Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (76 page)

Stanley made phone calls: Geraldine and Leslie, Lulu, the Karmillers, the Ellisons. Word quickly spread in tiny North Bennington. Visitors began to arrive: friends from the college, Stanley’s poker group. It felt as if “hundreds of people” came to the house that day, Sarah, who was then sixteen, recalled. As Shirley might have done, Stanley told her to go upstairs and put on a girdle and stockings. Thirteen-year-old Barry sat alone on the porch, strumming the same guitar riff over and over. Joanne, nineteen, was in Rochester for the summer, working in theater; she was away that day and did not make it back to North
Bennington until two days later, after Shirley had already been cremated, in accordance with her wishes. Laurence, age twenty-two, and Corinne were living in New York, where he was teaching music at a school in Spanish Harlem. That weekend he wandered into a voodoo shop and bought some “goofer dust,” said to bring money. The next day, Stanley called to tell him his mother had died. “That was my get-rich-quick—five hundred dollars [inheritance] or something,” he recalled. He always wondered if in some way he had been responsible.

In New Hampshire, the
New Yorker
writer Francis Steegmuller heard the news on the radio. Many others, on vacation, learned about Shirley’s death from
The New York Times
, which ran an obituary on August 11, or from
Newsweek
or
Time
, both of which ran short appreciations. Irving Kristol picked up the
Times
at the airport in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and saw the obituary: “That airport will, for me, remain forever haunted,” he wrote to Stanley. Leonard Brown’s daughter heard about Shirley’s death on CBS news and wrote to say how much Brown had always admired her writing. In Baltimore, Jeanne Beatty clipped the obituary from the
Times
and put it away in the file where she kept Shirley’s letters. She did not write to Stanley, who probably never knew of her existence.

Condolence telegrams and letters—as many as the “Lottery” letters, if not more—poured in from colleagues, friends, strangers. Roger Straus, Shirley’s first publisher, who would later recall her as “a rather haunted woman.” Marshall Best from Viking, who wrote of “Shirley’s rare talents and wonderfully warm spirit.” Jay Williams, who had long ago terrified Shirley by seeming to conjure a demon in front of her. Tom and Kit Foster, neighbors for so many years. Stanley’s
New Yorker
colleagues: William and Cecille Shawn, Philip and Edith Hamburger, E. B. and Katharine White, Brendan Gill, Andy Logan. Bruce Bliven, Stanley’s onetime boss at
The New Republic
. Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Fred Burkhardt, the Bennington College president who had brought Stanley back to the campus. Florence Shapiro, whose presence on
Spectre
and in Stanley’s life had irked Shirley so in college and after. Louis Untermeyer, Shirley’s friend from Suffield. Virginia and Bill Olsen, neighbors in Westport. Jesse Zel Lurie, Stanley’s long ago
Communist comrade, now the editor of
Hadassah Magazine
. College friends: Ben Zimmerman, Frank Orenstein (June Mirken Mintz was traveling and could not be reached). Walter Lehrman, Stanley’s fellow blues scholar. Myron Kolatch, his editor at
The New Leader
. Bernard and Ann Malamud. Kenneth and Libbie Burke. Stanley’s students, current and past, including Sandra Hochman, who was traveling in Hong Kong and heard the news there. The folksinger Tom Glazer, who recalled attending Stanley and Shirley’s wedding, nearly twenty-five years earlier to the day: “so different, I am sure, from any other wedding.” The renowned cookbook author Julia Child and her husband, Paul, who had met Shirley the previous summer at Bread Loaf and remembered her “wonderful talent” and “warm and wonderful personality.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had read a number of Shirley’s books after meeting Stanley in New York and saw her as “a kindred spirit in many ways.” “Shirley is the main reason I don’t even try to write fiction,” wrote a classmate from Syracuse. “It was too humiliating to go to school with her.” Many readers did not bother to sign their names, but instead identified themselves only as “a devoted fan.” “She was one of us, and greater and smarter and funnier than any of us,” wrote a housewife on Long Island. “It was so good to know she was
there
.”

One of the condolence letters came from Phoebe Pettingell, a shy, awkward Bennington student from Chicago who had taken Stanley’s introductory English class her freshman year. In December of the following year, she and Stanley would be married. The marriage lasted until Stanley’s sudden death, from a heart attack, on July 29, 1970.

STANLEY SPENT THE
first month in shock. He had no idea how to manage his day-to-day routine without Shirley; he could not even make coffee. Joanne and Sarah stayed with him, alternating nights. They cooked him dinner or, more often, took a taxi to a restaurant somewhere. He made them answer the condolence letters, ten a day, at random. That fall he taught his usual schedule—Myth, Rit, and Lit—and he tried to finish the short book about Flannery O’Connor that he had begun earlier that summer. “More than usual, it isn’t very good,” he told Kenneth
Burke. Now that Shirley was gone, he was unable to continue using the yellow paper she had loved; after sharing it with her for nearly a quarter century, he went back to white. In October, Burke nominated him for the National Institute of Arts and Letters, but even that honor did nothing for him. “I do not give a damn whether or not I am admitted,” he wrote to Burke. “If Shirley never made it, I do not need it.”

What energized Stanley most, in those early months, were his efforts on behalf of Shirley’s reputation. The day after Shirley died, Nemerov prepared a press release that included his own perceptive assessment of her talent. “In an age whose most-praised novels are given to descriptions of how it feels to sit on a real toilet seat, she told her fables of the real and abstract life . . . in sentences that read about as crisp and clean as those of Jane Austen,” Nemerov wrote. “By her power of writing such sentences she achieved her wonderful strangeness, which has to do with the power of magic both black and white in our lives.” Unfortunately, the journalists who wrote her obituaries ignored this aspect of her fiction, preferring to concentrate on the sensationalistic. The headline of her
Times
obituary identified her as “Author of Horror Classic,” reducing her body of work, as would many other such assessments in the coming years, to “The Lottery” (a “horror” story only in the loosest sense).
Newsweek
judged her an “absolute original” but emphasized the supernatural aspect of both her personality and her fiction, calling her “the most benign, warm-hearted, humorous and generous of witches.” The
New York Herald Tribune
repeated the old line about her writing with “a broomstick, not a pen”—in its headline, no less—and wondered yet again at her ability to write both family humor and ghost stories.

Stanley set out to “dissipate some of the ‘Virginia Werewoolf of seance-fiction’ fog.” The
Saturday Evening Post
still had one last story of Jackson’s: “The Possibility of Evil,” originally written in 1958. It ran on December 18, 1965, with Stanley’s introduction, for which he sought approval from the children, Nemerov, and Barbara Karmiller before publishing. The surprise of readers upon discovering that Shirley Jackson, author of “violent and terrifying” fiction, was also an “apparently happy” wife and mother, he wrote, was “the most elementary misunderstanding of what a writer is and how a writer works, on the order of
expecting Herman Melville to be a big white whale.” Whether or not she was, in fact, a happy wife and mother—a judgment Stanley finally was too honest to offer without a qualifier—his observation is undoubtedly correct. “Shirley Jackson wrote in a variety of forms and styles because she was, like everyone else, a complex human being, confronting the world in many different roles and moods,” Stanley continued. She had eschewed publicity, he said, because “she believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.”

The
Post
’s readers, presented with this introduction, might well have expected that a story in an entirely new style would follow—something like
Come Along with Me
. What they found, rather, was one that epitomized the method Jackson had been perfecting ever since “Janice,” the story that first caught Stanley’s attention: the deceptively simple but finally devastating exposure of hypocrisy, cruelty, or inhumanity in all its many forms. As usual, a woman is at its center.

Like “When Things Get Dark,” Jackson’s wartime story about the innocuous-seeming Mrs. Hope, who sends letters of support to whomever she meets, “The Possibility of Evil” tells of an elderly woman who takes pleasure in sending anonymous letters to unwitting recipients. In this case, however, the letters are intended not to lift people’s morale, but to destroy it by confirming their worst fears. A young mother who has been worrying about her baby’s development gets a note that reads, “Didn’t you ever see an idiot child before?” A woman who is about to have an operation gets one that says, “You never know about doctors. . . . Suppose the knife slipped accidentally?” The writer of the letters, Adela Strangeworth, considers it her duty to sow these seeds of discontent. Otherwise, her neighbors “would have gone unsuspectingly ahead with their lives, never aware of possible evil lurking nearby.” But one day she is discovered, and the townspeople take their revenge.

Shirley Jackson saw herself, it seems clear, as a version of Miss Strangeworth: she believed her role as a writer was to draw back the curtain on the darkness within the human psyche. The disturbance experienced by the recipients of Miss Strangeworth’s letters must have been something like the sensation that overcame the thousands of unsuspecting readers who opened
The New Yorker
on June 26, 1948, and were
confronted by a story unlike anything they had ever read before. They admired it, they raged at it, they were puzzled by it; but no matter their reaction, it illuminated their world. Jackson paid a high price for the evil she exposed: her hate mail, her ostracism from her neighbors, her crippling anxiety. Her insistence on telling unpleasant truths is surely part of the reason her work has been less appreciated than it deserves to be. Nonetheless, she kept it up until the end, sending her literary bombs unerringly to their targets, then standing back to watch them explode.

Select Bibliography

SHIRLEY JACKSON’S
PUBLISHED WORKS

The original editions of each of Shirley Jackson’s books are listed below. As explained at the beginning of the Notes, I often consulted a different edition in writing this biography.

     NOVELS AND STORY COLLECTIONS

The Road Through the Wall
. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.

The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris
. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949.

Hangsaman
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951.

The Bird’s Nest
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954.

The Sundial
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958.

The Haunting of Hill House
. New York: Viking, 1959.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
: New York: Viking, 1962.

     NONFICTION

Life Among the Savages: An Uneasy Chronicle
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.

Raising Demons
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.

Special Delivery: A Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.

     CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Witchcraft of Salem Village
. New York: Random House, 1956.

Nine Magic Wishes
. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1963.

Famous Sally
. New York: Harlin Quist, 1966.

     POSTHUMOUS COLLECTIONS

Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed.
Come Along with Me
. New York: Viking, 1966. Includes the unfinished novel
Come Along with Me
, fourteen previously uncollected stories, and three lectures.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed.
The Magic of Shirley Jackson
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Includes eleven stories from the
Lottery
collection,
The Bird’s Nest
,
Life Among the Savages
, and
Raising Demons
.

Hyman, Laurence Jackson, and Sarah Hyman Stewart, eds.
Just an Ordinary Day
. New York: Bantam, 1997. Includes thirty-one previously unpublished stories and articles and twenty-three published but uncollected stories.

Oates, Joyce Carol, ed.
Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories
. New York: Library of America, 2010. Includes the entire
Lottery
collection,
The Haunting of Hill House
,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, a selection of stories from
Come Along with Me
and
Just an Ordinary Day
, and the lecture “Biography of a Story.”