Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (65 page)

The editor at Little, Brown who signed Jackson up for
Special Delivery
had promised that her name would “only appear in some small note somewhere,” with no indication that the book had been written or edited primarily by her. But when the book came out, in April 1960, the publisher could not resist capitalizing on her fame, trumpeting her authority in providing “a sane and sage approach to the hilarious and homey situations which accompany the advent of motherhood.” Covici
was displeased, but Brandt soothed him with the promise that Jackson would do nothing to support the book promotionally.

Brandt also worked the miracle of mending Jackson’s relationship with Herbert Mayes, the
Good Housekeeping
editor who had demanded that she repay her advances from the magazine but refused to buy her stories. After Mayes moved in the fall of 1958 from
Good Housekeeping
to
McCall’s
, Brandt took him out to lunch and asked him to do her a personal favor by “burying the hatchet.” He astonished both her and Jackson by agreeing. Betty Pope, the editor who replaced Mayes at
Good Housekeepin
g, promptly offered Jackson another contract with the magazine, which she accepted, again to her later regret. At the time she needed the money, but after the movie rights to
Hill House
were sold—for the sum of $67,500—that was no longer a concern. And Pope edited her work heavily, often without running the changes by her before publication: “[she] thinks she is making them cleverer when she takes out my exquisitely formed phrases and substitutes madison avenue slang.” Perhaps because Jackson had little financial motivation, the pieces she wrote—“In Praise of Dinner Table Silence,” “The Fork”—were beneath her usual standard. The arrangement ended amicably in 1961.

Jackson was intimidated by Brandt’s personal style: “eight feet tall with lots of gold bracelets studded with rubies and enormous hairdos and the right shade of lipstick and a kind of little tolerant laugh,” the kind of woman who made Jackson nervous that she would overturn a martini onto her “perfect gray suit.” She was always anxious about her own clothes on visits to New York, where her relaxed style of dress stood out among the business suits and formal dresses worn by most professional women in the gray-flannel-suit era of late 1950s New York. Myron Kolatch, Hyman’s editor at
The New Leader
in the early 1960s, was astonished when she showed up for lunch one day in a loose-fitting housedress and bobby socks, then the rage among teenage girls. She often mentions rushing to buy new clothes before lunch with her agent or editor.

But Brandt, whose son Carl would follow her into the business, had a gentle, maternal manner that Jackson came to find reassuring. A dozen years older and the mother of two grown children, Brandt offered advice
about problems with the Hyman children—starting in the fall of 1958, when Laurence, a high school junior, was promptly kicked out of boarding school less than a month after he started. Her supportive words were a sharp contrast to Geraldine, who all but blamed Laurence’s problems on Shirley’s permissiveness: if she hadn’t let him spend so much time running around playing jazz with older boys and men, she reprimanded her daughter, he might have had an easier time settling down at school. When Jackson complained of arthritis in her fingers, Brandt sent her the name of a doctor she knew in New York and offered to make an appointment for her. And she seemed to understand when to give Jackson a little push and when to let her breathe. “Shirley, from my experience, is the kind of person who will come up with three ideas out of the blue just at the moment that you despair of having a letter from her. . . . Let her simmer on the back of the stove for a few weeks,” she told Betty Pope. “Don’t press the book and force the ending against the handicaps and difficulties you’re having,” she wrote to Jackson in spring 1959, when she was struggling to complete
Hill House
. “Take it easily and gently.” Jackson managed to finish a week later.

From the start, it was clear that Jackson’s experience with Viking would be different from her treatment at Farrar, Straus. In their letters to her, Covici and the rest of the staff took a deferent tone. “You are the most reasonable of authors,” Marshall Best, one of the firm’s top editors, assured her after she had complained about punctuation changes on the manuscript, promising that the house rules would be bent to accommodate her style. Covici himself was fairly hands-off, giving Jackson a list of changes recommended by the editors but emphasizing that they were suggestions, not directives. He had faith that given enough time, Jackson could perfect the manuscript on her own—and he was right. She would not become as close to him as she had once been to John and Margaret Farrar, but she appreciated his light touch and his supportive manner, dedicating to him
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, their second book together.
Hill House
was dedicated to Leonard Brown, the Syracuse English professor who had been a formative influence on both her and Hyman.

Hill House
was a financial and critical triumph. A month before
the publication date of October 16, 1959—appropriately close to Halloween—Viking ran an unusual announcement in
The New York Times
, generating advance sales of about eight thousand copies and considerable buzz. Though there was the usual wonderment at Jackson’s dual writing personas, reviewers responded far more enthusiastically than they had to any of her previous novels. Some treated it as little more than a particularly well-written horror tale. In
The New York Times
, Orville Prescott—often one of Jackson’s more skeptical critics—called it “the most spine-chilling ghost story I have read since I was a child,” although he was unsure whether she intended it to be “taken seriously” or had simply designed it “to give delicious tremors to readers who delight in one of the oldest varieties of folk tale.” Some thought the book was too obviously Freudian:
Time
opened its piece with the snide line “When busy Housewife Shirley Jackson finds time for a new novel, she instinctively begins to id-lib.” Jackson professed to think this was hilarious, claiming she had “never read more than ten pages of Freud,” though she later invoked him regarding
Castle
. But most critics recognized that
Hill House
was, as the
Providence Journal
’s reviewer put it, “a strong and scary parable of the haunted mind” in the vein of Hawthorne, Poe, or James. Along with Bellow’s
Henderson the Rain King
, John Updike’s
The Poorhouse Fair
, Louis Auchincloss’s
Pursuit of the Prodigal
, and others, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award—Jackson’s first and only nomination. The winner was
Goodbye, Columbus
, Philip Roth’s impressive debut.

Though
Hill House
did not make the best-seller lists, it sold far better than any of Jackson’s previous novels—around 12,000 copies for the hardcover edition in the first six months. For a condensed version,
Reader’s Digest
offered $35,000, split between Jackson and Viking, which guaranteed another 25,000 copies in print. Jackson was thrilled about the deal. “when i left farrar and straus two years ago [Covici] had enough faith in me to persuade viking to take me on with a big advance and not bother me until i had finished the book,” she wrote to her parents. “now, of course, they will be more than paid back.” For the first time, a novel of hers had finally earned back its advance and was even making a profit. She and Hyman paid off their mortgage and all
the smaller debts they had accumulated, including $1,800 to Geraldine and Leslie. “you come after the mortgage and before the dentist,” she told them. The money also meant that she could take her time before embarking on a new novel, which for Jackson was a mixed blessing: she consistently wrote best under a deadline. It would take her well over a year to get
Castle
off the ground.

The sale of movie rights was a huge financial boon. “i just deposited twenty-four thousand bucks in the bank and am feeling a bit lightheaded,” she reported after receiving an installment of the $67,500, an astronomical fee for the time. She used the money to remodel the house, buying a new washing machine and dryer, drapes for the living room, brightly colored sheets for all the beds, and a player piano; even after Stanley bought
New Yorker
stock for the children, they had enough left over to open their first savings account. In staid North Bennington, the idea of colored sheets was so shocking that Jackson’s fellow faculty wife Helen Feeley still remembered them decades later.

Robert Wise, whose film
West Side Story
(1961) was about to win numerous Academy Awards, would direct the movie, to be called
The Haunting
. (His next project was
The Sound of Music
, another blockbuster.) Julie Harris, then best known as a stage actor, starred as Eleanor Lance—not Vance—and Claire Bloom, who had appeared opposite Charlie Chaplin in
Limelight
, played Theodora, now unambiguously portrayed as a lesbian. Production began in October 1962, with interiors filmed at the MGM Studios in London. For exterior shots of the house, Wise chose Ettington Hall (now the Ettington Park Hotel), a gigantic Gothic mansion near Stratford-upon-Avon, which was said to be haunted by the ghost of a girl who threw herself from the balcony one Friday because she could not marry her lover. Bloom and Harris were reportedly terrified when they got their first look at the house. Wise decided, superstitiously, not to film on Fridays.

In keeping with the novel, Wise chose not to explicitly depict anything supernatural. “Shirley Jackson writes along that very fine line . . . just on the edge of reality and unreality,” he told a reporter. “There’s no ectoplasm in this picture, no ghosts, no manifestations, no monsters, no hairy claws coming out from behind the draperies.” Instead, Wise
generated suspense through the clever use of camera angles, including a special wide-angle lens that produced a distortion effect. For the soundtrack, he amplified recordings of the moanings and creakings typical of an old house, and he photographed the house through filters that blocked out the natural green of its surrounding gardens. Nandor Fodor, the parapsychologist whose book about poltergeists Shirley had consulted, served as a technical adviser. Jackson did not participate in the filming—as with
Lizzie
, she said that once she had been paid for the rights, the director could do whatever he wanted with her book—but she did meet with Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding to discuss their vision for the film. Gidding told her he saw Hill House as something like an insane asylum, with the manifestations coming from the demented perspective of the patients—was that what she had intended? “No,” she replied, “but I think it’s a very good idea.”

For once, Jackson was delighted by a promotional campaign: the advertisements for the movie were marvelously creative. A few months before it opened, ads ran in the New York papers requesting contact with anyone who had had a supernatural experience: “Wanted: Accounts of Persons Who Have Seen a Ghost.” Those who had were directed to write to The Haunting, in care of MGM, “All replies confidential.” Reviewers were almost unanimously won over. Wise had given the novel its due by filming it as “a top-notch ghost story, old-fashioned and therefore filled with the horrors of the unseen and unexplained,” wrote critic Judith Crist in the
New York Herald Tribune
. Others expressed relief that he hadn’t made it into a typical grade-B horror movie. Only Brendan Gill of
The New Yorker
managed to be snide. “Most of the devices it employed in trying to make my flesh creep go back to the days of
The Bat
,” he wrote. Jackson said publicly that she was pleased with the adaptation. “When I saw it, I was terrified. I couldn’t believe that I had written this,” she told a reporter. In private, she bemoaned the changes made to the plot, but said the house—the real star of the movie, anyway—was wonderful.

By the time
The Haunting
opened, on September 18, 1963, Jackson could barely make it to New York for the premiere. She had been housebound for more than a year, suffering from a debilitating combination of
agoraphobia and colitis, her own form of imprisonment. Hyman accompanied her: she could not travel alone. Eleanor, rather than return to her family, had driven herself into a tree; Shirley, mercifully, chose a less violent, if no less drastic, effort at self-preservation. “I have written myself into the house,” she chillingly told a friend. She would have to write herself out of it.

16.

STEADY AGAINST
THE WORLD

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED
IN THE CASTLE
,
1960–1962

i will so write ten pages if i like. . . . i was feeling very silly because i thought you were not going to answer my childish letter, which i so much enjoyed writing. . . . do you find it crazy, kind of, sending a letter out into the blue and then just wondering where it got to finally and how it was received and whether someone said goodlordlook at the length ofthis and then used it to light cigars with?

—Shirley Jackson, letter to Jeanne Beatty

T
HE LETTER, UNPROMPTED AND UNEXPECTED, ARRIVED TWO
weeks before Christmas 1959, an early gift. Jackson had just published a piece in
The Reporter
lamenting contemporary trends in children’s books, which tended to favor inspirational tales about historical figures or sensible, practical stories—“how Violet, Girl Horticulturalist, found love and a career in a greenhouse”—rather than the magical kingdoms and adventure sagas that had absorbed her as a child. Children these days, she complained, knew their way around Mars better than the Land
of Oz. “Every now and then,” she wrote, “even these days, I meet someone else who knows the names of the four countries of Oz. . . . There are fewer of us every year, I suspect.”