Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (89 page)

327
   
the Virgin Mary
: Interview with Jai Holly, July 22, 2013.

328
   
Friends recalled
: Interview with Midge Decter, March 13, 2013.

328
   
“Whatever you do”
: Interview with Naomi Decter, August 11, 2011.

328
   
“It was full of life”
: Interview with Midge Decter, March 13, 2013.

328
   
Some guests would complain
: Oppenheimer,
Private Demons
, 120.

328
   
“It was writing clutter”
: Interview with Midge Decter, March 13, 2013.

328
   
“The doors were always open”
: Interview with Marilyn Seide, April 19, 2013.

329
   
exotic delicacies
: For Altman’s, see SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [c. January 1955]; Sahadi’s order is in SJ-LOC, Box 41.

329
   
“Everything was somehow provided”
: Interview with Catherine Morrison, November 6, 2013.

329
   
“There was this great spread”
: Interview with Midge Decter, March 13, 2013.

329
   
“rarely letting anybody”
: Sarah Hyman DeWitt, “Shirley Jackson’s Daughter Remembers,” ReaderCon pamphlet, 2013.

329
   
“took up literally”
: Oppenheimer,
Private Demons
, 220.

329
   
“Stanley and Shirley”
: Interview with Morrison, November 6, 2013.

329
   
“Don’t stop!”
: Interview with Suzanne Stern Shepherd Calkins, October 16, 2014.

330
   
“She began to speak”
: Fredericks,
The Journal of Claude Fredericks
, October 13, 1961.

330
   
“We’d all be sitting” . . . “lose them”
: Interview with Morrison, November 6, 2013.

330
   
“sitting on the edge”
: Robert Zimmerman to SEH, August 10, 1965, SEH-LOC, Box 46.

330
   
“it may be bad luck”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, July 1953.

12. DR. WRITE

331
   
Bell Telephone ad
: Reprinted in Marta Caminero-Santangelo,
The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 99.

331
   
“business manager”
: Dorothy Thompson in
Ladies’ Home Journal
, March 1949, quoted by Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(1963; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 34.

332
   
“the tension” . . . “wives work”
: Quoted in Glenna Matthews,
Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 208.

332
   
“Split personality”
: Unsigned review,
Time
, June 21, 1954.

333
   
“innermost skeleton”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 3.

333
   
“It is not proven”
: Ibid., 2. In an early draft, SJ disavowed the relationship between the building and Elizabeth: “it is not probable that elizabeth’s personal equilibrium was set off balance by the interesting slant of her office floor.” In another early version, Elizabeth is a college student and the main lecture building of the university is falling down; the hole is in the wall of the office of a professor on whom she has a crush. Both in SJ-LOC, Box 20. The connection between Elizabeth’s psyche and the
building prefigures a crucial element of
Hill House
: the dangerous symbiosis between Eleanor and the house.

334
   
“blank and unrecognizing”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 4.

334
   
“no friends”
: Ibid., 3–4.

334
   
“ha ha ha”
: Ibid., 17.

334
   
sneaking off . . . aches
: SJ borrowed many of these details from Morton Prince’s description of Miss Beauchamp’s condition in
The Dissociation of a Personality
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906).

334
   
“I’m frightened”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 35.

334
   
“A man’s vanity”
: In an early draft, SJ left a blank space where she would later fill in the quotation, suggesting that she began the book while living in Erich Fromm’s house, without her own library at hand. SJ-LOC, Box 20.

334
   
mental blockage
: Caminero-Santangelo draws attention to the overt sexuality of this metaphor: “Miss Richmond’s problem, then, must be ‘relieved’ through a manful creeping down her pipe; all she really needs is a good screw” (
Madwoman Can’t Speak
, 105).

334
   
“the dreadful grinning face”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 50.

334
   
“the smile upon”
: Ibid., 49.

334
   
“Dr. Wrong”
: Ibid., 55 and elsewhere.

334
   
“Someday I am going”
: Ibid., 56.

335
   
“Hence, Asmodeus”
: Ibid., 54.

335
   
“one who has raised”
: Ibid., 50.

335
   
“normal whole self”
: Prince,
Dissociation of a Personality
, 3.

335
   
He initially hopes
: As Caminero-Santangelo points out, Dr. Wright initially plans to cure Elizabeth “not by integrating her multiple personalities but by choosing the one that seems to him the most perfectly feminine—that is, the one most perfectly compliant with his own opinions” (
Madwoman Can’t Speak
, 11).

335
   
nursery rhyme
: The original version is:

Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess,

All went together to seek a bird’s nest.

They found a bird’s nest with five eggs in,

They all took one, and left four in.

335
   
“much like a Frankenstein”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 143.

335
   
“one for each of you”
: Ibid., 190.

336
   
“a vessel emptied”
: Ibid., 248.

336
   
DR WRITE
: SJ-LOC, Box 20.

336
   
“I daresay a good writer”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 32.

336
   
“You have written”
: Roger Straus to SJ, April 7, 1954, SJ-LOC, Box 8.

336
   
“it’s really more”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, December 30 [1953], SJ-LOC, Box 3.

337
   
“a chameleon personality”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 199.

337
   
“deny reality”
: Friedan,
Feminine Mystique
, 65.

337
   
“hungry to go back to teaching”
: SEH to KB, March 19, 1952, KB-PSU.

337
   
“I assume that all this”
: SEH to KB, May 13, 1953, KB-PSU.

338
   
Form in the Novel
: SEH-LOC, Box 41.

338
   
“changed my life” . . . “in a woman”
: SEH,
Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time
(New York: Horizon, 1966), 103.

338
   
“spoken correlative” . . . “and not vice versa”
: SEH, “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,”
Kenyon Review
11, no. 3 (Summer 1949).

338
   
“the projection”
: Jane Ellen Harrison,
Themis
:
A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 49.

339
   
“found Greece marble”
: SEH,
Standards
, 107.

340
   
“a hand was laid upon their ark”
: Harrison,
Themis
, viii.

340
   
“That’s what Stanley found”
: Interview with Phoebe Pettingell, April 6, 2015.

340
   
“a kind of Pauline”
: Richard Tristman, “Myth, Ritual, Stanley,”
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 41.

340
   
“Its formal beauty”
: Jean McMahon Humez, “Myth, Ritual and Literature: A Student’s Eye View,”
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 42.

340
   
Mondays
: SEH’s syllabi can be found in SEH-LOC, Box 41.

340
   
Students were required to complete
: Interview with Joan Schenkar, June 8, 2012.

341
   
“The life of that course”
: Humez, “Myth, Ritual, and Literature.”

341
   
“before each class”
: Nicholas Delbanco, untitled reminiscence,
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 50.

341
   
Birkenstock sandals
: A
New Yorker
–style cartoon by Janna Pratt, a Bennington alumna, shows one student saying to another, “I
know
it’s Mr. Hyman. I can tell by the sox.” SEH-LOC, Box 46.

341
   
Toulouse-Lautrec
: Interview with Barbara Fisher, September 20, 2013.

341
   
“He was a very large”
: Interview with Anna Fels, August 3, 2013.

341
   
“an almost legendary figure”
: Wallace Fowlie,
Journal of Rehearsals
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977), 155–56.

341
   
“big black-bearded”
: Claude Fredericks,
The Journal of Claude Fredericks
, November 30, 1961.

341
   
“A man who”
: Harold Kaplan, “Stanley Hyman’s Bennington,”
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 19.

341
   
“one of the most”
: Francis Golffing, untitled reminiscence,
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 48.

341
   
“he dominated”
: Fowlie,
Journal of Rehearsals
, 158.

342
   
“infinitely giving”
: Greta Einstein Eisner, untitled reminiscence,
Quadrille
7, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 1973), 48.

342
   
“when we saw”
: Kaplan, “Stanley Hyman’s Bennington,” 19.

342
   
“your three hundred” . . . “the world you love”
: SEH-LOC, Box 2.

343
   
“Shirley and two friends”
: This dream note and the two that follow are my paraphrase of a document titled (in SJ’s handwriting) “Three Dreams and a Terror,” SJ-LOC, Box 20.

344
   
“a sudden and unusual”
: The description of SJ’s physical and mental symptoms comes from another document found among the
Bird’s Nest
drafts. Three and a half single-spaced pages, it may be notes she wrote to a therapist. SJ-LOC, Box 20. All quotations not otherwise identified in this section are from this document.

345
   
To meet the deadline
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [November 1953].

345
   
“steaming away”
: BB to Roger Straus, November 4, 1953, FSG-NYPL, Box 173.

345
   
“I’ve always wanted”
: Outline/memo for
The Bird’s Nest
, SJ-LOC, Box 21.

345
   
“it scared them to death”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, December 30 [1953].

346
   
“I am myself”
: SJ to BB, December 1, 1953.

347
   
“she must on no account”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 82.

347
   
“My mother loves me best”
: Ibid., 89.

347
   
“Why did Robin”
: Ibid., 115. Robin also happens to be the name one of Glanvill’s witches uses for the devil. See chapter 6.

347
   
“I
hate
that child”
: Ibid., 100.

347
   
“My mother loves me best”
: Ibid., 89–90.

348
   
“as though promising”
: Ibid., 84.

348
   
“going crazy”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, November 9 [1953].

349
   
“i am tangling” . . . “existing emotions”
: SJ-LOC, Box 20.

350
   
mothers who are not good enough
: D. W. Winnicott introduced the concept of the “good-enough mother” in his article “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” published in 1953.

350
   
“How about you”
: GJ to SJ, n.d. [spring 1949], SJ-LOC, Box 2.

350
   
“We’re so proud”
: GJ to SJ, n.d. [March 1950].

350
   
“Dear, you are getting”
: GJ to SJ, n.d. [September 1953].

351
   
loans during their dry spells
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [May 1953].

351
   
“all my ailments”
: SJ-LOC, Box 40.

351
   
“The Rock”
:
CAWM
, 126–45. The published story is dated “c. 1951,” for unknown reasons. I could find no rough draft in SJ’s archives.

351
   
“There once were two cats”
:
The Bird’s Nest
, 238.