The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson
Copyright © 2021 by Laurence Jackson Hyman, JS Holly, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, and Barry Hyman
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.
Line drawings throughout are by Shirley Jackson.
Photograph credits appear on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965, author. | Hyman, Laurence Jackson, editor. | Murphy, Bernice M., editor.
Title: The letters of Shirley Jackson / Shirley Jackson; edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman in consultation with Bernice M. Murphy.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2021] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045797 (print) | LCCN 2020045798 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593134641 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593134665 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965—Correspondence. | Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence.
Classification: LCC PS3519.A392 Z48 2021 (print) | LCC PS3519.A392 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045797
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045798
Ebook ISBN 9780593134665
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Lucas Heinrich
Cover illustration: calvindexter/Getty (town); letter images courtesy of Laurence Jackson Hyman
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: Portrait of the Artist at Work by Laurence Jackson Hyman
Introduction: “It Is a Wonderful Pleasure to Write to You…” by Bernice M. Murphy
Chapter One: From Debutante to Bohemian: 1938–1944
Chapter Two: The House with Four Pillars: 1945–1949
Chapter Three: On Indian Hill Road: 1950–1952
Chapter Four: Life Among the Villagers: 1952–1956
Chapter Five: Writing Is Therapy: 1956–1959
Chapter Six: Castles and Hauntings: 1960–1961
Chapter Seven: Magic Wishes: 1962–1965
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Photograph Credits
By Shirley Jackson
About the Author
About the Editor
About the Academic Consultant
PREFACE
• • •
Portrait of the Artist at Work
Laurence Jackson Hyman
My mother was a writer. That’s what she did. She loved nothing more than writing, though she certainly also loved her children, cooking, friends, cats, music, and playing bridge. I can picture her sitting on her beloved red kitchen stool, spiced meatballs simmering on the stove, making a shopping list—with scribbled asides of insight into or warnings for her characters in whatever novel she was working on. She might even stop one of us kids, whichever one was walking by, to try out a story idea.
From her early childhood, Shirley knew she wanted to write, and she managed to find some hours in most days to do just that—first handwritten poems and short vignettes, then long letters to friends and journals, then, when she met her first typewriter in her teens, a flood of poems, stories, and letters. Later, of course, came short stories, novels, family chronicles, plays, children’s books, and letters. Many more letters.
Shirley loved writing letters as much as she liked to write fiction, and later in her life, when she had become an established professional author, the two would often vie for her time and attention. She would sit down at her typewriter and contemplate the surface of her desk and worktable, covered with a dozen letters to be answered, a note to be written to her agent, an overdue letter to her parents—already eight pages—waiting to be finished and mailed off, and many single paragraphs on otherwise blank sheets: starts of stories, ideas for stories, character ideas, or fragments of dialogue. Looking over this array of papers, she would often choose to spend a couple of hours banging out a long letter on her typewriter, at times feeling a little guilty because Stanley, listening downstairs, would assume that she was “really working” on a story, to sell to a magazine, to help support our household.
Whenever my siblings and I were away—at camp or school or college—we would eagerly anticipate the familiar typewritten yellow pages from our mother. She would be funny, warm, chatty, and would walk us through family triumphs and mishaps with the same amused tone and wit she often brought to her published work. Both my parents were dutiful and skillful letter writers, and they passed on the habit. I became fond of writing to friends and relatives from a young age. Writing back to my parents in particular was, for me, a chance to try to juggle language and humor as brilliantly as they did. In our family, we were always expected to hold up our ends of the conversation.
Shortly after I moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s my grandmother, Shirley’s mother, Geraldine Bugbee Jackson, presented me with a shallow box, solid but worn, and told me it held all my mother’s letters to her and my grandfather (whom Shirley always called Pop), after they began saving them in 1948. She said she hoped I would publish them someday. I was honored, but it took me a while before I worked up the courage to read them; it was startling to see those familiar yellow folded pages and Shirley’s instantly recognizable typewriter font. But once I started reading them I was completely transported, re-experiencing events in our lives as she recounted them, and remembering our household, with all its nuttiness and intellectual sparring, its pets and books, its music and parties. Now, nearly fifty years later, most of my mother’s letters to her parents, together with many other letters she wrote, are being published for the first time in this collection.
Spending so much time with these letters during the past few years, as I assembled and edited this collection, has been an important personal journey for me. Among the photographs on the walls of my office are two of Shirley: in one, she is twenty, laughing while leaning against a mid-1930s roadster, a girl I never knew. The other is taken in the early 1960s; she sits with Stanley, both of them smiling, Shirley holding her beloved cat Applegate, just as I remember them. Both pictures appear in this book. Every now and then I catch a glimpse of one photograph or the other, and I become more determined in the effort at hand, reminded that my task now is to let my mother tell her own story.
My hope is that this book serves as both a wonderful literary document and the self-reported account of a short but extremely creative life. Shirley regarded letter writing as an art form as well as a mode of communication, and she excelled at it. Her letters are fun to read; they are constructed like marvelous miniature magazines, full of news and gossip, recipes, sports updates, jokes, childrearing concerns, tips and recommendations, with tantalizing glimpses of herself, the artist at work. And she took obvious joy in writing them. Many of these letters, especially those to her parents, run deliciously long, sometimes a dozen or more pages, typewritten, usually single-spaced, most done with total avoidance of the shift key.
Shirley’s own speaking voice really comes through to me when I read her letters, her natural ways of phrasing, and pausing, her choice of words and inflection, her use of language. And her letters, even to her agents, were always well-seasoned with gags. Shirley was at heart a
vaudeville comedian, and she could find a funny side to almost anything. Consider her description in a letter to me in the early 1960s of Stanley’s desk chair breaking: “dad’s chair fell apart again. you remember how it happens; first the chair cracks and joggles and then slowly comes apart and dad leaps up and the chair goes out from under him and he leans over and his lighter falls out of his pocket and he leans over to pick up the lighter and his cigarettes fall out of his pocket and he leans over to pick up his cigarettes and cracks the side of his head against the desk…”
Shirley’s habit of writing most everything in lowercase has been preserved here because it reflects her personality nearly as much as the letters’ content. When, during my youth, drawings and notes would suddenly appear on the refrigerator, or on a kitchen cabinet, or in the hallway near the telephone table, or on the study doors, they would almost always be typed lowercase, often with her playful abbreviations, run-ins, and deliberate misspellings, sometimes even cryptograms, puzzles, and silly poems. For Shirley, language was play. That same playfulness is abundant in the many New Yorker–style drawings and cartoons she loved to draw, some of which are included here.
Shirley wrote for most of her life on manual typewriters—distrusting anything electric—and often claimed nobody could read her handwriting. Shirley named her first typewriter “ernest” and gave him a jokester personality of his own, complete with mood swings. Subsequent typewriters shared the same name, and she often refers to “ernest” in her letters, and blames him for any revealing typos or pun-play misspellings. She was a rapid typist, usually firing a flurry of punches lasting half a minute or less, followed by brief silence, then another loud barrage. I remember coming home from school with friends who were startled at the percussive sound of my parents’ typewriters both going at once, pounding away in different rooms.
Shirley herself always expected her letters to be published one day, and wrote as much to her parents several times, at one point observing wryly that she wouldn’t relish the job of editing them since she customarily did not date her letters (and indeed I am grateful that many of her recipients did so). At the start of this project, I had managed to gather about five hundred Shirley Jackson letters—some thirteen hundred typewritten pages—from a variety of sources, including many from biographer Ruth Franklin, whose research uncovered the letters to Jeanne Beatty, Louis Harap, and Virginia Olsen. Many others came from the voluminous Brandt & Brandt Literary Agency files, and personal family files. In this volume, I have included nearly three hundred of Shirley’s letters, written to nearly twenty different recipients.
In order to include as many letters as possible, some have been shortened, eliminating, for instance, paragraphs describing, in detail, the four children’s clothing sizes at holiday time or misbehavior of the cats (and even those paragraphs were often hard to let go of). Many others were left virtually intact, especially her wonderfully crisp notes to her agents. Unfortunately, some letters could not find a place in this collection but will undoubtedly be studied by future literature scholars, who may indeed uncover still others.
Despite the long hours arm-wrestling myself over the selection and editing, it has been a warm pleasure getting to know my mother so much better, in all the various stages of her life, some of which I remember, some not. Beginning work each day has been like entering a time machine and setting the date on the dial, instantly to be transported to a day in, say, 1939 or 1950, or 1963. It is refreshing to hear my mother sounding so happy, so excited about her work and her children and her well-earned successes as a writer, even in the face of the many challenges she faced and the family troubles we all brought her. Together with her drawings, these letters take us on a bumpy, poignant, hilarious ride through Shirley’s version of life as an artist, a woman, and a mother in small-town mid-twentieth-century America.
It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that I am a player in all of this. Since childhood I have been asked how I felt being a character in my mother’s short stories and books. My answer: I never minded appearing in Shirley’s stories, though for many years as a kid I didn’t pay much attention to them. As an adult, I learned to have fun with my fictional early life. Sometimes I wonder whether my own childhood memories are real, or as Shirley told them. I think my mother always treated me fairly as a character, in both stories and drawings—and she gave me some great lines. Among many other things, this collection of letters is my own childhood, documented by one of the iconic writers of the past century. I remain her character.
INTRODUCTION
• • •
“It Is a Wonderful Pleasure to Write to You…”
In early 1960, Shirley Jackson wrote the following to a fan named Jeanne Beatty, with whom she had recently established a friendship that was conducted entirely through the mail:
it is a wonderful pleasure to write to you. i go from month to month and year to year never writing letters because i cannot write little letters which are polite and unnecessary mostly because i can’t stop, as you see. You provoked me, you did; if you write to a professional writer a lovely long letter you are apt to get a rambling long letter back. it’s like sitting down to talk for an hour, and far more agreeable than most conversations.
The Beatty letters—which were brought to light by Jackson’s most recent biographer, Ruth Franklin—are spontaneous, playful, confessional, witty, and forthright. They provide us with an invaluable insight into Jackson’s state of mind at a time when she was at the peak of her literary prowess and illustrate the vitally important role that letter writing played in her personal and professional existence. Through their letters, the Baltimore housewife and the bestselling author established an apparently genuine rapport, which came to serve as a significant emotional and intellectual outlet for Jackson.
As the Beatty correspondence underlines, the selected letters assembled in this volume give one of the most versatile and influential American authors of the twentieth century the chance to speak once again for herself. They provide revealing insights into Jackson’s remarkable body of work and vividly dramatize her efforts to reconcile domestic responsibilities with the creative impulse and a busy professional life. Her fierce intelligence, endlessly percolating imagination, genuine delight in the company of family and friends, and unique worldview are evident on every page.
Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, was the first to recognize that his wife’s correspondence represented an important strand of her literary output. In a March 1960 letter to her parents, Leslie and Geraldine, Jackson mentions that the couple have been discussing what will happen to her private papers after her death:
anyway the important thing is my letters to you over these years, which i pray you have kept, and will arrange for them to get back to me. stanley is most urgent about this, since he puts a higher value on them than i do […] since I hope i have a couple of years still to go the problem is not very pressing, but the vital thing is that you not throw them out. since I only write long letters to you they must be a long detailed record of many years. i am almost embarrassed when I think of the mountains of pages they must make.
Jackson’s hope that she has “a couple of years still to go” is poignant. Although she was only forty-three, she had a little over five years to live. As she anticipated, her surviving letters do indeed make “mountains of pages.” Jackson downplays their significance, noting that Stanley values them more than she does, but it is easy to understand why he felt they were worth preserving. The relationship between authors’ family lives and their creative endeavors is frequently a close one, but for Jackson, the two were often one and the same.
In order to understand why Shirley Jackson and her work still matter, it is necessary to mention the tale which made her one of the most talked about writers in the United States. Along with The Haunting of Hill House (1959), “The Lottery,” which was printed in The New Yorker in June 1948, se
cured Jackson’s reputation as a writer of elegantly written but viscerally unsettling fiction.
In this exquisitely controlled short story, ordinary people do terrible things because tradition demands it, and communal murder is an apparently unremarkable fixture in the local events calendar. “The Lottery” has for decades been a staple of short-story anthologies and high school English classes, and its classic status perhaps obscures just how shocking the story was considered when it first appeared. It has also been enduringly influential. Echoes of “The Lottery” can be found in Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” (1977), Thomas Tryon’s 1973 bestseller Harvest Home, and more recently, in some of the most prominent exemplars of the current “Folk Horror Revival”: see, for instance, Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar.
However, despite the considerable critical and commercial success Jackson attained during her lifetime, and the high esteem she has long been held in by aficionados of horror and gothic fiction, the true scope of her literary significance was, in the decades immediately following her death, often overlooked. This likely had much to do with the fact that her writing both evaded and traversed conventional generic and audience categories.
Jackson’s work appeared in a wide range of publication outlets, amongst them The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Charm, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, and The Saturday Evening Post. Although her six published novels share obvious thematic consistencies—in particular, a profound interest in the relationship between living spaces and the women who inhabit them—they also utilized a wide range of premises. The novels encompass a panoramic critique of a Californian suburb (The Road Through the Wall, 1948); an intense and original campus novel (Hangsaman, 1951); a furiously inventive psychiatric case study (The Bird’s Nest, 1954); an apocalyptic satire (The Sundial, 1958); a classic of supernatural horror fiction (The Haunting of Hill House, 1959); and a first-person narrative related by a teenager whose skewed perspective is simultaneously chilling and captivating (We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 1962).
