happy.”
Another of Jackson’s imaginary figures was Harlequin, the commedia dell’arte acrobat who became a familiar figure once again in the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to Picasso’s paintings. Also known as the Italian comedy, the commedia dell’arte was a lifelong interest of Jackson’s: an ornamental mask belonging to an actor who had played Pantaloon later hung in her living room in North Bennington. In the classical format, actors playing the stock characters of Harlequin, Pantaloon, Scaramouche, and others improvised variations on stock story lines, usually romantic in nature. George Sand described the commedia dell’arte as “a study of the grotesque and facetious . . . but also a portrayal of real characters traced from remote antiquity down to the present day, in an uninterrupted tradition of fantastic humor which is in essence quite serious and, one might almost say, even sad, like every satire which lays bare the spiritual poverty of mankind.” This assessment applies equally to much of Jackson’s fiction, which often juxtaposes supernatural or uncanny elements with realistic, even banal characters.
Traditionally dressed in a jacket of multicolored patches, adouble-pointed hat, and a black mask, Harlequin—as Pierre Louis DuChartre describes him in The Italian Comedy , a classic treatise on the subject—is the most versatile and enigmatic of the comedy players: at once a graceful and beguiling dancer, a buffoon so absentminded that he searches everywhere for the same donkey on which he is sitting, a poet both “of acrobatics and unseemly noises.” In other words, he is as unlike a shy, awkward, serious sixteen-year-old as a character could possibly be. In one famous episode, Harlequin, disguised as a doctor, advises a patient with a toothache to combine garlic and vinegar with a pinch of pepper and rub the whole concoction between his buttocks, telling him it will make him forget all about his tooth pain. Another story has Harlequin fall in love with a beautiful girl named Columbine who is guarded by her ferociously protective father. The old man is no obstacle for Harlequin, who concocts ever more elaborate ruses to trick him into handing her over.
Alienated, socially isolated, far from the sunlight of the California she missed, Jackson found in Harlequin an embodiment of lightness, charm, sprezzatura —qualities she valued and hoped to cultivate, but which came to her with difficulty. Sometimes she worried that to disguise her true emotions constituted “posturing”—for her, a cardinal sin. “I can’t understand this desire—this requirement—to hide true things, and display to the world a suave, untroubled visage,” she wrote in February 1934. “If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead—this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions.” Harlequin represented also the happy possibility of a life beyond her restricted world—and of a male figure who might someday come and sweep her away. When Harlequin “came” to her, as Jackson liked to put it, her confusion faded into the background and left her with the sense of peace she sought. “Knowing myself to desire so much and yet so vaguely, I catch webs of events in both hands, and pull them to me,” she wrote in June, just before her graduation. “Three days more—and I step out of high school. I am going on. Towards what I want, andneed, and dream of. Harlequin.” A few weeks later her confusion had returned. “Life is such a casual thing at best, and such a messy thing at worst, that it’s a wonder more people don’t quit it than do. I’m tired and tired and tired, and if ever Harlequin was to come when I needed him—no, I don’t want him to come yet. I’ll always be