Domestic and writerly lives collide

Letters penned by mid-century writer Shirley Jackson are now an ‘essential’ part of her work

Enigmatic, important, mid-century writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), most familiar from her often-anthologized, chilling story, “The Lottery,” is revealed anew fifty-six years after her death. This previously unpublished energetic, candid correspondence is compiled by her son Laurence in consultation with scholar Bernice M. Murphy. It’s an engrossing collection of nearly 300 letters that opens in 1938 with lovestruck missives to Stanley Hyman after they meet in Syracuse at university, and concludes with a note to her agent, Carol Brandt, a week before Jackson’s sudden death in August 1965.

Jackson considered letter writing an art as well as a form of communication. In these, her own voice shines through, and, as Laurence adds, “her natural ways of phrasing, and pausing, her choice of words and inflection” are as indelible. Reading the book is “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.”

The earliest surviving letter is June 7, 1938, written to Stanley and rife with her wit and her idiosyncratic typing style ignoring the shift key. She personifies her typewriter, nicknamed “ernest,” providing him with “a jokester personality of his own, complete with mood swings.” Later, she’s “reading steinbeck’s longvalley which i find interesting and any one of the stories worth three of minceandmen (that mince is ernest’s idea of a joke god knows I didn’t do it!).”

The bulk of the letters is written to her parents, Geraldine and Leslie Jackson (detailing the busyness of domestic life with four children and the stress of waiting for income due), and to her two agents. To her mother and father she writes in January 1949, “i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story — with as many levels as grand central station — with my right hand, stirring chocolate pudding with a spoon held in my teeth, and tuning the television with both feet.”

Her response to a complaining reader is legendary: “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.” There are also intimate missives to friends, including Ralph Ellison, who not only wrote “Invisible Man” at her house with her daughter Sally “sitting on his typewriter tormenting,” but also stood by to drive Shirley to the hospital for the birth of her son Barry, and helped the family move, their German shepherd draped across his lap on the journey and nine-year-old Laurie as his navigator.

Throughout this volume are spirited sketches Jackson drew, many of them chronicling the decline of her marriage, the final one that includes both Stanley and Shirley, “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,” shows him reading the New York Times, oblivious to Shirley standing behind, axe raised to strike.

Her health was poor in the final years of her life, as she suffered bouts of colitis and agoraphobia. In 1963, she wrote a chiding letter to herself, an imperative that was a response to Stanley’s desire to obstruct her writing: “please, that i should remember. remember, first, that what i write or want to write is to be kept to myself … the beauty of words coming is mine. let me not talk about it. this is prayer … i will not be afraid. ever again. i will not be afraid. i will not be afraid. i will not.” Yet, she continued to work, producing what would be her final novel and her finest work: “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”

The long, rambling letters Jackson wrote in place of conversation are glorious additions to her oeuvre. They are intimate, invigorating, essential.

Yours, for