Shirley Jackson - Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories Of Shirley Jackson

Praise for
JUST AN ORDINARY DAY Just an Ordinary Day is a long-overdue collection of Jacksons short fiction. Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-20th-century common. It is a gift to a new generation. San Francisco Chronicle Book Review [Jackson] will make you laugh, contemplate your own mortality, and scare you into a wakeful night. And she appears to have done it all equally deftly. The Miami Herald An unsettling tale-spinner in complete command of her craft. San Diego Union-Tribune For Jackson devotees, as well as first-time readers, this is a feast. A virtuoso collection. Publishers Weekly (starred review) A welcome new collection. Newsweek Psychologically complex and deliciously horrifying. Sun-Sentinel , Fort Lauderdale

Other books by Shirley Jackson THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL
THE LOTTERY: AND OTHER STORIES
HANGSAMAN
LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES
THE BIRDS NEST
RAISING DEMONS
THE SUNDIAL
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
THE MAGIC OF SHIRLEY JACKSON
COME ALONG WITH ME

Introduction
S EVERAL YEARS AGO, A carton of cobwebbed files discovered in a Vermont barn more than a quarter century after our mothers death arrived without notice in the mail. Within it were the original manuscript of The Haunting of Hill House , together with Shirley Jacksons handwritten notes on character and scene development for the novel, as well as half a dozen unpublished short storiesthe yellow bond carbons she kept for her files. The stories were mostly unknown to us, and we began to consider publishing a new collection of our mothers work. Soon we located other stories, some never published anywhere, and some published only once, decades ago, in periodicals, many long defunct. Shirleys brother and sister-in-law, Barry and Marylou Jackson, supplied more stories in well-preserved copies of magazines; other pieces our sister, Jai Holly, and brother, Barry Hyman, had filed away over the years. Many more were found in the archives at the San Francisco Public Library. A windfall came when we learned that the Library of Congress held twenty-six cartons of our mothers papersjournals, poetry, plays, parts of unfinished novels, and stories, lots of stories. After a week spent there photocopying, we began to feel we had the makings of a book, the first new work by Shirley Jackson since The Magic of Shirley Jackson and Come Along with Me , both published shortly after her death in 1965 at the age of forty-eight. We hoped Shirley Jacksons work could now be discovered by a whole new generation of readers. We uncovered a wealth of early writing from the late thirties and early forties, but very little from her precollege years. She claimed to have burned all her writings just before she left home to go to the University of Rochester, in 1934, and she may have done so, although some of her high school journals are among her preserved papers at the Library of Congress. While we could place them in a general time frame, none of the new stories we discovered had dates on them or any indication of when they were first written. Rather than be inaccurate we have left the stories in Part One undated. Later visits to the Library of Congress enabled us to find missing parts of incomplete stories or versions that we liked better. Soon we had assembled more than 130 stories, and of these we agreed on the fifty-four presented here, those that we feel are finished and up to Shirley Jacksons finely tuned standards. When we approached Bantam we were met with considerable enthusiasm for the project, and the book began to take shape as a significant collection of Jacksons short fiction. Of the stories included in this collection, thirty-one have never been published before. The remaining stories had been previously published in magazines, but never before included in a collection of Jacksons short fiction; and of these, only two or three have appeared in book form at all, mostly anthologies. One of those anthologized (and very hard to find) is One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts. Many of the stories we found untitled or with working titles, since she often waited until publication to name them. In these instances we have created titles in the best muted Jackson style we could manage. In other instances we decided to change repetitive character names, often arbitrarily assigned by Jackson and intended to be changed before publication. We decided not to alter the archaic money references in these stories, however dated they may be, feeling that the integrity and understanding of the stories ought not be compromised. We include a full range of Jacksons many types of short fiction, from lighthearted romantic pieces to the macabre to the truly frightening. We also include a few of the humorous pieces she wrote about our family, since those, too, were what Shirley Jackson pioneered with as a writer, as well as her shocking and twisted explorations of the supernatural and the psyche. We want this collection to represent the great diversity of her work, and to show the writers craft evolving through a variety of forms and styles. Our mother lived and wrote in a timethe thirties through the sixtieswhen smoking and drinking were both widespread and fashionable. Her characters grimly and gleefully chain-smoke and throw down drink after drink, in between boiling their coffee and spanking their children. But underneath these literary folkways of her time the universal themes glitter. The stories we include here are not all charismatic heart-stoppers on the level of The Lottery. Most of her short fiction was written for publication in the popular magazines of her day (Charm, Look, Harpers, Ladies Home Companion, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Readers Digest, The New Yorker, Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Womans Home Companion , etc.). She actually wrote very few horror stories, and not many stories of fantasy or the supernatural, probably preferring to develop those themes more thoroughly in her novels. She had the courage to deal with unfashionable topics and to twist popular icons. Some of the stories gathered here are so unusual in style or point of view that they resemble almost none of the rest of her work. We discovered that some stories tried to get themselves written over and over throughout Jacksons life. The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith is shockingly different in attitude, theme, and climax from the version it precedes here, The Mystery of the Murdered Bride. They are the same story, told years apart and from almost opposing viewpoints. This is the only instancebut a fascinating one for students of short fictionin which we have chosen to include two versions of the same story. We have also included a few feel-good stories beloved by readers of the (mostly womens) magazines of the fifties and sixties. They are tucked between tales of murder and trickery, among ghostly rambles and poetic fables, between hugely funny family chronicles and dark tales of perfect, unexpected justice. Our mother tried to write every day, and treated writing in every way as her professional livelihood. She would typically work all morning, after all the children went off to school, and usually again well into the evening and night. There was always the sound of typing. And our house was more often than not filled with luminaries in literature and the arts. There were legendary parties and poker games with visiting painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, poets, teachers, and writers of every leaning. But always there was the sound of her typewriter, pounding away into the night. This collection of short fiction, taken as a whole, adds significantly to the body of Shirley Jacksons published work. These stories range from those she wrote in college and as a budding writer living in Greenwich Village in the early forties, to those she churned out steadily during the 1950s, to those nearly perfect, terrifying pieces crafted toward the end of her life in the mid-sixties. This collection demonstrates her lifelong commitment to writing, her development as an artist, and her courage to explore universal themes of evil, madness, cruelty, and the humorous ironies of child-raising. She took the craft of writing every bit as seriously as the subject matter she chose (the Minneapolis Tribune once said: Miss Jackson seemingly cannot write a poor sentence) and in the work presented here the reader will find the wit and delight in storytelling that were her trademarks. L AURENCE J ACKSON H YMAN