To celebrate Hallowe’en, I read Shirley Jackson’s terrifying novel, The Haunting of Hill House (recently adapted for Netflix). Jackson’s famous story, “The Lottery” impressed me as an undergraduate forty years ago, but I had never wondered about its author’s life. This fall, a podcast led me first to the novel and then to Ruth Franklin’s wonderful biography. There I learned that Jackson had managed to write six novels and dozens of short stories while raising four children and supporting her husband’s academic and writing career; I also learned of the ill health, both mental and physical, that preceded Jackson’s death at 48. She died taking an afternoon nap. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest caused by coronary occlusion.
“If only Jackson had taken up running,” was the thought that came to mind. I know, I know—women jogging around the neighbourhood was not a thing in 1950s America, although there were superlative women runners who represented the country in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics (Mae Faggs, Catherine Hardy, Barbara Jones, and Janet Moreau won gold in the 4×100 relay in 1952; Isabelle Daniels, Mae Faggs, Margaret Matthews and Wilma Rudolph won bronze four years later). My response was a projection; in my late forties, I suffered, like Jackson, from panic attacks, and while I’m grateful to the care I received at the time, I wish that someone had suggested exercise as a possible therapy. It may be that my symptoms were perimenopausal and would have abated on their own. In any case, they disappeared when I turned fifty and took up running.
That year my youngest child left home for university. I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, a moment to breath and find my feet after twenty years of full-time work and children’s hockey, soccer, and music lessons—and also puppy training, dog walking, and household chores. The freedom that running afforded was an extension of a broader sense that new horizons were opening up in front of me. Jackson suffered agoraphobia in her mid-forties and was prescribed tranquillizers, which didn’t alleviate her fears and only left her feeling “stupid” (her word). In the novel she was drafting in the months before she died, Jackson tells the story of a woman who leaves everyone behind, finding a room of her own far from the demands of children and marriage. Clearly, freedom was on her mind.
Jackson drank, smoked, and ate poorly—all contributing factors in her untimely death. I can’t help wondering if exercise might have extended her life and helped her overcome her fears—if she had walked the hills around North Bennington, the Vermont town where she lived, would she have gained the sense of freedom that running gave me? Had Jackson lived to fifty, maybe she would have caught a glimpse of a new life on the path ahead.
I am grateful for the amazing narratives that Shirley Jackson gave the world. But I can’t help wishing, for her, more years of writing and the health she needed to sustain it.
(The featured image is “Vermont Countryside.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)
I love this post. Thank goodness she had writing or she might have died even younger, from all the pent up emotions she didn’t even release through writing. And yes, time moving through nature, which was so often frowned upon for women. Aargh.
My third grade teacher read to us parts of Jackson’s “Life Among the Savages” which I just loved. I got my parents to buy me the book so I could read the whole thing. (That led 8-year-old me to recognize the parts the teacher had carefully skipped – such as her time in labor in the hospital, but that’s a different story…) Anyway, when I read “The Lottery,” in high school, I was shocked to learn that she had such a dark side. Over the years, I gradually learned of her tough life and her early death. What an amazing woman, what an incredible ability to express both the bleak and the cheerful, funny sides of the world she lived in!
Now I am going to go read the biography.