Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (8 page)

Thus far, the connections between Natalie and Shirley are obvious. Even their names are similar: both contain the same number of letters and end in a “lee” sound. So what happens next is troubling. Natalie’s parents give a garden party, which was a regular occurrence in the Jackson household as well. Natalie drinks a cocktail and finds herself the object of attention of one of her father’s friends, an older man who offers her a cigarette and flirts with her. Like the girl in “The Intoxicated,” Jackson’s story about a teenager who disconcerts a party guest with talk of apocalypse, Natalie initially parries the man with clever conversation, but eventually he manages to lead her into the woods behind the house. What happens there is not described. When she awakens the next morning, she is sick and dizzy. The mirror reveals “her bruised face and her pitiful, erring body.” She wishes she were dead. The remainder of the book chronicles her psychic disintegration.

If this incident is based on anything that happened to Jackson at the time, there is no trace of it. There has been speculation that she was molested as a young teenager in California by her uncle, Clifford Bugbee, a lifelong bachelor whose “sticky touch” Dorothy Ayling, Jackson’s childhood friend, would recall squeamishly decades later. But Clifford is an unlikely sexual predator. For one thing, Jackson seems to have remembered him fondly, telling her children funny stories about his odd scientific inventions. When the Jacksons returned to California for a visit in 1939, the summer after Shirley’s junior year at Syracuse University, her letters to Stanley—which describe the trip in minute detail, including excursions made with her uncle—reveal no discomfort at spending time with him. And her diaries from high school and early college give absolutely no hint of sexual predation.

They do, however, reveal a young woman who engaged in sexual experimentation typical for girls of her time. In 1933, shortly before the move to Rochester, Jackson got drunk for the first time at a neighborhood party—“I feel like a package of condensed giggles”—and flirted with a local actor: “I mixed him a drink, and he tried manfully.”
Whatever that may mean, it does not sound like the comment of a victimized girl. In 1936, after starting college at Rochester, she joked in her diary about “the ruination of what we laughingly refer to as my reputation”—an incident in which her brother turned the lights on unexpectedly and exposed her canoodling with a date in the living room. Her initial embarrassment wore off quickly. “Absolved of sin,” she reported a few days later.

Yet Jackson, like her fictional counterpart, would experience a mental unraveling during her first two years of college. It was serious enough that she had to withdraw from the University of Rochester and live at home for a year before making a fresh start at Syracuse University. Between 1934 and 1936, her writings indicate that she may have made at least one halfhearted attempt at suicide. No particular event appears to have sent her into this downward spiral. More likely, Jackson was overwhelmed—for the first time, but hardly the last—by the constellation of social anxiety and familial pressure that left her feeling accepted by no one.

A FLOURISHING CITY
of about 320,000 on the banks of the often turbulent Genesee River, Rochester in 1933 was considerably more cosmopolitan than sleepy Burlingame. In addition to theaters, dance halls, and its own philharmonic and opera company, it boasted nearly forty movie houses. With the average ticket price a quarter—well within the reach of a high school student—Jackson, who loved the movies, sometimes attended as often as twice a week. Known as the Kodak City, after the Eastman Kodak Company, the city’s biggest employer and greatest homegrown success story, Rochester was also home to the optical company Bausch and Lomb and the Gannett newspaper chain. The private, coeducational University of Rochester, founded in 1850, benefited from the city’s prosperity: George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, was a major donor. Rochester was also known for its food-packing industry: a rich harvest from local farms and orchards supplied the city’s canneries. All those containers needed labels, which was where the Stecher-Traung Lithograph Company, Leslie Jackson’s employer, came in. The
company became well-known for the striking watercolor paintings that adorned its seed packets, which today are collector’s items.

In spite of its economic vigor, Rochester remained bleak and industrial. And it had all the social conservatism of Burlingame—one of the city’s nicknames was Smugtown, U.S.A.—with none of the mitigating factors that made California life so pleasant: the weather, the pomegranates and avocados, the eucalyptus-scented air. Jackson despised her new home from the start. “Golly, how I hate this town,” she complained on September 7, 1933. In her diary, she kept track of the number of days since she had left California. The first school she enrolled in was a poor fit, and she and her brother were both miserable there. She also developed hay fever immediately upon arrival, a problem that would plague her for the rest of her life. She was literally allergic to the Northeast.

The Jackson family settled in Brighton, an upper-middle-class suburb southeast of the city center. Their new home, at 125 Monteroy Road, was a handsome five-bedroom colonial with Tudor accents, built only a few years earlier. The neighbors were professionals: doctors, lawyers, University of Rochester faculty. In general, “people were on an upward trajectory,” recalls Marion Strobel, whose mother, Marian Morton, grew up near the Jacksons and knew Shirley and Barry in high school. The Jacksons were even more interested in social climbing. They hobnobbed with the city’s elite at the Genesee Valley Club, a city club, and the Country Club of Rochester, where Shirley and her brother golfed. (Strobel recalled that when she was growing up in Brighton, she thought she was underprivileged because her father’s club lacked a swimming pool.) Like many women of her class, Geraldine hired an African-American maid to help with housework and cooking. Shirley became close to the maid, whose name was Alta Williams, and in college wrote an unpublished story about her.

The house on Monteroy Road was walking distance from Brighton High School, where Shirley enrolled for her senior year. Two decades later, she would still recall “the sick inadequate feeling of standing in a hallway holding a notebook and wondering without hope if i would ever find the right room.” The transplant from California was obviously a novelty: when the first snow of the season began to fall one afternoon,
Shirley’s entire chemistry class insisted on accompanying her to the window to marvel at it. She did not bother telling her classmates that there had been a freak snowfall in Burlingame the previous winter.

Newness, however, did not translate into popularity. The school was small, with only sixty students in Jackson’s graduating class. And the awkwardness of winning acceptance by long established cliques in senior year was exacerbated by Jackson’s appearance. Her high school yearbook photo reveals a girl with a mass of unruly auburn hair and a stern, slightly puzzled expression. Her clothes were never quite right. “She used to wear a green sweater and a blue skirt, and in those days you didn’t wear a green sweater and a blue skirt,” one of her classmates would say, recalling that Jackson was also “on the heavy side.” She filled her calendar with football games, parties, and plays. The California girl soon grew to love tobogganing and ice skating, and would even try skiing. But she suffered a social setback almost at once, rejected from a sorority she had hoped to join. She did not let her disappointment show, instead cultivating a pose of aloofness. Jackson “didn’t give a darn about being with the in girls or the out girls,” Strobel recalls her mother saying. “That just wasn’t her thing.”

Geraldine, focused on her own social life, paid little attention to her struggling daughter. Barry Jackson gossiped to his friends that the whole family had given up on her ever dressing or acting the way the rest
of the Jacksons did. “We just don’t know what will become of Shirley,” he told Marian Morton. Marian’s older brother, Richard Morton, who got to know Shirley at the University of Rochester, also remembered her as an “odd duck.” In a story likely written a few years later, Jackson depicts a high school girl who comes home, sobbing, because she has no date to a basketball game. “i hate that school and i won’t ever go back because they’re so lousy to me. . . . i hate them all and they’re lousy to me and i wish i were pretty!” Her mother rather lamely tries to comfort her, suggesting that her brother take her to the game, but begins and ends the conversation by scolding her for slamming her bedroom door. After her mother leaves the room, she writes on a piece of paper, “i hate my mother . . . i wish that she would die,” and sets it on fire.

Shirley Jackson in Rochester, mid-1930s.

By the Christmas holidays, Jackson had accumulated a small gaggle of girlfriends. Judging from the way she portrayed them later, they occupied a rung on the social ladder close to hers. In one of her unpublished stories, a high school girl tells the other unpopular girls at recess, “My father doesn’t like me to go out with boys.
You
know, the things they do.” In an early draft of
Hangsaman
that offers a glimpse of Natalie in high school, her only friends are Doris (“fat, and badly dressed, and stupid, and the center of a little group of girls who did things by themselves, went to movies and had parties and went swimming in the summer, in a gay chattering body whose animation never quite concealed the fact that they were ugly”) and Doris’s sidekick Ginny (“she played sentimental tunes very badly on the piano, and was given to much giggling flirtation with her teachers”). Sitting in the drugstore with them, Natalie “knew that she was marked, just as irretrievably as though they had all worn distinctive uniforms, as one of the little group [of] social outsiders.” The humiliation of attending a school dance with these girls instead of with a date is redeemed only by her encounter there with a teacher, who compliments the poems she submitted anonymously to the school newspaper. “i knew they were yours, of course,” he tells her. “even though you tried to change your handwriting, you couldn’t change your own peculiar phrases and ways of looking at things.” She agrees to let him publish them under her name: “i’m sort of proud of them.”

The move, and the alienation that accompanied it, had a profound
effect on Shirley. Back in California, Dorothy Ayling was one of the first to notice it. Shirley still considered Dorothy her closest friend; at a time when long-distance telephone calls constituted a great occasion and expense, the two wrote to each other regularly, usually with news about boys. Shirley’s letters to Dorothy are lost, but the responses offer some clues about what she must have written. “When have I ever heard you say you weren’t nuts over somebody?” Dorothy wrote when Shirley confided her latest crush. On the surface, Shirley sounded just about the same. But Dorothy began to pick up on signs that something was amiss. “I was just wondering . . . if your mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby. . . . Something is radically wrong in your upper story—if you have any,” she wrote that winter. “Sometimes after I read your letters I wonder whether the climate’s good for you,” she joked a few months later.

Dorothy tried to make light of the change in her friend, but the transformation was significant. Perhaps it was the move; perhaps it would have happened anyway as Jackson matured. “I beg your pardon—may I?” she wrote in her “Debutante” diary in November, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. She now felt alienated from her own memories of a self she no longer recognized, “a girl who thought too much.” Jackson marked the change in uncannily stark terms: that girl is dead, she wrote, “and her passing is, as I now see, mourned by few. She was a dreamer, and dreamers have no place in our matter-of-fact modern world. . . . A somewhat more matter-of-fact, and infinitely wiser person has taken her place.” Jackson lacked the self-awareness to see that her assessment of her own infinite wisdom was somewhat premature. But, as always, she was able to step outside herself to offer self-criticism. On the same day, she wrote herself a stern note in her regular diary. The tone, and even the words, show just how deeply she had internalized Geraldine’s voice. “Hereafter see that there is a distinction between your present attitude and your former one,” she scolded herself. “You have always prided yourself on inherent good breeding. See that self-disgust does not destroy this rightful pride. One can be friendly without making enemies.” During a year that would have crushed a girl with a weaker ego, Jackson still placed a high value on her own dignity.

She had always been moody, as nearly all teenagers are. Now, in an extension of the persona splitting of her multiple diaries, she took the unusual step of assigning names to her moods, as if they were characters in a play. The habit continued through her college years and later manifested in her fiction—most strikingly in
The Bird’s Nest
, her novel of multiple-personality disorder, in which a woman’s mind fractures into four distinct characters, each with her own name and defining characteristics. Jackson called her happiest persona “Irish,” perhaps a reference to the features she liked best about herself: her auburn hair and green eyes. (Later, it would be one of Hyman’s terms of endearment for her.) “Irish has gone—completely and utterly,” she wrote during that difficult fall. “Has she left me to struggle along for myself, I wonder? Or has she merely, elusive as usual, left me when I want her most?” The trouble, as usual, seemed to be boy-related: more of the usual no-date-for-the-dance problems. On New Year’s Eve, she assessed the previous year as “eventful,” “rich in friends,” “colorful,” and “encouraging,” if “not always happy.” Her new year’s resolution for 1934 was simpler than usual: “To be happy.”