The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  if that doesn’t finish mother with the reading club i have lived in vain.

  my father has taken to reading aloud to me from the nation’s business and also donates small booklets which i am to read to rid my mind of the foul decay of communism. he has become convinced that i am a confirmed communist and despairs of my soul. here is one paragraph that you might like. from youthinbusiness, a speech by a man whom the big shot says is really quite intelligent: “The system under which we live is not perfect. of course not. no system yet devised by man is. but it has grown better and better over a long period of time, it is the only one that has done this in so consistent and enduring a fashion…the fact that we have come as far as we have doesn’t mean, though, that america has now reached a standstill. i said before that the system was far from perfect, but it is constantly getting better as we learn more about its operations. if you retain this system you will find, as you grow older, a constantly expanding opportunity, an enlarging horizon, better times than we have today…”

  am i the only one then who longs to perpetuate the status quo

  by the way, y is a socialist and not a communist, but i suppose it’s all the same. all radical. all vegetarians.

  dearest. i love you, i love you, and i need you so much. you’ve got walter and dartmouth to console you but all i have is y, who takes a malicious delight in explaining to people thus: “Well, he’s sorta dumb, but he’s got a lot of money. they’ve been secretly married for over a month now. lee*9 isn’t telling people because…well, it’s a secret. i think he’s wonderful. he’s taken over the rochester yacht club and is going to try to run it at a profit…” you should see janice who by the way is not speaking to me anymore. y says that she took great pains to get a copy of the threshold*10 to janice. y also says that she’s very fond of you and she thinks you’re giving me the needles. y’s cute.

  s.edgar. i am afraid that you will have forgotten very soon. please, if you do, don’t go on writing and trying to make me think that you haven’t. but, then, too, please don’t forget or stop loving me, or learn to love someone else more. because i love you so much. If I once start telling you what I really feel you’ll see how scared I am, and how much more I need you than you’ll ever need me.

  O.K. i’m sorry. i’ll shut up, and be a good girl and go pour tea. i love you. for gods sake write me and convince me you’re not lying to me when you say it’s all right. i think i’ll tear this damned document up. it’s not very clever is it. not up to the usual jackson standard. blame it on my misery. or on the reading club.

  lee

  p.s. i gather that you have managed to find a minute to whisper in walter’s*11 pearly ear that you love me.

  later…blessed be the name of my dog. mother took hours to persuade me into a pink dress with dots all over and even got my hair up, dragged me down to listen to mrs. johnston tell about her trip to europe…so wonderful, all those places, we really enjoyed it sooooo much, and the boat, so big, and england, so dirty, but charming, and i picked up the cutest bag in belgium, just like the ones in new york, only so much cheaper…only mother made the mistake of shutting the dog in my room, and so it became necessary for me to go upstairs and speak to him about his howling, and once upstairs, she can’t leave to come up and get me, so i grabbed the typewriter quick. debutante, indeed.

  have gone back to reading p.g. wodehouse. quiet the nerves. please dear write me soon, i’m afraid that whether i have anything to say about it or not y is going to write you. she says she has a few little things she’d like to tell you. god help you. she had a few little things she wanted to tell me and i’m still raw.

  for god’s sake can you think of any telepathic way by which i can get myself into your arms and stay there?

  • • •

  “Me.”

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  [June 13, 1938]

  sugar,

  i forget why i didn’t write yesterday; i think i was washing my hair. you ought to have received at least one of my letters by now. i mailed one tuesday night; at least i gave it to a funny little man in a mailtruck who said he was the postman; y was with me and will witness the same. maybe i forgot to stamp them or something equally stacian.*12 i had a letter from shiah*13 this morning. shiah wants y and me to wander syracuse-wards this summer for a call. mother properly outraged: whatvisitaman! perhaps that’s because shiah promised beer in his letter.

  also: mother, weakening visibly, asks me to correct an erroneous impression: she likes you, thinks you a dear boy, and, after hearing how you made me eat three hot fudge sundaes, positively dotes on you. she heard properly censored versions of your literary criticisms and thinks you an intelligent young man, but i told her you copied them out of a book.

  y has also asked me very nicely to ask you very nicely to ask walter very nicely if he would mind living in sin with her in new york. she has also taken a fancy to walter who is the only person she has ever heard of who lives in new york where she wants to study the ballet. she is afraid that walter will not look with favor upon her gifts, but says she will always hope and remember him fondly. (i am, s. edgar, worried about her. since her breakdown she has not opened a book and swears she will not read for the next two years, or, if she is not better, never study again. she rejoices at not having her degree, because she hates the university, and hates everyone there. she is beginning to hate stepan. she looks like hell, and all her previous knowledge is becoming confused, so that she contradicts herself and forgets what she is talking about. she has this constant deep fear of insanity. i have never known her to be less at ease. she just can’t think…she wants me to help her, and by helping her she means be with her all the time, and keep her from thinking. i’m scared…what can I do with her?)

  dear, i can’t write letters. the old art has deserted me. you take consolation in reading; i sit for hours at the typewriter and only succeed in composing strange sonnets. think i’ll send you a couple. they may not sound eclectic to you, but bear in mind the fact that i have been rereading finnegan. and anyone asking what they mean will be forthwith consigned to dante’s lowest level. (of hell, not writing) i personally think they are fascinatingly obscure, and maybe revolutionary. no, certainly revolutionary; maybe leftist. i can’t read you know. no concentration. i even abandoned mr. wodehouse. in rochester they don’t have mr hemingway in the libraries because they don’t think he is fit reading. is that chauvinistic, when they have thomas thackeryswinburne, richester’s [sic] own.

  y, after hearing your comments on spender and eliot, is seriously considering a long long letter to you. she wants to know how you work in the goldenbough.

  darling i haven’t remembered for two letters to tell you about this deep passion that i have been cherishing toward you. i tried to tell y and she wouldn’t listen. i miss your funny hair. and your dimples. i believe i even miss you a little. dionysius. maudlin hell. i’m in love with the guy. i love you…being without you, even for this past week, has been purest hell, and there haven’t been many moments when i wasn’t thinking about you. i wait for your letters every morning, and when i try to write to you i’m almost afraid to start because there are so many things i want to tell you and i’m scared i’ll say them. if only i could see you for even a little while! i could say them then. i’m not used to this business, s. edgar. i don’t know how to tell you these things. enough. me, i’ll go mad.

  darling, this is just what i wanted to tell you over the phone last night and didn’t have time to say. i’m not afraid any more, and not worried, and not going to marry any goddamned fool of a michael and i’m only going to love you for ever and ever amen. and don’t ever, ever believe anything different. all this nonsense about how i should be gaily having myself a time is to stop at once, because like the silly idiot i am, i am happier sitting around thinking about you all day. i want you more than anything in the world and you
needn’t imagine that anything you can say or do is going to stop me from getting what i want, and you can’t even stop me from wanting it, so stop arguing.

  this is the first real love letter i ever tried to write and it’s not very good, i need more practice. see that you give me some. practically the only thing i know is that i love you and love you and love you.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  tues. [June 14, 1938]

  hero of m’life,

  afternoon of a debutante…life is assuming alarming aspects. mad, mad gaiety. things like: fri. nite, bridge, sat. aft. ride to yacht club…not with michael…to see races, sun. country club, dinner (only i didn’t go because i was half-expecting a vereee important phone call), mon. nite, y, tues. ride horseback, wed. calling with mama, thurs. tea, fri. dash off a novel, sat., luncheon, sat. nite, country club dance…with michael, sun. baseball game…etc. i never plan more than a week in advance. notice, too, that every day leaves at least three hours off to write seh. and another hour each morning to decipher seh’s typing.

  had no letter from you yesterday, and came down to breakfast and a frown which my small brother aggravated until he was told to gotohellyougoddamlittlebastard, much to mother’s unmitigated horror. upon which she came soothingly into the sunroom where i was miserably feeding the dog toast and said poor little girl did she feel terrible because she didn’t get a letter? upon which i told her the same thing i had told my brother, with changes made necessary by the dog’s presence, and she said that’s all right, just be calm, maybe the letter will come this afternoon. so she took me shopping and bought me two new fuzzy sweaters, giggling the while because there was no seh for them to get fuzz all over. this morning mother, with a gleam in her eye that i suspect indicated gratitude to you, threw two letters in my face and said itoldyouso. next time, chum, if you want to keep peace in the jacksonhousehold, you write on monday.

  about that telephone call, now. hearing you be speechless for the first time in nineteen years did my heart good. i had been waiting all day for you to call…remember i didn’t know whether you would or not, and knowing your financial status, suspected not. but mother had me locked in the bedroom with the upstairs phone, so that if you did call…(don’t blame her. she tells her friends: “I just don’t know what to do with the child! seems she’s in love!”) by the time i got through waiting twenty minutes for you to find the phone after the operator got hold of me i was a nervous wreck, and was dropping ashes from my cigarette all over the phone book. and when i heard your voice…goddam you, don’t ever do that again. sound so suppressed and unhappy, i mean. and sort of incoherent, too. if you do decide to call again on sunday night, call after nine, anyway. my father was quite upset about being made to stay home from the club because i was waiting for a call. darling, it made a nervous wreck out of me, hearing your voice like that. and you did sound like a little boy…

  if you must be literary, tell me what to do with my novel, which is coming along fine, thank you. i have been working on anthony,*14 who has suddenly turned into an emotional weakling, with a very real fear of insecurity. he is afraid of paul and jealous of mary. is that fair. also, from nowhere there has come a wife to anthony, named edith, who just wandered in on page six of anthony and started to talk. i rather like her, though, she’s nice.

  last night y took me calling on a sick friend, a mrs. sherwood, a very charming young woman who had a wrenched back and to whom we took peonies stolen out of my mother’s garden. mrs. s., pleased, entertained us with rum toffee, which i adore. also, she is very interested in astrology, and always tells me how lucky i am to be a sagittarius, and the typical sagg at that. seems all of those people are happy, worthless, and lucky. that’s me. sun is now opposite my sign, which means i should be unhappy, only i ain’t, which mrs. s. lays to the fact that i don’t know anything about astrology.

  my demon returned unexpectedly last night and for two hours mrs. s. and y had to listen to stacia. i have discovered that you can’t be stacia and plan a luncheon. and mother everlastingly disgraced, taking me shopping. we went to buy shoes and the shoe salesman who is an old friend of the family and calls me, familiarly, sister, and calls mother madam, looked upon my darned stockings with distinct disapproval. i said defensively that i had mended them myself and after we had picked the shoeman up and revived him he said all by myself and i said yes and he said well…and turned my foot over and there was no sole to the stocking. mother swooned and bought me three new pair of stockings, and then she took me to buy dresses and it seems that my slip, a subject about which you, as a little gentleman, should know nothing, had been several inches too long and i had employed the old dormitory method of tying a string around the waist and hiking the slip up into a blouse effect so it was short. when mother saw that, and saw the red and black string i had used, she tightened her lips and went and bought me two short slips. and when we met some dar*15 friends of hers and they looked sort of funny at my old coat with the lining hanging in shreds and the belt in two pieces, she made me go and hide behind a rack of dresses until they were gone and then went and bought me a new coat and two new dresses. i dunno…maybe it’s a racket, but it always works.

  write me twice a day. i like the idea. you ought to start getting this week’s crop of letters round about wednesday. i’ll mail all the old ones i have lying around. i love you.

  s. edgar: for your info, there is a young female in rochester and i don’t mean y who thinks about you a lot and wishes she could see you and loves you very much.

  by the way make walter let you steal castaway.*16 dear walter let stanley steal castaway and i will give you all my oz books. that is a promise. shirley h jackson.

  ’tanley, i’m getting awfully fond of you.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  wednesday [June 15, 1938]

  dear,

  monopoly established by mother in the stamp market, raising the price to five cents per, and me in slacks and slippers, so could not get out to buy more. i of course refuse to bow to injustice and so did not mail your letter. i am going on strike or else going to carry the matter to the paternal supreme which will undoubtedly render an oracular decision running roughly: well, if you’ve got to write to a communist, which is all silliness anyway. why on earth are people communists anyway? thus high finance in the jackson household. my brother has paid me the dollar, under stress. very easy system. i talk to one of his fraternity brothers for a while. then: Oh, so you got stinking at the sigma chi dance, huh? out cold, huh? well, how’d you like to have headquarters hear about that?…he gave me the dollar quite easily.

  s. edgar, i am bewildered and unhappy, and i don’t quite understand so many things. you remember my telling you about elizabeth, my college friend who was a philosophy major, phi bete, and then couldn’t get anything but a factory job and subsequently turned radical? she is out of work again, and is deathly afraid that her younger brother will get a job before she does, because then he will have to support the whole family. she was here last night, and i asked her about this whole radical setup. seems she is a socialistunionworker or something like that, which she says is trotskyist. she bent that whole mighty brain of hers and all her personality to trying to convince me that any radical viewpoint, so long as it was cognizant of the necessity for social change, was right, and i, having listened to my father for lo these many long months, cannot be convinced. i respect elizabeth like i respect you, and believe that you are as right as my father, but why should i have to think one way or the other? do i have to shout and wave my arms in favor of the revolution, or else oppress the poor proletariat? must i be one or the other?

  why in hell should i be concerned over humanity, one way or the other? you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i hate this whole h
uman race as a collection of monsters. if so, why should i want to save the bastards? why should i worry if half of them are standing on the necks of the other half? i once made a character, my famous Man Who Went Mad From Eating Carrots, who, besides being a nice comedian, also managed to express much of this hatred of mine. he is a portrait of me, anyway, as usual. here’s my Man. being a sketch of the author at work, he enters reciting over and over again: A B C D…what comes after D? then, after some conversation with lee…who is also me…he says (still being me):

  …i want to reform the things that people hold so dear to their stinking little heads. i want to take something away from all these tiny unimportant creatures that call themselves God’s chosen. i wish i could hurt them terribly, terribly…i hate them—god, how i hate all people! their insignificance—oh, it’s all so funny, deathly funny, because they none of them know. but they’ll know how much i hate them. i’ll show them, when i take away those things they base their lives on! i’m starting with the alphabet, you see. they’ll never know what happened, only that their precious, comfortable alphabet is gone…destroyed. i’ll laugh—can you hear me laughing? and then…their cash-and-carry stores. and street cars. and imitation flowers and genuine soapstone bookends and cheap fancy letter paper and china dogs on ashtrays. i’ll take all these things, and rip them to pieces, and people will go mad, and then—then everyone will be mad, and they’ll know how i hate them!

  …and pictures on sofa pillows…sofa pillows with paintings on them that say: Souvenir of Sioux City…and their cheap novels, and glue, and five-and-ten-cent jewelry and movie stars. god! how i’ll tear their hero-worship to pieces! and their silly clothes, and…but most of all their stupid, stupid smugness! i’ll kill them all—but, you see, i can’t start yet, i can never remember what comes after D. if i could only remember what comes after D, I could…