Read Online Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ruth Franklin
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counterpart, would experience a mental unraveling during her first two years of college. It was serious enough that she had to withdraw from the University of Rochester and live at home for a year before making a fresh start at Syracuse University. Between 1934 and 1936, her writings indicate that she may have made at least one halfhearted attempt at suicide. No particular event appears to have sent her into this downward spiral. More likely, Jackson was overwhelmed—for the first time, but hardly the last—by the constellation of social anxiety and familial pressure that left her feeling accepted by no one.
A FLOURISHING CITY of about 320,000 on the banks of the often turbulent Genesee River, Rochester in 1933 was considerably more cosmopolitan than sleepy Burlingame. In addition to theaters, dance halls, and its own philharmonic and opera company, it boasted nearly forty movie houses. With the average ticket price a quarter—well within the reach of a high school student—Jackson, who loved the movies, sometimes attended as often as twice a week. Known as the Kodak City, after the Eastman Kodak Company, the city’s biggest employer and greatest homegrown success story, Rochester was also home to the optical company Bausch and Lomb and the Gannett newspaper chain. The private, coeducational University of Rochester, founded in 1850, benefited from the city’s prosperity: George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, was a major donor. Rochester was also known for its food-packing industry: a rich harvest from local farms and orchards supplied the city’s canneries. All those containers needed labels, which was where the Stecher-Traung Lithograph Company, Leslie Jackson’s employer, came in. Thecompany became well-known for the striking watercolor paintings that adorned its seed packets, which today are collector’s items.
In spite of its economic vigor, Rochester remained bleak and industrial. And it had all the social conservatism of Burlingame—one of the city’s nicknames was Smugtown, U.S.A.—with none of the mitigating factors that made California life so pleasant: the weather, the pomegranates and avocados, the eucalyptus-scented air. Jackson despised her new home from the start. “Golly, how I hate this town,” she complained on September 7, 1933. In her diary, she kept track of the number of days since she had left California. The first school she enrolled in was a poor fit, and she and her brother were both miserable there. She also developed hay fever immediately upon arrival, a problem that would plague her for the rest of her life. She was literally allergic to the Northeast.
The Jackson family settled in Brighton, an upper-middle-class suburb southeast of the city center. Their new home, at 125 Monteroy Road, was a handsome five-bedroom colonial with Tudor accents, built only a few years earlier. The neighbors were professionals: doctors, lawyers, University of Rochester faculty. In general, “people were on an upward trajectory,” recalls Marion Strobel, whose mother, Marian Morton, grew up near the Jacksons and knew Shirley and Barry in high school. The Jacksons were even more interested in social climbing. They hobnobbed with the city’s elite at the Genesee Valley Club, a city club, and the Country Club of Rochester, where Shirley and her brother golfed. (Strobel recalled that when she was growing up in Brighton, she thought she was underprivileged because her father’s club lacked a swimming pool.) Like many women of her class, Geraldine hired an African-American maid to help with housework and cooking. Shirley became close to the maid, whose name was Alta Williams, and in college wrote an unpublished story about her.
The house on Monteroy Road was walking distance from Brighton High School, where Shirley enrolled for her senior year. Two decades later, she would still recall “the sick inadequate feeling of standing in a hallway holding a notebook and wondering without hope if i would ever find
A FLOURISHING CITY of about 320,000 on the banks of the often turbulent Genesee River, Rochester in 1933 was considerably more cosmopolitan than sleepy Burlingame. In addition to theaters, dance halls, and its own philharmonic and opera company, it boasted nearly forty movie houses. With the average ticket price a quarter—well within the reach of a high school student—Jackson, who loved the movies, sometimes attended as often as twice a week. Known as the Kodak City, after the Eastman Kodak Company, the city’s biggest employer and greatest homegrown success story, Rochester was also home to the optical company Bausch and Lomb and the Gannett newspaper chain. The private, coeducational University of Rochester, founded in 1850, benefited from the city’s prosperity: George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, was a major donor. Rochester was also known for its food-packing industry: a rich harvest from local farms and orchards supplied the city’s canneries. All those containers needed labels, which was where the Stecher-Traung Lithograph Company, Leslie Jackson’s employer, came in. Thecompany became well-known for the striking watercolor paintings that adorned its seed packets, which today are collector’s items.
In spite of its economic vigor, Rochester remained bleak and industrial. And it had all the social conservatism of Burlingame—one of the city’s nicknames was Smugtown, U.S.A.—with none of the mitigating factors that made California life so pleasant: the weather, the pomegranates and avocados, the eucalyptus-scented air. Jackson despised her new home from the start. “Golly, how I hate this town,” she complained on September 7, 1933. In her diary, she kept track of the number of days since she had left California. The first school she enrolled in was a poor fit, and she and her brother were both miserable there. She also developed hay fever immediately upon arrival, a problem that would plague her for the rest of her life. She was literally allergic to the Northeast.
The Jackson family settled in Brighton, an upper-middle-class suburb southeast of the city center. Their new home, at 125 Monteroy Road, was a handsome five-bedroom colonial with Tudor accents, built only a few years earlier. The neighbors were professionals: doctors, lawyers, University of Rochester faculty. In general, “people were on an upward trajectory,” recalls Marion Strobel, whose mother, Marian Morton, grew up near the Jacksons and knew Shirley and Barry in high school. The Jacksons were even more interested in social climbing. They hobnobbed with the city’s elite at the Genesee Valley Club, a city club, and the Country Club of Rochester, where Shirley and her brother golfed. (Strobel recalled that when she was growing up in Brighton, she thought she was underprivileged because her father’s club lacked a swimming pool.) Like many women of her class, Geraldine hired an African-American maid to help with housework and cooking. Shirley became close to the maid, whose name was Alta Williams, and in college wrote an unpublished story about her.
The house on Monteroy Road was walking distance from Brighton High School, where Shirley enrolled for her senior year. Two decades later, she would still recall “the sick inadequate feeling of standing in a hallway holding a notebook and wondering without hope if i would ever find
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