The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  also, the government—don’t ask me why—has bought fifteen hundred copies to put in all the army and navy libraries.

  joseph henry jackson*13 in san francisco, who is for some reason working his head off for me, is apparently holding bookstores up at the point of a gun and making them order thousands of copies. i think he thinks we’re related. i have already passed the point in the sales where the advance is paid off, and all is gravy. from two thousand copies on i’ve been making money. they have six thousand in print now, with their two printings, and calmly expect to sell them all, although the novel only sold about three thousand. moreover, they expect to get rid of those odd thousands of copies of the novel now; they’ve had two requests from reviewers for copies of it, saying they missed it before and lottery has gotten them interested in it. the publishers haven’t put a cent into it yet; all this is honest free publicity.

  you can imagine how i feel, in the middle of all this. sort of small, and scared, and desperately anxious to go up and tap j.h. jackson on the shoulder and say listen, mister, the book is terrible, honest. because it is, of course. i read it a few days ago and it’s flashy and sensational and all fixed up to sell. and every advance review we’ve seen is favorable, although they keep referring to saki, and truman capote, and john collier, none of them writers i admire particularly, as people of whom the stories are reminiscent. and they’re all cashing in quite shamelessly on the press the devil has been getting recently, including half a dozen respectable books, mostly novels, which have come out in the last six months, and which use the devil as a character. also, there have been several odd witchcraft cases in the papers, and it all mounts up into a general interest in magic and such, which farrar and straus are exploiting, with me in the middle.

  the thing that really sends cold chills up and down my back is the story that pyke johnson, publicity man at farrar and straus, is telling around as a great joke; it started with a joke of stanley’s and mine, and i’ve been sorry for it ever since. when stanley was fighting with alfred a knopf, and the fight was at its worst, and everyone who knew alfred and knew what a rat he was, was urging stanley on and giving good advice, alfred took a weekend off and came up to vermont to go skiing, fell down the first day, and broke his leg. stanley and i made a joke about how it was obviously magic, and i did it, and we had to wait until alfred crossed over into vermont from new york because federal laws keep us from operating magic across a state line. it wasn’t a very good joke either.

  first thing we knew we started meeting our own joke everywhere we went, with all credit given me for breaking alfred’s leg. and the first thing the AP man said to me was that he understood i had broken the leg of a certain publisher who shall be nameless, and would i please tell him all about it. and later pyke slaps me on the back and says boy, that story sure is going to sell copies of the book. i feel about those things exactly as though i had a very bad hangover and everyone was telling me the screamingly funny things i had done the night before.

  if i really had a broomstick i would come to california and hide in the cellar of your house until about august.

  i hope everything goes well with you now. and i assume from that that you’re taking it easy and resting up. lots and lots of love from all of us.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  [June 13, 1949]

  dearest mother and pop,

  it has been so long since i’ve been near the typewriter that i’ve almost forgotten how to type, and i’ve certainly forgotten how to sit still. so much has happened.

  the things that have been happening start with lottery’s being quite a success; it’s sold five thousand copies, which beats all books of short stories for just ever so long. i’ve been lined up for interviews and photographs in everything from time on—wasn’t that picture a stinker, though? that was the one he wanted to take in the lobby of the algonquin hotel, and i balked. i’ve been interviewed by the times and the tribune and the associated press, and all the nonsense i told you about, that the publishers made up, is turning out to be wonderful stuff because the book is selling, so i have to tell people all this nonsense all over again, because the publicity man from the publishers is sitting over me and he corrects me if i say any of it wrong.

  anyway on the strength of lottery i sold three stories in a row to good housekeeping and we paid all our bills including the income tax. and we bought a television set which was the silliest thing we ever did, and the children love it and so do all our friends, the reader’s digest has picked up my third baby thing,*14 and something called omnibook*15 wants lottery, and the best short stories of 1949 does too. the agent turned down two people who wanted to make it into a play, and accepted the offer of an english publisher to bring it out in london this fall, followed, if there is any interest, by the novel next spring. if joseph henry jackson writes two more articles about it farrar and straus will put it into a third edition. the silliest thing of all is that my agent’s asking price is now a thousand bucks a story for me, and then she keeps me so busy with interviews i don’t have time to write. except the new york times asked me very politely to review a book for them and i said sure. naturally i’m having a wonderful time being fussed over, and i love it, but i feel like an awful fool most of the time.

  except for one other thing, that can wind up the literary news for today. surprisingly enough, stanley is not teaching but i am. stanley turned down the college offer of a job because they wanted him on a five year contract and he only wants to teach alternate years, and the next week there was a grand fight—completely unconnected—in the literature division and two of the faculty quit in the middle of the year. one of them was the short story man, and they asked me to fill in for him for a month, so again i said sure, and here i am teaching short story, and i love that, too. i have two classes a week and the girls and i talk very seriously about the art of writing and then they ask me very timidly where they can sell their stories and i tell them there’s nothing to it. i took the job with two conditions—one, a hundred bucks a week, and the other, that the college president learn to square dance. if he doesn’t learn by this coming saturday i quit.

  aside from my being the belle of the ball this season, there is not much news. we acquired a dog, who is naturally the biggest dog in town. he is a three-year-old shepherd, named toby and is so big that when he stands on his hind legs he is a head taller than i. like most dogs that size, he’s very gentle, and joanne rides on him. he is strictly the children’s dog, although he condescends to come with me occasionally to my classes, and he has followed laurie to school three times. he wakes laurie up in the morning by putting his front feet on the top half of the double decker bed and licking laurie’s face.

  both stanley and i have been asked to lecture at the marlboro fiction conference this august; if we work it right the family gets a free vacation.

  the only other thing is something i’ve delayed telling you for quite a while, for all sorts of reasons. it’s about my teeth. right after sally was born the dentist announced that it was no longer possible to fill my teeth since the fillings fell out before i got downstairs, and he suggested i get what he called an artificial denture and what turned out to be false teeth, for the top teeth. after much family discussion i decided to do it, and i have spent all the time since being grateful for it. it was wonderful. i made four one-day trips to new york; the first one was to have six back teeth pulled, which i did at nine in the morning, and spent the rest of the day shopping and having four martinis for lunch to celebrate. and then i had another trip for a check-up, and then—the great moment, friday the thirteenth—the rest of the teeth out and the plate put in while i was still unconscious, so that i never saw myself without teeth and have not yet, thanks to will power. i’ve been to new york once more for a checkup, and the dentist said it was the most beautiful job he had ever seen, an
d i’m inclined to agree with him. the nicest thing is that it’s really not noticeable; two days after having the plate put in i had to read lottery at a college assembly, and no one noticed it; i had no trouble talking or anything. since then, i’ve been lecturing to my classes and so on, with no trouble. i was very self-conscious for about two weeks, but no longer. i am just tremendously pleased with my appearance. i can eat almost anything, too. i tried a steak the other night and managed beautifully, almost without thinking about it. i look so much better, that i couldn’t possibly regret anything but the necessity for it. also i grin in all the photographs.

  this is a very confused and abrupt letter, mostly because i taught my class this afternoon sitting out in the sun, and got sunburned and so tired that when i came home stanley made a lot of martinis so i got tight before dinner. and then (probably because we were both tight) we went out after dinner and played baseball with laurie and his friends and i hit a home run. so by the time i got to this letter i was a little dopey anyway, but i didn’t want to put off writing it just because i was dopey.

  my class finishes in a week, so i shall be able to get to the things i want to do. we all send lots and lots of love, and are already excited about seeing you this winter.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  august 23 [1949]

  dearest mother and pop,

  you must be wondering whether we are still possessed of a typewriter or a sheet of paper, after this long delay in writing. I wanted to get a letter to you in time to say happy birthday to mother.

  we’ve been having a wild summer, and now i know how mother felt when she used to thank heaven that school was starting. two more weeks, and i think i can just make it. everything’s been fine, but very hot and very lively. the children have had a wonderful time. laurie has learned how to ride his two-wheeled bike, although he still falls off when he stops, and he now does errands for me at the store, taking only a little bit longer than if he walked both ways. he has lost all his front teeth, now, and insists still on his crew cut and dirty sweat shirt and sneakers, and looks, in fact, like a typical north bennington subnormal farmer. his vermont accent is so flat and nasal he could pass for calvin coolidge. he has also taught himself to tap dance from watching the television.

  and jannie is so much bigger; instead of being round and babyish now she’s gotten taller and thinner so that she looks like laurie did a year or so ago. her hair is still all curls, and she’s prettier than ever. she’s turned very strange, though, in many ways. we’ve been watching her carefully this last month or so, because she is so different from both laurie and sally, and even though she spends a lot of time playing dolls with the other girls, she spends a lot more time all alone, playing mysterious games of her own, with songs and private dances. she is still so amiable and cheerful that it is a pleasure to be with her, but so very odd. no one ever knows what she is thinking about, or what she will do next.

  and sally is nice, too. although she is just like laurie and so different from jannie—she is standing now, and trying to walk, and creeping all over. she eats crackers insatiably, and talks to herself, and her hair is curly like jan’s, and she laughs all the time. i think it’s true about how second and third children are more cheerful because they get worried about less, because both sally and jan are much more agreeable than laurie used to be, although laurie is so mature and self-controlled now that he isn’t cross very much. altogether, the three of them have done so much changing this summer—they are all so visibly older, and have such distinctive personalities now.

  i think the reason they all look so good to me right this minute is that we have visitors: red and minna*16 and their two boys, who are four and two, and the two boys are so wild and loud and badly-behaved, like company children always are, that my three look like angels, and they know it, too.

  i can see butchie, the four-year-old, out in the driveway now, trying to wreck jannie’s tricycle, and jannie standing calmly by eating a cookie and telling him coolly that she hopes he will get spanked. laurie is painting one of his masterpieces in his studio—he is a professional painter now, with all equipment and brushes neatly laid out by his easel, sally is walking around and around the inside of the playpen, and minna’s younger, jerry, is systematically ripping apart the living room. stanley and i are cowering in the study.

  on top of everything else i have a new girl, who arrived simultaneously with red and minna, and may not last as long as they do. her name is dorothy, and she is slow and not awfully bright, and spends all her spare time studying for a career as a missionary, but she does the work well. our career this summer with girls has been staggering. when i hired beulah early in the summer, we had decided to get a girl to live in and do all the cooking and so on, and after struggling with beulah for a couple of months i was about ready to go back and do it myself, because what beulah did was such a mess, that i was discouraged. so beulah left, and i put an ad in the paper and hired the first girl who answered; she moved in with us and seemed wonderful. her name was virginia, and she was a little odd, but i figured anyone moving into a strange house would be odd, so i overlooked it for the week she was with us. she was a fine cook, but the children didn’t like her much, because she alternately scolded them and talked babytalk to them. virginia had her first day off after she had been here a week, borrowed my raincoat and ten dollars in addition to her pay, and disappeared, leaving all her clothes and things here. she hasn’t been seen since, but a nice lady dropped in to see me a few days later, announced that she was the women’s parole officer for this county, and asked if i knew where virginia was? it seems that virginia has been in trouble with some man for about five years, was arrested and sent to prison in new york state for a robbery she committed with him, and had been paroled on condition she found a job and settled down without ever seeing the man again. the parole officer asked me if i wanted to prefer charges against virginia for the coat and the ten dollars and i said certainly not, so i packed up virginia’s things and hired dorothy. since then the parole officer has called me several times, to see if virginia has been here and finally to tell me that virginia has been located—wearing my coat!—and unless some miracle happens, is on her way back to jail, because she has broken her parole and is off with this guy again. i get my coat back, apparently, but no ten.

  add to all this the fact that we’ve been to two writers’ conferences—one at cummington, one at marlboro; at cummington i read stories to the assembled gathering, answered idiotic questions (“where do you get your ideas for stories?”) and had a wonderful next-morning playing water-witch; we all got out with forked apple twigs and looked for water under the ground. turns out i can make it work, and i wandered all over with my forked twig finding hidden springs. then we went to marlboro, where i had one of the most shocking experiences of my life, read stories, answered idiotic questions (“would you say that this story is symbolic?”) and stanley gave a lecture on folklore and fiction, which started lots of arguments and went on an hour and a half longer than scheduled because everyone had so much to say. my shocking experience was meeting jack sheridan, who used to sit in back of me in the fourth grade at mckinley grammar school, and who was in my class until i left burlingame. he hadn’t changed at all that i could see, and he says he has an old class picture in which i wore my hair in a dutch bob and looked awful. we spent a long time checking on old friends—he still lives in burlingame, and knew what happened to everyone—and stanley and i had a fine time being writers for two days.

  jerry has just broken the television, i think.

  i had better come out of the study and pick up the pieces. stanley says if i can finish this letter in two minutes he will mail it for me. so i will cut it short. all i wanted to say, anyway, was happy birthday. your usual birthday present has been renewed and should be coming alo
ng as usual, unless the new yorker’s usual inefficiency holds it up.

  lots and lots of love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine Jackson]

  tuesday [September 1949]

  dearest mother,

  just a short note to say how happy I am that you’re enjoying your trip, and happy birthday again. laurie is enchanted with the notion of you and pop wearing ropes of flowers around your necks. he has told his friends about it endlessly, and about your traveling in an airplane. it’s given him great prestige.

  his school started this morning, and i stood on the front porch and watched the procession of kids going sadly down the hill. laurie had on new pants—made of something resembling cast iron, which i hope will last for a month or so—and that was the only thing that cheered him. the boys say the second grade teacher is a horror; she pulls bad boys by the ear, and laurie is terrified. jannie’s school starts next week.

  stanley’s in new york, at an anthropological convention; right now he is probably attending a most serious discussion of the American Indian. i am going down this weekend, although i do not plan to catch up with the American Indian. i want to buy some living room drapes and slip covers and some warm dresses for jannie and a stroller for sally. all this is possible because I have sold two stories this month, instead of one. laurie and jannie are now my two principal subjects for these light stories, so they get a cut every time i sell one—we went shopping a day or so ago, to get what are now known as “story presents.” laurie got a cap gun and holster, and four boxes of caps; jannie got a big doll in a blue dress whose name is—heavens!—rosabelle. i, with the approval and assistance of both children, bought a bicycle for myself. now laurie and i go riding on our bicycles, and i have taken jannie for several rides on the back, and sally once in a basket. i am trying to work up to a position where i have sally in the basket, jannie on the back, and a picnic lunch hung around my neck. i rode for two hours the day i got the bike, went out to play bridge that night, and had to be accommodated with two pillows to sit on all evening, although i had wonderful cards.