Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (67 page)

While much of Shirley’s original draft has been lost or destroyed, it’s possible to piece together some of
Castle
’s initial plot from her letters to Jeanne. She was inspired by a famous case that took place in Victorian England, in which a man named Charles Bravo died mysteriously of antimony poisoning. His wife, Florence, was significantly wealthier and insisted on keeping her money in her name; he may, in fact, have accidentally swallowed poison that he intended for her. The couple’s maid might also have been involved. (The case was never solved.)

In Shirley’s novel, the two main characters were originally named Constance and Jenny; as in the final version, they are sisters who live together in “a big old brown house saturated with family memories.” Jenny is married, and the two sisters have jointly decided to murder her husband. (In a humorously vicious touch, Shirley named him after Louis Harap, the editor and friend of Stanley’s with whom she had a falling-out some fifteen years earlier, after he criticized her writing.) “they are going to kill him because he is a boor i think,” Shirley wrote. But she wasn’t sure how. “i want something highly suspicious
but possibly natural, like mushrooms but i don’t really know one end of a mushroom from another.” She borrowed handbooks on plants and mushrooms from her friend Libbie Burke, Kenneth Burke’s wife, and made careful notes on the poisonous ones:
Amanita pantherina
, false blusher (“highly poisonous”);
Amanita muscaria
, fly agaric (“highly poisonous”);
Amanita phalloides
, death cap (“deadly poisonous”). Her characters were constantly on her mind. “cooking now is putting something into a casserole and sitting on my red stool making notes,” she wrote in March. “about one-third of this will get into the book and the rest is just saturating myself with the two of them and trying to get ivy compton-burnett out of my system.”

The summer, though, was bad for her morale. Her evening lecture at Suffield drew a record-breaking audience, but she felt like a hypocrite giving writing advice—“do not impose your own prejudices upon your story; let your story tell itself”—when she couldn’t make progress on her own novel. With all three younger children in camp and Laurence touring Europe with his band, she and Stanley took a road trip to the Maine seashore and to Salem, which she had longed to see but found disappointingly filled with tourist traps: “there weren’t any witches. . . . but there was the Witch City Auto Body Wrecking Company and the Witch City Dry Cleaners and the Witch Grill. . . . after much searching i got to see a manuscript written in court of the trial of Rebecca Nurse and she really did say all those heartbreaking things.” They hoped to wander farther, but Stanley tripped and hit his jaw, doing major damage to his teeth. Together they took an emergency detour to New York, where he visited a dental surgeon and she met with Brandt and Covici, who asked her if the book would be ready by the following spring. “dogwood day, and i was eating eggs benedict and drinking martinis and pretending i was a lady being taken out to lunch. the book will not be ready a year from dogwood day.” She hadn’t heard from Jeanne since April, and the silence saddened her: “i would have sent you a postcard but you hadn’t written for so long.” Driving home by herself, she was caught in a heavy rainstorm and spontaneously decided to spend a night at a hotel in Albany, a luxury she could now afford. She told the desk clerk she wanted a room with air-conditioning and television, plus a bottle
of bourbon and a bowl of ice, and spent “a lovely evening all by myself watching television and drinking bourbon”—closed off, safe, secure.

In early September, Shirley returned Libbie Burke’s plant guides with a note apologizing for keeping them for so long: though the book was progressing slowly, she reported, two chapters were now done. But by the time Jeanne finally wrote again later that month, explaining that she had been overwhelmed at home, Shirley had decided to give up on the whole draft. “i am really seared by all this, although the clouds are lifting slightly,” she wrote. “i have spent eight months trying to make a novel out of that thing and almost convincing myself i could, and it is an absolute relief to be able to look at it and say there isn’t any novel there.” As a sign of the psychic cost of her failure, the nightmares that had plagued her periodically over the last twenty years—her “pact-with-the-devil series of dreams,” she called them—had returned.

Brandt was “heartily falsely cheerful” about the delay: she put on her most encouraging voice and said she would break the bad news to Covici, and in the meantime Shirley should “take a nice long rest.” Stanley’s reaction was rather different: “he said you have a nice long rest over my dead body you rested all summer you don’t have to write this novel if you don’t want to but you get the hell up to that typewriter and write
something
or your fingers will fall off.” Shirley found his tough-love approach reassuring, especially after he took her out to dinner at the Rainbarrel. “maybe i will write another book,” she told Jeanne. All the while, Covici kept up his gentle pressure, sending her a copy of his favorite cookbook,
Simple Cooking for the Epicure
, with a sweet but pointed note: “Good food helps my disposition. Does it help your inspiration?” To her parents, Shirley was philosophical: “these times come, and there is not much to do except wait them out.”

This time the waiting took longer than usual. A major setback came in early 1961, when Shirley came down with what she thought was a lingering intestinal flu. It was soon clear that she was actually suffering from colitis, a painful and debilitating inflammation of the colon that can be correlated with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking. The symptoms, which include intense abdominal pain and sudden attacks of diarrhea and nausea, would be distressing for anyone,
but for Shirley they were particularly upsetting. Always self-conscious about bodily functions, she initially tried to conceal her problems from Stanley. “She lived on Alka-Seltzer,” Sarah remembers. Dr. Durand prescribed paregoric acid, an over-the-counter diarrhea remedy, which she was to take six times a day, as well as “sulfa pills the size of eggs.” Her diet was severely restricted: no coffee, orange juice, salad greens, or various other raw vegetables, among other foods. Her meals consisted largely of cottage cheese and perhaps “a nice bracing cup of cocoa” in the morning. After several months of this, all she longed for was “a cold green salad with tomatoes and avocados and french dressing with lots of garlic,” but after she indulged, she regretted it.

Shirley’s illness posed serious challenges for her lecturing schedule. In April, she and Stanley were both scheduled to speak at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. The five-hour car ride caused her tremendous anxiety (“every time i saw a sign reading ‘next gas station forty-four miles’ i would get worried”); then she had to sit through Stanley’s event, a three-hour panel discussion. “then a coffee hour with the students (no coffee for me, thanks) and then a cocktail party (
that
they didn’t take away from me, thank heaven).” Her hosts took her and Stanley out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, where she suffered paroxysms of guilt when she was unable to eat the expensive steak that was ordered for her. Somehow she made it through her own lecture, before an audience of five hundred, with Stanley in the front row, ready to escort her out if necessary. With the exception of Suffield, it would be several years before she would travel again without him or someone else to accompany her.

In addition to Shirley’s illness, the summer of 1961 was rocked by a Hyman family tragedy: the sudden death of Moe Hyman, Stanley’s seventy-year-old father, from a heart attack. He and Lulu had come up to Bennington the previous New Year’s Eve, laden with all the customary kosher delicacies from New York: delicatessen meats, brandied cherries, chicken livers. It had been apparent to all that Moe’s health was declining, but his death still came as a shock. To Stanley he left his signet ring; Laurence, his favorite grandchild, inherited his collection of expensive
clothing: “a lot of silk shirts and fine sweaters, if he can bring himself to wear them.” Shirley, Laurence, and Joanne accompanied Stanley to New York for the funeral, leaving the younger children in Bennington in the care of Laura Nowak: Sarah’s behavior could be unpredictable, and Laura sensed that they “didn’t want to take a chance.” Shirley refused to attend the ceremony itself, citing her “terror of such things.” But she was fascinated by the rituals, especially the tradition that Jews identified as Cohens, or descendants of ancient priests, are forbidden to enter a cemetery or go near a dead body, “even the present-day members of the family named cohen—who are very far from being priests, considering that one of them is a small-time gangster.” She and her Jewish sister-in-law, tasked with taking charge of the food served after the burial, were bewildered by Lulu’s kosher kitchen: “we used the wrong dishes (put cheese and stuff in the dishes which are to be reserved entirely for meat) and put everything back where it didn’t belong.”

Shirley’s colitis may have contributed to her decision not to attend the funeral. The illness plagued her, on and off, for the rest of 1961. Paradoxically, it proved good for her novel, since it kept her close to her desk: “there’s nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing,” she wrote to her parents. During that anxious fall, as Soviet and U.S. tanks came to a standoff in Berlin and the first rumblings toward war in Vietnam were audible, both Covici and Brandt nudged her again to ask whether her novel might appear on Viking’s 1962 list. “No one has the desire to needle you or push you or hasten you, and if it makes you nervous to commit yourself, don’t,” Brandt assured her. But this time Shirley was finally able to give an affirmative answer. Covici would have the manuscript by next Dogwood Day.

AS JACKSON STRUGGLED
with
Castle
, a shipment of books from England arrived for Stanley. Among them was one that he had ordered for her “half-seriously”:
Sex Variant Women in Literature
, by Jeannette H. Foster. (The book, which first appeared in 1956, is now considered a minor classic of lesbian critical theory.) Jackson read one chapter and
decided the book was “clearly trash,” but before putting it aside, she checked the index. There was her own name, with a reference to
Hangsaman
as “an eerie novel about lesbians.”

Jackson tells this anecdote at the start of a five-page document in which she lays out, in considerable detail, the crisis she came to while working on
Castle
. These pages have previously been identified as an unsent letter to Howard Nemerov, but this seems unlikely: Nemerov was in residence at Bennington in 1960, the year the document must have been written, and Jackson would have been unlikely to write him a letter when he was living nearby. Moreover, none of her surviving letters to him—his archive includes only a few—is written in this style. It’s possible, of course, that Jackson may have written other, more personal letters (of which this was one) to Nemerov, to whom she was close during the last years of her life. But what the document most resembles is a letter to Jeanne Beatty—perhaps composed during the lull in their exchange in the summer of 1960, when Jackson might have hesitated to intrude on her friend but missed having her usual outlet. Like many of the other letters to Jeanne, it is typed on Jackson’s yellow copy paper and begins with no salutation, just the opening phrase, “now, can you help me?” And it is written in the intimate stream-of-consciousness style, sprinkled with jokes and puns, that characterizes Jackson’s letters to Jeanne, with references to some of the other subjects their correspondence touched on.

It also deals with something Jackson may well have wanted to discuss with Jeanne: the question of lesbianism in her work. As mentioned earlier, Jackson was vehemently opposed to the idea that her fiction might have a lesbian subtext—perhaps
too
vehemently opposed, considering how often figures who may be understood as lesbian appear in her fiction. Now, she writes, the idea that she belonged in a book about “sex variance” had “completely disintegrated
castle
,” because misreading Jenny and Constance as lesbians would distort the novel’s meaning. Stanley told her to “write about what you want to write about and the hell with what dirty old ladies say,” but she couldn’t dismiss the concern (although she admitted that she would rather be “called names” by Foster than write books that were “cleaned up so she would not have any
excuse for calling me names”). No one would believe that she had actually set out to write about the Charles Bravo murder; all readers would see were two women nefariously colluding against a husband. “my most basic beliefs in writing are that the identity is all-important and the word is all-powerful,” Jackson wrote.

i want my jenny in
castle
to be absolutely secure in her home and her place in the world, so much so that she can dispose of her husband without concern . . . but when jenny’s identity depends entirely upon her thoroughly romantic association with constance, then i am tagged again. jenny wants to see the world, with always one foot on base at home, constance never wants to leave home. they are again two halves of the same person, and must i then suspect that? together they are one identity, safe and eventually hidden. do they hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters? if the alliance between jenny and constance is unholy then my book is unholy and i am writing something terrible, in my own terms, because my own identity is gone and the word is only something that means something else.

Jackson’s judgment of lesbianism as “unholy,” though extreme, was not unusual for her time. But what disturbed her more than the idea of being “tagged” as a lesbian writer was that she might not have control over her own fiction—that her work might mean something entirely different from what she intended. On one level, to be sure, she wrote for herself; but she wrote also to be read and to be understood. The letter continues: