Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (10 page)

“Slightly mad, we were,” Jackson wrote in a poem in which she called the pair of them “Gay Jeanou and Crazy Lee.” With Jeanou at her side, Jackson, who was now signing her name “Shirlee,” spent her freshman year exploring all that sleepy Rochester had to offer: films (“I adore gangsters,” she wrote after seeing an Edward G. Robinson movie), concerts, meals in “funny little cafeteria[s].” The French bohemian and the California transplant were inseparable: they even wrote together in Jackson’s diary. They walked around for hours, bonding over their mutual dislike of the city, which in comparison with Paris must have seemed unbearably stodgy—not to mention frigid. (Rochester winters were so cold that the River Campus featured a system of tunnels connecting many of the buildings, so that students did not have to go outside in the punishing weather.) Eating lunch one day, “in one hour we counted one hundred people passing and found seven interesting faces,” Jackson recorded. They planned someday to spend a few weeks holed up in a hotel writing a book mocking the city, as “revenge.” At a Russian restaurant they frequented, Jackson developed a crush on a “charming” pianist named Kostia, who left her with an abiding fondness for Russian classical music. As a lover of the Child Ballads and other folk music, she was especially moved by the folkloric melodies of “Procession of the Sardar,” from Mikhail
Ippolitov-Ivanov’s
Caucasian Sketches
, a pair of orchestral suites written in the mid-1890s. That fall she also saw a production of Bizet’s opera
Carmen
, which she adored.

Jackson’s old friend Dorothy Ayling, who continued doggedly to send news of Bud Young, had no interest in her new obsessions. “Don’t fall too hard for the Russians. . . . They make very poor husbands,” she cautioned from Burlingame. Yet Dorothy slowly realized that Shirley was pulling away from her, and she reacted with anger and jealousy. “Nobody recognized your picture at school. . . . [Jeanou] looks like she’d like to chew somebody up,” she wrote sourly after Jackson sent a photograph of herself and her new friend. She called Jackson a show-off for writing to her in French. Worse, she disparaged Jackson’s dreams of becoming a fiction writer, suggesting that she work as an editor at a publishing house instead. (Dorothy’s own plan was to teach music in an elementary school.) Their correspondence, which until then had survived a vast geographical distance, could not withstand Jackson’s changing personality, tapering to a halt within a few months.

Jeanou, with a more elevated vision, encouraged Jackson’s writing, helped her with her French (“I shall
never
be able to pronounce my r’s,” Shirley lamented), and scolded her for not doing her homework. If she was worried about the looming cataclysm in Europe, she seems to have put it out of her mind during her stay in Rochester—at least, she did not discuss current events with Jackson. The two of them spent most of their time hanging out in cafés. Jackson cut classes whenever she had anything better to do—a concert, a play, a movie. She spent some of her rare moments apart from Jeanou joyriding around Rochester with Richard Morton, commiserating over their mutual disaffection with the university. Rather than following her syllabi, Jackson pursued her own intellectual interests: at one point she spent hours devising an invented language called Lildsune, complete with grammatical rules, and even wrote poetry in it. The assignment that occupied her most was a term paper on witchcraft, which led her to read, for the first time, a book that would greatly influence her as well as Stanley Hyman:
The Golden Bough
, anthropologist Sir James Frazer’s multivolume treatment of magic and ritual among primitive cultures around the world.

That spring, Jackson published her first story. An untitled fragment of several paragraphs, it appeared in
Meliora
, the literary magazine of the women’s college. The story tracks the reactions of various people in the audience as a violinist identified only as Yehudi takes the stage for his final encore, a rendition of “Ave Maria.” As he plays, his mother clasps her hands in her lap, silently moved; two high school girls abandon their giggling to listen; an old man brushes a tear from his cheek. There is no applause when he finishes, only silence: “The audience filed out, not talking.” Perhaps Yehudi is based on Kostia, although Jackson gives no indication that her Russian crush was Jewish, as the violinist’s name suggests. Regardless, the story demonstrates her continued appreciation of the creative artist’s ability to influence an audience—although it’s notable that emotion, not ideas, seems to be what she values most.

All these extracurricular undertakings distracted Jackson from her coursework. She continued to do well in English, but her average plummeted to a miserable 66—low enough to earn her multiple warnings from the dean’s office. (“I must really go to classes,” she chided herself after one such encounter.) She also regularly missed her dormitory curfew. Geraldine tried to keep an eye on her daughter, taking her to lunch and the movies and sometimes bringing her home to spend the night on Monteroy Road. It did not help.

Jackson’s abysmal grades may have been a symptom of more serious trouble. The first signs came at the start of the second term, in February 1935, which she called “a month of evil omen and disillusion.” Her schedule included at least one night class, which she found burdensome. And her mood, judging from her diary, was as low as her grades. Her unrequited crush on Kostia was making her miserable: “I die a million deaths of tears,” a sonnet she wrote for him began. Although she received a regular allowance from her parents, she and Jeanou were perpetually broke. She began to have dramatic mood swings: “Why does Life seem calculated to administer a deadening shock to each new jubilance?” she wondered. “Mind too confused with a million manufactured idiocies to write now,” she told her diary that February. The next day she felt “sane again—at least, comparitively [sic] so.” And she continued to be highly
self-critical. “I have filled out yards of pages in any number of diaries, and each one grows more conceited than the last,” she berated herself.

Jeanou was an emotional support for Shirley as well as a constant fount of excitement. But the intense friendship was tempestuous, marked by frequent quarrels. Once Jeanou was so angry that she threw a stack of typing paper at Shirley. She didn’t hesitate to tell Shirley exactly what she thought of her, criticizing her for being “spoiled” and “selfish” and saying that her affectations could be “unbearable.” At one point Jeanou wrote Shirley a note promising to stop criticizing her, but added: “I thought you would understand I do it for you, not for me. . . . You are aggravating yourself, and very often. I wonder if you don’t try to be right at least as [much] as I do.” Shirley was upset enough by these criticisms that she sent one of Jeanou’s notes to Dorothy Ayling to ask what her old friend thought of it. Dorothy was unsympathetic. “Poor Jeanou must have a swell time arguing with you. . . . If you really want my opinion, I think it is a very exact letter, and if I could write that kind of letter, I would say the same things,” she wrote back.

Despite the arguments, Jackson was bereft when her best friend returned to Paris in June 1935. France was about to undergo a dramatic political upheaval, with the socialist Léon Blum becoming prime minister the following year as head of the Popular Front coalition. Within a few years, Jeanou, like so many of her generation, would become an ardent Communist, sending reports back to Jackson about the Spanish Civil War; during World War II, she was active in the Resistance. But now, ignorant of the future, the two made a vow to meet in Paris three years later, on Bastille Day 1938. “Write to me,” Jeanou begged in a good-bye letter. “Don’t remember the quarrels but the nice times.” She asked for reports on Jackson’s schoolwork, the garden parties she went to, her life as a society “debutante,” and—not least—her short stories. “Try to work and write and meet people and leave Rochester as soon as you can.” As a parting gift, Jeanou gave Shirley an illustrated edition of the works of François Villon, the medieval
poète maudite
who wrote one of the most iconic lines in French literature:
Où sont les neiges d’antan
, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

Villon was the fifteenth century’s version of a beatnik poet: his
immensely popular poems were among the earliest vernacular works published in France. The poet was equally famous for the drama of his life, which included multiple robberies and the stabbing of a priest. In his “mock testaments,” he willed his meager possessions, literal and metaphorical—old boots with the toes worn through, the cobwebs from his bed frame, a fist in the nose—to his friends and enemies on the Paris streets: tradesmen, friars, whores, criminals, lawyers. Nearly five hundred years after his birth, Ezra Pound wrote that Villon “has the stubborn persistency of one whose gaze cannot be deflected from the actual fact before him: what he sees, he writes.”

Jackson’s literary taste at the time tended more toward popular novels such as
The Forsyte Saga
, John Galsworthy’s melodramatic series about an upper-class English family. The poets she admired most were plainspoken establishment writers such as Carl Sandburg and Dorothy Parker. Still, she immediately added the outsider Villon to her personal pantheon of quasi-mythological figures along with Harlequin and, later, Pan, the god of nature. “I know all things—except myself,” Jackson quoted him. If Pan symbolized joy in the natural world and Harlequin represented comedy and good cheer, Villon came to stand for self-reliance and the ability to stand tall in the face of others’ criticisms—a quality Jeanou also embodied. “She gave me as a parting gift the ability to face people and laugh at them, because she knew that I would need it,” Jackson later remembered. “In college, there were ex-friends who stared and talked and laughed, there were records of stupidity and heights of ignorance, to be challenged and lived down. I held in my hands a dream which they tried to crush, and they failed.” What others thought of her, Jackson concluded, mattered “not the smallest part of Villon’s grin. I shall be happy.”

“
I WENT TO COLLEGE
and i had a friend and she was kind to me, and together we were happy,” Jackson wrote in an unpublished memoir that likely dates from her later college years. The piece describes her relationship with Kostia, the Russian pianist she and Jeanou spent time with: “she introduced me to a man who didn’t laugh at me because i was
ugly and i fell in love with him and tried to kill myself but i was happy just the same.” Her description of the friendship merits a close look:

my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them. then i wanted to write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them. and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend went away and i was all alone.

Some critics have suggested that
Hangsaman
may be read as a lesbian novel. There is a scene in which Tony, the imagined girl Natalie seems to befriend, comes to Natalie’s bedside naked; later, they sleep in the same bed and bathe together; and in their final confrontation Tony appears to make a physical overture toward Natalie. “She
wants
me,” Natalie realizes with horror. And Jackson’s outline for the book even says that Natalie “barely escapes a Lesbian seduction,” although that sounds like sensationalizing language intended for the publisher’s sales sheet. On one of the drafts of that page, the line appears in the handwriting of Hyman, who often helped his wife compose publicity memos.

It is unlikely that Shirley’s friendship with Jeanou had a lesbian component, or that their friendship was the reason Kostia rejected her. There is no evidence that Jeanou, who seems always to have had a man or two ready to do her bidding, was sexually interested in Shirley. And although characters who may be lesbians appear more than once in her fiction, Jackson—typically for her era and her class—evinced a personal horror of lesbianism. It’s possible that the relatively extreme way in which she would later disparage lesbians reflects some repression on her part, especially considering that she and Hyman had several close male friends who were homosexual. But that is conjecture only. Jackson never spoke of experiencing sexual desire for women. When she refers to herself and Jeanou as lesbians in that piece, at a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity.

A novel that Jackson read during her years at Rochester offers a clue to
what she might have meant.
The Well of Loneliness
, by the British author Radclyffe Hall, was published in 1928 and quickly became notorious as the subject of an obscenity trial in England. The novel’s protagonist is a girl named Stephen, the daughter of parents who had longed for a son. Even as a child, she identifies strongly as a boy, wearing masculine clothes and cutting her hair short. By age seven, she begins to develop crushes on women and is continually disappointed when the objects of her affection prove more interested in men. But sexuality in the novel is expressed only obliquely. What is most palpable is Stephen’s sense of herself as an outsider—a person who cannot conform to social or parental expectations and finds herself punished as a result. Jackson—a girl who often felt awkward in her own body, whose mother pressured her to dress in a way she found unappealing, who romanticized outlaw figures such as Villon—must have deeply sympathized.

And it is crucial to remember that Tony is not a real character: she is a creation of Natalie’s fragmented psyche. In an unpublished document written around 1960, while she was working on
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, Jackson noted her chagrin to discover herself mentioned in a book of literary criticism about “sex variant women in literature,” which, she said, described
Hangsaman
as “an ‘eerie’ novel about lesbians.” “i happen to know what hangsaman is about. i wrote it,” Jackson retorted. She admits to having wanted to create a “sense of illicit excitement,” presumably with the suggestion of a sexual charge between Tony and Natalie. But she asserts that Tony is “not a he or a she but the demon in the mind, and that demon finds guilts where it can and uses them and runs mad with laughing when it triumphs; it is the demon which is fear and we are afraid of words. we are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds, something we build ourselves and never recognize.”