Tarot cards, &c.
Updates from the Shirley Jackson files, #13
Dear readers,
One night last week I was greeted at the door of my neighborhood bar with the question, “Are you a Leo?” As it happens, I am, and the bar was hosting a “star sign party.” Which meant that it was not only happy hour for me all night long, but a Tarot reader was on hand.
I’ve had my Tarot cards read only once before, at a New Yorker holiday party many years ago. I was in the throes of a personal crisis and was also finishing my first book. A friend in line waved me ahead of him: “You need this more than I do,” he said. The reader didn’t have much to say about my crisis, but she did assure me that I would finish my book on time—a pretty safe thing to say to anyone at a New Yorker party.
I had a feeling this time would be different. I don’t know how to read Tarot myself, but I read a lot about it while working on this biography, since—as you probably know—Shirley Jackson loved the Tarot. She got her first deck of cards when she was 19 and continued to read Tarot for friends and family throughout her life. The author’s note on The Road Through the Wall, her first novel, identified her as “perhaps the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch, specializing in small-scale black magic and fortune-telling with a tarot deck.” Her novel Hangsaman includes a lot of Tarot imagery, and in one scene the main character, Natalie, and her "friend" Tony play with Tarot cards, “old and large and lovely and richly gilt and red," as soft as parchment:
Tony and Natalie believed that they were the only two people in the world who now loved Tarot cards, and used them—so reminiscent of antique, undreamed games—for games of their own, invented card games, and walking games, and a kind of affectionate fortune-telling which was always faithful to the meanings of the cards as recorded in the Tarot book, but which somehow always came out as meaning that Tony and Natalie were the finest and luckiest persons imaginable.
I interviewed one person who had a reading done by Jackson, and I even got to see her personal set of cards. She preferred, strikingly, the Tarot of Marseilles, an older system with origins in Italy (despite its name), rather than the more standard Rider-Waite deck.
A few of Jackson's Tarot cards.
But did Jackson believe in the power of Tarot as a fortune-telling device? I doubt it. My sense is that she regarded the cards as a beautiful, mysterious path to constructing a narrative—a way to tell a story about someone’s life.
When my turn with the reader came, it seemed only appropriate to ask a Jackson-related question. I told her that I was reaching the end of a big project in which I had invested a lot of time and energy, and I wanted to know how I could ensure its success. And she shuffled her deck—the Wild Unknown Tarot.
Here’s what came up:
Do any Tarot-knowledgeable readers want to take a stab at unspooling the story in my cards? They included, among others, Eight of Pentacles, Two of Cups, Daughter of Pentacles, Daughter of Cups, and the Wheel of Fortune.
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As promised, here are answers to a couple of questions readers have asked.
Q. Are Shirley Jackson's houses in North Bennington accessible to the public?
A. Alas, no. There are two “Shirley Jackson houses,” at 12 Prospect Street (her home from 1945 to 1949, and where she wrote "The Lottery") and 66 Main St. (where she lived from 1952 until her death in 1965). Both are privately owned. At one point I wrote letters to the owners asking if I could have a look inside. Neither responded, and in the end I was glad. I tried to reconstruct the houses in my imagination based on Jackson’s descriptions and her children's memories. Seeing more modern versions might have confused me.
Q. Is there anything you found truly surprising that you can share pre-publication?
A. There were so many surprising things. The greatest and happiest surprise was discovering that for much of 1960 Jackson carried on an intense correspondence with a Baltimore housewife named Jeanne Beatty, who kicked off their exchange by writing her a fan note. (In case you missed it, the story of how I found their letters is here.) The period when Jackson wrote these letters happens also to have been the months during which she struggled to complete a first draft of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The letters touch on many aspects of both women's personal lives—their husbands, children, ambitions—and also describe that book's difficult gestation, about which very little had previously been known.
Speaking of which, the long-rumored film of Castle is now in production. Alexandra Daddario is playing Constance, Taissa Farmiga will be Merricat, and Sebastian Stan (who does have a bit of a smarmy look) is Cousin Charles. The director is Stacie Passon, of Transparent. “Perhaps she has an eye for the offbeat which might just pull off the adaptation,” The Guardian concludes. Let's hope.
All best,
Ruth
p.s. If you are interested in Tarot, definitely check out Jessa Crispin’s newsletter, which contains her uniquely thoughtful and candid insights on Tarot and life. It’s one of my favorites.
"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