our situation is a real freak. in january, 1954, we will be the richest people in vermont; my book is already piling up money, with book clubs and a condensation in the reader’s digest in july, and all of this money comes through the publisher, and reaches me with my next royalty statement—january 15, 1954. as a result, although we will have several thousand dollars next year, this year we are poorly. i sold a story, and that landmark book, and stanley sold an article, so we make going expenses, but—wouldn’t you know it—my car has gone, and couldn’t hold out. it is in the stage of decay where every day some new thing goes wrong, and i have spent the better part of the last week parked awkwardly in the main street of bennington waiting for the tow truck and trying to pretend i didn’t see the crowds of kids gathered around. i can get my new dodge any time, for the three hundred down payment, and that is what we can’t raise; stanley’s salary at the college, which starts the end of july, will take care of the payments until january, when we expect to be able to pay the whole balance down.
we were going to trade the lincoln in through stanley’s father, but stanley’s brother has recently been in very bad shape; he had two operations on his neck, and horrible x-ray treatments, and the probability of another operation by the end of the year; stanley’s father is so involved in that, financially as well as every other way, that we can hardly expect him right now to work up much interest in whether our car goes or not!
so, if you can help us, we would appreciate it very much, and if not—and believe me, we both realize that it’s a good deal to be asking for, especially in our position of theoretical financial independence!—thank you anyway.
i have at least one story requested, which i have only to get done to sell, but again that is a matter of time, and time is what we don’t have. also, yesterday, stanley, who was positive the mail would be full of bills, got three shocks one after another; the first—not really much of a shock, was a formal confirmation of his college appointment here; the second was an invitation to lecture at harvard this fall, all expenses paid for him and for me, and a hundred bucks besides, and the third, which finished him off completely, was an inquiry about whether or not he would be interested in being one of four american teachers who spend a month at salzburg, austria, lecturing on american literature to their university, all expenses paid. and since bennington is closed during the winter, which is when they want him at salzburg (if it should go through) he wired back that he was very much interested. it’s run through the university of rochester, by the way. it’s a tremendous boost academically, naturally, and of course by the time we were through thinking about it the kids and i were going along, and instead of a month we thought we had better take three, and see england and france and italy and maybe run over to Greece.
my new book is half-finished, and savages comes out on june 22; everyone thinks it will sell and we’ll know pretty clearly by the end of a week or so. their first printing is 7500, and 10000 is regarded as a best-seller, so if they go into a second printing we are doing okay. right now, we know definitely that it will pay off everything we owe, and put us in a fairly comfortable position, with stanley’s salary, so that we may be able to get a house this year and settle down for a while. like always, the future looks good; it’s tomorrow and the day after that are rough.
if you saw the house we’ve been looking at, you’d know we were crazy. it’s fifty years old, with two acres of land, a two-story barn, and sixteen rooms; within walking distance of the school, although a good hike from the college. two years ago (it was one of these old manor houses, with big high ceilings and infinities of space, big arched doorways and lovely staircases) it was completely remodeled into four apartments, and the owner wanted to remodel the barn into four more. he died, and the property went to his wife, who says she is far too old to manage an apartment house, and is so anxious to sell that she is offering it at an extremely reasonable price. we both love the house and if we could manage it when our ship comes in in january, would be very tempted to buy it. it’s also in a good neighborhood for the kids, with lots of other children, most of whom they know already; it would be the first sidewalk we ever had, and jannie could learn to roller skate at last. the grounds are tremendous, all lovely lawn with shade trees. if we could buy it, the biggest problem, of course, would be putting four families out, and she would take this responsibility on herself. if we were willing to give two of the tenants, who between them have ten rooms, a month’s notice, they would move without trouble, since both of them are fairly well off and can find comparable places easily; the other two are the two little back apartments, and would have more trouble; they would need more time, but we could give them definite notice and move into the front ten rooms; we would even keep them on for a while, since their combined rent would pay the mortgage payments.
stanley got so virtuous about not drinking that i couldn’t stand it, and quit too, just to show him it wasn’t so tough. now our house looks like something out of the w.c.t.u.*5—with stanley drinking grape juice and me drinking ginger ale. i haven’t paid much attention to it, actually, since in this heat all i want anyway is something with lots of ice cubes, but stanley still suffers. i suppose it is helpful, though; he bought a suit last week in new york, in preparation for teaching, and had to get two sizes smaller than his last suit. my clothes are beginning to bag, too, and with the money i figure i’ve saved not drinking i’m going to order me two summer dresses from saks, which i saw in an ad. now i go into the liquor store about once every two weeks and buy a bottle of whisky, which we keep to serve guests, but we find that when we play bridge in the evening our guests usually end up drinking ginger ale, too, and everyone always says my, it’s so much pleasanter not drinking, and why didn’t they think of this before, and stanley goes into the other room and cries.
we’ve started using our porch again and we have all our meals out there. it’s all screened, and wonderfully cool and pleasant, although kind of full of kittens right now. they’re almost ready to give away. stanley—who takes the stand that six cats are too many, although he is outvoted five to one—was just sounding forth tonight on how we were all trying to kid him into thinking we were going to give away the kittens, and hoping he wouldn’t notice that there were still six, when there came a meow at the door and laurie, answering, let in a completely strange, beautiful, half-grown three-colored cat, who was starving and wet from the thunderstorm, and very badly frightened. with stanley jumping up and down and screaming, laurie and i took the poor thing into the kitchen and fed it, and then shut it into the cellar to get warm and dry off. we told stanley we had turned it back out of doors, but i’m afraid he didn’t believe us. I’ve always wanted a good three-colored cat.
i wish i could talk you into a visit here when the weather is good; artichokes here have come down to fifteen cents apiece, so you see we’re getting civilized. also, our horseshoe court is set up and every day now, after lunch, i go out and let stanley beat me two games of horseshoes, and if you don’t think iron horseshoe pitching in the hot sun is work, try it. i figure by the end of the summer i may be able to beat laurie; right now i tend to get the horseshoes around the branch of a tree, or through the front window of the house, but stanley says the walking i have to do to get them back is very good exercise for me.
well, as i started to say pages ago, we are not in any dire straits financially, so if it is inconvenient to you, we can certainly manage. if you can spare it, though, we’d be terribly grateful, and, in either case, thanks.
book for you this week, if all goes well. much much love from all of us.
s.
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
Wednesday, June 17 [1953]
Dear Bernice,
Momentous day, here it is. Elizabeth*6 herself.
Barry is much better, out of the oxygen tent for four hours today, very cheerful and happy.*7 He has
been having everything from sulfa on, covering every medical discovery of the past ten years, and still gets injections regularly, to his vast annoyance. We have had cause to be very thankful for our small, modern, neighborly little hospital, where the head nurse in the children’s wing is the nurse who was with me in the delivery room when Sally was born; she is a lady whom I never wanted to see again, but she feels a motherly interest in Barry.
So, at any rate, back to work again. I am very firm about Roger’s giving me five thousand dollars to find out how Elizabeth comes out, and I hope he is happy enough over Savages to be agreeable.
I am most anxious to know what you think of Elizabeth. And I plan to relax and do some stories now. I wrote you once asking if you thought Mrs. Souvaine*8 still had the manuscript of Clothespin Dolls and if she might send it back to me. I figure I ought to have all that stuff in case someday Roger wants a Savages Revisited or The Son of the Savages Returns or some such.
Best,
S.
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
June 23 [1953]
Dear Bernice,
I feel like the end of a soap opera. Life can be beautiful. And so Mother Shirley faces the future unafraid, with little Barry on his way to recovery, and every hope for her book’s success…
We celebrated the great day*9 in our own peculiar fashions; I found a four-leaved clover, Laurie hid under a blanket in the back of the car going through the center of town, because the Times referred to him at one point as a girl, and Jannie fell into a pond containing an alligator. (She did; it was a baby alligator, but she ruined her sandals.) Carolyn Wolfe wants me to come to New York next week for M.M.McBride*10 and assorted interviews, and if I can find a pair of stockings I shall probably come, bringing my girls for protection.
Our copy of the book contract is of course in storage; can you discover the royalty rates and dates of payment? We are trying to figure out whether we can make the down payment on a house this summer. The bank people are thrilled about the reviews, but will not accept them as security.
I, too, am thrilled about the reviews, although the children snatch the papers away from me; they are all now literary critics.
I figured about six months to finish Elizabeth, perhaps a little longer. I think Doctor Wright can be livelier with a little emphasizing of the sensational nature of his discoveries, and I think I shall step up the old boy in the next draft. I’m glad you like it.
Best,
S.
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
friday [July 1953]
dearest mother and pop,
this is the first time in about three weeks that i’ve been able to sit down and write a real letter, and i’ll bet something happens to interrupt me before i’m through. it’s hot, and everyone is talking about going swimming.
first of all, you haven’t gotten the book you wanted because the publishers haven’t sent them to me yet. there’s a big delay on filling orders, and we think it may be because they’re going to have a fourth printing. so far, the last i heard, it had sold about fifteen thousand, and last sunday it was sixteenth, or rock bottom, on the times non-fiction best-seller list. this week it could either be fifteenth or out of sight. altogether it’s doing beautifully, and we’re so excited; it has already filled out our wildest expectations.
i’ve signed up with an english publisher. There’s been all kinds of nice publicity, and—for a wonder—even a few ads. fortunately the kids have forgotten all about it, and no longer leap to see their pictures in the paper. i went down to new york for two days, and took along sally and jannie; a publicity trip for which the publishers paid all expenses, and it broke my heart to go to a fancy restaurant knowing that f and s would have to pick up the check, and hear sally order a peanut butter sandwich. the girls had a wonderful time. our little local train was on strike, so we had to take a taxi to albany, and consequently the train trip was practically painless.
they had gotten us a suite in a nice quiet hotel on park avenue, which turned out to have television in the rooms, so the girls alternated between the television set and the window. it was, naturally, during the worst hot spell so far this summer, so it was hard for them to get to sleep, and when it got too bad i just put them in the bathtub and let them play there as long as they liked. the newspaper interviews were in my half of the suite, so i sat and drank tom collinses with all these people and the girls splashed in the bathtub and came out once to have their pictures taken. then they would have their supper sent up and sit in front of the television set to eat it. we had only one day when we had to go out, and that was when i had to be on mary margaret mcbride’s radio program. while i was on the program the girls went to the central park zoo with the f and s publicity director. i had a horrible time with m.m. mcbride, since she sat down with no rehearsal at all, announced that we were now on the air, and then informed me flatly that she had not read my book, or anything else i ever wrote, and so would i please tell her all about it? i found this highly offensive, since i was there by her invitation, and thought she might at least have read my book, so i said something to that effect, and this annoyed her. i found that there was nothing i could say to someone who had no idea of anything i had been doing for the past twelve years, and so didn’t say anything. as a matter of fact, it’s probably just as well; i was so mad that if i had tried to talk at all it would have been worse. stanley and laurie listened up here and said it was awful. i also refused to call her mary margaret, which hurt her feelings. she kept calling me shirley, which annoys me, so i kept calling her miss mcbride. she kept shaking her head at me and mouthing “mary margaret, mary margaret,” and i went right on obstinately saying miss mcbride. i hope you never heard it; it was a real display of temper on both sides. mary margaret said afterwards that it was the first real failure she ever had, and then she tried to kiss me goodbye but i ducked.
i then went off with the girls and had a fine time at the cbs studios tape-recording another interview, but this time with a nice man who let the girls play with the microphone and talk to each other from different rooms, and then the girls got taken home and he and i sat down and talked for a long time and he said they’d cut the recording and use it the following day, but no one i know ever heard it, so i don’t know how it came out. we came home the next day, to find that stanley and laurie had had a wonderful time taking care of barry; laurie had taught him to drink out of a glass and feed himself. that is going to be my only trip to new york for the next ten years, i hope.
last night we had a beauty of a storm, which i slept through until sally and jannie, operating as a committee of two, arrived in bed with me to say that the rain was coming in on them; not that they minded, because it was nice and cool, but their beds were getting wet. so i got up reluctantly and went and closed all the windows. nothing is any cooler this morning, however. my fingers stick to the typewriter keys and i am dripping wet.
stanley cannot say a word about my writing such a long letter; he usually protests that all these pages would make a story, but he has just figured out that savages is selling five hundred copies a day, making about three hundred dollars, and when i am making three hundred dollars a day just sitting around he can’t open his mouth whatever i do. the book, by the way, went up to twelve on the best-seller list yesterday. reviews continue good. our little bennington bookshop has more orders than they can fill.
my car is still my dearest toy. it is so beautiful, and so fancy, and it is so wonderful to start out somewhere and know i’m going to get home again. the kids like to put the back seat down and just use the whole back as a kind of truck; the other day i had twelve kids in there, taking them swimming, plus one dog. we watch it all the time for the faintest scratch, of which our bad toby has already put three on the hood; he went crazy one day during a thunderstorm
and tried to climb into the car.
in january—imagine this!—we pay for the car entire, plus paying every other debt we have, including, of course, our debt to mother and pop; we are then solvent, with a car, a house, a dishwasher and washing machine, and money in the bank, saved up for the day when we want to build. it doesn’t seem possible, and all of it from savages. it may be bad luck to say it, but right now there doesn’t seem to be anything more we need in the world; with barry well, a house in the offing, and the book a success, we are about as lucky as we can be. keep your fingers crossed, and knock on wood; there doesn’t seem to be anything that can go wrong. plus the fact that f and s are enthusiastic about the manuscript for the new book, plus even the fact that the girls get a quart of blackberries a day from our own back meadow. the only fault stanley can find with the world is that milwaukee is only three games behind brooklyn, and moving up.
paul feeley, whose name is in the book four times, has figured out that, with a sale of approximately fifteen thousand, sixty thousand people have seen his name, and he is making book on where he will be in the best-seller list next week. there is a very small chance—good odds, though—that it will beat out the bible. can’t see it touching polly adler,*11 though.
stanley says i may not start another page; he wants his lunch. so lots and lots of love from all of us.
s.
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
August 16 [1953]
Dear Bernice,
It is two in the morning; I just woke up out of a sound sleep and leaped out of bed to re-write the last page of this thing, having apparently dreamed up a better ending.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 27
