The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  our poor unfortunate virginia is back in the pen. i visited her in the local jail a couple of times, and got my coat back, although i’ll never see my ten bucks again. she was very remorseful and unhappy, naturally, although I am convinced now, seeing her in what is by now her natural habitat, that she is not at all right in the head. I tried to persuade the authorities to send her to a mental institution instead of the pen, but my influence was not enough, and they seem to feel that unless she is actually homicidal, putting her into an institution is letting her off too easy. it was very sad, and made me mad with that sort of frustrated fury you get when you run head on into the sort of unimaginative, badly educated people who get into such official jobs. the parole officer has a daughter who wants to be a writer, and every time i mentioned virginia the parole officer insisted on talking about how i ought to meet her daughter. and the sheriff said it was not necessary for virginia to have any kind of psychological help because they would give her an intelligence test when she entered prison.

  dorothy, virginia’s successor, is working out very nicely. she is very fond of both jannie and sally, although laurie confuses her a little and i am very reluctant to leave her in charge of him. she is living in now, and until school started this morning i was living like a queen, getting up at about ten o’clock, and working in the study all day without worrying about meals or anything. now that school has started, of course, i have to get up to see laurie gets off on time.

  dorothy and i have decided to do our own baking from now on, principally because the one bakery in bennington has apparently started using plaster of paris instead of flour. both of us turn out to be fairly good at following a recipe, and the house is suddenly full of nut cakes and brownies, sugar and tollhouse cookies, and apple pies. this is our season for good apples, and we have a bushel of macs which we all eat like candy. i spend my evenings with stanley away, sitting by the television eating apples and reading mysteries, with toby on my feet to keep them warm.

  dorothy just remarked that my lunch was ready; i eat in solitary state without stanley, reading while i sit at the table, and while the children are roughhousing in the kitchen. pleasant days!

  hope your trip continues to be as wonderful as it sounds. have a grand time, and write me if you get a chance.

  lots of love,

  s.

  • • •

  “Of course it is, dear—long as anything!”

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  wednesday [October 12, 1949]

  dearest mother and pop,

  not much time to write letters these days, what with leaves to rake and birthday parties to give. this is mostly to say thank you for the nice presents, which arrived a couple of days ago and were received with great joy.

  laurie’s birthday is safely over, except for his party, which had to be postponed until this coming Sunday, because he wants his guests—twelve tough little boys—to see the hopalong cassidy movie on television. jan’s birthday, coming up soon, includes a dainty luncheon for six young ladies from nursery school, and sally’s, thank heaven, will be confined to the family and a cake with one candle. fortunately dorothy, who is still with us, although teetering on the edge, loves making cakes. laurie’s main birthday present was a toy pool table, about half the size of a regular one, and just right for him and a shade small for stanley, who plays therefore at a handicap.

  his main birthday present, after that, turned out to be one for all of us; his birthday was on monday, and that night stanley’s father called up to say happy birthday, and invited both laurie and joanne down to see the rodeo that coming saturday. it’s a great thing, at madison square garden, with thousands of cowboys and indians, and bucking broncos and gene autry and trick horses, and such. so laurie and jannie were hysterical, and then the old man gets on the phone with stanley and says “do you think you can bring the children down?” and stanley says he supposes so, and dad says “fine, you and shirley come along with the children; i have world series tickets for all of us.” that was the thing that nearly finished me—you know, we’ve turned into ardent ball fans this summer—so i went upstairs and found a clean shirt for laurie and a clean dress for jannie and we left sally with dorothy and went off to new york on wednesday afternoon. we had tickets for the games on friday, saturday, and sunday, which turned out, unhappily, to be the last three. stanley’s father had hotel reservations for us at st. george hotel in brooklyn, which has two dubious advantages: 1) it is directly across the street from the apartment where stanley’s mother and father live. 2) it is here the brooklyn ball team stays when they are playing home games. it had a third real advantage this time, which was that stanley’s brother and sister had flown down from maine for the games and had the room next door. we kept jannie in the hotel with us and laurie stayed across the street, and everyone took turns with the children in the morning, and stanley’s mother had them in the afternoons while we all were at the games. every time brooklyn lost—which of course they did all three days—stanley’s mother arranged to keep the children quietly out of sight until we had all cheered up again. laurie insisted on having a baseball suit, and she bought him one which turned out, most horribly, to say YANKEES in big letters across the back, and we ripped the letters off and got him a brooklyn insignia, and then every time he came into the hotel he had to run the gamut of unsober brooklyn supporters who were hanging around to see the ball team and who would stop him and say “you sure pitched a great game today, son” or “who’s gonna win tomorrow, champ?” jannie got covered with brooklyn ball caps and pins saying “i’m for the bums,” by admirers. and every day at twelve o’clock all of us except stanley’s mother and the children piled into dad’s car and went out to ebbetts field and paid four bucks for parking, and sat there and watched brooklyn get beaten. we had wonderful seats, box seats right in center field, directly in back of dimaggio, and since we were all for brooklyn with the noisy bleachers in back of us we stood up and yelled “ahhhhhh, dimaggio, can’t hit, you’re gonna fall down, can’t hit, dimaggio can’t hit,” which of course he didn’t until the last game when he hit a home run almost into my lap. i suppose because he was mad at the names i had been calling him. we all got a nice sunburn anyway, and we’re all hoarse. the children spent saturday afternoon at the rodeo, and came back with cowboy insignia on top of the baseball insignia, and laurie wore a cowboy hat with his baseball suit, and we all took the train home monday morning with so many souvenirs we could hardly carry them, although we required the children to suppress the brooklyn badges.

  now the main subject of conversation around our dinner table is whether or not rickey is going to sell robinson and snider, and why he didn’t pitch palica sooner.

  enough of baseball. the season starts again next april, and by then brooklyn ought to have a winning team, and they will take the series next year and we will be sitting on the first base line where i can throw pop bottles at the umpire.

  i quite agree with you about the recent stories. they are written simply for money, and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. i simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today, and since they will buy as much of it as i write, i do one story a month, and spend the rest of the time working on my new novel or on other stories. stuff like the son and bully story turns out like that because i won’t write love stories or junk about gay young married couples, and they won’t take ordinary children stories, and this sort of thing is a compromise between their notions and mine, and is unusual enough so that i am the only person i know of who is doing it. that’s why i can sell them. in addition, the fan mail on such stories is going up, and i am now getting long letters asking for advice on bringing up children, letters which i answer with the statement that if i knew enough to give
advice my children would be better than they are. as a result, it’s keeping a name for me, building up a following, opening new markets with plenty of money, and helping support us while i take my time with the novel. i haven’t done much writing this summer—excluding one popular story a month—but am back at work on the novel now that the ball season is over. road through the wall comes out in a twenty-five cent edition in january, advertised, i am afraid, the way the reprint people are advertising all the legitimate novels they reprint—changing the name, putting a lurid cover on the book, and playing it up as some fantastic, love-among-the-haystacks routine. they expect a sale of seventy-five thousand, which seems fantastic. the stories you repudiate are selling at a furious rate abroad, two of the good housekeeping ones have turned up in england, and one other in sweden. none of this means much money now, of course, and the sixty pounds my english publisher still owes me has stopped looking like as much as it did, but still the things are building up to what will eventually be a regular reprint income.

  it has suddenly seemed to us that north bennington has fewer advantages than ever before, for us. one or the other of us is constantly having to go to new york, the difficulties of making arrangements over the phone or by telegram are getting worse, and whatever business we have to do now requires that five-hour train trip, which is beginning to look like commuting to us. also, i am very much disturbed over laurie in school, since he is at the top of his class and is mostly bored because the work goes so slowly. i want very much to get him out of that school, and the result of all this is that we have begun to think seriously of moving nearer to new york, into a small community just outside commuting distance, where there are good schools and pleasant people. we have written to our friends who are scattered all over connecticut and upper new york, and are now getting opinions from all over. we are, naturally, trying to keep out of westchester, although we know many people around there, and stanley refuses to live in new jersey, for some obscure reason. we figure we can afford to pay a higher rent now, although most people want to sell instead of renting, but the condition of real estate in the places where we want to settle is so unstable—everyone thinks prices are going down fast—that we are trying not to have to buy, always allowing that we could if we wanted to.

  the children are pleased with the notion of being somewhere where they have two television channels instead of one. i’d love to live in a house with two bathrooms and a town with at least one movie and a restaurant and an a and p. and the idea of being able to get into new york in a couple of hours instead of five intoxicates all of us. what do you think? wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were living so near to new york that you could come and really visit us when you come east, without having to figure in that trip to vermont, and where we’d have enough room and bathrooms to be able to entertain you properly? we’d like to be out of here and into a new place by the end of the year, since we have nothing to keep us here. the nicest thing about being as free as we are is that we can do whatever we please; we could either of us get a job teaching in half a dozen colleges if we wanted to, or move into new york city and stanley could go to work in the new yorker office, or go to england, although we’d rather wait for that until the children are older. also, we must stay near new york for a while at least because until both of us have regular income channels with our writing we have to keep in touch with magazines and agents. in another couple of years there will not even be that compulsion to stay near new york, and then we’ll come live in california for a while. so you can see why we keep writing for money. most of our money so far has gone into paying off ten years of accumulated debts, and into books.

  dorothy has taken over the job of doing the shopping and getting the mail, so i have nothing now to do except sit at the typewriter and duck out of raking leaves. these long mornings have become my writing time. from the time when I send the children off to school at eight-thirty until dorothy calls us to lunch at twelve, i am trying to spend at my typewriter, except that i end up writing a long letter like this, instead of finishing the story which sits at my desk. it is much more pleasant to write about baseball and think about moving than it is to work.

  write me soon, and keep your fingers crossed, that when you come in march you will visit us in a nicely located and fairly modern house, somewhere only five minutes from times square.

  lots and lots of love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  hallowe’en [October 31, 1949]

  dearest mother and pop,

  we are in such a state of high confusion that i don’t know if i can write a coherent letter, but i’ll try. stanley and i have just come back from (of all places in the world for us!) westport, connecticut, a nice fancy rich arty community which is apparently going to be our future home. we spend most of our time staring at each other saying “what are we doing?” and it’s a good question.

  i think i told you we were hoping to move. we wrote to friends asking for agent’s names, trying to find out what was available. the best answers we got for our requirements came from westport, and so stanley and i went down and looked at the houses. so we found a beautiful one. we would have to rent this one with the understanding that we might buy it.

  this house is almost perfect. it is two blocks from the station and a shopping district, is on the school bus line, and is at the same time almost isolated, or seems so, because it is on top of a hill with a lot of trees around it, and the other houses are similarly set back from the road, so although we have at least two next-door neighbors we can’t see them. also, it has an acre of land, with a long rolling lawn in front and plenty of trees, and a sort of wilderness effect behind. the house has been empty for quite a while, because the owners hoped to sell instead of rent, but they have finally given in and decided to rent, and redecorated the house completely. it’s fifty years old, and very solid and nice, and the same sort of rambling victorian mansion as the one we have now, but better made. it has a big cellar, paved and very good for a playroom and—probably what sold us on it, finally—an enormous porch going around two sides of the house, a glass-enclosed porch in back, just outside the kitchen, and a little second-floor balcony from which to pour boiling oil down on guests. although it is not going to be very expensive in itself, westport is an expensive town, and things like food and help are high, it makes up for all this by being seventy minutes from new york, and the wonderful facts that we are at last in a town with restaurants and even a movie, and decent stores. we are a five-minute bus ride from the sound, where there is a town beach and yacht club. the exorbitant rent for this gem is a hundred and seventy-five bucks a month, which the agent thinks will boil down to one-fifty. when we consider that we are paying fifty here, it sounds very dubious, but every time we get worried, we look at laurie, who is getting rough and vulgar, and who really ought to be gotten out of this town unless we want him to be a farmer when he grows up. the same is beginning to be true of jannie, although her school is all right. but she is beginning to talk and act like the disagreeable little girls around here. i don’t know if the children in westport are any less disagreeable, but at least the schools are better. and we all unite in disliking the vermont winter. in addition to all this, we are no longer fond of the town. we will probably not ever be farmers ourselves, and associating with people who are gets tiresome. we tend to grow farther away from the college, as all our old friends are leaving, and there are now only a few people we see up here. westport is full of people from the new yorker, and advertising men, and writers, and minor editors—the major editors live in westchester—and while they do not stack up very well against an honest new england farmer, at least we will feel more at home.

  our big problem, of course, is money, but i think we have that solved. on the basis of stanley’s salary, and my writing income, we should be able to swing it if neither of our typewriters break.
>
  right now i can’t think or write of anything else; if there is good news from my agent in the next day or so we will probably take the house on the spot; if not, we will delay and worry.

  just as i finished this, my agent called; she had the best news of our lives. good housekeeping wants to put me on a drawing account, against sales of stories. i send them eight stories a year, they pay me fifteen hundred every three months, plus extra on whatever they buy. my agent takes ten percent, and we take the house. this fixes the financial end of it, anyway. wow!

  love,

  s.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Joanne Leslie Hyman was born November 8, 1945, at Putnam Memorial Hospital in Bennington.

  *2 Pat (Pascal) Covici, legendary editor at Viking Press.