Let Me Tell You (2 page)

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-story 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.”

Jackson, too, considered herself at least a part-time housewife, and the life of a house—what is required to make and keep a home, and what it means when a home is destroyed—is important in just about all of her novels. (“I love houses” is the opening line of “The Ghosts of Loiret,” a humorous take on Jackson's real-life search for a haunted house she could use as a model for Hill House.) But the organized linen closet was more a fantasy than a standard she strived to uphold. More often than not, housekeeping done too perfectly in a Jackson story is a sign that something is wrong. In “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” it is the disagreeable Mrs. Spencer whose kitchen is “immaculate, dinner preparing invisibly”; the bustling hospitality of the unconventional Oberons, which Mrs. Spencer cannot appreciate, signals comfort and cheer. As the nonfiction collected here demonstrates, Jackson made no pretense of being a flawless housekeeper, “trim and competent”; unlike her neighbors, she inevitably found herself as she does in “Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again”—with the dishpan heaped high, inventing stories to carry her through the task. Close readers of “The Lottery”—Jackson's tale of a ritual stoning carried out in an ordinary village, which was written around the same time as that essay—will remember that one of the main characters arrives late to the village square because she was finishing her dishes. Another echo of “The Lottery,” and its warning about the dangers of conformity, appears in the unlikely setting of “Mother, Honestly!,” a humor piece about raising a pre-teenager. In Jackson's hands, the classic adolescent complaint—“Everyone else is allowed to”—becomes an alarming sign of groupthink: Even to write the phrase “everyone else,” she confesses, gives her “a little chill.”

A highlight of this collection, especially for aspiring writers, is the craft lectures, in which Jackson, via anecdotes and analyses of her own work, shares succinct, specific advice about creating fiction. Her diversity of themes notwithstanding, Jackson's style remained consistent from her earliest stories to her late novels. One of its hallmarks is her uncanny ability to seize the telling detail—what she calls, in the lecture “Garlic in Fiction,” the accent that when used “sparingly and with great care” gives a little extra emphasis to certain moments in a story. In “The Arabian Nights,” the way a couple pick up and set down their cocktail glasses tells us everything we need to know about their marriage; in “Paranoia,” the light-colored hat worn by the man following Mr. Beresford takes on its own malevolent power. Jackson explains that she generated credibility for Eleanor, the protagonist in
Hill House,
by carefully layering symbols—the cottage with the white cat on the step, the little girl who insists on drinking out of a cup painted with stars—to ease the transition from “the sensible environment of the city to the somewhat less believable atmosphere of the haunted house.” (“This was hard,” she admits.) In “Memory and Delusion,” she emphasizes that the writer's intelligence must be constantly alert: “I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.” For the writer, “all things are potential paragraphs,” but their emotional valence remains to be determined. When a green porcelain bowl on the piano suddenly shatters during a bridge game, Jackson keeps the image of the scattered pieces in her memory storeroom, waiting for the right moment to deploy it: as a symbol of destruction (“what I can remember is the way the little pieces of the bowl lay there so quietly after they had been for so long parts of one unbroken whole”), or as an illustration of a sudden shock, or to represent the loss of a treasured possession. This image would appear, in different form, in
We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
her last completed novel, when one of the characters discovers the family's heirloom sugar bowl—an important symbol—in pieces.

Let Me Tell You
contains a multitude of Shirley Jacksons. The whimsical fantasy of pieces like “Six
A.M
. Is the Hour” (about a poker game played by the Norse gods in which the jackpot is Earth) and “Bulletin” (a science fiction depiction of how a future society will understand life in 1950) may surprise readers who are expecting more fiction in the suspenseful mode of the Kafkaesque tale “Paranoia.” Some of the pieces here are alternate versions of published material: “Company for Dinner,” in which a man accidentally comes home to the wrong house, anticipates the more complex spin Jackson would give to a similar theme in “The Beautiful Stranger,” and both “Still Life with Teapot and Students” and “Family Treasures” are variations on scenes she would develop differently in
Hangsaman
, her second novel. A notable absence from the fiction in this collection is the interest in the supernatural that would characterize so much of her work: There is nothing here along the lines of “The Daemon Lover,” her retelling of the James Harris legend, in which a woman is jilted by a fiancé who may or may not actually exist. Only “The Man in the Woods,” a fable incorporating different strands of mythology, hits some similar notes.