The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  so, after two hours sleep, we arose to take me to the dentist again. and i went to sleep while he was drilling, an experience certainly unique for me. and friday night we slept quickly and long, me with only a recollection of the little fugue in my head.

  saturday the frustration girls were themselves again. seems michael and bill were racing the boat that afternoon, and, since it was a golden day with a long wind, we took the car and went to the lake. each with a notebook and a pencil we sat on the end of a long pier, trying to discourage the attentions of a young man who liked my hair and kay’s voice. when a gorgeous smooth cruiser went by we stood up and waved, calling to be taken for a ride. much to our astonishment, the cruiser turned and came up to the pier, and the two gentlemen in possession said they would be delighted. kay looked at me and i looked at kay, and into the cruiser we went. our first intimation that the two gentlemen were not boyscouts came when they put us up in front and then headed into the waves, improving upon this opportunity to say that we certainly had gotten wet, hadn’t we, and hadn’t we better change our clothes. upon which they offered two sets of old pajamas and turned their backs. kay and i stayed wet, thanks. they said ok then we’d better have a drink. it was rum. we drank it. when they offered us scotch as a chaser and beer as a chaser for scotch, jackson and turk knew that they were in for another of their startling adventures. my whisky and beer went overboard and so, as i subsequently learned, did kay’s. then, seeing the boats line up for the start of the race, we indicated politely that we’d like to go home now, thanks, but our offer was declined, since we were headed up the river. by the time we got a good distance up the river kay and i had consumed a good quart of rum between us. kay just had time to mutter aside to me: “keep your legs crossed old thing; we’re off again!” when they anchored the boat and produced another drink. from that time on every drink they handed me went overboard. somehow, they got us down into the cabin. i expect we were lured. anyway, i didn’t have the slightest trouble. i simply said no and doubled up my fist. the guy i had was the captain and owner of the boat, and you never saw a captain melt so fast on his own boat. you taught me well, seh. inside of five minutes i had the guy beating his head against the wall and crying. kay and hers wandered out into the woods somewhere, and from the look in kay’s eyes when they returned i judged that hers had certainly never been a boyscout. by that time i was beginning to feel a little sorry for the captain, who was on his knees trying to appeal to my better nature…the dirty bastard, he ruined my dress…so i told him no, but i’d be on the end of the pier the next saturday if he was still interested. he was interested; he said he would wait on the pier for the rest of his life if he thought there was a chance of my coming. it was a smooth line, and the only trouble with it, i discovered later, was that he had meant it, and i had him. they didn’t know our names, or anything about us, so i fed the captain an erroneous phone number, and had another drink on the house. when the captain came up into the light he had circles under his eyes and his face was all tear-stained, and he was dead white. his friend didn’t quite look quite so bad, but he looked much more furious. kay beamed at me and i beamed at kay, and we said we’d like to go home now please. they took us back to our pier, and, silently we faded off into the night, leaving behind us the wrong phone number and a promise to be on the pier the next week. we got back home to discover that we had missed one of the best races of the year, and that michael and bill had come in second. this coming saturday is the day i promised i’d be on the pier. kay informed me afterward that she had learned the captain’s identity; he is the dissolute, unmarried young scion of one of the richest families in town; his bank account runs, quite easily, into the millions. i was disgusted. somehow i always manage to miss my opportunities. wonder what would happen if i went back to that pier…

  kay and i went back to the club on sunday, only to see our cruisers face to face. fortunately they didn’t see us, and we ducked. that day we weren’t interested, thanks. so we begged a drink off a triumphant michael and bill, and wandered around saying oh looka the pretty boats. and met the cruiser again, the captain was aboard, and saw me quite clearly. he also saw bill, who is big, and michael, who is powerful. so the captain looked the other way. monday kay went home and i settled down, only to have seh start calling me. (incidentally, when you called sunday night, kay and i were drinking beer with bill and michael, all of us so tired we couldn’t stand.) tuesday and wednesday i slept and went to the dentist, and today, just as i begin to feel sane again, innes is arriving. o god.

  i discovered a book in my bookcase called fugue*29 which i am re-reading. it’s a hideous barnes-sort of thing, and i derive much delight from writing nasty little notes in the margins. i shall give it to you so you can add some more nasty little notes. (or shall i give it to you? shall i have the chance? whether we are to see one another in syracuse this year is, you know, completely up to you.)

  this week has taught me that michael is not for such as i, and he knows it. therefore what was previously a tense, strained, vaguely-misinterpreted emotion has now become an easy friendship, based on mutual devotion to boats and brahms. his mother, trying her damndest to make a match of it, and my mother, trying her damndest to make me happy, have given up so you had nothing to fear from michael, and, had i only thought to figure it out before, i imagine i might have spared you some bleakness. now, at last, i have returned to my former happy state of an emotion-less contentment.

  please say that you will forget that i have been in love with you and be my friend next year in syracuse. i would be terribly lonely without you and, having loved you so much, i couldn’t very well love anyone else until some far-off amnesia makes me forget you.

  well?

  s

  * * *

  • • •

  Shirley has just turned twenty-two. She is at home in Rochester on winter break from Syracuse.

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  Dec. 22, 1938

  stanley,

  you didn’t write to me, did you? i decided i wanted to write to you anyway. it’s christmas and there is an extraordinary combination of joy and madness in our house, as there always is around now. especially since my brother and i are both home, and my grandmother carries confusion with her like thurber’s gardener had a thunderstorm. my mama clings to the hidden-package theory, having mysterious bundles round and about. i keep tripping over them.

  i have been shopping, too, all alone, since y is working every day and every evening this week. i drop by and leer at her over customers’ heads. christmas is incredibly horrible when seen from the jacksonian leaping-at-sudden-fears angle. for example, wandering happily along, in a daze of beatific peace-on-earthness, i found myself face to face with a windowful of monstrous bells tolling horribly right before my nose. to my mind there is something dreadful about large objects moving silently and somehow ominously, particularly when, like these, they were swinging slowly back and forth…and all the people watching were of course ghouls…something of the sort occurs somewhere in poe…pushing myself away from the window i ran square into an old apple of a hag who grabbed my arm and cackled: “something for others less fortunate, lady?” she had a large pot, regrettably empty, and she obviously expected me to take some definite action. i did. restraining the impulse to say bubblebubbletoilandtrouble i snarled: “don’t be ironic” and fled. i walked down the street, flinching at santa clauses and their attendant charities, and met a friend to whom i did not send a christmas card. she seized me firmly by the arm, drew me off into a convenient doorway, and began to chat happily about wasn’t it nice to be home. i was looking in the window, and it was the five and ten we were standing next to, the window was filled with ties, and they were practically solid on the back wall, and crowded all through the window until there wasn’t room for anything else. i wish i could tell you the effect of crowdedness that the window gave; the worst of it was that the ties were almo
st all of a color—that peculiar deep maroon and hard mahogany brown, so that the feeling i got from the window was of dreariness and sheer ugliness trying to force its way out at me.

  then when the girl was talking, she was dropping packages and picking them up and swearing at people who stepped on them, and one poor little old lady came by when my friend had dropped a lot of bundles, and my friend looked at the old lady and said why in hell don’t you look where you’re going, and the poor lady looked at my friend and looked at me and said i’m sorry and hurried away. i told my friend that the lady hadn’t touched her and my friend said yes i know but i was so mad i had to blame somebody. (nice friends i’ve got) and then she started telling me how difficult it was to shop and she finished me by saying: “of course i like christmas, but i do wish everyone else didn’t like it too; it makes it so hard for me to shop.” then and there i suppose i should have socked her, but i didn’t; i only left. i went to the library and stayed there until it was calm and nice outside and then i walked home through the snow and thought about how nice it would be if i could be in syracuse all by myself in the apartment reading.

  mother and barry just arrived with the christmas tree. and we shall have mistletoe and on christmas day i am to put on a nice long dress and wear violets in my hair and receive guests who come to get drunk and by three in the afternoon my father and i will be very very drunk indeed and my father will say new york? of course you’re going to new york. and my father’s genial friends will kiss me under the mistletoe and my blessed godfather will take me off in a corner and say now then. what about this young man? will he like me? and has he got any brains? and i of course will say that this young man is very nice indeed. and michael will be here with joseph conrad on the brain and michael’s mother with michael on the brain and me with a long dress and violets in my hair trying to think of something to say to them. oh i shall get so drunk. and i shall enjoy it too. because when the house is full of people christmas day doesn’t get dreary and lonely and when you are very drunk you worry more about whether or not you can make the doorway than about whether there will be a welcome for you in new york.

  alta asked me privately whether or not you got any of the chicken and i ’lowed as how you had and she smirked at me and said did you like it and i said you did and she said she’d send another soon. she also told me when pop wasn’t looking that she had been going to communist meetings. she added that she still intended to teach me to cook.

  i wish you’d write to me, just once. they are taking me to california next summer, in july. i want to go very much. but i would like to talk to you.

  shirley

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  monday, june 5, 1939

  I am not dumb you dope

  paragraph by paragraph your letter: jay’s hex is also responsible for the fact i suppose that i have had a nosebleed*30 since wednesday.

  if jay would do two things for me i would be very happy. one is to tell me more about the blackmass and the other is to explain about bubblebath and his pictures are wonderful and OH ESTANLIE WOULD HE DRAW ME A BLACK MASS LIKE HE DID FOR JUNE???

  i have sent (that word is spent only ernest is sore about something) three days throwing away stuff because i have been cleaning my desks. except yesterday when i played eight holes of golf and i was SO BAD. i had two desks to go through and five packing boxes full of stuff which is not surprising when you consider that i have not thrown away anything i have written since i was six because i hadn’t the guts. y had the guts however and she sat and watched me and said be ruthless. i am still not finished having two boxes still to go but i found stuff from when i was about twelve and writing lovely poetry only it wasn’t love poetry but all about how i hated everything. i saved one or two as representative and maybe will show them to you. there is one about how conceited people go around boasting of how important they are and they set themselves up as judges and say that some of them are better than others and what are they anyway just a lot of dopes who don’t know nuthing and are only compensating for not being strong enough to keep on living and do something that is important enough to justify living. that is very complicated and i was surprised at how bitter it was and i wrote it when i was twelve. then there are a lot of experiments in fancy verse forms none very good and several starts of stories some of which i will use later. one story interested me tremendously about a man who was so afraid of dying that he killed himself—i swear that’s the story and it was very familiar indeed. then a couple of years later i was writing lousy stories about harlequin and the comedia*31 which had just caught my fancy and i was also writing a novel about a lot of people completely away from the world who were interesting because they were people and hated everyone else. the characters were nice (about a hundred pages were written only i couldn’t read them all because i got tired) and it was the first time i had used victor. there was the seven-year-old autobiographical original of cathie, my girl who was afraid people were going to talk to her, no less than six separate accounts of the year with jeanne,*32 one quite good and the rest lousy, numerous letters from me to myself…something i’ll bet you never did…all pointing out errors in writing and action which are very sound and about which i obviously did nothing because i still have the errors today. and there are a great many poems, going as far back as when i was around fifteen, about tomorrow and yesterday and today only when i was around fifteen the point in them was that things must be getting better and maybe tomorrow something (ANYTHING) would happen that would be nice. there are pictures of me that i wouldn’t even show you, diaries that make me blush when i read them (incidentally, you never should have suggested that i had an unhappy childhood, because from that angle most of this stuff is unhappy) and some of the diaries are miserable…and, as i have told you fifty times if i’ve told you once, you dope, it all stems from the fact that the only friend i had in the world was dot,*33 who flatly refused to read anything i had written and laughed at me when i did write and who wouldn’t listen to any of “that trash”…there is an entry in a diary covering three pages on the theme “who cares for beauty; it is the mind which matters” and which, judging from the next seventy or eighty entries, did not convince me in the slightest. i also used to clip pictures of beautiful women out of magazines and write pages and pages about how i didn’t have anyone to talk to and then talk to myself for lack of anyone else. for instance, i found an entry on my sixteenth birthday: “i am now sixteen, and consequently very wise. and i’m not the slightest bit lonely, am i, shirley?” for about half an hour since i wrote that i have been lost back in 1932, reading about a gentleman named bud, no more, with whom i fancied i was madly in love and to whom i wrote long letters (unsent!) which i would not show to anyone if my life depended on it. even reading them now gives me a funny feeling on the back of my neck and they remind me much too vividly of high school and summertime and eucalyptus trees and keeping my desk locked because my grandmother was just waiting to read what was in it. now, reading it over, i think it would probably have given the dear lady hysterics. and i must have been pretty desperate because some of the letters are even addressed to characters in my stories telling them all the things i wanted to ask people about and dot wouldn’t listen to. (stuff about why didn’t anyone else feel like i did and where could i go if i ran away?) jesus i wouldn’t like to meet that shirley face to face.

  i haven’t come to anything more recent than when i was about seventeen yet but i hope it will be a little more respectable. as it is, i don’t like to think about what i must have seemed like to my family and to dot…enough of that stuff. i am heartily ashamed of most of it, and a little in awe of myself. all of it is going to be burned…i am “being ruthless”…and when i think of what has been lying around loose all these years i turn pale.

  you don’t seem very real right now because i am back in 1932 and i am signing my name shirlie and i am ve
ry unhappy about bud whoever the hell he was and i am engaged in hating my family. you should thank god this stuff was burned before you ever saw it.

  in spite of your not being real, i love you very much and want lots of letters from you.

  cat

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  thurs. [July 6, 1939]

  my darling,

  june*34 and i have found comfort at last. we have discovered that the basement is at least twenty degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and we are now happily settled, with me and a card table (exceedingly difficult to type on) and ernest, and lots of cigarettes and completely surrounded with pillows and lamps and we have the Music Box. june shares, surprisingly enough, my passion for the thing, so it is now sitting on a table at june’s elbow, singing softly to itself. june also is singing. she has the thing fixed so it won’t stop, and it goes around and around and around. she is trying to make it be haunted and it won’t show off for her. embarrassing for me, since i have spent all morning telling her about it.*35

  i don’t think june has been enjoying herself particularly…there is of course nothing to do, and even june gets tired of that; i can amuse myself indefinitely here because i can be happy all afternoon listening to the music box or cutting paper dolls, but june gets tired and cannot read forever. she is anxious to get away, and plans to leave saturday. my young brother is sick…last night he developed symptoms and this morning the doctor decided that he probably had the same thing that kept him in the hospital for three weeks this spring. they want to take him back to the hospital again today, only he won’t go…the doctor says it might prevent us from going to california. mother is scared to death. i can’t come to syracuse naturally. i can’t get the hell out when mother is wandering around not knowing whether we’re going to have to drag him off to the hospital any minute. i would like to have you come to rochester, only i don’t know about your coming this weekend…god in heaven, i want to see you so much…could you, do you suppose, hitch up next weekend when barry is better? i’ve GOT to see you before i go, if i go. if you don’t want to meet my father come any day but sunday. i think perhaps you were wrong not to teach brown’s*36 course; it would be a splendid idea if you could teach from your own book, and it would help you see better what’s wrong with it. also, teaching a class like that would do wonders for you if you ever decided you wanted to be a professor…your teaching the course would bring you closer to brown which i gather is what you want…please tell me how the book is coming;*37 you never mention it and i am of course curious and interested…give my regards (seriously) to brown and marjorie…re felice*38…june has been telling me about it; she is heartily opposed to the idea. i’ve no opinions whatsoever, except that from what june tells me it would be rather a messy business and would make rather a fool of you. i don’t give a damn if you marry felice, so long as you come back to me and so long as you come back to me without having made yourself ridiculous by messing around with a girl who doesn’t even know what you’re talking about…but of course it’s not my business…you take care of these things yourself (that is not bitterness; it is a sudden realization that once again i have been meddling and trying to tell you i don’t like the girls you fuck…and i am not supposed to do that. i’m sorry). i love you so completely and i am trying very hard (and not too unsuccessfully) to think: stanley is going to have another girl this summer and it doesn’t matter; stanley is going to have another girl this summer and it is none of my business; stanley is going to have another girl this summer and of course he will come back to me…i won’t be jealous, but he can’t stop me from worrying.