In the summer of 1965, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman traveled to middle Georgia to visit the home of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor had died of lupus a year before, but Hyman met with her mother and neighbors in preparation for a study of her work (published in 1966 as part of the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers series). As usual, Hyman’s wife did the driving, and perhaps some of the literary analysis as well. His note of thanks to her would read, “[The author’s] indebtedness to the late Shirley Jackson is beyond the possibility of acknowledgment.”
Shirley Jackson, herself a literary legend, died of a heart attack shortly after she returned home with her husband. It’s hard even to imagine Jackson, so thoroughly Yankee, chatting with Flannery O’Connor’s mother on Southern soil. Over a thousand miles separated Bennington, Vermont, from Milledgeville, Georgia, not to mention light years of culture and point of view. Yet, in this not-quite conjunction of two writers’ lives lay a true meeting of worlds.
It’s easy to see what drew Jackson to Milledgeville (besides Stanley). Like O’Connor, she excelled at teasing the horrible from the ordinary, the shocking from the mundane. In Jackson’s most famous story, “The Lottery,” a mannerly group of neighbors draws names to decide which of their own will be sacrificed in a ritual fertility stoning. “Lottery in June,” goes their old chant, “corn be heavy soon.” When first published in the New Yorker, the story horrified readers who expected right up until the surprise ending that poor Mrs. Hutchinson was about to win a vacation to the Poconos. In the same way, O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” shocked gentle souls who couldn’t comprehend why a writer would kill off a family of five (including a grandma) just for taking a wrong turn on the way to Florida.
Both women dealt out violence and terror in a detached, often comical tone. Neither wasted much sentiment on her characters, and neither had much luck writing about “nice” people–the kind of folks you wouldn’t mind being stranded with on an empty highway. O’Connor populated her rural South with hypocrites, lunatics, and invalids. Jackson’s middle-class wasps hid their brutishness under thin layers of vanity and pettiness.
But cosmology, not style, united and divided them most. Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Conner were both supernaturalists. Invisible winds blew across their stories, shaping events and characters. For O’Connor, as a Catholic, these were the winds of Incarnation. Her characters, never heroic and at best only weak and invalid, embodied the worthless hopes of an unredeemed mankind. Only Christ–Christ the hero–could heal the lame and blind, could bend creation to make its crooked ways straight. This ultimate redemption made sense of the violence that so often brought it about.
Neither Jackson nor her world offered any such hope. From childhood on, Jackson claimed to have psychic visions and strange seeings; she was able, she said, to see “what the cat saw.” Like O’Connor, she believed that another world impinged upon our own, but hers was an utterly pagan experience of the real unreal. Raised without much religion, married to a wisecracking atheist who despised the organized church (though he liked Flannery O’Connor), Jackson fed her spiritual cravings with witchcraft and fortunetelling. She made voodoo dolls, read tarot cards, and occasionally put hexes on people who bugged her. There was nothing innocent about her interest in the occult; throughout her supernatural works, demons and devils appear as romantic figures, capricious but seductive.
In the preface to this volume of Jackson’s previously uncollected stories (many of them never before published, rescued from forgotten boxes in barns and attics and library archives), Jackson’s son and daughter refer to the courage she showed in exploring universal “themes” of “evil, madness, and cruelty.” Courage? It’s hard to attribute such a virtue to a woman who stuck pins in voodoo dolls. And yet the stories in Just an Ordinary Day do reveal a certain courageous clear-sightedness, a willingness to expose human vice without sentiment or excuse.
Some of Jackson’s most believable “villainesses,” for instance, may be distorted self-portraits. In “Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase,” a very large, very irritable woman (Jackson was both) commits fraud and theft in a department store while blaming everyone else there of everything conceivable–even heading to the complaint department at the end to carp about service. Jackson knew she could be as blind to her own faults as she was critical of faults in others. She showed herself no mercy, allowed her fictional self to learn nothing, and denied herself the cheap grace of a redemptive ending.
In other stories, the comedy becomes darker and the misery more acute. “When Things Get Dark” portrays a young woman taking her problems to an older lady who once wrote her an encouraging note after a brief talk on the bus. It turns out that the woman cares nothing about the girl or her problems–she’s only interested in brightening the lives of strangers (including Adolf Hitler) with her thoughtful advice. In Jackson’s last published story, “The Possibility of Evil,” a similar but nastier woman sends anonymous notes to her neighbors, warning them against each other, fomenting suspicion among them–all for the sake of “telling the truth.” Jackson may have seen herself as just such a fearsome and destructive “truth-teller.” As an artist, she removed herself from a violent society in order to criticize it. She took pleasure in being cooly, wittily harsh, offering the reader no comfort.
Clearly, Shirley Jackson recognized the real nature of evil–not as pleasure, not as freedom, but as grasping selfishness. The best expression of this occurs in one very short story, “Devil of a Tale.” The tone is epic and stately, mock-biblical. Satan despises the fact that he’s been overcome by the son of God, so he produces a son for himself with a mortal. Unfortunately for Satan, his son turns on him, even at the price of his own mother’s soul. Unlike the son of God–obedient to the point of death–the son of Satan can only seek his own. Evil has no loyalties. Jackson saw evil everywhere, in the spirit world and in the material world, and she reviled it.
So why, then, did she always allow evil to win? She offered up portions of both her life and her art to a force she apparently saw as inexorable. Her best stories in Just an Ordinary Day, though light and funny on the surface, abound with hopelessness: in this world, she says, one finds only wickedness, and in the spiritual world, only the endless, unmitigated sadness of ghosts.
A depressing conclusion, and yet an honest and courageous one from a writer who found no consolation in religion. Actually, the closest thing to Jacksonian redemption occurs not in her fiction but in funny tales of her own family life, several of which appear in the collection. In “Maybe It Was the Car,” for instance, Jackson the housewife has had it with a leaking bathtub, an annoying husband, hamburger again, and family in general. “Am I a writer?” she asks, “or am I a middle-aged housewife?” She backs her car (Toro) out of the driveway and takes off for an inn down the road, where she tells the check-in clerk she’s from Rio de Janeiro. “I thought I seen you at the A&P,” the woman says (shades of Flannery O’Connor).
It’s not long, though, before Jackson returns to her husband, four kids, and the laundry. That story portrays its author fairly well. Shirley Jackson was a devoted mother–reading to her children every night, squeezing her writing moments between stroller rides and Little League games, even volunteering to be a Cub Scout den mother (though she got the boys quiet by throwing eggs at her son).
Too bad that Jackson never saw the whole mass of miserable humanity as children of God, runaways and rebels, captive to Satan, but awaiting what O’Connor called the “terrible speed of mercy.” Though she recognized that mercy could not come from man–“The Lottery” has no heroes, not even the victim–Jackson never attributed it to God, either. Her Mrs. Hutchinson has no revelation at the hands of the stone throwers. Heaven remains silent, redemption does not come.
Jackson was a good writer, masterly at dialogue and decent at narrative. The stories in Just an Ordinary Day turn a sharp and unforgiving eye on wickedness, and in this sense they are true. But they are also tragic. It would be nice to think that Shirley Jackson had a revelation as she stood, just a few weeks before her death, among the famous peacocks at the O’Connor farm. June had arrived, after all, and the corn was already heavy in Georgia.
Betty Smartt Carter is the author of two novels: I Read It in the Wordless Book (Baker Book House) and The Tower, the Mask, and the Grave, just published by Harold Shaw.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
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