the director and the writer who are doing the movie of hill house flew here from hollywood to see me and talk about the book and the poor fellows naturally assumed that vermont in april would be fair and balmy and they wore their california clothes and there was still snow on the ground. they took me out to lunch and i had two cocktails and probably said a lot about hill house that wasn’t true. it is going to be what they call a big-budget picture, although it is still in the writing stage right now. i was dying to know who would be in it, but no one has been signed yet. i did learn a lot about how to make movies, and they expect to do their location shots in new england, since they think there are no california houses worth haunting, so perhaps we can see a little of it being made. joanne and sally made a great point of being introduced to a hollywood director (he is the director of “west side story” although i forget his name)*39 and we had a very agreeable day. the movie will be in color with a special musical background and we are all to go to new york for the premiere. in about three years.
we hear from laurie frequently; he is a great letter writer and calls us weekly usually to ask for more money. he is doing fine, loves the college, and is doing a lot more with his music this semester. he turned down the spring trip to bermuda with his band because it would interfere with his school work and although the band is signed up to go to europe again this summer he thinks he will not go; he has been offered a regular playing job at a local roadhouse and prefers that. the only one who has visited the college is joanne; stanley and i have never been there because laurie wanted to make his start by himself. we have met a good many of his friends, since he always brings three or four home with him when he comes and all they do is eat. oddly enough, (well, why oddly, come to think of it?) several of them have taken a fancy to joanne, and a couple of them write to her and come down with laurie just to see her. it was so funny; most of the other girls in her class went to the high school junior prom and joanne was not invited to go, but the same week one of laurie’s friends invited her to come to goddard for a two-day visit. she went to goddard, of course, and had a lovely time. she has become quite grownup. her conversation is more suited to laurie’s friends than her own, since she is interested in books and the theatre and music—she still plays the guitar and sings nicely. sally has grown up almost overnight. she wears the same size clothes as joanne and is an inch taller. she is still very babyish in her manner and habits, however, and we are hoping that this summer at camp will calm her down a little. she also is reading at a furious rate, she is writing a lot and is on the school paper this year; joanne has been on it for three years and the two of them do a lot of feature articles; sally also does a regular cartoon for them. besides that she is writing her own stories and poems and putting together quite a collection. barry continues to grow and become more of an elder statesman every day. he is still very serious and thoughtful and does algebra problems for fun. he pestered stanley until stanley taught him the rudiments of algebra and found him an old textbook and barry loved it. he is still at the top of his class. all three of them go to camp on july first. joanne will be a counselor and waterfront assistant. when they go stanley and i are going back onto our last summer’s schedule of no-cooking, having dinner in restaurants every night. it was so much fun last year, and we managed to see a lot of our neighboring country. i am going to my regular writers’ conference at suffield, connecticut. stanley will spend that week in new york, since writers’ conferences give him the creeps.
we have spent this spring making improvements in the house; had it painted again, and put new drapes in the living room and dining room and—thank heaven—had the bathroom upstairs redone. we got a new washer and dryer and a new typewriter for stanley and are thinking vaguely of getting a television set; ours has been broken down for months but now the baseball season has started and we like to watch the games on weekends so we may get one. best of all, we have our new player piano, spinet size but a full keyboard. we heard about a firm in new york that was now making player pianos, so we bought ourselves a player piano and never had so much fun. we bought fifty rolls and they sound lovely. the darn thing is so loud that you can hear it all over the neighborhood. also it is very stiff to pedal and the only one who can really work it for hours at a time is barry. stanley and i wear out after one roll. it has a very nice tone for regular playing, too, and we are happy to find that sally is interested in making up little tunes to play, and perhaps as she grows more pleased with herself she will take to music as laurie did. we are saturating them with music anyway; stanley and i play records every evening and sometimes the kids lie awake and listen. we are getting the records from the vivaldi society, vivaldi concertos, mostly for lute and harpsichord. (that should be concerti, shouldn’t it.) we are both very fond of harpsichord music and have been gathering up what we could; the kids go around whistling or humming fragments from the music we play in the evenings. when laurie comes home he plays the trumpet along with the piano, and one of his friends plays the flute and the guitar, so we sing and have trios.
we completely gave up the idea of going to europe this summer. we decided that we would rather wait and go another year with all the children. also stanley got very much annoyed at the kids because none of them knew anything about the bible, so we are reading the bible aloud every evening after dinner. first i read a chapter and then stanley reads a chapter, and we started at the beginning and are now nearly at the end of exodus. it is slow tough going because everyone argues about what is going on.
as usual i have to cut this short to go make lunch. write soon, keep well, and lots and lots of love from all,
s.
• • •
[To Libbie Burke]
Sept. 5 [1961]
Dear Lib,
As you know, family troubles*40 have put a lot of confusion and sadness into our routine recently; I don’t mean that as an excuse for not sending your books back sooner, but I did have them out ready to send.
Many many thanks for all the help they—and you—have given me. The book progresses very slowly but at least two chapters are done and now that things are calming down I can get back to it. I only hope you have not been picking mushrooms without your handy guide.*41
Best to you and to himself; see you soon? Please.
Love,
S.
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
sept 5 [1961]
dearest mother and pop,
i realize it has been a long time since i wrote but it has been such a hectic and confusing summer that i have not even made much progress on my book and i am beginning to get sharp little notes from my publisher saying he doesn’t want to push me or anything but the book is announced for publication in 1962 so let’s see the manuscript. anyway the movie money is running out so i had better get moving.
it is half-past ten and joanne is just lying in bed luxuriously; the other kids got up at seven and went off to school; today is their first day. joanne doesn’t have to go until the fourteenth and she wanted to get up this morning and sit on the front porch and wave to her friends going by but i gather she changed her mind. we are all very excited about her school; it is a very good one, highly recommended. she will find it very tough going after the north bennington high school but they will see to it that she works hard. the school itself is lovely, in the hills outside weston massachusetts with a little lake for swimming and ice skating, and good modern buildings. it is small, about one hundred fifty kids, coeducational, expensive (ouch) and only moderately progressive. it is about ten miles from boston. the big disadvantage of the school is distance; boston is a hundred and eighty miles away, and it will mean a lot of driving. people from bennington college go back and forth fairly regularly to boston, though, and there is a bus of sorts. we are dreading getting her stuff there next week because she plans to take everything she owns. i cannot
imagine what it will be like with only sally and barry home.
laurie is now in new orleans with his college roommate. a friend of ours has offered them the use of her air-conditioned house. laurie has taken a job with a local band for this fall to earn himself some spending money; it means he will have to come home weekends and although we don’t like it he feels that he can manage the job and college too. he has promised to quit the job if it interferes with his school work as i am sure it will. he is eager to get back to college after a summer of hard work. we finally opened up our third floor; it has always been a dingy attic reached through a trap door in the hall ceiling and only laurie and the television man had ever been up there, but we badly needed the space for books, of which we now have about twenty thousand. we had a carpenter come and put a stairway up and put in a skylight and install a huge fan which not only cools the attic but the whole upstairs. the fan did not come until a week ago so poor laurie worked up there all summer in the heat, and it was certainly hot. he insulated it and put up wallboard and sanded the floor and painted it and built four hundred feet of bookcase and earned enough money to take him to new orleans and still leave him a bank account. and now the attic is beautiful; there is a lot of floor space so we turned it over to sally and barry and barry has his electric trains there and sally has a painting studio. this past week stanley and the children have moved every book in the house, rearranging. the shelves look lovely and at last there is room for expansion.
the other kids had a good summer at camp, and joanne has been asked to come back next year as a full counselor which means she gets paid. sally was of course constantly at odds with her cabin mates because as she said they talked about nothing but boys. but sally found one friend who hated this as much as she did, and the two of them were very happy together. barry is getting to be a leader type, and was easily the head of his cabin; he is a quiet, popular, respected boy, and seems able to adjust comfortably to anything. he has none of sally’s rebelliousness and he is one of the camp favorites. he is the same at home and in school, goes along getting all a’s in his studies. he is also a miser. he kept track of every minute he worked moving books, because stanley was paying them by the hour, and once he collects, his money goes right into the bank and stays there.
stanley is finally finishing his big book;*42 it goes off to the publishers this week. he has gone over it so many times that i think he can recite large sections. he really hates to see it go; he has been working on it for so many years. the job of reading galleys on it will be enormous, and we both will do it.
barry just came home with the information that he could only take his lunch to school if he lived more than half a mile away or had a working mother so i had to call the principal and explain that i was a working mother and she agreed that writing a book qualified me as a working mother so now barry can take his lunch.
stanley is feeling considerably better about his father, although it was a terrible shock. he had been in bad health for so long, but everyone believed that he was much better, and he was getting out much more and seeing friends again. it happened early in the morning, very quickly, and stanley’s brother was able to get over there right away and take care of everything. we took laurie and joanne down with us, because they both wanted to go; they were both very fond of him, and laurie was particularly upset. i did not go to any of the ceremonies because i have a real terror of such things and will not go; everyone in the family understood perfectly because crazy old aunt bella used to be the same way, so they just left me home. of course the place was packed with relatives, and arthur’s wife and i, as the two daughters in law, were expected to handle the food and drink department, which was considerable. we handed out coffee and cake and scotch and iced coffee and beer until we felt like a lunch counter. considering that it was 96 that day in new york, and the apartment is quite small, with a tiny kitchen, we had a man-sized job. the family—about thirty of them—has to be served a traditional lunch after the funeral, so bunny and i did that too; it was the first time stanley’s mother has ever sat still in the living room while someone else used her kitchen, and she suffered, poor woman. we used the wrong dishes (put cheese and stuff in the dishes which are supposed to be reserved entirely for meat) and put everything back where it didn’t belong. after everyone left that night and lu was alone with just two of her sisters there she went out into the kitchen and washed everything over again and straightened up; it probably did her more good than anything else.
i was fascinated by the ritual of the thing; even though stanley’s parents have given up most religious observances for a long time the funeral still had to be done right. the strangest thing was the cohen tradition, which stanley had to explain to me; cohens are hereditary priests and cannot come anywhere near a dead body, so that even the present day members of the family named cohen—who are very far from being priests, considering that one of them is a small-time gangster—could not come to call on stanley’s mother and could not come to the funeral. what they did was dress in their best dark clothes and stand outside the temple while the service was going on, and when the family came out of the temple there were the cohens including the gangster standing just far enough away to be safe but they had come to the funeral as well as they could.
stanley’s mother absolutely refuses to live with either of her sons, wants a small apartment of her own, and as long as arthur takes care of all her business and financial matters, will be quite all right. since she has thousands of sisters and many good friends, she will never be completely alone. also the family business will continue to support her.
as usual everyone is clamoring for lunch. write soon. i am knocking wood because i haven’t had any hay fever this year; hope you are as lucky. everyone sends love.
s.
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
October 21 [1961]
Dear Carol,
The answer to your letter is definitely NO.
Although it is most flattering to think that Mr. Arnaz is interested in having me work on a screenplay*43 both my inclinations and my experience are definitely against it; as you know, I do not want to write teleplays or screenplays, but only books. And Hollywood holds no charm for me.
Book is growing and growing and growing.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
“When I tire of you—you die!”
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
monday [November 13, 1961]
dearest mother and pop,
we keep thinking what a nice time we had while you were here. it was such fun seeing you and the children are still drawing pictures.
we are all concerned over joanne’s knee, which happened just after you left; she was jumping over a fence (why? why?) and threw it out of joint; now she has a real football player’s trick knee, which keeps going out of joint. they thought she would need an operation and luckily the headmaster at the school stepped in or loony joanne would have gone right ahead and entered herself in a boston hospital and gone through the operation without ever bothering to let us know. so we are now planning for her to have it checked at christmas time and if she needs the operation have it done here with our own doctor supervising.
i have not been well again; i had a return of my friend colitis, and oliver put me right back on my former medicine, but even though it helps i have a side-effect which i don’t really care for: he figures it this way: the colitis includes a sudden attack of nausea, which is all right; that is what it’s supposed to do. but the sudden nausea causes an abrupt drop in blood pressure of perhaps twenty degrees, which is exactly like getting kicked in the stomach, and i all but pass out; i get dizzy and sick and staggery and shaking, and of course very scared; all i have to do is sit still for a few minutes and it goes away, but he says if i didn’t fight it so i would simpl
y faint and that would be it. but i have never fainted and am not going to start now. silliest thing is that although my blood pressure is normal (and he checks it every time) i always supposed that it was high blood pressure i would have to worry about, not pressure going down. so i am being careful about smoking, particularly in the mornings, which is when it seems to happen. it would go away much faster if it were not, like most fainting spells, entirely a matter of suggestion: once i start thinking it might happen, then of course it all starts. i stay home as much as possible in the mornings, and so am making fine progress on my book; there’s nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing.
we are waiting and waiting to hear from the movie people who want to buy sundial; their option ran out last week and they wrote that they were “optimistic” although i suppose in hollywood talk that just means they are broke. no news on the other movie yet.
the weather has been quite cold, and there is already snow on the hills. our foliage was quite as lovely as ever, the week after you left. now the kids have been out raking leaves, which is a considerable job on our lawn. we are having stanley’s mother here for thanksgiving. we will also have stanley’s brother, without wife, who is driving his mother up here, and very possibly stanley’s ancient aunt anna and uncle harry, the banes of the family; they are both in their eighties, completely crazy, and just as lively as they can be. they have no children, and spend all their time and energy keeping themselves healthy. anna and harry are quite strict, and the kids have been looking up the dietary laws in the bible, which ought to stagger harry some. it makes for an odd thanksgiving dinner. and i wish the bible would tell me how to make mashed potatoes without butter or milk.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 52
