The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  Stanley is in Canada with a group of book-buying blades, and he left the day after Laurie returned from camp, and the day after Stanley left, Laurie came down with mumps. So I have really been quite busy, mostly in the middle of the night. I have never had mumps, myself, and neither have Jannie or Sally or Barry, but luckily there is a three week incubation period, so that none of us will develop them until around the first of September, which is of course the week we move. Laurie feels a strong sense of injustice about all this, since the girls will thus almost certainly be quarantined for the first two weeks of school, but Laurie will be perfectly free to attend.

  I have also not had a chance to thank you for the monumental job of arrangement on the advance. By the time you are ready to put through a final deal on Elizabeth I should have more of it ready for Roger. John and Margaret came here for dinner a week or so ago, and John, who will as you know talk about any subject in the world except the immediate business at hand, was persuaded to admit that he liked Elizabeth but wanted the second section pepped up a little; I hope everyone will change opinions on that when they see the rest of the book, although naturally I expect to do some work on both first sections. By the way, I told John that we would have six bathrooms, four kitchens, and four telephones, all with different numbers, and he remarked evilly that he knew who would answer the four telephones—Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy and Bess, which scared the daylights out of me.

  Anyway, I hope you like the story. Naturally, if you or anyone else cares to have it changed, I shall be happy to leap out of bed at two any morning to rewrite.

  I hope you have had mumps, although I do not believe it can be communicated by the written word. Do you think you had better burn this?

  Best,

  S.

  I am also sending, doubtfully, a small thing named Bulletin,*12 which may be the result of reading too much science fiction.

  • • •

  [To Virginia Olsen]

  september 2 [1953]

  dear virginia,

  it was fun to talk to you, although i was so sorry that we had only a few minutes to talk.

  stanley wrote that westport transfer company, asking for our stuff on september first, and they wrote back was september third all right? and stanley wrote saying the third was fine, and so they said then definitely the third, and so today, the morning of the second, we get a telegram saying they are unable to get the vans, and hope to move our furniture “soon.” i called them long distance, and pointed out very politely that either our stuff got here on schedule or i would come around to westport and smash up their warehouse, and that furthermore i supposed that they would pay our hotel bills up here while we were waiting for our furniture, and perhaps, now i thought of it, we would refuse to accept the furniture when it did come, out of spite, so he had better get it into a truck or a pushcart or a wheelbarrow and get it up here on schedule, see? and i still feel i said it very politely, although when i got off the phone i found stanley with his head on his typewriter and tears in his eyes and he said it was because he felt so sorry for the poor man at the transfer company because there was no way of answering an unreasonable angry woman. anyway, we are now waiting to hear from the man as to whether or not our stuff is coming tomorrow.

  i can tell you all about the house, having spent long wistful hours there for the past week.

  we have two magnificent rooms on one side which will be filled with bookcases, and make a lovely study, and a pleasant living room with a bay window, and a dining room and kitchen; upstairs, four bedrooms. off the kitchen is a splendid pantry and utility room, where i plan to put simply everything. we will have left-over furniture at first, before we take on the rest of the house, and this will store nicely in the barn. expensive to heat because of the generous ceilings and over-all largeness of the doorways and such, but poor old mrs whitman, who wanted so badly to sell the house, confessed to us right away that we would find heating bills high; “oh, dear,” said mrs whitman mournfully, “it does get cold without heat, doesn’t it?”

  it’s the children’s house, so fortunately they like it. savages paid for it, in the form of a huge advance on sales from my publisher; he didn’t have to pay us a cent until next march, when royalties are due, but he was so pleased with the book he agreed to hand over enough for the down payment.

  of course there’s a flaw. mrs whitman (oh, dear me) didn’t have a clear title, so her lawyer and our lawyer are trying to determine whether the thirty-year-old bill of sale was or was not signed by one of the three heirs (that would be old laetetia hawkins, or it might be hastings, who married one of the franklin boys and moved on into north pownal, or didn’t she go farther west, maybe into york state even, or was that the watkins girl?) anyway it’s the bank’s worry. we’re moving in, and we haven’t even paid our money.

  we’re having a lot of fun with it, anyway. no one cares whether we stay in this house or not—what dr. fromm doesn’t hear in mexico won’t hurt him—and no one is waiting to move in here as yet, so we can take our time. we sit around debating over what belongs to us and what was here when we came. it breaks all our hearts to think that the furniture and dishes and—particularly—books, which belong in this house, will actually be either sold along with the house, or rented out to people even more unscrupulous than ourselves. the oddest thing is one carton of the doctor’s professional files on patients—he is a psychoanalyst you know—which was left loose and open in a filing cabinet, and very discreetly packed away unexplored by ourselves; whoever takes this house may, if they care, rummage happily among these case histories and fairly intimate facts; we have always thought of that one carton as dynamite, and have taken care to keep it safely out of the way in the attic. good blackmail material, particularly since many of his patients were local people.

  i have just been filling out my english income tax statement. it asks if i have been out of the united states in the last year, and i realize with a shock that i have not even been out of vermont; how do you like that for a country life?

  ralph and fanny ellison were here for a weekend recently, and we were talking of our moving from westport and our last days with you people, and how we missed you; ralph said when i wrote i was to send you his best regards, which consider me as sending.

  make your visit real soon, won’t you? and love to all of you from all of us.

  best,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  monday [September 1953]

  dear mother and pop,

  i have a million things i ought be doing, unpacking cartons and doing dishes and what not, but thought i would write you instead. i have four letters right here asking me to do articles, and a story i should finish, and curtains i should wash, and i am going to ignore all of them.

  our new house is lovely, and stanley and i are almost as excited about it as the kids are. it’s on the edge of town—as a matter of fact, we own the bennington-shaftsbury town line, and of course in north bennington the edge of town is two blocks from the store and the school and the post office. we’re across the railroad tracks, and from his bedroom window barry can just see the little freight engine which pushes freight cars around once a day. we have two and a half acres of grounds, with nice old trees and a nice lawn, an enormous two-story barn full of pigeons, and a seventeen-room house, divided into four apartments. we live at present in the front two, totaling nine rooms and still have tenants in the two small back apartments; these have separate entrances and even a separate driveway. we plan to keep the tenants for at least the first few months, until we get over our first big expenses, and let their rent pay the bank. eventually we will take the whole house, mostly to keep books in.

  the kids walk off to school every morning. they have to cross the tracks, but since we have one train a day i’m not very worrie
d. they go with packs of other kids, and come home for lunch; laurie rides his bike. sally is in kindergarten, and goes off with the rest of them; with stanley teaching three days a week i’m going to be all alone. it’s strange for me to settle down, after the hours of taxiing i did in the other house; instead of spending half an hour at breakfast time getting to school and back, i now wave goodbye to the kids and sit and finish my coffee. and instead of my driving four miles to get the baby-sitter, she walks up.

  the barn is our greatest blessing. it’s almost as big as the house, and the kids have the whole upstairs for a playroom. and the downstairs is a garage for me and one tenant and still has plenty of room for a pingpong table, all our bikes and wagons and stuff, all the things we want to store away (including two barrels of dishes), and a locked room, formerly a stall, where stanley keeps tools and things he wants kept away from the kids.

  i will write again the next time i can make a path through to my desk. until then, you’d better keep your fingers crossed for brooklyn. they’ve got to do it this year.

  lots of love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten]

  September 17 [1953]

  Dear Bernice,

  Do you know of any magazine that would like a sizzling article on the criminal activities of storage-cum-moving men, naming names?

  I finally located my typewriter this morning and spent two hours slamming away at a furious description of our treatment, and got it out my system enough to use it for material later. I spoke on the phone, just before, with a Mr. Morse, of the Westport Transfer Company, and the plumber, who came softly in through the back door while I was talking, said he stood there in admiration listening, because he never heard anything like it, even from his wife. Mr. Morse said if I wanted to be treated like a lady, I better talk like a lady; this was because I called him a liar and a crook, and he objected most emphatically to being called a liar. Mr. Morse chose arbitrarily to leave one-third of our furniture in his warehouse, for two weeks past the date it was to be delivered, because he “could not get a van.” The immediate result is that a hundred and sixty cartons of books, weighing four tons, are placed strategically around our house, located so as not to cave in floors. Mr. Morse thinks our furniture might arrive “in a few weeks.” Talk like a lady, indeed.

  Here are the contracts for Sweden. I never been published, Swedish-like, before.

  The house has gotten over its initial surprise with us, and has begun to spread a little, and is, I think, relaxing. I hung two curtains today.

  Never in all my life felt more inclined to manufacture great stories. I suppose it’s because I can’t find the yellow paper. Or it may be because of a feeling of fundamental security which is just beginning to creep up on us. The kids felt it first, of course. Parents Magazine, here I come.

  Imagine that liar calling me a lady?

  Best,

  S.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten]

  October 6 [1953]

  Dear Bernice,

  I am convulsed at Fantasy and Science Fiction; your letter made me laugh in the middle of the Brooklyn fiasco yesterday.*13 I have, as you know, been reading that magazine since its first issue, and even long ago wrote them a plug which they used for quite a while, and I think it is a real sweet tribute to my compliments and your stubbornness that they doubled the ante. Would you like to settle for a lifetime subscription for each of us?*14

  I have been reading Robert Caleff’s journal on the Salem witch trials, and I think the main trouble will lie in making the book not a comment on the present day; the parallels are uncomfortably close.

  I hope to get those stories out by the end of the week.

  Best,

  S.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  november 9 [1953]

  dear mother and pop,

  it is always such fun to talk to you over the phone, except i can’t ever think of any news. we are all excited about your trip. we just finished unpacking the books and pictures and records, which means the greatest part of the work is done. now all we have to do is plan for getting the floors sanded and the walls painted.

  our downstairs tenant sneaked out in the middle of the night, owing a month’s rent. We were mad at first, but then we thought of all the times we’ve been stuck to raise the rent, and even though we never sneaked out we often wished we could, so we figured we’d forget it. anyway we can rent the apartment any time we want. if no one wants it after a while we’ll just open up the passageway through our kitchen and use it ourselves. i wish the lady upstairs would move; she and her children are getting to be a nuisance; partly it’s the radio smack up against our bedroom wall which plays from seven in the morning until twelve at night, in spite of everything we say and partly it’s the fact that she regards us as just a kind of convenience; she uses our phone all the time (although somewhat less since i took her up the phone bill to pay) and feels perfectly free to ask me to drive her around, into bennington or wherever she wants to go; she asked me if i would be a witness in her divorce case, and when i said no, she said that she and her husband had had an awful fight the night before and her husband had heard me through the wall saying that i was going to call the police. i didn’t like to tell her that if they were having a fight i wouldn’t dream of calling the police, i’d be right there with my ear pressed against the wall, so i simply explained that her husband was mistaken, and she asked if i’d keep an ear open the next time her husband came home, which is apparently seldom, since he has a girl in hoosick falls. i went up yesterday as courageously as i could, prepared to ask her if she would mind leaving at the end of the month, and she told me mournfully that she couldn’t leave for six months, because she has to keep a residence in vermont to get her divorce. she hasn’t paid the rent this month, either.

  meanwhile, everything else continues to go well with us. savages has largely fallen off in sales, but the publishers wrote and asked me if i could get them the manuscript of the new book by january, since it is to be their big book for next summer. that means if i work constantly—and really constantly; no evenings off except possibly a saturday night bridge game once in a while, or a wild evening at the movies with the kids—i may be able to get it done. stanley is going crazy trying to keep up with his school work, because apparently the students work faster than he does, and in between times we try to unpack books. you can see why i don’t get many letters written. also, barry has been off again on one of his colds, with croup and asthma, and they have decided to try and control it now with a kind of penicillin mixture he takes three times a day. oliver’s*15 whole ambition is to get him through this winter with a minimum of discomfort, and he is sure that then by next winter it will no longer trouble him. he has taken to dropping over every afternoon for a drink, and to check up on barry, we no longer worry so about barry, particularly since instead of seeming thin and pale after the rough time he’s had since june, he gets fatter and healthier and livelier every day. he’s beginning to talk fairly well, and can communicate his wants perfectly. he torments stanley by stealing all the coasters in the house and hiding them, and stanley—who has, you know, this passionate kind of sense of order, and can’t stand a table with an ashtray at each end, and only one coaster—gets almost tearful begging barry to give back his coasters. he also hides glasses of fruit juice and small toys and little pieces of cheese.

  last night we had stanley’s ten counselees down for a drink; i had not met any of them before, because i’ve ducked all student parties, and so i had a wild time trying to tell them apart. they all look alike and sound alike, and they all eat like pigs. i had spent the morning with sally and jannie making dozens of fancy little canapes, and every one of them disappeared in five minutes. conversation
for the evening was largely about who liked cats and who liked dogs, and would mr hyman give cindy an extension on her paper until thursday? When stanley said he wouldn’t talk shop, conversation largely died until i fortunately thought of asking the girl next to me whether she likes horses, and then we got a brisk conversation going again. the evening was finally enlivened by a fit of hysterics by one of his senior girls, who is convinced that she is losing her mind because she can’t get all her papers written, the rest of them playing records. the girl was finally packed off home to bed, and the rest of us went back to discussing how we felt about snakes. they finally stayed till about two, and since they all had to be in class this morning, and so did stanley, they were able to have a pleasant little discussion about who would oversleep and be late for class. it was apparently a great success.

  time for the kids to come home for lunch. lots and lots of love from all.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten]

  November 11 [1953]

  Dear Bernice,

  I do not think that I can have Elizabeth by January first, but I should be able to get it done not long after that. I don’t know how long, because, as I told you, it got jammed and I have been in the third section long enough to develop three dissociated personalities of my own. It begins to crack open a little, however, and I know that once I get it going it will move fast. I am very hopeful of not delaying very long. I would like, however, to know that it was signed up with Roger, if that is possible, for the whole five thousand (which must surely look safe to him by now) so that I can figure on that money for January and not think of stories and such for a while, but go all out on poor Lizzie. What do you think? Or are you getting dissociated too?