The Letters of Shirley Jackson Read online

  as always when i get creative, i am creating more children. about october again; i can’t seem to produce anything but libras; a little girl to be named joanne,*1 we believe. at any rate, we hope wildly that you might be here to wait around nervously those last few weeks, as before. i remember you hexed laurie into being two weeks later, just by wishing him to appear.

  our new address is north bennington, vermont. i go every day to get our mail at the postoffice, and nod to the villagers. write soon. love from all of us,

  s.

  • • •

  “What he needs is a baby sister.”

  [To Jim Bishop, Shirley’s new literary agent at MCA]

  August 16, 1946

  Dear Mr. Bishop:

  That is good news about the Yale Review. They are welcome to the story, and I hope you can hurry them about printing it. As for my life and work: I have been writing short stories for four years, published everywhere from The New Yorker to a high school textbook; I am married to a critic and have two small children, both critics; I am now working on a first novel; I live in North Bennington, Vermont, and am learning to play the guitar.

  That is bad news about Covici,*2 the weasel, but I like your “they haven’t laid a glove on us yet” attitude. Try to find another publisher for them, and you can bait them with the news that I am now working on a cheerful novel about a college girl,*3 suitable for serialization in anything printed on slick paper, which I will have in your lap, done up in red and green ribbon, by Christmas day. If they want to contract for both the book of stories and the novel, they are welcome to publish the novel first (as Covici isn’t) but they must like the stories and want to publish them.

  As for the stories, incidentally, I want to take the ten worst ones out and put in a few good new ones. Anyone who gives me a contract for a book of stories can have a say about which are the ten worst.

  The other favor I would like to ask you is to needle Story*4 about when the hell they plan to print a story called Seven Types of Ambiguity they bought nine months ago.

  I hope to see you in New York in a month or two and introduce you to my husband, who claims that you are his agent too.

  Cordially,

  Shirley Jackson Hyman

  • • •

  “Ex Libris: The Hymans”

  Two years have passed. We have no letters from between August 1946 and October 1948. Shirley’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, is published in February 1948 to few reviews and modest sales. The following is the earliest surviving letter that Shirley Jackson wrote to her parents (they begin saving her correspondence at this point). It is written four months after “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker in June to huge acclaim, thrusting Shirley into the national eye. The mail she receives following the story’s publication—mostly very negative and threatening—chills her. Shirley now awaits the birth of her third child, Sarah.

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  thursday [mid-October 1948]

  dearest mother and pop,

  i have been postponing writing you, because i kept thinking that my next letter would be from the hospital.

  first of all, there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. i always seem to be late anyway—remember laurie?—and since i feel perfectly wonderful, and have no trouble getting around or anything, the doctor says just go on waiting. i go on briskly racing up and down stairs, and climbing the hill every day, and last weekend i raked all the leaves off the lawn, and so on, and no effects of any kind. i still haven’t had a piece of candy, but stanley agrees with me that if the baby hasn’t come by halloween i ought to be allowed to eat a marshmallow.

  one reason i think everything is so delayed is that i keep trying to get just one more thing done before i leave, so i don’t leave. first it was a story i wanted to finish, and get mailed off before i went to the hospital, and that’s been gone nearly two weeks; then the proofs of my book of stories*5 arrived and i prayed for time to get them read—they went off a week ago. now i am debating doing another story. if i start it i’ll want to finish it and it will keep me home longer; on the other hand, if i don’t start it, and don’t go to the hospital, i’ll be awful mad. all the children’s winter clothes are out and mended, the baby’s stuff is ready, the only thing i haven’t done is order my thanksgiving turkey.

  stanley says he will send you a telegram the minute anything happens. who knows, it may beat this letter.

  love to you and pop,

  s.

  • • •

  The children seeing their parents as one

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  [November 18, 1948]

  dearest mom and pop,

  i have been wanting to write this letter for two weeks now, and of course each day i delay there is more i want to tell you, since with so many children now i find that i have about fifteen minutes at a time between meals and feedings and baths.

  everything has been so pleasant, and sally*6 is such a good baby. she is on her own schedule, of course, and a very strange one it is, but she is fat and happy, and apparently very pleased to be here at last. laurie and jann are very fond of her, and jann can hold the bottle for her and will soon be able to change her. jann has begun an active social life, inviting guests for supper. and laurie has learned to read his whole school book, and is making such fast progress that it will not be long before he can read anything; he spends hours figuring out words in the paper, and writing lists of words on the typewriter.

  laurie and jann have gone to school, and i have probably fifteen minutes before sally wants her bath and then i make beds and then laurie and jann come home for lunch, and then we all go to sleep, and then i wake up and go downstreet to do the shopping and then i make supper and then if something doesn’t come up i may get back to the typewriter again. you can see how much work i do—make the beds and make supper—but it seems to fill up my day.

  the only other thing which i didn’t tell you over the phone was that two days after i got back from the hospital i got an attack of appendicitis, the first i’ve ever had and i hope the last. it was right at dinner time and stanley got the poor doctor over here from some fancy dinner he was attending; the poor man thought he was through with emergency calls from me, but he came over and said i definitely had appendicitis and for a little while it looked as though i was going back to the hospital again, but i got packed in ice overnight and the pain went away, so unless i get another attack i don’t need to worry about it. can you imagine me with appendicitis, like a bennington student?

  i haven’t gotten back to writing yet, mostly because i am still trying to get the house going again. i have a story in the october mademoiselle, and one in the november harper’s, and one in the december hudson review, and one coming up in the february woman’s home companion, which is the one they bought over a year ago. also my book of stories is due about february fifteenth, and i should have advance copies in a few weeks and will of course send you one. stanley finally broke his contract with knopf because he simply couldn’t get along with them, and is now working on a contract for his new book with a new publisher, and if that seems to work out i will probably change to them too, since i don’t much like the way farrar straus doesn’t sell or distribute books, even though they are the nicest people in the world.

  the thought of having two beautiful daughters has both stanley and me a little bewildered; we never really counted on another daughter, and stanley says he is a little frightened of them. i went to the local mother’s club meeting the other night—i finally had to go because they’ve been asking me for a year—and they were all laughing at me because i suddenly realized that girls wear dresses, that have to be washed and ironed, they had good chocolate cake at the mother’s club, though. no one mentions the fact t
hat i also write books, as though it were not polite to talk about. by the way i lost twenty-five pounds, and no longer like candy. it was a dirty trick, after all. stanley’s mother sent me a box of chocolates and i didn’t like them and gave them to the kids. all my clothes are too big. must stop. write me soon. lots and lots of love to both of you from all five of us.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Mary Rand, Women’s Home Companion]

  November 22, 1948

  Dear Miss Rand:

  I am enclosing a photograph, which I hope you will see is returned. If you need a glossier print, you can get one from the photographer, Erich Hartmann. If you do, please see that it is the same picture, since he also has one of me looking like Alexander Woollcott caricatured as an owl.

  Here is all the information I can think of. I am twenty-nine,*7 married, the mother of three children (Laurence, 6; Joanne, 3; Sarah, 3 weeks). I was raised in California, came East when I was about sixteen, lived in Rochester until I was married, and since then have lived in New York, chiefly Greenwich Village, in the woods in New Hampshire, and now in this village near Bennington College, where my husband taught for a while several years ago. I like Vermont and this town very much, except in the winter, when I long for California. We have a large house, six thousand books (including my fairly sizable witchcraft library), two black cats, temporarily no dog, and permanently no car. My husband is a folklorist and critic named Stanley Edgar Hyman, and my son sings folk songs to my guitar-playing.

  I have been writing professionally for about six years, and amateurly for as long as I can remember. I have sold a sizable number of stories to a wide variety of magazines. I have had a number of stories in anthologies, including a Foley Best Short Story in 1944. A volume of my stories entitled THE LOTTERY is being published early this spring by Farrar, Straus, including the “The Daemon Lover” in another form. Farrar, Straus also published my first novel, THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL, last spring. I am now working on another novel, and some long stories.

  The only background information on this story I can give you is that the germ of it came from an anecdote someone told me at a PTA meeting. The story as it stands frightens me a little when I reread it. James Harris, in one form or another, occurs in a number of my stories, and I am inclined to believe he is the Devil. It would not be beyond his powers, certainly, to transform himself into a rat.

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  [To Margaret Farrar, editor at Farrar, Straus and Co., publishers]

  [late 1948]

  Dear Margaret:

  Here are the corrected page proofs. The single big problem, as far as I am concerned, is the running of the stories together on the page, one beginning on the same page another ends, which I never imagined you would do. It seems to me to destroy any effect any of the endings might have, and I feel so strongly about it that I can think of no alternative to repaging the whole thing to begin each story on a new page.

  Other problems are minor. I like the jacket design very much, but think the subtitle, with or without “or,” complicates it unnecessarily. “The Lottery,” which after all is the title of the book, would make a nice simple effective jacket with the black circle, while the James Harris line would just muddle perspective purchasers (ditto in the advertising—the subtitle seems to me to serve a purpose only on the title page). Can the subtitle still be taken off the jacket? If not, as a poor second best, can an “or” be put on the front and on the spine?

  I have been thinking about the James Harris poem, and the inevitable place for it, it seems to me, is not at the beginning of the book, but at the end, after the last story, as an epigraph numbered “V,” and just listed in the index as “V.” I think this would give the reader a final jolt, and furnish the key to the stories where such a thing should come, after they have been read.

  I hope you will let me see a proof of the jacket copy while it can still be changed, remembering the two bad errors in the Road copy.

  I will be in town for a day or two next week, taking two-thirds of my children to see Santa Claus, and hope you will be able to talk to me about all this then. Most of them, although small things, seem quite important to me, and the repaging seems a big thing.

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  saturday [December 18, 1948]

  dearest mother and pop,

  thank you so much for the card and letter, and for pop’s nice birthday letter, and especially for the lovely robe. the robe will certainly come in handy—my old one was beginning to get a little drafty where the corduroy had worn off in patches, and wandering around this house at night is a mighty cold proposition.

  i took both laurie and joanne to see santa claus in new york; we spent a day going around the stores. Bunny—my sister-in-law—came with us, fortunately, since that made two of us to carry the snow suits, presents from santa claus, half-finished lollipops, and so on. we started at ten in the morning, and rode on the merry-go-round at gimbel’s, and jannie balked at speaking to santa claus. laurie was an old hand at it, and went up and sat on the old gentleman’s knee and rattled off a list of approximately fifty items (including a camera, a typewriter, and a new electric train) but jannie saw only a strange man trying to entice her to sit on his knee and she flatly refused. then we spent an hour or so riding up and down on the escalators, in the christmas crowds, and the children loved it, and then we walked around along with five thousand other people and saw the window displays. then the children, who were running the occasion, declared for lunch in the automat, and bunny and i doggedly ploughed our way through the automat mobs, still carrying the snow suits, etc., and since laurie and jannie must put their own nickels in, bunny and i held off a crowd of people while the kids kneeled on the counter and tried to decide whether they wanted a peanut butter sandwich or a cheese sandwich, and apple pie or chocolate cake. bunny and i each got a cup of coffee; i was too embarrassed to go near the sandwich counter and bunny was trying to carry three trays; laurie dropped his sandwich and the plate shattered and we all ran to the other end of the room and pretended we hadn’t noticed. after that we got the children onto the top half of a fifth avenue bus and rode them up and down fifth avenue for the rest of the afternoon, counting santa clauses on the corners. when we got back to the hotel we put the children to bed for a nap, and bunny and i took off our shoes and ordered a lot of cocktails from downstairs; the children thought it was the most wonderful day they had ever had.

  that was my birthday, by the way, and stanley’s father gave me a birthday party that evening; in order to include the children, he arranged for dinner in the hotel room, with champagne and a birthday cake, and the children both had champagne and felt very pleased with themselves, and all of stanley’s family was there, bringing me fancy presents like bottles of perfume and nylon stockings. i felt like a movie star being feted. thinking about that day now, i think it was fun, but at the time i was pretty bewildered; the combination of the cocktails bunny and i had had in the afternoon and the champagne for dinner had both bunny and me giggling and mixing up our words.

  except for that one day, our whole trip was pretty discouraging. my book of stories is all wrong; they set it in type all mixed up, and as a result of fixing that, the book will be delayed until april; they put through the copy for the jacket blurbs without consulting me, and made two serious errors and a number of embarrassing statements about me, which i am trying to have taken out now, and which will probably delay the book still further, and their advertising campaign, which they told me about proudly, is so excruciating that i will never show my face out of vermont again. they are playing up lottery as the most terrifying piece of literature ever printed, which is bad enough, and they have a long statement from christopher morley saying that lottery scared hi
m to death and will give ulcers to anyone who reads it, and they are working on things that say “do you dare read this book?” and except for lottery it’s a harmless little book of short stories. i feel like a fool. and the two stories i had at the women’s home companion and mademoiselle—they were both being considered, and looked very promising—both came back with glowing statements about how they were the best stories these people had ever read but of course they couldn’t buy them. which leaves me high and dry till the stories get to another magazine. and stanley, who is marketing his new book, got offered a contract with a thousand dollar advance, by a fine publisher. the only catch is that they don’t want to sign for six months or a year, until he’s got more of it written. which leaves us high and dry again, and which also brings me to the uncomfortable part of my letter, which is your asking how we stood financially. i was going to answer you saying thank you and that we were doing fine, because stanley was getting his advance and i was selling at least one story, but now that everything has bounced at once things are a little grim, and i would like to ask you if you can lend us a couple of hundred dollars; we will be all clear again in the spring (those stories have got to sell somewhere, even to a literary magazine for fifty bucks; stanley is bound to get his advance sometime) and some money now would make it possible to clear everything up that can’t be postponed, and would also enable us to keep mrs nadeau, who is our main luxury right now. we suddenly find ourselves living very bohemian-ly, something we haven’t done in quite a while—i charged all my christmas presents at gimbel’s and got out fast, stanley just barely managed to get money to the bank to cover the check we gave the hotel, and so on. we always manage to spend more than we’ve got, because money seems to come so easily, for stories and articles, and then suddenly something like this happens, and we realize that we live too well, and i think we both get scared. at any rate if you can find it possible, we’d be terribly grateful, and if not—just before christmas is a fine time, isn’t it?—please don’t worry about it. everything always manages to come out all right somehow.