The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  in answer to your question about how we acted at the accident itself, we both apparently gave the impression that we were infinitely brave and calm, except that stanley used an unrepeatable word to the poor old woman who hit him, and i was completely unable to light a cigarette, although i looked up the doctor’s number and dialed it correctly. i remembered to get joanne away and into the house before the ambulance came, and i clearly remember stanley telling the hospital clerk very solemnly that he worked for time magazine. when we came home from the hospital at about two o’clock stanley poured two water glasses full of whisky and we sat down quietly and polished them off before we did anything else. so you can see that we were both very possessed and level-headed. i really believe that until we got word monday night that he would be all right we were both in as much a state of shock as he was, and too dazed to know what was going on.

  by the way, much the same thing happened to stanley when he was about twelve; he was hit by a car on a snowy night, and lay in the street for several hours before he was found, and even then he was found by some people who nearly ran over him, and they took him to the police station where no one realized that he had a concussion and they kept asking him where he lived and trying to make him tell them. his father finally showed up, trying to make the police go out and find him, and came in to find stanley sitting in a chair unable to talk and practically unconscious. he knocked policemen right and left and grabbed stanley and put him in the car and took him home, and of course has never forgotten it, and when he heard about laurie it sort of fused together in his mind and made the shock twice as bad for him. stanley remembers enough of his own accident to know exactly how laurie’s head feels.

  all that sunday at the hospital, too, i kept remembering the day barry broke his arm, and i remembered mother as being terribly calm and quiet about everything, and i kept telling myself that i must be just as calm, only i’m afraid i didn’t do as well. i never remembered that day so clearly before, but in the hospital i even remembered details i didn’t even know i’d ever noticed.

  lots and lots of love to you both. i gave laurie your birthday telegram today and he was so pleased. he read it himself, of course. i had to explain every one of those odd little notes they put on a telegram.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten, of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agency]

  November 6, 1950

  Dear Miss Baumgarten,

  I have just parted company with my agent, MCA Management. I am told that you are the best agent in the business. I will be in town Friday, November 10; may I telephone you and hope to see you?

  Cordially,

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  [To Geraldine Jackson]

  thursday [late November 1950]

  dear mother,

  i have a bandage on my finger and cannot type very well, and as usual i have at least two splendid excuses for not writing sooner—one is the finger, which i managed to cut because we got a knife-sharpener, and the other is the fact that we were practically blown back into vermont this weekend, a performance which still has us jittery.

  laurie started it; thanksgiving day he came to me with a dime and said what should he do with it, and i said why not give it to the nice old birch tree out front, so laurie said fine and went outside and came back and announced casually that he had given it to the tree and asked for a dime’s worth of wind. so starting friday night his dime’s worth of wind was delivered. all we could figure was that wind must be very cheap indeed for him to get that much for a dime.

  laurie should have his head examined. nobody even dreamed we were going to have a hurricane. it was absolutely unexpected and apparently by the time the new york weather bureau got around to wondering if this wasn’t maybe a little more wind than they had said, all their equipment had blown away. stanley and laurie went in to new york to the dentist early saturday morning, remarking cheerfully that they had better wear warm coats since it looked pretty windy outside, and elmira and her mother left on the same train, and sally and jannie and i went peacefully to work to clean the bookcases in the kids’ rooms. about ten o’clock jannie remarked giggling that wasn’t it funny, the playhouse up in the tree, and when i glanced out of the window it certainly was. while i was looking the top of the sandbox disengaged itself and floated off. i told jannie that my, it was windy and she said yes it was, wasn’t it. i decided that maybe i’d better check the garage and make sure the doors were closed, since any good wind catches those doors and swings them open and we have about a thousand books in the garage. so i put on a coat and discovered that the only way i could get out to the garage was by hanging on to trees, found the garage doors open and was trying to close them when one blew out of my hands and landed about ten feet on the other side of the garage, scattering broken glass as it went. i figured there was no sense in going after it, so i threw blankets over the books and fought back into the house, toby being blown along beside me and very puzzled about it. and got back into the house to find all the electric current off and the upstairs porch door bending inwards and leaking. so i got towels and padded them, made an attempt to clean up the lake in the upstairs hall, watched the television aerial go by, and noticed sort of absent-mindedly, by then, that our neighbors’ beautiful old pines—three of them—had come down in a heap in the middle of the street. which is where our electric wires were, too. it meant that we had no heat, no light, no stove, no phone, nothing. all we had was a cold turkey and laurie’s battery radio. so i put the girls to bed with turkey sandwiches and the radio tuned into the ohio state football game, and there they stayed all afternoon. ohio state won, too.

  about four o’clock my wonderful grocer ploughed his way up the hill, like the united states mail, with a haphazard grocery order i had phoned in hours before, and a half gallon of whisky. he had also put in a lot of candles. and shortly after that a taxi pulled up and our weekend guests arrived. i nearly fainted; it was an old friend of ours and her ten-year-old daughter; they had gotten to grand central on their way out to visit us and had turned around to go home again and the daughter was blown down on 42nd street so they decided it was safer to come out to connecticut, which it turned out it wasn’t. stanley and laurie got nervous about the weather when their train into new york was an hour late, and began trying to get back right away, and made it at five in the afternoon. stanley said that once the wind caught laurie’s raincoat and laurie was sailing off like a balloon except that stanley caught him in time. laurie loved every minute of it, including the store windows crashing in on either side of him and the cornices falling into the street; part of the new yorker building came down and squashed a couple of cars, and laurie and stanley had to walk home from the station, through the trees in the road and stepping gingerly over live wires. when they got here they found therese and me and the half gallon of whisky, with one candle and the battery radio, while therese’s nora and jannie and sally played house with a flashlight. we gave the children all the cold turkey and pie they could hold and then put them all in bed, and then we went back to work on the half gallon of whisky. by about nine o’clock we couldn’t think of anything to do except go to bed, because besides being dark it was getting colder without any furnace. sunday morning stanley brought the charcoal grill up from the basement, and we had a magnificent breakfast, with charcoal broiled bacon and, thank heaven, hot coffee. for some reason we cannot understand, our phone was on long enough for me to find out from a desperate man at the electric company that we would be lucky to get electricity in about three days. that meant we had to move out, because it meant mainly no furnace, so off we went to a hotel in norwalk, a horrible place; therese and nora went home, after finding out from neighbors that although a house a block away from theirs had collapsed, their block was okay.

  half our town is gone. all of t
he beach and the beach houses are either submerged or on their way out to the sea, including a lot of cars, and many of the children in laurie’s school, who lived in a development called saugatuck shores, a pleasant place on a point of land by the sound, are coming to school in borrowed clothes and telling wild stories of getting out of their homes in boats.

  aside from our bit of weather, there isn’t much news. i finished my novel and am delivering it tomorrow to the publishers; it will be published this spring if they can make it. i delayed it a month because of laurie’s accident. i am trying to change agents, and have right now two of them working for me. they have divided me in half—the old agent gets everything up to and including the present novel, the new agent gets everything from now on, including the contracts for the next novel which she expects to negotiate as soon as this one is turned in. her plan is to contract for a year, at five hundred bucks a month, at the end of which time, she says blandly, i am to have an outline of a new novel for them. it sounds perfectly lovely, particularly since she is very firm about a clause in the contract saying i don’t have to give the money back if i don’t get the outline done in time. it looks like the book will be, actually, a collection and amplification of my stuff about children, which is a good investment for the publishers, since it is more apt to sell than anything else i might do for them. but i am so surrounded right now by contracts and legal language that i am dizzy. i have a contract with each agent, a clearance from one, five contracts with my publishers (none of these, the new agent points out hysterically, cancel any of the others, that being left out of all of them, so that somehow it comes out that i am committed for something like seventeen books all told), two contracts with my english publishers, an odd little contract with NBC about lottery on television, and—the big headache—an unwritten and unrecorded contract with good housekeeping by which i owe them a lot of money, although it was a verbal agreement and the new agent says not binding. i say not binding or not, i do really owe them the money, the old agent says well, we’ll have to talk about it, the new agent says let them try and get it, and good housekeeping says that actually i don’t owe them any money, but only four stories, which they are in no hurry for, and will buy whenever i feel like sending them along. this situation is the reason i got a new agent in the first place. but now that the novel is done i can give up the old agent altogether. also, ann harding*8 has arrived in new york, very much interested in this television series from my stories, and both agents are racing to find her to get the deal first. i am so happy that we have no phone.

  laurie sends a request: i don’t know if i told you about the coin collection he and stanley have started; they are trying to get a complete collection of american coins, without any emphasis on rare or valuable ones. one thing they cannot get is silver dollars, which i believe you can, can’t you? laurie says if you will send him some silver dollars, as old as possible, he will repay you from his allowance. the repayment is a firm rule, of course, since he asks everyone for coins and can hardly do so without paying back an equal sum. the coin collection is growing daily, and laurie makes trips to the bank to get dollars changed into quarters and quarters changed into nickels and dimes. they carry on long learned conversations about straight standing liberties and mint marks. laurie is quite adept at it, and is fascinated and much better than stanley. i find that i now do all my shopping with discarded change, so that i go down to the grocery with fifteen dollars in quarters and dimes and have to count out my money to pay, much to the amusement of everyone around.

  joanne, who was very much affected apparently by my story about her, has just arrived in the study with nine friends, all ellenoys,*9 who have come for lunch. they are all wearing corduroy hats and were all born in new jersey, to which place they return once a week on their ship, although some of them have rowboats which they use instead of the big ship. joanne is not in school again today because of her cough.

  lunch time. some day i am going to take three days and really finish a letter; this time i got distracted by the hurricane. i’ve been waiting for a letter from you for quite a while and hope your not writing means you’ve been having a wild time in town.

  lots of love from all of us; are you still coming in march?

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten]

  December 11, 1950

  Dear Ma’am,

  Here is the original of A Visit, suitable for selling. It has been to Good Housekeeping, New Yorker, Holiday, and Harpers.

  Also a small story of the slight type I have been selling. I decided to get it off to you right away without waiting because unless I somehow make some money inside of the next couple of weeks I shall have to find myself a job writing jingles for greeting cards, or television commercials, or singing at Bar mitzvahs.

  The title of the novel is now Hangsaman, and is taken from a nice old ballad about a girl who is going to be hanged unless her father or her mother comes through and pays her fine. The ballad will have to be quoted, of course. And I’m putting in some further explanation in the first section, to meet your objections there. They are going right to work on it, to get it ready for April publication.

  Best,

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  “No, I don’t think I’d ever want to have another, dear. It’s too much of a strain for me.”

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  january 2 [1951]

  dearest mother and pop,

  i hope you had a lovely trip, and a fine Christmas. it was so nice to talk to you, and even to hear barry’s voice, although he sounded completely unfamiliar.

  i am typing under great difficulties; there is a power shovel going in our back yard, digging a ditch which is now approximately ten feet long and three feet deep, because some horrid internal function of the plumbing gave way, and instead of calling a plumber like anyone else our landlord decided to dig up the cistern which would be fine except they couldn’t find it without looking, so the power shovel is looking. makes it hard to think, this darn great munching away about ten feet past the window.

  the children were delighted with your presents, and many thanks to both you and pop, for all the gifts and of course particularly for the wonderful check, which we both appreciate more than i can say.

  we had laurie’s hand x-rayed by a bone specialist in new york, and the doctor called us last thursday and said the pictures showed that the thumb had never been set at all, but only sort of stuck together, and that we had a choice: we could either let it go as it was, or we could have it reset, and keep it in bandages for two weeks and a cast for another month, but resulting, this guy guaranteed, in a straight and perfectly normal thumb; the catch was that it had to be done at once. laurie was out on his sled when the doc called so we went and got laurie and told him the whole thing, and he was very upset and we said he could decide which he wanted, either way okay. so after a little while he sort of gritted his teeth and said he wanted it done. so we took him into new york—one of those trips where you have half an hour to get ready. and we put him in a horrible hospital and the next morning they operated on him and i sat in the lobby downstairs for five hours waiting to see him and at the end of the time the nurse said no, i couldn’t see him because they didn’t have visiting hours that day and i started to break up the hospital, slowly and methodically, so that finally, regarding the damage i was doing they said, well i could see him for two minutes, so i raced upstairs and said hello, laurie, and he opened his eyes and said hello, and then the nurse threw me out. so i made a sizzling scene in the lobby again, turning away patients by droves, until they promised to let him out the next morning because i think they were really afraid to keep him any longer because i might cut into the hospital’s income. so we got him back, bandaged and theoretically patched.

 
laurie—that is, between christmas and hurting his hand again today, in case we should have had a dull moment—is now wanted by the police. it seems that in the fields next door a crew of men has been hired to uproot trees and generally lay the ground bare, and they have been using some great complicated piece of machinery, which is called simply “the works.” and laurie and two juvenile delinquent friends, one of whom is thirteen and a full-fledged boy scout, sneaked over there and somehow all the red lanterns got broken and the works got started, so that the motor was going full blast when the foreman dropped over to inspect the works on sunday. he tracked the boys here to where they were playing cowboy, and all i knew was that i had stepped out onto the porch to persuade laurie in for lunch and this great tough man walked up to laurie who was standing on the lawn holding the pingpong gun you gave him and said “listen, you, i want to talk to you about that air rifle.” laurie looked at the pingpong gun and then began to giggle, which was very wrong, since it subsequently developed that all the lanterns had been shot out with an air rifle. when the man began to yell at laurie i got sore and told him to get out and he said he was going to the police and then it turned out that the older of laurie’s friends, who was by then hiding in the garage, had done the damage. i thought it was silly until half an hour later a police lieutenant dropped in on us and gave laurie a bad half hour because it seems that the boy scout had ratted and put all the blame on laurie. fortunately we were able to prove that first of all laurie had no air rifle but only a pingpong gun and second that with only one hand he could hardly have started the elaborate machine going and that third of all he was telling the truth when he said earnestly that he had thrown one rock but that when the older boy had starting firing the gun laurie had strolled away to admire scenery; the third delinquent confirmed this. so laurie got off with a good scare, but the other guys are in real trouble, since they not only wrecked the machine by starting it haphazardly, but also embarrassed the foreman, who could not turn it off himself and had to call charley back to turn it off for him. our son, the gangster. so perhaps the rest of your check will go for bail.