Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (6 page)

Jackson once said that “the first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents. . . . Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.” The parental crime to be avenged may have simply been the Jacksons’ attempt to mold their daughter into a typical upper-middle-class California girl: proper, polite, demure. In a picture of Geraldine and Shirley taken when Shirley was a teenager, Shirley sits at the piano while Geraldine hovers watchfully in the background. Music was an interest the two of them shared: Geraldine taught Shirley many of the old English and Scottish folk songs collected as the Child Ballads, handed down to her by her own mother and grandmother, which Shirley loved and sang all her life. Leslie, too, liked to sing funny music-hall songs, and later took up the ukulele and the zither.

Still, Shirley generally preferred to sit outside in the grass making up stories or to hole up in her room with the fantasies she loved: Grimm’s fairy tales, the Oz books (she would eventually collect all of them),
Tarzan of the Apes
. As a teenager, she would invent a private mythology centered on the figure of Harlequin, the commedia dell’arte acrobat with a quick wit and a sly grin, scouring the local library for anything she could learn about the character. Geraldine had no use for her daughter’s imagination. In a letter sent decades later, she reproached Shirley for having been “a wilful child . . . who insisted on her own way in everything—good or bad.”
Come Along with Me
, Jackson’s final, unfinished novel, would feature a heroine whose mother lectures her not to spend all her time lost in her imagination, “gawking at nothing.”

The presence of Shirley’s grandmother Mimi added a layer of oddness to the household. Even though she no longer advertised her services
as a Christian Science practitioner, she continued to practice spiritual healing on members of the family. Jackson gave her children various accounts of such attempts, with her own skeptical assessment of them. Mimi once claimed that she had broken her leg and prayed over it all night, then walked down the stairs to breakfast the next morning; as it turned out, the injury was actually a sprained ankle. In another episode, which still distressed Jackson many years later, her little brother, Barry, broke his arm after Shirley mischievously told him to close his eyes and run down a hill. Her guilt over her own responsibility for the injury turned into anger as she watched Mimi and Geraldine pray over Barry for two days before they finally took him to the hospital. Later Jackson told her daughter Joanne that Mimi, who did not seek treatment for her own stomach cancer, “died of Christian Science.”

Jackson channeled the anger into her fiction, in which she often portrays a grandmother figure as an aggressor. “Afternoon in Linen,” one of her first
New Yorker
stories, features a grandmother who humiliates her granddaughter by demanding that she read her poetry aloud in front of guests. In the early 1940s, when she was living briefly in Greenwich Village, Jackson recalled meeting “one of my grandmother’s old cronies—the one with the evil eye—down on sullivan street.” Afterward, she felt she was being “followed by something supernatural and malignant.” Throughout her life, she had nightmares in which her grandmother chased her. Christian Science, particularly the belief that one can influence the material world through the use of mental power, is not entirely remote from witchcraft, a subject Jackson would study and come to know well. It also—as she witnessed growing up—could be turned into a vehicle for harm.

Shirley’s personal habits were another primary source of tension between her and her mother. The woman whose beauty had been remarked upon in her wedding announcement, who loved to drape herself in furs and gold jewelry, expected her daughter to have similar taste. Dorothy Ayling, Shirley’s closest friend in childhood, recalled that Shirley’s mother was constantly nagging her to dress neatly and behave herself. Geraldine once even ambushed her teenage daughter at the beauty salon and forced her to get a permanent. But Shirley was a redhead,
which at the time was considered déclassé, more appropriate in a servant than the daughter of a socialite. And the formal outfits Geraldine loved to see her daughter wear—stiff, heavy skirts with matching jackets and gloves—tended not to flatter Shirley’s large-boned figure. In a picture of the two of them riding bicycles—both dressed, as usual, in skirts and jackets, their hair in matching waves over their foreheads—Geraldine smiles encouragingly at her daughter while Shirley looks elsewhere, her entire body turned awkwardly away from her mother.

But if Jackson intended
The Road Through the Wall
as an act of revenge against her mother, she might have had in mind a crime more serious than wardrobe impositions. The relationship between Harriet and her mother is an all-too-convincing portrayal of familial dysfunction, and certain scenes in the novel appear to be drawn directly from Shirley’s childhood. In the first chapter, Harriet comes home from school to discover that her mother has rummaged through her desk and read her private papers. (“Writing used to be a delicious private thing, done in my own room with the door locked, in constant terror of the maternal knock,” Jackson would later write.) Mrs. Merriman forces Harriet to burn her work in the furnace while Mr. Merriam sits passively at the dinner table. Later, after the fit of rage has passed, Harriet and her mother spend afternoons writing together: Mrs. Merriam composes a poem titled “Death and Soft Music,” while Harriet’s is called “To My Mother.”

The scene of privacy invaded was one that Jackson used repeatedly in her stories; sometimes a mother is the perpetrator, sometimes a
grandmother. But certain details are always the same: the lock on the desk broken, the papers out of order. If such a violation did not actually take place, it was certainly something the young Shirley had reason to fear. She wrote voraciously as a child, including the graduation play for her fifth-grade class, and was an assistant editor of her grammar school newspaper. But she would later tell her children that she had burned all her childhood writing—in front of her mother, to make her feel guilty. Like Harriet’s father in
The Road Through the Wall
, Leslie Jackson always took Geraldine’s side in her arguments with Shirley. “He was not the warm and fuzzy guy we imagined him to be,” Joanne Hyman recalls.

Shirley and Geraldine Jackson, mid-1930s.

Some of Jackson’s childhood writing does survive. Her early poems are written in a singsongy tone, often with a didactic religious message revealing the influence of Christian Science. Her first published work was a poem called “The Pine Tree,” for which she won a contest in
Junior Home Magazine
(“The Something-to-Do Magazine for Mothers and Children”) in February 1929, at age twelve. (Her excitement over the award lasted only until she found out what the prize was—a six-month subscription to the magazine.) The poem describes a pine tree who lives in a “lonely wood” and is sad because “no one ever notices me.” Suddenly an angel appears and comforts the tree by telling it that God cherishes it. If the pine tree speaks for the adolescent Shirley’s struggles with her mother when it says “I do no good,” then it may also show that she, a lonely outsider, found more consolation in religion than she would later let on.

A poem addressed to Geraldine takes a different tone. “Written for Mother’s Day on May 1926” begins with the usual cadence but soon veers off course.

A mother is the nicest thing

That ever there could be.

I have never had cause to forget,

That mine means the world to me.

How sweet to have a mother who

is always willing to help you,

always eager to sympathise,

always ready to give happiness.

How sweet is the joy given to you by that loving mother, who is always hunting for new ways to give happiness.

If ever we feel that our mother is not quite fair to us, we must try to overcome this unfaithful feeling, for Mothers were given to us to love and obey, and should we not honor them as well?

Even at age nine, Shirley was capable of writing with regular rhyme and meter, as the other poems in her archive demonstrate. The problem was getting her feelings about her mother—messier and more unruly than she could accept—to fall neatly into place.

Yet another source of strain between Shirley and her mother was Shirley’s friendship with Dorothy Ayling, her best friend from the time she was twelve until the Jacksons moved to Rochester, New York, in 1933. Dorothy’s father was the gardener at La Dolphine—not the same class as an executive at the Traung Label and Lithograph Company. Though Geraldine never made Shirley break off the relationship, Dorothy later recalled that, in four years of friendship, she was never invited for a meal at the Jackson house. Nonetheless, the two girls were inseparable. Dorothy was a year younger and a grade behind Shirley, but they played together in the Burlingame High School orchestra, Shirley on violin and Dorothy on cello. (Dorothy went on to become a professional cellist; Shirley would abandon the violin after high school, though she sang and played the piano and guitar throughout her life.) On weekends, they went into the city or spent time together at home, playing piano duets or eating pomegranates—“two for a nickel in California at that time,” Shirley remembered—on the back fence, to the dismay of Geraldine, who found fence sitting “unladylike.” Dorothy would later recall some of the pranks they played together, including sneaking up to La Dolphine to peek through the windows when parties were going on. Shirley was the more flamboyant of the pair; Dorothy, “so careful,” was “eager to keep me chained down to sanity,” Shirley reported in her diary. Shirley also had a bossy streak, and seems to have expected the younger girl to be subservient to her. At one point, complaining that her
pen had “worked overtime” and she had too much copying to do, she mused about hiring Dorothy as her secretary.

Jackson chronicled one of their excursions in “Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors,” written during the 1940s and first published in her 1949 collection
The Lottery
. In the story—like all of Jackson’s autobiographical writings, it straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction—a girl’s mother and grandmother take her and her friend Dorothy to San Francisco to buy coats, have lunch, and visit the fleet, which is making its yearly stop in the harbor. The pleasant outing is darkened by the overprotective anxieties of the narrator’s mother and grandmother, which—though the girls are only around twelve in the story—have a foreboding sexual undertone: “My mother told us about the kind of girls who followed sailors, and my grandmother told us about the kind of sailors who followed girls.” On the ship, the narrator realizes that she is lost. She finds “a tall man in uniform with lots of braid,” whom she believes must be an officer, and he helps her find her family. After she rejoins them, her mother shakes her. “Aren’t you ashamed?” she asks sternly. Apparently the girl had attached herself to one of these feared sailors. The women’s anxiety infects Dorothy, who becomes hysterical a few hours later when a sailor sits down in the empty seat next to her at the movies. But the joke is on the mother and grandmother: the sailors, who clearly intend no harm to the girls, are innocent victims of the older women’s paranoia.

One of Shirley and Dorothy’s favorite activities was making clothespin dolls, which Jackson later described in a magazine article that was incorporated into
Raising Demons
(1957). Again, the depiction of Geraldine is revealing. In an early draft of the piece, Jackson mentions her mother’s temper twice in a single sentence: “My mother used to be angry at us for doing nothing . . . [one day] she came angrily to where we were sitting on the railing of the back porch.” Geraldine “must have been reading a magazine or something, because she had a bright and progressive idea, and she proposed it in precisely the voice which end-of-their-tether parents use to propose an idea which they have read in a magazine somewhere.” In the published version, Geraldine’s anger has faded from the picture, as has Jackson’s irony, replaced by the breezy
tone she customarily used for her women’s magazine pieces. “I do believe that it was probably my mother’s suggestion, because she was always asking us if we couldn’t find something to
do
, girls, and because I can remember the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which she approached us frequently, suggesting one or another occupation for growing girls, which she had read in a magazine somewhere—that we should plan a bazaar to sell homemade cookies, for instance, or take long walks to gather sweet grass, or fern, or look for wild strawberries, or that we should learn shorthand.” With her typical penchant for exaggeration, in her article Jackson claimed that the girls were so enthusiastic about the pursuit that they made more than four hundred dolls before Dorothy laid down her scissors on the dining room table and refused to continue. Shirley’s childhood diary, however, records a more realistic number: thirty-nine.