The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Page 53
dear old mrs king has just left, after brushing around ineffectually in the living room for two hours. i can’t possibly fire her because she needs the money so desperately, but she really accomplished very little. sally and i do the dusting and are just thankful that the rugs are vacuumed. the game of where-did-mrs-king-put-it goes on all the time; i finally found the bathroom wastebasket but stanley’s desk ashtray has eluded us for two weeks. if i ask her she doesn’t remember.
i am to be one of four speakers holding forth at the bennington library this wednesday night; we are supposed to talk about writing and i haven’t the slightest idea what to say. twenty minutes i have to talk. i enjoy lecturing now; i used to be terribly nervous but now i have done enough so i like it. both laurie’s college and joanne’s school have asked me to lecture; the trouble is they expect you will do it for nothing as a favor to the kids. the library will be fun; i will know everyone there and it will be quite informal. i said i would go if they would cancel my overdue fines on my library books.
the children keep asking when you are coming again. meanwhile, lots of love from all.
s.
Skip Notes
*1 This did not happen, and The Sundial has yet to be adapted for film.
*2 Utopian novel by Austin Tappan Wright (1942).
*3 Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, editor, and anthologist responsible for, among many other things, a series of children’s books published by Crowell-Collier in the 1960s. He was a panelist on What’s My Line?, was finally blacklisted by TV for taking controversial stands on social issues, and was named in hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. William Jay Smith was a poet appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1969 to 1970. Shirley Barker was a poet, author, and librarian. All became good friends of Shirley’s after meeting at the Suffield conferences.
*4 Padraic “Paddy” Colum was an Irish poet, novelist, playwright, children’s author, collector of folklore, and leader in the Irish Literary Revival. He was a beloved member of the Suffield faculty and a dear friend of Shirley’s.
*5 Marjorie Mueller Freer was the author of seven “teenage career novels.” Over time, she and Shirley became good friends.
*6 Theda Bara, known as “The Vamp,” was a famous actress in early silent movies.
*7 Lily Dale, New York, is a tiny upstate town founded by spiritualists that hosts annual conferences and demonstrations on mediums and mediumship.
*8 Down with Skool! by Geoffrey Willans, a series of children’s books first published in 1954.
*9 The Case of the Eighteenth Ostrich (1944) is a children’s novel by Colin Curzon.
*10 Charles Schulz, prolific cartoonist and creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip and marketing empire.
*11 Halfback and wide receiver for the New York Giants (football) 1952–60, 1962–64.
*12 Button Bright was a character in the Oz books.
*13 We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
*14 Shirley’s story “Weep for Adonais” appeared in Playboy magazine and is believed to be about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s death.
*15 John Brinnin, a poet and critic, brought Dylan Thomas to the United States for a book tour in 1950, during which he visited Westport and was invited to the Hymans’ for dinner. Brinnin was the author of Dylan Thomas in America.
*16 Flanders and Swann were a British comedy act who composed, sang, and recorded more than one hundred songs, including their musical revue At the Drop of a Hat.
*17 Jay Williams.
*18 Reference either to the epic Roman poem by Lucan titled Pharsalia, detailing the civil war between Julius Caesar and forces of Pompey the Great in 48 b.c.e., or to Luke 15 and the parable of the Prodigal Son/lost son.
*19 William Alton was a member of the Bennington College drama faculty, and a family friend.
*20 Groucho Marx, of the Marx Brothers comedy act, was the father of Bennington student Miriam Marx. Miriam was often Laurie’s babysitter when he was five, and took him to see A Night at the Opera.
*21 We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
*22 Ivy Compton-Burnett was an English novelist who specialized in dissecting the social mores of the upper classes in late Victorian and Edwardian times with melodramatic stories told largely in formal dialogue.
*23 Brendan Gill was a good friend and New Yorker writer for more than sixty years, known best as the magazine’s longtime drama and architecture critic, and author of Here at The New Yorker.
*24 Corinne M. Biggs, from the town of Bennington and now a Bennington College student and occasional babysitter at the Hymans’, is now dating Laurie; they will be married in 1962.
*25 Shirley’s Folkways record of her reading “The Lottery” and “The Daemon Lover.”
*26 1960 was clearly the first—and only—time Stanley accompanied Shirley to Suffield. It evidently did not go very well, as is reflected in a long letter to Stanley that Shirley will soon write.
*27 Laurie and his jazz band were returning from their European trip on a Holland America ship.
*28 L’Auberge, run by the Berends, who became good friends.
*29 Rebecca Nurse was one of the Salem women accused of witchcraft and hanged in 1692.
*30 Abigail.
*31 From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, though “normale” should be “mormal”—a scabby ulcer. The original quote describes an unpleasant cook.
*32 A 1960 novel, by Peter S. Beagle.
*33 Nineteenth-century English writer of adventure fiction set in exotic places.
*34 It has been challenging to discover when this letter was written, but it seems clear by the Suffield references that this comes shortly after they attended the Conference together for the first, and only, time in August 1960.
*35 Tommy Lasorda was a professional baseball pitcher and later manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers for twenty years. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as manager in 1997.
*36 Paula Welden disappeared on December 1, 1946, about a year after the Hymans first moved to Vermont. It was quite sensational, and there was much press coverage. She was never found.
*37 Paregoric, a tincture of opium, is a patent medicine used at the time for the treatment of diarrhea.
*38 We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
*39 Robert Wise.
*40 Stanley’s father, Moe Hyman, died in August 1961, at the age of seventy.
*41 Shirley has been researching poisonous mushrooms for her new book, in which they will appear.
*42 The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers.
*43 Desi Arnaz invited Shirley to develop a new movie story for his wife, TV star Lucille (Lucy) Ball.
SEVEN
• • •
Magic Wishes: 1962–1965
one world is writing and one is not, and from the one which is not, it is not possible to understand the one which is.
—Letter to self, 1963
After a period of writer’s block Shirley has begun work again on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and is pleased with its progress. Her agoraphobia keeps her confined to the house except for trips to visit her psychoanalyst in Bennington. Laurie is spending his Goddard College non-resident work term loading trucks at L. Hyman and Sons Paper Company in New York, and living in a furnished studio apartment on West Eighty-fifth Street. Corinne Biggs, also on her N.R.T. from Bennington College, is now secretly living for two months with Laurie. Joanne and Sally are at boarding school, and Barry attends the North Bennington grade school.
[To Jeanne Beatty]
jan 3 [1962]
i know i know i have owed you a letter for a very long time and i pray your indulgence because merricat is ending chapter four and sailing along and the publisher says it must be finished by dogwood day in april and four people have read the first two chapters:
stanley sally louis untermeyer the publisher
and all independently announce that it is the best work i have ever done so if i could only stop with the first two chapters and publish those it would be fine but no they want another two hundred pages. it is hard. very hard. i finally got it into a kind of sustained taut style full of images and all kinds of double meanings and i can manage about three pages a day before my eyes cross and my teeth start to chatter, and i shall be late i shall be late.
so i am really writing to thank you for the cookies which are incredible and of course all eaten with furious excitement. my mother-in-law was here for christmas and personally accounted for about a third of the cookies, stanley digging about in the box and snatching at “those wonderful little round fellows” and the kids deciding that the gingerbread creature was a grinch. thank you. thank you.
and happy new year.
best,
s.
• • •
[To Geraldine and Leslie Jackson]
tuesday [February 13, 1962]
dearest mother and pop,
have just been decorating valentine cookies for the kids, and a happy valentine’s day to you, too. it was twelve below this morning and our furnace works so well that right now my room is nearly eighty but the study downstairs where stanley is working is barely seventy. he is wearing a sweater and warm slippers and i am thinking of putting on a summer dress.
i am writing mainly to thank you for the insurance check, which was very welcome indeed; and to thank you, too, for the new dishwasher, which is what your christmas check bought. the dishwasher was not planned, but my old battered one broke down, and after four weeks of washing dishes by hand, even with rubber gloves and special hand creams, the ends of my fingers were so cracked and sore that i could hardly type. stanley said he figured it was costing us a couple of thousand dollars a day to have me wash dishes, so saturday morning he told me to call and have them bring over a new dishwasher. my hands are already better, and yesterday i mailed off chapters five and six to my publisher. he will get them today, read them tonight, and call me tomorrow morning to say it is wonderful, great, marvelous, keep going. Stanley likes them too but sally, who has been reading chapter by chapter, is very angry over one of the characters whom she thinks i am doing wrong and wants me to change. i finally did make some of the changes she suggested and Stanley was furious; he says he is a professional critic and i take the advice of a thirteen-year-old girl over his. i think sally was right, though. last night when i came upstairs i found on my bed a document from sally suggesting a new interpretation of the character and proposing that i go back and make him entirely different. i have put her document with my notes; i always make pages and pages of notes typed in all different directions so that i have to read through all of them to find the one i want, and i tape the pages of notes in a line along the bookshelf right by my typewriter. one of sally’s notes points out that as long as charles thinks everyone is “conspirating” against him the reader is going to sympathize with him. i am so pleased that she is so deeply involved in the book because it encourages her to write herself.
stanley’s mother sent me a clipping from a new york paper about the movie of hill house. it is to be called “the haunting” and will be directed by robert wise who did “west side story.” the clipping also said that they were trying to get someone named dick breymer for what they call the “romantic lead,” which i suppose is luke although i never thought he was very romantic, and—this delights me—peter ustinov is doctor montague. stanley says he wonders who doctor montague could have been modeled after if peter ustinov was a natural for the part.
talked to laurie last night; he is well and thriving. he goes over to see stanley’s mother once a week and she sees that he gets a decent meal. he and the friend he lives with believe that they are doing their own cooking, and stanley’s mother lent them a frying pan and a coffee pot but i think he is very pleased to go see her and have a steak. stanley’s brother and his wife are separating in march; they have planned things so carefully that arthur decided exactly which day in march he would leave their home in new jersey and move into a new york apartment. they cannot separate sooner because of an important business convention to which arthur must take his wife to avoid comment. one result of all this marital confusion is that arthur spends most of his time in new york and only goes to new jersey weekends, so he keeps inviting laurie to have dinner with him and go to a show. i think arthur wants laurie to introduce him to a couple of girls.
the u.s. government has asked for permission to print part of stanley’s chapter on karl marx from his new book; the part they want is the description of communism as described in das kapital, which will go into a government handbook on communism and what it is. this is secret, by the way; please don’t tell anyone. stanley is very pleased to be a government authority on karl marx. his book comes out in april. the index alone was a hundred and twenty pages.
sally turned out to have inherited a fine talent from her grandmother; in home-ec in school she had to make a blouse and she did a beautiful job and loved it, and now asks for a sewing machine of her own. if she is still interested we might get her one for her birthday next fall. any advice? since i never owned one i would not even know what would be practical for her.
joanne is quite well now, and very happy at school. she seems to have settled down there nicely, and is all excited over an invitation from laurie’s college roommate to come up for a weekend when college starts again in march.
barry is going to get me up at six-thirty tomorrow morning to see the astronaut again. it will probably be twenty below at that hour.
lots of love from everyone here and write soon.
love,
s.
• • •
[To Carol Brandt]
February 21 [1962]
Dear Carol,
I assume you knew that the Book of the Month Club has chosen THE WITCHCRAFT OF SALEM VILLAGE as their April selection for its Young Readers of America Club. What a mishmash. They wrote me asking me to do a letter addressed to DEAR YOUNG READER presumably telling them to read the book, so I did. Are we all going to make a lot of money from this?
My book goes along so well it scares me. I am now in the sad position of seeing the end a hundred pages away, and I am most reluctant to give up my characters. Stanley suggests an infinite number of sequels.
Best,
Shirley
• • •
[Generic “Note to a Young Reader” Shirley was asked to write upon republication of The Witchcraft of Salem Village]
[February 20, 1962]
Dear Young Reader:
No one is really very much afraid of witchcraft any more. If the bewitched children of Salem Village came screaming and writhing into a modern courtroom it would probably be assumed—and with some reason, too—that they were the willing victims of a new teenage dance craze. Fashions in fear change, but do people?
We are not more tolerant or more valiant than the people of Salem, and we are just as willing to do battle with an imaginary enemy. Santayana says that “if we do not learn from history we are sentenced to repeat it,” and if we cannot see clearly how the good people of Salem were deceived by their fears we cannot act honestly today. The people of Salem hanged and tortured their neighbors from a deep conviction that they were right to do so. Some of our own deepest convictions may be as false.
We might say that we have far more to be afraid of today than the people of Salem ever dreamed of, but tha
t would not really be true. We have exactly the same thing to be afraid of—the demon in men’s minds which prompts hatred and anger and fear, an irrational demon which shows a different face to every generation, but never gives up in his fight to win over the world.
Sincerely,
Shirley Jackson
• • •
“Mr. Ross is outside, sir, and wants to know if you can spare him five minutes.”
“Stanley carries on at The New Yorker—the way I hear it.”
[To Carol Brandt]
March 6 [1962]
Dear Carol,
As you probably do not know, I am intensely superstitious about things turning up when they are needed. I am at the moment puzzled in the middle of the climatic scene in my book and badly in need of some way of handling it better than I have so far. Now you write that you are sending me four old manuscripts of mine. I have no doubt at all that my solution will be in them somewhere. I am on page 124, expect to have about another hundred pages, and to finish by the end of April. I thought it would be some small sign of my gratitude to Pat for his patience all this time if I asked if I could dedicate the book to him, and he seemed pleased. He has six chapters now and says he still can’t guess the ending. I think I am going to surprise him.