This Week in Fiction: Shirley Jackson

An interview with Shirley Jackson’s son Laurence Jackson Hyman.

This week’s story, “Paranoia,” is by your mother, Shirley Jackson, who published twelve stories in The New Yorker between 1943 and 1953. Your mother died in 1965, and “Paranoia” was never published during her lifetime. Can you talk about the circumstances surrounding its recent discovery?

My mother was a very prolific writer, and when she died at forty-eight she left behind an enormous trove of unpublished work. We have been looking through her papers for years and only recently found “Paranoia,” along with several dozen other unpublished stories, among twenty-six unsorted cartons of her work sent to the Library of Congress by our father. Years ago a shabby box appeared on my porch with no return address, and after hours of suspicious avoidance I opened it to find the manuscript of one of my mother’s novels, lots of notes, and half a dozen of her unpublished stories. That prompted one of my sisters and me to harvest more stories from the Library and elsewhere, and co-edit a book in 1996, “Just an Ordinary Day,” containing thirty-two new Shirley Jackson stories along with twenty-two uncollected ones. Now we have found many more, and we are considering publishing another book of her work.

Shirley Jackson is enjoying a revival these days. All of her twelve novels and story collections are in print, for the first time in many years. Recently we have licensed adaptations of her work for ballets, musicals, plays (a big one may open in London this fall), and several movie adaptations are in the works. And the critic Ruth Franklin is working on an important new biography of my mother.

The story is about a businessman who is on his way home to see his wife on her birthday when he becomes convinced that he is being followed. Do you have an idea of the year the story was written in? How typical is it of your mother’s fiction at the time?

This story fits comfortably into the body of work my mother created, especially the short stories from the early forties, when we think this was written (and we know that New York City subways started charging a dime instead of a nickel in 1948; in fact, The New Yorker did a short Talk piece on the redesign of the turnstiles in the very same issue that contained “The Lottery”). My mother wrote often about alienation and withdrawal, fear, phobia, disassociation and paranoia, in ways that often leave the reader uncertain as to whether things are real or imagined. She created one of the most famous ghost stories of the twentieth century—“The Haunting of Hill House”—without revealing any ghosts at all. In “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” and many of her stories, she gives us narrators so obviously unreliable that the reader has to decide for himself what to believe. And Shirley certainly liked surprise endings, almost a trademark of hers.

Clearly “Paranoia” has an obvious chilly relevance today. It doesn’t have the polish of her later work, but it is still pure Jackson. It drifts in and out of dream-like situations and then, when the reader is briefly lulled into letting his guard down, Wham! The story explores one of her common themes, the gradual realization of no escape, where the horror is that there is no help coming, no way out, no relief from any direction. A lot of people may have been led to believe by the storytelling in “The Lottery” that Tessie Hutchinson was going to win a washing machine or lawn mower.

Shirley Jackson had a masterful ability to take quotidian experiences and make them deeply unsettling. In this case, a commuter’s trip home by bus and subway is fraught with anxiety and possible menace. Can you look at a street scene today and imagine how your mother would have refracted it in her fiction?

Shirley would typically present scenes of seeming tranquility, whether in the city or the country, and then would go on to find, as one of her stories puts it, “The Possibility of Evil” within her characters, and sometimes within buildings and other inanimate objects. She wrote many eerie street scenes, few finer than Merricat’s shopping trip into the village in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Shirley was especially vivid in her nightmarish descriptions of people riding public transportation—both Elizabeth, the young woman with a multiple-personality disorder in “The Bird’s Nest,” and the disagreeable old woman in “The Bus” have awful, near hallucinatory experiences on buses, and the husband in “The Beautiful Stranger” may have experienced an alien abduction on his train ride from Boston. She often wrote about the loneliness in cities, characters getting lost, distortions in scale. Some of her imagery reminds me of Edward Hopper and John Vassos, with the long shadows, and dramatic underlying tension. Shirley didn’t much care for cities, and it often shows in her work. She much preferred small-town life, and she enjoyed living in North Bennington for all the years we did. She is fondly remembered there with an annual Shirley Jackson Day.

Your mother also wrote many far less menace-filled stories about your family’s life in Vermont—and her role as a wife, housewife, and mother of four—which were gathered together in “Life Among the Savages,” in 1953, and, four years later, “Raising Demons.” Why do you think she was able to switch between the horrific and the comic so effortlessly in her writing? What was it like for you and your siblings to find your adventures at home shared with the world in print?

Shirley had the unusual ability to write comfortably in a variety of styles, from the humorous family chronicles to a novel like “The Sundial,” which is itself quite funny, while also playing with the end-of-the-world theme she often liked, to the darker work—novels like “Castle” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” and stories probing all sorts of evil in the least expected places. She often combined the comic with the horrific, comedy sometimes setting up the terror.

I rather liked my role in the family novels. She treated me pretty well in the books and stories and gave me some great Groucho-like lines. I don’t remember being embarrassed about being in the stories. One of them, “Charles,” her second most anthologized story, is about me starting kindergarten. I didn’t read it until I was a few years older, but I’ve been asked about it all my life. As a teen-ager I would go with my mother to summer writers’ conferences where she taught and people would grill me about “Charles.” I didn’t mind the attention.

I enjoy my mother’s accounts—with some slight embellishment, perhaps—of our family’s adventures. It actually seems a pretty idyllic household from this distance. My friends and my siblings’ friends were also identified by name in those books, and many of the villagers, and of course my parents’ friends, so there were a lot of us enjoying a bit of fame when the books first came out.

In real life Shirley had a wonderful sense of humor, and had a jovial laugh she got from her father, counter-balanced by the polite, proper persona she learned from her mother. There were always jokes in our house, especially at meals, where we each had to tell one. Both my parents were great jokesters. They would leave funny notes and drawings around the house, literary puzzles, playful poems on doors.

Not only was my mother prolific as a writer, she was also an artist. We have found more than eight hundred of her Thurberesque cartoons, watercolors and paintings, which we are also considering publishing. In fact, Shirley did a number of cartoons with references to The New Yorker, usually her impressions of Stanley’s life when he was off at the New Yorker offices, leaving the rest of us in snowy Vermont.

Your mother published frequently in The New Yorker and your father, Stanley Edgar Hyman, was a critic and staff writer at the magazine for many years. How aware were you of the magazine and its role in your parents’ lives when you were a child? Do you think your mother would have been pleased to see “Paranoia” in its pages?

I think Shirley would be very pleased to see “Paranoia” in print at last, and in The New Yorker, no less. She would be ninety-seven now and would probably be shocked at the eerie resonance the story has these days, with government snooping, out-of-control spies, drones, and secret prisons. One of the reasons this story might not have been published when it was written—in the years of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and U.S. wartime efforts to neutralize domestic communists and dissidents—is its political slant, fairly unfamiliar territory for Shirley. In the story, Mr. Beresford, on the bus, thinks one of the other passengers “looked as though he might be a foreigner … foreign plot, spies. Better not rely on any foreigners,” she writes, probably a poignant record of popular attitudes during the war. My parents may have been hesitant to send it out.

The New Yorker was a staple in our house, from my earliest childhood memories. The newest edition of the magazine was always on the coffee table between my parents’ reading chairs, often stamped PROOF. We all knew how important the magazine was for our father. Though Shirley’s work may not have appeared in the magazine since the fifties—until now—Stanley continued his work as staff writer until his death in 1970. He loved reviewing books for The New Yorker, and some other magazines, and would read furiously through a tall stack of books each week.

In 1949, when I was seven, we moved for two years to Connecticut so Stanley could be nearer the magazine’s offices. Sometimes he would take me with him on the train to New York. We’d go to the office together and I would accompany him as he made the rounds to see his good friends—Joseph Mitchell, Brendan Gill, Philip Hamburger, Jim Geraghty and Bill Shawn, who was then one of the magazine’s managing editors—and I remember lots of tiny offices piled everywhere with books and papers. There was a terrific camaraderie among them. Later, when we were back living in North Bennington, Shirley would often go with him, leaving us kids in Vermont with a sitter. They would hold forth at the Algonquin or Royalton Hotel, running a constant cocktail party in their room. Friends, magazine staff, anyone they knew (or friends of theirs) were welcome to join the usually raucous debates in their smoky suite. My parents enjoyed those times immensely.