The Letters of Shirley Jackson Read online

  which, seh, is the gentleman’s exit line. no doubt very bad writing, but so heartfelt that, even now, reading over it, it fills me with the same impotent fury that made me write it before.

  can you see any good, valid reason why i should be concerned with people? thinking of them makes me want to bash my brains out against the stone wall of their stupidity, trying to murder them all…remember Millay’s line: I love humanity, but i hate people? mine is altered to: i like many people, but god! what i think of humanity! can you understand my reaction when certain people, whom in individuality i like and admire and respect, like you and lizbeth and y, can, taken into the abstract, become part of that Masses which you want to save and i loathe? i like lizbeth and i like y and i love you but when all of you are withdrawn and become People, indistinguishable fragments in that great, headless brainless unity which is the race of man, you leave me screaming and beating helplessly at you with my lily white paws. oh, hell. it’s useless. i can’t explain a disgust and hatred like that. just accept it and then wonder why i should embrace either communism or capitalism. i don’t give one little pink damn for the things my father stands for. he’s just as surely People, when you stand off and look at him. you’re all fighting over something i wouldn’t go near. i don’t want your filthy old bone.

  and this…from shirley whore jackson. the great authoress, creator of the incomparable anthony, the magnificent paul, the delightful mary. this, the incoherent babbling of a madwoman crying for sleep. yeah, and that last line would have read better if it had been madman, always the artist. but all i can do is justify my position, which is after all the most that any of us can do, and some of us not so well. this, s. edgar, i strongly suspect to be me answering you back, and, also, one of the few times when i can talk without having you interrupt me. consider me as having said all i shall. you may talk now.

  i am reading the 42ndparallel.*17 y (whom you persist in spelling e) is making me. someday i shall tell you why i am so very angry at y right now, and why i think that very soon a beautiful friendship may be terminated abruptly.

  i never remember to tell you until the last page that i love you more than anything or anyone in the world. it’s because i know it so well and i think you know it so well that it just doesn’t seem necessary to tell you, until i realize that i can’t stop telling you. i love you, my darling, and always shall. even when you cry over telephones i love you. even when you write stupid things like spender being a better poet than eliot. even when you’re a million miles away i love you. if i may coin a phrase, i think you’re cute.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  thurs [June 16, 1938]

  snookums,

  wouldn’t you know…y has been using ernest again; he jitters. mother has established a system of snatching my letters out of the typewriter page by page, and, when she figures she has enough, slamming them into an envelope and mailing them, saying the while that the poor boy probably expects a letter…so if my letters seem somewhat disconnected, realize only that it is mother’s fault. she also closes her eyes politely while she puts them in envelopes. she also says that one of these days she is going to read all your letters, when she has lots of time, it having taken her a good month to read just gonewiththewind.

  mail this morning very interesting. letter from brooklyn, letter from hanover, and invitations to a wedding for barry, mother and me. barry and i are sending ours back. we have a new toaster which leaps at one, and barry and i spend hours baiting it from behind the kitchen door*18…i have hay fever as usual…y and i, stricken with the artistic fever, spent last evening painting pictures. our respective personalities betrayed in our art, as usual. i had seven, all horribly colored, mostly of faces with green eyelids, and one with rose and orange flowers, and y did a very poor impression of nijinsky being harlequin. she learns about these things the hard way. i meet a guy who has a sailboat, and learn how to sail; y reads a book. she also read a book about etchings. more hard way. i learned that the easy way too…y is also quite enthusiastic about anthony, wanting me to throw the rest of the novel away and keep anthony as a short story…we have started our old race for rejection slips. i used to be about six ahead of her but she has been cheating and getting them from the new yorker all winter.

  you should see my room, seh. the sun is coming in all over, but simply all over, and the whole damn place is gay and yellow. the books are glowing, and pan*19 has sunlight on his nose and ivy in his hair. he is laughing about something. the bed is not made, there are letters from seh all over the floor where they fell out of my desk when i opened it, and the red-brown chair has a raspberry sweater draped over the back, and a magenta cushion and a blue bathrobe over the arm. oh, seh, i love my room when it’s like it is now. nothing in it is passive. even the bookends have personalities, and everything is golden. all the windows are open and the curtains are flappinghappily. it’s wonderful, and all day…until three…i am going to be curled up in the redbrown chair, feet on a footstool, with cigarettes on the table and the bed unmade, and read and at three i go to a tea with y, in starched linen suits and with nice pink finger nails and appropriate white hats over one eye and neat little handkerchiefs, and we will be very polite. like hell we will. we’re going as stacia and tanya in dirty old clothes and we’ll sit with our legs over the arms of our hostess’s best chairs and gibber. you’d think people would stop inviting us to teas.

  but we are going to the artgallery tomorrow, to see an old friend of ours, a picture named mood. mood is a lady with a necklace of lima beans, and cruel slanting eyes and a half-smile which depends on whether there are shadows or not, and if we come in very softly she will raise an eyebrow at us and ask us to stay for tea, and if she is annoyed she will smile and curl her long yellow hand and tell us about murder and horror and grief. there is also an exhibit of local painting past which we shall walk with averted eyes. and after, coffee and waiters to frighten. and then, too, there is a secondhandbookshop which y discovered and has not visited because she has been waiting for me. and a concert soon. and people are after us to organize a picnic but we say no very firmly because people bore us. and we’re not doing any dancing or any partying or even any dating because we have a new makebelieve which is that we don’t know anyone in town and are all alone here with the whole city to play with and no obligations.

  seh, seh, life is such fun. even away from you life can be fun.

  michael? who’s michael? i can’t seem to remember…

  we’re going to have a summer that will make recapitulation wednesday seem hysterical. (recapitulation wednesday is always the last wednesday of the summer, because wednesday is our day, and we go to a very special little joint where we can sit all afternoon and drink coffee and we remember the summer, and compare it with all other less pleasant summers and we wonder how we would like to have had it different and we have never found a summer that is pleasanter than the one just over and after recapitulation wednesday the summer is officially over.) and sometime before recapitulation wednesday we are going to get very drunk, and we are going to find a new place to drink coffee and we are going to eat spaghetti all by ourselves and we are going to have collected some money so we can go to ny all by ourselves. we cannot go to salem because we have no money. we cannot even go to a movie.

  i’m babbling again. it’s because the sun is out and y is coming and i’ve got to find the reddest nail polish in the house. it’s such a long time to recapitulation wednesday. and you send me a letter all about vegetation.

  i’m going back to bed. yeah, and I’m taking dospassos with me. that book must be trash, because i can’t stop reading it and you know my tastes.

  i love you.

  s.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stanley comes to Rochester for a visit, and while he and Shirley are sitting on
the Jacksons’ front porch—she thinking her parents are out of town—Leslie and Geraldine unexpectedly drive up. Stanley, terrified of meeting them, jumps over the railing and flees. Shirley, startled and confused, runs after him. They then spend hours walking and arguing.

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  [July 5, 1938]

  dear stan,

  this may be a cruel and unnecessary thing to do, but i hope you can see that it’s my natural reaction under the circumstances. in case you think that my family is responsible, none of them has mentioned you since i came in sunday night, nor will they. evvie has no doubt told you of the scene that took place when i came in at two-thirty after spending five hours with a young man who not only refused to meet them, but took a most idiotic and silly way of indicating that he would have nothing to do with them…five hours for which i could account in no way except to say that we had been walking, which my father refused to believe.

  understand, i think that the way you acted that night was inexcusable. not that i so much wanted you to meet my father…god knows that in your state of mind there was nothing i wanted less…but that i resented your making a damn fool out of yourself and creating the worst impression possible. more than that, you made a damn fool out of me, which, since you know me, you will see is another reason why i find your conduct inexcusable. even the fact that i loved you wasn’t sufficient. i hated you for that.

  it would not be advisable for you to come to rochester again this summer. write to me, of course, but don’t try to communicate with me in any other fashion, that is not my family’s decree, it is mine. you would certainly not be thrown out of the house if you came here, but i refuse to endure a repetition of such an affair as last sunday’s. i won’t come to new york, or, needless to say, to massachusetts.

  can you see how such adolescent idiocy as that has succeeded in making me doubt that i love you? i am surely in no position to find fault with you, but i may certainly detest your childishness when it puts me in the position where i not only have to make excuses for you to other people, but also have to justify your actions to myself and find that i cannot. let me have until september to realize for sure that i do love you. i know i do, but i must do a little growing myself before i can be sure.

  that was the feeling you saw in me that night when you called it insanity. i was trying to reconcile my love for you to the great irritation you produced in me. you were more childish and more incomprehensible every minute, and every time you blamed me for it i wanted to leave you and go off somewhere and think, and try to see things clearly. i knew there was going to be a scene with my family when i got in, and i didn’t care, but to have you striking out at me and hurting me all the time i was with you was too much. i didn’t even try to tell you, this time. i knew you wouldn’t understand at all. so i said nothing about it and let you rave. therefore you were sorry you came. i was sorry too, only i didn’t want to hurt you. i wanted to be happy in the few minutes i had left with you, but you didn’t want that. you wanted to quarrel. so we quarreled. you did everything in the world to destroy whatever love i had left for you in that time we stood on the corner (where i had to take you because i knew my father was up and would throw you out if he heard us), and i made no attempt to stop you, because i am tired of trying to justify myself in your eyes. whatever attempt i could have made would have been condemned immediately because it did not meet with your ideas. i know that from experience.

  however, one thing i know now. you did not, and could not, destroy any of my love for you. i still love you as much as before, only now i am afraid to love you so much because you are so young, and because i am so young. you don’t mind my childishness because there are so many other things about me you want to change first, but that strange childishness in you is all that i want to see different. i’ve never made any attempt to change you…you know that. and by september i intend to be reconciled to that in you which i hate, and i shall leave you a clear field in which to change me. all our quarrels and all my “backsliding” have been because i banged my head against this and couldn’t accept it. now, i hope, it will be different. i love you and i’m afraid i always shall.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Walter Bernstein]

  wednesday [July 20, 1938]

  dear walter,

  first of all, thanks. only you didn’t make it harsh enough. what i needed—and still need—is a good talking-to. somebody ought to tell me a few things. i have resented stan’s trying to make me over for so long that when there came a chance to point out to him that nobody could boss me i took it and didn’t stop to think…and look what i started. i’ve behaved like a sap and i know it. but he still can’t be the boss of me, dammit. i got a very wretched letter from him yesterday, and am now in a state. walter, suppose you tell me. i wrote the letter to you against all y’s better judgement, when you sent it to stan and stan wrote me y began calling me names, and now she thinks that it would be much, much better for stan if i just ignored the whole thing and never saw him again. she says, in essence, that the poor guy never did anything bad enough to deserve me. she adds, my romantic little y, that this quarrel is the beginning of the end, and, that if we can display such temper and pride with one another, that one of us doesn’t love the other enough, and she means me. if she is right…and of course she always is…’tanley would be much better off. hell, though, i’m not being altruistic. i’m just as much afraid of being hurt anymore as i am of hurting him. i’m no martyr, but i won’t go around being a chameleon just so stan can smile smugly at a “new shirley.” do you suppose that if i were not to write, and to go on with this minor little matter of forgetting him that has occupied so much of my time for two weeks, that he would be miserable for about a week, and then start congratulating himself at having gotten out of it so easily? i don’t really think, you see, that this deep devotion of his is going to last, and i’m practically sure that mine isn’t, so wouldn’t finishing it be better now than later?

  yeah, i know. maybe i have talked myself into this attitude this last few days, when i thought everything was washed up. yeah, and if i had to do it, why didn’t i do it a long time ago? but…well, you get the general idea. i’m not going to answer his letter for a while yet. besides, in a fit of girlish rage i tore up the last letter he wrote…the nasty one…and it was the only one with his address on it. so i’ll have to ask you to send me his address, and i can’t write him till you do. do you mind?

  incidentally, this michael business is no lie. the only reason i didn’t agree to marry michael this last week is that he thoughtlessly omitted to ask me. there were a couple of days when i was particularly unhappy, and i wanted somebody, and instead of stan, i was with michael. michael, i suspect, affords a nice comparison because michael doesn’t care what or how i think, or act, and never even thinks to enquire if i have defied my family yet today. i detest having to drag michael into a disagreement between stan and me, but he is certainly becoming a contributing force to my attitude. it sounds as though i’m just giving all my troubles to you, gratis, walter, but god knows that you know stan much better than i, and you ought to know what i should do to make it alright for him.

  i am in a somewhat deranged state anyway. they have taken me to the dentist, practically over my dead body. aforesaid dentist peered in an interested fashion at my pet wisdom tooth, said tch. seems tooth was not only wisdom, but impacted, abcessed, and buried vereeee deep indeed. so the dentist, knowing my father, gave me a water glass full of scotch, slammed novocaine into the region somewhat south of my right ear, and went at me with a chisel. he also told me i was a brave little girl, and he heard that i’d sunk a ten-foot putt for a birdie three on the sixteenth sunday; i certainly did take after my father, didn’t i. upon which he poured me into the lap of a pale-faced y in the waiting room. the next day y came down with acute indigestion, which the doctor doesn’t know yet wh
ether it was appendicitis or not. now y has to take sedatives and i have to have an ice pack, and my golf game is ruined and y can’t go to the library and read books on the inquisition anymore because she might have an attack. so we sit home and play chess. y read a book on chess and now she knows a gambit, which makes me very unhappy because i do not know a gambit. y says her gambit is called the queen’s gambit, and it involves y’s losing her king’s rook, queen’s bishop and both knights on the first four moves, which she says is awfully good strategy, but i think is silly, because it gets the board terribly mixed up, since she has to have her pawns in a roughly star-shaped formation, and they keep getting in my way. the fact that this gambit invariably ends in my getting mate without losing a man does not discourage y; she says that someday i will make a mistake and then she will have me, because her gambit is absolutely infallible if i should make a mistake.

  i have a new set of fortune telling cards; do you know where or what the occult review is? they put out the tarot pack…as i remember kabumpo peg amy*20 was of course the princess…i went to look, found that i did not have kabumpo, but that i did have the hungrytiger*21; have been reading same for the last hour…we tried to buy the chessmen in rochester’s largest department store. thereby hangs a tale, and the newyorker ought to hear of it. we finally found them in sportinggoods, between a large canoe and an exhibition of shotguns…honorable mama bought me miceandmen…WHICH REMINDS ME!…walter, i love stan so much; i wish i knew what to do…can’t think about much else. it’s all damn foolishness. hell with it…y, from her bed of pain, has only the strength to murmur a loving message; no postscript.