Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (57 page)

As she had in
Savages
, in
Demons
Jackson again conceals her identity as a writer. In the story about moving, she notes that the family’s possessions include “typewriters,” plural, but Stanley is the only
person ever depicted using one. She often presents herself as at a loss for what to do with herself when the children are out of the house. Preparing Barry’s winter clothing for school—he entered kindergarten in the fall of 1956—Shirley realizes sadly “how strange it was going to be now during the long empty mornings.” When she drops him off, he is immediately so engrossed in the classroom toys that he doesn’t even hear her say good-bye. “I drove home very slowly because I had plenty of time before I had to pick him up at eleven-thirty and when I got home at last I went and sat in the study and listened to the furnace grumbling down cellar and the distant ticking of the alarm clock up on my dresser.” That “sat in the study” is the only hint that she will use the extra time for work.

In
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan myopically criticized Jackson as part of “a new breed of women writers” who wrote about themselves as if they were “ ‘just housewives,’ reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA.” By depicting her days as if they were restricted to housework and child care, Friedan wrote, Jackson played a role analogous to that of Amos and Andy, dressing up an ugly truth in the costume of comedy. “Do real housewives then dissipate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation?” Friedan asked. “Do they think their frustrated abilities and their limited lives are a joke?” Jean Campbell Jones, in
Saturday Review
, sounded a similar note, lamenting that “somehow one expects more of Miss Jackson, who has after all, in her pre–Little League days, done some memorable short stories” (though Jones also called the book a “shrewd and witty social document” as well as a “fresh and beguiling family chronicle).” And another female critic noted aptly that “if Miss Jackson’s role as wife and mother . . . had actually been quite as continuously hectic as the book implies, the book never would have got itself written.”

In Jackson’s defense, one could argue that she didn’t have to tell her readers that she was a writer—the evidence was right there on the page. Failing to read between the lines, Friedan and Jones also overlook the genuinely subversive element of Jackson’s family chronicles. Part of the joke is that Jackson herself is an inept housewife—and thus she
implicitly deflates the expectation that every woman must fulfill that role. She pokes fun, also, at the idea that her children ought to be at the center of her universe, unashamed of her delight at taking a weekend away or her need for two martinis to get through the dinner hour. For Edmund Fuller, again an admiring critic who enjoyed
Demons
as much as he had
Savages
, Jackson’s gift for mining “the humor of frustration” distinguished the book. “Some such humorous family chronicles are essentially on the saccharine side—but not this one, for the author’s merriment has a distinctly tart and tangy flavor,” he wrote.

For the most part, critics were won over by Jackson’s unsentimental realism, many agreeing with Farrar that the book was even better than its predecessor. By now most reviewers were no longer surprised that she should be the author of books in two wholly distinct genres, although one called her a “writer with two heads.” While some found the children too charming to be true, most were utterly convinced that Jackson was depicting her own household. “310 pages from life,” wrote Paul Molloy breezily in the
Chicago Sun-Times
. Another critic noted that Jackson’s “charm in writing lies in her ability to bring her reader into her home.” Many emphasized how typically American the family was—somewhat surprising, in a country still rife with tacit anti-Semitism, considering that Shirley’s identity as “Mrs. Stanley Hyman” was often mentioned: “an unusual but not really so different American family”; “as normal as hot dogs . . . the stuff that Americana is made of.” The political reporter Mary McGrory, in an example of a truly poor match between reviewer and subject, may have been the only critic who had no sympathy for
Demons
whatsoever. McGrory, who had covered the Army-McCarthy hearings for the
Washington Star
, found
Demons
all too realistic: the book made her feel, she wrote, like “someone trapped on a sofa immobilized by a doorstep [sic]-sized family album and a relentless, acid commentator.” McGrory concluded that Jackson “ought to go back to frightening people frankly”—otherwise, “impressionable girls reading her unvarnished recital of domestic life might take a vow of spinsterhood.”

What makes
Demons
feel so genuine—and to some degree counteracts Jackson’s apparent bitterness toward Hyman—is her fascination with the children: their conversation, their ideas, their particular talents
and desires. “The savages are older and more sophisticated now,” wrote Lewis Gannett in the
New York Herald Tribune
, but “the mood is the same: mingled awe, fatigue, exasperation and affection.” Others commented on the tone of nostalgia that characterizes some of the stories, though Jackson usually tempers it with just enough bite to keep them feeling realistic. The children are indeed growing up, and with their newfound independence comes a palpable longing—their own and their mother’s—to hold on to things the way they are. The book’s conclusion is an unapologetically sweet Christmas story that lovingly recounts the Hyman family traditions: the electric lights held together by a generation’s worth of tire tape, the ornaments that belonged to Shirley’s grandmother, the children’s sheer joy in it all. The story ends with what Straus called, with his characteristic hyperbole, “the two best lines any book ever ended with”: as Sally says “Last Christmas—,” Barry interrupts her with “Next Christmas—.” A mother must always be dizzyingly Janus-faced, simultaneously looking ahead at what is to come and backward at what has gone before. Her constancy, even in the face of change, keeps everything in place.

SHIRLEY’S INCREASING HEALTH
problems were another aspect of her life that she omitted from
Demons
. Rarely thin even as an adolescent, in her late twenties and thirties she had increasingly put on weight. Although she loved fresh vegetables, which reminded her of her childhood in California, and would splurge on avocados and artichokes if they were available at the grocery store, the food she typically cooked tended to be high in calories: meatballs, cube steak, the potato pancakes and potato kugel (pudding) that Stanley’s mother had taught her to make. “it’s not a real potato pudding unless [you grate] a couple of knuckles into it,” she once wrote, sounding like a typical Jewish mother. “It was the standard American diet,” Barry remembers. “There was always enough to eat and it was good. And whatever we wanted to eat, we weren’t denied. . . . She loved to serve food, she loved to eat, and she loved to see people eat.” Shirley took pride in her cooking and tried to find the best ingredients available in North Bennington: other children
had sandwiches on mass-produced Wonder Bread, but the Hymans’ sandwiches were made with Pepperidge Farm. She paid attention to the smallest details: when she put butter on toast, she spread it all the way to the corners. The days of food coloring in the mashed potatoes were long past, yet Shirley did invent some creative dishes. Her recipe for “spiced meatballs” included mustard, chili sauce, and pickle juice. Sarah’s favorite dinner was something Shirley called “turkey Sallies,” a cream cheese pastry dough stuffed with a meat and sour cream filling. She enjoyed baking as well—her grandmother’s recipe for nut cake was a staple. “She liked being in the kitchen and having smells like that in the house,” remembers Laurence.

The family ate together most nights, and the large oval dining table was the setting for some of the children’s most enduring memories, such as the year Shirley and Stanley read the Bible aloud after dinner, a chapter each night. Sometimes all the Hymans would head down to the Rainbarrel, North Bennington’s only real restaurant, run by a French-Algerian couple whom they befriended. Once Laurence was old enough to be responsible for the younger children, Shirley and Stanley regularly went out to dinner on their own, and they would happily drive twenty miles or more to try a new restaurant or patronize an old favorite. When they visited New York, they went out for food that was exotic at the time: fried rice, tacos, shish kebab, schnitzel, stuffed grape leaves. Brendan Gill, who unkindly described Shirley as “a classic fat girl, with the fat girl’s air of clowning frivolity to mask no telling what depths of unexamined self-loathing,” remembered eating breakfast with her and Stanley at the Royalton Hotel, down the street from
The New Yorker
’s offices on West Forty-Fourth Street, where Stanley always stayed while visiting the magazine. As Gill recalled, “Each of them ordered and ate a substantial breakfast of orange juice, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, buttered toast, and coffee; then they ordered and ate the same breakfast again. They got up hungry.”

Gill’s story sounds exaggerated. (How could he know they “got up hungry”?) Others, however, have also testified to both Shirley’s and Stanley’s large appetites. Stanley, who enjoyed food no less than his wife, was seriously overweight for much of his life. Kenneth Burke
recalled that when they ate together in the cafeteria at Bennington, Stanley would choose meat and potatoes while Burke, who prided himself on a healthy diet, ate only vegetables—a habit to which he later credited his long life. (He died in 1993, at ninety-six.) Carol Brandt, who would become Shirley’s agent and friend after Bernice Baumgarten retired at the end of 1957, believed that Stanley deliberately encouraged Shirley to eat fattening foods as a form of aggression, perhaps “for reasons of professional jealousy.” When the three of them lunched together in New York, Brandt said, “he would . . . urge food on her. Thick cream pies. . . . I had to watch him stuffing her like a goose.” Shirley, for her part, did not try to rein him in until much later. “our doctor (who never gains a pound) shakes his finger warningly under our noses and we glance gleefully at one another and call to make a reservation at l’auberge [a favorite restaurant].” Stanley would not attempt to lose weight until 1964, after a serious health scare.

Despite the pressure her mother put on her to lose weight, Shirley’s early attempts at dieting were desultory. In her high school diaries, she would confess to eating an entire box of chocolates and then resolve to lose weight. She tried again in 1950, when the “fancy doctor” she saw in Westport started her on Dexamyl, but that effort was derailed when she became pregnant with Barry the following year. In an unpublished essay likely written around the time of that pregnancy, she declared that she was done with worrying about her weight. “i have suddenly realized that i am fat, plump, stout, heavy, matronly, oversized, better-than-average, obese, and rotund,” she wrote cheerfully. “far from being the sleek trim character in the ads, i am the one they deal with in ‘matronly dresses, fifth floor.’ ” (Shirley’s taste in clothes, which tended to long, flowing dresses in bright colors, emphasized her bulk.) So what if Laurence’s friends made fun of him because his mother was fat, as he confessed over the dinner table one night? Their mothers thought about little other than their weight, and it made them miserable. Every once in a while their obsession—“calories are small demons which lurk constantly on the outskirts of the unguarded life”— infected her: when Laurence made such a remark, for instance, or when she tried to buy a new dress from an eighteen-year-old salesgirl, or “when any
one of the thousand small humiliations . . . in stock for us portlies slaps me in the face.” (Her story “Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase,” in which a plus-size woman suffers various indignities while shopping for clothing, is a masterpiece in detailing such humiliations.) Then she resolves to have salad for lunch and avoid the usual “small odds and ends at bedtime”—and promptly gives in. The trouble is that she simply loves “the beautiful and lovely and fascinating foods mankind has devoted himself to inventing since he first learned to heat up meat . . . the wonderful imported candies, the elaborate desserts, the rich sauces, the cheese and potatoes and creams and sweets.” Stanley’s
New Yorker
colleague Gardner Botsford would tell of a night spent at an inn with the Hymans in a suite of rooms that shared a connecting bathroom. Late at night, Botsford was awakened by the sound of their raucous laughter from the bathroom. Initially puzzled, he realized at last that they were weighing themselves—and finding the results hilarious.

Even though Shirley inveighed against “the claptrap . . . that the overweight are more mortal than others,” she had to acknowledge that her weight made her susceptible to heart disease, high blood pressure, or “any one of half a dozen frightful prospects.” The time finally came, in September 1956, a few months before her fortieth birthday, when Dr. Durand warned her that her weight and her blood pressure were much too high: at around five feet seven inches, she was well over 200 pounds. (By various estimates, she would eventually weigh as much as 250.) He sketched out a strict weight-loss plan amounting to about a thousand calories a day. Breakfast was to include toast, coffee, grapefruit juice, and maybe a scrambled egg; for lunch and dinner, she was allowed a small serving of lean meat, fish, or poultry with raw vegetables or juice.

Shirley threw herself into the diet with enthusiasm. She taped calorie counters to the kitchen walls and logged her meals in notebooks, keeping track even when she cheated: “SINFUL,” in capital letters, appears next to a lunch of two cheeseburgers. She also doggedly recorded everything she drank—normally at least two or three cocktails or glasses of bourbon a night. “i figure i will just have to get the food down to fewer calories to make room for the cocktails,” she wrote blithely. To her parents she described it as “a very lenient diet” that
she would have no problem sticking with: “i gave up eating candy a long time ago, and have no trouble doing without desserts and sweets in general, but i do mind potatoes and bread.” Fortunately, the pills Durand prescribed for her included “one of those relaxing dopes”—Miltown—which “does take the edge off that jumpy feeling you get when everyone else is eating potatoes.” Geraldine offered encouragement: this was an area in which she had experience. “I know excess weight is hard on your heart and your blood pressure and I hated to see you using yourself so badly,” she wrote. “Try nonfat milk. It isn’t bad if you want to like it. And it is fun if you make it so to count calories.” Baumgarten wrote that Shirley’s plan for apportioning calories between food and alcohol seemed so sensible that it almost—almost—gave her the courage to try it herself. (Margaret Cousins, at
Good Housekeeping
, was another professional contact with whom Shirley bonded over their mutual weight-loss struggles.)