The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  my birthday is december fourteenth, sagitarius. (i do not know which of those letters should be doubled.) lilydale? lilydale?*7 i have heard of down with skool,*8 but not the skin or the eighteenth ostrich.*9 you do not live in a city? in a suburb? (let me tell you a thing or two about city planning.) we are all house-happy and i ordered a fourteen-foot couch to lie on and listen to music to except laurie explains patiently that if it goes into the room at all we will have to stand it on one end.

  “and all that season it snew.” from a contemporary account of Richard 3’s military campaign.

  my book is so completely bogged down that i am almost frightened. quite seriously, writing these long letters to you (and, oddly, i do not write so to anyone else, perhaps because your letters are so delightful) does more good for me (selfish) than anything i can think of; it somehow relaxes and directs. i hope you will not find this too horribly conceited, and consequently will excuse long rambling incoherence. anyway i cannot get the book moving although the experience is hardly new; i have started so before. i have only a year and a half left to write it in, and so must get going. I do a page here and a page there and it is like modeling clay.

  if you are interested in stuff i am doing for magazines now let me know and i will lend you the carbons. i only read the magazines for the recipes. They send me copies but only a month or so after publication.

  i have decided since i am still shurly (surly shirley) that i must be catching barry’s cold. good. i want to catch cold. what? the rotary club? oh. well, he is president of the senior class and got asked. they had veal cutlets.

  valentines, valentines

  s.

  • • •

  [To Jeanne Beatty]

  [early 1960]

  dear jeanne,

  i have been invited by the new publisher of the oz books to do a long article on same; they will send me various unpublished materials and such; imagine the chance of spending a few weeks again in oz?

  no no—i hasten to the typewriter—i cannot agree with you about peanuts; the indefatigable sally wrote that man—schultz?*10—and got back a letter about how We Cartoonists (and he may even have said Artists) have an Obligation to You Young Folk and i swear he called himself We throughout. the very early stuff, perhaps, before he got to be We. sat in a bar one night (tim costello’s, third avenue, new york) and listened to walt kelly curse the people who were trying to put out pogo sweat shirts and pencil boxes. he says while he lives they will not. he made me a picture of albert alligator chasing a lady alligator (how can you tell it’s a lady alligator? well, it scandalized my mother) and it says “i love shirley jackson” and i had it framed and hung it over my desk and a great consolation in times of dreariness. he made sally a valentine of pogo proffering a motheaten bouquet.

  i had to take down the picture of frank gifford*11 on the refrigerator and burn it; i have now a picture of richard III and unless i am enticed into putting a bet on the roller derby it will stay. this is because stanley (stanley edgar hyman, my husband, professor of literature at bennington college, vindictive winner of bets, poker player, writer of profiles for the new yorker, stern bearded disciplinarian, who will not read hill house because he is mortally afraid of ghosts) has a knack for picking the losers and making me bet on them, he is also afraid of the electric blanket i gave him for christmas.

  barry—our spaceman-elect—says that 2+2=4 is not a universal absolute, since the mathematics of other planets may be non-euclidian (he learns this kind of thing from his father, who probably hasn’t got it quite accurately) but i do agree with you that children are the thing to send into space; at the very worst, it should keep them busy for decades in their little space ships, and the very concepts of space travel and non-gravity and light years belong more properly to the world of children than of sensible grownups; i personally have enough trouble running the automatic timer on my new stove. (they kept trying to attach an egg-timer and i kept trying to tell them that after cooking for twenty years i just knew by myself, somehow, when the eggs were done; you put on the eggs and plug in the coffeepot and set the table and put in two slices of bread to toast and those are four-minute eggs.)

  we moved out of westport because they always used caterers who made sweet martinis; everybody liked them. huysmans, yes, although he gives me nightmares. (so does proust. and most modern english writers.) i dwell these days happily in tudor england (all imposters if you really fancy richard III) and wander sideways into eighteenth century crime; i think my new book (which goes poorly, thank you) will be about a nice girl who murders simply everybody.

  i do not like peter pan. i don’t very much like button-bright,*12 either. do you?

  you are clearly not yet forty years old; one begins to perceive by then that both ends of the circuit are closed.

  oh dear. i went to bid jannie goodnight and she was trying to stand up in her new highheeled shoes (glee club concert, high heels required). laurie just got word that the band he plays with has a job on a liner next summer; they sail from new york the first of july, land in rotterdam, wander europe for six weeks, and sail home. i always thought somehow to see london before my children did; we do not go until summer after next. i go into a state of anxiety when i have to visit new york; how will i do in the capitals of europe? i want to see the tower of london, though.

  it is a wonderful pleasure to write to you. i go from month to month and year to year never writing letters because i cannot write little letters which are polite and unnecessary mostly because i can’t stop, as you see. you provoked me, you did; if you write to a professional writer a lovely long letter you are apt to get a rambling long letter back. it’s like sitting down to talk for an hour, and far more agreeable than most conversations. all best wishes to all of you.

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To Jeanne Beatty]

  thursday [February 25, 1960]

  dear jeanne

  frabjous day, sadly needed. your letter in the mail, which i read before the herald tribune then agent carol called and good house has taken both the things i sent them and something called family circle (as opposed to me, family square) has bought an old old story for some fantastic amount of money and stanley will be home one week from today. so, cheered, laurie decided to finish building the record cabinet, and except for the jolly sound of the power saw things are at peace. i have been deep in gloom and guilt; since there is no school this week and stanley is not here to enforce discipline i have been not waking up in the morning and then not able to sleep at night so i watch television which always makes me feel degraded and a trifle blind. just to get even with the world i told carol (now do i get even with the world or the word? they are both foul) that i was throwing out the new book*13 and—lip trembling—that i just didn’t see how i could ever ever ever write it so there, and got back the old tantrum-soothing routine, about put it aside for a week or so and get a new perspective and you know darling you always get discouraged at first and just don’t let me down on this because we both know it’s going to be great. bah. this before i had finished my coffee.

  whine whine

  damned book is nagging me so i wince. it is a perfectly splendid book, nicely planned, and if done carefully should work out true and complete; it has only one disadvantage—

  everything in it has been done before, by me or someone else. it is as unoriginal as an old sponge. you ask whether hangsaman started like this. yes it did. all of them do. but each one is worse because i nag myself by remembering the others. if i can get it off the ground at all it will go lofting until about page seventy and then come down with a crash. then this will all happen over again and carol will entreat me not to let her down and stanley will say put it aside for a week or so and then i will kick it to life again and about page one hundred and fifty the end will be in sight and i will be so encour
aged that i will go back and start over. the hell with it, actually. it’s no more degrading than watching television. and now i think of it why should i steam at you? you never said anything about getting a new perspective, or did you?

  i will endeavor to recollect myself. surely this loving dwelling on The Problem of the Artist in Modern Society is not fitting on a morning when i have had your letter. did i say anything that might indicate that i would write to you into a vacuum without getting your letters? no fair. i wait for your letters (what are you laughing at at breakfast) and won’t be deprived of them. anyone who can spoil three batches of fudge in a row might better be writing letters anyway. my habits irritate stanley because he sits down at the typewriter and says today i will write ten pages with half an hour for a cigar after lunch and today he writes ten pages and on tuesday he writes letters every tuesday and answers all the letters he has gotten since last tuesday and on sunday he files everything. and in the evening he says i will read these three books and take notes. and on wednesday he trims his beard. and if you think that on tuesday in detroit stanley is not writing letters you are drearily mistaken. so when he sees me spending a Working Day making a doll house out of an old carton he gets very nervous. or sometimes i look at pictures of houses or sing to myself or sit on the back steps telling myself stories and stanley frets. people were put into this world to keep busy at constructive things. he has always been driven by the nightmare of time; there are so many things he will never have time to learn, so many books he will never have time to read. i find this a Good Thing.

  how shall i say this? the playboy story. dylan.*14 did you know that they were not unconnected? stanley says sure as anything that whole pack around dylan is going to sue me for libel but i am outwardly innocent; i could not be supposed in actuality to have known anything about dylan’s death. (and don’t you tell.) john brinnin*15 (who will someday meet, i hope, the fate he deserves) took a crack at us in his book on dylan; among other things he remarked that our children were noisy. i feel i still owe him a little something. they were not any noisier than usual the day he brought dylan over.

  now later

  joanne called; this conversation:

  me: dear, any plans for next summer? any chances?

  j. yes; listen, is it all right if i work in a bar in chicago?

  me: DOING WHAT? DOING WHAT?

  j. i’ll ask. i’ll let you know. but is it all right?

  and stanley called and it is storming like anything in detroit and he is supposed to be flying tomorrow to akron (are these places real? you live out that way, you should know) for another lecture and i believe that one or another of these planes will fall down and i wish he would take a bus or something.

  previous ill-temper some modified. nice to know that faraway family is still remembering. Do you—oh, pussycat, do you—know flanders and swann,*16 the drop-of-a-hat cats? stanley said to me go out at once and get that record and i did and they are lovely lovely. or do you know dylan’s records? they sound like him. he taught me to say “not bluidy loikely,” and i can do it fine. you say it when someone tells you it’s time to go out and vote on city planning. no’ bluidy loikely, you say, no’ bluidy loikely. no’ me, myte. this is all welsh, except for city planning. someday i will know clearly how i felt about dylan. how far away?

  when we hitchhiked it poured rain all the time.

  you didn’t tell me about your course in architecture. did you major in it? (laurie is going to, i think; my family is one whole maggoty heap of architects) and at what college? laurie designed a house which to my eye looks wrong but i only like eighteenth century houses and baroque but at least i know when a kitchen has no wondows. (wondows are spaces for wondering in and any kitchen needs them.) my kitchen wondows are dirty and i will not clean them and neither will joanne because the house is so old that panes of glass fall out into your shoes when you rub hard. oh, about the picture of bix. how kind of you not to point out the scuff marks on the door beyond. what you so cavalierly call traffic marks are actually the boards of our fine old mansion floors, uncleaned, and they do not go out into the hall because vermont farmers were nothing if not sensible, and did not see any sense in using good wood to floor a hall where everyone was going to track snow anyway and besides we could not afford the sander for just every room, for heaven’s sake. that is an artificial doorknob which laurie is fond of sticking up just anywhere and hopelessly confusing stanley on the coat closet which he uses every day. (wait, wait, it is not the coat closet down there, no, really; the coat closet is…no. the coat closet which stanley uses every day—to hang up my coat which i leave on the floor—is somewhere else. that little low closet is….now wait. i knew just a minute ago. we use it all the time. it is a little low closet.) there is a definite cold spot in the hall because one of our several back doors opens upon it. melting snow lies deep just beyond the picture’s border.

  oh, jay.*17 or rather abrashkin; he does the research, is sick (in some fashion i never knew) and is largely unable to function; has to have everything read to him, cannot feed himself, etc. incurable. jay is an old and close friend of his, and so does the writing, so the style to which you object must be largely jay’s. jay was not originally a writer, but an entertainer, and still relies for his effects on sharp fast punches, which of course makes his style jumpy. privately, we both think it a shame that he took to writing at all, although his work with kids is incredible (they adore him) and some of that gets into his books, but he is such a great entertainer that he is really now a talent lost. his real love is medieval history. i suspect i am partial to the books because i am fond of the man; i can quite see your objections. he has blind spots, and in his adult books these are clearer; he loves to tell all about the witch cult in england in the times of james I, and so loses all perspective in character and ends up with what you rightly call “formula,” although it is formula in character rather than plot. what does come through, i think, in both adult and children’s books, is his genuine love of learning and enthusiasm for all kinds of off-beat ideas. the first time i met him was in college, and he—at that time apprentice to an african witch-doctor in new york—conjured up a silver tiger with emerald eyes in the living room of the house where i was living; many of us saw it, chanting mama loi, mama loi. he introduced himself as my father. We drank sour wine and danced on the top of a hill, and many years later he gave me the jade ring he wore that night because it was magic. i am to give it to sally someday. he introduced himself as my father so i could get out of the house because i was condemned to get in every night at eight unless my parents came. he sang all the time, jay. he knows a little something about everything, and a song about that. he is desperately anxious to be a success as a writer, and i do think the children’s books are far above most stuff being done today simply because of jay’s love for kids. i wish somehow you could meet him; you would know better what i mean.

  i am going to take off right here and now and get into the tub with lots of bath salts.

  * * *

  —

  fri

  oh, listen. in the mail this morning is a letter from some woman who lives on a paw paw lane in indiana and she is going to review hill house for her Fortnightly Book Club and she wants to know will i please answer the following questions like is the early haunting telepathy a quatre and what ever happened to the dog they chased out of the house? (you know, i went and forgot that dog? i don’t have the faintest idea how it got there or what it was but i do think telepathy a quatre is a lovely name for a dog.) she also wants to know why i said luke was a liar and a thief when he seemed like such a nice young man; she should know that luke is my dearest secret idol like essex in sundial and he is bad because i choose that he should be bad. he is named luke because stanley, who teaches the bible in one of his lit classes, was re-reading luke one evening and we got to talking about lucan devices*18 and the idea charmed me. but how can i t
ell this to a lady living on paw paw lane in indiana? i don’t have anything to say about the movie stuff, and don’t want to, but now—i may have told you—someone wants to do sundial as a movie, and a friend here in bennington is working on a project for making three stories (demon lover, pillar of salt, tooth, which were originally written as a trilogy) into a kind of art movie. do you know the stories? what do you think of this: they have been talking of running them together, not in sequence, so that the story lines interweave and the stories are separated by the use of different symbols and colors for each, with the same actor playing all three men, the james harris character (who is luke of course) and three different women.

  one of my difficulties with the new book is that luke has gotten into it. i am perhaps obsessed. i tried naming him charles but he comes through even so. i could name him king charles’ head couldn’t i.

  do you read jane austen or not since high school? i am sending you the carbon of the short good house piece because i like it; i have to have it back fairly quickly so that will make you write sooner. also it will make this letter look pretty odd, coming in a story envelope. sally and barry have just made a welcome home sign for joanne’s door. those fiendish cats.

  meow

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  monday [March 1960]