Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (7 page)

AS A SICKLY
, isolated child growing up in a strict New England family, Hawthorne is said to have developed an unusual quirk: he composed an inner dialogue, divided into two personalities, that substituted for conversation and companionship. One side served as storyteller, the other as audience, offering questions or criticisms. As a teenager, Jackson did something similar, but on the page. She kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose.

The earliest surviving diary begins in January 1932, shortly after Jackson’s fifteenth birthday. It is a small datebook with a black fake-leather cover stamped with the words “Year Book,” the kind that businesses often distributed for free. In these pages, she did her best to cultivate the aw-shucks tone of an all-American girl: “O Boy!” is a frequent exclamation. And the snapshot the diary gives of her life makes her look in every way like a typical suburban teenager who spends her days making fudge, playing hockey and tennis, riding bikes, gossiping with her friends, doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing card games (she favored a complicated version of double solitaire popular at the time called Russian Bank). She attended Girl Scout camp for a few weeks in the summer and regularly went to vaudeville shows and movies: the
Polish-born singer and actor Jan Kiepura was a favorite. She worried about her spending habits, her grades, and her weight: she had trouble resisting a box of chocolates. She quarreled, unsurprisingly, with her mother. There is nothing about events in the outside world: like many teenagers, she took no interest in politics or global affairs. In a year when the biggest hit song was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” she preferred syrupy romantic melodies such as Fauré’s “Berceuse.” But she must have been watching her neighbors carefully, gathering the details of social mores that would find their way into
The Road Through the Wall
.

Only one entry reveals something more unusual. On New Year’s Day 1932, Jackson made a series of resolutions, deciding confidently to “write down just what I’d like to be at the start of 1933 and . . . make myself just that.” She recognized that change would be difficult, especially because of her own high standards: “I’m not easily satisfied.” Most of what she aimed for was conventional: study harder, “make myself healthier (thinner),” be nicer to friends and family (she underlined “and family”), and control her spending. The last few lines are more curious. “I must lose that sense of inferiority, but not go so far as vulgarity, and, above all things, I must cultivate charm, and ‘seek out the good in others, rather than explore for the evil.’ ”

That last phrase, significantly, is in quotation marks. Those are not Jackson’s words, but someone else’s. They might be her mother’s: the reference to vulgarity especially sounds like something Geraldine might have said. Jackson’s daughters would later complain that even as Shirley rebelled against her mother, she had nonetheless internalized that scolding voice, which she would use on them: “A lady doesn’t climb trees,” “A lady sits like this,” and so on. After Jackson began writing fiction, Geraldine never hesitated to say that she didn’t understand or simply didn’t like her daughter’s darker works; she preferred the magazine articles and family memoirs. “You have too many demented girls [in your books],” she once commented.

Fortunately for her writing, exploring for the evil was not something Jackson ever truly intended to give up. And even as she committed her teenage self to self-improvement, she already had a precocious ability to
step outside herself, to observe herself as if she were one of the guests at her mother’s teas and garden parties whom she would later caricature. “Shirley—it would be very interesting to go thru this book with a more open mind, and find out how much is sincere, and how much affectation, tho I’m afraid the result would be rather overwhelmingly in the favor of the latter,” she wrote on an index card that she inserted into the front pages of the diary. Whether or not she ever did this, she was apparently aware of her own “affectation” even as she set it down on paper.

Jackson was able to step outside herself in another way as well. Even as she continued to write in the datebook, she began a second diary. This time she chose a tablet-size notepad, its cover printed with the image of an elegant young woman, her auburn hair gently waved, a yellow shawl gathered around her bare shoulders, a necklace of black beads at her throat—the proper young lady Geraldine wanted her daughter to be. The picture’s title is “The Debutante.” But the girl’s face is scratched out with a pencil. If Shirley could not express to her mother her resentment about Geraldine’s expectations, she could take it out in private.

Jackson wrote this diary entirely in the form of love letters to Harold (Bud) Young, who was a year ahead of her at Burlingame High and the concertmaster of the orchestra; he also played viola and oboe and was a member of the honor society. She described him as “my girl-shy violinist,” although she seems to have been the shy one: it’s not clear that they ever so much as spoke to each other. The crush existed entirely in her mind; Bud may not even have been aware of it. In the datebook, she marked as “lucky” the days on which she was able to catch a glimpse of him and enclosed a map that Dorothy, who took music lessons from Bud’s father, had drawn for her of the Youngs’ house, with an X marking Bud’s bedroom. But the tone she created in her “Debutante” diary was unreservedly passionate—entirely different from the “O Boy!” cheer of the first diary. It also was every bit as much of a performance. Jackson was trying out different personas, figuring out what fit and what did not. For the next two years, she kept both diaries simultaneously: the black datebook to gossip about her friends and report on her activities, the “Debutante” diary for her more personal confessions. Sometimes
she went for months without writing in one or the other; sometimes she wrote in both on the same day.

A significant portion of Jackson’s adult writing would be epistolary: the lengthy letters she sent to Stanley Edgar Hyman, her future husband, during college vacations; her chatty reports to her parents about all the goings-on in her household, often with a side helping of news about her writing; and, late in life, the intimate letters she wrote to Jeanne Beatty, the Baltimore housewife who became her confidante. In each of these instances, Jackson’s letters helped her to form her thoughts and develop her voice as a writer. The “Debutante” diary served a similar function. “Today, I shall write,” she announced dramatically in November. “I feel it. I shall write of the great joys of living.” She even started to abandon her crush. “Forgive me, dear, if I say it, but, these last few days, I find myself not caring so much,” she wrote on November 26. “Why Bud, even you seem less important than—what? I don’t know. My writing, possibly.” Still, the next day, she was swooning over his performance of “Berceuse.” “There has never been music more wholly yours, so softly triumphant. . . . I think, dear, that Orpheus should have had a violin, rather than a lyre.” A few weeks later, she wrote of her fondness for another unabashedly romantic piece: Wagner’s
Lohengrin
, with its ethereal overture for strings. “It’s exquisite. Our love song—only you don’t know it.”

On Shirley’s sixteenth birthday, she received from her mother a deep green turquoise ring (her birthstone) that she called her “Laughing Ring.” The end of the year meant the departure of Bud, who graduated in December and moved on to San Mateo Junior College. Shirley would continue to run into him occasionally—she tried to figure out which streetcar he took so that she could be on the corner at the right moment—but their encounters were much less frequent. “To my friend, my love, my hero, I whisper one last goodbye,” she wrote. The following day, she reflected, “I have realized that I have begun a new state of mind. I know that from now on I shall write differently in this book.” Bud had served his purpose; she, too, was ready to move on.

The start of 1933 saw the United States sinking further into the
Depression, the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a platform of economic renewal, and the first ominous steps toward Nazism in Europe—the last of which would prove, within a few years, of intense concern for Jackson. For now, blissfully oblivious in her Burlingame bubble, she began a new diary in a datebook identical to her 1932 “Year Book.” The back page contained a sheet for “Special Data,” on which she recorded the names of her crushes and best girlfriends, as well as her ambitions: “author, actress, aviator, lawyer (almost all impossible).” She also started a five-year diary, in which she would write intermittently. “[Dorothy] says this diary is to tell what I think—if at all,” she wrote in the first. The second “tells what I do—if at all!” No mention was made of the “Debutante” diary, which Shirley did not show to Dorothy or to anyone else, and whose musings could not be so neatly categorized.

The 1933 datebook was as superficial as its predecessor: a sixteen-year-old’s worries about her grades and reports on tame adventures. Increasingly, she wrote about movies that particularly impressed her: not the blockbusters of the year, which included
King Kong
,
The Invisible Man
, and
Duck Soup
, but minor dramas such as
The Match King
, about a Swedish businessman who cons his way to success;
The Mummy
, which she found too unreal and “horribly unhorrifying” to be frightening; and, most interestingly,
The Kid from Spain
, featuring Sidney Franklin—a Jew from Brooklyn turned professional bullfighter who played himself in the film. Shirley was so impressed that she saw the movie twice in two days; in five years, another Jewish boy from Brooklyn would prove even more alluring. She also kept track of her writing progress. “Wrote all evening—there was something in my pen tonight,” she reported in February. No fiction from this period survives, but the tone of her diary entries suggests a new maturity. In one, she reported on a party her mother had thrown—“I’ve been banged around, kissed, socked, and generally man-handled”—and described the guests as if listing the characters in a play. One of her mother’s friends was a “Spanish señorita with a Garbo complex,” another was “Harlequin with a yellow streak.”

These parties may well have inspired Jackson’s story “The Intoxicated,” written in the early 1940s and published for the first time in
The Lottery
. A man in his thirties attending a party encounters his host’s daughter in the kitchen, a “baggy and ill-formed” girl of seventeen who disconcerts him by calmly laying out a vision of apocalypse. “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside.” The man rebukes her—“I think it’s a little silly of you to fill your mind with all this morbid trash”—but she will not be dissuaded. “A really extraordinary girl,” he tells her father, who shakes his head and replies, “Kids nowadays.” If Jackson was anything like the girl in the story, then as a teenager she was already developing the knack for the perfectly shocking line that would come to characterize her fiction. The story also suggests that she might not have been as politically oblivious as she appeared to be: the apocalypse she imagines can be read in any number of allegorical ways. Of course, it can also be taken at face value, as a surreal vision of a world gone wrong.

That spring, Leslie and Geraldine broke the news about the Traung Company’s merger. The Jacksons would arrive in Rochester in time for Shirley and Barry to begin the school year in their new home. Shirley was initially heartbroken about the move, which meant leaving her beloved California—the garden where she had spent so many hours dreaming in the grass, the back fence where she and Dorothy sat eating pomegranates—for a blustery, unfamiliar new city. “This is the last time I shall ever press the first rosebud of Spring that comes off my rosebush,” she wrote sentimentally. Although she was justifiably anxious about having to finish high school in a new environment, she soon came to see the move as an opportunity for a fresh beginning. She had taken from her time in California what she needed; the question now was what she would do with it. “Get thee behind me, Cupid!” she wrote on the last day of school. “Off with the old—Come on, N.Y., I’m ready for yuh!”

The last two pages of the “Debutante” diary contain an undated story fragment that Jackson originally called “Berceuse”; later she crossed out the title and replaced it with “Melody.” A girl named Karleen, attending
a concert with her aunt, is deeply moved by the music. Her eyes fix on the orchestra leader—“oh, to create such music!” But Jackson has already learned that beauty and the grotesque can be effectively juxtaposed: the man’s back is fat, his coat shiny. Afterward, Karleen’s aunt asks if she enjoyed the concert: she wants her niece to “learn to appreciate good music, like I do.” Karleen’s teenage heart cringes in annoyance. She doesn’t want just to appreciate music. She wants to write it.

2.

THE DEMON IN
THE MIND

ROCHESTER,
1933–1937

All I can remember clearly about being sixteen is that it was a particularly agonizing age; our family was in the process of moving East from California, and I settled down into a new high school and new manners and ways, all things I believe produce a great uneasiness in a sixteen-year-old.

—“All I Can Remember”

H
ANGSAMAN
, SHIRLEY JACKSON’S SECOND AND MOST
autobiographical novel, begins with seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite about to leave home for college. Natalie’s home life is oppressive—her brother, two years younger, wants nothing to do with her; her mother is clingy and dissatisfied; her father is domineering. Quirky and sensitive, she lives mostly in her own mind, “an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions.” Her fantasy life is vivid and strange. Sometimes she imagines that a detective is questioning her about a crime, drawing on a deep wellspring of guilt with an unknown source. To distract herself in moments of boredom or discomfort, she imagines “the sweet
sharp sensation of being burned alive.” She shares her creative writing with her father, but also keeps a secret diary, though she admits to herself that she is writing it for “ultimate publication.”