Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (70 page)

Jackson photographed by Alfred Statler for
Time
magazine, 1962—the photo for which her mother gave her so much grief.

Even at this point in her career, with six published novels and two popular memoirs, Jackson still felt she had to prove her worth to her parents. She never missed an opportunity to emphasize how successful she had become, reporting back to them on just about every lecture, reading, and conference. She was embarrassed to shop at the bookstore Brentano’s, she had disingenuously complained earlier that year, because her charge
account was under the name Shirley Jackson and the staff always insisted that she sign autographs. For her part, Geraldine had never disguised her preference for Jackson’s lighter work over the stories about “demented girls,” which she confessed she didn’t understand. And she still took every opportunity to criticize her daughter, even about minor things. When “Weep for Adonais,” a lightly disguised story about Dylan Thomas’s death, appeared in
Playboy
, she reprimanded Jackson for publishing in “that dreadful magazine.” After hearing Jackson’s recording of “The Lottery” and “The Daemon Lover,” Geraldine complained that it didn’t sound like her voice.

Normally Jackson ignored these criticisms. But for once, she indulged in a sharp reply to her mother’s letter about
Time
. “i received your unpleasant letter last night when i got back from new york, and it upset me considerably, as you no doubt intended,” she responded.

i wish you would stop telling me that my husband and children are ashamed of me. if they are, they have concealed it very skilfully; perhaps they do not believe that personal appearance is the most important thing in the world. . . . as far as i am concerned [the picture] is a very minor thing. i am far more concerned with my book and the very good review which accompanied the picture. . . .

will you try to realize that i am grown up and fully capable of handling my own affairs? i have a happy and productive life, i have many good friends, i have considerable stature in my profession, and if i decide to make any changes in my manner of living, it will not be because you have nagged me into it. you can say this is ‘wilful’ if you like, but surely at my age i have a right to live as i please, and i have just had enough of the unending comments on my appearance and my faults.

The letter remained unsent. Just as she had more than twenty years earlier, when Stanley confessed his infidelity with his upstairs neighbor while Shirley was away for the summer, she repressed her fury. Perhaps, like the murderous preserves lined up along the Blackwood pantry
shelves, its bottled-up power frightened her. Instead, Jackson sent a cheerful note describing her trip to New York, emphasizing her lavish treatment at the hands of her publishers: a suite at the Royalton “with a refrigerator and bar, and big bowls of roses,” the cocktail party at the St. Regis and a fancy dinner to follow. The reviews so far had been “simply fantastic.” Geraldine seemed to get the hint. “I just remembered I hadn’t told you how I liked your story—I enjoyed it very much,” she wrote in her next letter. Even though she did still prefer the books about the children, she agreed with the critics: it was Shirley’s best novel. In an unusually magnanimous gesture, she had even bought two copies—probably the first time she had ever spent money on one of her daughter’s books rather than demanding free copies. For Geraldine—who never failed to mention the price of a large purchase, and who was so cheap that after Joanne’s visit to California a few years earlier she sent Shirley an itemized bill requesting reimbursement for all the clothes and other items she had bought for her granddaughter—this was the closest she could come to apologizing.

But the damage was done. Within two months, Jackson had retreated into her house. After months of emotional and professional stress, her mother’s letter was one of the final triggers. She would not emerge until the following year.

17.

WRITING IS THE WAY OUT

1962–1964

Past the turn I might find a mark of Constance’s foot, because she sometimes came that far to wait for me, but most of Constance’s prints were in the garden and in the house. Today she had come to the end of the garden, and I saw her as soon as I came around the turn; she was standing with the house behind her, in the sunlight, and I ran to meet her.

“Merricat,” she said, smiling at me, “look how far I came today.”

—We Have Always Lived in the Castle

T
HE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE CAME IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF
1962. With several of the children in tow, Shirley and Stanley made a trip to New York: she bought some new clothes and met Pat Covici and Carol Brandt for lunch, while he took the children to the Museum of Natural History—an unusual reversal of their typical roles. The city was in the midst of a heat wave, and Shirley, laden with shopping bags, suddenly felt faint. A passerby took her arm and led her into the shade to wait while he flagged down a taxi. The taxi got stuck in traffic, and in the heat and smog, she struggled to breathe. At the sight of Barry, standing in the doorway of their hotel, she nearly burst into tears. He took her shopping
bags and brought her inside, where Stanley fixed her a large drink full of ice. She spent the next day holed up in the hotel while Stanley and the children went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Back in Bennington, Dr. Durand told her the main cause of her distress was probably just rushing around in the heat, “with a spot of anxiety thrown in.”

This cartoon, by Charles Saxon, ran in the March 23, 1963, issue of
The New Yorker.

The spot grew, cancerlike, all through the summer, which was unusually event-filled and stressful. In May, Laurence—then nearing
the end of his sophomore year at Goddard College, a small, progressive coed school several hours from Bennington—had astonished his parents by announcing that he was about to get married. He had been dating Corinne Biggs, a local girl turned Bennington student whom Shirley had hired to babysit for Barry. Now she was pregnant. They had little choice but to marry: Corinne, a Catholic, probably did not consider abortion, which in any event was not easy to obtain in 1962. He was nineteen years old; she was twenty. Stanley referred to the situation as “Laurie faces life, the hard way.”

In public and to her mother, as always, Shirley downplayed her dismay. Laurence and Corinne, she told Geraldine, were perfectly suited to each other and had been talking about marriage for some time; this was not “some unlucky accident.” People were gossiping, but she and Stanley had been vocal in their support of the couple. The other children were extremely fond of Corinne, who was already like a member of the family. Corinne’s parents were more of a problem: they were upset that Laurence would not participate in a Catholic ceremony. As it turned out, the local priest refused to perform a mixed marriage. The couple would be married in June by a justice of the peace, in a quiet garden on the Bennington campus, with only immediate family present and a small reception afterward, “provided corinne’s mother can stop praying long enough to arrange for it.” Geraldine initially and rather cluelessly wondered why they couldn’t just be engaged instead of rushing to marry, but when the facts were spelled out she was supportive: marriage and a baby, she suggested, was just what Laurence needed to “make him grow up fast.” She and Leslie did not attend the wedding—conveniently, they had already planned a vacation in Hawaii—but she insisted on sending the newlyweds a full set of silver, followed by a series of nagging letters to Shirley when her gift was not immediately acknowledged.

Laurence’s godparents, Shirley and Stanley’s college friends Frank Orenstein and June Mirken Mintz, did come up from New York for the wedding, as did Lulu Hyman, now a widow, and Stanley’s brother, Arthur. Shirley wore a new dress of gray silk and even consented to put on a pair of high heels, which she had always hated; she felt vindicated
when one of the heels broke during the reception. Corinne was accompanied by numerous family members, “all the women wearing flowered hats.” Stanley was so nervous that he accidentally introduced Lulu to Corinne’s mother as his grandmother, the judge got the bride’s and groom’s names wrong, and the best man handed them the wrong rings. But the ceremony was dispatched in ten minutes, just before it began to rain, and the guests trooped over to the Four Chimneys, a historic inn in Old Bennington, for the reception. There was champagne for everyone except Shirley, who loathed it; the headwaiter, recognizing her, brought her a glass of bourbon instead. The Republican governor of Vermont, also dining at the inn that night, came over to congratulate the young couple, to which Stanley promptly shot back that they were planning to raise a fine family of Democrats. Back at the house afterward, Laurence was in such high spirits—Shirley described him later as “wild with joy”—that he gave one of Corinne’s aunts a trumpet lesson while Joanne taught Corinne’s mother to do the twist. Then the newlyweds took off for Europe, where Laurence’s band was once again touring for the summer, Corinne accompanying him for their honeymoon.

In public Shirley took an “all’s well that ends well” attitude toward the situation, but there can be no doubt that she was disappointed. The problem wasn’t Corinne, of whom she seems to have been genuinely fond. But a shotgun wedding at age nineteen hardly fit into the Exeter-to-Harvard track she had once dreamed of for her elder son. When Miles Hyman—named for Stanley’s father—arrived in late September, making her a grandmother at age forty-five, Shirley treated the baby with nonchalance verging on aloofness. She enjoyed being around him for an hour or so, but she was “always very glad to give him back to his mother and father,” she admitted to her parents. “She’d come over to our house and I’d make her a bourbon and she’d hold the baby. That was about it,” Laurence remembers.

ALMOST AS SOON
as Laurence’s wedding was over, another upheaval took place in Shirley’s personal life. Barbara Karmiller, the former
student of Stanley’s whose wedding Shirley had made a trip to New York to attend a few years earlier, and her husband, Murry, moved into the Hymans’ back apartment. At Bennington, Barbara had struggled with emotional and psychological problems, including severe writer’s block. As her counselor, Stanley took a close interest in her state of mind, suggesting alternate courses of study when she had trouble writing and worrying about how to encourage her without putting too much pressure on her. She also was one of the few students in whom Shirley, too, took a personal interest, perhaps sympathizing with her struggles. After her graduation in 1957, Barbara spent a few years working in New York, where she met Murry, a television writer. In the spring of 1958, when
The Sundial
appeared, she sent Shirley an effusive letter praising the book. That fall, when Barbara and Murry were married at City Hall in lower Manhattan, Shirley gave the newlyweds a marriage charm.

After Barbara came into an inheritance, she and Murry took off for Europe, where they lived for several years, sending the Hymans regular reports on their adventures in Antwerp, Rome, and elsewhere. By the summer of 1962, they were ready to return to America, and Shirley and Stanley invited them to stay at 66 Main Street until they decided where to live. Murry worked on his magazine writing and tutored Sarah in Latin. Barbara mainly helped around the house and enjoyed the country life. “Barbara chopped the vegetables, Murry chopped the wood,” Sarah remembers. Twenty years younger than Shirley, she fit nicely into the smart-younger-sister role left newly vacant by Jeanne Beatty, whose letters had abruptly stopped without explanation. Shirley kept trying: she sent Jeanne a copy of
Castle
as soon as it appeared and wrote to her with the news of Miles’s birth (although she pretended that Laurence had gotten married the year before). But Jeanne did not write again, even to acknowledge the gift. She never opened one of Shirley’s last letters to her, though she kept it, along with all of Shirley’s letters, until her death, at age eighty-four, in 2013. Perhaps she was angry that Shirley had neglected her during the intense year of work on
Castle
; perhaps she was too depressed to write and ashamed by her own neglect of their correspondence. Regardless, it was a sad ending to a friendship that had brought them both so much pleasure.