Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (73 page)

Shirley herself was not able to write. That was the worst part—worse than not being able to go to the post office or the supermarket, or to drive off alone in her car. “Today marks my official return to work,” she wrote to Brandt happily, if prematurely, in April 1963, as she first began to see improvement. But she wasn’t able to follow through on most of what she started. Buoyed by her enjoyment writing
Nine Magic Wishes
, she wrote another children’s book, this one called
Famous Sally
, about a little girl who decides she wants everyone in the world to know her name. The heroine uses different methods to communicate with people in different places: for Tall City, where the buildings are “so high they wore clouds on their heads like hats,” she writes her name on a thirty-one-mile-high kite; for Soft City, where “the people wore shoes made of cat fur so their feet would not make a sound on the streets,” she asks the wind to whisper it; for Slow City (“Here the people moved like water dripping from a faucet. . . . When the people of Slow City ate their breakfasts they ate so slowly that when they were through it was
time for lunch”), she paints her name on the back of a turtle. (The ideas for the cities were Sarah’s—Shirley asked her permission before using them.) The book was charming, but editors were not as captivated by it as they had been by
Nine Magic Wishes
; it was rejected by several publishers as too odd before finding a home with Harlin Quist, the editor of
Nine Magic Wishes
at Collier, who had now moved to Crown. It would not be published until 1966, after Shirley’s death.

With new material slow to come, she tried revising older stories, including “The Lie,” in which a woman returns to her hometown to try to make right on a shameful incident in her past. The story had gone through various versions since she first submitted it in 1951 but had never sold. Money was not an issue—although Viking did not owe her anything more until she submitted a new novel, Brandt had sold the dramatic rights to
Castle
, which brought in an additional $10,000. “I don’t seem to finish anything,” Shirley told Brandt in July, “but I’ve got several lovely starts.” Two months later, she admitted to her parents that she had “not been doing any writing at all, not even letters.” The most she could manage were some book reviews for the
New York Herald Tribune
, including an ode to Dr. Seuss in honor of his latest ABC book (she praised him for bucking the current trends in children’s reading, which tended more to “touching tributes to doctors and school-bus drivers” and directions for how to build a tree house than to imagination) and another piece on
The Pooh Perplex
, a parody of literary theory by the critic Frederick Crews, in which a fictional group of English professors apply Marxist, Freudian, and other trendy methods of analysis to the Winnie-the-Pooh books. (“Literary criticism may not survive her embrace,” Stanley joked to Kenneth Burke.)

The problem, she told Brandt, was that she simply had no ideas: “I am in the disagreeable position of being most eager to get to work, with nothing at all to work on. If I do not find an idea soon I will have to steal one.” Brandt tried to help, even suggesting that she visit Shirley in Vermont to “stir things up.” In the end, Pat Covici offered the most useful advice. He told her to sit down at the typewriter every morning for an hour and write anything that came into her head. She promised she would do it—she was “ready to try anything.”

WHAT SHIRLEY PRODUCED
during those morning sessions at the typewriter, during the dark winter of 1963–64, would be her last diary. Now she was writing for only herself: not Stanley, not her parents, not the vanished Jeanne Beatty. She was skeptical at first about whether it would have the effect Covici had suggested of loosening her up, preparing her to write fiction again. “if this is going to be largely automatic writing and i always hated stream of consciousness then perhaps something to do will come out of it although after thinking about writing ever since i woke up when i was not feeling sorry for myself and hating stanley i have nothing but phrases in my head,” she wrote on December 2, the first morning. “punctuate at least,” she scolded herself at once.

“Why do you not write?” Howard Nemerov had asked her. He suffered from regular periods of depression, most recently after the death of his father, but the act of asking himself that question and answering it had led him to begin a new book of poems. For Shirley, the answer was not straightforward. “my mind is so full of troubles that there is no room for writing,” she worried. “but the sound of the typewriter in the empty house is comforting.” The pages were “a refuge, a pleasant hiding place from problems and troubles.” Perhaps writing would help her not to think about Stanley. Perhaps the words she had been trying to use were all wrong; perhaps the “absolutely correct words,” like Merricat’s magic words, would help her “find a clear way through.” After her first day’s writing, she felt as if her mind had been “swept clean,” purified. “there is a calm which begins to come. and my fingers are more limber.” She told Dr. Toolan that the sheer act of writing again brought her happiness. “this is the most satisfying writing i have ever done.” Here, among her familiar yellow pages, she was “at home,” she wrote on December 3.

But her mind kept returning to Stanley. She could not write when he was at home because she could not tell him what she was doing, which he would regard as a “criminal” waste of time. She had internalized his criticism: “i feel i am cheating stanley because i should be writing stories for money.” (Of course, if she had been able to write fiction, she
wouldn’t have had to write this diary.) When he was at the college, she felt an “enormous relief”; she waited to do her shopping in Bennington until the day he worked at home so that she could have some time away from him. It was an issue of control, she thought. How could she wrest control of her life, of her mind, back from Stanley? And if she could, would her writing change? “insecure, uncontrolled, i wrote of neuroses and fear and i think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety,” she wrote.

if i am cured and well and oh glorious alive then my books should be different. who wants to write about anxiety from a place of safety? although i suppose i would never be entirely safe since i cannot completely reconstruct my mind. but what conflict is there to write about then? i keep thinking vaguely of novels about husbands and wives, perhaps in suburbia, but i do not really think that this is my kind of thing. perhaps a funny book. a happy book. . . . plots will come flooding when i get the rubbish cleared away from my mind.

The diary pages are filled with references to an obsession that Shirley would not name.

i cannot write about what i am going to call my obsession because i simply cannot bring myself to put down the words. i don’t think that this is a refusal to face it because heaven knows i have thought recently about very little else, but i do think that being unable to write about it is a clear statement by my literary conscience . . . that i know the problem is not real, is imaginary . . . and i cannot in good faith write about it as though it were real. the emotion—let me see—is shame. . . . is it painful to write? i thought it was getting better and then it got worse, but it
can
get better, i know.

So consuming was her obsession that the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which had just taken place, is never mentioned in these pages. Even the most tumultuous events in the outside world could not
break through her ruminations. She was entirely possessed with her own troubles.

What was she ashamed of? One possibility was her fears about Stanley and Barbara Karmiller—the idea of seeing Barbara now filled her with unease. As the diary continues, however, the issue takes on a new dimension. Shirley’s obsession was not the affair itself; it was what the affair might finally drive her to do. She was consumed with the idea of leaving Stanley, of creating a new home for herself. She may have planned to take the children with her—Sarah and Barry, then fifteen and twelve, were still at home—but her fantasies are of leaving alone. In
Come Along with Me
, the novel she was about to begin, the narrator will do just that, taking a room in a boardinghouse where she hangs up her clothes, puts her sleeping pills on the nightstand, and places her reading glasses next to them. “I had no pets, no address books, no small effects to set around on tables or pin on walls, I had no lists of friends to keep in touch with and no souvenirs; all I had was myself,” she tells the reader. It is a fantasy of total unencumbrance.

Shirley records a deeply suggestive dream in which Stanley tells her she is sick and sends her to a doctor. In the office, the doctor shows her a “most attractive picture”: its title is something like
Exodus
. It depicts a woman “sliding out through a parting in the background.” She does not dwell on what the dream might mean, but its significance seems obvious. It is a dream of leaving, of slipping away unnoticed through a crack in the wall. She no longer needed a daemon lover to sweep her away; she now imagined walking off on her own. But as long as she was unable to confront the fantasy in her conscious mind, she would continue to suffer from agoraphobia. How better could her psyche prevent her from acting on her desire? If she could not leave the house, she could not leave Stanley. “heaven knows i am learning enough about myself to develop a new style and i look forward every now and then to freedom and security (and i do mean security by myself) and that great golden world outside which i should be getting closer to every day,” she wrote. “i wonder what i will be writing then.” The “great golden world” cannot simply mean the world outside 66 Main Street, because by this point she was capable of doing errands like going to Bennington and to the post office
(though she still dreaded the hour when the mail was due to arrive). It was the world in which she would live out her fantasy of total independence. “writing is the way out,” she reminded herself.

“i think about the glorious world of the future. think about me think about me think about me. not to be uncontrolled, not to control. alone. safe,” she wrote that December. As she contemplated it more and more seriously, she began to feel “a kind of sadness, almost a sense of loss; i am giving up something very precious, and withdrawing from something very important”—the family life that she and Stanley had spent so many years creating. “the new life is worth it, i do believe that. but i cannot always remember that what i am losing is cancerous.” Still, she reminded herself that whatever the cost, it was worth it “to be separate, to be alone, to
stand
and
walk
alone, not to be different and weak and helpless and degraded . . . and shut out. not shut out, shutting out.” Her vision mimics the transformation that Merricat and Constance experience in
Castle
. At the beginning of the novel, the two sisters are “shut out” from the world outside, intimidated by the villagers’ hostility from pursuing the most minimal contact. By the end, they are “shutting out” intruders, barricaded in their kitchen, alone and in control and perfectly happy.

Shirley saw the process as “building a cover over the unbearable, now at first only a very thin crust, not enough to support my weight, not enough to walk on yet, but please constantly reinforced and made stronger. the focus is gradually turning on myself, which is where it should be.” There would be a way through. She could almost see it. “on the other side somewhere there is a country, perhaps the glorious country of well-dom, perhaps a country of a story. perhaps both, for a happy book.” The diary ends with a single repeated phrase:

laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible

COVICI’S METHOD WORKED
: plots did come flooding back. Between January and November 1964, Jackson wrote three new stories—a meager showing compared with her periods of greatest productivity, but a fine start after her fallow year and a half. All are variations on the theme
of homes that have been corrupted. Places that seem secure become suddenly dangerous; the familiar turns menacing. In “The Little House,” a young woman arrives to stake her claim to a house she has inherited from an elderly aunt, the first home that has ever belonged only to her. As she imagines the ways she will make it her own—“I can do anything I want here and no one can ever make me leave, because it’s mine”—her peace is disturbed by the arrival of neighbors, a pair of creepy old ladies who needle her about the changes she intends to make and terrify her with the suggestion that her aunt may have been murdered by an intruder. After they leave, she is so frightened that she cannot go upstairs alone in the dark. “Don’t leave me here alone,” she repeats madly into the empty kitchen.

“Home,” written later in the year, is a more typical ghost story, and a frightening one. Ethel Sloane and her husband, city people, have just moved to a house in the country, and when the story begins Mrs. Sloane is pleased with herself for going straight into the village and introducing herself to all the shopkeepers: “she liked knowing that people knew who she was.” The locals are friendly if somewhat nonplussed by her self-assurance, particularly when she refuses to heed their warnings not to use the old road leading up the hill to her house when the weather is wet, as it is that day. On the way home she stops to pick up an old woman standing with a child on the side of the road, who surprises her by asking for a ride to her own house by its old name—“the old Sanderson place.” The ride is slippery and dangerous, and the road requires all her attention; when she turns back to look at her passengers after reaching the top, they have vanished. When Mrs. Sloane tells the story to her husband, he confesses that he hasn’t told her a local legend about their new house. Long ago, a boy who lived there was kidnapped by an old woman during a rainstorm; both were believed to have drowned in the creek. Mrs. Sloane is pleased that her house has its very own ghosts, but her pride evaporates when she gets in her car to head down to town the next morning and discover them once again in the backseat. After a wild ride in which she nearly skids off the road, she understands why the locals say not to use the road in the rain.