Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (75 page)

Jackson at Bread Loaf, August 1964 (first row, second from right).
Howard Nemerov is in the back row, second from left.

It had been an exhausting summer. She and Stanley spent part of July in New York, where they both lectured again at the Columbia Writers’ Conference and she and Brandt finally had their long planned lunch at the Four Seasons. They had to leave the city in a rush when Stanley abruptly fell ill. A New York doctor said he should go directly to the hospital for treatment in an oxygen tent. Stanley, who always put off medical care until it could wait no longer, refused and headed home instead. Back in North Bennington, Dr. Durand warned that if he didn’t change his lifestyle, he risked an imminent coronary. Durand instructed him to cut down on smoking and drinking, reduce the amount of salt in his diet, and lose 50 pounds: he currently weighed 230.

Shirley sprang into action, acquiring numerous low-calorie and low-salt cookbooks and sweeping the pantry clean of canned and processed foods, “all the lovely chili and rich soups we liked so well.” She developed imitation versions of his favorite foods, including a low-calorie kugel made from cauliflower instead of potatoes, which she admitted was terrible. They also both started using Metrecal, a new brand of liquid protein
drinks designed to provide 900 calories per day. She left Joanne and Sarah in charge of Stanley’s diet while she went to Bread Loaf and came back to find them all 15 pounds thinner. Stanley was appropriately grumpy about the whole ordeal. “Currently teetering at 202 [pounds], hungry and mean,” he reported to Kenneth Burke. “I can stand every part of the diet except the congratulations, the people who say ‘Look at the way you bound up the stairs. Don’t you feel
much
better? . . . I think that bounding up stairs is a ridiculous infantile substitute for a free adult life of eating and drinking one’s self comatose.”

When Stanley went back to school that fall, his students were shocked to see how loose his clothing was. “Mr. Hyman lost a lot of weight, but his suits stayed fat,” one remarked. He wouldn’t have them altered, because he was still dieting. Despite the weight loss, he still seemed unwell. “He looked not slender but wasted,” Brendan Gill commented, his clothes hanging in “grotesque billows.” Stanley made light of it, complaining that the wind caught in his clothing and slowed him down when he tried to chase girls. Gill wondered whether Stanley’s prey was “only sometimes imaginary.”

As Shirley cared for Stanley, the fall brought another sadness. After a brief illness, Pat Covici died suddenly on October 14, at age seventy-five. Brandt had sent word to him in the hospital that Jackson’s work on
her new book was going well. “I knew this would be the kind of message that would give him great cheer,” she told Jackson. In the six years they worked together, he had proved an ideal editor for her: supportive, enthusiastic, and above all patient. When she found calendar deadlines too stressful, he came up with “Dogwood Day” as a gentle substitute. During her time of acute anxiety, he expressed unconditional sympathy and encouragement. Jackson, who still avoided travel when possible, did not go down to New York for his funeral at Riverside Memorial Chapel, which was attended by Bellow, Steinbeck, and Arthur Miller, among many others. “A great editor is father, mother, teacher, personal devil, and personal god,” said Steinbeck, who often kick-started a day’s work by pretending he was writing a letter to Covici. He called the editor “my collaborator and my conscience.” Brandt, too, felt the loss acutely. “It seems to me I have known him forever and ever,” she wrote to Jackson. “He was a wonderful man, a wonderful person and a wonderful editor.”

Jackson at Bread Loaf.

Thankfully, Covici’s death did not derail the progress Jackson was making. At the end of October, she submitted “The Bus” to Brandt with the news that she had put aside
The Fair Land of Far
for the moment. As her agent had suspected, the book had served its purpose of getting her limbered up for a “more grownup type of thing,” as Jackson called her new project. “Working, working,” she assured Brandt in November. They were both eager to match her with a new editor at Viking. After considering the options, Brandt proposed Corlies (Cork) Smith, a young editor whose literary taste ranged from highbrow to commercial and who had recently pulled Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel from the slush pile. Jackson was enthusiastic, and she and Smith hit it off when they met for lunch in January 1965. Brandt promptly negotiated a new contract for $20,000 that would allow Jackson to continue to draw $1,000 each month, allowing her just over eighteen months to finish the novel. “It is Viking’s wish and intention to give you peace of mind in which to work,” she assured Jackson. Brandt also negotiated a higher royalty rate.

“I am full of awe for you,” Jackson responded. By now she was “seriously at work at last” on the new book, which she thought she could easily finish within eighteen months, and “certainly with peace of mind under these terms.” It was to be called
Come Along with Me
.

IN HER LAST DIARY
, Jackson had imagined writing a different kind of book, “perhaps a funny book. a happy book . . . [in] a new style.”
Come Along with Me
was her attempt at a novel in this new style, markedly different from anything she had previously written, a comic novel featuring an unnamed heroine who outwardly resembles Jackson in middle age more than any other character in her work. Her age and size are both forty-four, she announces on the first page, “in case it’s vital to know,” and she “dabble[s] in the supernatural.” Her husband has recently died, and she is moving to a new city to begin a new life. There are shades of “Louisa, Please Come Home,” especially as she tries on new names searching for one that fits, but this woman is an adult, in full control of her destiny. The name she settles on, as we know, is Angela Motorman.

This narrator’s idiosyncratic, superstition-inflected voice contains something of Merricat, but a Merricat who somehow managed to grow up, leave the house, and get married. After her husband’s death—the circumstances of which are never made clear—she put all his possessions in the barn, just in case he “might turn up someday asking, the way they sometimes do.” In addition to his paintings and half-finished canvases—“my God, he was a lousy painter”—there were boxes and cartons of letters and other files. After selling all the furniture, she simply got on the train and left for the next city available: “I hadn’t ever been there and it seemed a good size and I had enough in my pocket to pay for the fare.” Again like Louisa, she has no trouble finding a room in a boardinghouse—“perfectly square, which was good”—and makes friends with the landlady, Mrs. Faun, who offers her tea and cookies. The house rules are simple: no smoking in bed, no pets, “and anything you raise by way of spirits you have to put back yourself.”

There is a jocular inflection here that is altogether new. This “happy book” is no
Bird’s Nest
or
Castle
: Jackson is thoroughly enjoying herself. “In case you are wondering about me having lunch on the train and coffee and a doughnut in the station, and now a cup of tea and cookies, let me just remark that I have plenty of room to put it all,” the narrator jokes in an aside. This is a comfort in largeness that has never appeared
before in Jackson’s work, a sharp contrast to the woman who counts calories and drinks Metrecal. Even her supernatural powers are mainly of a cozy, domestic type: as a child, she knew who would be on the phone before it rang and could see creatures—“what the cat saw”—under the dining room table. “i’m a kind-hearted mama who studies evil all the time,” she says in an early draft. When she decides to give a séance for the other rooming-house residents, Mrs. Faun is initially worried: “Are you sure . . . that you are not tampering with things better left alone?” The narrator assures her that “it’s exactly like taking a long-distance call. Once you hang up, it’s over.”

The novel amounts to only about seventy-five typescript pages; it’s not clear where Jackson intended to take it. There is no real plot, only a series of episodes featuring this singular narrator and her “fine high gleefulness.” “I think you understand me,” she tells the reader. “I have everything I want.” How close Jackson was to getting it.

IN EARLY FEBRUARY
1965, Jackson fell ill, probably with pneumonia, and was hospitalized for a week. She recovered just in time to travel with Hyman to Georgia to see Flannery O’Connor’s estate, including her famous peacocks. Hyman was planning a short book about O’Connor, who had died of lupus the previous year at age thirty-nine. The trip, Jackson reported to Brandt, was “splendid but tiring”; as of early March she was still not supposed to climb stairs, lift anything heavy, or “overdo in any fashion.” Her confidence had been shaken by the illness: “My whole life has been turned upside down in some lunatic fashion, and I can’t seem to come to terms with things yet.” But she was happy to be writing again, if only “half back at work . . . the hardest part of all is taking it easy.”

She could not afford to convalesce for long. At the urging of her psychiatrist, James Toolan, she had planned the five college lectures for the spring, with stops in Syracuse, Madison, Akron, South Bend, and Chicago. Since the Morris was wearing out, she treated herself to a new MG sedan for the trip: the lecture fees, she bragged to her parents, covered the cost of the car. The students, as always, adored her, even
when Hyman was the purported headliner: when he spoke at Nazareth College in Rochester, students hung around afterward until he got the hint and offered to introduce them to his wife. But the trip was difficult. The weather was unseaonably hot, consistently over ninety degrees, and Jackson “dripped all over” the pages she read. At Syracuse, one of her hosts worried that she looked like “a sick lady.” At the University of Chicago, she participated in an arts festival that required her to live in a student dorm for four days, taking her meals in the cafeteria, which she hated. “the schedule was so wearing that i thought i wouldn’t make it,” she confessed afterward. Compared with Bennington students, “full of ideas and enthusiasm,” she found the Chicago undergrads “dull drab creatures” who “only wanted to get their papers written and their homework done so they could get out of the place.” Even the mood of student rebellion, palpable at every other college she visited, had not infected them: when she asked if there had been any civil rights demonstrations at the university, “these kids just stared at the idea, completely apathetic.”

Exhausted, Shirley spent most of June and July at home, though she and Stanley did take Barry, along with his cousin Scott, on a road trip to Canada. Though she must have been weak, her mood, Barry recalls, was “gleeful.” She drove with the MG’s top down; Stanley, in the passenger seat, would light two Pall Malls off the lighter and hand one to her. They spent the nights in one of the roadside motels newly popping up beside the interstates, with the exception of a splurge at the Château Frontenac, a historic hotel in Quebec City. On Bastille Day, Shirley and Stanley let the boys buy Roman candles, which they set off along the waterfront. Even after the police showed up to stop them, Shirley—uncharacteristically—didn’t get angry. “My cousin and I were into all kinds of mischief that went entirely and intentionally unpunished,” Barry remembers. “It was a really happy time when Shirley and Stanley seemed to be getting along fine . . . no dark clouds on the horizon at all.” Perhaps the dynamic between them had shifted back to symbiosis. Or perhaps Shirley was preparing to take the decisive step.

Later, a couple of Shirley’s friends would say that she had acted unusually during that summer, as if she had a premonition that her death
was approaching. She visited June Mirken Mintz unexpectedly in New York, bringing a huge box of chocolates for June’s son. In general, she seemed relaxed and happy. And, in the very last days of her life, she sent Carol Brandt a strange, vaguely worded letter. She was about to leave for a wonderful journey, she said, where she would meet many new people. Though she offered no details, Brandt had the sense she was not talking about an ordinary trip. And it was clear that she was going alone.

Brandt, too, wondered later whether Shirley had foreseen her death. But there is a simpler explanation. The journey she was about to make was the journey she had been planning for so many years. Like the wife in “A Day in the Jungle,” or Eleanor in
Hill House
, or Angela Motorman, she would step through a crack and disappear.

THE AFTERNOON OF
August 8, 1965, was warm and pleasant. Shirley went upstairs to take her customary nap after lunch. Several hours later, Stanley tried to rouse her and found that he could not. In fear, he called out for Sarah. “I can’t wake your mother,” he said in a tone she had never heard before. Madly, he held a mirror in front of Shirley’s nose and mouth to see if it would fog. “Dad, I think she’s dead,” Sarah told him.

Since it was Sunday, they had a hard time reaching a doctor. Durand finally arrived several hours later. By then, they knew. The official cause was a coronary occlusion due to arteriosclerosis, with hypertensive cardiovascular disease as a contributing factor.