The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  i was so thoroughly demoralized by then that i just sat there staring and stanley remarked that well, he guessed he had missed his train. finally a policeman came by and arranged to have us pushed off the road onto the side. i knew the car would start sooner or later when it dried out so after a while i tried it again and it started and off we went except it turned out the brakes were wet too and wouldn’t hold. i crawled that car all the way to the railroad station, and finally turned a corner and let it roll to a stop in a parking lot. when i got out of the car my knees were shaking and i was soaking wet. i told the attendant at the parking lot that i was giving him the car for good and stanley finally told him to keep the car until i came for it, and i took my pocketbook and we went into the station. stanley had missed his train by half an hour, but had another in about forty-five minutes, so he suggested that either i come to new york with him or go to a hotel in albany until he came back the next day. i was hardly dressed for a hotel anywhere, much less new york city, but i was too upset to drive back home alone, so i elected the hotel in albany. i certainly felt like a fool walking into the fanciest hotel in albany and asking for a room. i told the desk clerk i wanted a room with air conditioning, television, a bottle of bourbon and a bowl of ice, and he asked if my pocketbook were a suitcase and i said no, so he made me pay in advance. i certainly didn’t look like anyone who belonged there, and the bellhop made a great production of carrying my key upstairs while i carried the pocketbook. i had them send my dinner up and i had a lovely evening all by myself watching television and drinking bourbon. and the next afternoon i met stanley at the station and the car was fine and the streets were dry and we drove home peacefully, him with a new bridge.

  this is the kind of adventure that kept us from doing a lot of the things we wanted to this summer. we did spend a couple of days driving through massachusetts and maine because i had never seen the seacoast, and i fell in love with those little fishing towns in maine. we stayed away from tourist places and just wandered looking for houses we would like to buy someday.

  i am going to burlington to lecture in october and the kids will take their lunch to school for two days, lovely. two days off. and stanley and i are taking an evening off on saturday and going to a wonderful new french restaurant*28 about twenty miles away; we found it this summer and the owners have read all my books and insist on sending us bottles of wine. consequently we keep on going back.

  lunch. must stop writing. write me soon, and lots of love from all.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Jeanne Beatty]

  monday [September 1960]

  have been wishing you would write but suppose sadly that you are too busy. somehow end of summer comes. our trees are turning; are yours? i love fall. i love red leaves and apples and pumpkins and generally getting tucked in against the winter, and it has been a good, a great, summer.

  sally and barry both came home with colds, and joanne came home with four stitches in her right hand. laurie came home with tales of far countries and vague, laughing reminiscences of the girls in florence. “in greece we used to…” and then sudden, stricken silence. “cracked up the motor bike outside barcelona but the doc patched me up okay. no, mom, no. no, mom, i tell you i’m all right. mom, I’m all right, honest i am.” but the girls in florence, and the goat’s milk in greece, and paris…

  and we went to salem, stanley and i, to see witches but there weren’t any witches not anywhere there. but there was the Witch City Auto Body Wrecking Company and the Witch City Dry Cleaners and the Witch Grill. and seagulls outside the hotel window and i sat at the window looking out over old lovely houses now the home of the See-Rite Framing and Window-Working Company, and packs of young hoods on street corners where the salem city fathers would have forbidden them to loiter if the city had not fallen upon ill days. they would have been in church. after much searching i got to see a manuscript written in court of the trial of rebecca nurse*29 and she really did say all those heartbreaking things; “can you really read that old writing?” said the neat girl at the desk, adjusting her harlequin glasses; “yes,” said i, “i know much of it by heart.” “really?” said she, “is it interesting?” i don’t know much of it by heart, actually. i was showing off. i wouldn’t sign any guest books because i was ashamed to say that i had been there. i would have sent you a post card but you hadn’t written for so long.

  new york. i bought lots of clothes because i had none. i went into a store and bought six skirts and two coats and five blouses in twenty minutes and raced back to the hotel and put some of them on and went out to lunch with editors who said of course the book will be ready by next dogwood day? dogwood day is a day made up by my publishers because i am afraid of real days so this is the day when the dogwood blooms in central park and it is not real because of course the dogwood never does bloom in central park, and i was eating eggs benedict and drinking martinis and pretending that i was a lady being taken out to lunch. the book will not be ready a year from dogwood day. the heroine is named merricat; do you like it? mary catherine really, but we who know her best say merricat. i am trying not to let her be sub-normal mentally. tell me a good man to use; i am desperate because i need a man and cannot think of a kind of one i want to use; “let your material guide you,” i said to the school-teachers-who-want-to-write at suffield, “do not impose your own prejudices upon your story; let your story tell itself.” i told them and told them. marjorie freer said to me do you remember that funny little man who came here for cocktails one day? yes, i said, his name was wolf. of course, marjorie said, i wonder whatever happened to nice little mr wolf. i broke all records for their evening lectures, a big big audience and very nice. i had a nice speech, too. stanley and marjorie kept giggling off on the side and i frowned sternly.

  if you write me a letter i will tell you about hazel at suffield. and the new scandal in north bennington. and my mother’s new car.

  well, yes. she does drive, in a manner of speaking. but a jaguar? my mother? nice little old lady, whipping down the california highways at a hundred and fifteen miles an hour? she said she just saw it and liked it and of course they are keeping the Cadillac for city driving. dammit i am going to get a ferrari and we can have drag races mother and i.

  it is such a dreary nasty rotten stinking beast of a day and your letter brightened it considerably. it has rained for two solid days and nights (a solid day and night is one where it doesn’t really make much difference which it is because it stays dark and everyone sniffles) and down around the store they are saying ominously that this here hurrycane might well be worse than thirty-eight. (thirty-eight it blew away the stone catamount (for mounting cats) from in front of the catamount tavern; forty-three the airport blew away, it really did.)

  * * *

  —

  thursday

  it missed us. by golly. in pittsfield forty miles away they had tornadoes and like everything else except tourists from new jersey the storm daintily avoided setting foot over the vermont border and took the scenic route through massachusetts. and down at the store this morning they were opining darkly that it don’t often happen twice and here is this new hurrycane building up and it is probably worse.

  not that the sun is shining or anything like that. me, i left this letter monday after being so happy to get your letter and have been walking around in blackest gloom, sighing, scowling, snapping. it is somebody’s fault, of that i am sure. mine.

  good housekeeping turned down my last article (and rightly; it missed by a mile, but that doesn’t help my self-esteem) and even though it’s the only one they’ve refused in the two years i’ve been writing for them and the editor practically cried over the phone and my agent was soulfully indignant on my behalf i still don’t like it because it was a lousy article and i knew it. and i had one of those searching self-inquiries all alone here with applegate the cat to listen and of
course that always makes you feel worse and i decided at last to give up on castle and i put it all in a filing folder and hid it away in my desk and called my agent back and told her so she immediately changed and became heartily falsely cheerful and slapped me on the back over the phone and said don’t force yourself to do anything you don’t want to do darling and i’ll tell the publisher for you that there won’t be any manuscript for him next spring and you take a nice long rest. so then i felt even worse, of course and applegate staring at me coldly. so stanley came home and i told him, woebegone, lip trembling, blinking fast, and he said you take a nice long rest over my dead body you rested all summer you don’t have to write this novel if you don’t want to but you get the hell up to that typewriter and write something or your fingers will fall off. so i began to feel better right away and he has invited me, my nice husband, to dine with him tonight at our fanciest restaurant and so maybe i will write another book.

  i am really seared by all this, although the clouds are lifting slightly. i have spent eight months trying to make a novel out of that thing and almost convincing myself i could, and it is an absolute relief to be able to look at it and say there isn’t any novel there. i have only done this once before and then it was a novel i liked but no one else did*30 so i put it away. this one i plain didn’t like, from the beginning i didn’t like it. now i am like a kid let out of school. there. enough moaning.

  applegate the cat is in high esteem right now because his brother gentle shax committed an unpardonable offense: he slept in stanley’s filing cabinet and mixed things up (“these cats have GOT TO GO”) and it took a lot of pleading and promises never to do it again to appease stanley and finally he allowed as how he would overlook it if he got a jar of macadamia nuts from the cats so he did but applegate the cat, dissenting, felt that one jar of macadamia nuts was hardly adequate for the magnitude of the crime so he brought four mice one after another and gave them to stanley to play with and the dead ones i got into the garbage can but (although i am afraid of mice i was wearing a long housecoat) after stanley had formally accepted the live mice and thanked applegate the cat the mice went under the bookcase and i spent the evening sitting up on the back of the chair. stanley was pleased and applegate felt that he had done the Right Thing, but the mice were gone in the morning and gentle shax had a stomach ache. so does justice triumph.

  * * *

  —

  monday

  i know your letter went on for months and months but you were not as sorry for yourself as i am. i am now in the i-don’t-have-any-real-friends-and-my-children-are-becoming-country-hicks stage. that means it ought to wear off about next friday.

  i now want to send joanne away to school, and am quite earnest about it, although she and her father think no. she went to a high school dance on friday and no one asked her to dance and she came home brave but hurt and i was sick; we have a distinct town-and-gown problem here and we are among very few college faculty who live in the village and the kids suffer for it. even barry, excited over joining cub scouts, confessed that he was timid because a couple of the other boys didn’t want him. stanley and i can put up with being regarded as a couple of local freaks but it is awful for the children. my great consolation is laurie, who has been completely staggered by the sudden encounter with higher education. he is at goddard college, which is even more progressive than bennington. he writes raptly that there are so many wonderful subjects to study he can hardly choose; he wants to take them all. he found a drummer and a piano player and a trombone player and they entertain the entire community (only 150 students and 30 faculty) and he really thinks he will try to learn to read music. stanley and i have not even seen the place; it is very strange to think that he is really gone for good, too. the college plan includes sending them out for three months each winter to work, like bennington, so he will be home only for a day or so at a time, at christmas and such. and i find it shocking that next month he must register for the draft (why do i say draft as though it were still 1914? i think because when he was very small i used to look at him and think someday they will make you be in the army, never supposing then that he would grow up exactly the kind of boy who would enjoy army life) and he is so tall.

  because you were so kind about my stew recipe and seem to enjoy it so much i am sending you two more. one of them is from my mother-in-law, the other is from a repulsive lady. she was the mother of an entering bennington student and because she was vaguely related to friends of ours we were charged with being Nice to her and her husband so we took them out to dinner and she confided during the onion soup (confided to me and to the owner-chef of the restaurant, a brilliant cook and a good friend of ours and i was so embarrassed because damn it i do know something about cooking and never had the nerve to ask him any such questions) that she was an expert cook and she thought his food was very nice indeed and would he please give her the recipe for his salad dressing and he, eyebrows-ish, said naturally madame and wrote down with care the recipe for an ordinary french dressing and said but of course madame will be sure to get wine vinegar and she said ardently that she never used anything else and he shrugged and gave me a glance which can only be described as enigmatic and poured another glass of wine for stanley and said then madame’s salad dressing will be as exquisite as mine. which of course his salad dressing is nothing much and he prides himself upon his chocolate mousse which is genuinely exquisite and which she never noticed being still all tearful about the salad dressing. anyway she got to pulling rank on me about cooking (“darling even if you’re not much of a cook i always say why worry? now take me, i couldn’t write a story if i tried.” and she kept patting my hand until i was ready to bite off her fingers and serve them up with a mornay sauce. “darling,” she said finally, “let me give you a couple of good recipes; they look like a lot and they only take twenty minutes to prepare and really no one will know what they’re made of.”) she patted my hand again and said but “remember i couldn’t write a story if i tried.”

  i am a standard size but it is nobody’s damn business what; stanley and i are a pair of stout-, good-eating burghers, and the diet is permanent when I remember or feel conscience-stricken. i am in a condition of permanent envy, too, at the people who can gobble. our doctor (who never gains a pound) shakes his finger warningly under our noses and we glance gleefully at one another and call to make a reservation at l’auberge. so it’s hard to buy clothes; who needs clothes? my mother is still a size eighteen but she never had any fun.

  * * *

  —

  monday again

  i mean, it was no use going on. it simply was no use going on. because i took the winter clothes out of the moth bags and my two best (best? only) winter suits had been devoured. why—beating my head vainly against the laundryman’s strong shoulder, why, i cry, why? barry’s raggedy old winter jacket which should have been thrown out was untouched.

  perhaps i will go and live on an island somewhere.

  anyway after that which i will bravely go on believing was the last and cruellest blow came what has never yet failed me which was louis untermeyer. it will be all right when louis comes, i kept telling myself, and so it was. except the untermeyers have never been here before and there were sand fleas in the guest room and we went to the poetry section of our books to make sure that one or two of louis’ anthologies were prominently displayed and we had none. none. stanley went wildly through the college faculty begging to borrow untermeyers to display for a couple of days and finally we turned up one collection which the wife of the physics teacher had used in her freshman lit course at swarthmore. prominently displayed. he is the funniest man i know. oddly he was completely enchanted by barry, a grave little boy who sat compactly on the fireplace step and explained with barry soberness to louis that he wanted to be a nuclear physicist when he grew up and a human biologist in his spare time but recently he had begun to wonder if he would have enough spare ti
me and he might have to make other plans. what kind of other plans louis wanted to know. well, barry said, considering, i will probably have to give up football.

  he is not humorless, that barry, he is thoughtful. he was explaining to sally about genes and sally thought he meant djinns. also when his counselor at camp tried to order him around barry announced that he was going to re-wire the counselor’s electric blanket and electrocute him and after that barry ran the cabin. they go to the same camp, by the way, all three. joanne was a junior counselor this year. nice small disorganized camp with a lovely lake and dirty old clothes.

  larkspur was used, by the way, in a lovely old english mystery whose name i cannot remember. i never had much faith in mushrooms. i just made brownies (and onne his shinne a normale hadde he)*31 and came from louis scher a big package of books for the kids.

  i wish you had come to suffield. next time you think of coming let me know and i will try to get you a scholarship. we still expect to be abroad next summer but i am going to try to squeeze in suffield for a day or so if i can. (oh, a fine and private place.*32 well, the publishers sent it to me and i looked at it and thought my god whimsy and with a raven yet and i didn’t read it and then it turned out that the untermeyers are doting friends of this beagle’s and he is their protegee and i promised them i would read it and now you like it too so i guess i will. but i will go cautiously because i am actually reading h. rider haggard*33 right now because graham greene said that he was a better historian than walter scott which is not really saying much is it. but i always use any excuse to reread haggard and have you by any chance picked up the pocket book of the incompleat enchanter?) hazel is young and cannot write at all and is possessed of a wholly unwarranted arrogance and belief in herself. before she came to suffield she sent in three-quarters of a novel, twenty-six poems, a novelette and eleven short stories. all terrible. shirley barker got the novel and i got the novelette and the stories and if i were ever going to write another book i would use hazel.