Read Online Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ruth Franklin
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about being sixteen is that it was a particularly agonizing age; our family was in the process of moving East from California, and I settled down into a new high school and new manners and ways, all things I believe produce a great uneasiness in a sixteen-year-old.
—“All I Can Remember”
H ANGSAMAN , SHIRLEY JACKSON’S SECOND AND MOST autobiographical novel, begins with seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite about to leave home for college. Natalie’s home life is oppressive—her brother, two years younger, wants nothing to do with her; her mother is clingy and dissatisfied; her father is domineering. Quirky and sensitive, she lives mostly in her own mind, “an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions.” Her fantasy life is vivid and strange. Sometimes she imagines that a detective is questioning her about a crime, drawing on a deep wellspring of guilt with an unknown source. To distract herself in moments of boredom or discomfort, she imagines “the sweetsharp sensation of being burned alive.” She shares her creative writing with her father, but also keeps a secret diary, though she admits to herself that she is writing it for “ultimate publication.”
Thus far, the connections between Natalie and Shirley are obvious. Even their names are similar: both contain the same number of letters and end in a “lee” sound. So what happens next is troubling. Natalie’s parents give a garden party, which was a regular occurrence in the Jackson household as well. Natalie drinks a cocktail and finds herself the object of attention of one of her father’s friends, an older man who offers her a cigarette and flirts with her. Like the girl in “The Intoxicated,” Jackson’s story about a teenager who disconcerts a party guest with talk of apocalypse, Natalie initially parries the man with clever conversation, but eventually he manages to lead her into the woods behind the house. What happens there is not described. When she awakens the next morning, she is sick and dizzy. The mirror reveals “her bruised face and her pitiful, erring body.” She wishes she were dead. The remainder of the book chronicles her psychic disintegration.
If this incident is based on anything that happened to Jackson at the time, there is no trace of it. There has been speculation that she was molested as a young teenager in California by her uncle, Clifford Bugbee, a lifelong bachelor whose “sticky touch” Dorothy Ayling, Jackson’s childhood friend, would recall squeamishly decades later. But Clifford is an unlikely sexual predator. For one thing, Jackson seems to have remembered him fondly, telling her children funny stories about his odd scientific inventions. When the Jacksons returned to California for a visit in 1939, the summer after Shirley’s junior year at Syracuse University, her letters to Stanley—which describe the trip in minute detail, including excursions made with her uncle—reveal no discomfort at spending time with him. And her diaries from high school and early college give absolutely no hint of sexual predation.
They do, however, reveal a young woman who engaged in sexual experimentation typical for girls of her time. In 1933, shortly before the move to Rochester, Jackson got drunk for the first time at a neighborhood party—“I feel like a package of condensed giggles”—and flirted with a local actor: “I mixed him a drink, and he tried manfully.”Whatever that may mean, it does not sound like the comment of a victimized girl. In 1936, after starting college at Rochester, she joked in her diary about “the ruination of what we laughingly refer to as my reputation”—an incident in which her brother turned the lights on unexpectedly and exposed her canoodling with a date in the living room. Her initial embarrassment wore off quickly. “Absolved of sin,” she reported a few days later.
Yet Jackson, like her fictional
—“All I Can Remember”
H ANGSAMAN , SHIRLEY JACKSON’S SECOND AND MOST autobiographical novel, begins with seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite about to leave home for college. Natalie’s home life is oppressive—her brother, two years younger, wants nothing to do with her; her mother is clingy and dissatisfied; her father is domineering. Quirky and sensitive, she lives mostly in her own mind, “an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions.” Her fantasy life is vivid and strange. Sometimes she imagines that a detective is questioning her about a crime, drawing on a deep wellspring of guilt with an unknown source. To distract herself in moments of boredom or discomfort, she imagines “the sweetsharp sensation of being burned alive.” She shares her creative writing with her father, but also keeps a secret diary, though she admits to herself that she is writing it for “ultimate publication.”
Thus far, the connections between Natalie and Shirley are obvious. Even their names are similar: both contain the same number of letters and end in a “lee” sound. So what happens next is troubling. Natalie’s parents give a garden party, which was a regular occurrence in the Jackson household as well. Natalie drinks a cocktail and finds herself the object of attention of one of her father’s friends, an older man who offers her a cigarette and flirts with her. Like the girl in “The Intoxicated,” Jackson’s story about a teenager who disconcerts a party guest with talk of apocalypse, Natalie initially parries the man with clever conversation, but eventually he manages to lead her into the woods behind the house. What happens there is not described. When she awakens the next morning, she is sick and dizzy. The mirror reveals “her bruised face and her pitiful, erring body.” She wishes she were dead. The remainder of the book chronicles her psychic disintegration.
If this incident is based on anything that happened to Jackson at the time, there is no trace of it. There has been speculation that she was molested as a young teenager in California by her uncle, Clifford Bugbee, a lifelong bachelor whose “sticky touch” Dorothy Ayling, Jackson’s childhood friend, would recall squeamishly decades later. But Clifford is an unlikely sexual predator. For one thing, Jackson seems to have remembered him fondly, telling her children funny stories about his odd scientific inventions. When the Jacksons returned to California for a visit in 1939, the summer after Shirley’s junior year at Syracuse University, her letters to Stanley—which describe the trip in minute detail, including excursions made with her uncle—reveal no discomfort at spending time with him. And her diaries from high school and early college give absolutely no hint of sexual predation.
They do, however, reveal a young woman who engaged in sexual experimentation typical for girls of her time. In 1933, shortly before the move to Rochester, Jackson got drunk for the first time at a neighborhood party—“I feel like a package of condensed giggles”—and flirted with a local actor: “I mixed him a drink, and he tried manfully.”Whatever that may mean, it does not sound like the comment of a victimized girl. In 1936, after starting college at Rochester, she joked in her diary about “the ruination of what we laughingly refer to as my reputation”—an incident in which her brother turned the lights on unexpectedly and exposed her canoodling with a date in the living room. Her initial embarrassment wore off quickly. “Absolved of sin,” she reported a few days later.
Yet Jackson, like her fictional
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