Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (72 page)

THE
“
SPOT OF ANXIETY
” Dr. Durand had observed in the summer continued to grow through the distressing fall of 1962. On October 22, Shirley and Stanley threw a big cocktail party in honor of Kenneth Burke, who had just finished giving a series of lectures at Bennington. The guests arrived fresh from hearing President Kennedy inform the nation that American spy planes had discovered Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba; it was all anyone could talk about. “After the President’s broadcast last night my poor young Barry, who used to dream of being an astronaut, fled back to the Oz books for comfort. I feel the same way,” Shirley wrote Carol Brandt the next day. To Joanne and Sarah, who were then attending boarding school outside Boston, she confided that she had been turning on the radio every hour to follow the news. The apocalypse she had satirized in
The Sundial
was turning out to be no joke; even the safety that Merricat and Constance finally found in turning their home into a kind of bomb shelter, with boards over the windows and a supply of canned goods in the cellar, might not be sufficient. The crisis would be resolved diplomatically within days, but its reverberations were felt for the remainder of the Cold War. Schoolchildren like Barry, taught to hide under their desks during air raid drills, were disturbed by the memories for years.

In the wake of
Castle
, Shirley didn’t try to do much writing, but even the small amount she undertook was unusually difficult. Louis Untermeyer, whom she had gotten to know at Suffield, was editing a new children’s series to be published by Collier Books and had asked her to contribute a picture book. She had an idea for a story to be called
Nine Magic Wishes
, a sweet and whimsical tale about a child who encounters a magician and wishes for various strange, enchanting things: an orange pony with a purple tail, “a squirrel holding a nut that opens and inside is a Christmas tree,” a garden of flowers made of candy, a pocket-sized zoo, and finally a “little box and inside is another box and inside
is another box and inside is another box and inside that is an elephant.” But the publisher had supplied her with an “arrogant little list” of approved vocabulary, and many of the words she needed were not on it. It included “getting” and “spending,” but not “wishing”; “cost” and “buy” and “nickel” and “dime,” but not “magic.” “I felt that the children for whom I was supposed to write were being robbed, persuaded to accept nickels and dimes instead of magic wishes,” she wrote later. She got her way: the publisher eventually agreed that she could ignore the list.

At Halloween, Jeanne Beatty’s daughter Shannon sent Sarah a birthday present, prompting Shirley to reach out again with a letter that started, “Jeanne?” There was no response. Shortly afterward, Shirley fell on the ice and twisted her ankle, which left her unable to drive her car. The only shoe that fit on her foot was a furry red bedroom slipper. She could not wear it into town, where she already felt self-conscious doing her errands. “so i just won’t get the mail, and the store will send up my groceries, and i will spend a happy day with my foot on the hassock reading a mystery story,” she wrote to her parents. She would not make it out of the house again until the following spring.

THE WINTER OF 1962–63
was unusually cold, with temperatures well below zero—“so terrible that even the vermonters are talking about it,” Shirley wrote. In two days there were thirty inches of snow. Aside from her birthday and Christmas, which both passed quietly, the Hymans did almost no entertaining. Shirley stayed inside. Something new and unpleasant had begun to happen every time she tried to leave the house. She would begin to shake, her legs would give way, and everything would start spinning. If she did not go inside right away, she feared passing out. Her nightmares returned, stranger than ever; she paced the floor in the dark, crying. She suffered from delusions that even she recognized were irrational: she was afraid to go into the post office, for instance, because she believed the postmaster thought she was crazy. When Stanley tried to reassure her that it wasn’t true, she lashed out at him. Eventually her anxiety was no longer associated only with leaving the house: anything could trigger a panic attack, even the phone ringing. Dr.
Durand prescribed tranquilizers, which she took around the clock, but “all they did was keep me kind of stupid but still frightened all the time.” She was experiencing, she later realized, “a classic case of acute anxiety.”

Shirley had never believed in psychoanalysis, which she felt was “a little bit like Christian Science.” Years earlier, her “fancy doctor” in Westport had tried to sell her on it, but she had rejected him soundly. Now it took the combined ministrations of Stanley, the Karmillers, and Durand to persuade her to see Dr. James Toolan, a psychiatrist from New York who had recently set up shop in Bennington. Shirley initially doubted whether he was intelligent enough to help her, but she finally consented to try. Fortified with her “usual tranquilizers, a sedative injection from [Durand], two stiff drinks, and stanley and barbara”—Barbara drove, Stanley accompanied Shirley from the car into the office—she set out on a late-winter afternoon. “i think getting out of the car in front of the doctor’s office was the most terrifying minute of my life,” she wrote later. Together she and Stanley went down a long path and a flight of steps into a hallway and then a waiting room, where Toolan was waiting to usher her inside. The journey seemed “many million miles long.” But she found Toolan a comfortable and reassuring presence. Of course he could help her, he said. Why had she waited so long? After the appointment, she had “a sudden very clear happy picture of what it might be like to be free again” and announced to Stanley proudly that she planned to have the “fastest analysis on record.”

In the beginning, Shirley did progress quickly. The purpose of the therapy was simply to get her back into her established routine—groceries, getting the mail, driving Stanley to the college—rather than to delve into the underlying issues that had triggered her anxiety. “The whole idea was to get her back on track, not to examine how this woman wants to reshape her life,” Corinne, her daughter-in-law, recalls. “You give her a bunch of pills and if she can go to Powers Market that means she’s getting better.” Two weeks after her first appointment, she was able to drive herself to Toolan’s office, with Stanley along to help her get from the car to the waiting room. She managed the next visit entirely on her own. The next step was the post office. One morning she and Stanley got in the car and drove the few blocks. Then they
went in together, “with stanley practically leading me.” She managed to remember the mailbox combination—“thank heaven it opened the first time around”—and then raced back to the car while Stanley gathered the mail. Each new step was followed by “a terrible after-effect of terror and trembling and gasping for breath,” but the aftershocks lessened with each repetition. Finally, she managed to complete the whole errand alone. “that one was a bad day afterwards but i was so triumphant that i didn’t really care.”

The same process had to be repeated for each new destination, such as going to the grocery store or into Bennington proper. The process, she wrote, “amazed and fascinated” her, “because it was so completely learning how to do things
alone
, like a baby learning to walk. . . . each step was a great triumph.” By spring, “though at considerable cost in fear,” she was able to function “almost normally.” But there were many setbacks. As Toolan explained to her, she was not yet mentally strong enough to maintain the gains she made. One day in Powers Market, Larry Powers noticed that she seemed to be hanging onto her grocery cart for support; her knuckles were white. “How are things going?” he asked her. “The doctor says I’m all right,” she replied. A few minutes later he saw that she had abandoned her cart, half filled, in the middle of the aisle. She called from home and asked him to finish filling her order and deliver it. “The doctor says I’m better,” she told him, “but I’m not sure.” A year later, she was still unable to enter the Grand Union supermarket in Bennington; it was simply too big.

Even though Shirley’s ability to go through the motions of daily life improved, writing was impossible. All winter, Carol Brandt checked in regularly—did she have anything new on the horizon? At first, Shirley downplayed her illness: “I am anxious to get to work, and in that irritable state where I am furious with myself because nothing happens,” she wrote in January. Brandt asked her to come into the city to meet with an editor at
Redbook
who was very interested in her writing, but the very thought of the trip sent her into “a quite serious paroxysm of terror.” That was the most she let on until March, when she finally confessed what was going on. Brandt professed shock, but she must have suspected that something was seriously wrong. She sent Shirley a
handwritten letter on her home stationery as a token of her friendship. “How grim for you—In our many telephone calls I never suspected it—That you are making progress is so good—That writing is your release is so natural and inevitable.” Brandt passed on Shirley’s letter about her difficulties to Pat Covici and asked him to destroy it. “It is your work that speaks for you in this curious city,” she told Shirley.

Covici, too, was supportive. “I was moved and touched and saddened when I learned of your attack of anxiety,” he wrote.

That agonizing mental state is not unknown to me. Anxiety fights dirty and dies hard. But, oh, what a relief when it leaves you. The burden of mental depression is difficult to surmount. . . . But you have the capacity to throw it off. And when you do breathe freer and think clearer . . . your imagination will take hold and shape things to your liking.

He added a few words of reassurance that would have meant a great deal to Shirley at any time, but were especially meaningful now:

With your last book,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, you have joined the few who can be called the masterful prose-painters of our time. With the very first paragraph in your book one is held and cannot help but go on reading, so vivid and rich and amusing is your prose, with so many felicities of wit and humor. You are exquisitely endowed with a fine sensibility, a rich vocabulary and a creative imagination. Never worry, you will soon be wrapped up in the writing of a new novel.

Geraldine and Leslie, so rarely able to provide emotional support, found the whole situation mystifying. Shirley tried to describe her condition in a letter that she was unable to finish; she did not write to them all spring, to Geraldine’s dismay. Instead, she decided to explain it in a phone conversation that left the Jacksons bewildered. “what ‘ails’ me, pop, is what they used to call a nervous breakdown,” she wrote bluntly afterward. The first signs had appeared perhaps eight years earlier,
around the time of her breakdown after
The Bird’s Nest
, when Durand had begun prescribing her tranquilizers “because i was so jumpy all the time.” Geraldine, who had been considerably worried by her daughter’s silence, was unsure of how to respond. “This thing that has been wrong with you—is it a very unusual thing?” she asked. Even more cluelessly, she wrote that Stanley sounded like “a good strong bulwark. . . . Poor man. It must have been tough for him.”

Shirley did lean heavily on Stanley during these months. When he went to Michigan to lecture in May 1963, she came along as a visiting writer, managing the trip only by drinking steadily through it: they got on an evening train with a bottle of bourbon for her and a bottle of scotch for him and woke up in the morning in Detroit. (“Two bottles of liquor on an overnight trip sounds as though you will have to be poured off in the morning,” Geraldine commented, unhelpfully.) For the rest of the year, their travel was minimal. In July, they went to New York to lecture at the Columbia Writers’ Conference and attend a special screening of
The Haunting
. Shirley had been looking forward to seeing the film, but all her normal New York activities were now sources of anxiety. “My two big difficulties . . . are a reluctance to be packed in tightly anywhere (as in cocktail parties or traffic jams!) and a reluctance to go alone across open spaces (like walking down a street),” she confided to Brandt. Both were easier if she wasn’t alone, but Stanley could not accompany her at every moment—he had responsibilities at Columbia. Julie Van Vliet, her publicist at Viking, was dispatched to help out if needed. The trip went well, including her lecture: “i was quite nervous ahead of time about getting frightened in the middle and having to stop, and stanley was ready to take over but actually once i started i forgot all about the panics and enjoyed myself,” she wrote to her parents afterward. When she saw Toolan at his New York office the next day, he was “very proud.”

For the most part, Stanley seems to have kept Shirley’s problems private. Laura Nowak once caught him in a rare confessional moment: when she greeted him at a Bennington concert and asked why Shirley wasn’t with him, he replied simply, “She doesn’t want to go out anymore.” But he was under significant pressure himself. In addition to his teaching, he had two new projects: a
Portable Darwin
reader and
The Promised End
, a
collection of reviews and essays published between 1942 and 1962, from his early essay on John Steinbeck to more recent pieces on myth, ritual, and religion. And he and Barbara Karmiller were still working on the Burke anthology, which now looked like it would require two volumes. Joanne, who had graduated from boarding school in June and was planning to attend Bennington in the fall, spent the summer of 1963 at home, keeping Shirley company and helping her with her errands.

Sarah was sent home from school that fall after just a couple of months. Shirley was disappointed but resigned. Though Sarah was having problems of her own, it was useful to have her around: there was still “a long siege ahead.” Throughout the winter and spring, the two of them both saw Toolan twice a week: one of them sat in the waiting room reading while the other had her session. In the spring of 1964, Sarah reapplied to school. Shirley felt too ill to accompany her to the interview—Stanley and Laurence took her—but wrote a letter describing how helpful she had been in running the house while her mother was unwell. In addition, she had written a short story that Shirley was sufficiently impressed with to send to Carol Brandt. While clearly less taken with the teenager’s work, Brandt gamely offered to shop it around.