During a literary career that lasted a quarter of a century, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) published six novels of the macabre, a collection of short fiction, two books for children, a play, and two comic memoirs of motherhood—enough work to fill a small shelf. But she’s best known for a nine-page short story, “The Lottery,” in which the residents of a quaint Norman Rockwell town are slowly revealed as participants in a ritual act of murder.
After “The Lottery” was first published in the New Yorker in 1948, it drew more letters than any other fiction the magazine had ever published. Of the 300-odd letters about the story that Jackson read that summer, “I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends,” she recalled. “Even my mother scolded me.”
Published only three years after World War II, which called Americans to fight evil overseas, “The Lottery” suggested that human depravity could also lurk closer to home, even in the quiet places beyond the cities where many returning veterans were starting to build families. Today, in a culture saturated with images of violence, “The Lottery” continues to shock. Much of the story’s power lies in its understatement. Jackson never overtly mentions blood in “The Lottery,” nor does she resort to exclamation or exaggeration to make her point. Jackson’s emotional restraint is the most chilling aspect of her fiction.
The disciplined objectivity of “The Lottery” makes it seem as urgently real as a newspaper story—so much so that some readers misread it as a factual account, writing the New Yorker to ask just where these gruesome lotteries were taking place. Jackson’s scrupulously neutral tone can seem clinical at first, but it serves a larger moral vision. Several months before Jackson died, she visited Georgia to see the home of the recently deceased Flannery O’Connor, a writer whom Jackson admired. Like O’Connor, Jackson incorporated violence in her work not in the service of sensationalism but to explore the world’s fullest spiritual dimensions. In all of Jackson’s work, writes Kevin Wilson, “It is so unsettling to see the darkness and the chaos beneath the surface. We encounter a world where, thanks to Jackson’s talent, we recoil from the danger and then move closer to see it more clearly.”
Shirley Jackson grew accustomed to staring demons in the face, in no small measure because she had demons of her own. She was born in 1916 in San Francisco to an affluent family that didn’t quite know what to do with her bohemian artistic personality. The Jacksons eventually moved to Rochester, New York, where Shirley proved an indifferent college student, graduating without distinction from Syracuse in 1940. Jackson married the literary critic and college professor Stanley Hyman, and they spent most of their years together in Vermont, where she raised four children and wrote the books that earned her international fame. Jackson battled with obesity, smoked and drank heavily, and abused amphetamines and barbiturates. On August 8, 1965, while taking an afternoon nap, she died of heart failure.
This year has brought the 50th anniversary of Jackson’s death, and next year is the 100th anniversary of her birth—two landmarks that are irresistible to the publishing industry. Let Me Tell You, a new collection of prose from the Jackson vault, is out now, and next year, just in time for the Jackson centennial, Norton plans to release a new biography by Ruth Franklin. In truth, the Jackson revival started five years ago when the Library of America unveiled a handsome edition of Jackson’s best novels, stories, and sketches, affirming her stature as an Important Writer. The subtle craft of The Haunting of Hill House, a celebrated Jackson novel included in the Library of America volume, invites comparison with Henry James’s Turn of the Screw with its narrative of a protagonist in a haunted house whose struggles might be as much psychological as supernatural.
Such recognition would surely please Jackson, who aspired to be not only a popular writer but a respected one. One of the most revealing selections in Let Me Tell You is a brief essay, “Notes on an Unfashionable Novelist,” in which Jackson declares her deep affection for Samuel Richardson, the 18th-century author best known for a sweeping, two-part epistolary novel, Pamela. Reflecting on Richardson, Jackson longs for the time when an author “could, if he chose, write a book a million words long and expect people to have time for it.” Jackson admired the winding architectural heft of Richardson’s fiction, although she recognized that his plodding pace couldn’t be emulated by any modern writer who wanted commercial success.
In “Garlic in Fiction,” another essay here, Jackson laments the shrinking attention span of her public.
The essay outlines Jackson’s suggested techniques for keeping readers hooked, breaking down the dry mechanics of symbolism and description in a tutorial that reads like Writing Fiction for Dummies. It’s a blueprint, of sorts, for decoding some of the formulaic material Jackson felt compelled to churn out to pay her bills.
In a perceptive introduction to Let Me Tell You, Ruth Franklin notes that Jackson “distinguished between her serious fiction and the less complex, cheerier pieces demanded by her editors at McCall’s, Collier’s, and other ‘slicks,’ as they were called at the time.” Some of the pieces here betray by-the-numbers expedience, such as “Company for Dinner,” a short story in which a man trudges home from the office for his evening meal, sitting for quite a while at the table before he realizes that he’s entered the wrong apartment. The O. Henry ending seems like a meager payoff for a slender tale, but it does point to one of Jackson’s prevailing preoccupations. She was fascinated by how humans could be governed by routine—sometimes with tragic implications, as in “The Lottery,” where ritual creates its own dark logic, and sometimes with comforting results, as in “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again,” an essay about the pleasure Jackson took in a daily domestic chore.
This kitchen-sink musing isn’t Jackson’s best work, either—there’s an extended ode to a carving fork that is, sadly, as riveting as the premise sounds—but several of the other essays about Jackson’s domestic life underscore her genius for household comedy. Pieces such as “Questions I Wish I’d Never Asked,” “How to Enjoy a Family Quarrel,” and “The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out with Children” compare favorably with James Thurber’s first-person farces—although, like Thurber, she didn’t adhere to literal truth in telling family stories.
“I find it very difficult to distinguish between life and fiction,” she declares in “How I Write,” a lecture reprinted in Let Me Tell You. Jackson’s accounts of motherhood “were often based on actual events, but they were wonderfully embellished,” the book’s editors (who are also two of her children) concede in an afterword.
Although Jackson’s autobiographical writings might not be strictly factual, they do have a compelling ring of plausibility for any parent who’s mediated fights at the dinner table or cast a bewildered eye over the wreckage of a room populated by youngsters. They also showcase Jackson’s tender side, her embrace of what she professed to value in Samuel Richardson: “peace, principle, and kindness.” Let Me Tell You isn’t the first sweep of Jackson’s literary archive: Two other posthumous collections—Come Along with Me and Just an Ordinary Day—have promoted prose not previously gathered between covers. This new anthology hints that we might be getting to the bottom of her publishable work. There’s memorable material here, primarily in the pieces about writing and family, but also a good bit of marginalia.
With any luck, Let Me Tell You will lead readers toward her novels and memoirs, which Penguin Classics has recently reissued. In “The Lottery,” and so much of her other work, Shirley Jackson explored what can happen when the mind is leashed by convention. She wrote to free herself from that prison, and free her readers, too. Existence, she believed, “is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.”
Danny Heitman is the author, most recently, of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
