*7 Leo Durocher (1905–1991) was a Major League Baseball player and legendary manager of both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
*8 Arabel J. Porter was a well-known editor at New American Library.
*9 MGM produced a similarly themed movie, The Three Faces of Eve, in the same time period as Lizzie. Shirley and others believed Lizzie could have been much more successful if it had not had the competition.
*10 Amelia Opie was an English author, poet, and abolitionist who wrote during the Romantic period in the early nineteenth century.
*11 Ethel Waters was a very popular Broadway and film actress, and touring blues singer.
*12 The Dodgers and the Giants had just announced they were moving to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively; Stanley was furious and abandoned his lifelong team.
*13 Shirley and Stanley had an open-door household, common among the Bennington faculty, but they sometimes had to set limits so they could work; this is one of many uninvited and unannounced drop-in guests they had to contend with.
*14 Mrs. Halloran is the self-appointed leader and head of household in The Sundial.
*15 The Book Find Club was an early book-of-the-month club.
*16 Explorations magazine was a short-lived intellectual journal of the day.
*17 George deKay was the cofounder of the M. Evans & Co. publishing house.
*18 Shirley’s editor at Viking Press.
*19 The Winchester “Mystery” House in San Jose, California, was built over many years by Sarah Winchester, widow of the gun magnate. It has long been believed to be haunted by the many ghosts of victims of Winchester firearms and is still very popular as a tourist attraction, with guided tours conducted daily.
*20 Shirley’s grandfather Maxwell Bugbee was one of many famous architects in her family; he designed some of the most stylish “gingerbread” mansions in San Francisco. Some of the Bugbee houses are still standing, and are worth millions.
*21 The original jacket featured large horizontal banners of orange and yellow, with the title repeated four times in caps, alternating with banners of black featuring Shirley’s name.
*22 Laurie is now playing cornet in the house band at a nearby New York State roadhouse called The Merry-Go-Round, a very popular dance venue for Bennington College students. The band is led by George Van Burgen, a former tenor saxophone player in the Count Basie band.
*23 John Fischer was editor-in-chief at Harper’s Magazine.
*24 Mel Evans was cofounder of M. Evans & Co., publishers of Special Delivery.
*25 James Thurber, an internationally popular humorist, novelist, cartoonist, and writer and editor at The New Yorker, would have known both Stanley and Shirley.
*26 Harold Ross was the founding editor of The New Yorker.
*27 “Erica” will soon become “Eleanor.”
*28 Gus Lobrano was fiction editor at The New Yorker under Harold Ross from 1938 to 1956.
*29 Kip Orr was a features writer at The New Yorker who also dealt with letters to the editor and the unexpected volume of correspondence sent by readers in the aftermath of the publication of “The Lottery.”
*30 Walt Kelly was a syndicated cartoonist and creator of the popular Pogo series that ran daily from 1948 to 1975, featuring Pogo the friendly Possum and the brash Albert Alligator, among many others.
*31 Publicity copy.
*32 Cynthia Gooding was an American folk singer known for her recordings of traditional songs from many cultures for Electra and Riverside. She toured nationally and in the early 1950s performed at Bennington College, where she met Stanley and soon became good friends with the entire Hyman family, sometimes staying for days as a houseguest and even performing in the living room, accompanied by various Hyman children.
*33 Langston Hughes was a poet, social activist, playwright, and novelist, known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Willis James and Marshall Stearns were folklore and jazz writers and scholars. All were participants, along with Stanley, in the Lenox folklore and jazz Symposium, and all became family friends.
*34 Sammy Price was a well-known boogie-woogie and barrelhouse pianist, singer, and bandleader. He was the house pianist the first year the Hymans visited The Music Inn, when he invited Laurie to sit in with his band, which included legendary trumpet player Herman Autrey. Sammy became a Hyman family friend.
*35 A series of beloved children’s books written by the Finnish author Tove Jansson.
*36 Unknown magazine was an American pulp fantasy magazine published from 1939 to 1943.
*37 Raymond Abrashkin wrote and directed The Little Fugitive and collaborated with Jay Williams on the Danny Dunn book series.
SIX
• • •
Castles and Hauntings: 1960–1961
i talk out loud when i am writing and yell and swear and laugh and sometimes cry, and it makes stanley nervous, particularly when he knows i am writing about something that will scare him.
—To Jeanne Beatty, February 5, 1960
The Haunting of Hill House is published by Viking Press in 1959 to superb reviews and great success, and film rights are quickly purchased by producer-director Robert Wise. In 1960, Special Delivery, a Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers, a collection of humorous short pieces by several writers in addition to Jackson, is finally published by Little, Brown to Shirley’s great embarrassment; despite the publisher’s promises to keep her name in “very small type,” it is instead trumpeted on the cover, on the title page, and in advertising. Shirley begins work on her next novel.
[To Carol Brandt]
January 19 [1960]
Dear Carol,
I am slow-witted when people start using phrases like twenty thousand dollars; it was not until I got off the phone the other day that I realized concretely that you had really sold SUNDIAL for a movie. Or probably, anyway. It has always been my favorite, you know, and I have always thought it would lend itself perfectly to dramatization. At any rate, it is wonderful news.*1
Now. The new book is named, tentatively, WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE. I like the title, but my Sally believes that there is already a book—perhaps a fairy tale—with that title. Anyway I am using that title for now. The book is completely outlined, although of course I may always go off on some tangent, and is, at present, about a murder, although of course not a mystery story. (Although I may write a mystery story yet.) I am not very pleased with the way it is set up now, so I will not decide finally what it is about until I have part of it fully written.
I will be happy to talk to the gentlemen about SUNDIAL whenever they are interested.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
January 26 [1960]
Dear Carol,
Please please do not let Pat go on thinking that I will have a finished book for him in six months; in six months I will have something to show him, perhaps the finished first section, but I will not commit myself to a complete book for at least a year. The poor miserable thing only exists in outline and notes right now. When I said six months hard writing I actually meant six months without doing anything else; I hate to rush this kind of thing because then I always want to rewrite it after it is published.
Barry has been experimenting with electro-magnets and has somehow magnetized my desk scissors so they stick to the typewriter. There are hazards in this profession, many more than the reviewers realize.
The only reason I am particularly anxious to see SUNDIAL in a movie is my own partiality for the book; I would love to see someone do it.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[To Jean
ne Beatty]
monday [February 1960]
oh golly i don’t know. you mean like Books That Have Changed Our Lives? i assume it wouldn’t be WAR AND PEACE or DON QUIXOTE or LITTLE WOMEN although i still get all overwrought over JANE EYRE. and i always took PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to the hospital to have babies with. do you know sylvia townsend warner’s LOLLY WILLOWES (why on earth did i start putting these damn titles in caps?) and all the josephine tey books particularly THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR and THE DAUGHTER OF TIME and anything at all about elizabeth 1 or as a matter of fact any of the tudors. none of these has made me a Better Person of course. and i think i am probably the only person around these days who reads samuel richardson for pleasure; SIR CHARLES GRANDISON is perhaps my dearest book. i don’t recommend it however unless you are in jail or somewhere else where you have plenty of time. mystery stories i read all the time and stanley gets furious because he is always reading something like ULYSSES which i frankly regard as a great bore. i have downstairs to read tonight a great huge biography of cardinal wolsey and an eighteenth century novel with long s’s about a lovely accomplished modest universally beloved young heiress whose family is forcing her to marry an aged reprobate because he has a title. it’s very nice. upstairs here in my study i have a ngaio marsh mystery and my own SUNDIAL which i confess shamelessly i have been re-reading. it is the only one i ever re-read.
odd that you should have thought of voodoo because of course that is what it was. laurie was building me a bookcase (he builds very good bookcases which never wobble) and when i came in to check on it i found on my desk a length of rawhide tied into nine knots and i asked laurie how it got there and he said he found it on the floor in the corner where the bookcase was supposed to go and he thought it might be something i wanted so he put it on my desk. well i guess anyone knows what that means so i took the thing downstairs very gingerly and put it into a box of magic names i have in order to neutralize it but i guess some of it got out. we finally decided that i had better untie the knots and see if that helped any and it did. i mean i have kicked the paregoric habit and this morning i had a cup of coffee and a slice of tomato (i do not ordinarily have tomatoes for breakfast but i was feeling bold) and shall probably be extremely ill later today but i have a little white pill to take.
my husband is an english teacher too, at bennington college (don’t you find english teachers get a little stuffy about MOBY DICK after a while?) and is just finishing writing a book which i am almighty glad of. for four years he has spent his free days writing and all his evenings reading so that our social life has been confined to perhaps one evening a month and that grudging. if anyone drops in (and there are great droppers-in around here although we have discouraged all but a few) i sit in the living room and talk and stanley shuts himself in the study and works. gee. we used to play bridge and give cocktail parties and have people over for dinner; it used to be great. now that the book is nearly finished i am getting stage fright at the idea of seeing people again. he was nice about summers, though; all our children go away all summer, sally and barry and joanne to camp, all together, joanne as a counselor and laurie off on some business of his own—one summer he had a job as bellhop at a jazz resort and last summer he went to europe with a band and this summer he may go to europe again or he may take a job playing in a roadhouse (i have gotten used to the idea of my little boy playing the trumpet in a roadhouse particularly since he brings home some very odd friends particularly jazz musicians and there are jam sessions in the living room, while stanley who loves jazz sits in the study and works). anyway, the children are all gone all summer so stanley says it is pointless for me to cook dinners when we live in a state with some of the best country inns around, so all summer long we dine out, wandering forty or fifty miles away and getting back early enough so stanley can go in the study and work.
what kind of things do you write? jay williams is an old family friend of ours; we knew him when he was an actor. can’t stand his wife. he is a particular friend of our sally’s, and sends her the danny dunn books; they write incredible letters to one another, both being mildly batty. (jay reminds me of the Tolkien RING trilogy; do you know that? or THE HOBBIT? i can’t get the kids to read THE HOBBIT although i love it.) do you really make dresses for your girls? joanne has tried to teach me to sew but i can’t. because my mother used to make me lovely things and i hated them. she made me an evening dress to wear to my first formal party and i was absolutely sick with embarrassment. what is facing?
i should be working because my new book was due at the publisher’s a year ago may fifteenth but i have spent the greater part of the morning composing verse. and cursing sally. we have contests around this house; every so often a notice will appear scotch-taped to the front of the refrigerator announcing CONTEST ABSOLUTELY NEW CONTEST and it will be something frightful and we will all dutifully enter. sally has a contest going now, ending at dinner tonight, for the best poem fifty words or less, in honor of our cat (senior cat of six) toro. it is very hard indeed to find a rhyme for toro. particularly since he is an evil baleful snarly old tyrant. toro is the judge. prizes will be given. stanley did his entry yesterday and spent all evening bragging about it and all i have is a last line (“with teetotal toro as tutor”) and nothing to do with it. wait. i just thought of scooter.
it might seem absurd
that a beer-drinking bird
would endeavor to ride on a scooter
with teetotal toro as tutor
oh, well. it won’t win anyway.
you should not write such pleasant letters because they encourage me to these interminable replies. it’s because i would rather write than do anything else i suppose. anything else meaning particularly this morning getting yesterday’s laundry out of the dryer.
best,
shirley
• • •
[To Jeanne Beatty]
friday [February 5, 1960]
dear jeanne,
i will so write ten pages if i like. you just don’t have to read them, is all. i was feeling very silly because i thought you were not going to answer my childish letter, which i so much enjoyed writing, because it was childish, and it was so good to get your letter today. do you find it crazy, kind of, sending a letter out into the blue and then just wondering where it got to finally and how it was received and whether someone said goodlordlook at the length of this and then used it to light cigars with? but i feel that about stories too, although i defy the nonfiction editor of good housekeeping to light a cigar with my current article which she is busily rewriting at this very moment. anyway i do not believe that you went down into the cellar by yourself even the next day. i do not believe it. i’m sorry, it’s just not the kind of thing you can believe—i know, i know, but i just don’t, and i’m sorry and all that, but you have to think of human nature and all. (unless of course you are one of those intrepid english spinster types who venture out into the sahara with a baedeker and a hip bath; do you know frank baker’s thoroughly delightful MISS HARGREAVES? if not, let me know and i will send it to you.) but the cellar no. for one thing it might have been a real ghost and not just some mad killer intent upon his vicious pursuits. or it might have been a rat or something, you know. or something real bad like a loose horse. (loose horses are the worst. they wear their hair in dyed tangled mops, and paint their nails and put red on their cheeks and dance can cans and generally bring a bad name upon womankind in general.)
i had to promise myself that i would not come back to this letter until i had done my good housekeeping stint since naturally i would rather be writing you a letter than doggedly pursuing an unrewarding idea through pages of heavy handed prose. i am so consumed with guilt about good housekeeping that it is almost impossible for me to write anything for them (stanley accused me of stealing the h from his typewriter but now i think he has come and stolen it back) because last year when we were very broke i
ndeed they (i have to go back over heveryone of those hs) offered me a column spot to run about eight times a year and of course it was wonderful but then hill house sold to hollywood and we don’t need the money but they were so nice to me i got to keep doing the columns and the woman editor there thinks she is making them cleverer when she takes out my exquisitely formed phrases and substitutes madison avenue slang. she calls me darling over the phone too. one reason i never go to new york is because my agent is that kind of lady too (eight feet tall with lots of gold bracelets studded with rubies and enormous hairdos and the right shade of lipstick and a kind of little tolerant laugh) and i am scared of them. i always upset the martini onto their perfect grey suits. or fall down so the headwaiter will have to come pick me up. she goes to the hairdresser every morning, my agent. stanley has just left for new york because he is on some odd committee concerned with the future of bennington college.
it is so quiet without stanley’s typewriter going downstairs. he has a downstairs study, see, and i have an upstairs study because if you must know the disagreeable truth he kicked me out of the downstairs study because my desk was a mess and i never covered my typewriter and he bribed laurie to repaint the guest room and they moved my desk up there and planked the typewriter down on it and said there. so i raided the house for everything i liked best and brought it all up to my study and shut the door and i live in here. stanley will not come past the door because not only are my books not in alphabetical order if you can conceive of such a thing, but one of the shades is always pulled up crooked and i put my pictures anywhere i like them and they are not level. stanley asked me why my study was so much lighter than his and i said because i was in it and so one afternoon he came up and sat down for a few minutes breathing heavily and cowering and finally with a wild shriek he leaped up and straightened a picture and fled. each evening sally and barry come in with their game of clue and we play three solemn games, me losing. through some mysterious architectural alchemy one of my windows regards one of laurie’s windows and in the summer time he sits in his window and plays the haydn horn concerto for me. i wrote hill house in the dining room though. i talk out loud when i am writing and yell and swear and laugh and sometimes cry, and it makes stanley nervous, particularly when he knows i am writing about something that will scare him; he said that one morning i was making such a racket in the dining room that if he could read the book he could pick out which scene i was working on. (i know which scene it was, too; it was the scene near the end where luke is jeering at eleanor and i was trying to get the right edge to luke, to indicate exactly that light evil tone, which i never did get actually the way i wanted it; stanley says i was yelling, “look alive you idiot.”)
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 44