Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

able to stand it a little longer.”
    Harlequin represented to Jackson an earlier, more innocent version of the “daemon lover” figure who would later appear in the Lottery collection and elsewhere: a character from one of the Child Ballads, also known as James Harris, who seduces a woman only to reveal, when it is too late, that he is the devil in disguise. Like a less sinister daemon lover, Harlequin offers escape from the ordinary world into a colorful realm of pastoral landscapes and freedom. In The Road Through the Wall , the character Marilyn, whom Jackson endows with some of her own traits, imagines that in a past life a commedia dell’arte troupe came to rescue her from her daily life. “There’s a little covered wagon that comes down the road,” Marilyn recounts, as if recalling a dream, “and inside they’re all talking and laughing and singing. . . . Pantaloon, and Rhodomont, and Scaramouche, and Pierrot, and . . . Harlequin. . . . He is waving and calling me, and I run down the hill as fast as anything.”
    A similar figure—a handsome, charming stranger who comes from another world—was the focus of the film that most affected Shirley during the spring of her senior year: Death Takes a Holiday (1934), a strange, Faustian fairy tale directed by Mitchell Leisen and starring Fredric March and Evelyn Venable. One night, Death appears to a duke and his friends while they are driving on a dangerous mountain road. He decides not to claim them immediately, but to spend three days as the duke’s guest in his palatial villa, disguised as a prince, to learn about life among mortals. At first comedy ensues, as all the single ladies present vie for the affections of the mysterious prince, who tries to conceal his befuddlement over mortal customs such as fancy dinners, gambling, and sex. Meanwhile, newspapers report on the miraculous events taking place all over the world while Death is on vacation: a race car driver walks away unharmed from a terrible crash, schoolchildren survive a fire, all passengers are rescued from a sinking ship. Matters grow moreserious when the seducer pledges his love to a beautiful young woman and she resolves to go away with him, even as her mother and the other guests try in horror to restrain her. “Remember that there is only a moment of shadow between your life and mine,” Death tells the guests as he bids them farewell. “And when I call, come bravely through that shadow. You will find me only, your familiar friend.”
    It is easy to see why the film appealed to Jackson. First, of course, the romantic element would have been alluring to any teenager who longed to swoon in the arms of her own ardent lover, even if this brooding man had little in common with the teenage boys who were the usual objects of Shirley’s affections. But more than that, Death longs to be loved by somebody who recognizes him for who—or what—he really is. He does not deceive his betrothed into committing herself to him; rather, she knows who he is and loves him anyway—exactly the fantasy of a teenager tired of “posturings,” who felt that her own mother, constantly trying to mold her in another image, did not appreciate her.
    And the film’s premise—that Death walks among mortals, sitting beside us at the dinner table or encircling us in his arms on the dance floor—must have deeply resonated with a girl whose great theme would one day be the evil present in every human soul, hidden where we least suspect it. “What a monstrous comedy!” Death exclaims of human life. Jackson might well have thought the same.
    THE 1934 UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER admissions application offered a space of several lines in which to answer the question “Why do you want to go to college?” Jackson wrote succinctly, “To prepare myself for a career.” At a time when many women attended college simply to meet a husband, she was already certain that she would support herself after graduation. Her preferences were