Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (91 page)

380
   
“The people of the village”
: LOA, 424.

14. WHAT IS THIS WORLD?

382
   
“thirty-two times”
: “Films of H-Bomb Now Being Shown,”
The New York Times
, April 2, 1954.

382
   
Operation Ivy
: For a description, see Betsy Hartmann, Bau Subramaniam, and Charles Zemer,
Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties
(Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 57. The film is available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQp8_fhY9YA.

383
   
“The sun’s rising in the west!”
: David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Ballantine, 1993), 346.

384
   
“when it became clear”
: Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in
Against Interpretation
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 224.

384
   
“Bulletin”
:
LMTY
, 115–18.

385
   
“Prominent in every book” . . . “everything outside”
: “Shirley Jackson Reverses Pattern,”
Syracuse Summer Orange
, July 30, 1957. The lecture appears in
LMTY
as “About the End of the World,” 373–74.

385
   
Halloran estate
: The protagonist in “Paranoia,” an earlier story, shares the name Halloran.

385
   
“so that all”
:
The Sundial
, 7. SJ’s notes for
The Sundial
reveal that the Halloran estate, like the estate in
The Road Through the Wall
, was based on La Dolphine, the Newhall mansion near her childhood home in Burlingame.

385
   
“could think of”
: Ibid., 8.

385
   
“summer house”
: Ibid., 9.

385
   
“that the human eye”
: Ibid., 11.

387
   
“Humanity, as an experiment”
: Ibid., 37.

387
   
“Splendid. I was”
: Ibid., 40.

387
   
“one night” . . . “their inheritance”
: Ibid., 35–36.

387
   
The date of the apocalypse
: “Shirley Jackson Reverses Pattern.”

387
   
“a pervasive sense”
: R. W. B. Lewis,
Trials of the Word
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 184–85.

387
   
“chosen people”
:
The Sundial
, 38.

387
   
“No one needs”
: Ibid., 5.

387
   
“Well, that, and the house”
: Ibid., 11.

388
   
“Nothing I have ever written”
:
LMTY
, 374.

388
   
“an immediate need”
:
The Sundial
, 81.

388
   
“You Can Survive”
: Eugenia Kaledin,
Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 6.

389
   
“contain everything”
:
The Sundial
, 8.

389
   
“this furniture had been built”
: Ibid., 158.

389
   
“a tiny island”
: Ibid., 209.

389
   
“the waffle iron” . . . “hurt you”
: “Memory and Delusion,”
LMTY
, 375.

390
   
“always a little behind”
: Tom Foster to Roger Straus, June 12, 1954, FSG-NYPL, Box 173.

390
   
“millions of petty irritations”
: SJ to BB, February 21, 1956.

390
   
“fond little notes” . . . “the head”
: Ibid.

390
   
fulfilled the option clause
: BB to SJ, July 26, 1955, SJ-LOC, Box 4.

391
   
“probably the best editor”
: BB to SJ, February 23, 1956, SJ-LOC, Box 4.

391
   
In his office
: Kachka,
Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 105.

391
   
“completely delightful”
: BB to SJ, April 19, 1956, SJ-LOC, Box 5.

391
   
Jackson’s account
: SJ to BB, March 23, 1956.

391
   
“What is the biggest”
: SJ to BB, April 2, 1956.

392
   
“How you managed”
: Robert Giroux to SJ, March 11, 1957, SJ-LOC, Box 8.

392
   
“the chosen Ark” . . . “part of the book”
: Robert Giroux to SJ, July 25, 1957, SJ-LOC, Box 8.

392
   
“decided on the spot” . . . “whiskey in it”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, July 7 [1957].

393
   
“when a set of soldiers”
: SJ to Robert Giroux, August 22 [1957], FSG-NYPL, Box 174.

393
   
“I would not like”
:
LMTY
, 373.

393
   
“an impenetrable, almost intangible”
:
The Sundial
, 132.

393
   
“millions of idiotic”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [August 1957].

393
   
“stanley was so annoyed”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, July 12 [1957].

393
   
“world of loveliness and peace”
:
LMTY
, 374.

394
   
“I am most anxious”
: SJ to Giroux, August 22 [1957].

394
   
“violently” . . . “too hard”
: SJ to Robert Giroux, November 1 [1957], FSG-NYPL, Box 174.

394
   
congratulatory telegram
: Notes for the telegram are in SJ’s handwriting on the back of a letter from BB dated May 22, 1956.

394
   
“development of great importance”
: Robert Giroux to someone identified only as “Frank,” “Thanksgiving Eve” 1957, FSG-NYPL, Box 506.

395
   
“spent more time” . . . “doing business with her”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [May 1951].

395
   
Baumgarten generally
: Matthew Bruccoli,
James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 291.

395
   
“tremendous, never-failing”
: Ibid., 290.

396
   
National Institute of Arts and Letters
: BB to SJ, October 18, 1956, SJ-LOC, Box 5.

396
   
“I know that”
: BB to SJ, December 24, 1957, SJ-LOC, Box 5.

396
   
“i keep getting”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14 [1958].

396
   
he continued to receive
: Thomas H. Foster and Catherine Osgood Foster Papers, Yale University, Box 9.

396
   
“an old old man”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14 [1958].

397
   
“one of those men”
: Saul Bellow,
To Jerusalem and Back
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 72.

397
   
“What it does”
: BB to SJ, December 24, 1957.

397
   
“like she killed my daddy”
:
The Sundial
, 1.

397
   
“the deadly mannered charm”
: Derland Frost, “Symbolism and Reality Combined in New Novel,”
Houston Post
, February 23, 1958.

397
   
“i always start”
: SJ to Jeanne Beatty, March 1960.

397
   
“As a satire”
: Edmund Fuller, “Absorbing, Puzzling Novel,”
Chicago Sunday Tribune
, February 23, 1958.

398
   
“an assemblage of weirdies”
: Stella Suberman, “But Shirley Is Terribly Game,”
Raleigh
(N.C.)
Observer
, August 24, 1958.

398
   
“A bizarre tale”
: John Barkham, “The End of the World,”
Saturday Review Syndicate
, n.d.

398
   
“all the big brains puzzled”
: Beatrice Washburn, “Black Magic—and Mathematics,”
Miami Herald
, February 23, 1958.

398
   
“hell bombs”
: Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,”
The New York Times
, February 18, 1958.

398
   
“As H-Hour”
: William Peden, “The ‘Chosen Few,’ ”
Saturday Review
, March 8, 1958. In his book
The American Short Story
, Peden would later dismiss SJ as a writer of “sick stories.”

398
   
“the hub”
: Robert E. Krieger, “Symbolism Is Varied,”
Worcester
(Mass.)
Telegram
, February 23, 1958.

398
   
“Mother Church”
: Jean Holzhauer, “Interpretation,”
Commonweal
, April 4, 1958.

398
   
“A novel such as this”
: Robert Kirsch, “The Book Report,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 24, 1958.

398
   
“Some kind of dissociation”
: Unsigned review,
Washington Post and Times-Herald
, February 16, 1958.

398
   
“ahead of all” . . . “throwing bricks”
: William Bittner, “Promise Still Unfulfilled,”
New York Post
, February 16, 1958.

399
   
“a very bright lady”
: Marsh Maslin, “The Browser,”
S.F. Gate Bulletin
, March 13, 1958.

399
   
“a nasty little novel”
: SJ to BB, April 2 [1956].

399
   
“One is tempted”
: Daniel L. Stevenson, “The Lost Audience,”
The Nation
, August 2, 1958.

399
   
“Miss Jackson is”
: Eleanor M. Bloom, “An Exciting Writer Spins Original Tale,”
Minneapolis Tribune
, March 23, 1958.

399
   
“Louisa, Please Come Home”
: LOA, 673–90.

399
   
The first version
: SJ-LOC, Box 17.

400
   
“I hope your daughter”
: LOA, 689.

400
   
“powerful and brilliant horror story”
: CB to SJ, May 28, 1958, SJ-LOC, Box 5.

400
   
The Haunted House
: “Shirley Jackson Finishes New Novel, ‘The Sundial,’ ”
Bennington Banner
, March 4, 1958.

401
   
“the most hideous” . . . “only a dream”
: “The Ghosts of Loiret,”
LMTY
, 244–45. A version of this story also appears in “Experience and Fiction.”

401
   
“When we got”
: “Experience and Fiction,”
CAWM
, 226.

401
   
229 West 140th Street
: “Tenement Blaze in Harlem Kills 3,”
The New York Times
, April 19, 1957. The previous year, the only fatal fire was at 125 West 115th Street, also not visible from the train: “Fire in Harlem Flat Kills Two Children,”
The New York Times
, March 9, 1956.

402
   
“I have always”
: “Experience and Fiction,” 227.

402
   
“the kind of novel”
: SJ-LOC, Box 22.

402
   
“type which wouldn’t be haunted”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14, 1958.

403
   
A picture of the mansion
: SJ-LOC, Box 51.

403
   
“pictures and information”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14, 1958.

404
   
the novel mentions
: LOA, 315.

404
   
“No human eye” . . . “concession to humanity”
: LOA, 265.

404
   
“We live over in the town”
: Ibid., 268.

404
   
“It had an unbelievably”
: Ibid., 269.

404
   
“A masterpiece”
: Ibid., 316. By contrast, Natalie in
Hangsaman
is pleased to find her dorm room “exactly right-angled at the corners,” the number 27 on the door “a good number, owning a seven for luck and a two for work and adding, triumphantly, to nine” (
Hangsaman
, 51–52).

405
   
In her notes for the novel
: SJ-LOC, Box 22.

405
   
“a symbol”
: Milton Bracker, “Mystery in L.I. House Deepens; Family, Experts, Police Stumped,”
The New York Times
, March 4, 1958.

405
   
The episodes continued
: “Bouncing Bottle Plague Still Puzzles L.I. Family,”
New York Herald Tribune
, February 12, 1958; “L.I. Bottles Again Blow Tops, So Family Departs,”
New York Herald Tribune
, February 21, 1958; “Professor Seeks L.I. Mystery Key,”
The New York Times
, February 26, 1958—all clippings in SJ-LOC, Box 51.

406
   
“It is a legitimate inference”
:
Haunted People
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 108.

406
   
Even had she not acknowledged
: Nandor Fodor to SJ, October 8, 1963: “I had my suspicion on reading your book that my writings may have had some bearing on your treatment. I am glad to have your confirmation.” SJ-LOC, Box 8.

15. THE HEART OF THE HOUSE

407
   
“there are going to be” . . . “told me”
: SJ to SEH, September [1958], SEH-LOC, Box 2.