hazel is armenian, born and living in boston in one of those tightly-bound communities within communities; until she grew up she really did not perceive that there was a boston beyond the armenian settlement. her whole life was spent in a culture completely derived from the old country—food, manners, furniture, language, tradition, everything. her father was lower-middle-class armenian which meant that there were strata above him right up to the extremely wealthy big-luxurious-house-with-servants level. (i bet the servants were irish, though.) hazel was okay—played with her cousins, sassed her mother—until she was twelve. then (yep) she developed second sight. in that community it was really something. she began predicting the future, accurately, terrifying her cousins and thoroughly awing her parents and her uncles and her aunts and her grandparents and eventually friends of the family and finally the whole community. people used to come to consult her, bringing gifts for her father in payment. she was a kind of priestess, and finally one of the very wealthy families wanted to consult her, so of course she had to be taken to them since they would not come to her, and every week for nearly a year her father took her to their beautiful home where she had a special chair and table and spent an hour or so writing in a big book (i gather it was automatic writing and self-hypnosis) and then she was given a sweet and sent home, her father having been paid. this lasted, i gather, for about a year and then she began having nightmares and hysterical fits and her father most sensibly put a stop to the whole thing and she lost whatever gift she had and has never tried it since.
i learned all this because of an accidental reference in one of her stories; i spent a couple of hours wheedling the story of her childhood out of her. she has forgotten almost all of it, and is thoroughly ashamed of what she remembers, because she has repudiated her armenian background and is now an american housewife, married. no, it never occurred to her to try automatic writing these days, she was too busy. no, she had no idea whatever happened to the big book of her writings. no, she didn’t think it was very interesting anyway. no, she didn’t think a writer ought to use her own experiences because who would be interested in stories about armenians? miss barker had her real work, the unfinished novel; that was the kind of thing that would sell.
poor miss barker went and read that novel. it was the story of a beautiful glamorous manicured brittle wife of a madison avenue advertising man whose life is so empty that she decides (and decide is the word) to have an affair with one of her husband’s junior executives who has cool amused eyes and a crooked grin and the novel takes them through the preliminaries (cookout in westchester, you know how they live, those people) and ended, abruptly, in a hotel room where the errant wife and the crooked grin had just checked in and had a drink (wicked) sent up from room service. now came the part that was hard to write. hazel’s television watching and movie magazines had taken her this far, but beyond the first drink together most of her sources had left her to her imagination with nothing but a line of dots to go on….please, hazel wanted to know, how do i go on from here?
shirley barker is a tough old biddy with gold-painted toenails and when you look at her pictures of hotel rooms and assignations and whispers in the dark simply leap to the mind but actually she dresses that way because she thinks it is funny and keeps beagles all alone in a white cottage in new hampshire. you’re married, she kept saying to me evilly, clutching me with her gold nails, you’re married, you tell hazel what comes next. the hell i will, i would say, edging away, if my husband found out i knew anything about strange men in hotel rooms he would be cross with me, and anyway hazel is married, so just being married doesn’t seem to be much use and anyway you’re supposed to be helping with the novel, not me. but i have never married, shirley kept saying, casting her painted eyes virtuously heavenward; i have never married and i keep beagles and i cannot think of half a dozen times when i have been in a hotel room with an amorous young man and anyway it is without doubt the worst novel i have ever read and what she should do is burn it.
the distant soft murmur is barry practicing his cub scout oath; he is the type who will keep it, too; “i will obey the law of the pack”—what a vision it raises; the translyvanian wolves coming blackly down the snowy hills raising their voices in an agonized howl for human blood at the gates of the castle dracula; after the Bobcat badge the loup garou. laurie became a cub scout in westport where the parents signed away lavishly without reference to the boy’s achievement and so silver arrows were handed out like television contracts.
i sat up till four this morning (and why? i have to get up at six-thirty; what perversity lures me into sitting talking late at night?) gossiping with our college psychologist; we have a tradition around here of puring (oh, dear and him a freudian) pouring out one’s heart, not unlike group therapy, really; there are some of us who love to sit up late and drink and say the kind of thing we would not say earlier, and the custom is corrupting; one drops in late at another’s house and says i-want-t-talk. i frankly love it. group therapy in that we all repeat shamelessly what we heard last night. anyway i convulsed the psychologist—as stanley had been earlier enchanted—with your story about the condoms and the liquid nitrogen. apart from stanley, who has to, and you, if you have read this letter at all, he is the only person who bears with my whining about writing. i told him i had only been saved from some frightful temperamental demonstration by a golden letter from you and he asked if he could read it and i said no. (he wasn’t being nosy, just wanted to know how a letter could be so brightening.)
there is no punch line to the hazel story anyway. shirley finally ducked the whole problem by a kind of evasive chat on the writer’s imagination (as if hazel had any) and hazel all but snapped her fingers under my nose when she reported that miss barker “liked” her novel and thought she ought to finish it. i said civilly that miss barker was an excellent judge of novels and wished her well and hazel has presumably gone off to do field work in hotel rooms. i do not think we will see her again at suffield, and shirley and i both protested to the boss there about having to endure this woman.
you are not going to vote for mr nixon are you? i liked him on television because he looked unshaven and just like a villain from gunsmoke which should lose him lots of votes. are you?
i did—and thank you—get the cookbooks which i read with joy and had already found your lovely recipe but have not tried it. what are crawfish? (is?)
i don’t think my chaucer spelling is correct. write, write. best,
s.
• • •
“Flotsam and Jetsam”
[To Stanley Hyman]
september 9 [1960?]*34
dear stanley,
i am writing this down for three reasons, one (you name it) ignoble. first, i may always be able to use the material for something else. second, i still hope and believe that if i write things down they will somehow go away. third, there are going to be, eventually, reasons why our marriage ends, and you ought to know that it will not be a vague sudden emotion, or quarrel, which drives—has driven—me away. i am of two minds about writing it down, embarrassed at reading it and very much afraid that i will not be able to wait, but will show it to you on some sudden impulse, although i have no reason to believe you would then read it, do i?
the material, the complaints, the worries are familiar to you; they certainly should be, by now, and you can recite them back to me cruelly and nastily, surely, however, a state of mind which has endured so resolutely (and you have no idea of the lengths i have gone to to suppress it, and would probably not believe me if i tried to tell you) ought by now to be dignified by a recognition of its permanence. when we talk about it, i cannot keep from sliding into self-pity and recrimination, and you are always so ready to belittle and call names; perhaps if i write it down and then read it over some months or years from now i will be able to put a name to it—something like paranoia, or jealousy, or self-destru
ction. (i know: reading, you would stop here, and say unpleasantly that we call them all schizophrenia now.) i am writing about myself, however, and can call my own names.
the truest name for it is loneliness. i am so lonely now that i am shocked when i remember being a child and an adolescent; i thought i was lonely then. it was frightening to me when you pointed out that our sudden rush of company at the end of the summer was due to your presence at home, because it was true. i was so used to being lonely that i spent the whole summer alone without realizing that i was talking only to myself and to people in the store; occasionally i would come to the surface and realize that it was necessary for me to see someone—anyone, really—and i would call one of those professionally lonely creatures, helen feeley or pat sherman, and spend a dutiful evening with them at the drive-in. the rest of the time it was hard to remember that i was more alone than usual. i tend to think of myself (as i suppose most people do) as intelligent, witty, a good companion and an agreeable person to talk to, imaginative, sensitive, and so on—all the valuable successful attributes, in fact. to a large extent i expect this is true. i would, however, rather drink as much and as fast as i can than face the fact that it might have been true once, but no more. i am afraid to talk to people because i have that nagging fear that i am actually what you have told me so often i am, a tedious bore. i think i see it in people’s faces sometimes—the eye that wanders, the impatient gesture, the alert false politeness.
indifference breeds indifference, stanley. i hear you say that every action has a reaction, and you use the firing of a rifle as an illustration, and yet you never see the concrete illustration in your own bed. how can i be a dim silent meaningless creature, hovering in the background (and hovering, of course, is the wrong word; one of the things i try most to do is hide myself out of sight; i am no more real by the magic of having a room of my own, but i can go there, at least, and be useless in private)—how can i be nothing at all for hours and days at a time, and then suddenly create myself into a real person for ten minutes at bedtime? i wonder, even then, what or who you are really thinking about. you have said positively that our sexual difficulties are entirely my doing; i believe you are right. i used to think, this summer, with considerable bitter amusement about the elaborate painstaking buildup you would have to endure before getting one of your new york dates into bed; you would of course have less trouble with them than with me because they had personalities to start with. they had been sought out, even telephoned, invited, spoken to and listened to, treated as real people, and they had the unutterable blessing of being able to go home afterward.
of course there was also the unspeakable effort of reading their stories and taking chocolate apples to their children and finding them jobs, but, as you have pointed out to me, you liked these people, they were your friends. you called them not because you were stuck with them but because you wanted to see them. (and here another point troubles me; do these women make themselves look nice, put on pretty clothes, because they know someone is going to be looking at them? i can’t think of a better reason for concerning yourself with your appearance, any more than you ought to concern yourself with your conversation when you know that no one will be listening.) i am still bitter when i hear you speak of those women as “unhappy” or “lonely” or “sick;” i would have changed places with any of them for the evening you invited her out to dinner, making the gesture of phoning and issuing an invitation, taking the trouble to arrange something, making a decision, enjoying yourself, listening to her, interested in what she was doing and thinking. well, we can’t have everything, can we? they were supposed to be unfortunate because they had been deserted by their husbands. do you have a good adjective for me?
one of my devices for suppressing these—no doubt—unworthy pangs has been telling myself about other wives, the ones you read about in magazines, your mother and mine, whose husbands stayed away all day at the office and came home to settle down to read the evening paper or watch television; i argue with myself that this is the lot of wives and i have no cause to complain, but i can’t win this argument either, because neither your father nor mine spent his working day in the company of three hundred-odd wives/mistresses/mothers/children, to whom he was devoted to the exclusion of his family. there it is, i guess. your “work” leaves no room for other emotional involvement, not even a legitimate one at home. i have quarrelled with your teaching theories hopelessly, because i see you change from your usual glum preoccupied personality at home, change during the short space of the ride up to college, into someone eager and happy and excited, almost unable to wait until you can get into the world you love. then at night you come home, preoccupied again, irritable and tired and bored, with no time for anything but the mail and work. you complain that our children never say goodnight to you; why should they? how can they compete with your children, your three hundred beloved babies? you have heard me say this a hundred times, but it is still true. if anyone comes to see us, you are too bored to talk unless that talk is about the college students. time grudged to your wife or your children or your friends is lavishly spent on a student who drops in to borrow a book. perhaps you are right in saying that this is what makes you a good teacher, and you can only do your work well if you love your students, but you must then admit that your children are justified in thinking you are indifferent to whether or not they say goodnight, and your wife is justified in thinking you are indifferent to whether or not she intrudes on your bed.
do you know, i think the worst single part of it is your unguarded delight at getting to the college in the morning? i am not flattering myself that you are so pleased at leaving me, since you hardly realize that i am there, but i think i even prefer the unguarded boredom with which you greet your home.
i also do not believe you realize the brutality of your constant small reminders, to me and to the children, of our insignificance; you invite guests into your study, absent-mindedly shutting the door in my face when i follow, you assume that a question about “your girls” refers to college students, your interest vanishes abruptly, in any conversation, when anyone asks about my book, and you constantly interrupt my answer with some new topic of your own; it is your study and your hi-fi and your college; you are incredulous if you discover i am planning to attend some college function to which you have not specifically invited me and of course when it was a question of my reading to an audience there i was genuinely afraid to have you come because it really takes very little to destroy my public-speaking voice, and i could not have stood the kind of belittling you employ when you suspect that i have wandered even slightly into your own preserve. incidentally, i do not want you to come to suffield with me next summer, because it is now one of the only places where i feel i have a personality and a pride of my own, and i cannot see that go, too, under your mockery.
i am not going to talk about my writing because i am afraid to; in any case, you already know how badly i have been hurt there.
i am laughing at what has just occurred to me; if i tried to tell you all this, even once more, even quietly and with restraint, even hoping desperately that somehow something can be saved, your answer would be, as always, that i am hurting your work. i am keeping you up too late, i am undermining your confidence, i am poisoning the atmosphere. at the very least, i am wasting your time which is so carefully budgeted. i am getting you, and myself, all upset over nothing.
well, it is enough. i don’t think i have written you a letter in many years; as i say, my only fear about this one is that some time i am going to lose my head and show it to you. it has served its purpose, i think. i will betake me back to my own indifference, bred from indifference, living in the state so familiar and pleasant to you, of complete privacy (you would not know it for that, i think; when i am complimenting myself most ardently upon my rejection of this painful wanting to be loved and cherished you are most apt to turn to me and say approvingly, “you seem so much more
calm these days; are you happy?” and cannot understand why i am caught at a loss for an answer). if it is a mature attitude, i don’t want it. did you know that we were commonly regarded as a happily married couple?
you once wrote me a letter (i know you hate my remembering these things) telling me that i would never be lonely again. i think that was the first, the most dreadful, lie you ever told me.
[unsigned]
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
October 5, 1960
Dear Carol,
I have been wondering about Roger Straus; is there any way to short-circuit his seemingly limitless control over most of my stuff—specifically, “Lottery”? It has just been reprinted in a collection of short stories with his permission in a section illustrating dishonesty in story-writing, which I do not find pleasant.
Although my morale has improved considerably I still find it impossible to do any writing at all. The road to hell is very likely paved with my notes for stories and books and articles. I am clinging doggedly to the conviction that it will pass eventually.
The Letters of Shirley Jackson Page 50