmarish figures, screaming that they were being poked by invisible hands. In addition to Tituba, they pointed fingers at several other village women, among them Sarah Goode and Sarah Osburn. “They could not have chosen
better,” Jackson remarks mordantly. Sarah Goode’s reputation was “already doubtful”; she was poor and wandered begging from door to door, acting “half crazy.” Sarah Osburn “spent a large part of her time sick in bed, and everyone knew her for a cross, disagreeable old woman whose house was always in disorder.” It was no accident that the girls had singled out this pair: “Their mothers had surely talked among themselves of the shiftlessness of Sarah Goode, and the slovenliness of Sarah Osburn, and had perhaps even told one another that such behavior was the devil’s handiwork.” Although the tone of this book is entirely objective and political rather than personal, Jackson must have been thinking also of a certain contemporary New England woman who, Hester Prynne–like, was sometimes the target of village gossip, who was said to keep a disorderly home, and who felt herself to be on the margins of a closed society. Later the targets would be even more defenseless: a mostly deaf elderly woman and a five-year-old girl sent to prison along with her mother.

The combination of political tension and fear of the devil—uncannily similar to the fear of communism that infected 1950s America like an evil spell—formed an explosive mix that generated “uncontrollable hysteria.” The afflicted girls wandered around the village “like a kind of sideshow, giving performances wherever they had an audience.” The girls may have truly believed that they were being tormented by witches; or they may have simply realized that to say so was “a wonderful way of attracting attention.” On an emotional level, Jackson also emphasizes how exciting the spectacle must have been, both for the girls who were allegedly afflicted and for the other children watching, who had been taught that witches were “as concretely dangerous as sickness or broken bones or storms which might bring trees crashing down upon the houses.” (Joseph McCarthy, too, clearly relished the fame and national attention that the Senate hearings brought him.) Within five months, more than two hundred people would be imprisoned.

The problem, of course, was that there was no way to argue against the evidence presented. Anyone who defended or even sympathized with the accused witches was automatically suspected of being a witch herself. (Men made up only a small proportion of the accused.) Clergymen
incited the villagers against one another, urging them to expose anyone who had slighted them in any way. One woman was arrested because her friends remembered a quarrel she had had years ago with her husband. “As in all such epidemics where there is no actual disease germ to be communicated, the sickness was not controllable,” Jackson writes. “Everyone was in danger, because no one . . . has ever spent a lifetime cautiously enough to escape all criticism.” When one of the afflicted girls admitted she had been lying, her friends accused her of being a witch herself; her only defense was to recant. By September 22, 1692, twenty people had been executed—insisting all the while upon their innocence. An unknown number died in jail. Paradoxically, those who confessed to witchcraft were spared, as long as they denounced their accomplices—in contrast to McCarthy’s victims, who were generally blacklisted whether they confessed or not.

As quickly as it began, the epidemic ended: “People simply stopped believing that their friends and neighbors were witches.” But the harm to the colony could not be repaired, just as the shadow of McCarthyism created an enduring fear of “Reds” that would loom over the American political theater for decades. So many people had fled Salem to avoid unjust accusation that the population of the village declined precipitously. The residents had been so focused on witch hunting that they neglected planting, cultivating, taking care of the roads, and all the other chores necessary to maintain a society. Food became scarce and taxes rose even higher. Salem Village slowly decayed; it no longer exists on the map. (The town that now stands in its place, five miles from Salem proper, is called Danvers.) Though twelve of the jurors in the trials publicly asked for forgiveness, the names of the accused witches were not formally cleared until 1957—the year after
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
was published.

Apart from an afterword describing the history of the church’s persecution of witches, Jackson restricts her book to the historical context of Salem Village. But the similarity between the wild accusations of the Salem Village girls and the persecution of American Communists—a germ that had infected her own household—was clear. The term “witch hunt” was used in connection with McCarthyism as early as 1950.
The Crucible
, in which Arthur Miller used the witch trials as an allegory for Red-baiting, was first produced in 1953. Like his predecessors among the Salem witch hunters, McCarthy claimed that the community was being infiltrated from within by a potentially fatal menace; he was aided by a credulous popular press that spread and amplified his rumors; and he inflicted damage upon countless innocents who were convicted in the court of popular opinion based on the most circumstantial evidence. In
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
, Jackson lamented that the automatic assumption of guilt by association made it difficult for “intelligent and thoughtful people to stop a great popular hatred like the hatred toward the witches.” She might easily have substituted “Communists.”

Even if she was happily oblivious to the fact that her neighbors in Westport and North Bennington had been asked to inform on her household, Jackson nonetheless knew about McCarthyism at first hand. Walter Bernstein, as she was well aware, was among the screenwriters targeted in the late 1940s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities; for years after that, he had to work under a pseudonym, if at all. (Stanley’s telephone calls to Bernstein were one element that stoked the FBI’s interest in the Hyman household.) Shirley and Stanley’s acquaintance Marc Blitzstein, the composer and Broadway librettist who was among the early supporters of the
Negro Quarterly
, was also called before the committee to testify. A decade later, Blitzstein, who was homosexual, would be murdered by a sailor he had propositioned in a bar in Martinique—the victim of another form of persecution that was no less repugnant to Jackson and Hyman, who bitterly mourned his death.

In a letter she sent to children who wrote to her after reading
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
, which was included in a later edition of the book, Jackson alluded to Salem’s message for the present day. Witchcraft, she wrote, has lost its power to terrify: “If the bewitched children of Salem Village came screaming and writhing into a modern courtroom, it would probably be assumed . . . that they were the willing victims of a new teenage dance craze.” But if “fashions in fear change,” people do not. The intelligent are in the minority, their measured voices in constant danger of being drowned out by the din of the mob. “We are not more tolerant
or more valiant than the people of Salem, and we are just as willing to do battle with an imaginary enemy,” she wrote resignedly. “The people of Salem hanged and tortured their neighbors from a deep conviction that they were right to do so. Some of our own deepest convictions may be as false. We might say that we have far more to be afraid of today than the people of Salem ever dreamed of, but that would not really be true. We have exactly the same thing to be afraid of—the demon in men’s minds which prompts hatred and anger and fear, an irrational demon which shows a different face to every generation, but never gives up in his fight to win over the world.”

AFTER COMPLETING
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
, Jackson succumbed to a state of extreme exhaustion. “i’ve been feeling very tired and depressed for most of the summer,” she confessed to her parents in the fall of 1954. Dutiful as she was, she generally sent updates on the household at regular intervals, in spite of her mother’s constant carping; now, she hadn’t written to Geraldine and Leslie in months. It wasn’t personal, she explained; she had been “working off my wild writing schedule last winter” and hadn’t been able to muster “energy or spirit to write” anything at all, not even letters. She finally went to see Dr. Oliver Durand, the local general practitioner, who told her that she simply needed rest and prescribed her sleeping pills—likely Seconal, a powerful barbiturate used widely in the early 1950s. “so i’ve been sleeping ten hours a night and a good part of the day, and spending the rest of my time doing just as little as possible.”

She could afford to do so, because money was still coming in: the movie rights for
The Bird’s Nest
, a substantial royalty check for
Savages
, plus a lucrative assignment from
Life
magazine for—inevitably—a family story, with a deadline months away. And
Savages
’ popularity meant that Bernice Baumgarten could sell just about anything Jackson gave her, even old stories dusted off from the drawer: one went to
McCall’s
for $2000, Jackson’s first sale to that high-paying publication. By the end of 1954, she was beginning to feel calmer, “eating and sleeping again like other people,” but she was still not ready to write. The article for
Life
, normally
a week’s work, took her two months to finish. Her pace would not be back to normal for another year.

Stanley was sometimes supportive—he took Shirley out to dinner to celebrate the sale to
McCall’s
. Knowing how financially necessary her writing was, however, he quickly grew impatient with her lack of productivity. His own cure for Shirley’s problems was to fill up her schedule, giving her lists of books to read and even signing her up for singing lessons at the college, something she had talked about doing but never undertaken. With her customary light tone, Shirley told her parents that “stanley says he is going to kill oliver [Durand] for deciding that my jitters were due to overwork, because now i am all calm and collected again i still don’t work, and he wants oliver to find something that he can diagnose as underwork.” Geraldine was initially sympathetic. “You were trying to do too much—writing all night and taking care of kids all day,” she wrote back. “You are the hub of your whole family . . . so keep yourself as well as you can. Without their mother around your whole family will fall flat on their little faces.” But she, too, worried about the Hymans’ finances—perhaps suspecting that she and Leslie might be asked for another loan. “When do you start the next novel?” she was soon asking. “Better hurry up and get started. Christmas will be here before you know it.”