Read Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Online
Authors: Ruth Franklin
Tags: #Literary, #Women, #Biography & Autobiography
58
“Don’t fall too hard” . . . “poor husbands”
: Dorothy Ayling to SJ, January 22 and February 3, 1935, SJ-LOC, Box 4.
58
“Nobody recognized your picture”
: Dorothy Ayling to SJ, April 5, 1935, SJ-LOC, Box 4.
58
“I shall
never
be able”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
58
an invented language called Lildsune
: SJ-LOC, Box 40.
59
Jackson published her first story
:
Meliora
12, no. 1 (Spring 1935). University of Rochester Archives, Rochester, N.Y.
59
“I must really go”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
59
“a month of evil omen”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
59
“I die a million deaths of tears”
: SJ-LOC, Box 40.
59
“Why does life” . . . “than the last”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
60
“spoiled” and “selfish”
: Jeanne Marie Bedel to SJ, June 16, 1936. SJ-LOC, Box 6.
60
“unbearable”
: Quoted in letter from Dorothy Ayling to SJ, June 15, 1935, SJ-LOC, Box 4.
60
“I thought you would understand”
: Note in SJ’s 1935 diary, SJ-LOC, Box 1.
60
“Poor Jeanou”
: Ayling to SJ, June 15, 1935.
60
“Write to me”
: Bedel to SJ, n.d., SJ-LOC, Box 6. Sadly, SJ’s letters to Bedel are lost. Bedel’s relatives, in accordance with her wishes, burned her papers after her death, in 1966.
61
“has the stubborn persistency”
: Ezra Pound,
The Spirit of Romance
(London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), 178; accessed September 7, 2015 via archive.org: https://archive.org/stream/spiritofromancea00pounrich#page/178/mode/2up.
61
“I know all things—except myself”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
61
“She gave me”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
61
“i went to college” . . . “i was all alone”
: “Notes for a Story on the Grotesque,” SJ-LOC, Box 14.
62
Hangsaman
may be read
: See Judie Newman, “Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering,” and John G. Parks, “Chambers of Yearning,” in
Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy
, ed. Bernice M. Murphy (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2005), 176, 242.
62
“She
wants me
”
:
Hangsaman
, 214.
62
“barely escapes a Lesbian seduction”
: SJ-LOC, Box 45.
63
must have deeply sympathized
: This sympathy is also evident in “The Lovely Night,” a story SJ rewrote in different forms, but which draws on an early draft of
Hangsaman
in which Natalie, in high school, accompanies her friends Doris and Ginny to a dance. The story indicates that Doris and Ginny, who dance together in defiance of others’ stares and comments, are lesbians. In the published version, at the dance Natalie meets a popular girl who encourages her to shun Doris and Ginny; the story ends with a boy escorting her home. But in a draft, Natalie wants to come to her friends’ defense: “they’re only here to have fun. . . . they don’t mean any real harm. . . . it’s just that they’re different, and they want a different kind of fun.” SJ-LOC, Boxes 17 and 45.
63
discover herself mentioned
: In fact, the book makes it clear that Tony is “the other half of [Natalie’s] split personality. . . . The drama in
Hangsaman
is that of an abnormally sensitive girl’s narrow escape from schizophrenia”: Jeannette H. Foster,
Sex Variant Women in Literature
(Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1985), 332.
63
“i happen to know”
: SJ-LOC, Box 14.
64
“there was a devil”
: SJ-LOC, Box 45. Asmodeus is mentioned by Dr. Wright in
The Bird’s Nest
; see chapter 12.
64
“glorious” . . . “like some privacy”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
65
“Wrote an allegory”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
65
“The idea is”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
65
Story
magazine
: SJ-LOC, Box 11.
65
“Wrote a play tonight”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
66
“very nice” . . . “technically known as Hell”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
66
“For people who do not care”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
66
“because i refused”
: “Notes for a Story on the Grotesque,” SJ-LOC, Box 14.
67
A psychiatrist who treated her
: Oppenheimer,
Private Demons
, 45.
67
likely influenced by
Hangsaman
: Bernice M. Murphy, “ ‘Do You Know Who I Am?’ Reconsidering Shirley Jackson,” in
Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy
, 8.
67
Plath . . . admired Jackson
: Linda Wagner-Martin,
Sylvia Plath: A Biography
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 97.
67
“deadening” . . . “when it comes?”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
67
“old fears of people”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
67
“nerves and overwrought temperament”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
67
“the fearful cold waters below”
: SJ-LOC, Box 1.
67
“ ‘you were just going to’ ”
: “Fugue: A Short Story,” SJ-LOC, Box 17.
68
“You don’t mind”
: SJ-LOC, Box 44. The letter is filed, hilariously, under “Letters to unknown correspondents.”
68
a thousand words a day
: Oppenheimer,
Private Demons
, 45. This number has been repeated often by others, but I was unable to confirm it independently.
68
“stay there and behave”
: “Preface (to be read aloud to a group of sympathetic listeners),” SJ-LOC, Box 30.
69
“I wish to further”
: Syracuse University file on SJ, Syracuse University Archives, Syracuse, N.Y.
69
“a hotbed of communism”
: Michael Palmer to SJ, n.d., SJ-LOC, Box 10.
69
“Since there were no books” . . . make her bed
: “All I Can Remember,”
JOD
, xii–xiv. After SJ left home, she and her brother were barely in contact. “A fine brother and sister we are! We scarcely know where each other lives,” Barry Jackson wrote to SJ in 1948, (SJ-LOC, Box 2).
3. INTENTIONS CHARGED WITH POWER
70
“I wanted to see”
: http://philippehalsman.com/?image=jumps.
72
“My ancestors were”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33.
72
“paid, even in Russia”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33. Elsewhere, SEH said his grandfather was a pawnbroker.
72
Stanley would later tell stories
: Interview with Phoebe Pettingell, March 26, 2013.
72
“sensitive, idealistic, and deeply religious soul”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
73
“She was one of those women”
: Interview with Pettingell, April 6, 2015.
73
“It has not yet been declared”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33.
73
a case of pneumonia
: In another version of this story, Lulu was told by the doctor who delivered Stanley that the baby was certain not to live. She left the hospital thinking her son was dead, only to be told two weeks later that he had survived after all. Interview with Pettingell, March 26, 2013.
73
“a willful, independent, unemotional man”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
74
“peremptory,” with “a tough demeanor”
: Interview with Walter Bernstein, February 27, 2013.
74
“I was scared”
: Ibid.
74
“I invariably took her side”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
74
Stanley’s IQ test
: Interview with Sarah Hyman DeWitt, February 17, 2013.
74
“frightened of his intelligence”
: Interview with Pettingell, August 12, 2011.
75
“full of savage little children”
: John Wakeman,
World Authors, 1950–1970
(New York: H. H. Wilson, 1975), 699.
75
he delighted a student
: Interview with Catherine Morrison, November 6, 2013.
75
he raised his hand
: Judy Oppenheimer,
Private Demons
(New York: Putnam, 1988), 56.
75
“competed with great success”
: Wakeman,
World Authors
, 699.
75
structure a story
: Unpublished story (“i would have said that i knew every grocery in this town”), SJ-LOC, Box 26.
76
“militant atheist”
: Wakeman,
World Authors
, 699.
76
“freed my mind”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
76
“Jesus is a myth”
: Wallace Fowlie,
Journal of Rehearsals
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977), 158.
77
“became stagnant physically”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
77
“For the first time” . . . “without being ashamed”
: Ibid.
77
“watch—with dazzling cruelty”
: Claude Fredericks,
The Journal of Claude Fredericks
, October 25, 1961. Marc Harrington of the Claude Fredericks Foundation generously provided me with excerpts from Fredericks’s journal.
77
“One got used to seeing”
: Malcolm Cowley,
The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s
(New York: Viking, 1964), 22.
78
$2.39 per week
: Ibid., 22–23.
78
“His idea of a good time”
: Interview with Laurence Jackson Hyman, February 17, 2013.
78
“Mom has periodical”
: SEH to Moe Hyman, May 19, 1932, SEH-LOC, Box 1.
79
an underage girl
: Interview with Pettingell, April 6, 2015.
79
Lulu once discovered
: Ibid.
79
“At least I do”
: SEH to Moe Hyman, May 29, 1932, SEH-LOC, Box 1.
79
“perhaps the greatest”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33.
79
“He knew where”
: Interview with Sarah Hyman DeWitt, February 17, 2013.
80
funny, if probably apocryphal, story
: Bernard Malamud, “Stanley’s Files,”
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 14.
80
campus on Flatbush Avenue
: Janna Malamud Smith,
My Father Is a Book
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 40.
80
“either cut down” . . . “completely disregarded”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33.
81
“miserably lonely” . . . “like a harelip”
: SEH-LOC, Box 32.
81
“dreadfully serious” . . . “learns to walk”
: Ibid.
81
Walter even snuck out
: Walter Bernstein,
Inside Out
(New York: Da Capo, 2000), 36.
82
“enter the fold”
: SEH-LOC, Box 18.
82
“He was born”
: Interview with Bernstein, February 27, 2013.
82
“I have read”
: SEH-LOC, Box 33.