The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  lots of love to all from all. keep well, write soon.

  love,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Carol Brandt]

  July 9 [1958]

  Dear Carol,

  My most earnest thanks are due to all of you; to your son for seeing that that check went out, to yourself, for the wonderful candy, and to some extent, I believe, to McCall’s for buying me my convertible. It is a tiny black Morris Minor with a red top and whitewall tires, and children stare at me as I zip by. I go up to the parking lot at the college and do figure eights.

  I enjoyed lunch with you and Pat enormously, and am seriously grateful for his readers’ comments. I think Pat knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t pay any attention to the ones I didn’t find helpful. It was a lot easier talking to Pat with you there, and far pleasanter, although two cocktails before lunch is an indulgence we in Vermont find dissipating; I went off and bought five dresses.

  No, I have not been working. I have been riding around in my car. But I promise that as soon as some of the shininess wears off I will write thousands of pages, starting with the little story I have waiting here. We fly to Michigan next Wednesday, a project far more terrifying and complex than your flying to Italy, and I must give a lecture out there, which I must also write between now and Wednesday.

  I am so excited about those two stories selling so fast.

  I am going out and ride around some more.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  “Oh, no, we haven’t got company—just a few friends of Stanley’s dropped in.”

  [To Carol Brandt]

  September 9 [1958]

  Dear Carol,

  Here is the new story, SUMMER AFTERNOON, and three carbons of old ones. I am sorry to send the carbons rather than clippings from magazines but I prefer these versions to the ones that were printed.

  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.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  october 27 [1958]

  dearest mother and pop,

  i was feeling so nostalgic this morning; i was making mimi’s nut cake—i have to make it often because everyone loves it—and i was wondering how she would have liked making it with the walnuts already shelled in a can, and an electric mixer.

  i hope your trip was wonderful; we’ve loved getting your postcards, and none of the children believe there really is a place called fiji.

  i might as well give you the bad news first: laurie was bounced out of prep school after three weeks. it was all his own fault; he apparently couldn’t go from the fairly free life he was living here; the first week he was in school he was warned for smoking and the second week he heard that his band was playing a date in troy, and figured if he asked the headmaster if he could go he would not get permission, so he left without permission; the headmaster called us and we tracked him down and got him back to the school, and then the third week (what an idiot he is!) he walked into a bar in the small town near the school with half a dozen other kids and they all ordered drinks. the others were suspended but laurie’s record couldn’t stand another crime, so he was bounced. the headmaster was very nice about it, and a good deal more understanding than we were; he thought that all three offenses were so open; and so obvious that any person doing them would expect to be caught. he said why not keep laurie at home for the rest of this semester, and then re-enter him in january, if he seems to have learned any sense. he hates being back in north bennington high school, but is trying to do his best, because he still wants to go to college, and he is back playing weekend nights with his band. if it has done nothing else it has at least taught laurie a lesson in discipline i hope he will never forget.

  all four children this fall seem happier and more settled than usual; barry is no longer a baby, and doesn’t have to be watched or entertained all the time. barry is also reading; he was just like sally, and discovered all at once that he could pick up a book and read. when he finally found a book he could read all the way through he wouldn’t give it up, but went back to the beginning and started over. sally has been feeding him carefully chosen books, and he is now on his third, reading each one at least twice. sally is odder than ever, of course. almost all the nervousness and irritability left over from that frightful teacher is gone; camp did wonders for her, but she still does not have any particular friends and nothing interests her but drawing and writing. we are giving her oil paints for her birthday, and a good phonograph hoping to interest her in music. sally is quick and careful and remembers everything she is told.

  joanne is closest to driving us crazy of any of them, right now. it takes her an hour to get dressed in the morning, and one morning she is starved and eats six pancakes and the next morning she has gone on a diet again and will take only a dish of prunes. she has to change her clothes three times before school. she is an extremely good dancer, and with all her giggling and general unbearable vanity, very popular. the phone rings for her all day long and she is always invited to the dances well in advance, and her days are as full of plots and counterplots as a spy movie.

  as for the rest of us: stanley, me, cats, dogs, and such, we try to bear up. my great dane is bigger than my car (which is still my dearest toy) and we have five new kittens. every now and then stanley says “when are we going to get rid of the kittens?” and the rest of us kind of turn away and pretend to be doing something else.

  stanley has accepted an offer to teach for six weeks this summer in the columbia university graduate summer school. it is quite an honor, and pays well for not much work. the girls and barry will be in camp, and laurie has several playing jobs lined up already, so i could go if i wanted to, but i can’t see finishing my book in a small, hot city apartment. stanley alone could live at the faculty club. i may spend part of the time there, but i am committed to a writers conference again in connecticut, and probably another trip to michigan, so we will be all over the map.

  we have started giving dinner parties once a week, and it’s quite a lot of fun; for a long time it was difficult to entertain in the early evening with children around but now they are always upstairs reading. joanne earns a good wage for waiting on tables and i have a new cleaning woman who gets the house looking decent, so it is practically painless, except for cooking the dinner. there are so many people up here we never get to see except at general parties, and a lot of people we owe dinners to, so it looks like quite a social season.

  write me soon all about your trip, and all our love from all of us.

  love again,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Carol Brandt]

  December 3 [1958]

  Dear Carol,

  I am so surprised and happy about the Post that I can’t think what to say; I will try to work them out a biography. And many thanks to you for sending on the check which, as you knew, we sorely needed.

  Sorely is the word for me, too, right now; I walked out of a cocktail party on Monday in high heeled shoes onto an icy path and landed flat on my back. As a result, I can hardly walk and sit very poorly indeed, but, not being able to move around, I put a cushion on my typing chair and finished off the present draft of Hill House, which means that I am running about a month ahead of my schedule. Stanley read it last night and likes it. Now I get a new typewriter ribbon, and type the manuscript once more, incorporating all my notes and putting in what I left out of the plot. I am very
set up about it, because I think it came out nicely.

  The only really comfortable position I can find is lying down. Either I must move to a warmer climate, or give up high-heeled shoes. Or cocktail parties.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  december 15, 1958

  dearest mother and pop,

  first of all, thank you so much for the magnificent bag; it is perfectly beautiful and i needed it badly. my little car will not fit in it, but it will only just fit in my little car. i had a lovely birthday, and it started off so nicely by being able to talk to you. everything went perfectly—my football team beat stanley’s in the last three minutes, and i won a dime, and then it turned out that there was a conspiracy on hand which decorated the dinner table and provided a beautiful cake.

  we are all well, looking forward to christmas, and keeping busy. this is the last week of school, and this morning we have six inches of snow, and it’s still coming down. my little car goes through, though, much better than the big one; it has one great advantage—because it doesn’t have much power, it stops immediately when you take your foot off the gas, which means you don’t have to use the brakes and so of course do a lot less skidding. this morning, though, when i took stanley to the college and went up the big hill i had a rough time. the lowest gear on these little foreign cars will get you up the side of a house, they tell me, and the little cars were getting up the hill and the american ones weren’t. we went up kind of sideways, but we got to the top, and then of course when i came back down again it was very lively, trying to duck the american cars stalled on both sides of the road.

  my poor cleaning woman, who lives fifteen miles upstate, couldn’t get her car out at all this morning. mrs wright is really very nice, and a most pleasant person. she comes three afternoons a week. because i never know where to tell anyone to start cleaning, she took it on herself to plan out what she did; one day I was struggling to sew a button on my coat and she took it away from me and did it, and now does all our mending. and she feels very sorry for me because i am so helpless. every now and then i tell her kind of timidly that i can write stories and she smiles at me and says not to worry. she is very much amused at seeing me sit at the typewriter all morning, and cannot understand why i want to waste my time at such a crazy occupation. her daughter, who is joanne’s age, got one of my books out of the library and the whole family read it and mrs wright thought it was very nice. but mrs wright cannot somehow make any connection between the book she read and my working every day. she loves to gossip and knows every disaster or scandal that has ever happened in vermont, and every now and then i can get some notes for a story from her.

  laurie seems to have adjusted extremely well. his school work has been poor, because he got so fouled up between schools, but in all other respects he is far better than he was. we have kind of given up hope for his education, since he is slowly building up a career, or at least a job, for himself in music. he is now in the union, which means that his pay has gone up to union scale, and has been invited to go to bermuda at easter time, for two weeks with all expenses paid, to play in a hotel there; also the manager of the roadhouse where he works weekends has offered him a contract job; laurie is to get together a band, and be responsible for them for friday and saturday nights all year round. the pay on this would be considerable; but of course we are not altogether in favor of it, since he is far too young to take on that kind of responsibility. just getting a band to be all together in one place is a major operation. we will not let him drive, and we will not let him drink anything except beer. he wants to smoke, and we compromised on a pipe, which he likes very much and i think he believes he looks very sophisticated with his pipe. whatever he earns goes directly to stanley and into the bank. he thinks it’s terribly funny to come downstairs in the morning and pay over what he calls stanley’s allowance.

  i have been keeping busy. one reason it is so hard to stay at the typewriter is that everyone is so excited and wild that there is really no chance to think. last night the children had their christmas pageant at the school, joanne singing in the girls’ choir and sally and barry singing with their classes. after that i brought my three home, put them to bed, and went off to the college to meet stanley and go to three student parties, where we met laurie off and on. there was a program given by the students of the social science division, kidding the faculty, and it was one of the funniest things i have ever seen. they did a parody of the faculty poker game, with paul feeley in a pink shirt and red tie and stanley, who was identifiable by his beard and his chain smoking, and it was incredible to realize how much the students know about the faculty—and they had emphasized a lot of little eccentricities no one would ever think of noticing. they were very cruel about one of the historians who never lets anyone forget that he graduated from harvard, and one of them who is inclined to be a little bit stingy will never, i think, dare mention money again.

  each of the student houses has a christmas party this last week and the parties tend to be very different, although usually loud and wild. we keep meeting laurie from time to time, always with a can of beer in his hand; he loves these parties, of course, and seems to know more students than stanley does. one party had hired laurie and his band, and that was great fun; we don’t get a chance to hear him very often and he was really good, full of spirit and enthusiasm and i guess beer.

  for christmas joanne’s present is a private phone, although that may be a big mistake. we are giving laurie a typewriter and sally a bike, and barry has finally gotten old enough for a phonograph, so it ought to be a gay noisy christmas.

  i told you that i sold a story to the saturday evening post, but didn’t tell you—because we didn’t know yet—that stanley has also sold them an article, one of that egghead series they have been running, on literature. It means that one of these days you will open your post and run into one of those full-page pictures of stanley. i have stories waiting at the journal and mccalls, and two small articles from the book i did on babies will be in redbook. i am selling every story i write but simply have not enough time to do many; i will have to spend january working on some because we are going to need the money. the first draft of my book is finished, and by march it should be finally done, thank heaven. i have put it away for a while before going to work on it again; I need about a month to forget it and then start fresh. it should be published next fall.

  for six years the editor of good housekeeping, named herbert mayes, has been feuding with me in a crazy kind of fashion. no one can find out what he ever had against me, but he hated my former agent and seems to have picked up grudges against many of her clients, for there are a lot of us in the same boat, artists, writers, and so on. mayes closed down the entire hearst organization, about six magazines, to all of us, and i have heard that he kept a file of names of people whose material was never to be put on his desk, but returned at once. the result was that my stories never went to him, and my present agent built up a market for me with mccalls and the journal, and then mccalls turns around and fires its entire editorial staff, including all my friends, and hires mayes away from good housekeeping with his staff and his file of enemies. for a couple of weeks it looked awful; if mayes kept up his feud and I was still blacklisted at the hearst offices there literally wasn’t a magazine i could sell to, and i was kind of discouraged, and it wasn’t any comfort to know that there were a lot of others feeling the same way. finally my agent persuaded him that he should give up his old feuds, presumably to start new ones, and he said he would run my story and would keep mccalls open as a market for me. she did get the hearst magazines open to me again, though, and this sale to redbook is a good omen. also the post is interested in more stuff, so i feel a good deal better.

  i have become fascinated by the idea of writing a play, and may very well try it next fall. i
have two one-act plays, one for the kids which is off in new york being copyrighted, and one for the bennington drama department which they are putting on next spring. I have no trouble writing the dialogue but cannot understand how to move people around on a stage, and bill alton of the drama department here is trying to teach me. he says if i do a long three-act play suitable for professional production he will let me try it out with bennington actors to get it right before sending it along to my agent; the agent would turn it over to the theatrical agent and there would be a chance of getting it produced for real. it is all very vague, though, because i may be in the middle of another novel by then. what i could do is write the novel in dialogue and then see which way to finish it—as a book or a play. also i don’t know how it will feel to see the thing on a stage, and maybe once i hear them saying my lines out loud i will never try again. sooner or later someone always suggests doing something for television, and i get the creeps when i think of it; one of the playhouse things bought an old story of mine and it has simply been buried, no sign of its ever being used, and the Schlitz people asked me for three stories, old ones, to be re-written for television, and i have never heard a word about those, either. my agent says that it is like doing business with a flock of birds—they have to get ten or twelve people to agree on everything, and no one seems to know quite what is going on; you can never count on them until the money is in the bank. even then, by the time they have finished taking out everything controversial or odd in the story, it turns out to be exactly like everything else they put on, with no more individuality than the commercials. i hate the whole business.