Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

by Shirley Jackson

  Shirley Jackson’s short stories in Let Me Tell You are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Illustrations, quotations, and all previously unpublished text by Shirley Jackson copyright © 2015 by Laurence Jackson Hyman, J. S. Holly, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, and Barry Hyman

  Biographical Note, compilation, and Afterword copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC

  Foreword copyright © 2015 by Ruth Franklin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following pieces have been previously published: “Paranoia,” “The Man in the Woods,” and “It Isn’t the Money I Mind” in The New Yorker and also in Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: The Library of America, 2010); “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” in Tin House; “The Lie” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in McSweeney’s; “Let Me Tell You” in Tin House’s Open Bar; “Bulletin” in Fantasy & Science Fiction; “Root of Evil” in Fantastic; “Clowns” in Vogue; “Good Old House” in Woman’s Day; “In Praise of Dinner Table Silence,” “Questions I Wish I’d Never Asked,” “What I Want to Know Is, What Do Other People Cook With?,” “Mother, Honestly!,” and “Out of the Mouths of Babes” in Good Housekeeping; “How to Enjoy a Family Quarrel” and “The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out with Children” in McCall’s; and “Homecoming” in Charm.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965.

  [Works. Selections. 2015]

  Let me tell you: new stories, essays, and other writings/Shirley Jackson; edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9766-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9767-5

  I. Hyman, Laurence Jackson, editor. II. DeWitt, Sarah Hyman, editor. III. Title.

  PS3519.A392A6 2015

  818'.54—dc23

  2014036656

  eBook ISBN 9780812997675

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for eBook

  Cover illustration and design: Edel Rodriguez

  v4.1

  ep

  “I just like the binding, that’s all.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Biographical Note

  Foreword: “I Think I Know Her” by Ruth Franklin

  I: Sudden and Unusual Things Have Happened

  Paranoia

  Still Life with Teapot and Students

  The Arabian Nights

  Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons

  It Isn’t the Money I Mind

  Company for Dinner

  I Cannot Sing the Old Songs

  The New Maid

  French Is the Mark of a Lady

  Gaudeamus Igitur

  The Lie

  She Says the Damnedest Things

  Remembrance of Things Past

  Let Me Tell You

  Bulletin

  Family Treasures

  Showdown

  The Trouble with My Husband

  Six A.M. Is the Hour

  Root of Evil

  The Bridge Game

  The Man in the Woods

  II: I Would Rather Write Than Do Anything Else

  Autobiographical Musing

  A Garland of Garlands

  Hex Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar

  Clowns

  A Vroom for Dr. Seuss

  Notes on an Unfashionable Novelist

  Private Showing

  Good Old House

  The Play’s the Thing

  The Ghosts of Loiret

  “Well?”

  III: When This War Is Over

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Period Piece

  4-F Party

  The Paradise

  Homecoming

  Daughter, Come Home

  As High as the Sky

  Murder on Miss Lederer’s Birthday

  IV: Somehow Things Haven’t Turned Out Quite the Way We Expected

  Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again

  In Praise of Dinner Table Silence

  Questions I Wish I’d Never Asked

  Mother, Honestly!

  How to Enjoy a Family Quarrel

  The Pleasures and Perils of Dining Out with Children

  Out of the Mouths of Babes

  The Real Me

  On Girls of Thirteen

  What I Want to Know Is, What Do Other People Cook With?

  V: I’d Like to See You Get Out of That Sentence

  About the End of the World

  Memory and Delusion

  On Fans and Fan Mail

  How I Write

  Garlic in Fiction

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Shirley Jackson

  About the Editors

  Margaret stood all alone at her first witch-burning. She had on her new blue cap and her sister’s shawl, and she stood by herself, waiting. She had long ago given up on finding her sister and brother-in-law in the crowd, and was now content to watch alone. She felt a very pleasant fear and a crying excitement over the burning; she had lived all her life in the country and now, staying with her sister in the city, she was being introduced to the customs of society.

  —SHIRLEY JACKSON

  Shirley Jackson

  Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” firmly established her as a master of the form, was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916. She grew up in the affluent suburb of Burlingame, California, a community whose prejudice and wickedness Jackson savaged in her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). Upon graduation from Syracuse University in 1940 she married fellow student (and future literary critic) Stanley Edgar Hyman and eventually settled in New York City. In 1945 Hyman joined the faculty of Bennington College, and the couple moved with their growing family to North Bennington, Vermont. Jackson artfully chronicled the joys and difficulties of bringing up four garrulous, rambunctious children in Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957), two works that place her among the front ranks of contemporary American humorists.

  “I find [writing] relaxing,” Jackson once remarked. “There is delight in seeing a story grow; it’s so deeply satisfying—like having a winning streak in poker.” Her first nationally published short story, “My Life with R. H. Macy,” appeared in The New Republic in 1941. Jackson’s most famous story, “The Lottery,” was printed in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. It prompted an unprecedented reaction from readers, most of whom felt betrayed by the story’s unexpected, gruesome ending. “I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name,” confessed Jackson. “Of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends. Even my mother scolded me.” Her first collection of short fiction, The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, came out in 1949. In the children’s book The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956) she attempted to explain in simplified terms the seeming madness that swept seventeenth-century Salem.

  Jackson enhanced
her reputation as a literary master with a succession of Gothic novels. Hangsaman (1951) tells of a shy, sensitive adolescent who escapes parental oppression by retreating into a nightmare fantasy world. The Bird’s Nest (1954), a psychological thriller about a woman with multiple personalities, was made into the 1957 film Lizzie. In The Sundial (1958) Jackson offered up a satirical, apocalyptic novel about a group of people who await Armageddon in a secluded country estate. The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a bloodcurdling ghost story hailed by Stephen King as one of the greatest horror novels of all time, and a finalist for the National Book Award. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is the macabre tale of two sisters ostracized by a community for allegedly murdering the rest of their family. “Jackson was a master of complexity of mood, an ironic explorer of the dark conflicting inner tyrannies of the mind and soul,” observed New York Times book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith.

  Shirley Jackson died unexpectedly of heart failure on August 8, 1965. Stanley Edgar Hyman subsequently edited two omnibus collections of her work, The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966) and Come Along with Me (1968). Just an Ordinary Day, a volume of Jackson’s unpublished and uncollected short fiction, appeared in 1997. “Everything this author wrote…has in it the dignity and plausibility of myth,” said The New York Times Book Review. “Shirley Jackson knew better than any writer since Hawthorne the value of haunted things.”

  “I Think I Know Her”

  by Ruth Franklin

  In 1966, Stanley Edgar Hyman received a letter asking if he would consider donating his “literary manuscripts and personal papers” to the Library of Congress. At the time, Hyman was one of the most distinguished critics in the United States: a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, former chief book reviewer for the opinion magazine The New Leader, and author of several erudite works of scholarship. As an aside, the letter mentioned that the Library would be interested also in the papers of Hyman’s late wife, the writer Shirley Jackson, who had died suddenly the previous year at the age of forty-eight.

  How taste changes. Today Hyman’s rigorous, insightful work has been largely (and unjustly) forgotten, his once-admired books out of print for decades. Jackson’s star, meanwhile, is steadily rising. At the time of her death, she was hardly unknown: the author of six completed novels, two memoirs, and dozens of published short stories, including, of course, “The Lottery,” which became an instant classic upon its publication in The New Yorker in 1948 and remains a touchstone of midcentury American fiction. She was also an in-demand lecturer on the college circuit and at writers’ conferences such as Bread Loaf, as well as a highly compensated contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and other glossy magazines. Yet—perhaps in part because of her popular appeal and her frequent appearances in women’s magazines rather than the prominent intellectual organs of the time—Jackson’s work, unlike her husband’s, was not yet perceived as an essential piece of American literary history, important to preserve. That, too, would change.

  The Shirley Jackson Papers at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress fill more than fifty boxes. (Hyman’s archive, which followed after his own early death, in 1970, is now stored off-site.) Like many creative thinkers, Jackson thrived amid chaos, and her files mimic her overstuffed desk: pencil sketches and watercolor paintings; meticulously kept diet logs and appointment calendars; postcards, magazine clippings, and other visual sources of inspiration; multiple drafts of novels and stories; scattered dream notes and diary entries, often stashed among the pages of whatever else she was working on at the time; even Christmas and grocery lists (“5 lbs top round, 12 lamb chops, box minute rice, can pineapple chunks, Pepperidge French bread, Puilly-Fuisse”). In the lecture published here as “How I Write,” Jackson comments that the “storeroom” in her mind for the “hundreds of small items” and ideas she might someday use in her fiction “must look a good deal like my desk drawers, which also contain all kinds of things I am sure I am going to need someday.” In the preliminary stage of her writing process, she continues, she likes to keep “pads of paper and pencils all over the house,” so that if an idea comes to her while she is doing something else, she can “race to the nearest paper and pencil and write it down, frequently addressing it to myself, in my own kind of shorthand dialect.” Many of those scribbles, too, survive, puzzling the researcher with their cryptic notations: “Grock—pantomime/pathos/ex tempore…Harpo Marx, Chaplin.” Indecipherable when I first encountered it a few years ago, this particular note now reveals its meaning as part of the writing process for “Clowns,” published in Vogue in May 1949 and reprinted here.

  Most significant, Jackson’s files contain also an astonishing amount of unpublished material, nearly all of it neatly typed on her signature yellow copy paper. The pieces range from fragments of a page or less to works that were completed but not published during her lifetime. Nearly two decades ago, two of Jackson’s children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, gathered fifty-four stories in Just an Ordinary Day, bringing together powerful works of literary fiction such as “The Possibility of Evil” with lighter stories and humorous household chronicles beloved by their mother’s women’s magazine readers. Now Let Me Tell You showcases Jackson’s work in even greater depth and variety. A few of these stories appeared recently in The New Yorker and other magazines; others have not seen the light of day since their publication in the 1940s or ’50s; still others have never been published before at all.

  A brief note on Jackson’s several modes of writing is in order here. She herself distinguished between her serious fiction and the less complex, cheerier pieces demanded by her editors at McCall’s, Collier’s, and other “slicks,” as they were called at the time. “At a thousand bucks a story, I can’t afford to try to change the state of popular fiction today,” she responded when her mother remarked that a few of those stories weren’t up to Jackson’s usual standard. Yet it’s worth remembering that this was an era in which women’s (as well as men’s) magazines published significant literary fiction: Readers of Mademoiselle might find a story by Jackson in one issue and stories by Truman Capote or Jean Stafford in another. Many of Jackson’s stories blurred the line between literary and popular: One of the stories here, “The Lie,” about a woman’s lingering guilt over her betrayal of a former classmate, was considered for publication by both The New Yorker and Good Housekeeping. Jackson also had a tremendous gift for warm, funny chronicles of life with children, represented in this collection by pieces like “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” in which the children inadvertently spread gossip about the family (“You should have heard what Mommy said when the car wouldn’t start”). Long before Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies or Erma Bombeck’s At Wit’s End, Jackson essentially invented the form that has become the modern-day “mommy blog.” Her sympathetic, open-minded perspective on children and their imagination is evident in the homage here to Dr. Seuss, in which Jackson complains of her frustration when a publisher who had asked her to contribute to a series of children’s books presented her with a list of “suitable” words : “ ‘Getting’ and ‘spending’ were on the list, but not ‘wishing’; ‘cost’ and ‘buy’ and ‘nickel’ and ‘dime’ were all on the list, but not ‘magic.’…I felt that the children for whom I was supposed to write were being robbed, persuaded to accept nickels and dimes instead of magic wishes.” Jackson must have had her way: The book she would write was called 9 Magic Wishes.

  —

  Jackson wrote many of the stories in Let Me Tell You during the earliest years of her career, a period of impressive productivity as well as inspiring persistence. In 1943 and 1944, she published a dozen stories in The New Yorker, an astonishing achievement for an up-and-coming writer; yet for every piece the editors accepted, two or three others were sent back. Though the rejections stung, Jackson maintained her confidence in her work: A number of the pieces here, including “Remembrance of Things Past,” “Gaudeamus Igitur,” and the war stories, were earmarked for a short-st
ory collection she shopped around in the mid-1940s. After she hit upon the organizing principle for the book of short fiction that would appear as The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris (1949), some of those early stories dropped out. But Jackson never abandoned them entirely: After her great success with The Haunting of Hill House in 1959, her agent dusted off a few from the drawer and sold them.

  Not surprisingly, more than a few of Jackson’s early stories are preoccupied with World War II. Like the husband in “4-F Party,” Hyman was rejected from the Army as physically unfit, owing to his poor eyesight (though he liked to joke that the Army doctor had told him he had the organs of a forty-year-old). But a number of the couple’s friends served, and Jackson watched the war news closely. As a Gentile married to a Jew, she was well aware that if she and Hyman had been living in Europe, the whole family—their first child, Laurence, was born in 1942—would have been sent to a concentration camp. (Something of Jackson’s parents’ antipathy to her marrying a Jew appears in “I Cannot Sing the Old Songs,” in which a girl’s parents disparage her plans to marry a man of whom they do not approve.) Jackson also sent food and clothing to a French exchange student she had befriended in college who wound up in a Paris prison for her work with the French Resistance. Still, the war appears in these stories primarily as a backdrop to the human dramas: the wives (loyal and less so) left behind, the children taken aback by a father’s sudden reappearance. In “As High as the Sky,” the mother inspects her children as they sit together on the couch, “with just the table lamp turned on in back of them, the light softly touching the tops of their heads and the bowl of flowers behind Sandra’s shoulder,” anxious that their father be greeted by a model tableau of family life. “Homecoming” emphasizes the wife’s anticipation of her husband’s return and the pleasure she takes in the necessary housekeeping duties: “This is the part of the house he never sees, that no one ever knows about,” she muses before her open linen closet. “The laundry when it comes back, the wash on the line fresh from the tubs….Women with homes live so closely with substances, bread, soap, and buttons.”