Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (71 page)

As if by magic, Barbara appeared to take her place. A talented pianist who had once thought of becoming a professional musician, she was a happy partner in the same piano duets that Shirley had played with Dorothy Ayling, her best friend in Burlingame, many years before. She baked a loaf of bread for Shirley and didn’t care when one of the cats walked over it while it was rising and left footprints, delighting Shirley. And she and Murry, hoping to have a child soon, doted on the Hyman children. After they moved to a house of their own that fall, Barry took to dropping in to chat on his way home from school. When Miles was born, Barbara and Murry were named his godparents and often helped with the baby, who was nicknamed Big Moey: when Laurence and Corinne wanted to spend a weekend in New York, it was Barbara and Murry who took care of him. “grandma and grandpa not only did not offer . . . but were extremely deaf to all hints on the subject.” At Christmas, Shirley bestowed upon them the sorts of gifts she lavished only on family and her closest friends: for Murry, a paperweight, desk supplies, a Zippo lighter, and records by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; for Barbara, a black scarf, cigarette holders, harpsichord albums, and a ceramic serving platter.

Stanley, too, paid a good deal of attention to his former student. In December, he asked Barbara to collaborate with him on an anthology of Kenneth Burke’s writings, which Burke had asked him to put together. It was a huge task, requiring someone to read all of Burke’s dense literary theory and suggest ways to excerpt it. That Stanley trusted Barbara with the work shows how highly he valued her intelligence. It also gave them a reason to spend a significant amount of time together.

The year before Barbara came back into his life had been challenging for Stanley, both personally and professionally. After his Jackie Robinson profile failed to see the light of day, he had to accept that
The New Yorker
did not value his feature writing.
Poetry and Criticism
, a short book of lectures he published, failed to attract attention. Then a new opportunity arose. In January 1961, following the death of founder Sol Levitas,
The New Leader
, a small, biweekly opinion magazine, underwent a transition. Its focus had primarily been on foreign affairs, but Myron Kolatch, a longtime staffer and the newly minted managing editor, was
interested in building up the magazine’s arts criticism. (Kolatch became executive editor the following year.) Recognizing that Hyman’s talents were being wasted at
The New Yorker
on capsule reviews, one of Kolatch’s first acts as managing editor was to invite him to write a regular book review column, called “Writers and Writing,” to lead the section. Hyman accepted. He remained on staff at
The New Yorker
—and continued to use its stationery for all his correspondence—but he was now the voice of
The New Leader
’s book criticism.

It was, from the start, a terrific pairing. From June 1961 until June 1965, when he decided to step down for health reasons, Hyman published a book review of around two thousand words every other week. The column was “an instant hit,” Kolatch says. “People were just eager to read him.” Hyman collected his favorites in
Standards
(1966), which included pieces on virtually all the important writers of the period: Hemingway, Ellison, Malamud, Mailer, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Truman Capote, Günter Grass, and John Barth, among many others. In his column, Hyman did not try to formulate an overarching theory of literary criticism. His goal, as he put it in his introduction to that book, was to confront “the literature of our time with a hard eye . . . insisting on standards of excellence at a time of general cultural debasement, trying to tell the truth when truth has become unfashionable in literary journalism.” Though he acknowledged that his talents were “mainly of a destructive order, with a highly developed instinct for the jugular,” he insisted that he had “sternly” restrained himself, allowing only nine “blasts” in his four years on the job. (The “blasts,” inevitably, were the pieces that generated the most mail and were most widely read and discussed.) His column was “the core, the nucleus of the magazine,” said John Simon, whom Kolatch hired as film critic around the same time as Hyman.

The reviews are witty, learned, and personal. In a piece about baseball books, Hyman mourned the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957: “I still feel drawn to them, but faintly, as by the moon’s gravitation,” he wrote. “Like the moon, they are so far away, and they shine while I sleep.” Reviewing
Herzog
(1964), he aptly observed that “Bellow is a word-spinner, as a consequence of which the
sources of his strength lie very close to the sources of his weakness.” He judged John Updike, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, as “the most gifted young writer in America.” When he allowed “the old bloodlust” to sweep over him, the results were as wickedly withering as ever. He called Herman Wouk’s novel
Youngblood Hawke
(1962) “the most fraudulent and worthless novel I have read in many years,” its characters “cereal-box cut-outs,” written with “the most dazzling ineptitude.” In the irresistibly titled “Norman Mailer’s Yummy Rump,” one of his final reviews, he wrote that “the awfulness” of Mailer’s
An American Dream
(1965) was “really indescribable,” its similes “deranged.” But if the post of
New Leader
book critic was ideal for Hyman, it was also a tacit acknowledgment that his career at
The New Yorker
, to which he had devoted virtually all his working life, had not fulfilled his hopes.

A bigger disappointment, especially in contrast to the encomiums his wife had lately grown accustomed to receiving, was the reception that greeted
The Tangled Bank
, finally published in April 1962 after thirteen years of research and writing. Hyman spent many of those years painstakingly working his way through the entire published works of Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and Freud, the book’s four pillars. (It was dedicated to the children, “who are glad to see it done.”) The book he wrote, amounting to nearly five hundred densely printed pages, represented a fusion of the interests that had preoccupied him all his life: his early fascination with natural science, his political sensibilities as a young man, myth and ritual criticism, and the reverberations of primitive beliefs in human psychology. “I believe their books to be art,” he wrote of his four subjects, “but I believe art itself to have an ethical as well as an aesthetic dimension, in that it is the work of the moral imagination, imposing order and form on disorderly and anarchic experience. That this vision of order and form is primarily metaphoric makes it no less real, since lines of force radiate out from the work of art and order or reorder the world around.”

Hyman followed essentially the same structure he had in
The Armed Vision
, beginning with a brief biographical note about each of his subjects and proceeding to an overview of their writings, punctuated with his commentary. In Darwin’s account of natural selection, he found a
version of the ritual stages of Greek tragedy as presented in the famous terms of classicist Gilbert Murray:
agon
, contest;
sparagmos
, tearing apart;
anagnorisis
, discovery; and
epiphany
, joyous culmination. (
Agon
and
sparagmos
constitute the struggle for existence;
anagnorisis
and
epiphany
, the survival of the fittest.) He confronted the blatant anti-Semitism—in this case, Jewish anti-Semitism—in Marx’s correspondence with Engels. He saw Burke’s theory of the scene-act ratio (the idea that a specific scene must require a specific act) at the heart of
The Golden Bough
. The book’s conclusion gorgeously expresses Hyman’s vision of the underlying tie among the four thinkers: the powerful beams of their works, he writes, illuminate “our wriggling ancestor, the bloodstain on our fancy clothes, the corpse from which our grain sprouts, our lustful and murderous wish”—in short, the fundamental underpinnings of modern life. It is a conclusion, not incidentally, that is wholly consonant with Jackson’s fictional project of searching out the desires and fears hidden deep within the human psyche.

The book, alas, was not met with the literary huzzahs Hyman had hoped his long awaited magnum opus would generate. Critics reacted as if confronting a literary mausoleum: they were in awe of the amount of work that had gone into the book—“merely to read all the works of those four tireless researchers was no mean task,” wrote one—but were underwhelmed by its argument.
The Tangled Bank
“notably accomplishes its chief purpose, that of making the minds of these innovators
present to us
,” wrote Harold Rosenberg in
The New York Times
, but it was structured too much like a classroom reader, with “blocks of quotations shepherded by comments.” Others were less kind. “Mr. Hyman undertakes a bold adventure, one which I am sure all will agree is highly commendable, the more so because it is hazardous and foredoomed to failure,” sniffed the Harvard historian Perry Miller, an old acquaintance of Hyman’s, arguing that his methods of analysis were inappropriate to his subject. Still others concurred with Rosenberg that the book smelled too strongly of the undergraduate lecture hall.
The Tangled Bank
, wrote James Gray in the
Saturday Review
, amounted to “an enormous instruction schedule for a do-it-yourself course in the humanities.” Academic reviewers, too, were unimpressed. “Where his deductions are not
derivative they are extravagant,” Ronald S. Berman wrote in
The Kenyon Review
. The reaction that gave Hyman the most pleasure was that of the U.S. government, which requested permission to print the section on Marx’s
Capital
in a handbook on communism. Although his politics had changed since college, he appreciated the irony nonetheless.

Hyman photographed by Philippe Halsman for the
Saturday Evening Post,
1959.

Shirley, too, was dismissive. At “a quarter of a million words long not counting the introduction and the index,” the book “ought to make a very handy doorstop,” she wrote to her parents. Granted, Geraldine and Leslie were hardly Stanley’s ideal readers; they could barely get through a dumbed-down essay about tragedy he had written for the
Saturday Evening Post
, their favorite publication. In public, Shirley mocked Stanley in an interview with the
New York Post
on the eve of
Castle
’s publication. Asked whether her husband had anything new in the works, she replied, laughing, “He published a book in the spring. That one took him thirteen years.”

For all the rigor of his working habits, Stanley was a slow writer. Perhaps he had simply set out to do too much: one wonders if he truly needed to read every single word written by his subjects, other than to stake his authority. He watched from the sidelines while
Castle
shot onto the
best-seller lists. It was a repetition of the same pattern of fourteen years earlier, when
The Armed Vision
was immediately eclipsed by “The Lottery.” This time, it may have hurt even more.

Within a few months of
The Tangled Bank
’s publication, Barbara Karmiller—Stanley’s lovely, intelligent former student, perhaps beginning to entertain doubts about her marriage—took up residence in his home. Many people who knew the Hymans at the time suspect that Stanley and Barbara fell in love. Stanley had already had other affairs, of course, but most were brief, and certainly none was as serious as the relationship with Barbara. Phoebe Pettingell, to whom Stanley confessed the infidelities of his prior marriage, says that aside from his wives, Barbara was the only woman Stanley ever loved, though Pettingell describes the affair as primarily emotional rather than sexual. Slim, with short red hair, Barbara was “very smart, very elegant,” Barry says. “Very perceptive. I was ten years old and I thought she was enormously attractive.” She and her husband may not have been well matched. Barbara was fiery and emotional, with an Irish background, while Murry, raised Jewish, was calm and laid-back. “Very thin and pale. He didn’t make any noise when he walked,” Barry says. “But very kind. He never raised his voice.”

Previously, Shirley had never revealed to the children her anguish about Stanley’s infidelity. Joanne remembers often watching television in the front room of the house and overhearing her parents arguing in the study next door. “I could hear them talking, I couldn’t hear the words, but I could hear her crying,” Joanne says. “But she was careful not to reveal anything about her unhappiness.” Now, betrayed not only by her husband but by a woman she regarded as a close friend, she allowed her façade to crack. Joanne and Barry both remember an evening when Shirley, drunk and hysterical, insisted on driving to the Karmiller house to confront Stanley. The children ran out into the snow after their mother, trying to persuade her not to do it; eventually they were able to calm her down and bring her inside. “I desperately did not want her to go there, and I didn’t really know why,” Joanne says. “But there was a lot of sexual tension.” Later, after she heard gossip that her father and Barbara were having an affair, she realized what must have been going on. “We would go over to their house for dinner, and Murry and I would be in the living room at
the piano singing show tunes, and Stanley and Barbara would disappear. It was very uncomfortable.” Sarah, too, recalls Shirley’s discovery of the affair as traumatic: “Barbara was her best friend.”