Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (61 page)

Bernice Baumgarten (1903–1978) was Jackson’s agent from 1951 until her retirement in 1957.

In the six years they worked together, Baumgarten had sold four of Jackson’s nine books for adults, engineered an acceptable resolution to the
Good Housekeeping
debacle, generated lucrative new relationships for her with
Woman’s Home Companion
and
McCall’s
, and gotten her into the Random House Landmark series with
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
—a book that cost Jackson little effort and paid enormous dividends. Baumgarten squeezed as much money as humanly possible out of the notoriously parsimonious Straus, hitting him up for advances every
time Jackson needed cash—often before a contract had been signed. And she was an excellent manager, constantly suggesting new magazines to which Jackson might contribute and placing her work skillfully and strategically. Together with Giroux, she nominated Jackson for a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1956 (alas, without success). Jackson acknowledged Baumgarten’s impact on her career by dedicating
The Sundial
to her. “I know that you are bound for great success,” Baumgarten wrote in her valedictory letter.

Baumgarten left Jackson with a parting gift that would shape the rest of her career. In December 1957, before Giroux had a chance to pounce again, she negotiated a three-book contract for Jackson with Viking Press. “i keep getting sad little letters from people around farrar and straus saying how they are so sorry i am leaving them . . . and i write sad little letters back which read like lee’s farewell to his troops although actually i am delighted to be leaving them and i bet they are just as happy to see me go, since we have been fighting for fifteen years,” Jackson wrote. The person who was probably the most sorry to see the relationship end was Jackson’s neighbor Tom Foster, who—as a reward for his role in bringing Jackson to the firm—received significant royalties on her sales. Had she stayed at Farrar, Straus for her next two novels, her highest selling ever, he would have stood to benefit considerably. As it was, he continued to receive royalty checks from Farrar, Straus into the 1990s.

Pascal Covici, a legend in the publishing world, was to be Jackson’s editor at Viking. Born in 1885, the grandfatherly Covici, known to everyone as Pat, was the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants. Though he never finished college, he started his own publishing firm early in his career with partner Donald Friede, publishing writers such as John Steinbeck, Clifford Odets, and Nathanael West. When he moved to Viking, in 1938, Steinbeck came with him; Viking published
The Grapes of Wrath
, a Pulitzer Prize winner, the following year. Covici cultivated a list of writers with serious literary clout who were also commercially viable: in addition to Steinbeck, they included Graham Greene, Joseph Campbell, Marianne Moore, and Saul Bellow—who, like Jackson, made the best-seller list under Covici’s guidance. Jackson described him as “an old old man who is tremendously respected in publishing
and has the fanciest office i ever saw.” Bellow, who dedicated
Herzog
to Covici, later recalled him as “one of those men in broad-brimmed fedoras who took drawing rooms on the Twentieth Century Limited in the John Barrymore days, people who knew headwaiters and appreciated well turned-out women. . . . Pat knew how to order a fine dinner, how long to let wine breathe, how to cherish a pretty woman, how to dart into the street and stop a cab by whistling on his fingers, [and] how to negotiate a tough contract.”

Jackson’s contract was actually quite advantageous to her. For the first time ever, she had a guaranteed stream of income. She would receive a total advance of $15,000 for three works of fiction, one of which was to be a short-story collection, with payments spaced out as she wished. There would be no more wrangling over money—Jackson could simply request installments as she needed them. “What it does is to give you money on call at intervals and, I hope, keep you easy in your mind,” Baumgarten wrote.

Ease of mind was perhaps too much to hope for, given Jackson’s fragile nerves. And eventually the money would prove not to be enough; it was never enough. But with Jackson looking ahead to significant expenses—boarding school for the older children and college rapidly approaching—she indeed found it a relief, at least initially, to have a dependable source of income from Viking.

LIKE JACKSON’S THREE
previous novels,
The Sundial
did not earn back its advance. The book’s ambiguity was too much for many reviewers, who split just about evenly between admiring and mystified. Almost unanimously, they praised Jackson’s writing, especially the novel’s bitingly funny opening scene, in which ten-year-old Fancy asks if she ought to push her grandmother down the stairs, “like she killed my daddy.” One reviewer said the book had “the deadly mannered charm of an Oscar Wilde drama,” and others compared Jackson to Hawthorne, Kafka, Poe, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English domestic novelist whom Jackson thought her tone often resembled. (“i always start like ivy and have to write it off,” she confided to a friend.) “As a
satire of much common behavior, its darts strike home,” wrote Edmund Fuller, a consistent (and consistently perceptive) fan of Jackson’s work. But others had a hard time keeping the many characters straight (“an assemblage of weirdies,” one called them); many also got key points of the plot wrong. And the dénouement, or lack thereof, was a particular sticking point. “A bizarre tale with an enigmatic ending,” wrote critic John Barkham.

The book had “all the big brains puzzled.” Reviewers judged it to be blatantly symbolic, but what it was meant to represent they weren’t sure. The theories ranged as widely as the interpretations of “The Lottery” had ten years earlier. Could it be an allegory of the atomic age: “hell bombs and space platforms bristling with atomic artillery and . . . [other] stylish nightmares of our day?” asked Charles Poore in
The New York Times
. Numerous critics mentioned the recent Sputnik launching. “As H-Hour of an apocalyptic D-Day approaches,” wrote William Peden in the
Saturday Review
, the book presented “a shocking picture of a society paralyzed by conceit.” Another wondered if the sundial was “the hub of a new universe” or “the symbol of life eternal.” A review that Jackson found particularly amusing argued that the entire book was an allegory of the Catholic church, with Mrs. Halloran standing for the “Mother Church,” the statues in the garden for remnants of paganism, Aunt Fanny for the Old Testament prophets, and so on. “A novel such as this is a kind of literary Rorschach test,” Robert Kirsch wrote sensibly in the
Los Angeles Times
. “The right answer is the one you provide for yourself.”

And again, some reviewers simply could not reconcile themselves to the idea that Jackson might legitimately write two different types of books: humorous memoirs and serious fiction. “Some kind of dissociation of personality is certainly going on in Miss Jackson, one half of her flying off toward the women’s magazines, the other half out-Kafkaing K,” wrote one. In a long piece in the
New York Post
that compared
The Sundial
unfavorably to a new book by the lesser-known novelist Frederick Buechner, critic William Bittner, who taught Jackson’s work in a course on postwar fiction at the New School for Social Research, lamented that she—who “ahead of all the rest” had understood “the nature of the human predicament in our time and made art out of it”—had “fiddled
her time away with
Life Among the Savages
,” to the detriment of her fiction. “Why parturition (an activity my cat goes through without losing a bit of the enthusiasm she has for the better things of life) should be able to make temporary dopes out of intelligent human beings I do not know; but when one of the finest literary talents of our time wastes her ability on books about brats, to the complete stagnation of her own development, I feel like throwing bricks,” Bittner wrote insultingly. Others took issue with the book’s misanthropy, with one reviewer calling Jackson “a very bright lady with a savage vision of our world.” (Jackson herself acknowledged that it was “a nasty little novel full of mean people who hate each other.”) Reviewing
The Sundial
in
The Nation
together with John Dos Passos’s
The Great Days
—both “novels striven for but not quite attained”—another critic wondered whether the problem was less Jackson’s writing than the general literary climate: “One is tempted to think that we have now had a surfeit of elegant sensibility and formal artistry in fiction.” It was the old Diana Trilling/John Aldridge debate revived, with the same lack of awareness that the woman-centric fiction Jackson was writing was fundamentally different from the mainstream. Only Eleanor M. Bloom, one of the few women to review the book, seemed to recognize Jackson’s interest in women’s issues as a crucial element separating her from Mailer, Salinger, Bellow, and the Beats. (Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
had recently inaugurated that iconoclastic, but still male-dominated, movement.) “Miss Jackson is, for my money, the most exciting writing talent in America today, and that includes all of the angry young men,” she wrote.

With her future at Viking already sealed, the reviews had no power to damage Jackson’s contractual situation—or her self-confidence. By the time
The Sundial
was published, she had already written a new story called “Louisa, Please Come Home.” As long and complex as “Flower Garden,” it would also go through two dramatically different drafts. The first version was a kind of sequel to “The Missing Girl”: what might happen if, several years after a Paula Welden–like disappearance, an impostor showed up, claiming to be the absent daughter and knowing all the details about her life? Would she be able to infiltrate the family, fooling even the parents of the missing girl? In Jackson’s telling,
the parents are all too easy to convince, but the girl’s sister and aunt are skeptical from the start. Their suspicions are vindicated when the girl and her husband (a family friend who has abetted in the deception) are exposed as con artists—but not before they make off with money, expensive clothing, and jewelry.

That draft was clever and pointed, but Jackson was dissatisfied with it. In the next version, the tale of the impostor was relegated to a sidebar. Instead, Jackson focused on the missing girl herself, here named Louisa Tether. For no obvious reason, nineteen-year-old Louisa decides to run away from her family, carefully strategizing so as not to be discovered—she buys a round-trip train ticket, to avoid suspicion—and eventually settles in a nearby city, where she finds a room in a boardinghouse and a job in a stationery store. Three years later, she has just about eradicated all traces of her former life when she encounters an old friend on the street, who insists on bringing her back to her parents: each year, on the anniversary of her disappearance, her mother has delivered a plea on the radio for her to come home. But when she arrives, her family refuses to believe that she is the real Louisa—it turns out that the friend has already brought two impostors. Rather than argue, Louisa goes along with them. “I hope your daughter comes back someday,” she tells her own parents.

Carol Brandt, now Shirley’s agent, judged this version a “powerful and brilliant horror story,” but she wondered why Jackson had left Louisa’s motives unexplained. What made her run away from home? Jackson declined to answer, but it seems clear that Louisa does not in fact need a reason. Like the wife in “A Day in the Jungle,” or the later character of Angela Motorman in
Come Along with Me
, she wants simply to disappear, to begin a new life, untethered from the old, even if that means giving up everything. Jackson’s next novel—its working title was now
The Haunted House
—would be centered on another woman who does precisely that. The consequences for her, as for Louisa, are dire.

IN EARLY JANUARY 1958
, as Sputnik I crashed to Earth and the United States prepared to launch its own satellite, Jackson and Hyman went down to New York together so that she could meet Carol Brandt and
Pat Covici. As their train pulled into the stop at 125th Street, where trains coming from the north then paused before continuing to Grand Central Station, Jackson was startled by the sight of “the most hideous building” she had ever seen. It was an ordinary tenement-style apartment house, but something about it felt “unspeakable . . . horrifying,” she remembered later. As the train pulled away, something strange happened: it disappeared. Her initial thought was to turn around immediately and head back to Vermont: “I didn’t want to spend another minute in a city with that building in it.” In the confusion of arriving and checking into their hotel, she put the building out of her mind. But that night it appeared to her again in “one of those bad nightmares which get you out of bed to turn on the lights and make sure it was only a dream.” For the rest of her stay in New York, she dreaded the moment when she would pass the building again on the way home. Finally her anxiety was so paralyzing that she and Hyman switched to a night train so that it would be dark when they passed 125th Street and she would not have to see it.

After returning to Vermont, Jackson was still obsessed with the hideous-looking tenement. She wrote to a friend at Columbia to ask if he knew of any explanation for its ghastly appearance. “When we got his answer I had one important item for my book,” Jackson remembered later. “He wrote that he had had trouble finding the building, since it only existed from that one particular point of the 125th Street station; from any other angle it was not recognizable as a building at all. Some seven months before it had been almost entirely burned in a disastrous fire which killed nine people. What was left of the building . . . was a shell. The children in the neighborhood knew that it was haunted.”

Like so many writers’ best stories, this one seems only to be partially true. There was a fatal fire in Harlem in April 1957, in which three people (not nine) were killed and five injured; but the apartment building where it took place was at 229 West 140th Street, too far to be seen from the 125th Street train station. If Jackson received the letter she describes from a professor at Columbia, no record of it exists in her files. But she may well have glimpsed an uncanny-looking apartment house from the train that got her thinking about how houses become haunted. The feeling Jackson had when she saw the building, she would say later, was the
closest she had ever come to a supernatural experience. “I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor,” she wrote. “Most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly
could
meet a ghost if they weren’t careful—if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.”