The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  i was going to say some awfully profound things about the hobbit because of course that is (i think) the essential of all fantasy; clearly it is not written to satisfy the reader but began years ago when the author lay in bed at night telling himself stories to make up for the spanking or the fact that the other kids wouldn’t let him play second base; the non-important things are the ones not important to the author’s ego. (why do any of us write, come to that?) i think more of islandia,*2 which is revolting in a sense, full of adolescent prurience (for two hundred pages his hero—a harvard graduate, no less—tries to bring himself to a pitch of boldness so he can put his arm around the heroine, but of course once that first deadly step is taken things move on apace, but still very much of the sixth grade) and yet the book stands as the work of a grown man. and i think that the queen of the elves is exactly what leaped to tolkien’s mind when he thought women; of course, english dons are easily distinguished from errol flynns, and i daresay tolkien’s whole knowledge of women might have been early concretized by terror of his headmaster’s wife. in any case it is only one step removed from boy’s life and you know what they thought of girls there. funny, you don’t notice the lack of females in robinson crusoe; i wonder if it isn’t because dafoe never felt called upon to explain that he simply couldn’t care less. i am not very coherent; what i am trying to say is that the idea of women as a particularly irritating mystery is very close to tolkien and the islandia man and consequently they get very stiff and sophomoric about the reverence due to queens and princesses and you only know they are not actually the captain of the cricket team or the president of the senior class by the fact that they are insistently referred to as she. i cannot read the second volume of the ring anymore because i think it falls apart, as though as a child he had gone over and over lovingly the fellowship and the good comrades who set out with him (“i will take the ring, although i do not know the way.”) on his grail-journey and then found himself, grown-up, without the boy fancy which would continue the story, and had to fall back upon learning and logic to complete it. (surely when he was a boy the book ended with his becoming king of all the countries and on very good terms with his adored mother, the queen of the elves.)

  i have a morris minor convertible, black, with red wheels. for heavens sake you don’t need to know how to drive. i have had the morris for a year and it giggles when i drive it and on the ice you only need to head it toward the nearest snowbank and it stops, giggling helplessly. stanley does not drive either but he likes me to drive fancy cars which are of course always registered in my name (i have two cars now like two heads) and he makes sure they are heavily insured. i was so delighted with the morris that I went out and bought a hillman station wagon but it doesn’t giggle so now laurie drives the hillman and i go along madly with the morris. last summer i had my ultimate vacation: i was alone. on the fifth of july i found myself alone in the house, but alone. it was the first time in my remembered life that i had been completely alone for any length of time. first thing was, no cooking. i went out for lunch. (for lunch!) i went out for dinner. i did make myself breakfast because i was ashamed to go out for coffee. it took me four days to fill the dishwasher (because i ran out of coffeecups). i slept. the phone rang and i said sleepily that i was sorry, i was really too busy to go anywhere for dinner. after a while i packed a suitcase (new; i bought it specially) and morris and i took off. it was great. we stayed at inns and told people fantastic stories and wandered. morris wanders beautifully (“there’s a road; let’s take that”) and we did get home in time.

  if my typing seems erratic it is because laurie (erratice? escarole?) is playing one of those stereo test-records just downstairs and the air in my room is full of airplanes flying just overhead and dive-bombing into the typewriter; every time i stop to light a cigarette i duck. engine trouble. you can’t send a mere boy out there, lieutenant. it’s not right, i tell you, it’s not right; that crate hasn’t been up in fifteen years.

  our stereo is new, of course. i gather from the way you toss around words like “momaural” (one-eared mother!) that you are old hands at this kind of thing. ours was set up last week by a friend (ralph ellison; do you know his great book invisible man? because it was written in our house with sally sitting on his typewriter tormenting and he would really rather set up electronic equipment than write) with barry’s help (“barry, hold this wire”) and of course they won’t let me run it but i like to sit and drown in it. someone turns it on for me. whenever i turn it on the television set lights up or all the cats get blasted off the couch. jerry’s pretty close, sir. better get the women under cover. oh lord, clue is coming. (“mommy please try to pay attention. it’s mrs green in the conservatory and that’s just laurie’s record.”) my god they’re bombing the village.

  best, best,

  s.

  • • •

  “No, I’m sorry, we can’t come tonight. Stanley is cleaning his filing cabinet.”

  [To Jeanne Beatty]

  friday [February 12, 1960]

  dear jeanne

  ha. you have caught me. you knew I was just sitting here at the typewriter pretending to work. longing for a letter from jeanne so i could answer it. feeling generally irritable and sharly (snarly shirley that is) because barry is sniffling and home from school and cannot go to his valentine party even though i made millions of valentine cookies (my ha has not come back. the typewriter man says he can put it back but he must keep the typewriter for three days and wouldn’t i look like a fool pretending to work without a typewriter?) and laurie for some unspeakable reason is lunching at the rotary club and joanne is lunching at school and if i had been smart enough i could have let sally take her lunch and shared a small cup of chicken soup with barry but now i must Make Something. longing for a letter from jeanne so i could read it, i do mean. your letters are wonderful fun and i won’t do without them. besides you can’t afford not to write because stanley in a fury figured out that considered in terms of pure writing time my letters are worth forty dollars a page if only you could find someone to buy them. he has come upon the grisly notion of editing my letters after my death and has made me write my mother—to whom i write about twenty pages every few months—and tell her never to throw away anything i have written her so the poor woman will really have to get an attic built onto their one-story ranch style california house to store my letters. if i locate anyone who will cough up forty dollars a page i will let you know. (he also figured once that the brownies i made were worth six dollars a brownie. this is because he grudges every minute i do not spend writing although he is very fond of brownies.) he was thinking about death because he had to fly to detroit last tuesday. he will be there for four weeks with perhaps a quick trip home in the middle (home home in the middle) and he will give four lectures at wayne university on Poetry and Criticism and i read them and they are very nice. the first was last wednesday night and according to a small family tradition we all stopped whatever we were doing at eight-fifteen and said bon chance papa. we must tell laurie bon chance in two weeks; he is the enchanter in the bad children and the high school is doing it in the district play contest although they put my particular hate of a girl in as gretel and consequently i will not go and see it besides i am sure everyone will turn around and stare at me when they get to the crack about the school principal because it is well known i am scared of her. i got a check this morning from royalties for the bad children so someone somewhere is putting it on. i can give it to the local high school royalty free which is almost certainly why they are doing it. i had another letter this morning, too; may i tell you a funny story about it? yes?

  you must know, then (continued she) that during the summers i spend one week in august at a garden spot called suffield connecticut where they run a reader-writer conference and several nice people like louis untermeyer and william jay smith and shirley barker*3 are permanent staff and so am i; we enjoy oursel
ves enormously. our duties are light; all entering students are required to submit manuscripts and the first day we staff divide up the manuscripts, generously urging one another to take the heaviest ones; we then read the manuscripts, you perceive, and we are expected to meet for an hour individually with their several authors to discuss. (paddy colum*4 is always there too but no one has ever managed to communicate with him about reading manuscripts; we just sit and listen to him talk in that wonderful voice.) at any rate i am regarded (complacently i say it) as outrageous because i insist upon having a pitcher of water and a bowl of ice delivered to my room one hour before lunch and one hour before dinner and i set a bottle of bourbon on the table and people tend to drop in for a drink before meals. so they put me in what they call their guest house which has a little living room so i can conduct my orgies away from the students. i think this is charming but i do deplore their giving me a lady named marjorie freer*5 for a roommate. marjorie is the sweetest person in the world and i took a wholly unworthy sideswipe at her in that article on children’s books because she does write things like violet girl horticulturist and damn me she sells them too and teen age girls read them except i told joanne she could read them in the library if she wanted to but not to bring them home and marjorie sent joanne one and it was about a girl (teen age) who opened a little bakery in her home because her father was an invalid and her mother could not support the family (small brothers and sisters; our marjorie does not miss a trick) so dorothy girl baker soon owned her own factory. you know. but that is exactly what marjorie is like. she kept coming into my room at night and sitting on my bed while she put up her hair and we had what she called—i swear to this—girl-talk. my notion of girl-talk is somewhat conditioned by the hard-bitten faculty wives at bennington college but i honestly found myself solemnly discussing things like My First Dance and Should I Cut My Hair? (really i don’t think so marjorie dear; it looks so nice the way it is). marjorie thought the world of me and told everyone what a sweet child i was (she was really only about three years older but there is a type of female which finds me childlike perhaps because i sit with my mouth hanging open while they talk about slip covers). marjorie and i got along simply wizard together from the very start. when we divided up the manuscripts at the staff meeting marjorie was supposed to take juvenile stuff and i was supposed to take short stories. the boss reads off the titles and everyone says oh give it to marjorie or oh give it to bill or why not save that big stinker for louis. he reads off a title “how Johnny went to the party” and everyone said juvenile juvenile give it to marjorie. marjorie accepted it, remarked with her usual martyred sweetness that it was not just one story, but three, but never mind, she would read them. there. this is a long introduction to a short story.

  marjorie and i took ourselves off to our shack, and marjorie sat down in her room—good old marjorie—to read her manuscripts because she had said she would. i, having managed to leave my stack of manuscripts in the dining room (i always lose them and don’t think it isn’t on purpose) was lying on my bed drinking bourbon and reading a mystery story when marjorie strode into the room, dead white, eyes flashing, lips trembling. “this,” she said tensely, “this is NOT A JUVENILE.” she was holding “how johnny went to the party” and other stories by one corner, at arm’s length. “so?” i said. “how dared he?” she said and she does honestly talk like that. “how dared he? he knew there were ladies at this conference.” “yeah?” i said, interested now, and reaching out for the stories, “let me read them.” “no, no,” said marjorie, backing up, “you mustn’t read them; they’re not fit for you to read. you have a good clean ladylike mind and—” “i have not got a good clean ladylike mind,” i told her, and snatched them.

  well, she wrung her hands and entreated me not to sully my pure mind with such trash but of course i was already reading them. the second story was called “luanne and the hired man” and the third one was called “jenny’s profession” and while there was not actually anything in them i have not read before i do have to admit marjorie could have made a good case for the mind-sullying. they were also abominably written. because i am a nasty sadist I told marjorie i would keep them and maybe even read one in my class and i presume marjorie went in and cried herself to sleep. the author—a gentleman named (stanley says i made this up) wolf, was in my class, as it happened, and was exactly the kind of shy, nice-mannered fellow you would expect; what i had in the stories was his dream world and outwardly he was a mouse. Understand, the stories were not obscene, or pornography, but simply the racy fancies of a timid fellow. one who reads exclusively—he told me later—playboy and the various men’s magazines. i did not have the gall to read one in class, but toward the end of the week he came up to me after class and asked if we could have a conference about his writing. i said certainly, although i wondered if i was quite qualified to pass judgement, and it developed that the only time he was free was at five that afternoon and i—not thinking, and determined not to give up my before-dinner cocktail because you had to have something before facing that crew at dinner—said come down to the guest house at five, then.

  i forgot to tell Marjorie that he was coming.

  at five he knocked on the door and i opened it and said “come in, my wolf, come in,” and turned and went into the living room; when i realized that he had not followed me i looked around and he was standing in the doorway holding his hat looking terrified. he was looking at the coffee table where there was a bottle of bourbon, two glasses, a bowl of ice and a pitcher of water. i suddenly began to feel a little bit like theda bara*6 and i kind of wished there were silken hangings around instead of the pictures of the last ten graduating classes from suffield academy, but i made myself very brisk and said, “do come in and have a drink.” “i have a wife and two children,” he said with a sick little laugh. oh, for a tiger skin or at the very least a snake bracelet. “doesn’t your wife let you drink?” i asked him. (i couldn’t help it.)

  “you go ahead and have one,” he said, still with that little weak smile.

  “well, sit down anyway,” i said.

  “i’d rather stand,” he said.

  “of course,” i said. “Well, mr wolf, about your stories—”

  “i just write that stuff,” he assured me hopefully.

  “of course,” i said. “what I wanted to say—”

  “I only write that kind of thing for—well—fun. i mean, i only write it because—well. i mean—”

  then the door to the bathroom opened and marjorie, clad in an inadequate bathtowel, came tripping into the doorway. “hi, sweetie,” she said, not perceiving mr wolf who, his worst nightmares come true, was looking from one of us to the other with the most outrageous terror i have ever seen on a man’s face. then marjorie saw him. “yeek,” she said distinctly, and took off; mr wolf, clearly thinking she was taking off after him, scrambled wildly for the front door and out. i don’t know what he ever told his wife. he dropped out of my class, though, and enrolled in bill smith’s poetry. marjorie was cross with me for about two days because, as she said several times, she didn’t see anything funny about it and she had heard me laughing. she had, too. i was draped over the arm of the chair gasping and howling with tears in my eyes. and this morning, six months later, i have a cold note from mr wolf. “I note,” the man writes, “that playboy magazine is publishing a story of yours. my congratulations.” a good loser, mr wolf.

  i have dined out since on marjorie and mr wolf. marjorie writes the darlingest letters but she is pretty busy now. she is deep in a new book about this girl who makes these ashtrays and things out of seashells. her mother’s sick, see, and…

  of course i would not go into a haunted castle with twenty schoolteachers. i would not go into a haunted castle with even one schoolteacher. and can you see stanley in greece trembling grapes with his beard? (no, no. no.) i cannot really remember what it is like to have a child under two, and glad i am for it
. i realize abruptly every now and then that barry is taking on that “really, mother” tone they get at a certain age and then they suddenly get into a discussion at dinner about town planning and i look at them and think goodness they are four people. also now it is nice to do things as a family, where it used to be something of a chore; we can all go out for dinner together, or have a family poker game (did i tell you about that? they play rough poker, particularly barry) or communicate through family jokes. i got kicked out of the city planning discussion because i said i liked our town better since the movie house burned down. stanley, red-faced, shouts in arguments, “everything in this world is either true or not true or one of your mother’s delusions,” and the children nod, all together.