Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (69 page)

Friends and neighbors who knew the Hymans in the early 1960s have suggested that Merricat was the image of Sarah, who was twelve years old—the same age as Merricat at the time of the crime—when Jackson began her major rewrite of
Castle
. Like Merricat, who was sent to her room without supper on the night of the poisoning, Sarah regularly managed to get herself ejected from the dinner table for making insolent remarks. (As Constance does for her sister in the novel, Jackson often brought food up to her later.) A slender girl with bright eyes and long, wild hair, Sarah also shared her mother’s interest in magic and omens. She had become close to Jay Williams, who originally helped Jackson explore her own interest in magic; the two of them made up their own holidays, including the feast day of “Jay-Hey-Day” and a magic ceremony to be conducted on “Salli’s Eve.” In
Raising Demons
, Jackson humorously depicts Sarah’s early attempts at domestic magic and the chagrin with which her father greeted them. Elizabeth Greene, a friend of Sarah’s in those years, remembers her conducting a healing ritual on behalf of a friend: “She was always pushing at edges . . . living in this imaginary world.” Other friends speak of her physical recklessness, including a former classmate who recounted an episode in which Sarah, exploring in the woods, accidentally tumbled over a cliff. Sarah was intensely interested in the novel: she read the chapters as her mother finished them and offered critiques. Hyman was reportedly annoyed when Jackson accepted some of Sarah’s suggestions rather
than his: “he says he is a professional critic and i take the advice of a thirteen-year-old girl over his.”

Jackson told Joanne that Merricat and Constance were in some ways modeled after the two Hyman daughters—Merricat on Sarah, Constance on Joanne—but only loosely. Joanne had Constance’s aura of common sense, but she did not share Constance’s placid domesticity. “It was fluid. It wasn’t firmly attached that I was Constance and Sarah was Merricat,” Joanne says. “They were both of us . . . in fantasy versions.”

Of course, the elements of Merricat that reflected Sarah were precisely the ways in which Sarah most resembled her mother. Jackson, too, was preoccupied with omens and signs, making note of her lucky and unlucky days even as an adolescent. She spoke openly—perhaps too openly—of her interest in witchcraft and magic. Like the alleged witches of Salem Village, Merricat and Constance are outsiders, living a nontraditional lifestyle, vulnerable to the ill will spread by gossip—which Jackson felt to be her own social status in North Bennington. (Merricat’s witchiness is enhanced by her faithful black cat, Jonas, to whom she often speaks, just as Jackson conversed with her cats.) Witchcraft, in this context, is again best understood as a metaphor for female power and men’s fear of it. It is a last resort for women who feel that they are powerless, the only way in which they can assert control over their surroundings. Even imaginary control is preferable to no control at all.

The domestic arts, which Constance practices to perfection and which were a source of both interest and anxiety for Jackson, are another way in which women have traditionally expressed control over their environment. It is no accident that the witch’s symbols are, of all things, a broom and a pot. In
Castle
, the kitchen—Constance’s center of command and the sisters’ final refuge—is “the heart of our house,” as Merricat says. (Recall that Jackson used nearly the same phrase in
Hill House
to describe the nucleus of the haunting, the cold spot in front of the nursery.) The significance of preparing and preserving food is gorgeously represented in the rainbow of preserves stockpiled in the cellar: “All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and
pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.” (The only other “poem” that appears in the novel is the villagers’ cruel ditty about Constance and Merricat.) Constance’s contributions, we are told, are the product of her life’s work, and “her rows and rows of jars were easily the handsomest, and shone among the others.” Just as she painstakingly separates edible mushrooms from those that are poisonous, Constance will allow the family to eat only from her own preserves; the others, she says, will kill them.

Female power and creativity, bottled up too long, turn lethal. This is the closest the novel comes to offering an explanation for the murder. If Merricat and Constance are two halves of a whole, in some ways forming a single person, then it does not matter which of them put the arsenic in the sugar bowl—they are both responsible, and equally justified. The crime turns their house into a prison, but it is a prison of their own creation in which they shut themselves willingly, as they affirm: “We are going to be very happy.” The happy ending to their fairy tale requires a new definition of happiness, severed from the traditional marriage plot. But it is not ironic. Within a few months of
Castle
’s publication, Jackson, too, would build herself a prison. The difference was that she would inhabit it alone.

“
MY BOOK GOES
along so well it scares me,” Jackson wrote Carol Brandt in February 1962, shortly before submitting the manuscript. “I am most reluctant to give up my characters.” Throughout the process, Pat Covici had expressed nothing but absolute faith in her ability to produce a novel of the highest quality. He especially admired her unusual skill at fine-tuning her own work. “What a relief it is to get a manuscript that is not only the product of a first-rate imagination but has also gone through the fires of criticism,” he told her early on. “Don’t you rush anything for anybody,” he assured her in another letter. “Go about your business of sharpening your pencils and literally sniffing the air of murder and love and intrigue and cover the pages at your own pace and let
no one dare disturb you or do aught that would detract from the quality of your work.”

Now his confidence in her was rewarded. Aside from the most basic copy-edits—which, unfortunately, included mistakenly changing the common name of
Amanita phalloides
from “death cap” (as Jackson correctly had it in her manuscript) to “death cup”—“not a word” of
Castle
needed correction. Marshall Best, the head of Viking Press, cried when he read it. Hyman predicted that if the book could “bring tears to those mean old publishing eyes,” it ought to make a million dollars. Jackson had her doubts. “i do not think this book will go far,” she wrote to her parents. “it’s short, for one thing, and stanley and the publisher and the agent all agree that it is the best writing i have ever done, which is of course the kiss of death on
any
book.” Also, she warned, “the heroine of this one is
really
batty.”

In terms of publicity, Viking pulled out all the stops. The book party took place on September 20, 1962, the eve of publication day, in the library of the luxurious St. Regis Hotel, an opulent wood-paneled room lined with leather-bound books in glass-front bookcases. The seventy guests included primarily reviewers—Orville Prescott of the
Times
, Brendan Gill of
The New Yorker
—with a few friends: the Ellisons, the Burkes, Louis Untermeyer. Viking publicist Julie Van Vliet set up a whirlwind schedule of interviews: two radio programs,
The Reader’s Almanac with Warren Bower
on WNYC and
Arlene Francis at Sardi’s
(a talk show hosted by the actress and TV personality famous for
What’s My Line?
), plus print journalists for the
New York Times
,
New York Herald Tribune
,
New York Post
, and others. Jackson’s days were so packed that Harry Hancock of the
Chicago Tribune
had to interview her at the party. John Barkham of the
Saturday Review
echoed earlier interviewers in finding her “a solid, substantial personality as far removed from her Alice-in-Wonderlandish characters as it is possible to be.” With the press, she was open about her struggles over the novel, confessing that she had written the first chapter in many different forms—first person, third person, with narrators of different ages, and so on.

For the first time in Jackson’s career, the critics were virtually unanimous:
Castle
was her masterpiece. Many quoted the opening paragraph
in its entirety, with even the usually tough Prescott counting
Castle
among the best books of the year and declaring, “Only one woman alive could have written this paragraph . . . a literary sorceress of uncanny prowess.” He and others marveled at how deeply she had infiltrated Merricat’s character: “the most eerie yet oddly attractive child in recent fiction,” as one put it. Critics compared her to Poe, Edward Gorey, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Isak Dinesen, even Faulkner—Merricat, with her stilted, strangely affectless diction, reminded at least one reviewer of Benjy in
The Sound and the Fury
. There was the usual confusion about what genre Jackson was writing in. Was
Castle
a whodunit, a horror novel, or a “shocker with a stunning denouement like ‘The Lottery’?” asked Barkham, concluding that the book contained elements of all those genres, yet was “a better piece of writing than any of them.” Jackson needed “no ghosts, werewolves or clanking chains to inculcate horror,” wrote Beatrice Washburn in
The Miami Herald
. “She finds it where it really exists, in the secret passages of the human mind.” Several reviewers found the book beyond criticism: “one to read, not to review, for the aura it generates cannot be confined or itemized,” raved the
Boston Herald
.

Even reviewers who found the plot difficult to believe complimented Jackson’s “elegant distinction of style”: she wrote like “a demon-touched angel,” as one of them said. “Shirley Jackson looks at the world as practically nobody else does and describes it in a way almost anybody would like to emulate,” wrote Max Steele in the
New York Herald Tribune
. Kenneth Burke, writing for
The New Leader
, to which Hyman was now contributing regular reviews, called the novel “fanciful realism” and suggested that readers track Jackson’s use of the words “black” and “wood”: “In watching how they tie things up, you will discover for yourself the astounding kind of complexity implicit in the imaginary lines of this charming book’s apparent simplicity.” (This, incidentally, is an excellent demonstration of Burke’s method of literary criticism.)

Not everyone was certain that the novel meant more than it appeared to on the surface, but many tied it convincingly to Jackson’s other writings about man’s inhumanity to man (or, more often, woman).
Castle
“manages the ironic miracle of convincing the reader that a house inhabited by a
lunatic, a poisoner and a pyromaniac is a world more rich in sympathy, love and subtlety than the real world outside,” wrote
Time
’s reviewer, who also called Jackson, in a line Hyman would later deplore, “a kind of Virginia Werewoolf among the séance-fiction writers.” In
National Review
, Guy Davenport saw it as a product of its times, a fable of “camping on the brink” inspired by “the refrigerated horrors of the cold war and [the] icy emptiness of space.” One of the most insightful pieces, in
The New York Times Book Review
, argued that Jackson offered “an alternative to the canonical view of ‘seriousness’ in literature” by exploring “a real world which is at once more sane and more mad than the world we see.” The best line came from Dorothy Parker in
Esquire
: “This novel brings back all my faith in terror and death. I can say no higher of it.”

Within a few weeks of publication, nearly 14,000 copies had been sold, and Viking doubled the size of its second printing, bringing the number of copies in print to 25,000. By late November 1962, close to 30,000 copies had been sold. In December,
Castle
became Jackson’s only novel to hit the
New York Times
best-seller list, where it stayed for five weeks, alongside
Ship of Fools
by Katherine Anne Porter and
Fail-Safe
by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, a thriller about nuclear war. A newspaper cartoon depicted a couple in bed, the man reading
Fail-Safe
and the woman reading
Castle
, gripping each other’s hands in terror.

Jackson was thrilled by the reviews. But her elation did not last long. When she returned from her triumphant trip to New York, waiting for her at home was Geraldine’s most recent summons. She had seen the review in
Time
. Her letter did not mention its content; instead, she focused on the new picture of Shirley by a
Time
photographer that accompanied it. “Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awful pictures of you,” she lamented to her daughter (either not knowing or not caring that Jackson had no control over the choice of photograph). “If you don’t care what you look like or care about your appearance why don’t you do something about it for your children’s sake—and your husband’s. . . . I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like. . . . You were and I guess still are a very wilful child and one who insisted on her own way in everything—good or bad.”

This kind of criticism was nothing new—Jackson had been experiencing
it all her life. But this particularly blunt letter hit her in a very vulnerable place. For years Jackson had hated having her picture taken; the photograph that appeared on the jacket of
Castle
was the same one she had used for
The Lottery
, thirteen years earlier. Both Brandt and Covici respected her wishes on the matter—Brandt, who once reassured Jackson that “you and I seem to think quite differently about your face,” constantly refused magazine editors permission to publish Jackson’s picture alongside her stories. Jackson had been relieved that Alfred Statler, the photographer sent by
Time
, took more pictures of the cats than of her, but she hated the published picture nearly as much as her mother did. In truth, it was not that bad: wearing a sleeveless blouse and looking somewhat exhausted, Jackson slouches before her typewriter, an enigmatic expression on her face. The condescending caption was “Deranged but enchanting.”