Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
April 20 [1962]
Dear Carol,
It’s done, it’s done. I sent the manuscript to Pat this morning. He wanted two copies so I have only one copy left which I will send you in a day or so; I want to look over it once more.
Now he owes me a lot of money.
Hope you have a pleasant trip. Also hope to see you in June.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
April 23 [1962]
Dear Carol,
In a veritable frenzy of terror, I hasten to place this in your hand with all possible speed. And I am sorry about having deprived you by even a day of the bliss of reading it.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
monday [April 1962]
dearest mother and pop,
it’s really too much to have a monday morning after school spring vacation with daylight saving with pouring rain with a leak in my car roof so that i sat down in a puddle. the children went drearily off to school in raincoats and rubbers and stanley went drearily off to school in raincoat and rubbers and the bird—who is moulting and won’t sing—is doggedly taking a bath in his water cup and ignoring his nice bathtub. we do need the rain badly but i wish they could have put it off till tuesday.
this is actually my first unoccupied morning and i have spent an hour just wandering around. i finished my book on friday april 20, but with the kids home all last week i had no time to relax and sit back and take it easy. after three years devoted to that book i can hardly believe it’s finished; it’s exactly like having one of the kids leave home. the desk is so empty without my folders of notes and the wall is bare; i usually make pages and pages of odd notes and taking them down makes the room look funny.
everything is moving fast with the book; once they got past me as the bottleneck they really went into action. it is at the printer now, and i’ll see galley proofs in a few weeks. they are publishing it in september. pop: the heroine of this one is really batty. my editor, pat covici, to whom the book is dedicated, called me last week full of enthusiasm: not a word needed changing (except could they please change the spelling of “grey” to “gray” and marshall best, head of viking press, cried when he read the book; pat swears marshall was crying. stanley says if the book can bring tears to those mean old publishing eyes it ought to make a million dollars; it’s foolproof. my agent is talking big, as agents always do. agents are supposed to say about each book that it is a natural for the book of the month club, and the national book award, and probably the pulitzer prize, so my agent says all these things very politely and then gets back to reality and goes out and tries to sell it for money. the silly part of it is that i don’t want the national book award or the pulitzer prize and i most particularly do not want the money. stanley says a movie sale on this book would finish us. the money on the last book finally ran out this past january and we were just settling down comfortably with enough to live on and all we really want right now is enough for a new car. stanley is having a terrible time with the college because [president] bill fels is trying to raise his salary and stanley is trying to stop him. it really is crazy, although it is such an unusual and wonderful situation to be in that we are enjoying it thoroughly.
actually—although the foregoing is just a slight exaggeration—i do not think this book will go far. it’s short, for one thing, and stanley and the publisher and the agent all agree that it is the best writing i have ever done, which is of course the kiss of death on any book, and then there is that batty heroine. my little group of regular readers will buy it and the local library will feature it on the table they reserve for books by local authors and my friends will write me nice letters and it will be published in england and get panned.
as you can see, it’s practically all i can think about. this is the worst time, when the baby has been sent out into the world, and you don’t know how it’s going to get along. poor stanley just got jolted by a vicious review—written by an old friend, of course—in the new york herald tribune, but then he had two nice reviews, in the times and newsweek. most of his reviews, naturally, come in the little magazines and the scholarly journals, so the times and newsweek reviews were a pleasant surprise. he is keeping a list of people he hears of who actually spend ten bucks for the book, and there are fifteen already. he was very pleased that you read about the sex life of the worm, which he says is really the most exciting part. by the way, hill house is coming out in a paperback this june, and i hear they are actually going to start the movie. my agent tells me that ghost stories and the supernatural are definitely in this season.
well. it’s wonderful to have the book done, anyway. around this house, when i say the book i mean mine, but when stanley says the book he means his. sally and barry followed my book chapter by chapter, reading each one as it was finished, so they are deeply involved in what happens to it.
by the way, the day i sent off my book i stopped taking my pills. the colitis is just about gone, and all my other symptoms disappeared. so now until i start a new book i am fine.
must stop writing. it’s so nice not to have any pressure to get back to the book. keep well. write soon. keep soon. write well.
lots and lots of love from all.
s.
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
thursday [June 14, 1962]
dearest mother and pop,
i have started three letters to you and torn them all up, so now i will try again. stanley thinks i should write you this, and so do laurie and corinne; as you must have guessed, they are expecting a baby in the fall, which is the reason for the early marriage. they had the good sense to come directly to us, instead of trying some silly solution of their own, and we are every bit pleased and happy as i told you. they have been talking of marriage for a long time, and consequently this is not just some unlucky accident which ties up two people who would not otherwise consider marrying; now they will go back to college as married students, or at least laurie will go back; corinne will be pretty busy for a while.
i know it sounds awful and it was something of a bad shock to us at first, but actually we have been so accustomed to the idea of laurie and corinne getting married sooner or later that after the first gasp we decided that we were really delighted. joanne, who is very close to corinne, knows the truth, but of course sally and barry do not, and i am afraid that corinne’s mother is not taking it well, although both mother and father are extremely fond of laurie.
we have been in a wild mess all week because corinne’s family are all devout catholics; stanley has been referring to the whole situation as a soap opera called “laurie faces life, the hard way.” at first they thought that the only way they could be married was in church, because of course corinne’s mother and father couldn’t see it any other way, but then laurie discovered that to be married in a church he must sign away his kids and even take a course of instruction in the catholic religion himself, and guess who turned out to have all kinds of scruples i never knew i had, and i raised such a howl (“i will not go to any popish wedding or put on a hat or see my grandchildren raised in ignorance and fear and i will never vote for john f. kennedy again…and so on”) that even stanley was impressed, since he remembered our marriage and thought that any alternative was preferable to alienating parents from their children because of a mixed marriage. we were actually saved by the lord high priest of the area, who refused his consent to the marriage under these circumstances. laurie said he talked to every priest in vermont and he doesn’t think much of them. corinne is not at all strong in her f
aith (after two years at bennington college, she hardly could be) and surprised and stunned her parents by siding with me. but corinne took a beating. so she is being married in sin, by a justice of the peace, and her parents are sinning by coming at all. the result of all this is that it is to be a very short small ceremony, with only immediate family present, and with a small reception afterward, provided corinne’s mother can stop praying long enough to arrange for it.
about corinne: we have known her for so long that she is quite one of the family. the other kids are extremely fond of her, and joanne thinks of her as a close friend. she has been one of stanley’s students, and he and i both think highly of her. she is one of the few local girls to attend the college, and has done fairly well. she is quite intelligent, very lovely, and—until she met her mother head-on in the church battle—we thought of her as quiet and docile. she is very well-bred, with good manners and dresses well. since she is an only child her parents have devoted everything to her, and insist upon her education because they have none themselves. the college has turned her from a bennington town girl to a bennington college girl, and the result is fine. she surprised me a little by her enthusiasm over the baby; she apparently wants nothing better than a home and a family, and when i read her the section of your letter about silverware she was overjoyed, and dumfounded laurie by saying that their own silver was somehow the first step in settling down. laurie still thinks of their lives as wandering europe in the summers and going to school in the winters, but he is going to be surprised by finding that he is being turned into a husband and a father. i think it’s wonderful, and stanley—who is still giggling over the idea of being a grandfather—thinks it’s terribly funny, and has been giving laurie dire accounts of how i did the same thing to him.
once the religious question was solved—which it only was yesterday—everything seemed much smoother. they are not sending out invitations, since the family has already been notified by phone but corinne is planning announcements; her mother points out that she hardly wants to tell her friends that her daughter is being married in sin, but corinne says her father has already come round to accepting the idea, and she thinks her mother will be all right in a day or so; corinne refused to tell them about the baby until the quarrel over religion made it necessary, so her mother got all the shocks at once. anyway they are really very nice people, and devoted to both the kids, and her father finally admitted that he certainly wasn’t going to let anyone else give his daughter away no matter where she was married.
naturally there is talk whenever any two kids announce a sudden marriage, and we have gotten a little bit of it already, but our friends, who will certainly know the truth soon enough, have already mostly guessed it, and the general tone seems to be one of polite indifference. i think that our public and immediate support of laurie, and the fact that this is no fly-by-night affair, has already done a good deal to take the sting out of the gossip. laurie and corinne will be in europe all summer, so they will be pretty much all right, as far as gossip goes, and stanley and i simply couldn’t care less. among all the difficulties that is the brightest note—we are adding to our family exactly the person we want.
and of course the rest of the world continues to move along. sally goes tomorrow on the bus to new york to visit her dear friend betsy for the weekend, and the rest of us drive down on sunday, laurie following us on monday. we are coming home on thursday, marrying them on saturday, and seeing everyone off to europe and camp the following week. i am seeing my publisher and agent in new york and will get the latest word on my book. publication day has been set back to october because of a heavy printing schedule; i may very well have a book and a grandchild at the same time.
laurie very much wants to enter bennington as a special student in literature and drama, and bill fels, our president, has said that he would be very much in favor of it, since laurie made such an impression here the year he took one literature course. if laurie should be admitted (and it is a much better college than goddard) then corinne would also be re-admitted whenever she wanted to come.
i have interrupted this letter a dozen times to answer the phone and run errands; the whole thing has been great for me personally; i am so busy i don’t have time to worry about my anxiety problems.
i hope you will be as pleased and happy about all of it as we are. i am sure the baby comes as no surprise to you, but i hope it comes as a great pleasure. you will like your new granddaughter, i know. and much much love from all of us.
s.
p.s. corinne is smallish, very dark, with enormous dark eyes and a nice voice.
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
wednesday [July 4, 1962]
dearest mother and pop,
your letter arrived this morning; surprisingly, since it was postmarked july 2 in hawaii. i am sorry that you are cutting your vacation short; i hope it was because of the weather and not mother’s wheezing. i do hope that mother is well and comfortable.
things seems so quiet and uneventful around here after the past few weeks. stanley is typing away downstairs and the canaries are singing and cat applegate is asleep on the chair and mrs king is cleaning the bathroom and it’s all just like an ordinary day with the kids at school, and hard to remember that they are all gone. somehow each year they go to camp it seems less going away than just switching homes; they know what and how to pack by now and when they arrive everything is just the way they left it last year and they move right in. joanne will enjoy being a counselor; she had to go three days earlier than the others to help get things ready and was getting along quite nicely with the boy counselors, which is of course why she took the job.
the thought of describing the last three weeks appalls me; i cannot even remember clearly what happened when. first, sally went to new york to spend a weekend with betsy, and we saw her off on the bus with considerable apprehension, since it was her first trip anywhere alone. joanne and barry and stanley and i drove down on sunday, going to a hotel in brooklyn across the street from stanley’s mother’s apartment, so that she could take over the kids and stanley and i could spend at least one evening in the city visiting friends. it was ninety-five degrees in the city when we arrived about four o’clock. the hotel had messed up our reservations. we finally got settled with us on the ninth floor, barry on the tenth floor, and joanne on the fifth floor, and they had a lot of fun telephoning each other and driving the telephone operator crazy. we got all the air-conditioners turned on, too. on monday stanley doggedly started off with barry and joanne, to see the planetarium and the museum of natural history; i headed off into new york where i had lunch with my agent and publisher and heard lots of nice things about my book except the reader’s digest didn’t take it and no book club wants it, which made us all very sad but didn’t really surprise anyone, and we ate cold salmon with capers and drank whisky sours and had a lovely time. after leaving them i thought this was a good time to do some shopping, and in order to get as much done as possible i hurried and hurried and suddenly about half past four i found myself loaded down with packages standing on a street corner in that searing heat and feeling very awful indeed, and a man passing took my arm and said was i all right and i said no i was not and he said stand back here in the shade and i will get you a taxi and the poor man stood on the corner for fifteen minutes trying to get a taxi while i kind of sagged against the wall with people going past staring at me. (i have asked oliver about this of course since i came back and he said it was probably mostly the heat and the hurrying with a spot of anxiety thrown in and wasn’t i silly to rush in and out of air-conditioned stores?) anyway i finally got a taxi and the poor man was mighty glad to see the last of me and i thanked him earnestly and wanted to give him money but he wouldn’t take it. when i finally got out of the taxi in front of our hotel and saw barry standing in the doorway i nearly cried. barry took my packages and took
me upstairs and i sat down under the air conditioner while stanley made me a drink with lots of ice cubes.
the next day they went off to the metropolitan museum and i simply stayed in the hotel room. it was lovely; i had my lunch sent up and i read and washed some clothes and did all my business with editors and such on the phone. i never had such a nice day in new york. about seven in the evening, when it was cool again, we all went out for dinner with stanley’s mother and his brother, and came back to stanley’s mother’s apartment to find laurie sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching television. he moved into the hotel room on ten with barry and it was fun to have everyone together for breakfast, particularly since laurie had come down for only two reasons—to buy a wedding ring, and to go to the baseball game with stanley and barry. they had tickets for a double-header that afternoon, and we then went into one more of our complicated ballet sequences; laurie drove stanley and barry to the polo grounds and i waited in the hotel with the girls until sally’s good friend jay williams arrived; he had invited sally to come out to their home in connecticut overnight. he was going to take her out to lunch and then back to connecticut and give her a fencing lesson, and he wanted sally to meet his little girl vicky who is ten. she loved jay’s wife and the little girl, and she and jay wrote a poem and fenced and he taught her how to use a crossbow. in the meantime joanne and i took stanley’s mother into new york to lunch and we very daringly let joanne order a tom collins which made her feel very old and sophisticated and we had a very gay time, and then came back to brooklyn. i was expected to meet stanley in new york so joanne and stanley’s mother had tea and peanut butter sandwiches in the apartment, on the terrace, which is nice and cool.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 54
