Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin Page B

girls. She is keenly aware of fine distinctions of social status: the “senior queens in high school,” the girls “with their obvious right clothes,” the girls in the “best cliques”—the same types who had rejected Shirley at Brighton. Then there were the outsiders: “the ascetic amateur writers with their poems safely locked away upstairs . . . the girls who would fail all their courses and go home ingloriously (saying goodbye bravely, but crying) . . . the girls whose hearts would break and the girls whose spirits would break.” Jackson, of course, was the amateur writer with a desk full of hidden poems—she would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to write, to the astonishment of a friend sleeping over. She enjoyed parties and going out, but resented that the only girls who seemed drawn to her were the Doris and Ginny types, plain and dull—not a reflection of the way she wanted to see herself. The only person who initially befriends Natalie, a dumpy girl named Rosalind, eventually rejects her, telling her that the other girls call her “spooky” and “crazy” because she spends all her time in her room. Natalie’s recourse is to create an imaginary friend, a girl she calls Tony, whoinitially seems to be the companion she longed for but who leads her nearly to her psychic breaking point.

    Shirley Jackson with Jeanne Marie Bedel, c. 1935.
    Jackson was far luckier: she found a real friend, and an exceptional one. Jeanne Marie Bedel, whom Shirley nicknamed Jeanou, was an exchange student from Paris who also lived in Stephen Foster Hall. (It was customary in the 1930s for Rochester to host two exchange students each year, one from Germany and one from France.) Vivacious but not conventionally beautiful, several years older than Shirleyand possessing a continental savoir faire, she was incalculably more sophisticated, a lover of art and literature who was the single greatest influence on Shirley to date: only Stanley Hyman would eventually have a bigger emotional and intellectual impact on her. “A true Parisian,” Shirley called her. And, as the only French student on campus, Jeanou was even more of an outsider than Shirley was herself. In a picture of them taken that year, Jeanou stands a few inches shorter than Shirley, with short, tousled dark hair and deep-set eyes. (Shirley would later describe her, not especially kindly, as “a bad caricature of Beethoven.”) Wearing a dark, belted coat, Shirley tilts her head back, laughing freely; her hand rests on Jeanou’s shoulder. It is the happiest of all her youthful photographs, in which she normally looks guarded, even suspicious—often, of course, because she was posing before Geraldine’s vigilant eye.
    “Slightly mad, we were,” Jackson wrote in a poem in which she called the pair of them “Gay Jeanou and Crazy Lee.” With Jeanou at her side, Jackson, who was now signing her name “Shirlee,” spent her freshman year exploring all that sleepy Rochester had to offer: films (“I adore gangsters,” she wrote after seeing an Edward G. Robinson movie), concerts, meals in “funny little cafeteria[s].” The French bohemian and the California transplant were inseparable: they even wrote together in Jackson’s diary. They walked around for hours, bonding over their mutual dislike of the city, which in comparison with Paris must have seemed unbearably stodgy—not to mention frigid. (Rochester winters were so cold that the River Campus featured a system of tunnels connecting many of the buildings, so that students did not have to go outside in the punishing weather.) Eating lunch one day, “in one hour we counted one hundred people passing and found seven interesting faces,” Jackson recorded. They planned someday to spend a few weeks holed up in a hotel writing a book mocking the city, as “revenge.” At a Russian restaurant they frequented, Jackson developed a crush on a “charming” pianist named Kostia, who left her with an