dearest mother and pop,
this is going to sound crazy. prepare yourselves. our lawyer is forcing us to make wills, on the grounds that our estate (get that!) is now of such proportions as to need handling, and if we did not make wills the kids would be involved in enormous tax and red tape problems if anything happened to us. also, we have to provide for the disposition of the books and the coins which are both collections of considerable value and—this is the kicker—my literary estate.
stanley’s literary works are fairly static; they bring in a small regular sum, but my royalties are growing every year and from them money is to be put aside for the kids’ education and such. it all sounds very pretentious, particularly when the lawyer gets it done up in that fancy language. anyway, my private papers are the point at issue now. stanley and sally have already arranged to publish my letters as joint editors. anyway the important thing is my letters to you over these years, which i pray you have kept, and will arrange for them to get back to me. stanley is most urgent about this, since he puts a higher value on them than i do, and i promised him and the lawyer that i would write you at once and make sure that they would be returned to me eventually. since i hope i have a couple of years still to go the problem is not very pressing, but the vital thing is that you not throw them out. since I only write long letters to you they must be a long detailed record of many years. i am almost embarrassed when i think of the mountains of pages they must make.
we were both charmed by the will-making. of course it was nice to know that we were worth so much, and infuriating to realize how much the government will take away. the children were delighted and spent a long pleasant morning dividing us up. if sally gets the literary properties then laurie wants the coins and joanne wants the books, leaving poor old barry with the house and land, and he finally decided he would make the house into a laboratory. joanne said well then, she would take the house and make it into a ski lodge. i felt absolutely like a character in a mystery story making a crazy will to get everyone fighting. will you let me know about the letters as soon as you can?
we have had near-spring the last couple of days; the snow has not gone, of course, but it has been warmer. it means our season of mud is coming. and summer plans are in the air; joanne has been accepted as a counselor in training at the camp where barry and sally will be. laurie of course will be in europe, and stanley and i plan to take a couple of short trips; i still want to get to salem, and we both want to go back to newport for a few days.
still no word on the movie of hill house. i suppose the hollywood strike has held everything up. i’ve told you, i know, about the art movie the drama people up here want to make of three of my stories; they have backing and a script writer and we are all to work together and they keep saying it will be great fun and referring to this fellow bergman who is apparently the greatest right now and has pictures playing all over new york and they discuss things like his mastery of symbols and such; we are to do a movie just like bergman. unfortunately, the college brought bergman’s seventh seal up here for a special showing and stanley and i went, all eagerness, to see the great art movie and about half way through i walked out because it made me actually sick. there is no question about his being great, but he is too rough for me. it was about the plague in denmark in the fourteenth century and altogether too graphic.
i had a rough weekend of it because i can’t walk. last week i slipped on the ice on our steps—like a fool, really; after a winter of walking on ice i should know better than to run up the steps in high-heeled shoes but i was in a hurry—and banged my knee; after a couple of days my whole leg turned purple and stanley called the doctor who spent two minutes looking at my leg, announced that i had bruised it and it would go away and there was no sense trying to do anything about it, and then sat for two hours telling us about his trip to the virgin islands. then on saturday i got my foot caught in our heavy metal storm door and got a bad gash in the heel on my other foot and for a few minutes i was hopping around the kitchen first on one foot and then on the other wondering how people could limp on both feet and so now i kind of shuffle around, unable to wear boots or even stockings. thank heavens they are nicely brought up; joanne did most of the work around the house this weekend, funny sally voluntarily scrubbed all the bathroom floors, and barry dusted. they were like a pack of little goblins, all busily telling each other what to do. and of course once i did the cooking, most of which i did sitting down, the girls were able to deal with serving and dishwashing.
laurie has made us the most beautiful cabinets for the stereo set; they are going to make the room look so nice. we have ordered a new sectional couch for what used to be the front room but is now the music room (where we have the television set) and new drapes, and laurie is going to make a huge coffee table and it will be beautiful, we are also having the house painted again as soon as the weather allows, and the living room chairs recovered. now that we are finally able to put some money into the house i am cutting down the cat population—over the strenuous objections of the children i got rid of all cats but seven who were close personal friends of one or another child, and had them all fixed so there will be no more kittens. also i am advertising again for someone to clean the house. stanley says to offer unusually good pay, since everyone is so discouraged when they see the size of this place. (this is all the money from the reader’s digest, by the way; when the movie money starts i don’t know what we’ll do.) it is nice to be able to fix things up. we may find that we have to get a new furnace, since this one is getting very old, but the idea doesn’t worry us half as much as it would have a year ago.
well, i must start my trip downstairs. it takes me quite a while. but i suppose they will want lunch as usual. write soon, and we are still hoping to see you in may.
lots and lots of love from all,
s.
• • •
[To Jeanne Beatty]
monday [March 1960]
dear jeanne,
i have been wanting to write for days but somehow things move too fast. college opened last week and this morning stanley had to drag himself out of bed and go teach and the campus, which has been so clear and empty all winter is now full of screeching girls always eating and wearing skin tight pants. it means the end of our peaceful winter; bennington, as you probably know, has a three-month off-campus winter period, when the girls are supposed to be pursuing their educations at various jobs and research projects, and the faculty hibernates. now it has begun again and already i feel tired. last night was the faculty cocktail party, officially opening the social season, and people who have lived within a mile of one another all winter emerged and blinked and greeted one another after three months. we have such an odd community; we are so isolated with no trains and only an occasional nasty bus and roads not fit to travel on most of the time, so we are forced to find all our social life in one small college community. it means we see the same thirty-odd couples all the time. now that the term has begun we have to be social again. that means a dinner party every saturday night, and all the invitations in return. it also means—which is worst of all—being entertained by students, either way it’s a headache. i stay rigorously away from the college, rarely mix with students, don’t know any of their little names, and so before any such function stanley has to spend half an hour or so briefing me on who i am going to see and what to talk to her about. i can manage the faculty pretty well, and even have some close friends among the faculty wives, but rarely see them; an affair like last night’s usually leaves me shaken up for two or three days because the impact of a big room full of people all talking hits me harder than the cocktails. i have luckily managed to establish a reputation for mild eccentricity, and now no one minds if i go and sit by myself in a corner for half an hour, and no one insists on coming up to make bright conversation because i am sitting alone. they are all nice people and i like them very much but they c
ertainly do all talk all the time. also i invariably fall down, not from drinking but from nervousness and unaccustomed high heeled shoes, and last night was no exception although i did manage to hold out until i was coming up our own steps and slipped on the ice. it is so beautifully quiet here in my study this morning, and no one talking. stanley is trying to make me learn to talk to people, particularly since i am giving more lectures and readings now than i used to and you can hardly give a lecture and not talk to people. i do all right, not even nervous, with the lecture itself, but then afterwards they ask questions or come and talk to me and i am numb and dumb. but i did lecture at williams college last week and stanley said that afterwards i answered at least two questions quite intelligently. mostly, at the party afterward, stanley answered all the questions for me; i just smiled charmingly and nodded. i never remember any words when people ask me something.
now i will have to leave this and go make lunch. why do they have to keep eating? that damn school keeps sending them home every day at twelve. hot dogs.
* * *
—
thursday
have been trying to work but barry has a friend, loud david, here, and polished prose goes out the window. david brought a tin whistle. depend on david.
so many things i keep trying to remember to write you but mostly when i am not writing i sit and dream about my castle. my big problem now is how to kill him; after reading ten million mystery stories i still don’t know a good way. i want something highly suspicious but possibly natural, like mushrooms but i don’t really know one end of a mushroom from another. some highly poisonous garden plant (not oleanders i just happened to find that by chance in the children’s encyclopedia) but i read somewhere larkspur.
oo let us make a orchestra cries david you bang on the wastebasket. her name is jenny. she lives with her sister constance in a big old brown house saturated with family memories and her husband lives there too; they have been married for seven years and her sister constance still calls him mr harrap. they are going to kill him because he is a boor i think.
oh. lottery is out of print. unbuyable. i cannot even get copies for myself or else i would send you one. they keep saying they are going to reprint it but that is the publisher i had such a fight with because they wouldn’t give me a lot more money and so they are most incivil and never reprint my nice books. and we don’t know who is going to make the art movie because all that has happened is this fellow and bill alton*19 from bennington and me all sitting around drinking all afternoon and saying what if we did this? this fellow whose name is i think sparks and he had a black eye and he talked all the time he said why didn’t i put more sex in my books and i said my mother reads them and he said how old is your mother darling and i said if he was going to make any movies with me he was going to keep sex out because art movie sex is bad enough without sparks obvious trype sex and he said but it was (no not trype, type) very important to put sex in a movie and i said the sexiest scene i ever wrote was toward the end of hill house where luke is describing what he may or may not do to the house all the time sneering at eleanor and sparks got a light in his eye and said hey he better read that and i am very anxious to hear from him what he thought. high up in the list of people i do not understand as i may have said before come drama and acting people. sparks told bill afterward that he thought i was going to be very very wonderful to work with because i did not insist upon intruding my own ideas into the script talk but of course sparks has not really had a chance to find out because that man is going to lay one finger on the plot of tooth—my favorite—and i am going to black his other eye. anyway it ought to be about six years before we even get a script much less start making any movie and they have several backers interested but are not committing themselves yet because every time they get together they talk big and convince each other that this thing is really too great to give to anybody for certain right now.
did you know i once saw groucho*20 plain? he was the father of a bennington student for a while. (she was only here for a while, see, and anyway she would have traded him for any other father going.) she was a good friend of mine—perhaps the last student friend i ever had—and said that he was the most dreadful vulgar sadistic man she had ever known. she adores the other brothers.
yes. know dylan thomas records. do not listen.
i have been reading pride and prejudice because stanley has been playing harpsichord records every evening.
i have suddenly thought that if i hurry and send this then it will be my turn. kind of cheating but who doesn’t cheat?
david if you cannot treat barry’s toys gently you will have to go home. “we have always kept male cats, mr. happap,” constance said politely, “but of course they have always been fixed.”
cooking now is putting something into a casserole and sitting on my red stool making notes. (“constance sends christmas cards. jenny gardens.”) about one third of this will get into the book*21 and the rest is just saturating myself with the two of them and trying to get ivy compton-burnett*22 out of my system. i always start like ivy and have to write it off. i am not yet talking like jenny but i will be soon. on the old filing folder for hill house there is a note saying “theo has six toes.”
your friend’s letter (for which thanks) said you wrote stories. where are they?
* * *
—
tuesday
i hope you do not mind if i do this kind of a page at a time. i am feeling so odd tonight (oh look single space; that is because i wrote a letter to poor marjorie freer whose husband died very suddenly and about whom i cannot make any more jokes because i am so sad for her; she idolized him like not many women do their husbands; poor poor marjorie) because we have spent the day making wills. it is very odd. i mean i never made a will before. our lawyer is a charming lady named elizabeth and she said we had to make wills. so we went. and she said now how would you like to be buried, and what kind of service? i said a wake with lots of people drinking and stanley said certainly a wake but no services, and i said no services but lots of people drinking and elizabeth said never mind i personally will see to the lots of people drinking as a matter of fact i will throw the party myself but in the meantime you must be serious and decide what you want them to sing at your funerals and i said i do not want a funeral because it will be rough enough for the kids fighting over what we leave without having a funeral to go to too and stanley said we are going to be cremated together and elizabeth said but suppose you don’t die together and that thought was so appalling that we looked at each other and said then what the hell we won’t die at all. and elizabeth said look you’ve got to make this will, friends, and so we are to be cremated. no services. good god what a thing to do on a sunny day.
shirley
• • •
[To Sally, Barry, and Joanne]
thursday [summer 1960]
dear sally/barry/joanne or whatever your names are,
we got nice letters this morning from sally and barry but there seems to be someone missing; weren’t there three of you when we left? is the third too busy with the fancy hairdryer to sit down and write a letter?
(harlequin, sitting on the dining room table to watch me type: i can’t find sally. where is sally? why doesn’t sally ever go to bed any more?
me: sally is at camp.
harlequin: oh.)
barry’s letter, while not very informative, is consoling; at least, it doesn’t say that he has lost his knife, his good pants, his compass, or his sleeping bag yet. sally’s letter is fine, except who is rupert of hentzau?
(harlequin: i just went up and looked in sally’s room. where did you say she was?
me: at camp.
harlequin: oh.)
the attic is going on beautifully. it has been considerably cooler so laurie hasn’t suffered so much, and most of the insula
tion and dirty work is done. the carpenter is here now, putting in a skylight, and they have ordered the fan. there is no point in my trying to clean the upstairs hall (even if i could find the broom and dustpan) or any bedrooms, because so much sawdust and scrap wood keeps falling down the trapdoor. if they ever finish i will go to work up there. if i can find the broom and dustpan. meanwhile i am getting some work done on my book and dad is working hard between feeding the fish and clearing the bar and carrying laundry.
we had a lovely time after we left you at camp. we drove on down to connecticut where we were expected at the gills’*23 25th anniversary party, and what a party it was, to be sure. they have a big garden (this is in their small house; the big house is down the road and has an even bigger garden, but it is too big to open for just the summer) and they had set up a tent on the grass and there were about a hundred people and about a hundred cases of champagne. dad says he drank one case. we saw some old friends and stayed on after the party—never did get any dinner except cocktail sandwiches—and had a nice evening with the gills and the next morning visited their lake cottage for a few minutes (they do not own quite all the lake; four other families have little pieces of it) and then came home. the road there is so narrow that when last year they had a fire at the cottage and the fire engine came charging down the road and got thoroughly stuck between two trees and could not get out, so the neighbors put out the fire and a wrecking crew came and got the fire engine. i was very much impressed with the outfits the gill girls were wearing; there are five of them although only four were there, and they were dressed alike in white pleated cotton skirts and colored blouses; the skirts were so handsome that i asked one of them where to get them and she said everyone wore them and you could buy them everywhere in new york, so if i get a chance i will try to find a couple. I will guess at the sizes.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 47
