Shirley Jackson - The Letters of Shirley Jackson

My mother was a writer. Thats 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 listwith 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 thatfirst 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, childrens 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 parentsalready eight pageswaiting 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 awayat camp or school or collegewe 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, Shirleys mother, Geraldine Bugbee Jackson, presented me with a shallow box, solid but worn, and told me it held all my mothers 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 Shirleys 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 mothers 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.

Shirleys 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 Stanleys desk chair breaking: dads 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