The Letters of Shirley Jackson Read online

  Jackson remains best known as the author of nuanced and elegantly written works of fiction which often contain gothic elements. However, she also wrote numerous stories inspired by experiences as a wife and mother. These comic tales quickly became a staple fixture in the most prominent women’s magazines of the era. Readers may even recognize early versions of some of this material in this volume. As Jackson says in a 1955 letter to her parents: “i guess the reason i always think i have written you is because i write the same material in stories; if i sent you the first drafts of all my stories you would have twice as many letters but i guess not as much true news.” Many of these stories were revised for publication in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). Jackson’s family stories became so well known during her lifetime that she was singled out for criticism by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) as one of the female authors of what Friedan scathingly characterized as “Happy Housewife” magazine stories.

  Jackson’s family stories likely contributed to the surprising lack of critical attention her work received in the decades following her death. As scholar Lynette Carpenter has persuasively argued: “traditional male critics could not, in the end, reconcile genre with gender in Jackson’s case; unable to understand how a serious writer of gothic fiction could also be, to all outward appearances, a typical housewife, much less how she could publish housewife humor in Good Housekeeping, they dismissed her.” Jackson’s popular fiction associations were also seen as problematic. Lenemaja Friedman, the author of the first academic study of her work (Shirley Jackson, 1975), considered Jackson to be an undeniably interesting but ultimately minor writer because she “saw herself primarily as an entertainer, as an expert storyteller and craftsman.”

  Nor did Jackson appear to fit neatly in with the dominant postwar trends in the literary gothic. By dint of her California birth and strong New England associations, she certainly could not be classified as a product of the American South. This distinguished her from Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, all of whom were considered to be key exemplars of the “New American Gothic.” Furthermore, although, as critic John Parks has noted, she certainly had numerous thematic and symbolic elements in common with these writers, Jackson’s blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy invariably leaned more towards the subtly uncanny than to the overtly grotesque.

  Within a popular fiction context, Jackson was again often left out of the critical conversation, until recently seldom discussed alongside the male writers more usually associated with the postwar boom in fantasy, horror, and science fiction (although Stephen King extensively praises The Haunting of Hill House in Danse Macabre, and Mark Jancovich has effectively situated Jackson alongside other genre 1950s writers such as Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch). Jackson was also often only briefly referenced in discussions of the so-called New Yorker School during the 1940s and 1950s, despite the fact that she wrote one of the most (in)famous stories ever printed in the magazine. In summary, her gender, versatility, professionalism, and commercial popularity meant that Jackson was frequently deemed less worthy of serious scholarly and critical inquiry than many of her contemporaries.

  Times have changed, and a new wave of academic interest in Jackson’s oeuvre has emerged, supplementing excellent work carried out in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, there have been four edited essay collections, two monographs, dozens of book chapters and journal articles, and numerous dissertations and PhD theses. Although “The Lottery,” We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Haunting of Hill House remain the most frequently discussed texts, a much wider selection of Jackson’s work is now being studied than was previously the case.

  Jackson’s back catalogue has been attractively repackaged and relaunched for a new generation of readers. It is now much easier to find her lesser-known works than before, particularly outside of the United States. In 2010, Jackson’s selected works were published in a Library of America anthology compiled by Joyce Carol Oates, one of her most accomplished literary successors, with a second volume, edited by Ruth Franklin, following in 2020. Franklin’s award-winning 2016 biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, marked another significant milestone in the author’s return to critical and popular prominence. It inspired numerous reviews and articles enthusiastically reappraising Jackson’s literary legacy. Jackson’s estate has played an important role in keeping interest in her work alive, encouraging publishers to reprint her work and releasing two volumes of previously uncollected and unpublished writings: Just an Ordinary Day (1995) and Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (2015), which were both edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt. The Jackson-Hyman family’s promotion of the author’s work and legacy has carried over to the next generation. Jackson’s grandson, visual artist Miles Hyman, illustrated an edition of her children’s story 9 Magic Wishes in 2001 and adapted “The Lottery” as a graphic novel in 2016.

  Renewed interest in Jackson’s life and work has now extended to a new wave of visual adaptations. A film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, directed by Stacie Passon, came out in 2018. In that same year, Mike Flanagan’s horror series The Haunting of Hill House, inspired by Jackson’s most famous novel, was released on Netflix. In a turn of events which would probably have both amused and horrified Jackson (she was notably camera-shy), in 2020, Handmaid’s Tale actor Elisabeth Moss played a fictionalized version of the author in the film Shirley, which is based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel.

  It is fair to say, then, that Jackson is most definitely back in the spotlight. That being said, this is the ideal time to publish this carefully selected and abridged collection of her correspondence. The letters provide a wealth of illuminating insights into Shirley Jackson’s professional and personal life as it unfolded over the course of twenty-seven years.

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  The volume opens in June 1938, with one of the many love letters Jackson wrote to Stanley when they were undergraduates at Syracuse University. It concludes with a note to her literary agent Carol Brandt which Jackson sent little over a week before her death on August 8, 1965. Unfortunately, no letters written by Jackson before 1938 have yet been found. The 1950s is the most well documented decade here. Although it appears that Jackson did not ask her parents to start saving her correspondence until 1960, it is interesting that the earliest letter we have from her to them was sent in 1948—the year she came to national prominence with “The Lottery.”

  The letters are addressed to a relatively small circle of regular correspondents. Those most frequently featured here are Stanley (almost all of these letters were written between June 1938 and May 1940), her parents (from 1948 onward), and from the early 1950s, her agents—first, Bernice Baumgarten and later, Carol Brandt. There are also letters to her children, Laurence, Joanne, Sally, and Barry, and to friends such as Louis Harap, Walter Bernstein, Ralph Ellison, Virginia Olsen, Libbie Burke, and Jeanne Beatty, as well as assorted other business contacts and acquaintances.

  The letters featured in the first part of this volume, “From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938–1944,” depict a side of Jackson that has often been overlooked. The title is entirely apt. We first encounter the author as a madly-in-love college student who is only too aware that she is living a decidedly bourgeois existence. As well as depicting her intense early relationship with Stanley, these letters amusingly reference the day-to-day realities of college life—whimsical conversations with friends, frequent parties, romantic misunderstandings and passionate reconciliations. There are also references to Jackson’s literary interests, college classes, and contemporary political debates. Jackson’s clashes with her fiercely anti-Communist and politically conservative father, Leslie, come up on several occasions.

  There are also letters documenting Jackson’s return to her native state of California during the summer of 1939, durin
g which she writes movingly about the joy of once again seeing San Francisco. Jackson pines for Stanley throughout the trip, repeatedly declaring her love for him in extravagant terms. It is clear that the stay in California consolidated her already strong feelings for him. Jackson felt that she had found in him a true intellectual equal, and someone who supported her creative ambitions. These early letters also explain the idiosyncratic formatting style Jackson deployed in her letters to family and friends (and in first drafts of her writing) throughout the rest of her life: “notice if you haven’t already that i have borrowed your distinctive writing style with ideas of my own such as no punctuation which is a good idea since semi-colons annoy me anyway.”

  There are many passages of interest pertaining to Jackson’s development as a writer. These include references to Anthony, the unfinished novel that she worked on during this time, as well as brief mentions of poems and stories written while she was a teenager. Jackson also displays a keen awareness of her aptitude for conflating the everyday with the uncanny. In a letter to Stanley written in December 1938, she declares:

  christmas is incredibly horrible when seen from the jacksonian leaping-at-sudden-fears angle. for example, wandering happily along, in a daze of beatific peace-on-earthness, i found myself face to face with a windowful of monstrous bells tolling horribly right before my nose. to my mind there is something dreadful about large objects moving silently and somehow ominously, particularly when, like these, they were swinging slowly back and forth…

  Readers familiar with the later fiction will recognize this as a superb early instance of Jackson’s unrivaled ability to imbue inanimate objects with malevolent qualities. It is hard not to flash forward to 1959, and to Eleanor Vance’s first, repulsed impression of Hill House: “The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

  We have no letters written between the end of May 1940 and January 1942. During this time, Jackson and Hyman graduated from Syracuse, moved to New York City, married (in August 1940), and had their first child, Laurence. The correspondence starts back up again with a series of letters and notes to their friend Louis Harap. Jackson was already beginning to sell stories to magazines such as Mademoiselle and The New Yorker, and confident enough in her talent to chastise Harap when he provided literary feedback that she clearly disagreed with “i don’t think you’re any kind of judge of what i’m trying to do.”

  We also find here the first of many references to the practicalities of balancing motherhood with a literary career. Jackson explains to Harap in a July 1944 letter that the nocturnal wanderings of their young son mean that “my usual time for writing—the evening—has been curtailed, and i do even less.” This same letter references an event of great historic import—the Allied invasion of Normandy—and an intriguing career opportunity for Stanley. It seems that Bennington, a small liberal arts college in the wilds of rural Vermont, is looking for young instructors. Jackson’s closing remarks are typically droll: “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.”

  There was indeed a job in Bennington, and the young family’s move from the city to the countryside would have lasting personal and professional consequences for Jackson. Despite the fact that she seldom referenced a specific geographical setting in her fiction, thanks in part to the flurry of attention generated by “The Lottery,” her writing soon became irretrievably associated with New England. Apart from a two-year stint in Saugatuck, Connecticut, she spent the rest of her days living in North Bennington. As Jackson’s subsequent letters illustrate, her life, Stanley’s life, and the lives of their young children became intrinsically connected with Bennington College and the surrounding community.

  From the late 1940s onward, publishing deadlines vie with the due dates and demands of Jackson’s human offspring. In the earliest surviving letter to her parents, written in October 1948, Jackson mentions juggling proof corrections for The Lottery and Other Stories (1949) with preparations to give birth to her third child, Sally. A rather flustered letter written to her mother, Geraldine, in April 1949 details the origins of a delicious (but untrue) story that dogged her thereafter: the rumor that Jackson had cast a hex on publisher Alfred A. Knopf, causing him to break his leg while on a skiing trip in Vermont. Jackson’s evident dismay here is compounded by the flippant response she gave to a reporter who asked her to expound upon her supposed expertise in witchcraft: “fortunately he had just bought me two drinks, so i was able to tell him, very fluently indeed, about black magic and incantations and the practical application of witchcraft in everyday life, most of which i remembered out of various mystery stories.”

  Jackson’s family stories became an increasingly important facet of her creative output during this period. We find in the letters from this time considerable delight in the fact that they are an obvious popular and financial success and came to constitute a vital source of income for their growing household. It is therefore striking to see her critique the quality of this material in letters to her parents, as in this October 1949 missive:

  I quite agree with you about the recent stories. they are written simply for money, and the reason they sound so bad is that those magazines won’t buy good ones, but deliberately seek out bad stuff because they say their audiences want it. i simply figure that at a thousand bucks a story, i can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today, and since they will buy as much of it as i write, i do one story a month, and spend the rest of the time working on my new novel or on other stories. […] this sort of thing is a compromise between their notions and mine, and is unusual enough so that i am the only person i know of who is doing it. that’s why i can sell them.

  Contrastingly, in a letter written a few years later to her editor at Good Housekeeping, Jackson persuasively defends the originality and social importance of these stories:

  i suppose that essentially what i am saying is that there is just so much fun and satisfaction in day-to-day life in a family that maybe it’s time someone wrote about that, and shouted down the children-are-monsters people. some articles, perhaps, on the infuriating things, like bullies and outsiders and meanness, but always stressing the notion that things are fundamentally nice. i get many letters from women who feel that they are buried hopelessly under the endless problems of a family, and have found that just one humorous article has given them enough of a brief new glimpse so that they can dig in again and get the laundry done in half the time, or get through dinner one more night without screaming. i admit it’s a subject important to me. i’d like to know what you think.

  This obvious contrast between the ways in which Jackson characterizes her magazine writing in these quotes is one of several intriguing instances in this volume in which we see her express different shades of opinion about her own works (or their filmic adaptations) depending upon whether she is addressing her parents or discussing them with a professional contact. Jackson’s letters to Geraldine and Leslie frequently itemize the financial and reputational rewards of her literary endeavors. Yet at the same time, she could downplay the significance of work which her parents (and perhaps even she herself) seemed to perceive as being motivated less by artistic inspiration and more by practical commercial imperative. This critique of the family stories may suggest that Jackson had on some level internalized the wider societal feeling that explicitly “domestic” and female-focused material was of course meant to be taken less seriously than challenging, intense works of fiction such as “The Lottery” and The Road Through the Wall (both of which were published during the late 1940s, at much the same time that Jackson’s family tales started to become an increasingly important facet of her output).

  The same reasoning may also explain the negati
vity Jackson later expresses towards the film adaptations of The Bird’s Nest (Lizzie, Dir: Hugo Haas, 1957) and The Haunting of Hill House (The Haunting, Dir: Robert Wise, 1963) in letters home. It’s almost as if she’s reluctant to be seen to endorse these “Hollywood” versions of her work despite the apparently sincere excitement she expresses elsewhere (particularly in letters to her agents). Throughout their correspondence, it is obvious that Jackson wanted her work to be a source of pride and satisfaction to her parents, and this may explain why she sometimes self-deprecatingly preempts (or agrees with) their potentially critical response to the more “commercial” side of her career.

  Jackson’s works in progress (particularly the novels) are often referenced in the 1950s letters, particularly those written to Baumgarten and Brandt. Highlights include a witty aside about the unexpected side effects of writing a novel about a protagonist with multiple personalities—“The trouble, I find, with writing and being absorbed in a book about dissociated personality is that after a while you begin to dissociate yourself”—and Jackson’s hilarious account of a business meeting she and Baumgarten had with the wildly enthusiastic actor-producer Franchot Tone, who wanted her to write a film about Isadora Duncan.

  There are letters here which highlight Jackson’s attention to detail and absolute certainty regarding the effect she wanted her work to exert upon readers. For instance, in a 1957 letter to her publishers correcting misleading jacket copy for The Sundial, Jackson demonstrates a keen awareness of the delicate sense of equilibrium associated with her work: “I realize that this must sound like a childish temper tantrum, but it seems to me that Sundial is so precariously balanced on the edge of the ridiculous that any slip might send it in the wrong direction; I tried to keep it on that uneasy edge because I thought it made the book more exciting, but I wouldn’t like to see anyone breathe on it too hard.” We are also privy to some tantalizing insights into the research Jackson conducted when in the early stages of planning her most famous novel. In January 1958 she writes to her parents to ask if they have any information about the Winchester Mystery House: