Book Review: Private Demons
Apr. 4th, 2023 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI have at long last read Judy Oppenheimer’s Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, and if you’re going to read just one biography of Shirley Jackson, I would absolutely pick this one over Ruth Franklin’s more recent Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Neither biography is perfect, but overall Oppenheimer just seems more simpatico with Jackson than Franklin.
In particular, I think that Oppenheimer does a better job delving into Jackson’s relationship with the supernatural. Throughout her life, Jackson saw things that other people didn’t see and heard things they didn’t hear - sometimes literally could not tell whether a thing was “real” or not (is it only real if other people experience it?) - which an outsider might describe as a hallucination and consider a mental health issue; but Jackson considered these things psychic powers, and Oppenheimer mostly follows Jackson in this belief, and it gets the book much closer to actually understanding Jackson than it would if it tried to pin a diagnosis on her. A diagnosis really only tells you what other people think about a thing, not how the person herself experienced it, and Jackson experienced these phenomena as magic power.
The book is also excellent at Jackson’s perception of evil: her bloodhound ability to sniff out human meanness and duplicity, her sensitivity to the way that people will draw lines between outgroup and ingroup, her own strong prejudices that perhaps helped her understand so intimately the prejudices of others. Although she and her husband Stanley Hyman decided not to live in faculty housing at Bennington College, this was clearly a choice driven by the desire not to be subsumed by the college, not the actually become one of the local people: she referred to the denizens of North Bennington as “peasants.”
Oppenheimer spends far less time than Franklin on Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman. Now there’s still a lot of Stanley - he was a huge figure in her life - but he doesn’t loom over the book in quite the way that he does in Franklin. And there’s more about the kids, and more understanding of the kids as individual people, and also some interesting stuff about the kids’ reaction to becoming copy in Jackson’s happy family books.
The one real flaw in Oppenheimer is that it barely touches on queer themes in Jackson’s life, a topic that Franklin also struggled with. They both quote the same bit of Jackson’s writing, where she’s reflecting on her college friendship with the French exchange student Jeanou: “my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them…and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend went away and i was all alone.”
And both make the same suggestion that Jackson didn’t know precisely what the word lesbian meant, which, okay, I am willing to spot you that perhaps she didn’t know the exact mechanics of what lesbians get up to in bed, but c’mon! Jackson is a sharp, precise writer, and there’s no reason to believe that in this one instance (and this one instance alone!) she used a word that she didn’t actually understand.
And there’s also no reason to make this argument, because it seems really clear to me that Jackson is saying “this man I loved rejected me because he thought I was a lesbian even though I wasn’t.” But perhaps that doesn’t push the specter of lesbianism quite far enough away, hence the “she didn’t know what lesbian meant” argument.
I found this easier to forgive in Oppenheimer because the book was published in 1988, and also, honestly, it’s easier to deal with a book that for the most part does not deal with a topic than a book that attempts to deal with it and mostly does it badly. And, other than this one thing, the book gives a strong and persuasive picture of who Shirley Jackson was and what she was like as a person and how that enabled her to write the stories she did.
In particular, I think that Oppenheimer does a better job delving into Jackson’s relationship with the supernatural. Throughout her life, Jackson saw things that other people didn’t see and heard things they didn’t hear - sometimes literally could not tell whether a thing was “real” or not (is it only real if other people experience it?) - which an outsider might describe as a hallucination and consider a mental health issue; but Jackson considered these things psychic powers, and Oppenheimer mostly follows Jackson in this belief, and it gets the book much closer to actually understanding Jackson than it would if it tried to pin a diagnosis on her. A diagnosis really only tells you what other people think about a thing, not how the person herself experienced it, and Jackson experienced these phenomena as magic power.
The book is also excellent at Jackson’s perception of evil: her bloodhound ability to sniff out human meanness and duplicity, her sensitivity to the way that people will draw lines between outgroup and ingroup, her own strong prejudices that perhaps helped her understand so intimately the prejudices of others. Although she and her husband Stanley Hyman decided not to live in faculty housing at Bennington College, this was clearly a choice driven by the desire not to be subsumed by the college, not the actually become one of the local people: she referred to the denizens of North Bennington as “peasants.”
Oppenheimer spends far less time than Franklin on Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman. Now there’s still a lot of Stanley - he was a huge figure in her life - but he doesn’t loom over the book in quite the way that he does in Franklin. And there’s more about the kids, and more understanding of the kids as individual people, and also some interesting stuff about the kids’ reaction to becoming copy in Jackson’s happy family books.
The one real flaw in Oppenheimer is that it barely touches on queer themes in Jackson’s life, a topic that Franklin also struggled with. They both quote the same bit of Jackson’s writing, where she’s reflecting on her college friendship with the French exchange student Jeanou: “my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them…and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend went away and i was all alone.”
And both make the same suggestion that Jackson didn’t know precisely what the word lesbian meant, which, okay, I am willing to spot you that perhaps she didn’t know the exact mechanics of what lesbians get up to in bed, but c’mon! Jackson is a sharp, precise writer, and there’s no reason to believe that in this one instance (and this one instance alone!) she used a word that she didn’t actually understand.
And there’s also no reason to make this argument, because it seems really clear to me that Jackson is saying “this man I loved rejected me because he thought I was a lesbian even though I wasn’t.” But perhaps that doesn’t push the specter of lesbianism quite far enough away, hence the “she didn’t know what lesbian meant” argument.
I found this easier to forgive in Oppenheimer because the book was published in 1988, and also, honestly, it’s easier to deal with a book that for the most part does not deal with a topic than a book that attempts to deal with it and mostly does it badly. And, other than this one thing, the book gives a strong and persuasive picture of who Shirley Jackson was and what she was like as a person and how that enabled her to write the stories she did.
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Date: 2023-04-04 09:45 pm (UTC)That does not read as an ambiguous use of the word "lesbian" to me, no.
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Date: 2023-04-05 02:54 am (UTC)I didn't know that Jackson had ties to Bennington College!
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Date: 2023-04-05 07:44 am (UTC)The Jackson letters that just came out are AMAZING. I loved them so much.
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Date: 2023-04-05 12:03 pm (UTC)Also: I had no idea that Shirley Jackson felt she had supernatural powers. That's interesting and not something you run across much in modern Western writers.
Other than classism, what other strong prejudices did Jackson have? (Maybe you've talked about this in talking about the other biography, but I've forgotten, if so)
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Date: 2023-04-05 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-05 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-05 03:12 pm (UTC)I hadn't realize there was a new volume of Jackson letters! Might have to look that up...
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Date: 2023-04-05 03:16 pm (UTC)I think classism is really the big one, but given her circumstances (living in the village full of "peasants") it's certainly a looming presence in her life. And this isn't exactly a prejudice, but she was capable of being quite vicious on occasion - Oppenheimer recounts parties where Shirley and Stanley would team up to cut someone verbally to shreds. (After one such party, Ralph Ellison told the couple that he would end their friendship if they ever treated someone like that in front of him again.)
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Date: 2023-04-05 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-10 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-10 05:21 am (UTC)+1.
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Date: 2023-04-10 12:22 pm (UTC)