Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (9 page)

Another of Jackson’s imaginary figures was Harlequin, the commedia dell’arte acrobat who became a familiar figure once again in the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Picasso’s paintings. Also known as the Italian comedy, the commedia dell’arte was a lifelong interest of Jackson’s: an ornamental mask belonging to an actor who had played Pantaloon later hung in her living room in North Bennington. In the classical format, actors playing the stock characters of Harlequin, Pantaloon, Scaramouche, and others improvised variations on stock story lines, usually romantic in nature. George Sand described the commedia dell’arte as “a study of the grotesque and facetious . . . but also a portrayal of real characters traced from remote antiquity down to the present day, in an uninterrupted tradition of fantastic humor which is in essence quite serious and, one might almost say, even sad, like every satire which lays bare the spiritual poverty of mankind.” This assessment applies equally to much of Jackson’s fiction, which often juxtaposes supernatural or uncanny elements with realistic, even banal characters.

Traditionally dressed in a jacket of multicolored patches, a
double-pointed hat, and a black mask, Harlequin—as Pierre Louis DuChartre describes him in
The Italian Comedy
, a classic treatise on the subject—is the most versatile and enigmatic of the comedy players: at once a graceful and beguiling dancer, a buffoon so absentminded that he searches everywhere for the same donkey on which he is sitting, a poet both “of acrobatics and unseemly noises.” In other words, he is as unlike a shy, awkward, serious sixteen-year-old as a character could possibly be. In one famous episode, Harlequin, disguised as a doctor, advises a patient with a toothache to combine garlic and vinegar with a pinch of pepper and rub the whole concoction between his buttocks, telling him it will make him forget all about his tooth pain. Another story has Harlequin fall in love with a beautiful girl named Columbine who is guarded by her ferociously protective father. The old man is no obstacle for Harlequin, who concocts ever more elaborate ruses to trick him into handing her over.

Alienated, socially isolated, far from the sunlight of the California she missed, Jackson found in Harlequin an embodiment of lightness, charm,
sprezzatura
—qualities she valued and hoped to cultivate, but which came to her with difficulty. Sometimes she worried that to disguise her true emotions constituted “posturing”—for her, a cardinal sin. “I can’t understand this desire—this requirement—to hide true things, and display to the world a suave, untroubled visage,” she wrote in February 1934. “If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead—this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.” Harlequin represented also the happy possibility of a life beyond her restricted world—and of a male figure who might someday come and sweep her away. When Harlequin “came” to her, as Jackson liked to put it, her confusion faded into the background and left her with the sense of peace she sought. “Knowing myself to desire so much and yet so vaguely, I catch webs of events in both hands, and pull them to me,” she wrote in June, just before her graduation. “Three days more—and I step out of high school. I am going on. Towards what I want, and
need, and dream of. Harlequin.” A few weeks later her confusion had returned. “Life is such a casual thing at best, and such a messy thing at worst, that it’s a wonder more people don’t quit it than do. I’m tired and tired and tired, and if ever Harlequin was to come when I needed him—no, I don’t want him to come yet. I’ll always be able to stand it a little longer.”

Harlequin represented to Jackson an earlier, more innocent version of the “daemon lover” figure who would later appear in the
Lottery
collection and elsewhere: a character from one of the Child Ballads, also known as James Harris, who seduces a woman only to reveal, when it is too late, that he is the devil in disguise. Like a less sinister daemon lover, Harlequin offers escape from the ordinary world into a colorful realm of pastoral landscapes and freedom. In
The Road Through the Wall
, the character Marilyn, whom Jackson endows with some of her own traits, imagines that in a past life a commedia dell’arte troupe came to rescue her from her daily life. “There’s a little covered wagon that comes down the road,” Marilyn recounts, as if recalling a dream, “and inside they’re all talking and laughing and singing. . . . Pantaloon, and Rhodomont, and Scaramouche, and Pierrot, and . . . Harlequin. . . . He is waving and calling me, and I run down the hill as fast as anything.”

A similar figure—a handsome, charming stranger who comes from another world—was the focus of the film that most affected Shirley during the spring of her senior year:
Death Takes a Holiday
(1934), a strange, Faustian fairy tale directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Fredric March and Evelyn Venable. One night, Death appears to a duke and his friends while they are driving on a dangerous mountain road. He decides not to claim them immediately, but to spend three days as the duke’s guest in his palatial villa, disguised as a prince, to learn about life among mortals. At first comedy ensues, as all the single ladies present vie for the affections of the mysterious prince, who tries to conceal his befuddlement over mortal customs such as fancy dinners, gambling, and sex. Meanwhile, newspapers report on the miraculous events taking place all over the world while Death is on vacation: a race car driver walks away unharmed from a terrible crash, schoolchildren survive a fire, all passengers are rescued from a sinking ship. Matters grow more
serious when the seducer pledges his love to a beautiful young woman and she resolves to go away with him, even as her mother and the other guests try in horror to restrain her. “Remember that there is only a moment of shadow between your life and mine,” Death tells the guests as he bids them farewell. “And when I call, come bravely through that shadow. You will find me only, your familiar friend.”

It is easy to see why the film appealed to Jackson. First, of course, the romantic element would have been alluring to any teenager who longed to swoon in the arms of her own ardent lover, even if this brooding man had little in common with the teenage boys who were the usual objects of Shirley’s affections. But more than that, Death longs to be loved by somebody who recognizes him for who—or what—he really is. He does not deceive his betrothed into committing herself to him; rather, she knows who he is and loves him anyway—exactly the fantasy of a teenager tired of “posturings,” who felt that her own mother, constantly trying to mold her in another image, did not appreciate her.

And the film’s premise—that Death walks among mortals, sitting beside us at the dinner table or encircling us in his arms on the dance floor—must have deeply resonated with a girl whose great theme would one day be the evil present in every human soul, hidden where we least suspect it. “What a monstrous comedy!” Death exclaims of human life. Jackson might well have thought the same.

THE 1934 UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
admissions application offered a space of several lines in which to answer the question “Why do you want to go to college?” Jackson wrote succinctly, “To prepare myself for a career.” At a time when many women attended college simply to meet a husband, she was already certain that she would support herself after graduation. Her preferences were law, journalism, or “literary work.”

The university had recently opened its River Campus: eleven handsome redbrick buildings along the Genessee, arranged around the traditional quadrangle and dominated by Rush Rhees Library, which could accommodate up to two million books. But the River Campus was restricted to men; the women’s college, which had admitted its first
students in 1900, was located downtown, on the corner of University Avenue and Prince Street. As was the case at most women’s colleges then—newly founded Bennington College, which Jackson would later come to know intimately, was a notable and soon-to-be notorious exception—social life was rigid and traditional, dominated by sororities. Women were dissuaded from taking classes on the River Campus or using its facilities. Fellow Brighton High alumnus Richard Morton, who was in Jackson’s class at Rochester, would later tell his family that the university had discouraged them both from pursuing their desired careers—for him, mechanical engineering; for her, writing. After a year at Rochester, he transferred to the University of Michigan and later became a successful engineer.

If Jackson was steered away from writing fiction into a more practical profession, the university may have been responding to the times. The college newspaper commented that the Depression, not surprisingly, had made Rochester students “more serious,” with less interest in social activities. The essay questions for Jackson’s English composition placement exam give a vivid picture of the era: “Contemporary American Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism, and Fascism”; “Effects of Unemployment on Family Life” (with 25 percent of Americans still unemployed, this was the critical issue of the day); “Managing a Student’s Wardrobe on a Small Budget”; “The Farmer’s Desperate Situation”; “The Ethics of Motoring.” Jackson opted for the only nonpolitical subject, “The Educational Value of High School Dramatics,” which she broached with less than complete confidence: the paper shows her struggling to spell “playwright.”

Jackson likely chose Rochester for the sake of convenience. Her grades at Brighton were mostly Bs and Cs, with a single A, in English—sufficient to gain admission, especially at a time when the vast majority of students were local, but probably not good enough for a more competitive school. The academic program, with a heavy emphasis on the sciences, was not ideal for her, and she found the social culture stifling. Her parents may have insisted that she remain in town, where they could keep watch over her. Her entrance form lists her religious preference as Christian Science, a sign either that she still felt some attachment
to her family’s faith or that Geraldine—who accompanied Shirley to her admissions interview—was watching as she filled out the form.

Jackson’s first-year course of study included English, government, psychology, philosophy, and music appreciation. (In
Hangsaman
, Natalie’s classes are virtually identical.) If Geraldine and Leslie had insisted that she stay in town, they allowed her at least to live in Stephen Foster Hall, the women’s dormitory—a decision they may well have come to regret, as it allowed Jackson to take full advantage of her newfound freedom. But her initial adjustment to dorm life was difficult. Watching a sorority initiation left her deeply shaken, “sick at the things girls will do to one another.” In
Hangsaman
, the freshman girls are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and made to confess whether they are virgins. Natalie, who assesses the experience in coolly ironic terms—“the persecution of new students, once passionate, is now only perfunctory”—declines to answer, and as a result finds herself ostracized.

Natalie casts a cool eye on her fellow students, but the novel makes palpable her sense of inferiority and internal confusion in the face of the other girls. She is keenly aware of fine distinctions of social status: the “senior queens in high school,” the girls “with their obvious right clothes,” the girls in the “best cliques”—the same types who had rejected Shirley at Brighton. Then there were the outsiders: “the ascetic amateur writers with their poems safely locked away upstairs . . . the girls who would fail all their courses and go home ingloriously (saying goodbye bravely, but crying) . . . the girls whose hearts would break and the girls whose spirits would break.” Jackson, of course, was the amateur writer with a desk full of hidden poems—she would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to write, to the astonishment of a friend sleeping over. She enjoyed parties and going out, but resented that the only girls who seemed drawn to her were the Doris and Ginny types, plain and dull—not a reflection of the way she wanted to see herself. The only person who initially befriends Natalie, a dumpy girl named Rosalind, eventually rejects her, telling her that the other girls call her “spooky” and “crazy” because she spends all her time in her room. Natalie’s recourse is to create an imaginary friend, a girl she calls Tony, who
initially seems to be the companion she longed for but who leads her nearly to her psychic breaking point.

Shirley Jackson with Jeanne Marie Bedel, c. 1935.

Jackson was far luckier: she found a real friend, and an exceptional one. Jeanne Marie Bedel, whom Shirley nicknamed Jeanou, was an exchange student from Paris who also lived in Stephen Foster Hall. (It was customary in the 1930s for Rochester to host two exchange students each year, one from Germany and one from France.) Vivacious but not conventionally beautiful, several years older than Shirley
and possessing a continental savoir faire, she was incalculably more sophisticated, a lover of art and literature who was the single greatest influence on Shirley to date: only Stanley Hyman would eventually have a bigger emotional and intellectual impact on her. “A true Parisian,” Shirley called her. And, as the only French student on campus, Jeanou was even more of an outsider than Shirley was herself. In a picture of them taken that year, Jeanou stands a few inches shorter than Shirley, with short, tousled dark hair and deep-set eyes. (Shirley would later describe her, not especially kindly, as “a bad caricature of Beethoven.”) Wearing a dark, belted coat, Shirley tilts her head back, laughing freely; her hand rests on Jeanou’s shoulder. It is the happiest of all her youthful photographs, in which she normally looks guarded, even suspicious—often, of course, because she was posing before Geraldine’s vigilant eye.