Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Ruth Franklin

Liveright (2016)

Rating: ★★★★☆

Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary, Women

Biography & Autobiographyttt Literaryttt Womenttt

This "historically engaging and pressingly relevant" biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master.

Still known to millions primarily as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of such classics as
The Haunting of Hill House
and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
.

Placing Jackson within an American Gothic tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror." Almost two decades before
The Feminine Mystique
ignited the women’s movement, Jackson’ stories and nonfiction chronicles were already exploring the exploitation and the desperate isolation of women, particularly married women, in American society. Franklin’s portrait of Jackson gives us “a way of reading Jackson and her work that threads her into the weave of the world of words, as a writer and as a woman, rather than excludes her as an anomaly” (Neil Gaiman).

The increasingly prescient Jackson emerges as a ferociously talented, determined, and prodigiously creative writer in a time when it was unusual for a woman to have both a family and a profession. A mother of four and the wife of the prominent 
New Yorker
 critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson lived a seemingly bucolic life in the New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. Yet, much like her stories, which channeled the occult while exploring the claustrophobia of marriage and motherhood, Jackson’s creative ascent was haunted by a darker side. As her career progressed, her marriage became more tenuous, her anxiety mounted, and she became addicted to amphetamines and tranquilizers. In sobering detail, Franklin insightfully examines the effects of Jackson’s California upbringing, in the shadow of a hypercritical mother, on her relationship with her husband, juxtaposing Hyman’s infidelities, domineering behavior, and professional jealousy with his unerring admiration for Jackson’s fiction, which he was convinced was among the most brilliant he had ever encountered.

Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of new interviews,
Shirley Jackson
―an exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaging childhood and turbulent marriage―becomes the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant.

60 illustrations

**

For Sam and Phoebe,
as promised

“It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power . . . can make manifest in deeds.”

—
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
, “Young Goodman Brown”

CONTENTS

NOTE ON QUOTATIONS

INTRODUCTION:
A Secret History

 1.   FOUNDATIONS:
California, 1916–1933

 2.   THE DEMON IN THE MIND:
Rochester, 1933–1937

 3.   INTENTIONS CHARGED WITH POWER:
Brooklyn, 1919–1937

 4.   S & S:
Syracuse, 1937–1940

 5.   THE MAD BOHEMIANS:
New York, New Hampshire, Syracuse, 1940–1942

 6.   GARLIC IN FICTION:
New York, 1942–1945

 7.   SIDESTREET, U.S.A.:
Bennington,
The Road Through the Wall
, 1945–1948

 8.   A CLASSIC IN SOME CATEGORY:
“The Lottery,” 1948

 9.   NOTES ON A MODERN BOOK OF WITCHCRAFT:
The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris
, 1948–1949

10.  THE LOVELY HOUSE:
Westport,
Hangsaman
, 1950–1951

11.  CABBAGES AND SAVAGES:
Bennington,
Life Among the Savages
, 1951–1953

12.  DR. WRITE:
The Bird’s Nest
, 1953–1954

13.  DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES:
Raising Demons
, 1954–1957

14.  WHAT IS THIS WORLD?
The Sundial
, 1957–1958

15.  THE HEART OF THE HOUSE:
The Haunting of Hill House
, 1958–1959

16.  STEADY AGAINST THE WORLD:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, 1960–1962

17.  WRITING IS THE WAY OUT:
1962–1964

18.  LAST WORDS:
Come Along with Me
, 1964–1965

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY: SHIRLEY JACKSON’S PUBLISHED WORKS

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PERMISSIONS

INDEX

NOTE ON
QUOTATIONS

I
N HER LETTERS AND ROUGH DRAFTS, SHIRLEY JACKSON USUALLY
typed using only lowercase letters. I have chosen to preserve her style as a way of delineating unpublished material.

INTRODUCTION

A SECRET
HISTORY

S
HIRLEY JACKSON OFTEN SAID THAT THE IDEA FOR
“
THE
Lottery,” the short story that shocked much of America when it appeared in
The New Yorker
on June 26, 1948, came to her while she was out doing errands one sunny June morning. She thought of the plot on her way home, and she immediately placed her toddler daughter in the playpen, put away the groceries she had just bought, and sat down to type out the story on her signature yellow copy paper. It was off to her agent the next day, with virtually no corrections: “I didn’t want to fuss with it,” she later said.

As origin stories go, this one—first told by Jackson and repeated countless times by others—is just about perfect. Its near mythic quality suits “The Lottery,” a parable of a stoning ritual conducted annually in an otherwise ordinary village. And it sets up the reader for the surprise that follows: the angry, confused, curious letters from
New Yorker
subscribers that would soon overwhelm the post office of tiny North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson lived. Some of the letter writers rudely announced that they were canceling their subscriptions. Others expressed puzzlement or demanded an interpretation. Still others, assuming that the story was factual, wanted to know where such
lotteries could be witnessed. “I have read of some queer cults in our time,” wrote a reader from Los Angeles, “but this one bothers me.”

There is only one problem with Jackson’s origin myth. It is not entirely true. The letters are real, all right—Jackson’s archive contains a huge scrapbook filled with them. But her files show that certain details do not match up. The changes made to “The Lottery” were not as minimal as Jackson suggested they were; there is no evidence that Jackson’s agent, as she would claim, disliked the story; and the period between submission and publication was a few months, not a few weeks. These details are relatively minor; they alter neither the meaning of the story nor the significance of its impact. But for the biographer, they are the equivalent of a warning siren: Caution! Poetic license ahead!

Some writers are particularly prone to mythmaking. Shirley Jackson was one of them. During her lifetime, she fascinated critics and readers by playing up her interest in magic: the biographical information on her first novel identifies her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” To interviewers, she expounded on her alleged abilities, even claiming that she had used magic to break the leg of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. “Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but a broomstick” was an oft quoted line. Roger Straus, her first publisher, would call her “a rather haunted woman.”