Let’s face it, nobody wrote about postwar family life the way Shirley Jackson did. Margaret’s little tale is typical: a beautifully nuanced account of domestic tranquillity suddenly subverted by mysterious horror. Jackson, who died of a heart attack at 48 in 1965, also produced lighter reports from the domestic front in her dryly witty, semiautobiographical books “Life Among the Savages” and “Raising Demons.” Both sides of this extraordinary imagination are represented in a welcome new collection, Just an Ordinary Day (388 pages. Bantam. $23.95), compiled by two of her children from magazine stories and unpublished manuscripts. While little in this volume is as perfectly tuned as her most famous fiction–notably “The Lottery,” the 1948 story instantly acclaimed as a classic of creepiness–Jackson’s voice is unmistakable, and her fans will rejoice over it.
Some of the most fascinat-ing stories in this volume are the previously unpublished works that hint at a private life very different from the funny accounts of domestic chaos she turned out. Jackson’s marriage to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman was complicated and tempestuous. Hyman, who died in 1970, was a flagrant and compulsive skirt-chaser; and although the marriage lasted, Jackson dosed herself liberally with alcohol, tranquilizers and Dexedrine. She also suffered from agoraphobia and occasional bouts of severe depression. (Yet she managed to be a remarkably disciplined writer: her children remember hearing the typewriter clack every day and into the night.)
These dark tangles of Jackson’s personal life seem to lie right below the surface in such stories as “What a Thought,” about Margaret and the ashtray, and a chilling tale called “The Good Wife.” Here a newlywed wife is kept prisoner by her husband, who suspects her of having an affair; at the end of the story we see him taking up a pen to write yet another of the incriminating letters he accuses her of receiving from a strange man. What a glimpse of ’50s-style wedded bliss! No wonder these tales never made their way into the magazines to which Jackson typically contributed–either she didn’t dare submit them, or they weren’t deemed “suitable,” as rejection letters often put it. They’re suitable now, that’s for sure: her disquieting take on home life will still resonate when Martha Stewart is a memory.
