The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  I am very happy about the Sundial progress, and as you know would simply love to see it done as a movie. It has always been my favorite.

  Best,

  Shirley

  • • •

  [To Jeanne Beatty]

  wednesday [November 2, 1960]

  how enchanting to have your letter on hallowe’en while i was making octopus costumes; i resolutely put it aside unopened because of course duty to the little ones comes first and all the time i was stapling tentacles i was thinking ha a letter to read as a reward for all my sacrifices and working my fingers to the bone making octopuses and what thanks do i get. stanley says the plural is octopodes and i suppose it might very well be. it was very fine. i read my letter and giggled and wriggled (she swallowed the spider to catch the fly.) and sally went to a hallowe’en party and barry went trick-or-treating (you be home by eight i don’t care how late david can stay out and don’t cross any streets without looking first and if the big boys from shaftsbury are hanging around the center of town you go the other way, you hear? and don’t step on your tentacles). he did, though. step on his tentacles, i mean. pretty soon barry was trailing tentacles far far behind and he said bitterly they got caught in every single door and he left tentacles behind all over town. How do octopodes manage I wonder.

  such an eerie morning we have got today. it began when stanley found a tooth in his breakfast rolls (friehofer brown and serve salt sticks) and got worse when he discovered that the tooth was not his own. i have only seen him so shaken once before and that was because gentle shax took to sleeping in wastebaskets and stanley got up in the night to go to the bathroom and glanced down at the wastebasket and found it was filled with a pool of black fur. “i mean,” i said in the grocery, “the friehofer people have always seemed so sanitary.” “i’ll speak to the delivery man today,” said larry. “do you want a fresh box of rolls?”

  well it didn’t really begin then. it really began during the night with my dream. which is the third (and don’t get all college-psych on me and say i imagined dreaming the other two because i wrote them down yah only i can’t find them and stanley says it’s because he was reading milton aloud last night over my protests and i hate milton except satan but stanley says it is only the great rolling lines which stayed in my head but it wasn’t because i have heard people read milton before and it never gave me nightmares and anyway i think a husband who reads milton aloud in the evening when his wife wants to take off her shoes and settle down with an old unknown ought to be shut in the cellar) and it scared me. i id (what the hell. that’s three times i’ve tried to write did in that spot) did did did fancy briefly that i might be only a character in an old novel from unknown but actually that might be worse.

  what? oh, it’s a kind of pact-with-the-devil series of dreams. the first, nearly fifteen years ago, was so frightening that when i wrote it down a friend of mine went home and dreamed it herself scaring both of us even more. i woke up from that first one screaming “i didn’t sign i didn’t sign” and the second—a recreation of what i thought was a scene from my childhood leading inexorably into the same dream—was about six years ago and i got so worried that i wrote to my mother (you don’t write my mother things like this) asking her if i had ever been criminally attacked as a small child because i had been dreaming about it and she wrote back not to me but to stanley asking if he knew i had been Imagining Things and Was There Anything Wrong Between Us? now the third last night and i was standing there at a sabbat shouting prophecies. how silly it sounds. i almost asked stanley to cancel his class this morning because i was afraid to be alone. frightening because of the sneering little voice that keeps saying you go right on thinking it’s a dream if you want to, dearie.

  what a shame that dreams are not the stuff that stories are made on.

  i think i will spend a very sensible day, just in case. i will read the new yorker. i will finally sew on that button. i will take the chair in today to be fixed, i promise i will. i will make chocolate pudding. i will bring faun malkin and applegate the cat upstairs after lunch. i will get out the soft blue puff and i will turn on all the lights because it is a kind of dark day and i will take a nap. i will tell barry that yes, david may play here today. i will get a boy to rake the leaves. i will persuade sally to do her homework this afternoon in her room. (did i tell you that sally-magic is in bad repute? because some friends who were building a house asked her for lawn-magic when they were putting in the lawn and they wanted it to grow fast and she gave them magic to sprinkle on the bare ground and now the lawn grows so fast it is ankle deep most of the time and there is a real fairy ring in the center? and recently we were expecting week-end guests and they didn’t come and they didn’t come so i asked sally for a little guest-bringing magic and she gave me some to sprinkle on the threshold and our guests came almost at once but that evening eight more people dropped in?) because with the tooth and the dream anyone knows that one more will happen. stanley will not be home until six. i have asked him most politely not to read milton aloud again tonight and he has promised and even offered to get off a little swinburne if i thought it would help but i rather think i will watch television. something sane like the untouchables perhaps.

  i do not think you will believe this: laurie writes that he has been reading the oz books at college because some girl lent him several. he says they have been having oz-and-jazz readings and especially dig the munchkins. i do not believe it either, but i have written urgently to know more about what kind of girl brings oz books to college and passes them around.

  we are having such a joy of a time with stanley’s tooth (the tooth of my husband’s salt stick). larry in a state of high righteous indignation turned over the tooth to the pepperidge farms salesman that afternoon and the salesman, pale and trembling, telephoned his main office on the spot to report tooth found in salt stick; larry gave them our name and address and the salesman tottered off on his appointed round after assuring larry that i might have a brand new box of salt sticks on the house. larry said he rather thought not, thank you, at least not for a day or so. then i got a splendid letter from mr pepperidge himself, referring guardedly to my “horrible experience” and pointing out that the most extreme care was taken in their bakeries to avoid such things: employees were not allowed to drink out of glasses, but must use paper cups, no one was allowed to wear watches or rings or hearing aids, hair was always covered, and so on. nothing was said about checking teeth at the door. he was very careful to indicate that this was probably something that had been put into the rolls by a bad magician long after they left the factory. and he finished by saying that he was “taking the liberty” of sending me some of their products which he hoped we would eat with confidence. confidence he said. and lo! came the next day a box from pepperidge farm with a loaf of hovis bread therein. special delivery. cost of bread thirty-seven cents. cost of mailing eighty-three cents. the children are boiling; they had expected those lovely cookies. i am boiling because i badly wanted to write back “dear mr pepperidge farm, thank you very very much for the lovely loaf of bread…” and stanley won’t let me. the poor people are probably terrified that we are going to sue but i think i will content myself with just telling everybody about it. stanley has taken to wondering idly what happened to the rest of him; after all, we only found one tooth and there ought to be cuff links and perhaps a watch charm in the coffee cake or the dinner rolls.

  dear mr pepperidge farm: oh, boy! a free loaf of bread! how did you ever…

  (“look, peppy, there’s this dame up in new hampshire or somewhere and she found that tooth mannie lost the night of the office party and it got into that batch of salt sticks the way we were worried it might of, and we better do something, the way i figure, we send her like bread, maybe—those people are always so crazy to get something for nothing, like free samples, you know? so maybe she hasn’t gotten to a lawyer yet and you get that yo
ung fellow in copywriting to send her the same letter we sent that guy with the caterpillar last year and i’ll go through the salt sticks to see if i can pick out mannie’s glasses.”)

  it is true about the oz books. all true. laurie came home last week for a day with a friend and they knew all the countries but not the rulers in order and they tried to steal a copy of the little engine that could (“man, figure that i-think-i-can chorus against a cool bass”) but barry wouldn’t let them have it.

  sally got a tankful of tropical fish for her birthday and we gave joanne a canary for her birthday; barry says that on his birthday, which is next, he confidently expects a cluster of microbe bacteria. he cornered us; he brought home a report card all a’s, and barry—who is not modest—requested a present, our standing offer for an all a’s report card. (stanley never got so low as a b in his life until the year we took shakespeare together in college and he says that was my fault.) we had put away a microscope set for his birthday but stanley, carried away, gave it to him for his report card. he is the only child i have ever seen who attacks a microscope set by reading the enclosed booklet before he touches anything. he got a feather from joanne’s bird and some algae from sally’s fish and last night he seems to have been staining cells in the bathroom. the purple dye will of course not come off the soap dish.

  sally has asked me to send you a recipe. i made it up several years ago during the broadcast of a brooklyn dodgers baseball game and the winning pitcher for brooklyn (now long since retired) was named lasorda*35 so when everyone liked their dinner they named the dish lasorda. it is a particular favorite of sally’s and she asked that year that it be served at her birthday dinner for her friends and they all liked it so well that it has become a standard for sally’s birthday and everyone wants the recipe but it is difficult since i never know how much of anything i put in.

  do you know about the paula welden case? an account of it turned up recently in a cheap collection of sensational articles on missing persons, and i was reminded of how i always wanted to write it, but can’t, of course. she was a bennington college girl who disappeared about ten years ago;*36 i’m sure i have told you about it. it is such a lovely story and every now and then around the store people will get to talking about it again and going over and over all they remember; they were talking about it today. she walked out of her dormitory room on a sunday afternoon, telling her roommate she was going up local mount glastenbury on what is called the long trail and the last anyone saw her she was going out the college gates heading for the hills. odd thing was that by the time—the next day—she was reported missing and boy scouts and hunters and firemen and such were out combing the long trail for her, everyone already knew positively that she had never reached the long trail; larry-at-the-store and a couple of other scoutmastering types had been up and down the trail all afternoon clearing out a scout camping spot and at the time when she was last seen heading for the trail they were coming down, walking, so that she actually vanished somewhere between the college gates and the start of the trail. (someone saw her getting in a car, someone saw her on mount anthony, someone saw her in a shoe store in albany, someone saw her hiding in a college cellar.) i love the story, we all have our theories, of course. we were also talking about our other classic case, which is the story of middie rivers, a local man of seventy-seven, who still lived in the house where he had been born and had never been farther away from home than the nearest town. he had hunted and fished the woods around his house since he was old enough to walk and yet one day he wandered into a woods on his own land and vanished like paula. they are still searching for his body in an area of perhaps ten acres; he went seven years ago and there has been no sign of him. i keep wondering where they are, paula and middie. i could maneuver paula’s story around so it wouldn’t be about bennington but i am puzzled about police procedure; the police in paula’s case did most of their investigating sitting around the sheriff’s office drinking hard cider and even the f.b.i. put in a half hour of pointless questions, but it wouldn’t be nice to write it like that.

  i am awed by your control of your washer; i am afraid of mine. when it goes pocketa-pocketa i get barry to go in and turn it off. my electric coffeepot blew me across the kitchen for the second time and i got mad and went out and bought a good oldfashioned five-and-ten percolator and stanley said at last a cup of coffee strong enough to taste. effete, that’s what we all are, effete.

  did you know i had four thousand old post cards? i don’t exactly know why. stanley gave them to me for a present.

  writewritewrite.

  best,

  s.

  • • •

  [To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]

  friday [May 1961]

  dearest mother and pop,

  haven’t written because i expected to be talking to you on mother’s day but although we put the call through several times you were always out, so happy mother’s day anyway and lots of love from all of us. i was brought breakfast in bed in honor of the occasion and was presented with a most magnificent bouquet of yellow flowers, yellow being my favorite color, so i had a lovely morning reading the sunday paper in bed admiring my flowers.

  we are still in the midst of spring which means that the mud season is over but it rains every other day; overnight the grass turned green and the leaves came out on the trees, and we had one spell of very hot weather.

  i have had a most unpleasant time since february with something called colitis; i apparently picked up the bug while i was still getting over the flu; it is a kind of intestinal flu that hangs on and on and although i am nowhere near as uncomfortable as i was a few weeks ago i am still troubled and taking pills. for a while i was very poorly, enough so that oliver was considering packing me off to the hospital but the mere threat of the hospital was enough to make me better. i had to take paregoric*37 six times a day and as though that was not bad enough i had sulfa pills the size of the eggs to take and about four other things and just to top it off there was nothing i could eat except cottage cheese. it is not at all serious, merely very uncomfortable, and annoying because it keeps on so long. oliver told me cheerfully that some people have it for months and months. i had a harrowing three days last month when stanley and i went to farleigh dickenson university in new jersey to do a dual lecture stint; we drove down on the throughway for five hours but i made the trip all right and then the next day we had to perform and imagine me on this schedule: at lunch time we left the inn where we stayed and drove five miles to the college where we had lunch and i smiled politely and had a cheese sandwich and tea while everyone else had wonderful curried chicken. then there was stanley’s performance, a panel discussion which lasted for nearly three hours and i had to sit in the audience and of course could not leave without being very conspicuous. then a coffee hour with the students (no coffee for me, thanks) and then a cocktail party (that they didn’t take away from me, thank heaven) and then i finally got back to the inn for half an hour to change. after that dinner at a very fancy restaurant and the combination of my ailment and knowing that i had to lecture in the evening completely destroyed my appetite so that i sat there looking at an eight-dollar steak and absolutely unable to touch it and of course the people who were taking us to dinner were english teachers with salaries not always equal to eight-dollar steaks and i felt perfectly awful with no possible way to apologize. i had been dreading my lecture although i usually enjoy lecturing, but this time i had to make arrangements with stanley so that he would carry on if i suddenly got up and ran out. the funny thing was that in all this time i had no trouble at all; oliver had given me a great bagful of pills to take and there was no problem. the lecture went beautifully; there were about five hundred people and i sat on a platform with a mike and stanley, alert, in the front row; afterward they asked stanley to come up onto the platform too and we both answered questions from the audience, although i make stanley do most of th
e talking when i can. the next day we drove home and as soon as i got home my difficulties returned.

  i seem to have spent a long time discussing my own health, sorry; it’s because it has kind of influenced everything i have been doing. we are going off again next week, this time to bard college, but only stanley performs this time. i will sign autographs and smile politely. i am a great autographer because my handwriting is so poor that no one knows whether it is my name or not. we both autographed dozens of books in new jersey and stanley is always so neat and careful and i just scribble. next year i think i will be doing a good deal more lecturing. up till now it has always been hard to leave the kids but we have found a nice bennington girl who loves to come and take over while we are gone and the kids like her and most of what corinne has to do is cook with joanne’s help and keep an eye on things at night. and i certainly like going away for a day or so and staying in hotels. these days the kids take their lunches to school so my life is considerably easier. three days a week stanley is at the college and i am all alone all day and manage to get a lot done. i have finally started my book*38 and i think it is going quite well. i get in a couple of hours of work every morning and then at twelve i get in the car and drive to a little restaurant and have lunch; it is such a nuisance making lunch just for myself and going out makes a welcome break after working. then i come home and go to sleep until the kids come home from school, although these days all three of them have so many outside activities that there are days when no one comes home and then i am apt to sleep and sleep and sleep. as you can see, it is a nice easy life, and the book is getting written. it is only a year late. the publishers keep sending me money, though.