Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (46 page)

Many of
Hangsaman
’s readers, then as now, are bewildered by the ending and its abrupt shift from a mood of danger to one of serenity. But when understood in the myth and ritual context, it becomes clear. Classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, author of
Themis
(1912), a book of myth and ritual criticism that was one of Hyman’s touchstones, argues that in ancient cultures, the ritual enacting the death and rebirth of a vegetation deity—Frazer’s Hanged God—should be understood also as a ritual of initiation into society: like the god or his representation, youths die symbolically and are reborn as adults. In an article called “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,” published in summer 1949, around the time Jackson began working on
Hangsaman
, Hyman mentions the scholar Joseph Campbell’s theory that all myth can be traced back to a “monomyth,” which he describes as “an elaboration of the three stages of [ethnographer and folklorist Arnold] Van Gennep’s
rites de passage
, thus: ‘a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.’ ” That, in brief, is precisely the plot of the strange final section of
Hangsaman
. Unfortunately, to the average reader not steeped in Harrison, Campbell, and Frazer, the book’s underlying structure was opaque.

“
MARY HAWORTH’S MAIL,
”
A
popular advice column, was syndicated in newspapers nationwide from the early 1940s until the mid-1960s. In June 1951, just after
Hangsaman
was published, a letter appeared under the headline “Should She Leave Husband?” The writer identified herself as a mother of three, married for eleven years to a college professor named Stan, who has been unfaithful to her. “Do I owe it to the children,” she wonders, “to keep my marriage together for practical reasons?” The letter is signed “S. J.” Jackson saved the clipping among her papers.

Hangsaman
can be interpreted in many ways, but on one level it is unmistakably a document of Jackson’s rage at her husband. The novel’s subtext—never far beneath the surface—is sexual danger, always invoked in code. Perhaps that is why what happens to Natalie at the garden party is not made explicit: the scene may represent the encounter in which Stanley “forced” Shirley into sex, about which Shirley felt she had to remain silent. His presence is otherwise inscribed all over the novel. In addition to the book critic Mr. Waite, the professor Arthur Langdon embodies elements of Stanley: his teaching style, his attention to his students, his infidelity. In a story called “Still Life with Teapot and Students,” written around the same time as
Hangsaman
, Jackson puts herself explicitly in the faculty-wife role, entertaining two students—in the original draft, their names are Vicki and Anne—who come over for tea. She knows them well because they studied writing with her, which allows her a candor that she usually represses. “You still making passes at my husband?” the wife in the story asks Anne. Both girls affect surprise at the discovery that such a thing might bother her. Why doesn’t she just overlook his affairs? Vicki asks. “I mean, it’s not anything serious, ever, is it?” The wife realizes she cannot defend herself further, because “any more talking would destroy the handsome invulnerability she had set up for herself.” After the students leave, she pours herself a drink. “So I did it, she told herself defiantly. He can’t say a word without admitting everything. No more respect for his wife than that, she thought, every fat-faced little tomato who walks into his class.” When
one of Hyman’s Bennington colleagues brought a girlfriend to a party at her house, Jackson used the same striking term: the professor had arrived, she announced, “with his latest tomato.”

In fact, her jealousy may have been misplaced. There is no question that Hyman enjoyed the dynamic of being a male faculty member at an all-girls college—particularly one as permissive as Bennington, with a student population both so intelligent and so free-spirited. Walter Lehrman remembers him saying, “You know what Bennington’s really about? Sex.” But Hyman’s former students insist that he—unlike many of their other instructors—did not have affairs with students. “Stanley didn’t do that. He exuded admiration and delight, but he did not make a pass,” says Suzanne Stern, a student of Hyman’s in the mid-1950s. Many commented on his lack of physical appeal, especially in comparison to his colleague Howard Nemerov, whose seductive qualities are well remembered. “There was nothing inherently attractive or romantic about Hyman as a figure. But he was dazzling,” says Marjorie Roemer, an English major and 1959 graduate. Another student, who graduated in 1965 and was close enough to the Hymans to spend a few weeks at their house babysitting while Shirley and Stanley were on vacation, recalls Stanley’s telling her that he had a “hundred-mile rule”—no cheating within one hundred miles of Bennington.

Hyman may not have always stuck to this rule. Regardless, it created a loophole by allowing him to look up former students on his regular visits to New York. And the move to Westport—which allowed him more convenient access than ever before to the city, now less than sixty miles away—facilitated this. He normally spent two days a week there, working in the
New Yorker
offices; in the evenings, he often played poker with Walter Lehrman, Louis Scher, and others. But he also had the opportunity to meet women for dinner, drinks, and whatever might follow. “This was the world of the double standard,” says Phoebe Pettingell. “Part of the ethos was that you didn’t get involved with people you might get too emotionally attached to.” And he may not always have been able to control his behavior. Lehrman and his wife, Jinny, were regular overnight guests at the Hymans’. One night Jinny went to bed early while the rest of the household stayed up playing poker. While
she was in bed, Stanley, thinking she was asleep, came into the room, uncovered her, then covered her back up and left. Lehrman considered the incident “just ordinary drunken curiosity,” but others might have taken such things more seriously—especially Jackson.

The years in Westport—where her initial happiness was so quickly eroded by one debacle after another, all of which she had to face largely alone, far from the friends she had made in North Bennington—seem to have been when Shirley first began thinking about divorce. In a letter to Stanley that runs to nearly six typewritten pages, she would later lay out the reasons she believed their marriage would inevitably end—that is, why she would someday gather the courage to leave him. Not only did he belittle and neglect her, but he lavished attention on other women—especially former students whom he visited in New York. “i used to think . . . with considerable bitter amusement about the elaborate painstaking buildup you would have to endure before getting [one] of your new york dates into bed,” she wrote. “they had been sought out, even telephoned, invited, spoken to and listened to, treated as real people, and they had the unutterable blessing of being able to go home afterward. . . . i would have changed places with any of them.”

Up to this point, the women in Jackson’s stories required a magical escape from their unhappy marriages, in the form of James Harris or another beautiful stranger. But in “A Day in the Jungle,” written in the spring of 1951, a woman simply walks out on her husband, packing a suitcase and leaving a note. It was “so shockingly, so abominably, easy, that her only vivid feeling about it was surprise that the institution of marriage might pretend to be stable upon such elusive foundations,” the story opens. The woman goes to a hotel, where she naps and relaxes with a mystery novel; she lunches in a restaurant and flirts with a stranger. Her reverie is interrupted by a call from her husband, who has tracked her down, and she agrees to meet him for dinner. On the way to the restaurant, she grows bizarrely, irrationally frightened of some unknown menace: the neon signs swinging dangerously above her, the “devouring earth” lurking beneath the sidewalk, ready to open up and swallow her. “What am I doing?” she wonders. “This is madness, this is idiotic; I am not supposed to be
afraid
of anything; I am a free person,
and the path I have chosen for myself does not include fear.” But when she sees her husband waving to her at the restaurant, he seems “wonderfully safe and familiar,” and as she greets him she thinks, “I have been alone for so long.”

Jackson—as Margaret tells the Dylan Thomas figure on the porch—was afraid of staying. But not as afraid as she was of leaving. Not yet.

IF HYMAN WAS
bothered by his wife’s portrayal of him, he didn’t show it. “Shirley finished the novel last night, and sends it off tomorrow. I think it is a beaut,” he wrote to Ben Zimmerman at the end of November 1950. His own book, yet again, was stalled. He complained to his editor that he had been “in peonage” to
The New Yorker
, writing long pieces, including his profile of Louis Scher, which he submitted that fall but was not published for more than two years. After the next one—a gargantuan history of the Brooklyn Bridge—was in, he promised, he would have a year off from the magazine to work full-time on the book. He requested an extension to December 31, 1951.

“my novel is coming out in april and no one likes it[,] even me,” Jackson wrote to her parents just before Christmas. It wasn’t true that no one liked it: Jackson’s friends had been typically effusive with their praise. Nemerov—whose first book of poetry,
The Image and the Law
, had appeared a few years earlier—complimented her “delicate and certain” tone, and Jay Williams wrote that it was “a splendid, mature, beautiful book.” But Jackson smarted at rejections from the women’s magazines where she had hoped to place excerpts; the editors admired the book but thought it was unsuitable—in other words, too unconventional—for their readers. Elliot Schryver at
Woman’s Home Companion
compared Jackson to Djuna Barnes and remarked, perceptively, “It’s a story that terrifies you because the madness is kept on the near side of the fence where you yourself dwell.” Margaret Cousins, Jackson’s editor at
Good Housekeeping
and a friend, said she felt “wrung dry” upon finishing the novel. But her admission that she did not understand “half of what is going on” foreshadowed the most common criticism of the book—that it was simply too obscure.

Farrar, Straus was optimistic about
Hangsaman
’s prospects: the first printing was 7500 copies, and advertising was aggressive. A new publicity picture was arranged, in which Jackson looks severe, her hair pulled tightly back from her face. She wears a business suit and pearl earrings; the only sign of unconventionality is the large scarab pin on her lapel. Alas, reviews were mixed.
Time
magazine would mention
Hangsaman
along with
The Catcher in the Rye
, another novel about an adolescent with a precarious grip on sanity, as “one of the most successful U.S. novels of the year, a perfectly controlled, remarkably well-written account of a college girl’s descent into schizophrenia.” Jackson’s friend Kit Foster, writing in the
Bennington Weekly
, found
Hangsaman
“a considerable advance” over
The Road Through the Wall
: “realistic, sharp descriptions and dialogue combine with a spine-tingling, hallucinatory inner monologue to produce the sensation of life in two worlds.” In
The New York Times
, daily reviewer Orville Prescott called it “a beautifully written and thoroughly exasperating novel,” observing that the parts of the book dealing with Natalie and her parents were “almost unfairly brilliant” but that the story of her breakdown was too opaque. The reviewer for
The New York Times Book Review
loved the book—“One cannot doubt a word Miss Jackson writes”—but missed its point entirely, treating Tony as a real character. Those who understood it tended to find the ending problematic. W. T. Scott, writing in the
Saturday Review
, complained that “the structure of the novel falls apart; it cannot contain both the satirical reporting of the first half and the nightmare fantasy of the second,” and W. G. Rogers, the Associated Press book critic who had earlier quizzed Jackson about witchcraft, found the climactic scene “part magic and part gobble-de-gook.”

In June 1952, a year after
Hangsaman
appeared, Diana Trilling published a column in
The New York Times Book Review
that inadvertently revealed the extent of the disconnect between Jackson’s work and the broader reading public. Trilling blamed the general decline in fiction sales in America (which Roger Straus tended to invoke whenever Jackson complained about her own sales) on the generally poor quality of contemporary novels, for which the usual explanation, she said, was that the modern world had become “so complex and awful that the novelist
is unable to deal with it,” just as painters had turned away from representative art to abstraction. Trilling disagreed: she simply found the novels superficial, “fashion-drawings of what the sophisticated modern mind wears in its misery—and it is no accident that their authors are so welcome in the pages of our expensive fashion magazines.” The central question, she continued, was whether writers would use their talent to “assert the human possibility” or continue to “give rein to the perverse and destructive will which is somewhere in all of us.” On both counts—the fashion magazines and the negative view of humanity—she might have been speaking of Jackson.

Critic John Aldridge published a response to Trilling’s essay the following week. In his mind, the problem wasn’t that writers were striking “fashionable poses of doom,” but that the novel itself had run out of subjects. The taboos that had energized eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction were now all but broken down: the drama surrounding love had faded into “the lesser drama of sex,” while money and social ambition had disappeared as sources of tension with the blurring of class lines. The tendencies in the novel that Diana Trilling had criticized, he concluded, were simply “necessary adjustments to a changed cultural situation.” As a result, he believed, novelists such as Salinger, Stafford, Capote, and Carson McCullers were immaturely resorting to childhood as a source of inspiration.