becomes hysterical a few hours later when a sailor sits down in the empty seat next to her at the movies. But the joke is on the mother and grandmother: the sailors, who clearly intend no harm to the girls, are innocent victims of the older women’s paranoia.
One of Shirley and Dorothy’s favorite activities was making clothespin dolls, which Jackson later described in a magazine article that was incorporated into Raising Demons (1957). Again, the depiction of Geraldine is revealing. In an early draft of the piece, Jackson mentions her mother’s temper twice in a single sentence: “My mother used to be angry at us for doing nothing . . . [one day] she came angrily to where we were sitting on the railing of the back porch.” Geraldine “must have been reading a magazine or something, because she had a bright and progressive idea, and she proposed it in precisely the voice which end-of-their-tether parents use to propose an idea which they have read in a magazine somewhere.” In the published version, Geraldine’s anger has faded from the picture, as has Jackson’s irony, replaced by the breezytone she customarily used for her women’s magazine pieces. “I do believe that it was probably my mother’s suggestion, because she was always asking us if we couldn’t find something to do , girls, and because I can remember the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which she approached us frequently, suggesting one or another occupation for growing girls, which she had read in a magazine somewhere—that we should plan a bazaar to sell homemade cookies, for instance, or take long walks to gather sweet grass, or fern, or look for wild strawberries, or that we should learn shorthand.” With her typical penchant for exaggeration, in her article Jackson claimed that the girls were so enthusiastic about the pursuit that they made more than four hundred dolls before Dorothy laid down her scissors on the dining room table and refused to continue. Shirley’s childhood diary, however, records a more realistic number: thirty-nine.
AS A SICKLY , isolated child growing up in a strict New England family, Hawthorne is said to have developed an unusual quirk: he composed an inner dialogue, divided into two personalities, that substituted for conversation and companionship. One side served as storyteller, the other as audience, offering questions or criticisms. As a teenager, Jackson did something similar, but on the page. She kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose.
The earliest surviving diary begins in January 1932, shortly after Jackson’s fifteenth birthday. It is a small datebook with a black fake-leather cover stamped with the words “Year Book,” the kind that businesses often distributed for free. In these pages, she did her best to cultivate the aw-shucks tone of an all-American girl: “O Boy!” is a frequent exclamation. And the snapshot the diary gives of her life makes her look in every way like a typical suburban teenager who spends her days making fudge, playing hockey and tennis, riding bikes, gossiping with her friends, doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing card games (she favored a complicated version of double solitaire popular at the time called Russian Bank). She attended Girl Scout camp for a few weeks in the summer and regularly went to vaudeville shows and movies: thePolish-born singer and actor Jan Kiepura was a favorite. She worried about her spending habits, her grades, and her weight: she had trouble resisting a box of chocolates. She quarreled, unsurprisingly, with her mother. There is nothing about events in the outside world: like many teenagers, she took no interest in politics or global affairs. In a year when the biggest hit song was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” she preferred syrupy romantic melodies such as Fauré’s “Berceuse.” But she must have been watching her neighbors carefully, gathering the details of social mores that would find their way into The Road Through
One of Shirley and Dorothy’s favorite activities was making clothespin dolls, which Jackson later described in a magazine article that was incorporated into Raising Demons (1957). Again, the depiction of Geraldine is revealing. In an early draft of the piece, Jackson mentions her mother’s temper twice in a single sentence: “My mother used to be angry at us for doing nothing . . . [one day] she came angrily to where we were sitting on the railing of the back porch.” Geraldine “must have been reading a magazine or something, because she had a bright and progressive idea, and she proposed it in precisely the voice which end-of-their-tether parents use to propose an idea which they have read in a magazine somewhere.” In the published version, Geraldine’s anger has faded from the picture, as has Jackson’s irony, replaced by the breezytone she customarily used for her women’s magazine pieces. “I do believe that it was probably my mother’s suggestion, because she was always asking us if we couldn’t find something to do , girls, and because I can remember the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which she approached us frequently, suggesting one or another occupation for growing girls, which she had read in a magazine somewhere—that we should plan a bazaar to sell homemade cookies, for instance, or take long walks to gather sweet grass, or fern, or look for wild strawberries, or that we should learn shorthand.” With her typical penchant for exaggeration, in her article Jackson claimed that the girls were so enthusiastic about the pursuit that they made more than four hundred dolls before Dorothy laid down her scissors on the dining room table and refused to continue. Shirley’s childhood diary, however, records a more realistic number: thirty-nine.
AS A SICKLY , isolated child growing up in a strict New England family, Hawthorne is said to have developed an unusual quirk: he composed an inner dialogue, divided into two personalities, that substituted for conversation and companionship. One side served as storyteller, the other as audience, offering questions or criticisms. As a teenager, Jackson did something similar, but on the page. She kept multiple diaries simultaneously, each with a different purpose.
The earliest surviving diary begins in January 1932, shortly after Jackson’s fifteenth birthday. It is a small datebook with a black fake-leather cover stamped with the words “Year Book,” the kind that businesses often distributed for free. In these pages, she did her best to cultivate the aw-shucks tone of an all-American girl: “O Boy!” is a frequent exclamation. And the snapshot the diary gives of her life makes her look in every way like a typical suburban teenager who spends her days making fudge, playing hockey and tennis, riding bikes, gossiping with her friends, doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing card games (she favored a complicated version of double solitaire popular at the time called Russian Bank). She attended Girl Scout camp for a few weeks in the summer and regularly went to vaudeville shows and movies: thePolish-born singer and actor Jan Kiepura was a favorite. She worried about her spending habits, her grades, and her weight: she had trouble resisting a box of chocolates. She quarreled, unsurprisingly, with her mother. There is nothing about events in the outside world: like many teenagers, she took no interest in politics or global affairs. In a year when the biggest hit song was “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” she preferred syrupy romantic melodies such as Fauré’s “Berceuse.” But she must have been watching her neighbors carefully, gathering the details of social mores that would find their way into The Road Through
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