Sweet Land of Lottery, Of Thee We Sing

I am particularly fascinated by the revulsion with which many readers of the New Yorker greeted Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery when it appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue.

“One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers,” Jackson wrote later. “I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.

“It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the 300-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me.”

The readers seemed unpleasantly surprised, as if Jackson’s fantasy tale were some big, hard stone thrown by one of the residents of Jackson’s pious and traditional American town.

People who choose to wear blinders often get blind-sided, I suppose.

It can smart, even today, when you suddenly realize that behind the ringing Madison Avenue slogan of “Liberty And Justice For All” lies the ritualized shooting of unarmed black men by America’s anointed agents.

Rereading the story last May, I realized how aptly it anticipated Donald Trump’s America  — happy small-town families selecting innocent people to torture to death in a ritual that serves their self-satisfied, never-to-be-questioned tribal traditions and vanities. Then, no doubt, they do a little shopping and argue about dinner.

“‘The Lottery’ takes the classic theme of man’s inhumanity to man and gives it an additional twist: the randomness inherent in brutality,” wrote New Yorker writer Ruth Franklin in a 2013 retrospective. “It anticipates the way we would come to understand the 20th century’s unique lessons about the capacity of ordinary citizens to do evil — from the Nazi camp bureaucracy, to the Communist societies that depended on the betrayal of neighbor by neighbor and the experiments by the psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo demonstrating how little is required to induce strangers to turn against each other.

“In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they did not realize exactly what they were looking at.”

And although she died in 1965, I don’t think 21^st century America would surprise Jackson much.  She described the tone of the first letters she received as “…a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.” 

The Good News Is, You've Won the Lottery...

Illustration by Anita Stevens Rundles

Americans all seem to want to win the lottery, even though the idea is a ludicrous waste of time and a distraction from anything that might improve their actual lives. What they don’t realize is that they’re already living inside a “lottery” — Shirley Jackson’s.

At Joseph Bryan Judd’s book store yesterday, I bought a book of Jackson’s stories, including The Lottery, because I realized that it’s Trump’s America summed up — happy small-town families selecting innocent people to torture to death in a ritual that satisfies their smug tribal traditions and vanities. Then they go shopping.

The now-classic tale inspired surprisingly violent denunciations from New Yorker readers when it was published in 1948.

“It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open,” Jackson said. “Of the 300-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only 13 that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me: ‘Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker,’ she wrote sternly; ‘It does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don't you write something to cheer people up?”

Those stones struck too close to home, didn’t they?

Please Don't Eat the Angst

By Dan Hagen

Reread the domestic humor of writers like Shirley Jackson, Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck a half-century later, and you may detect a familiar undertone — the chatter of forced cheer mixed with a hum of quiet, if not desperation, at least constraint.

These were writers of considerable talent, a fact that gave them an outlet of expression largely denied to their audience — women raising large postwar baby boomer families who probably dreamed of other careers growing up, but found themselves bound to the lonely routine of housework. They felt unappreciated. People may pay lip service to drudgery, but nobody respects it much.

So, in magazines like “Woman’s Day” and “Good Housekeeping,” you could find short purported memoirs describing the life of a housewife as a lark of minor absurdities surrounded by reassuring routine. The happy home life was the hot fudge sundae, and those weird kids and that oblivious Mr. Magoo of a husband were the tasty sprinkling of nuts.

Those pieces from the late 1940s into the 1950s became a kind of cottage industry for freelance writers, and were reprinted in hardcover with titles like “Life Among the Savages” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.” Movies were made. The pickings were choice enough that even some male writers started to poach in the field with books like “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.”

And yet, with the women writers, there’s something unsettled there beneath the smiles. This was the freelance market of their discontent. Amplifying domestic trivia into Thurber-level wit was no easy feat to begin with, and it had to be done under editorial restraints as stringent as those for sonnet writing. No martini-fueled drunken rows. No despair. No rage. No childhood polio or kleptomania or sexual acting-out. No genuinely hostile in-laws. Certainly no infidelities, either imagined in vivid detail as you waited alone in the silent house for his return or performed yourself, in frustration, in resentment, in a search for a thrill that might make one of those days vary from the sameness of all the rest.

Sometimes you can see the outlines of those darker absurdities that the women might have wanted to include. Shirley Jackson, for example, talks about the period when her son kept attributing his own misdeeds to another boy at school who didn’t exist. She plays the experience for laughs, but it’s the sort of thing that must have caused parents some anxious nights, some whispered conversations.

Restraints can channel artistic composition, but they can also inhibit it, particularly overtly commercial restraints. What editors demanded be censored in these stories may sometimes have been the most powerful undercurrent in the housewives’ lives.

Transient entertainments might have been elevated to something more enduring in these compositions, had editors not silenced the cellos and the oboes and demanded to hear only the flutes, always just the flutes.