The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  I am lightheaded. I have a rough idea of what is going to happen to poor Erica*27 and if she had any sense she would pack up and leave on page 66.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To James Thurber]

  [summer 1958]

  dear mr thurber,

  i am sorry to have to tell you that i have almost no information regarding mr ross’ reaction to my story, the lottery. i never met mr ross, and all my dealings over the story were with gus lobrano;*28 i do know that when gus called me to say that they were buying the story he asked—“for our own information”—if i cared to take any stand on the meaning of the story. i could not—having concentrated only on the important fact he had mentioned, which was that they were buying the story—and he asked if i thought the story meant that superstition was ignorance; if the story could be called an allegory which made its point by an ironic juxtaposition of ancient superstition and modern setting, and i said sure, that would be fine. he said “good; that’s what mr ross thought it meant.” since at that time none of us, i believe, had any idea that the story would raise any kind of fuss, i have always assumed that mr ross and gus were only asking to make sure that their interpretation was a reasonable one; this “meaning” for the story was afterward the official one that kip orr*29 used in answering the letters that came in.

  mr ross had all the letters sent to me, including the ones which were addressed to him or to “dear ed” or to the magazine in general. because i am sentimental i put them in a scrap book, and it is now almost impossible to get them out again. i find, however, that i have the one note mr ross wrote about the story, and even that was not to me, but to someone else instructing that the letters be given to my husband to give to me, since farrar and straus might find them useful as publicity for my book of short stories, which was due to be published, and which—naturally—featured “the lottery.” since i cannot get the note out of the scrapbook, i will copy it for you and enclose it.

  if the scrapbook itself is of any slightest use to you, i will gladly send it on. it has, as i say, the letters which came directly to the new yorker and the letters which were forwarded to me, and the newspaper clippings and such. i have not bothered to keep it up since, although i still get letters fairly often asking me what that confounded story means.

  i wish i had more information to give you. since we were here in vermont during the entire tempest, i knew nothing except what was written to me; perhaps i am just as well off, not having had a chance to hear what mr ross had to say about it all.

  all best wishes,

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  [To Carol Brandt]

  June 9 [1958]

  Dear Carol,

  Here is the children’s play; the delay in sending it has been my son’s fault, because I have been waiting and hoping that he would write down the music, but he has just taken to his bed with a virus which seems to be half caused by too much trumpet playing in drafty roadhouses.

  Stanley says that if I can write and sell six stories this summer he will let me get a grey convertible with pale blue upholstery next fall; since the car always belongs entirely to me I like to let my gaudy tastes run wild, but it also means that I have to work for it. Consequently I am feverishly working away at another story, along with the book.

  About the book. I am glad you like the beginning; it is misleading, however, because due to the mishmash they are all going to get into later the present picture of Theodora and Luke is altogether misleading. (Misleading, misleading; you’d think I was running a paper chase.) Luke is not at all the sugary romantic character he seems to be now, but an exceedingly unpleasant young man, and Theo is an ass. The doctor is married; his wife, Erica’s sister and brother-in-law, and Luke’s mother will be among the occasional visitors, I think. Also, I have to find out what Erica is always feeling so damn guilty about; she must have been rotten to her mother.

  I am extremely sorry to have to say that we will not be able to get down on the 19th. I do regret it, because we were looking forward to seeing you, but an unexpected vista has opened up. Laurie goes off to work, the two girls go to camp, and my blessed sister-in-law has invited young Barry to visit them for two weeks at the end of July. That means that for the first time in sixteen years Stanley and I will be ALONE, in a kind of beautiful golden silence. So we think we will spend some of that time in New York and some at the Saratoga track.

  Have a nice trip to Italy.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  june 16 [1958]

  dearest mother and pop,

  in the past three weeks i have written

  1 children’s play, 3 stories, ⅓ of a novel, no letters and feel that it is time i quit everything else and wrote you. i had to get to work because my new publisher wrote me a very polite, very wary letter about how they would certainly like to know if i ever intended to send them a book, so i had to write them one. once i got to work on that it seemed reasonable to write up the stories that have been sitting around in notes, and the children’s play.

  we are just coming into the wildest part of the year, when all the kids are out of school and stanley still has to go, and the college is in a fever of term papers and final productions; from now on until the end of june we will be knee-deep in cocktail parties.

  we are all well and very excited with plans for the summer, although everything will happen at once—june 28 is the college commencement, the day laurie leaves for lenox, and the day the girls go to camp, not to mention the final faculty party in the evening; for some incredible reason, i am the chairman of an organization known as THE FACULTY WIVES COMMITTEE, a group which apparently exists for the purpose of making cheese dip for cocktail parties. now we have a president’s wife who delights in entertaining, so our little committee is not really much use; my first suggestion, on being elected, was that we disband, but they said it was not fair because i was just trying to get out of the dirty work, which i was. anyway i have the job of planning and running the final faculty party.

  i am feeling very important right now, anyway; last week bill fels, the new president, invited us over for a drink, and of course (we knew it ahead of time) what he wanted was to invite me to teach at the college; the literature faculty is going to be one short next year because howard nemerov is taking a leave of absence, and they badly need someone to teach his classes, or similar classes. at any rate, bill finally asked me and i was finally able to say no positively, but it was flattering to be asked. i did offer, at stanley’s suggestion, to help out in counseling next year, which would lessen the department’s work to some extent; it means that i meet half a dozen students one hour a week each, and listen to them talk. they are supposed to bring their college problems, work and such, to the counselor, and the counselor then channels the problems off to the people who can deal with them. all i have to do is listen, and there are two or three girls who are interested in writing and i can read their stories and steal their plots.

  stanley’s mother, father, brother with wife, and scott, spent memorial day weekend with us, and we had a great time. they always arrive with a car full of food and presents, and this time bunny completely captivated joanne by walking into the house in a flaming orange chemise dress—even laurie liked it—and bunny spent the entire weekend helping joanne put up her hair, and fixing the hem of a skirt, and such, and arthur spent the weekend listening to laurie’s tales of woe about girls. arthur and bunny drive a brand new convertible, and were perfectly willing to drive the kids around town so they could wave at their friends. altogether, a most enchanting aunt and uncle. i am kind of surprised, you know, that bunny had the nerve to wear that dress in public.

  the girls are going to the sam
e camp as last summer; the camp is only half an hour’s drive from here, and it is small and informal, with a lovely lake. the people who run it are comfortable, easy-going types who have four children of their own. last summer i used to make the grand circle, from bennington to camp to laurie at lenox and back to bennington, in about two hours. laurie is pleased at going back to lenox; he is getting to be quite a well-known figure locally, and sits in with various bands in various unsavory places every weekend. we hear of people running into him in roadhouses as far away as troy [New York]. he is making a good deal of money, and thank heaven, putting most of it into the bank. we are rather worried about him in general, because all he wants to do right now is play the trumpet and date the college girls and drink beer. it’s an odd problem, because all his difficulties seem to be reasonable ones for his age, but the one upsetting thing is the trumpet playing, which gets him into association with people much older, and perhaps sometimes not altogether suitable, and lets him into places like roadhouses where kids of his age don’t usually go. he seems very much older, by the way, and is certainly self-possessed and poised enough for a boy much older. stanley hears from his students that laurie “really took the place apart” when he was playing at a local roadhouse, and that’s all we know. if we ask him he tells us where he was, but it’s hard to keep track of him. he dates only college girls with cars, you understand; we wonder sometimes what excuse he gives for not having a car, since stanley hears everywhere that his son is eighteen years old, that being laurie’s story, of course laurie gets older every year but the college freshmen stay the same age. he entertained a young lady here last night, a very nice girl who is in stanley’s freshman class. they stayed in the music room playing records while we played bridge in the living room, and the minute i brought out food they showed up, both starved. unfortunately we were playing bridge with paul feeley, and laurie and jennifer feeley quarrelled in a most spectacular fashion about three weeks ago, and i am sure that paul went home and told jennifer about laurie’s date. everyone got involved in the laurie-jennifer business, and i wish i could write it as a story. laurie did a really splendid job of offending everyone including his mother and father. he and jennifer were supposed to be going steady (horrible phrase) and laurie disregarded the rules by going out with another girl—actually, three other girls—and then got sore at jennifer when she did the same thing. there was one high point when he walked into the local soda shop and there, scattered around the tables, were the girl he had a date with, the girl he had broken a date with, the girl he had forgotten a date with, and jennifer. how he got out and sneaked home i do not know. the story has a happy ending, though. a few days later an old friend of helen’s called her, said she was up for the summer with her son, who wanted to meet some nice young people, and would jennifer be interested in introducing him around? it turns out the son is eighteen, in dartmouth, has a car, and was immediately taken with jennifer, and laurie is furious. she apparently had the good sense to wave at laurie when she drove past with her young man.

  we took the whole crew of them last night to a special college production, which was the most wonderful thing i have ever seen; the drama staff chose a harlequinade from sixteenth-century italian drama, and did it with fantastic sets and a lot of acrobatics and slapping people with wooden swords, and they opened it with the entire cast of fantastic creatures parading down the center aisle of the theatre banging a drum, and they run up onto the stage and put up their set, banging into each other and standing on each other’s shoulders to put up the curtain, and so on. stanley and i went to see it the first night, and were so delighted that we wanted to go again with the kids, and then found that we couldn’t get tickets. we got in touch with the head of the drama department, and told him our sad story, and he reserved the first four seats in the front row for us, so we had the best seats of all. at one point in the play this guy—who is a kind of stage janitor, doing a clown act with a mop and pail, and delighting the children—comes to the front of the stage and pretends to throw the water from the pail into the audience, only it is confetti, and is supposed to scatter over the front few rows; this was done right at our side of the stage, and we were looking forward to the moment, because it always raised great shrieks in the front rows; of course, we hadn’t told the children. unhappily, last night, instead of throwing the confetti his hand slipped and he threw the pail too, and it went sailing past joanne’s ear and smacked a little boy in the row behind. so they were surprised, all right; sally and barry thought it was part of the play and were very pleased. the little boy wasn’t hurt. then a little later in the big duelling scene, a wooden sword got out of control and sailed into sally’s lap, which she again thought was part of the play and laughed happily until we made her give back the sword. i had previously put in a request for pantaloon’s ornamental mask, which was a beautiful piece of work, and at the end of the play it was formally delivered to me. as a result we all feel very much as though we had actually participated in a sixteenth-century theatrical performance, and all four of the children have a sudden vivid feeling about the commedia del’ arte. pantaloon’s mask is hanging in the living room. i am particularly delighted since the next thing they do at the college, next fall, may very well be my play.

  it was joanne’s fault. some of the college faculty kids got together with a drama student who wanted them to do a play. they did a haphazard informal play, mostly ad lib, and sally and joanne had prominent parts. the play was presented to a small audience, and was extremely well received. as a result they immediately wanted to do another, and were all enthusiastic until they got to the library and found that there were simply no one-act plays for children that were anywhere near their abilities. so, foolishly, i said sure, i’d write them a little play. i decided on a re-write of hansel and gretel, with the children as the villainous characters, always mean and quarrelling, and the witch won’t keep them and the parents won’t take them back. i wrote it in one evening, and the kids loved it. i called it “The bad children; a play for bad children,” and then laurie offered to write music for it if i would put in some little songs, which i did, including one called “mean old wizard blues,” to which he wrote a fine blues tune. unfortunately so far it is the only one written down; he can play and sing the rest but is too lazy to record them. the play got itself finished and sally sneaked a copy off to school and passed it around the fourth grade. it turned out to be too late this year to put it on, so they planned it for the fall, however, in the meantime i got a call from a school in williamstown saying that they heard i had a one-act play suitable for children to act, so could they possibly put it on next spring? i was still trying to digest this when our school called to say could they put it on? i had already sent over a copy to bill alton, who is the college drama head, asking him if he could give me some advice about technical things in it, since i had never written a play before and bill called back and said would this possibly be available for the college students?

  the result is that the play is now at my agent’s being copyrighted; it will be sold to one of the companies which publishes children’s plays, and i will collect royalties on it. i also put laurie’s name on it as the composer of the music, which may provoke him into getting the music written down, although maybe mean old wizard blues (it starts “i want a rich witch, baby…”) may not be just the thing for everybody’s high school. he’s also doing an incantation boogie.

  the college people love to do big stage productions, with odd effects and wild sets and lighting, and one reason this play appeals to them is the scene where the witch and the wizard set up a magic incantation, with a wild dance—laurie’s incantation boogie. i would love to see them do it.

  stanley had set ten o’clock last night as the absolute deadline for his class papers to be turned in, and was apparently very emphatic about it, because at five minutes to ten he asked me if i would run up to his college mailbox and collect the papers that were there, and when I walked into
commons at five minutes after ten there was a great cheer; about fifteen of his students had waited to see if he meant it and planned to pick up the papers. i explained that the extra five minutes was my doing because i wanted to give them a little more time.

  i hope you read this letter in installments, like a book. it is so much easier, actually, for me to write long long letters telling you about everything than it is to write short letters leaving half of it out. i suppose that is the penalty you have to pay for having a writer in the family. there are so many letters on my desk waiting to be answered; it makes stanley angrier than anything else to see unanswered letters. he says that i wait until there are so many letters they cover the desk and then start a novel so i won’t have time to answer them.

  we are going to michigan this summer, where i am supposed to lecture. they pay my expenses, which means that if i go by myself i will fly out for two days, but we are trying to arrange for all of us—that is, stanley, barry and me—to go, and the idea of going by airplane thrills barry. i am also lecturing at a writers’ conference in connecticut, where you lecture one evening and then sit in on discussions for the next two days, and they offered me expenses and a hundred and fifty dollars which is about average unless you are james gould cozzens. i wrote them and said to make arrangements at the hotel for three of us, my husband and one child were coming with me, and the next thing we know is that they have printed their official announcement saying that i am lecturing and stanley is joining the seminars as a visiting critic. stanley wrote them a sizzling letter saying that he was not accustomed to making his lecture dates through his wife, and that they had no authority to use his name on the program without dealing with him directly, particularly about payment, since the money they paid me did not include him as an assistant. we are waiting to hear from them saying they don’t want either of us, which would be fine. we keep running into this difficulty because when i go with stanley sooner or later they ask me to sit in on something, or give a brief impromptu talk to a few of the students, and of course it is expected that i am doing this out of pure goodness, since it was stanley they hired, and then someone else turns around and does the same thing to stanley when they hire me. the solution is to go alone, but we like going together and making a vacation of it.