Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (64 page)

“The house
is
the haunting (can never be un-haunted),” Jackson wrote in her notes for the novel; on another page she wrote, “The house is Eleanor.” Jackson clearly intended the external signs of haunting to be interpreted as manifestations of Eleanor’s troubled psyche; over and over, in her notes and lectures about the book, she states that she does not believe in ghosts. But the novel makes it clear that something in the house brings out the disturbance in Eleanor. En route to Hill House, Eleanor indulges in fantasies of creating a home, picturing herself in various houses she passes along the way—a mansion guarded by stone lions, a cottage with a blue door and a white cat on the step—in each of which she imagines living a different kind of life. Later, she lies to the group about where she truly lives, conjuring a make-believe apartment based on these fantasies. Her final breakdown occurs after a conversation with Theodora in which Eleanor asks if they can live together after leaving Hill House and Theodora rejects her. When Eleanor submits to the house, she experiences a feeling of oneness with it, a heightened sense of its sounds and structure: “Somewhere upstairs a door swung quietly shut; a bird touched the tower briefly and flew off. In the kitchen the stove was settling and cooling, with little soft creakings. . . . She could even hear, with her new awareness of the house, the dust drifting gently in the attics, the wood aging.” Eleanor is unmarried and alone, with no place to go, no home to return to; her first desire is a longing for home. And in the end she achieves it by surrendering to the pull of Hill House. “I am home, I am home,” she thinks in her last moments of delusion, racing madly through the house before driving her car into a tree.

In an early version of the novel, the spirit voice that the protagonist
hears whispers to her to go away. But at some point in the writing process, Jackson realized that staying in Hill House was more frightening than leaving it. Like an abusive relationship—or an ineluctably entangled marriage of nearly twenty years—the house is both impossible to remain in and impossible to escape. In the end, of course, Eleanor’s delusion that she is coming home to join whatever has been calling her turns out to have been painfully wrong. The novel concludes with the same lines it opened with, which show that her fantasies of unity go unfulfilled. Just as Shirley’s hope that marriage would bring an end to her loneliness turned out to be in vain, Eleanor will not take her place in Hill House among the ghosts with whom she imagined herself in communion. Whatever walks there still walks alone.

IN THE MIDST
of her work on
Hill House
, Jackson found a new intellectual home: the Suffield Writer-Reader Conference. Founded by the poet William Jay Smith in 1956, the conference, held on the grounds of a private school in Suffield, Connecticut, gave amateur writers a chance to interact with professionals in a casual, intimate atmosphere. Jackson was first invited in 1958 by Louis Untermeyer, a poet and author of children’s books, who became a friend; she would return nearly every year until her death. During her first summer, the other faculty, a group of distinguished poets, critics, and fiction writers, included Untermeyer, Malcolm Cowley, Padraic Colum, Shirley Barker, George Abbe, and Jackson’s old friend Jay Williams; Hyman attended as a guest lecturer. Their obligations were light: each faculty member was required to give a single public lecture and to read and critique student manuscripts. The others regarded Jackson as “outrageous,” she proudly told a friend, because she insisted on having a pitcher of water and a bowl of ice delivered to her room an hour before lunch and dinner, so that she could set out a bottle of bourbon and host guests for a drink before meals. She was given a room in a private guest house, “so i can conduct my orgies away from the students,” but she had to share the house with Marjorie Mueller Freer, a writer of saccharine juvenile fiction whose presence she found grating. “she kept coming into my room at night and sitting on
my bed while she put up her hair and we had what she called—i swear to this—girl-talk. . . . i honestly found myself solemnly discussing things like My First Dance and Should I Cut My Hair? (really i don’t think so marjorie dear, it looks so nice the way it is.)”

In the lectures Jackson gave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at Suffield and elsewhere—“one [new] lecture a year usually manages to get you through”—she analyzed her own writing techniques and shared succinct, specific advice about exactly how she achieved her effects. In “Memory and Delusion,” delivered her first summer at Suffield, she emphasized that the writer’s intelligence must constantly be working, “always noticing”: “I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again.” Everything the writer observes is possible fodder for a story. When a green porcelain bowl on the piano suddenly shatters during a bridge game, she keeps the image of the scattered pieces in her memory storeroom, waiting for the right moment to deploy it: as an image of destruction (“what I can remember is the way the little pieces of the bowl lay there so quietly after they had been for so long parts of one unbroken whole”), or as an illustration of a sudden shock, or to represent the loss of a treasured possession. “All things are potential paragraphs,” she writes; the writer must decide upon their emotional valence.

The following summer, just after completing the
Hill House
manuscript, Jackson gave a lecture called “Garlic in Fiction,” a masterpiece of clarity that reveals how thoroughly in command of her talent she was. The greatest danger to the writer, she said, is a reader who decides to stop reading, and so the writer must use every weapon in the arsenal to snare his or her attention. But images and symbols, if used too frequently, will overpower the story, just as garlic will overpower a dish; they must be employed only as accents. For each character in a story or novel, she explains, she uses one basic image or set of images that the reader will associate with the character. For Eleanor, there are five: a little old lady she meets on her way to get her car, who tells her she will pray for her; two stone lions outside one of the houses she passes; the oleander bushes surrounding another house; a white cat on the step
of a cottage; and the little girl she encounters in the diner who refuses to drink her milk because it is not in the cup painted on the inside with stars that she prefers at home. (“Insist on your cup of stars,” Eleanor silently bids the girl, poignantly, since her childhood—like Jackson’s—clearly did not include such a cup, or a mother who would have indulged her whims.) The five symbols will recur throughout the novel, and each time they do, Jackson explains, they remind the reader of Eleanor’s essential loneliness and homelessness. They become “artificially loaded words” that, deployed correctly, have a powerful impact.

Holding forth at Suffield, in her lectures and the lengthy question-and-answer sessions that followed, Jackson relaxed happily into her authority as a writer. Unlike Bennington, where despite her growing fame she was always identified as “Mrs. Stanley Hyman,” Suffield was an oasis where she was recognized and celebrated as an individual. Refusing to allow Hyman to accompany her there, she explained that “it is now one of the only places where i feel i have a personality and a pride of my own, and i cannot see that go, too, under your mockery.”

Jackson also took her first plane trip in July 1958: she went with Stanley and Barry to lecture at a book festival at Eastern Michigan College in Ypsilanti. Neither of them was distressed, but she was “frightened enough for three.” After the plane ride, the lecture did not faze her, though the auditorium was “roughly the size of radio city,” with an audience of more than six hundred people. The president of the University of Michigan invited her to lecture there the following year, but Jackson declined to commit. In fact, she would never set foot on a plane again.

Her car, however, was a source of pleasure and freedom—and another place where she could escape Hyman’s eye. That summer, Jackson acquired, for $1850 (less than
Woman’s Home Companion
paid for a story), the first of a series of tiny Morris Minor convertibles, black with red leather seats, which she called “the pride and joy of my life.” Later, after the money for the movie rights to
Hill House
came in, she considered buying an Austin-Healey convertible, but when she sat down in it she realized she wasn’t “the sports car type”; she couldn’t even reach the brake. Many of Stanley’s former students remember seeing
her tooling around North Bennington in the “Morris,” as she called it, one arm stuck out the window. She liked to drive fast, taking the turns at full speed. Barry, sitting in class in the North Bennington Village School, could tell it was his mother driving by from the way she revved the motor. In September 1958, she drove by herself to New York and back to attend the wedding of her friend Barbara Karmiller, a former Bennington student; afterward they had champagne and caviar and she headed home, “sailing along in my little car.” The following summer, when all the children were out of the house and Stanley spent a month teaching in New York, she went on long spontaneous drives, stopping to spend the night at inns she happened to find along the way. She and Stanley also traveled together, taking a road trip to Massachusetts and Maine because Shirley had never seen the coast; she loved Maine’s little fishing towns.

That was before her agoraphobia set in. During Jackson’s worst periods, in the last years of her life, she found it impossible even to walk from the house to her beloved car. The ability to drive—since Westport an important element of her identity, allowing her both convenience and independence—had been taken away from her. (Eleanor notably begins her own journey to Hill House by stealing the car she shares with her sister; that she drives herself to her new home, with various encounters on the way both real and imaginary, is crucial to the novel.) As Jackson began the process of recovery, her first challenge was to get behind the wheel once more. When she was finally able to gather her strength to begin the novel she would not finish, Jackson endowed its heroine with a name potently symbolic of her own longing for freedom and autonomy: Angela Motorman.

“
HILL HOUSE IS REALLY
swinging,” Jackson wrote to Carol Brandt after her return from Suffield. But the main character would go through at least three different versions—one, incongruously, a spinster with a swagger not unlike Aunt Morgen in
The Bird’s Nest
—before Jackson settled on the final, significantly more subdued version of Eleanor. By September 1958, she had made little progress: every week she threw out
half of the manuscript and started over. Most of her work was done in a private study upstairs: Hyman had kicked her out of the downstairs study, she claimed, because her desk was always too messy. But she finished the book at a second typewriter she kept in the dining room, adjacent to his work space. Perhaps she was trying deliberately to discomfit him: Jackson tended to talk out loud when she was writing, and “yell and swear and laugh and sometimes cry,” which made him nervous. For the first time, he refused to read her manuscript: he found the concept of ghosts too frightening.

Fortunately, Pat Covici at Viking proved to be the most patient of editors. Rather than give Jackson a firm deadline, he liked to ask her to submit her novels “when the dogwood blooms in Central Park,” which they both took to calling “Dogwood Day.” Brandt, whose instinct for soothing Jackson’s nerves would prove very strong over the coming years, encouraged her to put the book aside and write some short stories. She quickly submitted a whimsical piece called “The Very Strange House Next Door,” which Brandt sold to the
Saturday Evening Post
for $2250—Jackson’s first story to be published there and her highest fee to date. Nearly ten years earlier, Jackson had written a series of stories about a housekeeper named Mallie who acts as a kind of fairy godmother, creating home-cooked meals and handmade curtains seemingly out of thin air. Now she resurrected the character, perhaps as an antidote to
Hill House
—a cheerful domestic version of the evil powers at play there. The story, however, has a darker subtext: the family who employ Mallie are newcomers in town, and eventually the locals hound them out because of their odd ways. Like “Flower Garden,” which has a similar theme, the story is told from the perspective of one of the villagers, who is blissfully unaware that she may have done anything wrong. (“I don’t gossip,” she announces in the first line of a story that consists of virtually nothing but gossip.)

With her own touch of the fairy godmother, Brandt also managed to finesse several professional difficulties that dogged Jackson. Back in the fall of 1957, after Roger Straus refused to advance her any more money, Bernice Baumgarten had signed her up to contribute a few sections to a guide for new parents to be published by Little, Brown. Titled
Special Delivery
:
A Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers
, the book would intersperse words of advice from Jackson with humor pieces by Mark Twain, Ogden Nash, and others, as well as professional advice from a doctor and a nurse. Jackson found the whole project embarrassing, explaining bluntly when it came out that she did it for money. In fact, her contributions are charming and down-to-earth, particularly next to the articles written by the “professionals,” which give a taste of the conventional wisdom of the era. (The nurse advises bringing a loose-fitting dress or girdle to wear home from the hospital, “as it usually takes a few weeks to regain your pre-baby figure.”) Jackson, by contrast, is candid, uncondescending, and thoroughly realistic. On the difficulty of getting babies to sleep through the night, she writes, with her customary understated humor, “No one has ever solved this problem adequately.” She urges new mothers not to adhere strictly to a schedule, as many pediatric experts of the time advised: “No baby ever developed an excruciating disease because he got a swift sponging instead of a bath.” “We Just Came to See the Baby” is an all-too-realistic depiction of a gaggle of judgmental elderly aunts descending upon a helpless young mother at the very moment the baby decides to nap. A piece urging new mothers to go ahead and hire a babysitter—“in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the baby will wake up, take his bottle calmly, submit to being burped and changed, and go back to his bed and to sleep without any sign of shocked disbelief at seeing a stranger”—ends with a very funny story about a mother who left her two children with their usual sitter and went out for the evening without mentioning that she had recently given birth to a new baby, whom she had left sleeping on the porch. Jackson presents this anecdote as having happened to a friend, but it sounds like something she could conceivably have done herself.