Read Online Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin - Free Book Online
Authors: Ruth Franklin
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and “horribly unhorrifying” to be frightening; and, most interestingly, The Kid from Spain , featuring Sidney Franklin—a Jew from Brooklyn turned professional bullfighter who played himself in the film. Shirley was so impressed that she saw the movie twice in two days; in five years, another Jewish boy from Brooklyn would prove even more alluring. She also kept track of her writing progress. “Wrote all evening—there was something in my pen tonight,” she reported in February. No fiction from this period survives, but the tone of her diary entries suggests a new maturity. In one, she reported on a party her mother had thrown—“I’ve been banged around, kissed, socked, and generally man-handled”—and described the guests as if listing the characters in a play. One of her mother’s friends was a “Spanish señorita with a Garbo complex,” another was “Harlequin with a yellow streak.”
These parties may well have inspired Jackson’s story “The Intoxicated,” written in the early 1940s and published for the first time in The Lottery . A man in his thirties attending a party encounters his host’s daughter in the kitchen, a “baggy and ill-formed” girl of seventeen who disconcerts him by calmly laying out a vision of apocalypse. “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside.” The man rebukes her—“I think it’s a little silly of you to fill your mind with all this morbid trash”—but she will not be dissuaded. “A really extraordinary girl,” he tells her father, who shakes his head and replies, “Kids nowadays.” If Jackson was anything like the girl in the story, then as a teenager she was already developing the knack for the perfectly shocking line that would come to characterize her fiction. The story also suggests that she might not have been as politically oblivious as she appeared to be: the apocalypse she imagines can be read in any number of allegorical ways. Of course, it can also be taken at face value, as a surreal vision of a world gone wrong.
That spring, Leslie and Geraldine broke the news about the Traung Company’s merger. The Jacksons would arrive in Rochester in time for Shirley and Barry to begin the school year in their new home. Shirley was initially heartbroken about the move, which meant leaving her beloved California—the garden where she had spent so many hours dreaming in the grass, the back fence where she and Dorothy sat eating pomegranates—for a blustery, unfamiliar new city. “This is the last time I shall ever press the first rosebud of Spring that comes off my rosebush,” she wrote sentimentally. Although she was justifiably anxious about having to finish high school in a new environment, she soon came to see the move as an opportunity for a fresh beginning. She had taken from her time in California what she needed; the question now was what she would do with it. “Get thee behind me, Cupid!” she wrote on the last day of school. “Off with the old—Come on, N.Y., I’m ready for yuh!”
The last two pages of the “Debutante” diary contain an undated story fragment that Jackson originally called “Berceuse”; later she crossed out the title and replaced it with “Melody.” A girl named Karleen, attendinga concert with her aunt, is deeply moved by the music. Her eyes fix on the orchestra leader—“oh, to create such music!” But Jackson has already learned that beauty and the grotesque can be effectively juxtaposed: the man’s back is fat, his coat shiny. Afterward, Karleen’s aunt asks if she enjoyed the concert: she wants her niece to “learn to appreciate good music, like I do.” Karleen’s teenage heart cringes in annoyance. She doesn’t want just to appreciate music. She wants to write it.
2.
THE DEMON IN
THE MIND
ROCHESTER,
1933–1937
All I can remember clearly
These parties may well have inspired Jackson’s story “The Intoxicated,” written in the early 1940s and published for the first time in The Lottery . A man in his thirties attending a party encounters his host’s daughter in the kitchen, a “baggy and ill-formed” girl of seventeen who disconcerts him by calmly laying out a vision of apocalypse. “Somehow I think of the churches as going first, before even the Empire State building. And then all the big apartment houses by the river, slipping down slowly into the water with the people inside.” The man rebukes her—“I think it’s a little silly of you to fill your mind with all this morbid trash”—but she will not be dissuaded. “A really extraordinary girl,” he tells her father, who shakes his head and replies, “Kids nowadays.” If Jackson was anything like the girl in the story, then as a teenager she was already developing the knack for the perfectly shocking line that would come to characterize her fiction. The story also suggests that she might not have been as politically oblivious as she appeared to be: the apocalypse she imagines can be read in any number of allegorical ways. Of course, it can also be taken at face value, as a surreal vision of a world gone wrong.
That spring, Leslie and Geraldine broke the news about the Traung Company’s merger. The Jacksons would arrive in Rochester in time for Shirley and Barry to begin the school year in their new home. Shirley was initially heartbroken about the move, which meant leaving her beloved California—the garden where she had spent so many hours dreaming in the grass, the back fence where she and Dorothy sat eating pomegranates—for a blustery, unfamiliar new city. “This is the last time I shall ever press the first rosebud of Spring that comes off my rosebush,” she wrote sentimentally. Although she was justifiably anxious about having to finish high school in a new environment, she soon came to see the move as an opportunity for a fresh beginning. She had taken from her time in California what she needed; the question now was what she would do with it. “Get thee behind me, Cupid!” she wrote on the last day of school. “Off with the old—Come on, N.Y., I’m ready for yuh!”
The last two pages of the “Debutante” diary contain an undated story fragment that Jackson originally called “Berceuse”; later she crossed out the title and replaced it with “Melody.” A girl named Karleen, attendinga concert with her aunt, is deeply moved by the music. Her eyes fix on the orchestra leader—“oh, to create such music!” But Jackson has already learned that beauty and the grotesque can be effectively juxtaposed: the man’s back is fat, his coat shiny. Afterward, Karleen’s aunt asks if she enjoyed the concert: she wants her niece to “learn to appreciate good music, like I do.” Karleen’s teenage heart cringes in annoyance. She doesn’t want just to appreciate music. She wants to write it.
2.
THE DEMON IN
THE MIND
ROCHESTER,
1933–1937
All I can remember clearly
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