If Truth be Told: the aura of Shirley Jackson
If perception and perspective are the gatekeepers of conceptual truth, then Shirley Jackson is the bombardier who blew its sanctity apart with these six words (spoiler alert!) : "and then they were upon her". Her short story, "The Lottery", managed to outrage the world in less than 3,400 words upon its publication in the very polite New Yorker magazine in 1948. One wonders what they were thinking asking their readership to stretch their conformist minds so uncomfortably taut!
Compelling as this short story is, Ms. Jackson, herself, has her own story that is equally captivating. The intersection of life and art is on full display in her writing with themes of isolation, disaffection, and fear woven throughout—patterns that plagued and shaped her thinking most of her life. You can't fully appreciate either "The Lottery" or Ms. Jackson without first understanding the implications of "place".
Beginning in 1945, North Bennington, VT, became home to Jackson, along with her professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman and their two (eventually four) children during Stanley's tenure at Bennington College. On the surface, Shirley's life would likely elicit words like idyllic and bucolic--it is Vermont after all, and nearby Bennington, with its hallowed college campus featured a picture-perfect backdrop of stately homes, historic buildings, and cows grazing lazily upon distant meadows, all surrounded by spectacular views of the Green Mountains. And just like its mountains, the provenance of the town residents was, likewise, as old as those New England hills.
Image: Bennington College, Bennington, VT.
New Englanders possess their own unique character that varies from state to state, region to region, county to county, and even town to town. The essence of what it means to be a New Englander is derived from the perpetual stability of its very nature. Perpetual stability. It is a cultural inheritance that provides continuity for our identity. It was, also, the playground of Shirley Jackson's talent, where she found a breach in the predictability of human nature, and then skillfully dumped her emotional baggage into it, obfuscating that perpetual stability, and ultimately piercing its soul with her pen.
They say in order to be a good writer it helps to know a little bit about everything. To that I would also add, it greatly helps to know a lot about some things. Shirley Jackson knew a thing or two about despair.
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born on December 14, 1916 in San Francisco, CA, into a comfortable middle class family that descended from a long line of affluent architects. Despite her fortunate circumstances, she suffered a complicated relationship with her mother, Geraldine, who was disappointed to find herself pregnant with Shirley soon after marrying Lewis Jackson, a somewhat remote man. She fretted incessantly and vociferously about her daughter's lifelong struggle with weight, making Shirley increasingly self-conscious as a teenager and beyond. Her mother was also critical of Shirley's writing, particularly the dark narratives, which she never understood; she found "The Lottery" appalling.
Geraldine endlessly heckled her daughter about the very essence of who she was. Once when a photograph of Shirley appeared alongside a book review in Time magazine her mother's only reaction was to excoriate Shirley for her "awful" looks, and the shame Stanley and the children must have felt. At the time, these comments were the final straw that defeated Shirley causing her to suffer a severe mental collapse that reverberated for years.
In an unpublished essay Shirley wrote:
"i thought i was insane and i would write about how the only sane people are the ones who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of people who are different.”
Throughout her childhood she found it difficult to integrate with her peers and understood early on that she was an outsider. This alienation led her to experience depression as well as social anxiety, a situation that further perplexed her mother and caused constant acrimony between them. In her mother's eyes, Shirley was neither pretty enough or thin enough, and worst of all, she was willful. Consequently, Shirley buried herself in books and writing to escape these severe criticisms, and by the time she graduated high school she had already begun keeping several diaries (simultaneously recorded with various and distinct personalities) and composing poetry and short story. During a New York Post interview when asked if her family had supported her early writing efforts she quipped, "they couldn't stop me".
In 1934, she attended the University of Rochester, where, early in the first semester she was rejected from a sorority. She continued to struggle to fit in socially, despite her efforts to attend campus parties and other social events throughout the year. Further complicating matters, her grades were failing, and by the end of second semester, when the school asked her to leave, she was precariously close to suffering her first nervous breakdown.
Image: Shirley, 1938, photo courtesy of June Mirken Minz
A year later, after recuperating at her parents' home, she then transferred to Syracuse University in 1936 where she published her first story, "Janice", which details a teenager's attempted suicide. The piece was all the buzz around campus as it was so different compared to anything else being written at the time. Upon reading the piece, Stanley, himself a student at Syracuse, thought the story was brilliant (he was often dismissive of campus literary works). He declared he needed to meet the woman who had authored it, and further asserted he would marry her. They did meet, and the trajectory of Shirley's life changed in an instant. They fell madly in love, and upon graduation in 1940, Stanley and Shirley married, much to their parents' chagrin (his because she wasn't Jewish and hers because he was). Shirley gave birth to the first of their four children in 1943. During these early years both she and Stanley were busy honing their careers, she as an essayist and he as a literary critic.
Their conventional marriage included Stanley pursuing his professional goals, while leaving all of the child-rearing and housekeeping duties solely to his wife. He regarded Shirley as a highly gifted writer but Stanley contributed little towards managing their busy and growing household. Had he done so, it would have provided Shirley a more propitious writing environment. Although her eventual success as a writer made her the family breadwinner, Stanley maintained control over their finances, and inasmuch, provided her with an allowance for the household expenses as he saw fit.
“Dear, you know the doctor said you weren't to carry anything heavy.” (left illustration)
“I thought I'd rest awhile, dear. I did three paragraphs all at once and it tired me out.” (right illustration)
Images (click to enlarge): from Shirley Jackson's papers, drawings courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Their lopsided marriage was also plagued by serial infidelity on Stanley's part. He was always candid about his dalliances, and insisted that Shirley accept their open marriage—which she did but with pained reservation. When they relocated from New York to Vermont in 1945, Stanley continued his open philandering, mostly with his students at the all-women's Bennington College. But to conclude that theirs was a loveless marriage would be a caustic assumption. Despite the challenges and obstacles they faced, both Shirley and Edgar sustained a deep and devoted attachment toward one another.
Even though Shirley spent the balance of her adult life living in rural Vermont she forever yearned for the open and warm vibe of her native West Coast. New England was something altogether different. Typical for any transplant, the nuanced behaviors within the local community would have stood out to her like a kind of foreign language (in some instances it was just that). Jackson wrote "The Lottery" while residing in North Bennington, and although the story's location is never identified it isn't a far stretch to conclude that she smuggled the native townsfolks' idiosyncrasies into her writing.
On a bright June morning in 1948, after running errands, Jackson composed the story in her head as she walked up the hill back to her house, simultaneously steering a baby stroller and carrying an arm full of groceries while pregnant with her third child. Later in the morning, as her toddler sat nearby in a playpen, Shirley wrote the story—all before her son returned home from kindergarten at noon. One wonders if something in particular had occurred in the village that morning to cause Jackson to conjure such a capricious drama (the Hymans, on occasion, had experienced antisemitism from within their community, and Shirley was aware of the catty whispering going on about her unorthodox lifestyle—typical small town, native bullsh!t). Perhaps it was simply her own preternatural ability to spin a yarn out of thin air. She never said. Her only response when asked was: "it's just a story".
Image: Stanley and Shirley from a joint book review featured in the Bennington Beacon, 1948.
During her lifetime, Jackson published six novels, over two hundred short stories, two memoirs, and three children’s books. And even though she is known primarily for her horror/mystery writing she also had a talent for wry humor. Her hilarious 1952 memoir, "Life Among the Savages", chronicles Jackson's adventures as a wife and mother trying to achieve domestic bliss, while at every turn those efforts are thwarted by her husband, children, pets, neighbors and even her house. The sequel, "Raising Demons", followed in 1957, and picks up from "Savages". It enjoyed similar success and received praise from critics, although it was a notably darker satire than her first effort. Both stories make evident that she thoroughly delighted in her children, minus the customary maternal sentimentality, of course.
Image: Shirley and her children. Photo by Erich Hartmann for Magnum, 1955.
By now, Shirley was earning the kind of money that provided her family with a comfortable life, one in which Stanley quickly grew accustomed to. But, he also harbored resentment toward her for both the financial and critical success she had achieved. In turn, he rode her constantly, insisting that she write all the time. Shirley even hid her letter writing to family and friends from Stanley because he now deemed such an activity as frivolous. In addition to being the family's chief cook and bottle washer, Shirley was also, in essence, Stanley's golden goose, and he wasn't going to allow her a moment's rest.
Ultimately, Shirley had traded one kind of prison for another between her parents' home and life with Stanley. Throughout their deeply troubled relationship, Jackson remained tethered to Stanley because she had always believed he "kept her insanity at bay". Long before Stanley, she had battled what she termed the "demons in my head", and although one could easily conclude that her writing was a form of therapy it could also be equally hypothesized her stories were manifestations of her emotional torture.
"we are afraid of being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do and of being taken and used by someone else, some other guilt-ridden conscience that lives on and on in our minds...this is fear. then it is fear itself, fear of self that I am writing about...fear and guilt and their destruction of identity....why am i so afraid?" (S.J., unpublished document 1960)
As both victim and witness, Shirley grasped man's capacity for inhumanity; through her keen lens she observed global atrocities and her own (local) experiences, then lobbed these unpleasant truths back at a complicit world. Conversely, she wrote confrontational letters to both her mother and Stanley, which were never sent. On many occasions she remained tacit toward them choosing to repress her rage regarding their flagrant insensitivity towards her.
By 1962, the numerous and longstanding disappointments she had endured in her personal life combined with the professional pressures of writing finally broke Shirley. She suffered a complete emotional collapse, accompanied by agoraphobia so debilitating she was unable to leave her house or write for two years. By then she had been smoking and drinking heavily for decades, was morbidly obese, and taking anxiety-producing diet pills followed by other pills to calm her nerves—both prescribed by her medical doctor. Unable to wrest herself free from the grip of her struggles Shirley reluctantly sought the help of a psychiatrist with whom she was able to gradually reclaim her stability.
In fact, by the summer of 1965 she seemed to have fully recovered from her breakdown, as evidenced by the literary tour she had just completed at a half dozen colleges. She may also have been seriously considering a major shift in her personal life as she worked to complete an unfinished manuscript: a different kind of story that featured an uncharacteristic and positive theme about a woman who completely abandons her former life for a new and exciting one (even shedding her name). But none of it was to be. On Sunday, August 8, 1965, while taking a nap on a glorious summer's afternoon, Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48 from heart failure.
Just months later, Stanley married his current lover, a 20 year old named Phoebe Pettingill, who had been his student at Bennington College. Four years later she gave birth to a son, Malcolm, his fifth child. They remained married until 1970, when Stanley, too, died from a sudden heart attack.
"For all of her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition. She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led. She saw these honors go to inferior writers, without bitterness. I think that the future will find her powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity increasingly significant and meaningful."~S.E. Hyman
And that's the truth.
References: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Post Script:
In June of 2019, we attended the annual "Shirley Jackson Day" celebration in North Bennington, VT, where her youngest son, Barry Hyman, performed some of his musical compositions on guitar followed by selected readings of his mother's writings, which were presented by him, his sister, Jai Holly, and two others affiliated with the "Shirley Jackson Awards".
A few photographs from the annual "Shirley Jackson Day" celebration featuring two of Shirley Jackson's children, Barry and Jai Holly (click image to expand and scroll through the photos). Photos by Mark A. Jordan for Ars Poetica Designs.