The Letters of Shirley Jackson Read online

  i have always wanted to see the places in england you take so casually. save them for me; i will exact a graphic description when we see you again.

  love from all of us, and if you get a chance write soon.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  “They get along fine.”

  [To Louis Harap]

  [May 11, 1944]

  dear louis—

  laurence is a fine tough specimen of semi-animal personality, with a sort of deadly logic that confounds his father and a sense of parody that would do justice to harpo marx. he communicates almost entirely with the dogs upstairs who are fond of him in a patronizing sort of way.

  did stanley tell you i am writing a novel? i decided that i might as well, just to keep stanley from sounding too superior about his old book. he wants me to tell you he is up to 1910. well, i am up to page fifty in my novel, and there isn’t a critic in it.

  i have been reading henry james and am having a hard time keeping him out of everything i write, even letters. if i sort of drift off into something like “it is with the deepest admiration and regret that i find i must inform you that i am unable to bring myself to believe that i could ever feel towards you as you were so kind as to indicate that you could possibly have felt towards me, unworthy as i am of such a gentlemanly and deeply human regard, although unwarranted in my behavior, i trust, by the very graciousness of your tolerance towards one who can only sign herself, believe me, my dear dear friend, only, and no more, trust me, ever, your resigned and ever admiring…”

  i must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. if you think of any good scenes for a novel covering about forty pages send them right along. i can use anything i can get. accept from all three of us our undying devotion.

  love,

  Shirley

  • • •

  “Well, looks like we’re going to win the war.”

  [To Louis Harap]

  july 16, 1944

  dear louis—

  first of all, we are delighted to hear of your collection of promotions and transfers. i don’t understand any of it very well, but it sounds terribly impressive.

  you wanted to know how the invasion*60 news was received? it’s hard to describe; i only saw what it was like in our neighborhood, and i think it was the most terrible day of my life. i went out to do my marketing in the morning and people kept stopping me on the street to take my paper out of my hands to look at the headlines, and the butcher looked at me when i asked for veal and finally picked up a handful of hamburger and put it in a bag and gave it to me, and the old lady who has the bakery was sitting behind the counter crying and when i muttered something embarrassed and sympathetic she wailed “they’re going to raise my rent ten dollars a month,” and then her daughter came in and told me she had four sons overseas. we got the news when the new york times came, and sat through breakfast with all the radios on.

  stanley says he promised to send you copies of my stories; they’ll be coming out soon. our collective books progress slowly; stanley reads more every day, and i write lots of stories, some of which sell. laurie is due to start writing his book any day; he has started getting out of his crib; we caught him one night and he had apparently been getting away with it for weeks; he hoists himself up and over the edge and lets himself down by his hands. like humphrey bogart going over a prison wall.

  now he does it one-handed. so, until about ten o’clock at night when he gets really tired, he keeps getting out of bed and wandering into the living room and asking for a drink. consequently my usual time for writing—the evening—has been curtailed, and i do even less. we still can’t communicate with him so he goes blindly and happily on believing that this is the way people live, shoving elephants out of their way. he’s got muscles in his back like joe louis. for god’s sake come home and teach him to box, or tango, or ride a bicycle, or something. he’s got too much energy for us. now, when he takes his nap we both go to sleep too.

  we all send love, and are anxious to hear from you. s.

  * * *

  —

  stanley wants me to add a postscript saying that kenneth burke, who has been teaching at bennington, let us know the other day that bennington is looking for young instructors and he mentioned stanley to them. if they should offer stanley a job it means i would be married to a college professor, doesn’t it, unless i got wise in time? and can’t you just see stanley teaching a seminar in a girl’s college? whee.

  • • •

  “Yes. But why doesn’t he learn to walk?”

  [To Louis Harap]

  december 29, 1944

  dear louis—

  we work hard and profit little. i sent my book*61 to the publishers, fifty-five thousand words of it, and stanley has completed ten thousand words of his first chapter.

  stanley is making all ready, mentally, for the bennington harpies;*62 i am planning furniture and watching white sales in the paper. everything seems very cold and dismal, four days after christmas, with no stories selling at present and none being written. i am, however, enclosing a thing of mine from the new yorker; it was in a week or so ago. now that my book is finished i am looking again toward a novel; god send me a plot.

  would you do me a favor someday if you have a chance? i had several years ago, a very dear friend whose home is in paris. naturally i haven’t heard from her for quite a while, although i know indirectly that she is safe. if you ever get near there would you look her up? i think you would have many things in common. her name is mlle. jeanne-marie bedel. she and most of her family speak English. if you ever see her, will you show her one or two of my stories? she always thought i’d be a writer, and i never get into the overseas edition of the new yorker, so no one over there has heard of me but you, and you’re a friend. i wouldn’t ask you to do this if i didn’t believe that you would be very favorably impressed with her; she is a terrific person.

  i don’t dare write any more since i want to enclose the story. love from all of us, including laurie.

  love,

  shirley

  Skip Notes

  *1 A plush beanie hat, still popular today, named “c and c” after the French cheveux corp, or “body of hair.”

  *2 Stanley is staying with Walter Bernstein at Dartmouth for the summer.

  *3 Alta is the Jacksons’ live-in maid and cook.

  *4 Elizabeth Young, nicknamed y (“ee”) by Shirley, was her best friend in Rochester.

  *5 Liberty magazine was a general-interest weekly that was started in 1924 and lasted until 1950.

  *6 Michael Palmer, Shirley’s casual boyfriend in Rochester, was from an affluent family, raced boats, and was a member of the Rochester Yacht Club, where his family socialized with the Jacksons.

  *7 “Faithful in my fashion, Cynara” was code between Shirley and Stanley for Stanley’s infidelities. The term comes from a poem by Ernest Dowson, with the line “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

  *8 Kenneth Fearing, poet.

  *9 Lee was a nickname Shirley gave to herself, to rhyme with that of her friend y (“ee”).

  *10 Shirley’s story “Janice” appeared in The Threshold in February 1938.

  *11 Walter Bernstein—Stanley is still staying with Walter at Dartmouth.

  *12 Another of Shirley’s nicknames for herself was Stacia, representing the troublesome side of her personality; she sometimes called her “my demon.”

  *13 Shiah is a Syracuse friend of theirs.

  *14 Anthony is the title of a novel Shirley is struggling to write.

  *15 Daughters of the American Revolution. Geraldine’s Bugbee-Field family considered themselves members.
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  *16 Castaway, a novel by James Gould Cozzens, was very important to both Shirley and Stanley. By odd coincidence, Shirley’s agent and friend years later will be Bernice Baumgarten, wife of Cozzens.

  *17 The 42nd Parallel is a 1930 novel by John Dos Passos.

  *18 A very early example of Shirley’s giving inanimate objects malevolent personalities.

  *19 Shirley’s pewter mask of Pan.

  *20 In Kabumpo in Oz by John R. Neill (1922). Kabumpo was the wise Elegant Elephant and Peg Amy was a living wooden doll who was revealed to be a long-lost princess in the Winkie country of Oz. Walter shared Shirley’s passion for the Oz books.

  *21 The tenderhearted tiger in another Oz book, The Hungry Tiger of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson (1926).

  *22 Merricat Blackwood will dream of “living on the moon” in Shirley’s final completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Her mention of commedia dell’arte and Harlequin reveals a lifelong interest.

  *23 These godparents are not named and their identity is unknown.

  *24 Stanley was spending the summer doing hard labor at a twenty-dollar-a-week job at a paper mill in Erving, Massachusetts. No one expected him to last at it, but he stayed, working for nearly two months.

  *25 Kay Turk, one of Shirley’s Syracuse friends.

  *26 The Rains Came (1937), a novel by Louis Bromfield.

  *27 Innes is another Syracuse friend.

  *28 Bill is another Rochester friend.

  *29 A novel called Fugue by Olive Moore (1932).

  *30 Jay Williams was a friend of Stanley’s, now also Shirley’s. Jay later would become a film actor, writer of the Danny Dunn juvenile books series, and self-described wizard/magician. He had given Shirley various charms to bring on her period during a time in spring 1939 when she had a number of pregnancy scares.

  *31 The commedia dell’arte and its elaborate costumes would remain a touchstone for Shirley throughout her life.

  *32 Jeanne Marie Bedel (“Jeannou”), an exchange student at Rochester, was a dear friend and confidante for a year.

  *33 Dorothy Ayling, Shirley’s early childhood friend in California.

  *34 June Mirken was a friend from Syracuse who became a very dear lifetime friend and, later, Laurie’s godmother.

  *35 Shirley claimed for the rest of her life that the ancient music box was haunted, and would turn itself on in the early hours of the night, usually favoring “Carnival in Venice.”

  *36 Leonard Brown, their esteemed but controversial literature professor at Syracuse.

  *37 Stanley is struggling to write a book of literary criticism, much later to become The Armed Vision (1947).

  *38 A woman Stanley is also seeing.

  *39 Kenneth Burke, lifelong mentor of Stanley’s, and his wife, Libbie, were dear friends of both Shirley and Stanley.

  *40 Thomas Hart Benton.

  *41 The founder of Christian Science.

  *42 This is two years after the Nanking Massacre, when Imperial Japanese troops committed murder and atrocities against citizens of Nanking, then the capital of China. San Franciscans are afraid such aggression could reach California, and are experiencing high anti-Japanese anxiety. The Chinese, however, are longtime California residents and workers and, as such, are considered welcome.

  *43 Alec Templeton (1909–1963) was a Welsh-born American pianist and composer, with absolute pitch.

  *44 1939 World’s Fair.

  *45 Geraldine’s mother, Shirley’s maternal grandmother.

  *46 Leslie’s mother, Shirley’s paternal grandmother.

  *47 Conservatives tried to deport militant labor leader Harry Bridges in the 1930s and 1940s.

  *48 Shirley will not be twenty-three for four months.

  *49 They would soon be working on a new issue of Spectre, the political “quarterly of the arts,” co-edited by Jackson and Hyman at Syracuse.

  *50 The Cosmological Eye by Henry Miller, a collection of short fiction published by New Directions (1939).

  *51 Most likely a chauffeur hired by the family.

  *52 Reference to Moe Hyman, Stanley’s father, who was vehemently against Stanley dating Shirley.

  *53 Shirley’s cat, named after legendary boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis.

  *54 Rae Beamish published American Signatures: A Collection of Modern Letters (Black Faun Press, 1941) with contributions by William Saroyan and Henry Miller, among others.

  *55 Blues singer Bessie Smith’s 78 rpm phonograph records, which Stanley was beginning to collect.

  *56 Field & Stream magazine, for hunters and fishermen.

  *57 Most likely a reference to another staff member at The Jewish Survey.

  *58 The New Republic.

  *59 Stanley is trying to enlist but having little luck.

  *60 The invasion of Normandy occurred in June and July 1944.

  *61 Elizabeth, not finished and soon abandoned.

  *62 Bennington College was a recently established, ultraprogressive school for women students interested in literature and the arts.

  TWO

  • • •

  The House with Four Pillars: 1945–1949

  i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story—with as many levels as grand central station—with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet.

  —To Ralph Ellison, spring 1949

  In March 1945, Shirley, Stanley, and Laurie move to North Bennington, Vermont, into the large Greek Revival house with four two-story Doric pillars later pictured on the jacket of Life Among the Savages. It is a village of less than a thousand residents in a rural farming and small manufacturing area in the southwest part of the state. Bennington College, an ultraprogressive college for women, is only a mile from the Hymans’ new house. Less than two decades old, the college has about three hundred students and a small faculty made up of well-known professional artists, writers, composers, painters, poets, and playwrights drawn to this remote small center of learning because of its dedication to the educational philosophy of John Dewey; students are expected to learn by doing, not just reading and studying. Bennington College has a three-month winter non-resident work term, when students take mostly volunteer jobs in the fields of their interest and the faculty are free to pursue their own artistic and intellectual interests.

  [To Louis Harap]

  april 1, 1945

  dear louis,

  we haven’t done much reading or writing or even sitting down the last week or so, which might account for our slowness in answering your letters. we are fairly established in our new house now, but it’s been a fight. we were here a week yesterday, after a feverish week of packing in new york, and a bewildering trip up here with laurie, who had the time of his life.

  due to some horrible inadequacy of housing possibilities, we have a little nest of sixteen rooms, including a conservatory and two pantries, and just mapping it out for the quickest route to the bathroom has been a problem. laurie knows every corner of it by heart, including the attics, of which there seem to be seven or eight, and the layer upon layer of cellars. he is also pleased to find that we are to have our friends the painters, paperers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and so on, with us for the next month or so; they are his joy and delight, and he keeps showing up for lunch with great streaks of white paint on his face. he has also met two little boys who live next door, who knocked him down and hit him over the head with a box, and he is completely captivated with them. except for the facts that stanley starts teaching next week and that tonight a neighbor made us a gift of
a mother cat and four kittens, that is about all i have the strength to say about this house, except that it’s lovely and sunny and dirty and agreeable and bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.

  i am so happy you met jeannou and liked her; i was sure you would. i expect to receive a letter describing her meeting with you and giving her impressions of you.

  not offended, i was more than a little irritated over your patronizing comments on my stories; i seem to recall that you turned down some of them for your magazine and then had to eat your words once before when they started selling. since i am probably no more tactful than you are, i can only say that i don’t think you’re any kind of judge of what i’m trying to do, and let it go at that. stanley believes you completely misread the review you commented on, and intends to write you to that effect, calling you to account for your further comments on his future career which, if not openly insulting, smacked nevertheless of that same misreading and deliberate judging by false standards. back to my stories again, i can only say that if you think a “full career as a writer” comes with the length of a novel you are more ambitious for me than i am for myself. there. now to something more pleasant.