The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Page 39
Have you been following that poltergeist on Long Island? I am waiting to see how long they can hold out before they give up the house. You can’t win against a poltergeist. And no one but me seems to understand the recent heavy snows; do you remember the billions of gallons of water that disappeared suddenly in New Jersey about a month ago? That was clearly poltergeist work, but when poltergeists steal something like that they always have to give it back sooner or later. Those people in New Jersey are extremely lucky that it was cold enough to freeze. It was unfair, though, to send it as far as Vermont.
I am very anxious for news of the baby book; I certainly hope they like it.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
February 28 [1958]
Dear Carol,
I thought you should have my own highly-colored version of my telephone conversation with Mel Evans*24 last night:
(Assume the usual preliminaries: the phone has been answered by a small child, who says “Who? Who? Oh. Mooooooooooooooooom? Telephone. It’s some man. Shall I tell him you’re in the bathroom? What? Oh. Hello Mister? She’s coming.”)
Shirley: (snarling slightly) Yeah?
Mel: Shirley, this is Mel. Mel Evans.
Shirley: Hello. Did you send me a check?
Mel: I just wanted to tell you we thought the baby book was great. Simply great.
Shirley: I’m very glad to hear it. Now you can send me—
Mel: By far the best work you’ve ever done along these lines. Just great. I just got it yesterday and I read it last night and finished it this morning and I think it’s—
Shirley: I’m very glad you like it. Will you—
Mel: You were wrong about the horoscope, though.
Shirley: I was WHAT?
Mel: August 21 is the sign of Leo. My birthday is August 21, and that’s the sign of Leo.
Shirley: Well, if you want to be Leo you can, just so you send me—
Mel: I thought the work was just great. As a matter of fact, I thought the whole thing was just great. Just great.
Shirley: Listen, if we don’t pay our bill they’re going to shut off—
Mel: (tolerant amusement) Well, first I’ve got to raise the money, don’t I? I’m so broke—
Shirley: You’re broke? Listen, let me tell you what the man from the gas company—
Mel: And we all think it’s great because we never expected to see the whole thing so soon, and to have it come out so well. Of course it’ll be a couple of months before we get the rest of the material together, and settle about the name and so on—
Shirley: If you think I’m going to wait a couple of months for—
Mel: But we all think it’s just great.
Shirley: I’ll be glad to revise anything you like, but first—
Mel: Well, of course we haven’t gotten to that yet. But it’s just great.
Shirley: I’m very happy that you like it. So—
Mel: Well, I wanted to call you and let you know we think it’s great.
Shirley: It was very nice of you to call. And—
Mel: We’ll be talking to you, then. Goodbye, now.
Shirley: (hanging up reluctantly) Yeah. (Turns and goes into living room where Stanley is sitting drinking scotch and reading the Bible, Book of Luke) That was Mel.
Stanley: (anxiously) Did you ask him about the money?
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
March 3 [1958]
Dear Carol,
I am perplexed about the offer from CBS for SUMMER PEOPLE; as you know, I would do a good deal for a thousand dollars and would hate to turn it down. Can’t some arrangement be made with them? I know so little about television anyway that I have no idea whether or not this offer is a good one, of course, but these days, when I am not doing any stories, we get broker and broker faster and faster.
Is writing a television script very difficult? It occurs to me that some such thing might be my solution for that horrid LOUISA story, since I am wholly unable to handle it the way it is, and they taught me in college that Mann said an unmanageable story frequently works out in dramatic form. Also, I need the exercise; the start of the new book sounds too much like the end of the last one. What do you think?
That story is like a jigsaw puzzle anyway; it keeps bothering me because there’s a piece missing.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
“Now that I’m not pregnant he can have his sweater back.”
[To Carol Brandt]
March 6 [1958]
Dear Carol,
I will now make a decision. It is perhaps my fourth decision in twenty-odd years, and it makes me very nervous. But I shall not shirk.
Three years with CBS is all right with me. I know it is longer than you like, but it seems enough better than seven years to warrant taking it, to my mind, and besides, CBS is the channel we get up here. This is only my decision, though—you still get the final vote.
I am extremely sorry that I can’t manage Mr. Fischer’s suggestion about the super-market. It is entirely outside my experience: we are, around here, still the farm women who come into town to visit together and gossip. We shop in a small-town grocery which we call The Store. When young Larry got out of the army and came back to help his father run The Store he brought a lot of fancy ideas he picked up in the city and he even talked old Mike into putting in a frozen-food case, but we’re still a long way from a supermarket. You should hear some of the stories Larry can tell about the city.
I will try my hand at the ghost piece. I would avoid the Long Island poltergeist, I think, because very soon now it is going to turn out that the little boy is responsible; Stanley sometimes tosses me the Times when he is finished with it, and it does not sound as though the little boy can keep it up much longer. But there is a fine house in East Shaftsbury and I think I can put a ghost in it for Mr. Fischer.
Stanley’s students will get their first look at his beard when they come back next week. Since Bennington girls are encouraged to speak their minds freely I think it will not be long before Stanley shaves. I have tried to tell him that a man who associates constantly with three hundred and fifty adolescent girls and thinks he can hold his own by growing a beard is clearly living in a fool’s paradise but I am afraid it will take the students to point it out to him clearly.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
April 8 [1958]
Dear Carol,
I am hard at work upon my ghostly book, a poltergeist story, and a sad little true little tale about my recent experiences with a gentleman calling himself Harold who gypped me out of two dollars worth of tin. Harold led me into one of my rare contacts with our local constabulary, and there have been few faces as radiant as my young Barry’s when he answered the phone and found that he was speaking to Police Chief Silver.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
april 10 [1958]
dearest mother and pop,
it is one of the loveliest spring mornings you can imagine, and i should really be outdoors planting bulbs or something, but ever since i planted the twelve blackberry bushes upside down the children have refused to let me into the garden and so i am forced to fall back on the typewriter.
since we’ve had two or three nice days in a row everyone is talking about summer. we didn’t tap our maple trees this year because it was so rainy and cold and the sap wasn’t much good, so we will h
ave to use new york state syrup until next spring. last year we got enough syrup to last us through the summer.
our big surprise these days is barry. because all the other children take courses of one kind or another at the college, we decided to enter barry into a course in percussion instruments being given for the five to seven age group by one of the music assistants, and he has never had so much fun in his life. there are eight in the class, and they make enough noise for eighty. the woman who teaches the class has been concentrating, naturally, on time and rhythm rather than musical quality, and the first day she showed barry how his name sounded like two eighth notes, and showed him how to write them down on a piece of music paper. after a few classes, barry asked me if I would get him some music paper of his own so he could write his name in two eighth notes, so i got him a music copybook and he borrowed a pencil and went to work. this was on saturday, right after his class. by yesterday afternoon, when the class met again, he had filled up one book with written music and had started on a second. luckily, we had had weekend guests in the meantime, one of whom was a professional pianist, because barry was able to get some expert assistance when his music got to be too much for him. he insisted on being told about time differences, and then he started singing a little tune and writing it down. when we played it on the piano for him he discovered where he had gotten it wrong and corrected it. he took his music book to bed with him and sat there in bed composing, calling down every now and then to ask about things like triplets. when he handed his composition to his teacher yesterday i had to stand there and swear it was his own work, and explain that all we had done was answer his questions and when i had convinced her she went tearing out and found the chief composer at the college and showed it to him, and he came in and talked to barry, who was by then simply paralyzed with embarrassment, and said that if barry would copy out some of his music and give it to the composer he would set it for two or three instruments and they would play it at one of the college seminars. i daresay we will have to go one of these days and hear his first string quartet. pop will have a lot to answer for, if one of his grandsons is a jazz trumpet player and another a composer.
laurie continues to work fairly regularly every friday and saturday night; he is now playing with several bands, so never lacks for playing dates. he has been asked to come back to music inn again this summer and be a bellhop but he would rather see if he can play regularly with a band. we are quite unhappy because he has not been admitted to the putney school, where he very much wanted to go. he simply has to get out of north bennington next year; it’s getting worse and worse, and even playing once or twice a week doesn’t make up for the general miserable quality of the teaching in the high school and the fact that literally the only entertainment for the kids around here is hitch-hiking to the bennington movie. his only friends—aside from jennifer feeley—are the boys in the bands he plays with, and they are mostly williams college students, so that he is too young to associate with them unless they are playing. he still has the same problem of playing in places he couldn’t get into otherwise because of his age. jennifer is leaving next fall, to spend two years with helen’s sister, and so laurie will be all alone. by the way, did you get the clipping i sent you about the play he and jennifer were in? they went on to win that state contest, and were finally eliminated in the southern new england contest, beaten by a new york state high school. we drove up to middlebury with the feeleys to see the southern finals, and it was wonderful—practically the entire north bennington high school showed up; miss corcoran, the high school principal, was there, and everyone swears she took a drink in the inn before the play. we were the four most nervous parents you ever saw, and i think it was a relief to all of us when they got beaten. the north bennington high school has never gotten into regional finals before; this is the first time they have gotten past the first contest.
joanne is riding high these days. she spends more time putting on lipstick and nail polish and curling her hair than she does hanging up her clothes, and most of her planning seems to settle around a young man named oliver durand, oldest son of our doctor, who is a year ahead of her in school and consequently a very desirable catch. he takes her to all the school dances. the durands live on the college campus near the college pond, which is actually a kind of swamp about a foot deep, fine for ice-skating in winter, but usually dried up by summer. the kids have made boats, because the pond is unusually deep this year, and oliver’s boat is easily the finest; it is a raft with a pink sail and two people can ride on it, although i discover that it tips over easily. joanne’s greatest triumph is that oliver’s boat is named “joey” after joanne, and she is the only person besides oliver who is allowed to sail the boat. everyone is very jealous of her.
sally is growing at last. she can no longer wear barry’s clothes, which is a great relief, and she is looking forward to camp this summer. she is still studying french, and is still keeping her book order with her new york book dealer, who sent her another package a few days ago. tonight is the school spring gym program, when the smaller grades perform for their parents. if i can get through the unbearable excitement tonight, i must gather myself together to attend the lions club minstrel show on saturday night, to hear laurie play in the band. and next week joanne’s class does a polka for the p.t.a. you can see how busy things are. stanley refuses to go to most of these things because he says the chairs in the school auditorium are too hard.
sundial is still selling well, and has just about run through the second printing. it’s getting some fine reviews, and a particularly crazy set of reviews in the catholic magazines, which have taken it up as an issue. we got a furious review from a current catholic magazine saying that sundial was an outright attack on the catholic church, that the halloran house was actually heaven and mrs. halloran was the anti-christ and the other characters were dissenting protestant sects and true catholics everywhere should rise to defend themselves against this defamation. oh, yes—the first mr. Halloran was god and the poor old man in the wheelchair, kept prisoner by the heretics, was actually the true religion. considering that my information about the catholic church is extremely slight, i am very pleased to know that i managed to get so much of it in.
lots and lots of love to both of you, and come soon.
s.
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
April 29 [1958]
Dear Carol,
How nice to be in Portuguese at last. Here are the contracts.
Pat Covici wrote asking if I would possibly dare to commit myself on whether or not I ever planned to get a manuscript for him (that is not nice of me; his letter was so polite and kind) and I have just written him saying that I will send him a novel by spring 1959. Now all I have to do is write one. I also said I would try to get some pages to him in a month or so to see if he likes it.
I have also been called upon by James Thurber*25 to report, for his book on Harold Ross,*26 the reactions of Harold Ross to “The Lottery.” That was even harder, because so far as I know or ever heard the only reaction Ross ever had toward “Lottery” was a kind of mild irritation.
I have a kind of story about ghosts to send you, but all my life, from ghosts to Harold Ross, has been infuriatingly complicated by my new unconscious device for avoiding work, which the doctor, patting me gently on the wrist, calls “a kind of arthritis,” although I am sure he does not know any more about the devious kinds of arthritis than I do. At any rate, for days now I have been nursing a bad finger and musing gleefully upon his further statements that I have “a typical malformation of the fingers” and may “expect further difficulty.” In other words, if I can swing it, I need look no farther for excuses not to work. I flatly refused to go over to the hospital and stick my finger into one of those frightful machines they have over there, so he makes me keep soaking it in oil of wintergreen and not even the dogs will come near me.
/> I can’t keep it up very long, though. I’ll get the story out to you in a day or so, and then settle down, snarling, to writing a book for Pat.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
June 3 [1958]
Dear Queen Midas,
I am so excited over the way the novel is going that I keep sneaking back to it, during lunch, or late at night, to add just one more page. What I will do is get as far as I can before mailing it to you, and hope to get it to a point where something happens. As I tried to explain yesterday over the phone it has to start slowly because it is going to get so crazy so fast, and because the people and the house must be fairly well known before the ghosts show up. I have a note for later on which reads “Hand beckoning? Dog in fits? Moan?”
Looking forward to seeing you.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
June 4 [1958]
Dear Carol,
I am most almighty pleased with myself. I hit the bottom of page 66 at four this morning and decided to quit for the night; this morning, reading it over, it seemed like a good place to stop temporarily and a good amount of manuscript to send to Pat Covici. I do not think I will write any more ghost scenes alone in the house at night, however.
I am also annoyed at having chosen the name Theodora, which I seemingly cannot spell, any more than I can spell verandah.
Stanley points out that at the rate of twenty-five pages a day, or night, I could finish the book before we come to New York. He says Voltaire did, but of course, that was in French.