The odd twist is a frequent feature in Shirley Jackson’s stories. It’s one reason she inspired writers like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King.
Where writers have lived, where they worked, what habits they followed, and what quirks were part of their personalities are subjects of perennial fascination for prospective writers.
It isn’t going to make you a better writer knowing how Dylan Thomas preferred to have his eggs prepared, or where Stephen King rode his motorcycle, or under what circumstances J.K. Rowling completed her first Harry Potter novel. Still, the glimpses into successful writers’ lives cuts through literary mystique and highlights the commonalities in their life stories. Writing legends or not, we quickly learn they are not much different from anyone else trying to turn thoughts and ideas into art.
I first encountered Shirley Jackson’s writing in the classroom, during a discussion of a reading assignment of the short story, “The Lottery.” Published in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker, the story paints a portrait of the curious role of ritual and tradition in communities, ending with a macabre twist. If you haven’t read the tale, The New Yorker has an audio version of the classic on its site. The story generated more mail — much of it hate mail — than any story before or since.
Jackson’s odd twists
The odd twist is a frequent feature in Jackson’s tales, along with a knack for finding the sinister in ordinary circumstances. These traits are among the reasons she became an inspiration for a host of writers, including Peter Straub, Richard Matheson, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and others.
Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916, and lived in Burlingame, California until her mid-teens, when her family moved east and settled in Syracuse, New York. Her writing life gained momentum in North Bennington, Vermont, after she began a relationship with Stanley Hyman, who later became a faculty member and literature critic at Bennington College. Hyman proved both an inspiration and a vexation during their complicated marriage.
12 Prospect Street
Because of the slow pace of change that characterizes much of Vermont, many of Jackson’s haunts are still landmarks in the town.
Jonah Daniell, in an article for Literary Bennington, introduced me to many of the key landmarks around town, and his article provides many entertaining insights into Jackson’s life in North Bennington. As Ruth Franklin points out in her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, houses have often played a role — not unlike physical characters — in Jackson’s fiction.
The house on 12 Prospect Street, in North Bennington, was home during the time Jackson wrote “The Lottery” and her novel, The Road Through the Wall, as well as other short works. Money was tight at the time, and the family rented the house for $50 a month from 1945 to 1948. A likeness of the Prospect Street house appears on the dust jacket of Jackson’s later novel, Life Among the Savages.
Powers Market
Originally constructed in 1833, Powers Market was a social hub (and grocery store) in North Bennington. Later in life, when Jackson began to suffer serious bouts of agoraphobia and anxiety, her daughter-in-law was quoted in Franklin’s biography as saying, “You give her a bunch of pills and if she can go to Powers Market that means she is getting better.”
On the verge of shutdown, Powers Market has recently been slated for reopening in the summer of 2022 in a project engineered by Nick Disorda and Lani DePonte-Disorda, the owners of the nearby Pangaea restaurant. Quoted in the Bennington Banner, DePonte-Disorda says, “The Pangaea crew has recently undertaken the reopening of Powers Market just across the square, and plans are to restore it to the glory days of a classic Vermont grocery and butcher.”
The commons area adjacent to Powers Market (sans fountain) is the spot where Jackson allegedly first got the spark of the idea for “The Lottery.” From Franklin’s biographical account:
As she told it, she was out doing errands one bright June morning “when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story.” She was pushing [daughter] Joanne, around two and a half, in a stroller; [son] Laurence was at kindergarten. The idea came to her, she said, on the way home — “perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story” — and as soon as they arrived, she put Joanne in her playpen, put away the groceries, and sat down to write. She was finished by the time Laurence arrived home for lunch. “I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause,” she would recall. “As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.
Franklin does note that Jackson may have taken some liberties with this tale and explains how it wasn’t quite as quick and easy as related.
The Rainbarrel
Near to Powers Market is a restaurant Jackson and Hyman used to frequent. Now Pangaea, it was a French restaurant called The Rainbarrel at the time. Curiously, it is the place when Hyman had a fatal heart attack during a meal in July 1970, nearly five years after the death of his wife.
66 Main Street
With some writing success accrued, including the earnings from Life Among the Savages, Jackson and Hyman purchased this home at 66 Main Street in North Bennington for $15,000. It was the place at which Jackson penned what many consider her masterwork, The Haunting of Hill House.
The house was also where many of Shirley Jackson’s other important works were written, including The Sundial, The Bird’s Nest, Raising Demons, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It was also the place where Shirley Jackson died, on August 8, 1965, at age 48. On a hot summer day, she was taking an afternoon nap and died in her sleep of a coronary occlusion and was discovered by her daughter.
In a tribute in The New York Review, Joyce Carol Oates says, “Characterized by the caprice and fatalism of fairy tales, the fiction of Shirley Jackson exerts a mordant, hypnotic spell. No matter how many times one has read The Lottery, Jackson’s most anthologized story and one of the classic works of American gothic literature, one is never quite prepared for its slow-gathering momentum, the way in which what appears initially to be random and casual is revealed to be as inevitable as water circling in a drain.”
Additional resources
Kathye Fetsko Petrie traveled on a journey of discovery and wrote “In Search of Shirley Jackson’s House” about her experience for the Literary Hub.
With Elisabeth Moss playing a slightly creepy version of Jackson, the movie Shirley pushes the boundaries of a typical biopic and presents a somewhat harsh view of the marital relationship.
The movie Set Fire to the Stars has an extended scene in which the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who has come to America on a university reading tour, spends the evening drinking booze and exchanging stories with Shirley and Stanley.
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