The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Page 37
jannie has been wandering over to the lake daily, getting browner and browner and spending most of her time, i gather, pushing boys off the raft. she looks so lovely with her tan; she is a very good swimmer. she looks wonderful and feels wonderful. she goes off to the first of her two camps next week, then comes home for a few days, and then goes off for the whole month of august. she will be about ten miles from laurie, which will make it easier to go and see both of them, and sally is finally learning to swim. stanley, who taught the two older kids, was ready to despair over sally, who suddenly this year made up her mind and is now actually swimming; the combination of such a triumph and a very quiet life, mostly reading and sleeping and playing outdoors with barry, has calmed her down a great deal, and she is almost our old sally again. i notice that she has gone back to writing stories, which i regard as a good sign. barry, of course, is getting bigger every day; he is on one of those growing binges. before he left laurie made the kids a treehouse, and sally and barry spend most of their time climbing up and down the tree, scaring me to death.
our new college president moves in next month, and they are planning a forty-eight hour poker game to celebrate the departure of the old president; they are making him give it, of course, and hope to win all his money before he leaves.
lizzie opened in london, and punch gave it an enthusiastic review. it is playing now here in third-rate theatres; laurie said it was advertised in pittsfield, and i think it is going to turn up at the bennington drive-in, but i am not going to see it again, thanks. i am going to syracuse to lecture the end of july. it has been hard to stay on the diet because of the general haphazard manner of summer meals, but i am still working on it and am still losing, although slowly. stanley has given up baseball. after the way the brooklyn players performed in the all-star game he refuses to listen to any more games.*12
we are all looking forward to your next visit. we had such fun when you were here, and want to do it all again.
lots and lots of love,
s.
• • •
[1957]
dear martin,*13
it troubles me very much to have to write you this, but i am afraid that i must ask that, in future, you telephone us before stopping off at our house, so that we can avoid further interruptions of our working days. as you must know, our house is as much an office as any you visit, and i especially have so little working time that i must protect myself against visitors to a large extent. we are both delighted to see our friends at reasonable times, for reasonable times, and with reasonable warning and invitation, but i am afraid that i regard the six hours you spent with us yesterday as a wholly unreasonable intrusion, and i would prefer not to have it happen again. our house is not a hotel, a public telephone booth, or a country club, and i resent having it treated as such. because of the constant irritations yesterday my entire day’s work was wasted and must be done over; i suggest that if you cannot find anyone in bennington with time as free as your own, you make your local headquarters in some professional establishment better equipped to cater to transients.
Shirley
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
July 14 [1957]
Dear Bernice,
Here it is. By golly, here it is. I have gone at it until I am wild-eyed, but here it is.
Now I am going to take a week off and go swimming.
Even though this is not the final draft will you hit Roger for the other thousand?
I am trying to rush it through because Bob was so anxious to have it ahead of schedule. I hope the ending drives him to tears. I wrote it six times six different ways.
Yippee.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To a complaining reader]
July 24 [1957]
Dear Mrs. White,
If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.
Sincerely,
Shirley Jackson
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
friday night [August 1957]
dearest mother and pop,
for the past week barry and i have been here all alone and having a wonderful time. first, as you know, laurie is in lenox; joanne went to camp the first of august, and at the end of her first two weeks i went to visit her and the camp director said that they had a vacancy in joanne’s cabin and if sally wanted to come for the last two weeks of camp they would be delighted. so we packed her suitcase full of clothes and off she went. she is having a marvelous time, is doing just what the other kids do, is eating enormously. the camp is very small, about fifty altogether, boys and girls, and very informal and relaxed. barry was charmed with the idea of being an only child for two weeks, and then stanley had to go to new york to the dentist and to the new yorker, so barry and i have been alone. the two big results of this have been first that i finished my book, and it is now ready for the typist and second that barry quite without any planning or intention fell into a group of neighborhood children and instead of being a small child who has to be escorted to places to play has been wandering up the block daily to visit his friends, and entertaining them down here.
i thought that since barry loves to travel in the car and stanley left us some money we ought to take a couple of trips, so we drove the forty miles to saratoga (only we made it nearer seventy, by going quite a way in the wrong direction) but they wouldn’t let barry into the race track. they said if we wanted to come back for the trotting races in the evening they could let him in, but not by day, so we went exploring around the saratoga lake and then got lost again coming home. nobody from north bennington has ever gotten lost on the way to saratoga yet, although several have gotten lost coming home. i told the school principal about it and she said she was having a bad year; she had been down to the track four times and lost money every time. the local priest, i hear, is way ahead for the season.
it has been such a busy summer that i can’t remember half of it, i think; like all summers, it has gone too fast.
stanley and sally and barry and i went to syracuse, where i gave my little speech. they paid me three hundred dollars, on which we just about broke even, since we insisted on staying in a hotel instead of visiting someone (we hardly could, with two small children, we figured) and it was lovely; the room which barry and sally shared had a television set right at the foot of their beds, also, the hotel was air-conditioned, and it was ninety the day we got there, and hotter the next day, so we were fine. i spoke to about sixty writing folk, read part of the new novel, and answered millions of idiotic questions and some embarrassing ones and then had individual conferences with a selected fifteen of the students and then, the third day, sat there while they asked me anything they could think of, and they thought of all sorts of things i couldn’t answer. this all took place in the room where i flunked the final exam in spanish several years ago and also our old friend and teacher, leonard brown, sat in the back of the room and kept putting in questions like, “do you take neat notes now, shirley, or do you still scribble on anything?” it was a lot of fun, and apparently went well, because they invited me to come back next year. the fellow who ran the writers’ conference also runs a farm and riding stable about thirty miles outside of syracuse, and we spent one afternoon and evening there. sally and barry rode horseback and they went swimming while we drank vodka martinis and sally got into a fight with a rooster, which was a draw, although sally was armed with a broom, and then we met bix. these people had a magnificent great dane, and she had eleven puppies. the nicest of these eleven puppies was—is—bix. stanley argued and sally and barry were amused and so we drove the two hundred miles home from syracuse with bix in the back of the car. He is my own dog and he is going to be just slightly bigger than an elephant althoug
h now he is only six weeks old. he is already the neighborhood favorite and in the two weeks we have had him has outgrown two collars; i can still lift him, but barely.
on sunday morning we left barry with jennifer feeley, and two t-bone steaks, and drove to lenox, where stanley’s mother and father were spending the weekend. we had lunch with laurie, who was wearing the dirtiest shirt i have ever seen, and then all drove over to visit the girls at their camp, and found sally actually fatter, and sunburned, and very happy, and joanne, of course, enjoying herself immensely; we watched her first dive. sally loves the food at camp, and had been horseback riding with joanne. after visiting the girls we went back to music inn, and sat on the lawn watching laurie work. he puts in a full day; he had dinner with us and then his real work began; it was a jazz concert of the wilbur de paris band, most of whom are friends of laurie’s, and he had to take care of the lights, and help usher, and so on. he looked very busy and very officious, and made a good many trips back and forth across the stage before the concert, and around the auditorium, and looked very important. after the concert, he was off duty, and we all went off and ate enormous sandwiches and drank in the bar.
so all the children are well and happy, and none of them are looking forward to school. laurie in particular hates seeing summer end. his only consolation is that this winter he can go down to new york and get into night clubs because now he knows all the musicians. we met dizzy gillespie, who is certainly dizzy. and we met thousands of other jazz musicians and some old friends from last summer. laurie of course knows everybody, and has been taking time off to go to the jazz lectures they are giving.
my book has gone to the typist, stanley is preparing classes, and now all i have to do is get clothes ready for school. and practice getting up at seven in the morning. write soon, happy birthday, and lots of love from all of us.
s.
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
September 27 [1957]
Dear Bernice,
I know you’ve been waiting for this, and I’m extremely sorry for delaying it, but the Literature Department at the college asked me most urgently to give a reading from it last night, and even though I feel that I could recite large swatches of it I felt that I ought to have the manuscript in front of me.
I read the first twenty-odd pages, and was ready to stop, but there was such a clamor that I had to go on for the rest of the chapter. One of the students told me afterward that I had seventy-five sales assured through the reading.
It’s odd—students who know me all year around, and treat me with that dull indifference they save for faculty wives, spend this one evening a year when I read publicly addressing me as Miss Jackson. This morning I am Mr. Hyman’s wife again. My moment of glory.
Any publication date?
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
October 1 [1957]
Dear Bernice,
I am most anxious to know what you think of Sundial. It may interest—and warn—you to know that I have twice had substantially the same nightmare about it, of trying to get into the big house and being driven away and pursued; I want desperately to turn around and tell them that they are nothing but a pack of cards, but never think of it until I wake up. This morning, fearful and clammy, I woke up with the clear statement in my mind that Mrs. Halloran*14 had told me the house was built in 1492, which probably means that it will be discovered by the Book Find Club.*15
Stanley says we need money. I am working on a story for you so off-beat it would draw puzzled looks from the editors of explorations.*16
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
October 4 [1957]
Dear Bernice,
Now, no one could call this a family piece. Stanley says I may not start a new novel until after the first of the year, but must spend the next three months making a fortune from magazine pieces so we can get enough ahead so I can write a new novel which I already have partly outlined. I have also, at last, found someone to do housework and as long as I can keep her I can idle my days away at the typewriter.
My ex-English professor at Syracuse read Sundial and wrote me a learned letter about it, praising it and mentioning Mann, Chekhov, Meredith and James. Something very complicated about an “ironic central intelligence.” My, I’m glad I’m through school.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Farrar, Straus & Cudahy]
November 1 [1957]
Dear Bob,
I am extremely sorry, but I find the jacket copy wholly unsuitable.
First, although it is only a proof and I know can be corrected, I can see no reason why whoever wrote it should be so unfamiliar with my book as this. Orianna is misspelled throughout. The Captain’s name is not Scarabombardon. Aunt Fanny’s first vision is not in the maze.
Second, I mind the attempt at plot summary very much. Essentially, the only statement necessary is that the book is about the end of the world. Descriptions of the mirror reading and Aunt Fanny’s visions are pointless.
Third, I object most violently to the one-adjective description of each character: “Senile Richard Halloran,” “beautiful Gloria Desmond,” “experienced Mrs. Willow,” and so on.
I am sorry to quarrel so, but even leaving out the several additional and lesser objections I have, I think the carelessness alone is enough to rule it out. Since actually there is no way to summarize the plot, I would suggest that it be cut down to the following:
“The new novel by Shirley Jackson has the suspense of The Lottery, the psychological insight of Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest, and the cool humor of Life Among the Savages plus an irony and brilliance all its own. The twelve occupants of the Halloran mansion, set in the large walled estate outside the village, are awaiting the end of the world. It is their belief that they will be the only survivors of the general cataclysm. The little that can be known about the future, in advance, they now know. They can only wait for it; wondering what it is that they do not know…”
Since this would fill only one flap of the jacket, it would be my most optimistic hope that the other flap would be left completely blank. If you don’t care for that idea, Bernice suggested that the other flap might list my other books.
I realize that this must sound like a childish temper tantrum, but it seems to me that Sundial is so precariously balanced on the edge of the ridiculous that any slip might send it in the wrong direction; I tried to keep it on that uneasy edge because I thought it made the book more exciting, but I wouldn’t like to see anyone breathe on it too hard.
Best,
Shirley Jackson
• • •
[To Bernice Baumgarten]
November 13 [1957]
Dear Bernice,
Naturally, I am very much depressed by your letter; I can of course understand that Roger would be reluctant to advance any more money, but I cannot help feeling that I have never, after all, asked for any money from him in all these years which I was not prepared to earn. Perhaps it is because we are so desperate that I can’t be altogether sympathetic toward his point of view. I cannot remember ever being so completely discouraged about everything.
However, I don’t expect that whining will do me any good, so I have been studying the prospectus for SPECIAL DELIVERY; it does sound like a practical and pleasant gift book, and I’d like to do some of it. I think I could manage any of the sections he names, and would like to suggest one he seems to have overlooked. That is the other side of the excitement and pleasure of the new baby, the terrible feeling of anti-climax and being hopelessly trapped which seems to hit
every new mother after about three weeks. I’ve never seen it discussed anywhere and yet every new mother I’ve ever known seems to catch it. It’s a kind of horrible realization that you’re in this business for life.