The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  we are wondering these days about another child, since it seems to be the only sure way i can lose weight, and anyway sally is so old now she is no longer a baby. it would be fun to have another, and the kids are all for the idea. laurie wants twin boys and so do i. we haven’t decided yet, but will have to soon, because sally broke the high chair and stanley says he will not bother to fix it again unless it will be used by a new baby. since laurie has a new carpentry set and is passionate about fixing things the vote will probably be yes. i have gone back on my diet anyway.

  i must stop writing. i have a million stories to write. my book comes out april 10th, and i have signed a contract for the next. also, the one they paid for is nearly finished, and may even come out next fall.

  so anyway it looks like a good year starting. many many thanks again from all of us for all the wonderful things you did, and lots and lots of love.

  love, s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  wednesday [February 1951]

  dearest mother and pop,

  we are having a blinding snowstorm which has been going on since early this morning. i had to send the kids to school in a taxi because i am nervous about driving in such snow and besides, although i can usually get down our hill without much trouble, getting up is something else again. i am now debating whether to have canned tunafish for dinner or to try to get down to the store.

  joanne decided a few days ago that she wanted to start a scrapbook, and so i went out and got her a scrapbook and a jar of paste and half a dozen women’s magazines. now joanne has gone crazy; she must have fancy little tea sandwiches for lunch, two-toned jello for supper, her breakfast cereal has got to have a face made out of marshmallow, and so on. her scrapbook is full of pictures of pretty little girls, and she is also setting up furniture, one page for the living room, one page for the kitchen, and so on. i sneaked one over on her, though; i suggested that as she finished each page she tell me the story of the things on that page, and i would write it down. so i have story material for months. all her little girls are ellenoys, of course, and i have had half a dozen requests for their further adventures. i had a letter from a lovely old lady who said that she and her husband had no children of their own, and were adopting jannie and her girls.

  the reason you haven’t seen any of my stories is i haven’t written any. i spent most of my time until a month or so ago working on the book*10 but since then i have done four stories, none of which have so far sold, although that doesn’t mean much in a month. however, about eight months ago, my old friend june was made fiction editor of charm, and the first thing she did was rush up here and go through my files and pick out a story she liked which no one would ever buy although we thought it was fairly good.*11 it was the first story she bought and last week it got tapped for the best short stories of 1950, making a great credit to me and a greater credit to june, whose editors are all very pleased at her eye for good fiction. charm has not gotten into the b.s.s. very often, and of course it’s almost as important for the magazine’s prestige as the author’s. anyway, the result of it was that last friday i had to go into their offices and get introduced all around, particularly to the grand editor of the whole thing, and i had to sit in her office and chat gaily for half an hour; then june was allowed to take me out and buy me a drink on the expense account. after that we went to the opposite extreme and went down to the village where we met stanley and a pack of dissolute friends and we had a spanish dinner full of rice and clams and then went to the golden gloves. louis scher, our great friend and seventh bookhunter and subject of stanley’s new yorker profile, is an ardent amateur fight fan, and he has insisted that this year we help him follow a young boxer named stoutmorriss through the finals of the golden gloves; we saw poor stoutmorriss get cleaned in the finals last year, but this year louis thinks he will make it. i like the golden gloves because up until the finals the fights are held in a small club in brooklyn and i can have a ringside seat. no one will pay fifteen dollars for me to have a ringside seat at madison square garden.

  stanley is now pestering the life out of me to play bridge. the greatest mistake i ever made was teaching him. we can’t seem to find anyone up here who likes to play, except for two couples neither of whom are very good and who will not, unlike stanley, come out on a bad night just to play bridge. i think however that it is mostly because right now he is doing his new yorker article on the brooklyn bridge, which has taken about six months of research. he is full of odd little facts about the bridge, and his desk is piled with big books and photostats of the new york times from the last century, and either bridge games or brooklyn bridges take up most of his time.

  stanley is really not a bad bridge player, just persistent. he has such an unfortunate mathematical and literal mind that once he is told a thing he believes it is always true, and it is like playing with a robot bridge player. until about two years ago he refused to play cards at all and then someone got him playing poker and that was the beginning of the end. once he learned poker and belote, bridge was inevitable, but i’m sorry i started it. until he learned poker there wasn’t a deck of cards in the house.

  both laurie and jannie are very excited over your coming to visit. jannie says she has trouble remembering you, you will find her very odd when you see her; perhaps you will know where she gets it. wasn’t there an aunt maud who used to see things on the stairs?

  it will be such fun to be together again. i will take you for a ride. lots of love to you both,

  s.

  • • •

  Laurie feeds elephant

  [To Geraldine Jackson]

  tuesday [spring 1951]

  dear mother,

  just wanted to send you the enclosed, which is (brace yourself) a copy of my listing in (i said brace yourself) Who’s Who in America; a very flashy operation. i thought you’d be amused by the way it sounds like a horse’s pedigree; if they listed the number of races you and pop won it would be perfect.

  my publisher is lecturing in westport the end of this week and we got stuck to lodge them while he and his wife are here. as a result we have to get invited along with them everywhere they go and so we are tied up for drinks at something like fourteen different places, all f and s authors who want to entertain the publisher, and we are going to meet more people in two days than we have in two years.

  stanley and laurie put an ad in the paper about coins and a local woman called us and said she had coins she had collected while she was a navy wife before her husband was killed in the last war. so we went over last night and she had spent many years in san francisco and i dragged up all sorts of odd facts from my memories of california and she was so homesick that she tried to give the coins to Stanley.

  my agent just called to say that she thinks they may possibly have reached an agreement so i must quick write something for the movies.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Leslie Jackson]

  friday [May 1951]

  dear pop,

  a praying mantis has just stepped out of the manuscript for my new novel; i put a strainer over it and will let laurie dispose of it when he comes home. i wish i knew what a praying mantis was doing in my book. hope you and mother are well. we’re hoping to see barry and marylou in a week or so.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  tuesday [May–June 1951]

  dearest mother and pop,

  when you called last night i was sniffling sadly over isadora duncan and stanley was weeping loudly over a double play which put the dodgers out in the ninth inning, and we were just debating taking a drink to cheer us up, but your phone call served nicely in additi
on, particularly since brooklyn came back to win in the tenth.

  i also must have confused you very much with my wild stories of the movie world. what happened was that last week i got a telegram signed franchot tone, which had our local telegraph operator in a frenzy because it invited me to come to new york and discuss a movie project with him, and she kept saying “gee, you’ll get to meet him, won’t you?” so i called my agent and she made an appointment for me to get together with franchot, and elmira quickly ironed my one blouse and i raced out and bought a pair of stockings and i went into new york and my agent and i sat down with franchot and a very sharp operator named hakim, who is apparently the boy with the money, and a flowery character named siodmak, who kissed my hand and my agent’s hand and kept jumping up to light people’s cigarettes and told me i was the greatest writer of the century and he had read every beautiful word i ever wrote and that when he thought of doing a movie on isadora duncan he thought immediately of me because i was the only one, he knew right away, to capture her matchless personality because of my own matchless personality and he could see the minute he met me that i was a person of insight and intelligence and he flatly would not direct the movie unless i wrote it. none of this, of course, is true. the idea of the movie was franchot’s; he has admired isadora for years and owns the movie rights to her autobiography, and siodmak hadn’t even signed to direct it—the only part that was remotely true was that he wants me to write it and had made their considering me for the writer a condition of his signing. except no one had a chance to consider anything because siodmak wouldn’t stop talking about himself. he kept asking me if i had seen pictures he directed, and naming them, and it turned out that the only ones i had seen, which i remembered lovingly, were the french ones starring jean gabin, upon whom i had a crush on when i was about sixteen, and that most of siodmak’s american pictures, none of which i had seen, had starred franchot tone, who got stiffer and stiffer each time i said no, i hadn’t seen that one. the funniest part of the whole interview was when siodmak, practically with tears in his eyes, lamented the fact that he was due to leave for italy the next day to direct a movie for warner brothers and here he had only just met bernice and me, and had to leave us right away. then he turns to me and says “why should you not come to italy? you have seen capri, of course? no? but my dear, my dear, you cannot live without seeing capri—come with me?” i mumbled something about having to see brooklyn finish out the season, and he says to bernice, “but no one can write about isadora on a farm in america—we must do this movie in italy—or paree—there is no culture in america.” then to franchot, “tell this girl she must come to italy—tell her we will take her to italy.” so franchot, who is practically overwhelmed, like the rest of us, says meekly, “we will see that you get to italy.” so bernice, who has been turning purple through all this, says very softly, “and miss jackson’s husband? and her three children?” “we’ll take them all,” says franchot numbly. “and me?” says bernice, “i’m her agent, after all.” “you, too,” says franchot.

  siodmak actually felt that he was talking me into writing a movie through the force of his personality, whereas actually bernice and i had decided ahead of time that if it looked like they’d pay enough we’d jump at it. the poor man was so proud of himself when bernice finally said well, we’d take a try at it, and everyone got up and shook hands with everyone else, and then they began making plans for getting me a copy of the autobiography and all the other books written about isadora, and i kept saying look, we have a copy of the autobiography at home on our shelves under D, and they kept saying, well, we can order it from brentano’s, and franchot kept saying if i would come back to his hotel with him he could give me his copy and we could have a drink and he could tell me about the movies and siodmak kept saying well, why didn’t i go back to his hotel and have a drink and talk about the movies and the character hakim who had sat there all the time wincing whenever money was mentioned, carefully refrained from offering anybody a drink, so i said very quickly no, i had to catch a train home and i could get a drink there and anyway we had the book at home and franchot said well, then it was settled, they would mail me the book or send it up by messenger. bernice finally got them into the elevator and then she and i sat down and stared at each other and then she said by golly she wouldn’t talk to those guys again or let me write one word for less than ten thousand bucks, nothing could pay for the hour she had just been through.

  anyway i spent the weekend reading the life of isadora duncan who seems to have been quite a person, and bernice spent the weekend trying to get money out of hakim, and they finally came out of it with the following deal: they pay me two thousand dollars right now, and i do a twenty-page story, not a screen play about isadora, not bothering with dialogue or transitions or anything, but more an outline than anything else. concentrating on action, of course, rather than philosophy, of which she wrote plenty. then if they like the way i’ve outlined it, they pay me two thousand more. if they don’t like my twenty pages, i can do them another twenty for another two thousand, or we can quit there; it comes to the length of a story and about three weeks’ work. if they like my first twenty, and pay, then i do them a long novelette, sort of, a complete job, about a hundred pages including conversation and transitions, including characters rounded out, and so on—precisely a novelette. if they like that they pay again, another two thousand, before they can have it. i have then received six thousand, and again can quit. then (this was what finally broke hakim’s nerve) if they decide to make it into a movie and put a screen writer to work on it (bernice specified that i should not have to do any screen treatment, since i have not the slightest idea how) and want me to work with the screen writer, supervising the characters and such from my own story, i get two thousand a month for as long as the screen writing continues and if you figure it as two months, which is average, i have gotten ten thousand altogether, although poor old hakim has only had to let two thousand at a time slip out of his clenched fist.

  both bernice and i, and probably hakim, figure it will fold up after the first two thousand, since what they think they want and what will make a good movie are two widely different things, and most likely siodmak’s dream of a story like “lottery” about isadora will hardly work out. which is why bernice is getting us paid in advance.

  so anyway you can see how fantastic the whole thing is. none of us believe it, but we have been having a wonderful time telling everyone i am now writing for the movies. and if siodmak takes it into his head to do the picture in hollywood instead of capri i may find myself moved out to hollywood. and of course if this should work out i may get a chance to do another, although bernice says sweetly that if the first one is successful the second will of course cost more. the reason, by the way, that i switched to bernice for an agent is that she is commonly supposed to be the toughest agent in the business, and i think she really is. my last agent used to quit on any deal when it looked like she couldn’t get as much as she wanted, and anyone could scare her, and she spent more time taking people out to lunch and asking me for news about the children than she ever did making money; but i don’t think bernice has ever taken anyone out to lunch in her life and she has certainly never said two words to me about anything but business,*12 and there is nothing she likes better than getting someone like hakim by the throat. i wouldn’t like to have her for a sister, but i do love doing business with her.

  this fantastic dream has occupied us all, for almost a week. stanley and the grocer flatly refuse to believe that i was ever invited to italy at all, and joanne has somehow been persuaded that this movie actor wants me to marry him and i think stanley is making a secret list of movie actresses he intends to meet. i myself am planning on a new car, and it suddenly turns out that everybody needs new clothes. it has even caught up with elmira, who reflects that california is a nice warm climate. naturally we wouldn’t dream of soiling our hands with the movies unless they guarantee us a tw
enty-room house with a swimming pool and a pair of dark glasses apiece so no one can recognize the classic writers who have lowered themselves for nothing more than money.

  i took laurie and jannie to the circus and we had a lovely time, eating hot dogs and cotton candy and watching the high wire act. stanley’s father got us wonderful seats in the third row and jannie was convinced that an elephant was going to land in her lap. i thought so myself, for a minute.

  i went to the doctor yesterday, although i was positive anyway about the baby. he says i am in fine condition and recommended an obstetrician in bridgeport, which makes for a transportation difficulty, but the hospital there is immeasurably better.