©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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It's a fair bet that James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" are two of the most popular American short stories of this century, by which I mean that even people who don't know or care much about literature probably have heard of, if not read, them. And it's probably a not much riskier bet to say that, of the two, Jackson's is the more well known. It's almost impossible to graduate from an American high school without having been assigned "The Lottery" to read.
Unfortunately for Jackson, who died in her 40s in 1965, her literary reputation pretty much rests on "The Lottery." None of her other stories approaches its fame, and her novels (The Haunting of Hill House) and humorous volumes of autobiography (Life Among the Savages) have been consigned to the critically disdained heap of popular literature, despite the efforts of feminist critics to awaken the literary world to her worth.
I'm with the feminists on this one, especially after having read a new collection of stories, Just An Ordinary Day. Perhaps I more properly should have said, "a collection of new stories," because of the 54 pieces here, 31 have never been published before at all; the other 23 were published in popular magazines of the day, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Charm. They were pulled together from various sources by Jackson's children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart, who provide an introduction. In vintage they range from stories written while she was in college to those published in the 1960s, and in quality from the competent to the exceptional.
All that having been said, what, you ask, are the stories like? Well, they're not all examples of the sort of thing, like "The Lottery," for which Jackson is best known -- fantastic or supernatural or horrifying tales that explore the dark side of the human psyche. As her children say in the introduction, the book includes "a full range of Jackson's many types of short fiction, from lighthearted romantic pieces to the macabre to the truly frightening."
Despite the stories' diversity, common elements lie behind them. Nearly all of them, for example, revolve around women, or women and children, for whom the world can be a cold, fearful, even alien place (e.g., "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith"). Most of them give off a sense of the isolation and loneliness of the individual. Quite a few are set in small towns, which most often are closed, exclusive, unwelcoming places, as in "The Possibility of Evil" or, better yet, in "Home," a superbly crafted ghost story that mocks its simple title.
There are also recurring themes. The devil appears several times, never, to my mind, to particularly great effect, except possibly in "My Uncle in the Garden." The author also is fond of (white) magic, especially as practiced by a sort of fairy-godmother type of woman (always named Mallie) who helps out people in three of the stories, which sometimes they appreciate and sometimes they don't ("A Very Strange House Next Door").
Some, however, fit none of these slots. Some are simply humorous, such as "Indians Live in Tents" and "Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase," a wickedly funny story about a woman who likes to tyrannize shopgirls being made the object of quiet ridicule. Others are satiric -- "A Great Voice Stilled." And others (the weakest, I would say) are domestic comedies ("About Two Nice People").
Admittedly, though, the ones that will stick in your mind are the chillers -- "Jack the Ripper," "Nightmare," and "Lover's Meeting" are among the best. The very best are "The Missing Girl," an impassive commentary on our indifference to the fates of others, and "All She Said Was Yes," in which a teenage girl reacts dully to her parents' deaths. Again, the problem here for Jackson's reputation is that, though the public may appreciate them, stories of horror and the supernatural, like comedy, generally are not accorded the respect that "serious" literature is given.
In all, the stories call back a world lost to us now -- a world of Saturday afternoon movies with serials, of traveling by passenger train, of women whose primary work was in the home and of men who came home from work to read the newspaper -- and of casually heavy drinking and smoking by both. A world of ordinary people living through ordinary days, but which, through Shirley Jackson's startling imagination, was turned into something quite extraordinary indeed.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.