mo*52 frightens me, does he mean that or is he still thinking that it will all blow over? i think that we had better just go to south america QUICK. and oh, i love you rather, son, and it isn’t really much longer. you crazy son of a bitch if you had any sense you’d marry the girl and stop all this fooling around.
s.
• • •
“She says: ‘but dear, now that Stanley’s a Phi Bete, we’re all respectable.’ ”
[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]
thurs. [March 28, 1940]
o stanul!
is nice. warm. sun.
i have discovered a refuge in rochester. yesterday i went down to see y at her bookshop and it was nice. so nice that i bought you a book. i have never been down there before, except to call for y, and i didn’t know it was so refuge-like. y and i had lunch together and meadelux*53 came, with a red carnation. we were sitting in a booth with two eastman music students (recognizable by the triads in their buttonholes, the gracenotes in their hair) and one of them said to the other do you hear a music box? (y was holding meadelux under her coat) and the other said now you mention it i have been worrying about it for quite a while now and i believe it comes out of her, and he pointed at y who smiled reassuringly and said it does it does. then the music students bowed politely and took their departure. we went back to the bookshop and sterling, y’s boss and my old pal, started an argument with me about how it was to the credit of rochester that he could sell more waldens than he could grapesofwrath, and lots of people came and argued with us. i had taken down a copy of spectre and sterling had been reading it and was distressed about your story. i told him the quotation of the title which my brother had taught me, and he said it wasn’t a nice story. then a guy came in and met meadelux and me and sat down and said so you edit this magazine well well can you use any professional material? he said it was stuff submitted to him for publication. it seems he is the sole and rather unhappy owner of something called black fawn publishing co. mostly he is bringing out a volume of lorca translated by langston hughes. he says he is chasing lorca’s brother around new york. he wants to bring out some of henry miller’s work and kept telling me about DEAR henry, how difficult he was why i had a letter from him only yesterday…he also had a large sheaf of manuscripts of his own, which he wanted me to read. he says he is having a book of surrealist poetry published in the spring by the obelisk press in paris and these were some of the poems which were going to be in it. i waded through about fifteen pages of poetry and kept saying how interesting and he kept telling me about how he was the only american surrealist and if he could only get to paris where they would Understand him, and i kept telling him he was about twenty years too late i asked him how he happened to write surrealist poetry and he said he just grew into it. every time he said that i would say o why don’t you grow out of it and he would say it is the only true art surrealism. he had illustrations for his book, which were lovely. much better than the poetry. by the way, his name is rae beamish*54 and i suppose he is internationally famous as an excellent poet.
mother just came in to bother me about california again and then she started about my going to new york in june and she says she will give me fifty bucks and i must come home when it is gone only if i SHOULD get a job my father wants to send me an allowance.
and i saw michael last night and he thinks he is going to marry me in six months and when i said no he wasn’t he laughed.
it’s only thursday and friday and saturday and then i shall come back sunday afternoon. y may come with me. and when will you be back?
and i love you much.
s.
* * *
• • •
Shirley is on a short Rochester vacation to please her mother.
[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]
sunday [May 26, 1940]
darling,
it’s gotten to be pretty hellish around here already. they were so nice until they got me home and then they started in and it’s still going on. the trouble is my father was so damned nice and so decent that there just wasn’t anything to say. they have offered me a proposition. they will do anything in the world, says my father, to prevent my marrying you, even unto bribery and threats. if i marry you i can clear out. they won’t help me at all, won’t give me any money to come to new york, and won’t have you come here ever, although i can always come home. i finally got them to the point where, if i wait six months, until december, they will do all they can to help me, and won’t open their mouths when we get married. my father is tremendously upset, and really knocked all to hell by the whole thing, and mother won’t stop crying. my father is quite sure he can get me a job in new york, and will if i promise to wait.
so look. if it means a job for me would we be smart to wait? there won’t be any trouble about my coming to new york, they won’t ask me not to see you or anything, and they will go to california, which would be a great relief. i have been thinking that we could just live together and not tell them, is there some way we could work it like that? my father would come into new york on about the twentieth, take me around to these guys he knows, one of whom he says has practically promised me a job already, and then see me happily situated in new york and go away. he has been getting addresses of places where girls can live alone in new york and wants me to live in one of those places, but i think i could get out of that. by december i could hold them to their bargain, and they would have to let us go ahead and not say anything. darling, would you change your mind in six months? that is their main argument, of course, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why i wouldn’t wait unless we were living together. would you?
i don’t know what to do. it’s narrowed down to a quite simple choice between a job or no job. do you think it’s worth it? living together anyway, i mean?
mother slipped last night and made a remark about something and my father quick tried to shut her up but it was too late and she had to tell me. some friends of theirs have organized a citizens’ committee against unamericanism in rochester, and i don’t know how far around, and are contemplating running all the communists out of town. my father said that there were similar committees in all the towns around here and all over the country, which didn’t surprise me a lot, and then mother added practically over my father’s dead body, that they had the names and addresses of all the communists around here and were really going to clean up on them. they are secret citizen committees—vigilantes, and they are only doing their duties. i suspect that my father is on one of them. he will be surprised when he has to run me out of syracuse. he tells me that they are all very secret and the members don’t even know each other. very funny. he was insulted because i laughed, and he said i had no idea of the menace these communists were.
my brother took a crack at me this morning, he wasn’t very nasty and, like my father, every time i showed signs of getting mad he shut up. he says he doesn’t give a damn what i do, that he doesn’t care whether i live or die, but he wishes i would stop making mother cry. so write me special and tell me you wouldn’t stop loving me if we just lived together with a job for me instead of getting married with no job for me. i love you much and of course wouldn’t stop whatever we did.
s.
• • •
[To Stanley Edgar Hyman]
tuesday [May 28, 1940]
darling,
apparently it didn’t please you to answer my letter, although i made it as urgent as i could. is there any good reason why you should leave me not knowing how you feel or what you think? or am i supposed to guess? i’ll be back in syracuse thursday morning, since i have a dentist appointment late wednesday afternoon. i had my wisdom tooth out yesterday and have to keep going back for treatments. it was pretty bad. i saved the tooth for you if you want it. it is the prettiest tooth i ever saw, and big.
i sp
oke to alta about records and this morning she showed up with four bessies*55 she had found in her attic. i think we have them all, they’re all columbias. the trouble is, alta has heard me talk about them so much, and knows they’re worth more than a nickel, so mother is giving her fifty cents for each of them. i don’t pay. also she is going around among her friends and telling them about the records. she doesn’t want to sell them particularly, but is doing it as a favor to me. outside of my tooth which put me flat on my back, i have been shopping with mother, who has gone completely mad and is buying me everything she sees.
i went to a party with my father the other night and a great many people were there who knew about my wanting a job, and i had an actual serious offer of a job on field and stream*56 which my father declined saying that there were better jobs i could have. the field and stream guy wanted manuscripts rewritten and stuff. my father told him there was plenty of time for that later.
my father, you see, has assumed that i decided to take his offer. i left it up in the air, waiting for an answer from you, and then figured that your silence was either agreement or not caring to consider the problem at all, and so i let him think it was okay. right now i don’t care. i was terribly worried about it when i wrote you, and wanted to hear from you right away. for a couple of days i waited insanely for a special from you, and i still think it’s pretty damn lousy of you.
much love, and even when i’m so sore at you i miss you terribly,
s.
* * *
• • •
No letters survive from the next two years, during which time Shirley and Stanley graduate, he magna cum laude, and move into a small apartment on Thirteenth Street in New York. They are married in a short, small civil ceremony on August 13, 1940, in a friend’s apartment. Shirley’s parents are greatly dismayed, and Stanley’s father disowns and disinherits him. Stanley finds a job as editorial assistant at The New Republic, and Shirley takes many short-term jobs, including selling books at Macy’s, secretarial work at an advertising agency, and writing copy for commercials at a radio station. Stanley also contributes regularly to The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. Meanwhile both work at their writing whenever they can make the time. In the fall they move to a rural cabin in New Hampshire to focus on writing; Stanley also collects reptiles and small snakes as a hobby, an interest of his since childhood. On December 22, 1941, The New Republic publishes “My Life with R. H. Macy,” Shirley’s first story published in a national magazine. In the winter the cold forces them to seek refuge in Syracuse. War is declared, and Stanley is 4-F due to poor eyesight, to his dismay. The following letter is to Louis Harap, editor of The Jewish Survey and close friend of both Stanley and Shirley.
[To Louis Harap]
January 23, 1942
O Editor:
Now everything that once was youthful and sweet between us has perished, gone are the promptings of friendship, the easy sewing-on of buttons; there is left only, sad and perhaps a little bit pathetic, the editorial condescension, the artistic wistfulness. Here is your goddam story.
The story is, of course, better than you have ever printed in your magazine, better by far than I can expect you to recognize. The revisions, as you will see at first glance, are Stanley’s. The art is mine. You will be kind enough to convey to chrstn std*57 the information that any inquiries or requests for assistance will be answered by Mr. Hyman himself, in his own handwriting. If her entreaties, or your own inadequacies, cause you to conclude that this work is not available for your magazine, your frankness will not be appreciated. Just send it along.
If you conclude that we are acceptable to you, I beg that you remember your former promise of illustrations, and contributor’s note to read: Shirley Jackson is the wife of Stanley Edgar Hyman, himself a writer of no small promise. Shirley Jackson claims to be a writer too, and has a beard to prove it.
Syracuse is wearing thin; you may see us before you expect. If you print this story, change one word of it and you will see us sooner. Leave out one line and you die. I charge you.
Writer,
Shirley Hyman
• • •
“Certainly he’s in there. Why?”
Two more years pass, for which we have located no surviving letters. Shirley and Stanley are well-established in the New York publishing and artists’ circles. Stanley is on staff at The New Yorker (a position he will maintain for the rest of his life) and Shirley has recently published stories there, and in several other magazines. Laurence Jackson Hyman, their first child, is born October 3, 1942. They continue to write whenever they can. Their apartment, on Grove Street in the Village, is cluttered with books and papers, and becomes the site of frequent meals and raucous gatherings with their friends. It is a bohemian lifestyle filled with art, blues records, international foods, and intellectual debate over coffee and drinks. Shirley and Stanley love to give parties.
[To Louis Harap]
[early 1944]
dear uncle louie—
i have really nothing to say in a letter, any letter, because i am saving up everything i know to get ten cents a word for, and it isn’t everybody gets a letter from me these days either. however. i read, painstakingly (why the hell don’t you get a typewriter?) all your letters to stanley, and am very proud to find that you are now in a chazzical school learning to be a gwlyph. you must tell us all about it when you come back or when you learn to write. also stanley tells me that you are a private french chess (o you louie!) and have a frimbinch coming up. good for you, old man! i hope to god that when the army gets stanley and starts to make a man of him he will keep away from gwylphs, which i understand the army discourages anyway.
stanley and laurence get along fine, by the way, except that i think stanley is going to get along better without the patter of tiny feet on his face.
junie came back to town and is looking for a job. every time she comes over here laurence throws up on her and she has to stay for two days. the last time she came he decided to get teeth and she had to walk the floor with him because we couldn’t wake stanley.
now that we are making a lot of money we are living fine. we even saw a movie not long ago. i bought myself a fascinator, one of those head things.
i do very little writing these days.
by the way one of the things you most want to get a furlough for is to see stanley pushing a baby carriage around the block. laurence has the biggest and fanciest carriage on the block, with his initials in emeralds and a eunuch (we have to have a eunuch, he’s such a clever baby) waving a peacock fan over his head. what did veblen call the stage of capitalism where you worry because the lady next door has four initials on her baby carriage and you only have three?
i lead such an active life these days, following laurence around and now and then finding time to answer the phone. i write at night, after the last feeding. i expect that by the time you get this the new yorker will have rejected at least three more stories.
stanley sends regards.
this is not a letter. this is a way of killing half an hour until stanley is finished reading the book i want to read. i will write you a proper letter soon.
s.
* * *
—
postscript from stanley dictated to shirley:
little i can add to shirley’s magnificent social document…will put as many clippings as i can find in here and will keep sending them…news about your prospective furlough sounds fine…i think isidor was overly gentle with kazin. the reviews were uniformly favorable because kazin took care to lick the ass of every working reviewer. he left the nr*58 incidentally, because his book’s success had made him too cocky to want to waste time in what he called “a menial clerical job” when he could be a great critic…i expect to hit the army about the middle of the summer.*59 write, we’ll write, an
d come visit us.
yrs.
Stanley
* * *
—
postscript from shirley:
look, you should spend furloughs here when you are in new york. laurence doesn’t howl at night and i could use your temporary ration book. house is always open to members of the armed forces.
s.
• • •
[To Louis Harap]
[February 20, 1944]
dear louie—
it’s been a long time since i wrote you, and i only do so now by default, i am afraid, since stanley wants me to write you and tell you he is going to write you.
stanley points out with some bitterness that he may see you before he writes you, he having just been reclassified 1A, and in some hope that the army will take him this time. i expect laurence is next. also my kid brother, who will no doubt direct a new invasion, from the way he talks!
we live quietly, writing books and being in a constant state of chilled horror at our son. he is tough, snarling, street cornerish. he leers, and talks back, and eats with his fingers and looks at his father and snorts contemptuously. he is already so strong that it is wiser to appeal to his good judgment than force.
i got tapped for the best short stories of 1944, and sold a couple more stories to magazines like the new yorker and mademoiselle. someday i am going to sell a story to colliers and then we can pay our income tax.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 12