The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  the reason for this is my new book; it is to be about a haunted house, and i can’t seem to find anything around here; all the old new england houses are the kind of square, classical type which wouldn’t be haunted in a million years. i have half a dozen sketches of california houses which look right, but remember the winchester house as a good type house for haunting.

  The new book was, of course, The Haunting of Hill House. We later see Jackson’s evident satisfaction with the rapid progress of her exciting new project, and her empathy for the characters as the plot trajectory arcs inexorably towards tragedy: “The novel is getting sadder. I suppose it’s because of a general melancholy, leaves turning red and a frost last night, but a general air of disaster is slowly settling over Hill House. It’s always such a strange feeling—I know something’s going to happen, and those poor people in the book don’t; they just go blithely on their ways.”

  There are fascinating glimpses here too of works that might have been, including several unfinished novels. These include her early 1950s effort Abigail, the college novel Anthony, the fantasy novel The Fair Land of Far, and of course, Come Along with Me.

  Work on Jackson’s final published novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, had begun by early 1960, but it was to prove a more protracted process than the composition of Hill House. As Jackson explained to Jeanne Beatty, “the heroine is named merricat; do you like it? mary catherine really, but we who know her best say Merricat.” As detailed by Ruth Franklin, Beatty had sent a “simple fan note” to Jackson in December 1959. This led to an intense and intimate correspondence, which lasted for much of the writing process of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

  In the Beatty letters, Jackson enthusiastically discusses her opinions on literature and, in particular, her thoughts on fantasy, science fiction, and children’s fiction. She is often humorously frank here about her personal preferences: “and i think i am probably the only person around these days who reads samuel richardson for pleasure; SIR CHARLES GRANDISON is perhaps my dearest book. i don’t recommend it however unless you are in jail or somewhere else where you have plenty of time. mystery stories i read all the time and stanley gets furious because he is always reading something like ULYSSES which i frankly regard as a great bore.” A particular high point is her droll analysis of the reasons why J. R. R. Tolkien has such evident difficulty in writing about women.

  Jackson also discussed the evident difficulties she was having with her promising but difficult new novel, of which “four people” had now read the first two chapters:

  and all independently announce that it is the best work i have ever done so if i could only stop with the first two chapters and publish those it would be fine but no they want another two hundred pages. it is hard. very hard. i finally got it into a kind of sustained taut style full of images and all kinds of double meanings and i can manage about three pages a day before my eyes cross and my teeth start to chatter, and i shall be late i shall be late.

  The number of letters written by Jackson from the late 1950s onward appears to have decreased significantly. Conversations with Laurence Jackson Hyman about this issue have raised the possibility that a reduction in the price of long-distance phone calls to California meant that lengthy digests of the latest family news for her parents were no longer a practical necessity. There is also a strong likelihood that the issues that impeded Jackson’s progress on We Have Always Lived in the Castle also affected her correspondence. She wrote to her friend Libbie Burke in October 1963, “Part of my current writing bloc is a complete inability to write letters; I can barely manage.” As has been documented by her biographers, this was a difficult time for Jackson, who had to contend with marital problems, physical ailments, and episodes of severe anxiety. Jackson’s female protagonists often found home to be both a sanctuary and a prison: one of the most moving sentences in this volume is therefore surely the author’s weary admission, in a 1962 letter to her daughter Sally, that “i no longer go out of the house.” Another is found in a heartbreaking letter written to Stanley (probably) in 1960, which concludes with the lines: “you once wrote me a letter (i know you hate my remembering these things) telling me that i would never be lonely again. i think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me.”

  It is for these reasons then that Jackson’s final years are amongst the most sparsely covered here. As with the makeup of her selected letters throughout this volume, this state of affairs accurately reflects the composition of her entire body of (known) correspondence. Jackson’s last known letter was written to Carol Brandt only a few days before her death and ends with the unintentionally moving line “everything this summer seems to have been conspiring to keep me from working, but I do make progress.”

  It is clear that Jackson relished every opportunity to tell a good story. Many of the anecdotes contained in these letters are comic gems in their own right. A personal favorite is her account of the night when, tired of “hovering between three and four children,” Jackson resorted to drastic, doctor-prescribed measures. She vividly describes forcing down a vile concoction of castor oil and cream soda (followed by a whisky chaser), as Stanley and their close friend Ralph Ellison—who was supposed to drive her to the hospital—looked on with horror and “real respect.” The frustration caused by the baby’s stubborn refusal to appear despite these heroic efforts is accentuated by a twist in the tale. Little Barry wasn’t overdue at all: they’d miscalculated his due date.

  As a Jackson scholar (and a Jackson fan), it has been a pleasure to consult with Laurence Jackson Hyman throughout the editing and selection process for this volume. The letters featured here deserve to stand alongside her previously published writings as works of considerable literary merit and interest in their own right, and I have no doubt that they will inspire further critical and academic interest in Jackson’s entire oeuvre. Even more importantly, I know that they will fascinate, delight, and move her readers.

  It seems appropriate, then, to leave the final words here to Shirley Jackson, for whom writing (of every kind) constituted such an essential component of her personal and professional identity. As she wrote toward the end of an April 1962 letter to her parents: “keep well. write soon. keep soon. write well.”

  Bernice M. Murphy School of English, Trinity College Dublin

  Note: I would like to thank Janice Deitner and Dara Downey for their invaluable feedback on this introduction.

  WORKS REFERENCED

  Carpenter, Lynette. “Domestic Comedy, Black Comedy, and Real Life: Shirley Jackson, a Woman Writer.” In Faith of a Woman Writer, eds. Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

  Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016.

  Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.

  Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975.

  Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1959; 2009.

  Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996.

  King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981; 2011.

  Parks, John. “Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson’s Use of the Gothic.” In Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, ed. Bernice M. Murphy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984; 2005.

  ONE

  • • •

  From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938–1944

  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 get.

  —To Louis Harap, May 11, 1944

  Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1916. Her father, Leslie, emigrated from England at age twelve with his
mother and two sisters and became a self-made successful business executive with the largest lithography company in the city. Her mother, Geraldine, is a proud descendant of a long line of famous San Francisco architects and can trace her ancestry back to before the Revolutionary War.

  Shirley grows up primarily in Burlingame, an upper-middle-class suburb south of the city. But when she is sixteen, Leslie is promoted and transferred, and the family moves—luxuriously, by ship, through the Panama Canal—to Rochester, in upstate New York. The Jacksons quickly join the Rochester Country Club and become well-established in the city’s active society world. The move is very hard on Shirley, who misses California and her friends there, especially her best friend, Dorothy Ayling. She finishes high school in Rochester (where one of her classes is once interrupted for a few minutes so that Shirley can marvel at snow falling outside the window), then attends the University of Rochester for one difficult year, before deciding to spend the next year writing alone in her room at home, with the lofty goal of producing a thousand words a day. Little of what Shirley writes during that period is believed to have survived.

  She then enrolls at Syracuse University, where she enjoys literature classes, and where the university’s journal, The Threshold, publishes her story “Janice,” a one-page conversation with a young woman who brags that she has that day attempted suicide. Another literature student, Stanley Edgar Hyman, from Brooklyn, New York, the brash, intellectual son of a Jewish second-generation wholesale paper merchant, reads her story and vows on the spot to find and marry its author.

  Shirley and Stanley meet on March 3, 1938, in the library listening room, and an intellectual connection quickly develops into a romantic one. These letters begin just three months after they’ve met, when both Shirley and Stanley are on summer break, she at home in Rochester, and he at first at home in Brooklyn and then rooming with his friend Walter Bernstein at Dartmouth, then working at a paper mill in Erving, Massachussetts.

  This is the earliest known surviving letter of Shirley’s. She is twenty-one, and Stanley is about to turn nineteen.

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  tuesday [June 7, 1938]

  portrait of the artist at work. seems i brought a collection of miscellaneous belongings home from school, among them a c and c hat*1 which bewilders goddamnthatword my little brother. he says if it’s a hat why doesn’t it have signatures all over it. mother seems to think i’m insane, and closes her eyes in a pained fashion when i call her chum. she also tells me that love or no love i have to eat and when i say eatschmeat she says what did you say and for a minute icy winds are blowing. there has been hell breaking loose ever since mother woke me this morning by telling me that that was a letter from dartmouth that the dog was eating.*2 when she came in an hour later and found me reading the letter for the fifth time she began to be curious and asked me all sorts of questions about you. yes, she got it all. consequently there was a rather nice scene, me coming off decidedly the worse, since mother quite unfairly enlisted alta’s*3 assistance and alta went and made a cake and i like cake. mother says, in effect: go on and be a damn fool but don’t tell your father. i had to cry rather loudly though. which means that you are going to meet a good deal more opposition than i had counted on. i think mother was mad because she took your long distance call the other day and the big shot was expecting an important business call and he was quite excited when the operator said that the party at the other end of the line wasn’t going to pay. yes, and mother says to tell you that any more letters arriving with postage due and she will either steam the letters open since they belong to her since she practically bought them or she will start taking the postage out of my allowance.

  however all in all she is being rather sweet, and more intelligent than i gave her credit for, since she absolutely refuses to forbid me to see you which means that now i have no reason to be romantically clandestine. disappointing when i’d already picked out a hollow oak tree. which brings me to the point: if you love me so damn much why don’t you come out and say so? looked all through your letter to find out if you loved me and you refuse to say. damn you anyway. i love you you dope.

  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. and incidentally i read mother the poem at the top of the pages in your letter and she translated it for me, she knows french and i don’t but even then it wasn’t such a good idea. i also told father all about communism which was wrong, wasn’t it. he said re-ally in a whatthehelldoyou-knowaboutlifeyoushelteredvictorianflower sort of voice.

  also. y*4 snarls deep down in her throat whenever i mention you which idoratheroftenchum. she thinks you’re a nice sweet child, only it’s too bad you had to fall into my clutches. i managed to get to talking before she did so now she knows all my troubles and i don’t know any of hers. ’tanley…i think i’ll come to new york and get laid. oooooooooh yes. my mother mayhertribeincrease had been reading liberty*5 that oracle of the masses and has discovered that eight out of ten college students are all for immorality. she has been asking me leading questions until i came out and said that if she meant had i preserved the fresh bloom of dewy innocence yes i had but it hurt me a damn sight more than it ever hurt liberty. mother is reassured but not too happy about the whole thing, having doubts.

  i didn’t know y was an ardent communist but she is, but then she was a vegetarian once too. we’re going to drink beer, and i mean that we’re going to drink lots of beer. but quantities. we have sorrows to drown.

  about our mutual friend Michael.*6 he brought the scamp…boat…in fifth in saturday’s race and mother saw him that night and he was plenty drunk and getting drunker and the damnfool insulted mother in some way and now she’s mad and michael can’t come see me till mother is appeased and he’ll never remember that he said anything wrong till someone meaning me reminds him. are you happier than formerly?

  s.edgar. it’s so silly to write this junk when all i want to say is i can’t stand it i won’t wait four months i love you. what am i going to do? it’s not going to be long, is it? it’ll be september soon, won’t it? like hell it will.

  shan’t go on like that. i’m going to Be Brave. bloody, but unbowed. going to be a debutante. yeah. i’m going to count the days and minutes till september. think of me sometimes, won’t you, chum. hell. wish i could think of a good quotation to top that paragraph off with.

  i shall go on writing revolutionary poetry as long as i damn well please. i just thought of a good line: capitalists unite you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chains…

  dearest, be a good boy, and do wear your rubbers, for mother’s sake, now won’t you?

  darling!

  p.s. s. edgar; goddamn your lying soul why did you have to go away and leave me? I love you so much.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  [June 8, 1938]

  hawney!

  every time i get a letter from you, which seems to be an event happening with astonishing frequency, i think of more things i want to say to you, most of them being i love you but that’s beside the point. so it has come to the position where i write you every day because you write me every day and i hope you like the idea. anyway i like to write letters in your style because i don’t have to hunt for the shiftkey and because it’s easier on ernest, who is typewriter, and makes him very happy because he is lazy too.

  this is gibbering

  and it looks like e e cummings, who y said my revolutionary poetry reminded her of and when i asked her what that meant she said she didn’t like e e cummings either.

  i know that should be whom

  stop correcting me

  you better go easy on my mother. she is getting amused by this faithful in my fashion*7 id
ea and says she thinks you must be an awful dope to expect me to learn to cook. moreover she wants to know why she can’t read your letters. i told her it was secret propaganda but that didn’t help much either. she is having her reading club here this afternoon which means that she expects me to pour tea but that ain’t all she expects. she says: now, darling, please for my sake put on a decent dress and do something with your hair, and you might even do your fingernails something quiet if you can, and will you be polite to my guests, after all they may be society but some of them are really quite nice and if you’ll only be nice like i said i might buy you that silly book.

  that silly book being fearing*8 if i can get it

  so i put up my hair

  but that ain’t gonna stop me from flapping my eyelashes at miss macarty who is the dame what reviews the book and saying sweetly: do you like cathedral close, dear? don’t you think it’s too, too wonderful, and what about eliot? i adore eliot, but robert frost? so much horse-shit, as i know you will be the first to say. you do have such a wonderful grasp of literature, dear.