Dear friends,
Some months ago, a professor at the University of Tokyo asked me to give a keynote lecture about Shirley Jackson at a conference she was planning on the use of houses in Gothic literature. Naturally, I was thrilled to accept, and this week I had the incredible fortune to visit Japan for the first time. In addition to spending two days at the conference, where I encountered a fascinating community of literary scholars from all over Asia, I had two days to explore Tokyo—not nearly enough, but a start. I saw woodblock prints at the Ukiyoe Ota Memorial Museum of Art and visited the Meiji and Senso-ji temples, where I was awestruck by the architecture and the atmosphere. I ate terrible cheap sushi that arrived via conveyor belt and amazing sushi at the old Tsukiji market. I fell in love with the vending machines stocked with iced green tea on just about every block and even got accustomed to the idea that KitKats don’t have to be chocolate.
Prayer tablets hanging under a perfect tree on a rainy morning at the Meiji shrine. Not captured: the clinking sound they make in the wind.
The theme of the conference was “Gothic spaces,” and as I was considering how to frame my thoughts on Jackson’s work, it occurred to me that biography is itself a kind of Gothic space. The biographer in the grip of research is a figure obsessed, not to say possessed. Last month, in the wake of the death of Jim Atlas, who was a friend and guide to me from the start of my work on the Shirley Jackson book, I picked up The Shadow in the Garden, Atlas’s book about his life as a biographer, and was struck by the impassioned language he used to describe first getting to work on his Delmore Schwartz project, leafing through archival boxes "with the nervous fervor of an heir reading a will." Or think of the main character in Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers, who will resort to just about any scheme to get his hands on a never-before-seen stash of letters.
That kind of excitement feels very familiar to me, as longtime readers of this newsletter well know. (Remember the letters in the barn?) If I was a person haunted by Shirley Jackson, the book I wrote is its own form of haunted house. Indeed, every biography is a kind of ghost story, told by a person who strives for communion with an inaccessible other.
I’m chasing a different ghost these days. As some of you know, I’ve signed on with the Yale Jewish Lives series to write a short book about Anne Frank—part biography, part cultural history of the diary and its reception over time, throughout the world. On this trip I learned as much as I could about the Japanese interest in Anne Frank, who is surprisingly big in Japan. In addition to two translations of the diary into Japanese, there’s an anime film and a manga book based on it. In the 1960s, there was even a tampon named after Anne—an homage by the manufacturer, because the diary was the first book published in Japan, as in many other places, to deal frankly with the subject of menstruation. Clearly, many Japanese identify with Anne as an innocent victim of the Holocaust, seeing her as comparable to their own position as victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But is this somewhat reductive comparison a way of obscuring the complications of their role in World War II? It’s a tricky question.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that at long last, I’m restarting this newsletter with a somewhat different focus. It goes without saying that I’ll continue to be your trusted source for all news Shirley Jackson-related. But I’ll also be using this space for meditations on the practice of writing biography more generally—the subject of a course I’m teaching at Columbia in the spring—as well as items of interest that pop up in the course of my research on Anne Frank. If you signed up as a diehard Shirley Jackson fan, I won’t be hurt if you decide not to stick around for this new incarnation. But I hope you will. I don’t know what lies ahead, but I expect it to be an interesting ride.
As always,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House