Catching up: Shirley Jackson, part 2.

The beginning of the summer found me blown away by Shirley Jackson.

As noted here yesterday, Jackson is perhaps best known for her short story "The Lottery." I've read that, and although I remember liking it okay back in high school, I couldn't remember much about it. But when I found Jackson's humorous collection of vignettes about raising her kids, Life Among the Savages, I became completely fascinated by her. So much so that I checked out the only biography I could find about her, Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, by Judy Oppenheimer (published in 1989).

Reading that biography was quite a trip, I'll tell you. Jackson was an interesting personality from the start, but I thought the story really took off when it examined both her writing life and her marriage. She married a man she met in college, who was a literary critic, and taught at Bennington College in Vermont (near which they lived). In addition to having and looking after their four kids, and still writing prolifically herself, she also had to look after her very needy husband Stanley.* I forget the details now, but the book is full of ridiculous stories like Shirley having to stop whatever she was doing in the house and run to sharpen Stanley's pencils whenever he needed.

It's also a trip reading a biography from 1989. Is it really so long ago? It got the job done, and I can't rightly remember what took me by surprise about the book, but the author seemed to offer a great deal of conjecture and amateur psychoanalysis of her subject. Biographies I've read in recent years seem to be a lot better, leading me to believe perhaps we are in a golden age for biography? Anyone else have an opinion on this?

In addition to simply being fascinated by Jackson, I'll never forget the experience of reading this biography. I read it when I was having a slight health blip, and one day when I was feeling particularly lousy, Mr. CR took CRjr to the park for me and for an hour or so I just lazed about in bed, reading about Shirley Jackson and eating a Hershey bar (my condition was not one that precluded me from having chocolate, mercifully). For whatever reason, the whole experience made me feel very warmly about Shirley Jackson. Interesting how people think reading is entirely passive, and yet many of my very strong and visceral physical memories include books and reading. Do you find this to be true as well?

*She lived intensely, but she didn't live long, the poor thing: she died in 1965 at age 48.

Comments

[Simon T]

I wish I could get hold of the Jackson biog, having loved both her creepy and her domestic novels. It might be nicer if I could just believe the life she projects in Savages and Demons, though...

[Citizen Reader]

Simon,
I wish you could get hold of this bio too--it really, REALLY adds a lot to reading the Savages book and her fiction. Ironically I have a hard time finding Raising Demons but I'm going to try and track it down.
Are you in the UK? How do your libraries work there? Is it possible to do what we call interlibrary loan--where you ask your local library to ship hard-to-find books in for you from other libraries across your country? Or maybe it's just not available there at all. Bummer.

[Robert Burgin]

Just having Robert Caro's biographies of LBJ is evidence enough for me to believe that we indeed live in a golden age for biography.

[Citizen Reader]

Robert,
I've read one of those books by Caro, and I wanted to read more (just haven't had the time yet). So I know his writing MUST be good, as I have less than zero interest in LBJ, the sixties, or politics. Let's hear it for the golden age of bios!

[bybee]

Private Demons is one of the books I dragged with me to Korea. The biographer does tend to slather on the conjecture, but when it was written, there was absolutely nothing about Jackson except a turgid maybe 50 page bio of her written by someone whose first name was Ludmilla. Ludmilla knew almost nothing about Jackson except the basics, which she delivered in hard little turds of prose, so the Oppenheimer biography was like a bracing cool wind and sunlight streaming into..etc etc. Isn't it great that all 4 of the kids and so many of her friends agreed to interviews? My favorite anecdote in the book is the one in which Shirley 'gaslighted' Stanley about his favorite movie "Freaks".

[bybee]

Not Ludmilla. Lenemaja. Oops. Sorry about getting the name wrong. I'm sticking to my comments about the critical biography, though.

[Citizen Reader]

Bybee,
How great that this is one of the books you took along to Korea. I can see why you would--even if I quibble with the writing, Shirley is a fascinating character. I think "slather on the conjecture" is a great (and accurate) descriptive phrase, but like you, I am just thankful someone, somewhere, wrote this biography. Why isn't there more critical interest in Jackson?

I blew right through the book and have already forgotten a lot of it, which is so sad. I do not remember the Stanley movie anecdote, but I'm still shocked about the general gist of how she waited on that guy hand and foot. I wonder how all of her kids are doing now.