The Letters of Shirley Jackson Read online

  she has promised to write you, so be patient.

  ’bye

  shirley

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  wed. [August 3, 1938]

  you go to hell, you. you’re a masochist. and a deceiver of women. the truth of all this self-torture of yours is that (me miserable) i am afraid i do love you and the reason i sent that letter was because i thought it conveyed that idea, the letter you get wed. will further explain, and i wish that if you do not believe me or do not care particularly (which it is obvious you don’t) you would mention that fact and so stop me making a damn fool of myself. i refuse to be the victim of unrequited love. (i said the victim but i meant recipient as well!) and am tired of trying to lie to everybody, including stacia who won’t believe me anyway. so sit back, take a deep breath, light yourself a cigarette and try and let this sink in. I LOVE YOU AS MUCH AS IF NOT MORE THAN I ALWAYS DID AND THAT LIE I TOLD YOU WAS ONE OF WHICH I CONVINCED MYSELF BECAUSE I WAS ANGRY AND HAD BEEN HURT AND IT SHALL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN IF YOU WILL TAKE ME BACK. (got it?) and now, my dope, if that has caused you to laugh, snort derisively (which you do very well, did i ever tell you?) or shrug and say etchapetchametcha, kindly sit down and write me a letter telling me so. if you are pleased and magnanimous, generous and forgiving, willing to TAKE ME BACK, tell me that too. but for god’s sake believe me or i can’t be answerable for the consequences. if some large lithuanian has captured your vagrant fancy, ok. if you’ve decided that Emerson Was Right, and you have no need of an unworthy object…i’m far too dignified to chase you, and much too proud to appeal to you, but i warn you i’ll give you hell. but i wish that if you’ve stopped loving me you’d tell me so instead of writing me evasive letters, so that i can go into a decline and sit by the window and sigh over my embroidery. no, i do not weep large tears onto your picture. but i came near it yesterday when i got the lecture i deserved, (just because ernest has been bad and hurt that page i shan’t write it over. hell, if i so much as read it over i’ll probably tear it up!) from y (remember that sentence?). i am in a penitent mood, and shall undoubtedly stay that way until i hear from you about your reaction to this humbleness of mine. yeah, s. edgar, and i’m as humble as you’ve ever seen me. so please don’t leave me in doubt. i’m in an awful state.

  that is that. you know that i can’t even be humble without parenthesis, or happy without side-comments, so i hope you grasp the essential soberness of that explanation. everything is there, without reserve.

  you devoted your letter to saying things to make me writhe, didn’t you? note: “if you haven’t the decency to tell the truth…rather than indulging in these frenzied fabrications…” “oh, well, the guy can’t see a thing until he’s been told thirty-seven times, anyway,” or: “you give the helen affair more importance than it deserves…” i commented briefly and kept my innermost thoughts where they belonged—in y’s hands. my opinion of helen has not gone up. “don’t expect any intellectually giant replies (from martha).” i’ve gotten out of the habit of expecting such from anyone, thanks. “everything is harlequin’s fault but at least you can say for him that he never stays silly for more than a week at a time.” that, knowing harlequin, i should say was an absolute lie. i refer you to duchartre, on the commedia, chapter on harlequin and his ancestors and he did go away. he went to the moon.*22 “i do not want stacia’s love…” stacia is a sap but i can think of several esteemed gentlemen who would be glad to get what you scorn so carelessly. (that is a point to make you writhe and don’t deceive yourself; i know your reaction.) furthermore i do not give a damn about your job and your being in your element with the women. i want to hear about you and that does not mean the books you are reading. and if you inquire thoughtfully in my next letter about the typographical errors in mine i shall refer your fate to ernest, who makes the errors. and you ought to know a lot about snakes.

  as one i.s.p. to another, i think you’re nice.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  monday [August 15, 1938]

  adored one:

  i am going to tell you about yesterday, partly because it will give you a new picture of these godparents*23 of mine whom you seem to loathe so, and partly because i was so happy. we went to their antique house at the lake. the house is at the bottom of a cliff…no, it’s half-way down, and the cliff is of course steep, so that there is a precarious path down, and a road with a hairpin curve every ten feet, so that the only two people in the world who can drive it are my godfather and his hired man. you either wait to be called for by the car at the top…the car is as antique as the house or my godfather, and navigates those curves with what can only be forty years of familiarity…or you slide down the path. i always slide down the path, because it is dangerous especially since our recent rains and flood which washed most of it out, and you have to cling to trees all the way down. the house looks complacently off over the lake, which is still farther down the cliff, and reached by a worse path or more dangerous road, and is bluer than any lake has a right to be. millions of trees, of course, where pan might be living. trees that reach up to the house and look over the edge of the porch in an inquiring fashion. the house is filled with antiques because godmother’s mother died and left it that way and godfather is far too polite to disturb the old lady’s fondest possessions. we arrive, my honorable father chasing me down the path to effect an entrance, to be greeted by my godfather in an atrocity of a bathing suit that must have been condemned in 1906 as unsafe. he is, i think i have told you, the only intelligent man i have ever known. (he is a paleontologist!) my godmother has gone quietly to sleep somewhere and no one can find her, so we sit down to play some childish game that belongs to the two sons of the family. after godfather has beaten the pants off the three of us in this…some variety of tiddliwinks…more guests arrive, having come sedately down by the car. they are a prominent rochester business man and his wife. my godmother wakes up and appears in a pair of shorts which are most unbecoming (but too damn comfortable, my dear!). a delightful english doctor and his staid lady wife arrive, practically head-first down the path, and we are complete. in practically no time at all we are in bathing suits and being driven down to the lake. that is where i am happiest. godmother tells my mother briefly: “hell, girl, let the child swim without a cap. if she can appear in public in that bathing suit she can do anything. godchild, you’re letting your legs get fat.” so i swim without a cap. and sit on the raft and get myself sunburned because i am arguing with the doctor and honorable father about whether or not dinghies are better boats than snipes…the doctor holding out for snipes. race my father back to the shore, try to drown the doctor, get out of the water to my godmother’s shrieks, to find that my suit, which is only a bra and shorts, has parted company definitely and finally, with most of me. thus breaking the ice.

  dress hastily, with charming mother complaining mildly because i in my wet suit had sat on her girdle, thus making it more difficult to get on than ever, and don, sure of my godmother’s defense, a dress with no back and practically no skirt, under which i am reluctantly permitted by charming mother, struggling with her girdle, to wear nothing. then cocktails, six or seven for me, and magnificent conversation with madame doctor re love, versus career. my godfather appeared long enough to advise me to take love, and vanished.

  had a terrific appetite, up to then i had never eaten more than one steak at a time in my life. i had…i think…four, and two ears of corn, and watermelon and cake. conversation at the lunch table ought to have revised your opinion of my godmother at once. at the head of the table she was talking nonsense with honorable father. about cooking experiences, i believe. at the foot of the table godfather was holding mother and the rochester business man and his wife enthralled with a tale of anthills in germany, anthills containing four hundred million ants. he was discussing
the possibility that the ants would destroy the germans before the germans could destroy the rest of the world. the doctor and i were chatting merrily about the harlequinade, racing happily through duchartre, winifred smith, and frank shay, to end up with a bang at karl marx. anyway the doctor started it by quoting swinburne. nothing, to me, is so fascinating as the several different topics at a table. godmother beamed at me, and for some obscure reason, said that she personally was very fond of the swissfamilyrobinson. which of course brought up alice in wonderland and the doormouse, and my godfather took a hand. this time it was necessary for godmother to drag us away. so i went to sleep, leaving a bitter bridge game in progress at one end of the porch, and my father teaching the ladies the tiddliwinks game at the other. i had a nice soft hammock overlooking the lake, which was blue, and a particularly nice rum collins, which was greenish, and lots of pillows. so i thought about lakes and rum and pillows and seh and such silly things for a few minutes and then, the collins having disappeared, fell asleep. to dream about lakes and rum and pillows and seh, and very nice it was, too. i was awakened by having a lighted cigarette fall on my sunburn. so we went swimming. and then we drank much more and then we ate much more and then we came home.

  y and i have been trying to think of a nice cool way to commit suicide. between hay fever and heat, we think we are dying. it seems that the only things you can do in such a condition are nice quiet things, so we sit around and play chess, or do jig-saw puzzles…a nice occupation, requiring no brainwork…or go to the movies. god in heaven, seh, did you ever have hay fever? this is my third year of it, and every august i wish i were dead and every september i think that maybe i won’t get it next year, but i do. the morning i wake up and see frost on the ground is the morning when my life will begin anew. so forgive; it is the hay fever.

  write to me and be consoling. tell me it’s not so bad, i’ll be ok in september.

  yeah. september. goddam. GODDAM.

  goodnight, sugar. i’ll be brave. i love you, hay fever or no hay fever.

  s.

  • • •

  “Stanley—a critic.”

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  [August 18, 1938]

  stanley,

  i recall, with gnashing of teeth, that in an earlier letter you informed me that you had told your landlady that you were married and your wife was in rochester, expecting me to fall for that bait and come straight to your bed. that is merely a theory, of course, but i’m glad it boomeranged right into your face. you deserved it.

  i wrote to robert and have already received an answer. robert and i have decided that castaway represents the struggle between the forces of good and evil for the soul of man. there seems to be some slight confusion in robert’s letter, with his moustache inextricably tangled with ernest my typewriter of which he wants to know the sex and how one determines it. SHALL I TELL HIM? (you remember ernest’s erection, which is better’n yours. but robert might realize that i wasn’t a lady.)

  i haven’t been doing any writing at all. i can’t go near my beloved anthony, because (duck quick, more bitching) our own incomparable y has laughed at it for so long, and said so often that it is terrible that i have begun to regard it as definitely inferior, and worthless, and useless and not fit to go on with. worst of it is, i can see damn well myself that it’s good, but this constant belittling has made me feel that perhaps i may be kidding myself. i wish she’d have the decency to shut up. is it fair for her to tell me over and over that i couldn’t write a novel if i tried the rest of my life, that i’m making a dmn fl out of myself by trying, that no one really believes i can write, however polite they may be, and that even if i could write i’ve never produced anything to prove it? true as it might be, it doesn’t help much. i’m so tired of being told what a fool i am! is she being fair, stan? is she telling the truth? is there anything in the world that can prove to her (and to me, now) that i can write? sure, i’m a sap for trying to write a novel, but the fact i can’t get through her head is that it’s a good novel. you don’t believe that either. no one does, damn their eyes. but no one’s read it, either. and no one’s going to read it ever, because i don’t care a damn about showing little gods like you and y the nice piece of work i’ve done in private.

  in my extreme boredom between trips to the dentist i have taken to reading the saturdayeveningpost. that, my sweet, is BOREDOM! i go to the dentist again this afternoon, but it’s too hot to be scared.

  look, my angel, re you. now it can be told. the day you wrote you were going on the machines*24 i put in several hours of sheer hell. please don’t tell me until afterward next time. i was, frankly, scared to death, remember, all you told me of the machines was their danger, and all i knew was that right then you were probably getting yourself killed. I shouldn’t like you half so much dead.

  darling, don’t let me lose you to dot and thy landlord’s wife. i love you too much to shy away from killing two other women.

  thy

  mistress

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  [September 12, 1938]

  dear,

  will you forgive me for wanting to write to you even though by this time you are probably calling me names in the lexicon of seh? i want to talk to you. and just tell you all the things i’ve been saving up to tell you for so long, when i did not dare write to you, partly because you’re not writing, and partly because i was trying to gather courage to tell you The Truth. please, will you accept my position as it stands. and not try to change it? and will you not hate me?

  so, carefully avoiding all mention of Us, i can tell you about this maze of weariness which encompasses me, and the reasons for it. i have seldom been so simply tired. blessed kay*25 stayed for a week, monday to monday, and, having led me to peace, departed. i had two days in which to resign myself to a glorious freedom, gratefully giving myself to the books i had been saving, abandoned myself to a comfortable chair and a pair of overalls, retired into oblivion. i had read a hundred pages of therainscame*26 when innes*27 called me last night to inform me that she would arrive today to stay until next monday.

  kay and i drove rochester as nearly mad as rochester can be driven. we stole mother’s car and drove twenty miles to ionia for hamburgers, coming home the “long way,” or through naples, thus putting an extra hundred miles on the car. we saw a cow, much to my delight. there were also clouds which looked like elephants. altogether a splendid day. wednesday night we took mother and father at bridge to the tune of three rubbers. thursday morning my mother informed me that since it was necessary that i entertain kay somehow i was giving a dinner party that night. reluctantly, kay and i entertained at dinner. mother and dad left for new york shortly before our guests arrived, so cocktails were created by my brother under the weird influence of his girl’s presence. aforesaid babe has the effect of making me feel horribly eccentric and somewhat lunatic. kay loathed her at sight, and y, tolerant and near-sighted, smiled politely, said “oh, really?” twice, and ignored de babe thereafter. barry adores the creature, god knows why. y arrived in dead black with her hair piled up on top of her head in hideous little curls. kay looked really charming in one of my favorite dresses, providing a welcome ice-breaker. informing me from across the room that she had spilled her cocktail, she gave me an opportunity to roar apprehensively: “what! on my dress?” much to the amusement of stepan, who had had four cocktails and was beginning to feel as though he might tackle even bridge with equanimity. stepan had brought music for me, among them a familiar fugue which made kay wince and which stepan played as though knowing full well that every note he struck hit me like a ton of thumbtacks. michael reclined, at ease behind his pipe, carrying on a slow-paced conversation with y re modern novels, and bill*28 sat at my feet and talked boats. alta had outdone herself, and dinner was enough to cause even bill to sigh feebly and r
efuse to be moved. the one high point of dinner was the sudden appearance of the excitement-maddened babe at our table, where kay, bill, michael and i sat comfortably discussing the superiority of pipes to cigarettes; babe chose such a moment to lean confidentially on bill’s shoulder and scream peekaboo. the four-way look of disgust was enough to bring my brother to his lady’s side to drag her away. that finished de babe. thereafter she sat in comparative quiet with her feet in barry’s lap, giggling. we played bridge. stepan played as though inspired by the devil himself, and proceeded to show de babe, who prides herself on her bridge, how we phi betes do it. significant is the fact that babe, impressed not at all by stepan’s phi bete key, fawned on him when she knew he could swear in french. bridge was abandoned, and the whole was divided into its parts. barry and de babe disappeared to the amusement room to play ping-pong. y and stepan got confidential over the horrible mismanagement of the university’s english department. kay and bill quarreled violently over boats. michael and i were talking about me, only somehow every time we talk about me we end up talking about that goddam boat. finally, michael and bill having taken their departure, barry and babe playing ping-pong remarkably silently, y and kay and i led stepan again to the piano. with all the lights gone, except the one over the piano, with plenty of cigarettes at hand, with the clock pointing timidly to quarter past three, stepan played for me. my request was for noise. he played liszt. my request was for color. he played grieg. then he played for himself, and for kay…strange old english songs, and the gavotte, and the only two chopin numbers i like…the chord prelude, and the polonaise. then, for y, brahms, and, for kay, the moonlight sonata…by ear, damn him. and more beethoven fragments for me, and finally, as the clock was turning five, old songs…and so kay and i sat up until eight, after they had gone, talking of strange things, such as sunrises on windy mornings, with dirty ashtrays on all the tables and birds calling outside.