The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  Cynthia Gooding*32 was there, and sends her love to all of you, as do Willis James and Langston Hughes and Marshall Stearns,*33 all of whom you met at Lenox. Langston says, Sally, that Sammy Price is playing now in a nightclub in New York, and Dad is going to see him and will give him your love. We had dinner one evening with Willis and Langston, and all they could talk about was Lenox and you kids. Cynthia was on the program the evening we went; it was held in the open in a kind of stadium, and there were over three thousand people there. Unfortunately Cynthia had chosen to wear a purple chiffon dress with a long scarf, and sitting up there on the stage with the wind blowing she had more trouble managing her clothes than she did with her guitar. There were some wonderful bands, and a man named Memphis Slim, who played and sang very much like Sammy Price,*34 and a new fine singer named Odetta, and the Kingston Trio arrived just as we were getting ready to leave. Cynthia wanted me to meet them so I could write Joanne all about them, but all we had been hearing all weekend was how disagreeable they had become since they’ve been famous so I thought there would be nothing good to write Joanne about them. After the outdoor program the performers (of whom Dad was supposed to be one) came back to the hotel for a big party, and since the program hadn’t ended until two the party went on until about four, and then a group of awful amateurs in the hotel got into a room, and sang until six in the morning. No one got any sleep, and no one could quiet them. The next morning they were singing again at breakfast and a lot of us were going to catch them and strangle them, but we had to go hear Dad give his lecture, which he did very nicely, considering that he hadn’t had any sleep. We didn’t want to stay on for any more because we were sure they were going to sing all night again and we were sleepy, so Dad and Cynthia headed back for New York and I started home about three in the afternoon. I got about halfway, as far as Springfield, Massachusetts, and found that I was falling asleep while I was driving, so I went to a hotel and got a room with a television set and had my dinner sent upstairs and watched television while I had my dinner and then went to bed and came home yesterday.

  I am supposed to be doing a Good Housekeeping story about Christmas, but it is very hard to think of Christmas right now. I never wrote to the man with the haunted houses because I have been so busy I haven’t had time. Dad is having dinner tonight with Jackie Robinson. He used to be a great baseball player in Brooklyn, and Dad is doing a New Yorker article on him.

  I got a telegram saying that my new book is being considered by The Book of the Month Club, which means absolutely nothing. They consider every new book that comes out, but if they should take it as one of their selections we would make a lot of money. New stove. We’ll hear the end of July. Everyone keep your fingers crossed.

  Now I really must stop and write about Christmas. Lots and lots of love to all of you; and write soon. Joanne give our love and thanks to Grandma and Pop.

  Love,

  Mom

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  november 2 [1959]

  dearest mother and pop,

  for the first time in almost four months the pile of work on my desk is down to manageable proportions; that is, i have only about three things to write, and twenty letters. i am very sorry not to have written for so long, but so much has been happening, and i have had deadlines following me around all the time.

  we are having our first really nasty weather, cold and rainy and windy, and of course everyone is sniffling. barry always gets just a trace of his old asthma when he starts to cough, and has to stay in bed; he has been down for a couple of days but seems fine today. everyone always has a cold on monday morning anyway.

  most of the news here is good, and some of it is simply wonderful. let me start with HILL HOUSE. it has gone into a second printing, is selling well, got good reviews all over, including a rave review from orville prescott of the newyorktimes, and has been taken by the reader’s digest for their condensed book in april. when my publisher called to tell me about the digest he said that by the way their minimum guarantee was thirty-five thousand dollars, to be divided between him and me, and for about two days i went around thinking he had said thirty-five hundred and feeling terribly pleased. stanley finally explained it to me. it means a good deal to pat covici, my editor at viking, because when i left farrar and straus two years ago he had enough faith in me to persuade viking to take me on with a big advance and not bother me until i had finished the book; now, of course, they will be more than paid back.

  it also means that for a while i can choose what and when i want to write and no starting a new book until i feel like it.

  most of all it meant that the day the news came i went out and bought a hillman station wagon, turning in the dodge with considerable joy. i get the new car this week; it is lovely, grey and white with red upholstery. it’s considerably bigger than the morris, but still not the size of the american small cars, and quite a lot fancier. laurie will now drive the morris, which pleases him, and the hillman—which is a four-door station wagon—will hold the whole family.

  i have also just signed the contracts for english publication; they like this better than any of my other books, i suppose because it is actually—and is intended to be, in spite of what time said—just an old-fashioned ghost story. time is usually nasty to me, which is odd considering that the book section is run by an old friend, but he always liked hangsaman and thinks i have never done another good book since, and ever since bird’s nest he has been convinced that i am actually a secret psychoanalyst, which is pretty silly when you come to think of it because i have never read more than ten pages of freud.

  oh, there is lots more news. we are going to europe, stanley and i, in the summer of 1961. by invitation. they wanted us to go in 1960 but stanley has to finish his book. it is because of jackie robinson, whose profile stanley is just finishing; jackie was invited by an organization called “cultural tours” to take a group of people on a sports tour of europe; they ask various people to lead tours in their field, set their own itinerary, and generally act as names to attract customers. the people met stanley through jackie, and wrote asking if we would be interested in leading a literary tour, so stanley said yes. jackie is taking his tour to the olympics. i want to see the great houses of france, and am busy trying to think of literary associations for them. of course england is easy; i will also finally meet my english publisher, who keeps writing me asking me to come for dinner.

  my new great interest right now has turned out to be english kings (richard III did not kill the princes in the tower) and of course all I really want is a couple of weeks at the tower of london and hatfield and bosworth, all probably housing developments by now. stanley has gotten me stacks of books on the tudors and the wars of the roses and i go around muttering dates to myself and considering writing letters to the london times.

  oh, yes. i am making a record. a firm called folkwaysrecords which puts out records of writers reading their own works has asked me to do a record of lottery and one other story, and since i will not go to new york to do it i have to try to get it done on the college recording equipment here.

  as you can see most of our news is actually HILL HOUSE because it is all happening so fast, but even otherwise things are going on. laurie is doing exceptionally well in his school work, sitting in on an english class at the college and piling up credit for his going to college next year (we hope). laurie still gets two or three letters a week from his girl, and they are meeting in new york at thanksgiving time, when he also has an audition with a williams college band on the chance that they may get a job on a boat next summer. he is also playing with the bennington college orchestra in a brass concerto; they will give at a concert next spring. he is also starring in the high school senior class play (which i wrote. and i will now see the world premiere of my first dramatic creation). joanne is directing her class play. she trie
d out for a local summer playhouse, and banked very heavily on getting in with them next summer. luckily the weekend she went to try out we had as house guests the two people who run the compass players in new york, and they said if she was turned down (which of course she was) to plan on spending a week or so in new york with them this fall and getting a look at off-broadway plays and maybe even get a chance on a future job in the compass theatre. this means painting scenery, of course, but she would love it. she may change her mind, though; her girl scout troop is taking a training course at the hospital in being nurse’s aids, making beds and entertaining patients, and she loves that; we may have her turning into a nurse.

  sally is so changed no one knows her. she came back from camp much less of a wild tomboy, and much more grownup. she is getting interested in clothes, and goes off to school each morning looking unbelievably neat and ladylike. she is in a dancing class at the college, and last year she was nothing but a pest, always rough-housing and wild, and this year she is the best in the class. this year she has a man teacher for the first time and he has awed her, so she is doing very well at her work and is generally altogether different.

  barry plays the clarinet, goes doggedly off to his lessons, is learning to play football, and brings home an endless series of young gents to climb in the treehouse. i can’t tell one from another but the other children point out that i can’t tell their friends apart either.

  we expect stanley’s father at thanksgiving; his father is much better and goes back to his office now, but cannot climb stairs and must be careful on his diet. he will eat turkey when he is here, though. fred wohnus had a coronary last month and is almost recovered, although still being very cautious. it is certainly the thing to have this year; i think there have been a dozen around and it seems that we are always sending off flowers to the hospital. everyone is giving up smoking and drinking, and living on cottage cheese.

  please write. i hope you can come east some time not in march, and get a look at some decent weather. everyone sends lots of love.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Leslie Jackson]

  wednesday [late December 1959]

  dear pop,

  i can’t tell you how upset and unhappy i was when i got your letter. can mother really think for a minute that i would dream of ignoring her on christmas? i can’t understand how she could believe such a thing, and why she doesn’t just assume that nothing came from me because it was held up in the mail or some such thing. actually, i ordered her a crazy little perfume gadget that i thought she would like, from altman’s three weeks ago, and it should have been there long before now. but mother should know that we love her and think of her on christmas and drink your health every year when the old christmas tree ornaments are taken out and stanley and laurie put more tire tape on the light strings.

  i am just terribly sorry that the gift was delayed, and that mother was unhappy; it just seems so incredible to me that she would think i had forgotten.

  will write again later. love to you both.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Jeanne Beatty, a fan]

  December 29 [1959]

  Dear Mrs. Beatty,

  Many many thanks. You have done us a great service. We knew Moomin*35 only in the big picture book, and never dreamed there was any kind of “real” Moomin book; we have now the publisher and such, and are ordering. Your Moomin was read with joy around our family.

  I have looked forward to writing you, and had promised myself a pleasant morning dwelling on dear books (do you know Unknown Magazine?*36) and of course find myself with half an hour, a sick typewriter ribbon, and twelve thank-you letters waiting. I have promised absolutely to begin a new book next Monday morning, after the children have gone back to school; that means that I must lock myself up in my cave for four dogged hours a day, and sneak a minute or so here and there for writing letters and making lunch (“You will eat vegetable soup again today and like it; Mommy’s beginning chapter three”) so if I do not write now I never can.

  Yours was the only kind letter I received. I am less than pleased with the unkind letters, which all come from librarians, and ask how we are ever going to beat the Russians to the moon if our kids read all this fantasy stuff (“There was a copy of that book about Oz in our library but of course our children could never manage to get through the first chapter.”) and recommend stern measures for my children, who are clearly never going to be able to cope with the modern world, and will clearly fall into all kinds of psychological pitfalls.

  I spent Christmas afternoon with an old friend who believes that the changes in the geography of Oz were due to the fact that Baum never intended to write a second book and kind of started fresh, as it were, with almost a new country and certainly a new illustrator. (Do you know the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis? If you don’t, don’t read the last one, where the children involved discover that they have all been killed in a railway accident and, being dead, may now stay in Narnia forever; we all found this a blasphemy and an outrage.) We gave our Sally the complete works (eighteen volumes) of E. Nesbit for Christmas, and are waiting in line for her to finish each one. Sally also asks how old your Shannon is, and does she like to write letters? Sally is a joyful correspondent, far more reliable than her mother. (Jay Williams’ Magic Gate? Or the Danny Dunn*37 series? He is a dear friend of ours, and particularly of Sally’s; the new Danny Dunn book is dedicated to her, and will be published on her birthday as a surprise; she and Jay share a strange world with their own calendar, in which Jay-Hey-Day is a feast day, and Salli’s Eve a magic ceremony; no one else knows anything about it.) I am enclosing with your books a piece of nonsense I wrote for my kids, which they have never let me live down; I do indeed regret the children’s song, which Laurie set to music and which I hear day and night.

  Again, many thanks. Best wishes to all of you for a wonderful new year.

  Most cordially,

  Shirley Jackson

  Skip Notes

  *1 Under hypnosis in 1952 in Colorado, Virginia Tighe “became” Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century Irish woman, and researchers apparently concluded it was the result of cryptomnesia. The case caused an international stir when it was published in a series of articles in 1954 in The Denver Post.

  *2 Rev. Alvin Kershaw was an Episcopal priest (Emmanuel Church, Boston) and noted jazz expert. He became famous when he appeared on the popular TV quiz show The $64,000 Question and stopped the contest after winning $32,000. He later credited iconic gospel singer Mahalia Jackson for talking him out of continuing. Stanley and Rev. Kershaw hit it off immediately and became good friends.

  *3 Leo Margulies was an editor and publisher of many paperback science fiction and fantasy anthologies. The contents of this obviously complimentary letter are unknown.

  *4 Joris-Karl Huysmans, French Decadent novelist most famous for À Rebours.

  *5 Edward R. Murrow was a popular radio and TV reporter who later hosted interview programs on television. Person to Person ran from 1953 to 1959.

  *6 The Sundial.