Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (60 page)

And a writer, like a homemaker, also creates his or her own world and stocks it with objects of beauty and fascination. In one of her lectures on writing, Jackson spoke of the way objects in her house became characters in stories in which she might imagine, for instance, that “the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster.” In the next breath, she gave this whimsical notion a serious cast. “The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, so long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”

BY THE TIME SHE
began writing
The Sundial
, Jackson had been dissatisfied with Farrar, Straus for many years. Each book seemed to bring new problems. She blamed the disappointing sales of
The Road Through the Wall
and
Hangsaman
on the firm’s failure to put sufficient promotional muscle behind them: not only was she dissatisfied with the advertising, but Farrar, Straus consistently neglected to supply books to the Bennington Bookshop, a sure source of sales for her. (Tom Foster, Jackson’s friend and the local scout for the firm, agreed that they were “always a little behind” with regard to marketing her books.) With
Life Among the Savages
, the production department forgot to send her page proofs; on
The Bird’s Nest
, a production editor annoyed her by suggesting that the book should carry a disclaimer averring that it was fiction. The original jacket art for
Raising Demons
depicted five children, not four. And years after she had moved back to North Bennington, the secretarial staff continued to forward letters to her in Westport. Most of these “millions of petty irritations” were indeed petty, but they added up to give Jackson the impression that her publishers didn’t care enough about her books, or about her, to treat her as a truly important author.

It may simply not have been an ideal match between author and publisher. For some time the aging John Farrar had been relegated to the background; from
The Bird’s Nest
on, his main role seemed to be sending “fond little notes” and books to her children. Jackson saw him more as an “indulgent old uncle who pats me on the head” than as a professional who treated her as a colleague. Straus, whom Jackson rarely saw or heard from, was the firm’s dominating force, directing his energies primarily toward prizewinning European literary heavyweights, such as François Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Since the house was now publishing sixty-five books a year, it’s not surprising that Jackson felt her work was getting less attention. But she was essentially stuck with Farrar, Straus, because each of her contracts granted the firm the right of refusal on her next work.

That changed after
Demons
, which fulfilled the option clause on
The Bird’s Nest
; Baumgarten had deliberately neglected to include a new
one in the
Demons
contract. Jackson was now free to look elsewhere, and she let it be known that she was ready to do so. Straus knew that he could not persuade her to stay himself. Instead, he dispatched Robert Giroux, the firm’s newest editor, formerly of Harcourt Brace. As reticent and modest as Straus was outspoken, Giroux was already known, as Baumgarten told Jackson, as “probably the best editor in publishing today.” At Harcourt, Brace, he had worked with Thomas Merton, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, George Orwell, and E. M. Forster. He would later say that he left the firm over its refusal to publish
The Catcher in the Rye
. In his office at Farrar, Straus, where his authors would eventually include Susan Sontag, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elizabeth Bishop, he kept a framed Thurber cartoon depicting a dog in a meadow, baying soulfully and obliviously at the moon, while another dog bounds toward it, ready to pounce. Giroux called the drawing “Author and Publisher.”

Giroux prepared to pounce. On March 21, 1956, he took the train up to Bennington for the express purpose of meeting Jackson. He spent time with the whole family that afternoon; the next day, Jackson and Hyman attended a cocktail party that Tom and Kit Foster hosted in Giroux’s honor, with the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a local celebrity, among the guests. Giroux reported to Baumgarten that everything had gone splendidly: he found Jackson and Hyman “completely delightful,” and the children were “the best behaved kids” he had met. Jackson’s account was a little more acid: Mrs. Fisher had patted her on the arm and asked her what she was studying at Bennington, and Tom Foster put too much ice in his martinis. She also suggested to Giroux that her next contract ought to include a clause requiring Straus to ensure Laurence’s admission to Exeter, where, despite his undistinguished academic record, she still hoped to send him. “What is the biggest advance that yacht-owning pirate ever gave to any writer in his life? Because I want to top it by fifty cents,” she told Baumgarten. But Giroux’s gambit worked. Jackson signed on for another book with Farrar, Straus, now with Giroux as her editor, with an advance of $5000.

With regard to the content of Jackson’s books, Farrar, Straus had taken a hands-off approach. Straus negotiated her fees and Farrar handled
the personal side of the relationship, but other than to offer vague praise, they mainly refrained from commenting on her prose. That was not the case for Giroux, who wrote Jackson long and thoughtful letters upon reading each installment of
The Sundial
. After seeing the first seventy pages or so, he was already prepared to declare the novel her best yet. “How you managed to make a houseful of characters so clearly identifiable right off is something of a miracle,” he wrote to her in March 1957. By the end of July, she had submitted the full manuscript, and his quibbles were minor. If she meant to convey that the big house was “the chosen Ark,” he was concerned that the logistics of how it would weather the storm required more explanation. He also worried that the other characters reacted too casually to a dramatic plot twist in the last chapter. “All this is a tribute to the enormous suspense and credibility which you have created in the earlier part of the book,” he assured her.

Jackson took both suggestions into account in her revision, which she finished much more quickly than usual. For the first time in more than a decade, she had only one child to take care of. Joanne was away at camp, and after hearing how much she enjoyed it, Sarah spontaneously decided to join her there. Laurence, trumpet-obsessed at fourteen, had gotten a summer job at the Music Inn, a hotel and concert venue fifty miles away in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Located on the former estate of a countess, the Music Inn specialized in jazz, blues, and folk, with concerts held outdoors under a tent. Shirley and Stanley had first taken him to visit the previous summer, when Stanley gave a lecture there about jazz. When Laurence got out of the car, he “decided on the spot that this was where he planned to spend the rest of his life,” Shirley told her parents. The staff normally consisted of college boys, but the owner made an exception for Laurence, allowing him to work part-time taking care of the sports equipment and generally helping out around the place. Like Stanley’s summer at Mount Freedom, it was an enormous amount of independence to offer a young teenager, with consequences that Laurence’s parents did not entirely foresee. For now, they were pleased with the arrangement. “He says bop musicians only tip a quarter and every time someone comes in and insists on carrying one small suitcase and letting the bellhop take the others, you can figure the small suitcase
has a bottle of whiskey in it,” Shirley reported. Visiting him there, she and Stanley got to meet Dizzy Gillespie, the bebop trumpeter who had recently toured the Middle East as “the ambassador of jazz.” That left at home only Barry, who had reached an age “when a set of soldiers and box of blocks are sufficient occupation for hours.”

Jackson and Hyman made a small vacation of her appearance at the Syracuse Summer Writing Workshop, organized by their former professor Leonard Brown; Malcolm Cowley, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz also lectured. Jackson’s talk, to her chagrin, took place in the same room where she had failed her final exam in Spanish nearly twenty years earlier. Brown, with whom Jackson and Hyman had sporadically stayed in touch, teasingly asked her whether she had “ever learned to keep a neat notebook of story ideas, or . . . still took notes on old scraps of paper.” (Of course, a “neat notebook” never would be Jackson’s way.) She spoke to around sixty students about writing
The Sundial
—“I would not like to have any of you believe that I cook up this kind of thing in a cauldron”—and read a frightening scene in which one of the characters tries to escape from the Halloran house and, after a nightmarish ride with a sinister taxi driver, finds herself lost in a disorienting fog, “an impenetrable, almost intangible, weight of darkness pressing down.” The students asked “millions of idiotic questions and some embarrassing ones . . . and they thought of all sorts of things I couldn’t answer.” They also wanted to know the book’s ending, but she told them they would have to wait until it came out.

The truth was that she wasn’t entirely certain about the ending. Could she really leave the question of apocalypse unresolved? Hyman read the manuscript and told her to change the ending; she refused, and they argued. “stanley was so annoyed that he couldn’t sleep . . . and sat up reading and snarling until about four-thirty and then tried to come to bed quietly and of course woke me . . . so it is now seven-thirty and stanley is sound asleep and i have been up since four-thirty and i refuse to change the ending of the book because why should he sleep when i can’t?” she grumbled. It seems she considered going through with the Day of Judgment and allowing her characters to emerge into the new “world of loveliness and peace” they were anticipating. But she was
right finally to leave them on the cusp, waiting for an apocalypse that may or may not arrive—a last note of ambiguity that suits the novel’s perfectly tuned satire.

In the end, the only changes Jackson made between the drafts were to alter some of the characters’ names and flesh out a few scenes. By late August, she had sent the final version to the typist. Now that the book was done, she actually had time on her hands. “I am most anxious to start a new book,” she wrote to Giroux, “so if you have any old plots lying around send them to me fast.”

As always, however, something went wrong. This time it was the jacket copy. Jackson loved the design: an all-text cover that repeated the title and her name in alternating rows and with alternating blocks of color—orange and fluorescent yellow. The effect was kaleidoscopic and dizzying, almost an optical illusion. But she was insulted by the mistakes in the book’s description: names of characters were misspelled and elementary details of the plot were wrong. She also objected “violently” to the plot summary and the character descriptions, offering instead a brief and oblique outline of the book. Ideally, she wanted the back flap to be left entirely blank. “I realize that this must sound like a childish temper tantrum, but it seems to me that
Sundial
is so precariously balanced on the edge of the ridiculous that any slip might send it in the wrong direction,” she concluded. “I tried to keep it on that uneasy edge . . . but I wouldn’t like to see anyone breathe on it too hard.” Giroux yielded. The copy was edited to her specifications and the back flap contained only a list of her previous works—no photograph.

At the same time, a big change was taking place at Brandt & Brandt: Baumgarten had decided to retire. James Gould Cozzens, her husband, had seen enormous success with his thirteenth book,
By Love Possessed
, which was the top-selling novel of 1957. (When it hit the best-seller list, Jackson and Hyman sent Baumgarten a congratulatory telegram warning her not to “let your old man steal the spotlight.”) After years of commuting from their farm in remote Lambertville, New Jersey, to her Park Avenue office, Baumgarten was ready to leave the business.

Baumgarten’s departure was a “development of great importance in the publishing scene,” Giroux told a colleague. It was also a great loss to
Jackson: the two of them, if not exactly intimates, had developed a close and trusting working relationship. In contrast to a previous agent who “spent more time taking people out to lunch and asking me for news about the children than she ever did making money,” Jackson was reassured by Baumgarten’s straightforwardness and tough-mindedness: “i don’t think bernice has ever taken anyone out to lunch in her life and she has certainly never said two words to me about anything but business. . . . i wouldn’t like to have her for a sister, but i do love doing business with her.” (Baumgarten generally revealed so little of her personal life to her clients that many of them did not realize she was married to Cozzens.) The critic and novelist Mary McCarthy, another of Baumgarten’s authors, would remember her “tremendous, never-failing control” and “straight, reflecting, considering look, as if she always wanted to measure the truth of what she was saying.”