Shirley Jackson: Thriving on Chaos

Well, let me tell you: Shirley Jackson found a mother lode in the mother’s load a full half century before Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, never mind the mommy blogs so prevalent on the Internet today. Before Jean Kerr’s antic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Erma Bombeck’s “At Wit’s End” columns about the trials and tribulations of being a suburban housewife, she was chronicling her family foibles with sharp humor and shrewd insights. It was a life that she and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a scholar, Bennington professor, and noted book critic for The New Yorker and The New Leader, had “fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind.”

Jackson — whose obesity and fondness for tobacco, alcohol, and amphetamines probably contributed to her early death — was by her own account neither a domestic diva nor a crackerjack “trim little housewife.” But she worked mightily to win over her toughest critics on the home front by concocting flavorful, winning family meals — for which she was occasionally rewarded with a “Say, this isn’t half bad.” On the literary front, she worked just as hard to “snare the reader’s attention and keep it” by judiciously spicing her prose with what she called “garlic in fiction.”
“Due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment,” Jackson noted wryly in one of several essays on writing that pepper Let Me Tell You, her household consisted of “a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, and two Great Danes and four cats and — if he has survived this long — a hamster. There may also be a goldfish somewhere.” As biographer Franklin comments in her smart foreword, “Like many creative thinkers, Jackson thrived amid chaos.”
In a classic example of what her children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, describe as “herculean paragraphs consisting of one very complex single sentence,” Jackson describes a typical day with a witty pileup of details:
Anyway, what this means that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter, and about sixteen — assuming that I indulge myself with a few hours of sleep — to spend wondering what to have for dinner tonight that we didn’t have last night and letting the dogs in and letting the dogs out, and trying to get the living room looking decent without actually cleaning it, and driving children to dancing class and French lessons and record dances and movies and horseback riding lessons and off to town to buy a Ricky Nelson record, and then back into town to exchange it for Fats Domino, and over to a friend’s house to play the record, and then off to buy new dancing shoes. . . . It’s a wonder I get even four hours sleep, it really is.
So, besides skimping on sleep, how did she do it? She explains in a lecture titled “How I Write”: “Most of my time, actually, is spent doing things that require no very great imaginative ability, and the only way to make these mechanical jobs [like vacuuming] more palatable is to think about something else while I am doing them. I tell myself stories all day long . . . it does take the edge off cold reality. And sometimes it turns into real stories.”

Jackson’s humor has bite, plus a proto-feminist edge that has kept her wry, subversive voice fresh more than half a century later. That said, some dated customs will jump out at contemporary readers, including lighting up a cigarette on the way to deliver her third child, and driving around country roads with unharnessed kids standing on their heads in the backseat. Her lively stories manage to convey the distinct personalities of each of her children, who, in their afterword to Let Me Tell You, recall the “rapid-fire percussion” of their parents’ typewriters, which formed the background music of their childhood. They note that they accepted these sketches even at the time they were written as embellished fictions, stories that they later enjoyed sharing with their own children and grandchildren.
A working mother in every sense of the word, Jackson is particularly on target with her mordant send-ups of her chauvinist husband, a relic of another era who is invariably the last one up in the morning. She is most scathing on the subject of being a faculty wife, a role that suited her even less than dealing with their finicky furnace. Idolatrous coeds with whom her husband carried on brazen flirtations and more (like his colleague and friend Bernard Malamud) are a frequent target of her barbed jabs. “You still making passes at my husband?” the faculty wife in her short story, “Still Life with Teapot and Students,” challenges a nubile student at one of the detested tea parties.
Jackson is at her sarcastic funniest in “A Garland of Garlands,” which skewers book reviewing — her husband’s occupation (and mine). Ruing the pileup of books that quickly defy containment, she gleefully mocks overused “earmarked” words like heartrending, delectable, invidious, and insidious, and declares hilariously that “people marry book reviewers with the expectation that it is a temporary thing, that sooner or later the poor dear is going to find himself a better niche in life, such as selling vacuum cleaners.”
A classic running gag, typical of the era, involves tussles over household finances. Jackson writes, “My husband is always making little remarks about money. Sometimes he says it doesn’t grow on trees, and sometimes he says that I must think he is made of it.” The irony of this, barely alluded to in Savages and Demons but underscored in Let Me Tell You, is that Jackson was actually making good money from her writing by the time she published these essays, not just from robust book and magazine sales but from movie deals.

Life Among the Savages opens with a situation readers can still relate to — being priced out of the New York City rental market and desperate to locate a decent affordable home on short notice. What they find is a large old haunted house in North Bennington, Vermont, population 1,000, with six bedrooms, four fireplaces, and five attics.
“Our house is old, and noisy, and full,” Jackson writes. “When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books: I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.”
One tale, which describes a restless, complicated night of musical beds in which cigarettes, pillows, and cups of apple juice travel with somnolent family members from room to room, has the zany busyness of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off. “Remembrance of Things Past,” a story about a man who’s forgotten his wife’s name, and “The Trouble with My Husband,” in which a bitterly drunken hostess awkwardly complains to her guests that her husband, a painter, “thinks he’s God almighty,” wander deeply into James Thurber and John Cheever territory. “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again” evokes Tillie Olsen, while “Paranoia,” about a man who thinks he’s being pursued as he heads home on his wife’s birthday, is pure Jackson in its mix of homey domestic details and mounting uncertainty and trepidation.
Not all of the stories collected in these three books hit home, and none packs the power of “The Lottery” (but then, few by any writer ever have). But in aggregate, even the fragments contribute to a well-rounded portrait of this writer who captured the terrors, thrills, and magic not just of houses teeming with ghosts but of family life lived at full tilt alongside the phantoms.
Funny thing about parenting: each harried generation thinks the relentless, exhausting cycle of cooking, cleaning, feeding, bathing, chauffeuring, scolding, and soothing that go into raising children is unique to them. Reading Shirley Jackson’s personal writings reminds us that she was there before us, packing lunches, hustling her kids off to school, up to her elbows in soapy dishwater — but, to our good fortune, stowing away the telling details for those precious, productive stolen moments at her typewriter.