Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (66 page)

The letter opened with a list of the four countries of Oz (Gillikin, Munchkin, Quadling, Winkie). It also contained books: one from the
Moomin
series by the Finnish writer Tove Jansson, a cheerful fantasy about a family of oddly shaped creatures who have various adventures, as well as another book called
Palm Tree Island
: “better than
Treasure Island
, a hundred times better than
Swiss Family Robinson
.” And it showed that the letter writer, a housewife in Baltimore named Jeanne Beatty, was a kindred spirit: in addition to knowing the Oz books, even the more obscure ones, every bit as well as Shirley did, she was searching, somewhat desperately, for someone to talk to about the books she loved—fantasy and science fiction, but also contemporary literature.

Shirley did not always answer her fan mail, but she found this letter irresistible. “I have looked forward to writing you, and had promised myself a pleasant morning dwelling on dear books . . . and of course find myself with half an hour, a sick typewriter ribbon, and twelve thank-you letters waiting,” she wrote back, kicking off an intense correspondence that lasted for well over a year. On both sides, the letters became personal and intimate almost immediately, moving quickly from books to children, husbands, and writing: Shirley was about to start
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. “I have promised myself absolutely to begin a new book next Monday morning, after the children have gone back to school,” she told Jeanne in her first letter. “That means that I must lock myself up in my cave for four dogged hours a day, and sneak a minute or so here and there for writing letters and making lunch (‘You will eat vegetable soup again today and like it; Mommy’s beginning chapter three’) so if I do not write [to you] now I never can.”

The writing did not proceed exactly according to plan. Though Shirley had the title of her new book from the start—Pat Covici found it “lovely,” but a Viking sales representative worried that it was “too long for anyone to remember”—she would not complete it until April 1962, more than two years later. She spent 1960 embroiled in the most
difficult struggle she would ever experience writing a novel, unable to find her way in. That fall, she decided to discard the entire draft and begin anew; she kept the title and the basic theme but drastically altered the main characters. The following spring, when she was nearly immobilized by colitis, in pain and largely unable to leave home, the book began to take shape. By January 1962, she had four chapters. Two more came quickly in February; she was finished by the end of April.

But in 1960, she did virtually no writing, other than a few pieces for
Good Housekeeping
—and her letters to Jeanne Beatty. Those letters total more than sixty pages, often single-spaced, of Shirley’s signature yellow copy paper. Their subject matter ranges widely: from the Oz books to C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Frank Baker’s comic mystery novel
Miss Hargreaves
, about a young man who invents a fictional character and discovers, to his astonishment and eventual chagrin, that his invention has come to life; Sarah’s troubles with the third-grade teacher (three years earlier, but still on Shirley’s mind); the arthritis plaguing her fingers; the literary tour of Europe she and Stanley had been invited to lead the following summer; the pleasure she took in the Suffield writing conference, to which she encouraged Jeanne to apply; recipes for beef stew, brisket, potato pudding, and, from Jeanne, a classic of the era: canned grapefruit slices frozen in gin and served on toothpicks. Discussing children, Shirley treated Jeanne—twelve years her junior, with four children eight and under—as a kind of younger sister, writing with the confident authority she displayed in
Special Delivery
, which came out that spring: “i cannot really remember what it is like to have a child under two, and glad i am for it.” (“Dear Master Parent,” Jeanne teased her after reading the baby-raising manual.) Shirley sent a photograph of some of the household pets: Bix, a newly acquired Great Dane, curled up with a black cat named Piney Brown, with another black cat, Harlequin, visible in the background. And she showed off, relishing Jeanne’s admiration of her work and playing the role of “Important Writer.” In an aside about her newly acquired stereo, she couldn’t resist adding that Ralph Ellison helped put it together. “do you know his great book
invisible man
? because it was written in our house with sally sitting on his typewriter tormenting [him] and he would really rather set up electronic equipment than write.” She also
alluded to her romantic encounter with Dylan Thomas, now dead for six years: “he taught me to say ‘not bluidy loikely,’ and i can do it fine. . . . someday i will know clearly how i felt about dylan.”

As the friendship progressed—only through the mail; the two women would never meet face-to-face—Shirley did not shy away from the more difficult aspects of her life. She joked about her moods, calling herself “sharly (snarly shirley)” and “shurley (surly shirley).” She complained about the isolation of North Bennington, “with no trains and only an occasional nasty bus and roads not fit to travel on most of the time, so we are forced to find all our social life in one small college community.” She described her nightmares about the daemon lover, which by the end of the year had begun to recur. And she wrote at length about Stanley, whom she described to Jeanne, in her second letter, as “my husband, professor of literature at bennington college, vindictive winner of bets, poker player, writer of profiles for the new yorker, stern bearded disciplinarian, who will not read hill house because he is mortally afraid of ghosts.”

In the beginning, Shirley presented their family life as quirky but happy, full of inside jokes and private games. When Stanley went to Detroit for a month to give a series of lectures, she told Jeanne it was a tradition for her and the children, at the precise time of his lecture, to stop whatever they were doing and send him mental wishes of good luck. But soon a note of melancholy crept into her tone. Stanley refused to
enter her office because her books were not alphabetized and her shades and pictures were always crooked. He begrudged “every minute” she did not spend writing fiction or articles, and once “in a fury figured out that considered in terms of pure writing time my letters are worth forty dollars a page.” And her haphazard working habits irritated him.

A photo of Jackson’s pets, sent to Jeanne Beatty in 1960.

he sits down at the typewriter and says today i will write ten pages with half an hour for a cigar after lunch and today he writes ten pages and on tuesday he writes letters . . . and answers all the letters he has gotten since last tuesday and on sunday he files everything. . . . so when he sees me spending a Working Day making a doll house out of an old carton he gets very nervous. or sometimes i look at pictures of old houses or sing to myself or sit on the back steps telling myself stories and stanley frets.

Some of Stanley’s impatience surely had to do with his frustration that his orderly routine did not translate into efficiency at the typewriter: he still had not finished
The Tangled Bank
after more than a decade, largely because of his demanding teaching schedule. He made no real headway on the writing until early 1959, when a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies finally allowed him to take a semester off, but he had to stop after finishing the Frazer section so that he could write the never published profile of Jackie Robinson for
The New Yorker
. He would finally complete the book in the summer of 1961.

Jeanne empathized with Shirley. She had attended Oberlin College and Johns Hopkins University, taking courses in English, mathematics, and botany, and was evidently brilliant, but had given up her studies to marry and raise children. Her husband, an engineer, worked long hours, and she often broke off her letters in order to tidy the house before he got home: “Of course I will meet him smiling.” He, too, believed that time she spent writing or reading was time wasted. “What am I doing reading the Sunday papers? (It’s Sunday.) Why am I not washing fingerprints off the woodwork and vacuuming spiderwebs off the ceiling? . . . What are women for, anyway?” He had made her give away her piano—“House wouldn’t hold both it and play pen and we’re
not
giving
the baby away”; she couldn’t even have a record player. She wouldn’t leave him, at least partly because she suffered from depression and depended upon his stability (“he solidifies the atmosphere”). But when Shirley described how she had spent part of the previous summer driving around by herself in her Morris Minor, Jeanne felt “purest saturated envy for your aloneness, your morris, and your wandering. . . . I want loneness, no kids, no responsibilities but me, or nothing [no writing] comes. Except a couplet now and then put down on kitchen paper, and one of those got put out by mistake for the milkman.” In a poem she sent to Shirley, her longing is palpable:

make me a poem make me a psalm

make me a song when the lights lie down

make me a charm so the dark won’t find me

and the frightful things rise up behind me

It’s easy to understand why Jeanne was thrilled to receive Shirley’s letters, which she carefully numbered and preserved. She was an anonymous housewife—albeit an extraordinary one—flattered by the attention of a famous writer. As for Shirley, she had not had a female friend whose mind was so well calibrated to hers since Jeanou, back in her days at the University of Rochester, with whom she had long since fallen out of touch. Her closest friend at Syracuse had been June Mirken, charming and witty and sympathetic, but June was Stanley’s friend first, and an element of rivalry always existed between them. At Bennington, Shirley had friends among the faculty wives, including Helen Feeley, Laura Nowak, and Harriet Fels, but these were social acquaintances: she went out to lunch with them and chatted with them at cocktail parties, but she did not unburden her heart to them. (Some also were prone to making catty remarks about her behind her back.) And all her male friends were Stanley’s friends as well: Ralph Ellison, Joseph Mitchell, Howard Nemerov.

In Jeanne, Shirley had finally found an ear attentive to her and her alone, a person who not only was truly interested in what she had to say about the things that mattered to her most, but also posed no threat
of exposing her to anyone else she knew. “it is a wonderful pleasure to write to you,” Shirley confided. “i go from month to month and year to year never writing letters because i cannot write little letters which are polite and unnecessary mostly because i can’t stop, as you see. . . . it’s like sitting down to talk for an hour, and far more agreeable than most conversations.” Shirley had always loved to write for an audience, whether imagined or real: the letters to Bud Young she scribbled in her high school diary, the voluminous correspondence she and Stanley carried on during the summers they spent apart in college, her regular reports on family life to her parents back in California. Now she had Jeanne, who—like the character in
Miss Hargreaves
who astonishes her creator by coming to life—seemed to magically combine the best attributes of all Shirley’s correspondents: she was a real person who wrote back, but the fact that she was far away and knowable only through her letters meant that she served as a screen onto which Shirley could project her vision of the ideal friend, without any risk of disillusionment. The novel Shirley was writing, or trying to write, would ultimately center around two women who are perfect complements: one light, the other dark; one older, the other younger; one domestic, the other untamed; one sane, the other unhinged. Together they form an inseparable, self-contained unit; apart, they are vulnerable to destruction.

As
Castle
stalled, writing to Jeanne became Shirley’s only solace. “my book is so completely bogged down that i am almost frightened. quite seriously, writing these long letters to you (and, oddly, i do not write so to anyone else, perhaps because
your
letters are so delightful) does more good for me (selfish) than anything i can think of; it somehow relaxes and directs.” She waited impatiently for Jeanne’s responses—out of eagerness to hear from her friend, but also because she couldn’t wait to write back. One letter ended “my turn my turn,” urging Jeanne quickly to pass the baton. Jeanne couldn’t help but be a little insulted. “I resent being called a vacuum between letters. No, I resent being one,” she wrote. At the same time, she was glad to help. “If it soothes and pleases you to write, here I am, an everlovin’ raccoon blanket. . . . You write letters to keep down the underbrush so the ground’s clear for more
ambitious building; any letters I write are a triumph over the underbrush of daily days.”

If Shirley was trying to “keep down the underbrush” so that her mind would be clear to focus on
Castle
, she was unsuccessful. Did she have trouble making progress on the novel because she spent too much time writing to Jeanne (as Stanley surely would have scolded, had he caught her at it)? Or did she write so often to Jeanne because she could not write the novel and needed another outlet? The latter seems more likely—once the novel picked up steam, their correspondence dwindled. A major theme of the letters is the novel’s failure to thrive. “damned book is nagging me so i wince,” Shirley wrote in February 1960. “it is a perfectly splendid book, nicely planned, and if done carefully should work out true and complete; it has only one disadvantage—everything in it has been done before, by me or someone else. it is as unoriginal as an old sponge.” She reminded herself that her novels almost always began this way; the false starts and dead ends were simply part of her process. But that didn’t make the difficult period easier to get through.