thirty years later are reminiscent of the stresses she suffered as an adolescent: “being someone else and doing the things someone else wants us to do,” “being taken and used by someone else”—in other words, yielding to Geraldine’s (and later Hyman’s) vision for her, which she feared would cause her to lose her own identity. Even words are to be feared: words that unfairly categorize, that criticize, that damage.
AFTER JEANOU’S DEPARTURE, SHIRLEY spent the next few months in summer school, trying to improve her grades. Her sophomore year started inauspiciously, with an English teacher she had a crush on conspicuously absent from her course schedule. But now her focus was her writing: she had a “glorious” new typewriter and was happy with what she was accomplishing with it. She had reason to suspect that her mother was going through her papers again, especially after Geraldine scoldedher for writing “sexy stories.” (She was living back at home—the Jacksons had moved to a larger house within walking distance of campus.) “I shall have to lock my desk,” Shirley resolved. “I would like some privacy.”
Despite Geraldine’s interference, she continued to be productive. “Wrote an allegory which might mean something,” she reported to her diary in September. She was most pleased with a story she called “Idiot”: “The idea is driving me insane, but it’s there—and the story won’t end.” The piece does not survive, but the title suggests that it dealt with a character who was mentally retarded or otherwise deficient—another of the outsider tropes that would later recur in different versions throughout her fiction. Jackson worked up the courage to submit “Idiot” to Story magazine, which rejected it. Nonetheless, her confidence in her work continued unabated. “Wrote a play tonight which delights me—it is so myself !” she exulted a few weeks later, chiding herself immediately afterward for conceit.
None of the girls in Shirley’s small circle of friends had replacedJeanou, especially in terms of intellectual excitement. But she began to date a boy named Jimmie Taylor, whom she had met one night in November at the movies: “very nice, and surprisingly fun—good dancer.” For her nineteenth birthday, he took her to the Peacock Room, a rococo restaurant featuring opulent chandeliers and a live cabaret band. Jackson complained that he was dull, but she enjoyed having a boyfriend to go dancing with. After he stood her up for a date, she vowed never to speak to him again—until the next day, when he showed up at her house with a gardenia to apologize. (She still gave him “what is technically known as Hell,” she told her diary proudly.) Her customary new year’s musings for 1936 show that, unserious as it was, the relationship was interfering with her Harlequin equilibrium. “For people who do not care, life can hold so much of interest and so much of delight, I have discovered. There is a strange charm in feeling not able to be hurt.” But she could not will herself out of emotion. “It is so desperately easy to resolve ‘I will not care,’ and so much easier to break that resolve!”
Shirley and Barry Jackson in Rochester, c. 1935.
If the Jacksons’ intention in moving Shirley home had been to keep an eye on her schoolwork, they were not successful. She failed three of her fall courses—biology, French, and psychology—and barely squeaked by in the remaining two, English and archaeology. In the spring, her grades plummeted even lower, and she was put on academic probation. By June, the university had asked her to leave. Later she would say she was thrown out “because i refused to go to any classes because i hated them.”
Jackson certainly did not lack the intelligence to succeed at Rochester. Did she suffer another episode of depression that led to her failing grades? Or was it the other way around—her grades began to slip, inducing her mental
AFTER JEANOU’S DEPARTURE, SHIRLEY spent the next few months in summer school, trying to improve her grades. Her sophomore year started inauspiciously, with an English teacher she had a crush on conspicuously absent from her course schedule. But now her focus was her writing: she had a “glorious” new typewriter and was happy with what she was accomplishing with it. She had reason to suspect that her mother was going through her papers again, especially after Geraldine scoldedher for writing “sexy stories.” (She was living back at home—the Jacksons had moved to a larger house within walking distance of campus.) “I shall have to lock my desk,” Shirley resolved. “I would like some privacy.”
Despite Geraldine’s interference, she continued to be productive. “Wrote an allegory which might mean something,” she reported to her diary in September. She was most pleased with a story she called “Idiot”: “The idea is driving me insane, but it’s there—and the story won’t end.” The piece does not survive, but the title suggests that it dealt with a character who was mentally retarded or otherwise deficient—another of the outsider tropes that would later recur in different versions throughout her fiction. Jackson worked up the courage to submit “Idiot” to Story magazine, which rejected it. Nonetheless, her confidence in her work continued unabated. “Wrote a play tonight which delights me—it is so myself !” she exulted a few weeks later, chiding herself immediately afterward for conceit.
None of the girls in Shirley’s small circle of friends had replacedJeanou, especially in terms of intellectual excitement. But she began to date a boy named Jimmie Taylor, whom she had met one night in November at the movies: “very nice, and surprisingly fun—good dancer.” For her nineteenth birthday, he took her to the Peacock Room, a rococo restaurant featuring opulent chandeliers and a live cabaret band. Jackson complained that he was dull, but she enjoyed having a boyfriend to go dancing with. After he stood her up for a date, she vowed never to speak to him again—until the next day, when he showed up at her house with a gardenia to apologize. (She still gave him “what is technically known as Hell,” she told her diary proudly.) Her customary new year’s musings for 1936 show that, unserious as it was, the relationship was interfering with her Harlequin equilibrium. “For people who do not care, life can hold so much of interest and so much of delight, I have discovered. There is a strange charm in feeling not able to be hurt.” But she could not will herself out of emotion. “It is so desperately easy to resolve ‘I will not care,’ and so much easier to break that resolve!”
Shirley and Barry Jackson in Rochester, c. 1935.
If the Jacksons’ intention in moving Shirley home had been to keep an eye on her schoolwork, they were not successful. She failed three of her fall courses—biology, French, and psychology—and barely squeaked by in the remaining two, English and archaeology. In the spring, her grades plummeted even lower, and she was put on academic probation. By June, the university had asked her to leave. Later she would say she was thrown out “because i refused to go to any classes because i hated them.”
Jackson certainly did not lack the intelligence to succeed at Rochester. Did she suffer another episode of depression that led to her failing grades? Or was it the other way around—her grades began to slip, inducing her mental
Similar Books
