Shirley Jackson: A More Remarkable Writer than just for her human sacrifice short story, “The Lottery”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/books/review/the-lottery-75th-anniversary-shirley-jackson.html

March 9, 2017 (past post)

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Shirley Jackson was ranked among America’s most highly regarded fiction writers…an article in 1955 on the strength of contemporary American fiction listed her with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty…In 1968, Macmillan’s Literary Heritage series included her with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Welty, and Ellison in its canonical anthology The American Experience: Fiction…When Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel appeared, her publisher advertised her as ‘already compared to William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Shirley Jackson’…This study argues that Jackson’s reputation should be restored to the lofty position it occupied during her life” (1, pp. 1-2).

“Jackson was…almost, at least at times, a multiple personality. As is well-known, multiple personalities often arise from sexual abuse, and it seems that Jackson might have been so victimized [by her] maternal uncle…”

“More precisely…She was a bit like the multiple personality described in a book by [Morton] Prince…that she used to develop Elizabeth, the protagonist with a multiple personality in The Bird’s Nest…

“Sometimes when Jackson awoke, she found disturbing notes that she had written to herself while sleepwalking” (1, pp. 25-26).

“As Jackson did in her letters…Betsy [one of the alternate personalities in The Bird’s Nest] refers to herself with a lowercase i ” (1, p. 134).

“In her diary as an adolescent, [Jackson] wrote of her writing as something that came not from her but from her pen or her typewriter” (1, p. 22).

“The most important nonfictional work enabling this novel [The Bird’s Nest] is the definitive work of the time on multiples, The Dissociation of a Personality by a doctor named Morton Prince. Jackson studied it assiduously before writing this novel…Prince appears to have helped Jackson understand her own life” (1, pp. 130-131).

1. Darryl Hattenhauer. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003.

2. Wikipedia. “The Bird’s Nest.” By Shirley Jackson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bird's_Nest_(novel)

March 15, 2017

Shirley Jackson on Writing: Notes she writes to herself while awake, and other notes she writes to herself while she is supposedly asleep.

Notes Written Awake

“When I start writing a book, I go around making notes, and I mean that I literally go around making them; I keep pads of paper and pencils all over the house…I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five’…or ‘Shirley, have old man fall downstairs.’ When I am ready to write the book, I go and collect all my little scraps of paper and try to figure out what I was thinking when I wrote them” (1, p. 392).

Why do these notes address “Shirley”? They could not be mistaken for anyone else’s notes. They were obviously written by the only novelist of the house; written by Shirley for herself. Yet the notes are written as if someone else were addressing Shirley to help her write her book.

Notes Written Supposedly Asleep

People with MPD (multiple personality disorder) “frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find drawings, notes, poems, relocated furniture, discarded clothing, or other evidence that they have been up and busy. If this is a common life experience for a patient, there is an excellent chance that he or she has MPD” (2, p. 81).

One Example

“I was talking casually one evening recently to the husband of a friend of mine, and he mentioned his service in the Marines. I said, ‘Oh, yes, your rifle number was 804041,’ and then we kind of stared at each other dumbfounded, since one does not usually just happen to know the rifle numbers of the husbands of friends. We finally remembered that some months before, during a similar conversation after another bridge game, he had mentioned his Marine service, and remarked that one thing he would never forget was his rifle number, 804041…

“I was having a good deal of trouble at the time, working over a new novel that somehow refused to go together right…One night I gave up; I shoved the typewriter away and…went to bed, somehow forgetting to set the alarm clock.

“When I came rushing downstairs the next morning, half an hour late…I did not go at once into the study…it was not until much later in the morning that I went near my desk, but when I did, I got one of the really big shocks of my life. A sheet of paper had been taken…and put directly into the center of the desk, right where it would be most visible. On this sheet of paper was written, in large figures, and in my own writing with my own pencil, 804041.

“Now, I have walked in my sleep frequently, particularly when I am under pressure with a book, and have done odd things in my sleep, but I have rarely taken to writing notes to myself, and particularly not in code…Clearly, I was remembering this number as a clue to something else…”

Then Shirley remembered that the former Marine had told her about a woman member of an anti-Fascist organization who had been taught to “withdraw her mind from her body” so that she would not break under torture.

“When I remembered all of this and went back to my book again, I found that the trained ability to separate mind from body, a deliberate detachment, was the essential characteristic I had been looking for for my heroine, and was what I had been trying to tell myself by [the number]…(1, pp. 378-380).

Another Example

“Two weeks ago, I had written part of the beginning of the book and was having a great deal of trouble making it go together and could not find a suitable name for my secondary female character. One evening…finally I decided to give up…and I stomped furiously up to bed.

“The next morning, when I went to my desk, I found a sheet of typing paper…set right in the middle. On the paper was written, ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora.’ It was written in my own handwriting, but as though it had been written in the dark.

“I have always walked in my sleep, but I don’t think I have ever been so frightened. I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing it in my sleep…Since then, the book has been going along nicely, thank you, and my female character is named Theodora and is turning out quite well.

“Now, incidentally, you can see why a writer might be reluctant to explain where ideas for books come from” (1, pp. 392-393).

1. Shirley Jackson. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt. Foreword by Ruth Franklin. New York, Random House, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.