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

by Shirley Jackson

  Before she has quite completed her dream of the lions, she passes an oleander hedge along the road, and she imagines that she might stop her car and go through the gate in the hedge and step into a castle, magically released from a spell by her coming, and she thinks that she would run down a path of jewels to a terrace before the castle, where there are fountains and stone lions and a little old lady who is actually the queen, her mother, waiting for the princess to come home and break the spell. Before she has quite unwound this story, she comes upon a little cottage almost buried in roses, and sees a white cat sunning itself on the step; she thinks that perhaps she will stop and live here forever, becoming a little old lady herself with a tiny pair of stone lions by her fireplace, oleanders and roses planted close beside her door, and she will make love potions for village maidens and dig magic herbs in the forest.

  After Eleanor has driven a hundred miles, she stops at an inn for lunch, and while she is sitting in the inn a little girl at a nearby table cries out clearly that she will not drink her milk because she does not have her cup of stars. Eleanor is thinking with delight that of course a cup of stars is vital and essential for any fairy-tale heroine when the little girl’s mother explains to the waitress that it is not really a cup of stars, but a cup with stars painted inside, so that when the little girl drinks her milk at home she can see the stars in the cup.

  Now, the basic emphasis in the entire journey has been Eleanor’s longing for a home, for a place of her own, and of course for a real cup of stars to break the spell of dullness and loneliness that she has always known. Five symbols have been set up. First there is the little old lady who is praying for Eleanor, then the two stone lions, then the oleander bushes and roses, then the white cat, then the cup of stars. Now, you see, the phrase “white cat” is beginning to take on the meaning it needs for the book. Each of these cumulative symbols dovetails with the others, each belongs absolutely to the journey between reality and unreality, and each must carry the weight of Eleanor’s loneliness and longing for a place where she belongs.

  Now, these artificially loaded words can only be used with extreme care, and there again is the garlic. Garlic is a splendid thing, and one that is irreplaceable, yet there is no question but that it is possible to use too much of it. This collection of weighted words can only be used like garlic, where they will do the most good, and they must never be used where they will overwhelm the flavor of another passage. They can only be used, in short, in spots where it is essential to emphasize Eleanor’s loneliness, and then only in very small quantities. If one of the other characters in the book happens to remark that he dislikes cats and Eleanor says at once that she likes cats, but only white ones, what she is saying, of course, is that she likes white cats and has a dream of living alone in a little cottage covered with roses with an old lady praying for her and oleander bushes by the door. Consequently, Eleanor cannot make such a remark unless it is absolutely necessary, and the other character cannot even be made to remark that he dislikes cats unless Eleanor’s entire structure of fantasy has to be evoked at that particular moment.

  One side result of this, of course, is that the garlic-laden symbols cancel out any similar references. Eleanor cannot, for instance, admire a pair of Chinese porcelain lions without keying in to the whole laborious story again; she cannot have any dealings with black cats or tortoiseshell cats; she cannot admire a privet hedge or drink from a cup painted pink on the inside. Moreover, each time one of these symbols turns up, it gathers new meanings and identities; when, later in the book, Eleanor wants to make an impression on one of the other characters and says boastfully that when she was a child she used to have a cup of stars, this is supposed to act as a kind of jolt to the reader, because of course it was not Eleanor as a child who had a cup of stars, but a strange child in an inn. Eleanor’s appropriating the cup of stars has become a further statement about her own lost loneliness; she has suddenly made a picture of herself as a little girl in an inn with a loving mother and father indulging her pretty whims.

  Furthermore, it is beginning to appear that Eleanor is sinking into her fantasies, is moving herself into her dreamworld where she is loved and secure, and is perhaps already beginning to see herself as an enchanted princess or a happy child. Before she is through, Eleanor has made every one of her symbols her own; simply by presenting these various things as real, as belonging to her, she has come from her unhappy real life to a very happy, very dangerous, unreal life. By the end of the book, Eleanor is looking at other characters and thinking “I remember you; you dined with me once, long ago, in my home with the stone lions on the terrace.” Her last sad statement—spoken as she is leaving the haunted house at the insistence of the others, who do not believe she is safe there any longer—is “But nothing can hurt me; somewhere, someone is praying for me.”

  It has become a statement that she is so far lost in fantasy that reality cannot touch her anymore; she is safe from danger because she no longer believes in its existence. The other characters, who believe reasonably enough what Eleanor has told them—that she has a little house where she keeps her cup of stars that she used as a child, where she has a white cat, where she has two small stone lions on the mantelpiece and roses and an oleander bush by the door—think that they are doing the right thing by sending Eleanor away; they think they are sending her home.

  I would like to finish by reading two stories that demonstrate in a rather extreme fashion the idea of substituting symbols for characters; in one of them, the hero does not appear at all, and in the other, the heroine makes only the most brief token appearance.

  —

  Here she would read her short story “Charles,” about an infamous first grader who never appears, and another of her short stories, “The Third Baby’s the Easiest,” which culminates with the birth of her third child. Both these stories appeared in magazines (Mademoiselle, Harper’s Review) before being collected into Jackson’s fourth book and first family memoir, Life Among the Savages, published in 1953.

  “Push me again, dear—it’s just like flying.”

  Afterword

  Assembling and editing this book of our mother’s unpublished and previously uncollected writing has been a great pleasure, and an enormous challenge. Editing any world-class writer is a daunting task, but in our case the author was so familiar to us that the process often felt more like collaboration. Sometimes we had to step away from the material and banish the thought that it was our mother’s writing, in order to focus on the words alone, particularly in the stories featuring us as characters.

  These stories and essays have awakened many memories from our childhood. We literally heard these pieces being written: The pounding of our mother’s typewriter and its infernal ring at the end of each flurry—then the syncopated peppering beginning again seconds later—were a constant part of our household. Now, as editors, we have undergone an emotional experience, working with copies of those original stories and essays as they emerged from her typewriter, many of them first drafts, with Shirley’s occasional handwritten corrections, and even rare word substitutions by our father, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman.

  We recall coming home from school and finding our mother typing away upstairs or at a folding table in the dining room, or sitting on her kitchen stool making notes while baking brownies. For years our parents worked side by side in their study, sitting at desks four feet apart, the sounds of their furiously fast typing rattling through the house. We easily tuned it out, but visiting friends were often shocked by the rapid-fire percussion coming from behind the closed door.

  Many of the works here, especially the humorous ones, kindle recollections of dinnertime in our house, an important tradition we were not allowed to miss. Shirley would have the meal prepared, and would be sitting on her kitchen stool talking to the cats. We would all take our assigned places at the table, with one parent at either end, and after discussion of the day’s events, more serious conversation would begin.

/>   Our father would do most of the talking, with our mother adding details, color, and insight, and we all laughed a lot. Over the years we learned about mathematics, logic, ethics, history, the Greek alphabet, physics, music, comparative folklore, and religion. (One year our parents took turns reading us two chapters each night from the Old Testament, and we all explored the language and the meanings of the rituals.) We were exposed to whatever our parents were reading. We shared puzzles, songs, jokes, riddles, wordplay, and dialect humor—and we were all expected to participate. Fragments of these dinnertime conversations found their way into the many short articles and stories that Shirley wrote about our family.

  One by one, we four children became characters in Shirley’s work, which was published regularly in the popular magazines of the time. Some of the best of those stories were collected into memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. The stories were often based on actual events, but they were wonderfully embellished in Shirley’s telling. She could make even the most mundane or embarrassing incidents seem funny, and we often opened magazines to find ourselves appearing as unwitting comic actors. Sometimes we were portrayed as clever and wise, sometimes foolish or mischievous, but our mother always treated us with respect and gave us some great lines.

  As children, we didn’t mind the attention we received. We learned to dissociate ourselves a bit from the stories, though we enjoyed them, because we recognized them to be, essentially, fiction. As adults, we proudly read them to our children and grandchildren, who love hearing them and seem to feel a connection with our younger selves and with our parents, whom most of them never met.

  Laurence has been asked all his life about the much anthologized short story “Charles” and has steadfastly refused to answer questions about it, borrowing Shirley’s typical response: “It’s just a story.” But after sixty-five years in continuous print, the story of his kindergarten nemesis refuses to die. He even received, a few years ago, a box of ninety handwritten letters from an entire fifth grade class, asking him in many admiring voices if he, “Laurie,” was still mischievous, and if he had really done “all those terrible things.” Laurence answered each one, as, predictably, did Charles.

  Our mother’s fame, though, was hardly limited to her humorous pieces. As we grew older, we read her frightening stories and novels with great, though sometimes mixed, pride. Sarah remembers that informing a new, literate friend that her mother wrote “The Lottery” could be both hilarious and terrifying. In the next few moments, she would watch herself change in their eyes.

  After Shirley’s early death at forty-eight, we understood, with the rest of the world, that she would write no more books. But then, one day in the mid-1990s, the manuscripts that would lead to this volume mysteriously reentered our lives when Laurence opened his front door to find a carton with no return address. After some hesitation, he peered into the box and found a stack of manuscripts, clearly identifiable by the goldenrod paper she always used and by the familiar font of her old upright Royal typewriter, as Shirley’s.

  Examining short stories he had never read, Laurence realized that much of the carton’s contents had never been published. This prompted us to look around for more of our mother’s possibly undiscovered writing. We made the first of several trips to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to search through their Shirley Jackson Collection, more than fifty boxes of material our father had donated, according to our mother’s wishes. We found and copied many more pieces of her writing that we had never seen. We read for months, gradually assembling and editing an anthology of fifty-four stories, which we titled Just an Ordinary Day.

  There were many other stories that, for a variety of reasons, we chose not to include: Some ended abruptly and confusedly, some seemed too similar to other stories already slated for the collection. Some Shirley had reworked for use in one or another of her novels; sometimes there were two different drafts, both good, and it was hard to choose between them. We had decided only to include short stories, so the essays and reviews and other nonfiction pieces were kept out of the book, which was published in 1997.

  For years afterward, some of the pieces we had set aside kept coming back to haunt us, and we often mused about doing another book. We knew how prolific a writer our mother had been, and we suspected there were more gems hidden in the files at the Library of Congress. Finally, in 2011, we decided to return there to search.

  Again we spent long days sorting through the now much more organized Shirley Jackson Collection, photocopying hundreds of pages that looked promising, then reading through them at night, trying to make sense of them. Sometimes we were horrified to discover that the last page of a story seemed to be missing, or that, despite a promising beginning, a piece just never got itself completely written.

  This was because Shirley usually worked on several things at once, often putting aside stories she had started, planning to return later to finish or rewrite them. “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” for instance, was begun, then restarted, then rewritten twice. In two early versions, the mysterious visitors left garbled phone messages and notes in the Spencer house while the family was out, irritating but always missing them, and then left town, so the two families never actually met. In the final version, included here, Mrs. Spencer is portrayed as a scold, obsessed with breeding and propriety, horrified that her family is abandoning her stiff standards. The addition of the popular town picnic and Mrs. Spencer’s inability to “save” her husband and children created a much larger and more universal story. We feel the version we selected shows Shirley’s consummate skill and dark vision as well as anything else she ever wrote.

  We found that we had copies of a great number of partial stories and fragments. Sometimes we were able to match disconnected pages by noting small technical details, comparing Shirley’s typewritten pages or carbon copies with others bearing similar degrees of textual clarity or fuzziness, or that had apparently been typed with the same tired ribbon, in our effort to spot missing pages and put stories back together. We tried to date pieces by guessing the general period in her life when they were written: when she had used wide margins and when narrow, when her pages were numbered and when her name was typed at the top. We tried to calculate general time periods from dated figures of speech and slang, or by how much things cost. The manuscripts that bore our father’s comments showed that she had considered them complete and good enough to show to him.

  Ultimately, we were able to retrieve much forgotten material, including some stories written in Shirley and Stanley’s cramped, book-filled West Village apartment in the early 1940s, when our parents were both just starting to publish. We found good stories written during every period of her life. We discovered more book reviews, lectures and short essays about writing, and humorous pieces still funny decades after their original appearances in magazines. To our surprise, with our brother Barry’s help, we also discovered hundreds of our mother’s line drawings, cartoons, and watercolors, a few of which we remembered from our childhood, when they would appear on the refrigerator or the study door, taped up by Shirley to surprise and amuse Stanley.

  Over the many months we spent poring over all this material, we found that some stories, new favorites of ours, clearly belonged in this volume, but we were forced to cull others we liked, sometimes with great reluctance. Some stories we did not fully understand at first, but the moment we did, they were transformed clearly into much more important stories than we had first thought. It took many readings for a few of the stories to sink in, and we came to understand more fully the depth and subtlety with which our mother wrote.

  “The Man in the Woods,” for example, at first seemed to be simply a fairy tale, or a fantasy time-travel story, but overnight it suddenly became clear to us how deeply it is grounded in mythology and iconic symbolism, with Shirley’s typical hanging ending. Clues are playful and abundant, left along the way like breadcrumbs. We may not know how the story will turn out, but the mysterious Mr. Oakes clea
rly does when he says that he hopes that the lost traveler Christopher will care for his roses and remember that it was he who planted them. Clearly, a ritual battle is intended, and the outcome is inevitable, as foretold by the victory of Christopher’s black cat, and the traditions of myth.

  Shirley was raised on the classics and self-educated in the literature of the supernatural, and was fascinated by the study of myth and ritual, a driving passion of our father’s, who refined his theories with Kenneth Burke and others at Bennington College in the late 1940s and ’50s. After “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker in 1948, bringing ancient ritual shockingly into the modern day, Burke observed that while Stanley was a serious scholar of myth and ritual, Shirley’s work embodied it.

  In this book we have attempted to share as many strong and varied pieces of Shirley’s writing as possible. We could not keep Sossiter or Miss Lederer or Mr. Halloran Beresford to ourselves. Each story presents a new narrative voice: a rebellious teenage girl or an angry maiden schoolteacher, a slow-thinking child or an ironic reviewer. We think that this collection demonstrates the qualities that Shirley Jackson fans appreciate: her mastery of different writing styles, her pointed wit, and her ability to reveal startling truths about the darker side of our common experience.