The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  laurie, who still cannot read or write, turns out to be able to throw a pretty good curve; they have finally started a little league in this vicinity, taking in three small towns, and they have made up four teams, on one of which laurie is pitching; he is starting against south shaftsbury in the first game of a double header on memorial day. i had to get him a pair of official baseball shoes, with rubber spikes. he goes out to baseball practice at five, and then comes home around eight and makes his own dinner. aside from baseball, he is now interested in nothing but science, and is doing a regular series of chemical experiments in school, for extra credit, which he badly needs. he has been going to dances every friday night at the school, and taking a girl; the last dance i suggested that he invite three of his friends and their dates over for dinner and all go to the dance together, so he did, and i gave them a buffet supper which they ate on card tables in the living room; the girls were all very ladylike and the boys all had great trouble eating with ties and jackets on. laurie is still taking trumpet lessons, too, and expects to play in the school band next year.

  jannie is going to camp this year, and laurie is not; laurie can’t bear to leave the little league. jannie has been so anxious to go that we let her apply; i didn’t want her to go, because i think she is too young—only nine—but stanley thought if she wanted to go that much she should be allowed to try it out.

  i began singing lessons. the singing teacher here at the college, leslie chabay, a prominent giver-of-concerts and such, asked me if i would like to start taking lessons, and after stalling and sashaying around for a couple of months i finally went up for a lesson and loved it; i spent an hour and a half and thought it was about ten minutes. i go back the end of this week for another try at it.

  later, it’s now ten o’clock at night, stanley is out playing poker, the kids are asleep—all except laurie, off on a hay ride—and i can finish my letter.

  stanley had a wonderful idea earlier this evening which has been charming me ever since; a new foreign car agency has opened in bennington, and he wants me to get one of these tiny foreign cars, keeping the station wagon for when the family goes, but using the tiny car for the million odds and ends of trips i make every day. he suggested that i could have a lot of fun with a fancy little car, find it easier driving and probably cheaper, and one story would just pay for it. i have been wanting to turn in the station wagon, because—this horrifies laurie, who is very prim—i am tired of the color. i want a pink one. laurie says he won’t get into a pink one, but a pink one i intend to have. stanley says that since the car is entirely mine i can do as i please about color, but wouldn’t i rather have something more modest, say a dark blue.

  the companion bought a story just in time to pay the income tax, which i thought was nice of them. and they are talking of buying another, which is even nicer. no word on the great movie version of bird’s nest; savages is turning up in translation all over the world, and i keep getting checks. stanley’s armed vision is coming out this fall in an abridged edition as a knopf vintage book; stanley had to cut it by one-third, and it was just like getting barry’s hair cut—howling and wailing and hanging on desperately. my publisher wrote me a lovely long letter, full of compliments and flattery; he had heard i was planning to find a new publisher and thought he had better get down to work; he had received a request from the university of california for my original manuscripts for the university archives, the university people pointed out that since i had been an undergraduate there and was always spoken of as one of their most illustrious alumna i might be interested in donating said manuscripts to my old alma mater. stanley and i decided they were thinking of helen hunt jackson, but i told them that the next time i cleaned my filing cabinet they were welcome to anything i found.

  did i tell you that we had a new puppy? he was given to us about two months ago; his name is jack (or jackson); he is big and brown and will grow up to look exactly like our dog toby; he is silly and affectionate and fond of the children, just like toby; it’s nice, too, to see barry and sally playing outdoors with two huge dogs guarding them, although heaven knows what would happen if any emergency came up—toby is well-known to be the biggest coward who ever lived. i think barry is actually better protected by his watchcat, gato, who never leaves him for a minute outdoors, and keeps an eye on him indoors, too. the other night gato caught a mouse and took it up to barry’s bed to share with barry, just as i was coming out of the shower with bare feet and nothing on but a bathrobe, and barry yelling to come get the mouse off his bed. what i did, of course, was run down the hall and into sally’s room and slam the door and wait until stanley heard barry and came and made gato take the mouse—which was very lively—downstairs into the kitchen.

  do you remember the fromm house, where we lived before we moved here? tonight just as i was making dinner, a woman knocked on the back door to say that she and her husband had just bought the house, and wondered if we could give them any advice about it, particularly about the electric pump, which was not working right. i told her what i could, and asked her how the house looked, and she said that the people who had rented it after us had left it in a terrible mess, and all the furniture just piled in the attic. i said i had always coveted some of the things in the house, and had actually been tempted to make off with the lovely little demitasse set and the electric mixer and the good phonograph and she said she wondered what had happened; none of those things were in the house now. apparently the people who rented the house furnished after us just simply walked off with everything good, and left only the big furniture they probably couldn’t carry. i’m really sorry i didn’t take that demitasse set. fromm, a psychoanalyst, left all his files and notebooks lying around and we packed them all (not reading them; i’m sorry now) into one big filing cabinet and tied it up and put it into the attic; it is still there and apparently goes with the rest of the contents of the house. he had a number of famous patients, including a big hollywood trade for a while, and i imagine all their case histories are still sitting up there in that attic. i’m sure the lady would give it to me if i asked her. think of the plots for novels.

  stanley must have won thousands of dollars by now, so i think i will go to bed and read a mystery story.

  lots and lots of love to all, from all of us.

  s.

  • • •

  [To Bernice Baumgarten]

  May 24 [1955]

  Dear Bernice,

  I am making little tentative stabs at getting some work done. I have been thinking about that story, the Mice one; if another magazine or so turns it down, I think I should try cutting the middle section down. But actually I’m doubtful whether the middle can be cut without losing the sense of the story. I’ll grit my teeth and read it, anyway.

  Laurie is pitching the opening game of our new Little League next week. If I don’t get a story out of it I shall at least get a movie; Laurie insists that I get three film magazines for the movie camera and photograph the whole game. if only Laurie’s curve is breaking right we will be okay.

  These are tense times; Howard Nemerov and I are racing; he is on page six of a new novel; I have gone back to page one again. His typewriter is broken, though.

  Best,

  Shirley

  P.S. later. I have been talking to Mel Dinelli,*22 who was very excited about the movie script of Bird’s Nest; he says he is sending me a rough draft to read, and wants to come up and talk about it, although he suspects I may not want to see him after I’ve read it. He was full of news items about people in Hollywood and New York who are, he thinks, interested in the script, which I think is wonderful.

  He said he was very fond of all my books, particularly “Life Among the Natives,” and just where was Vermont, and how did one reach it by plane? I had to tell him that not only did we have no plane service, but there was no train, although we do have a bus of sorts. I
suppose in Hollywood if there’s no train they take a helicopter.

  S.

  • • •

  “She says ‘I don’t know why you’re so self-conscious, for—everyone has his faults.’ ”

  [To Mel Dinelli]

  May 31, 1955

  Dear Mr. Dinelli,

  Many thanks for letting me see the dramatization of Bird’s Nest. I found it exciting to read; characters I had always thought of as lying down flat on a page surprised me by standing up and walking around. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of seeing this change from one medium into another. I realize, however, after reading the manuscript, that I could be of absolutely no use to you discussing it, since the translation is completely mystifying to me. I did like it, though, very much.

  Sorry not to have met you, in any case. I hope that at some future time communication between Vermont and New York may be enough improved to enable us to get together. Perhaps jet transport through Schenectady?

  Cordially,

  Shirley Jackson

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  june 12 [1955]

  dearest mother and pop,

  just a short letter to say thanks for the beautiful wallet and pocket-book. and stanley wants me to add particular thanks for the fortune he found in his. he is delighted to have it, and most grateful. yesterday was his birthday so it was well timed, and what with the new cool shirt laurie picked out for him he will be the flashiest teacher on campus.

  in honor of his birthday stanley went off the wagon; his school year is over in two weeks, so he figures he is entitled to a few drinks. we had some people over to play bridge last night and someone brought him a bottle of scotch, of which he consumed a large part. he won’t get up this morning.

  i don’t know if you heard or read about bird’s nest; m.g.m. bought it for production this august. stanley read the item in the new york times one morning and came yelling out of the bathroom to tell me about it, so i called my agent and she was amused, since the official notice from hollywood had only just reached her, and the sale was not at all official. it seems to be going through, however, only unfortunately no one is going to get much money. someone named eleanor parker will star in it; laurie seems to know who that is, and assures me that the movie will win all kinds of oscars. talk around the grocery has established that there used to be a family of parkers in south shaftsbury and one of the boys moved out west and raised a family, so eleanor is clearly almost a local girl.

  i do not plan to see it, myself, but my agent proposes that they have the grand premiere at the general stark theatre in bennington, if they can get the bats out of the lobby.

  everyone around here was very excited for about a day, and then of course lost interest when it turned out that no one was going to have to fly to hollywood and no movie stars were going to be hanging around upper main street in north bennington. stanley’s students treat me with a new note of respect, however. do you remember miriam marx, groucho’s daughter, an old friend of mine? she is coming up this weekend with her husband, and i hope to get information from her about how they go about making movies and how to avoid getting my name in the credits; i have read the screen play and it sounds a little like ma and pa kettle. or abbott and costello meet a multiple personality.

  everyone here is fine, weather warm, children lazy now that school is out. stanley and barry have to go to school for two weeks more, but barry likes it and stanley has no choice. laurie is banking about ten dollars a week from his lawn mowing, although he says he is mighty sick of grass.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  wednesday [July 1955]

  dearest mother and pop,

  got pop’s letter yesterday, and it was reassuring; i was a little worried, talking to you on the phone. pop’s letter, though, makes everything seem fine, and your trip to south america sounds wonderful.

  stanley finally got his students graduated, after three weeks of wild confusion. it happens every year, and we’re never prepared for it; he gets stuck with late papers and last minute reports, and for the last three weeks of school it has become traditional for each student house, each organization, each department to give a separate party, so that—since you can’t go to some and not others without being offensive—there is a cocktail party every afternoon and at least two parties every evening, usually ending in informal gatherings at faculty houses. none of the students seem to need any sleep, either. or any food. i found that a couple of times i had to gather up two or three of stanley’s seniors and bring them down here and fill them full of scrambled eggs and black coffee. there were the usual number of seniors who ended up in the goldfish pond on campus in their best summer dresses. then the last two days everyone irons their dresses and finds their shoes and washes their faces and takes three aspirin and the parents arrive, and sit around on the lawn admiring the college and trying to get the real truth about their daughters out of the faculty.

  after such a wild time it is wonderful to be free again. stanley put his one good suit away in the closet to stay until september, and there are no more white shirts in the laundry and we go swimming every day. the kids are having a wonderful time. after our long wet winter it’s good to see the kids getting brown again. i got a terrific sunburn, of course, which is almost gone now. we do a lot of cooking and eating outdoors, and the kids make their own breakfasts and lunches, usually finishing breakfast before i’m up in the morning.

  stanley went to new york last week, because the kids gave him tickets to the brooklyn baseball game for father’s day, and he took jannie with him. jannie of course loves going shopping and to movies, which is apparently all she did. while they were gone laurie ran the house, cooking dinners outdoors and seeing that the coffee was hot by the time i got downstairs, and we spent our days playing miniature golf. after laurie had done the housework he usually went off swimming at the lake with his friends, so sally and barry and i just got into the wading pool and stayed there. i did some writing, not very enthusiastically.

  laurie is really enjoying himself this summer in the little league, which has been started here. he is in it for this one summer, and will be too old next year, so he’s making the most of it. it has turned out, coming as something of a shock to his cynical mother and father, that he is a natural pitcher, and he has become something of a sensation locally. his team, the braves, is in first place. laurie’s first full game was a one-hit shutout, and his latest game, last monday, set a record for local little leagues, since he was only two walks away from a perfect game: of twenty batters in six innings, he walked two, got two out with infield flies, and struck out sixteen. he also hit a double and a triple. he got a tremendous write-up in the local paper. i took him down to the barber shop yesterday and there were half a dozen men around waiting, and all the conversation was about laurie’s pitching. stanley says that people point him out as laurie hyman’s father. since we have been in despair all these years because he could hardly read and write, it’s nice to discover that he does have some kind of talent.

  our lives have been completely changed by this baseball, by the way. the games are twice a week, one evening at six-thirty and sunday afternoon at three; it’s amazing how the whole town, only a thousand people, has reacted to the little league. everyone turns out for the games, particularly since everyone has a boy on one team or another, and feelings run pretty high in the bleachers. they built a beautiful little field in about a week with volunteer labor. it’s also done what nothing else so far has been able to do completely, which is finally break up the old feud between the college and the town; some few college people, like us, who live in the town and know everyone, got along fine, but most of the college people were distant and did their shopping
in bennington and never came near north bennington. now, though, the college people have started coming down for the games and getting to find their way around north bennington. we’ve been yelling for a long time about how the college people ought to come down off the hill and meet the townspeople.

  peg wohnus and i go to all the games and sit in the bleachers behind home plate with mrs haynes, whose husband manages the braves and whose two boys are on the team, and stanley and fred wohnus keep far away from us and try to pretend they don’t know us, because we make so much noise.*23 mrs haynes can’t remember to call her younger boy rickey, and she calls him sweetheart, which is what she calls him at home, and when he comes to bat and she says “come on sweetheart” he turns pink and glares at her and once he came over and said “mother, please,” and she tried to remember but in a minute she was calling him sweetheart again. stanley is concerned because when laurie is not pitching he plays second base and he stands too far out in the outfield and most of the time he is telling laurie to come in, come in. i have decided that if i sit directly in back of the umpire while laurie is pitching i can yell “no, you’re blind, you’re blind,” whenever he calls the pitch wrong. the field is only two blocks from our house, so sally and jannie wander over whenever they please and come home if they get tired; they spend all their money at the refreshment stand and then go up on top of the hill and play tag with their friends. by a unanimous vote of the whole braves team, barry got elected mascot, and stanley’s mother sent him a baseball suit saying braves, and now he sits in the dugout, very proud of himself.