Read Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Online
Authors: Ruth Franklin
Tags: #Literary, #Women, #Biography & Autobiography
Hyman, Laurence Jackson, and Sarah Hyman DeWitt, eds.
Let Me Tell You
. New York: Random House, 2015. Includes thirty unpublished or uncollected short stories; twenty-one unpublished or uncollected essays, reviews, or articles; and five lectures.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the notes.
PEOPLE
| SJ | Shirley Jackson |
| SEH | Stanley Edgar Hyman |
| BB | Bernice Baumgarten |
| CB | Carol Brandt |
| KB | Kenneth Burke |
| RE | Ralph Ellison |
| GJ | Geraldine Jackson |
| LJ | Leslie Jackson |
| JW | Jay Williams |
Jackson’s children are referred to in notes by the names they now use: Laurence Jackson Hyman, Jai Holly (Joanne Hyman), Sarah Hyman DeWitt, and Barry Hyman.
ARCHIVES
| SJ-LOC | Shirley Jackson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The vast majority of SJ’s publicly available papers are here. (The University of Colorado at Boulder has drafts and notes for around twenty stories, some of which duplicates material in the LOC.) The archive exists in two parts: Part I was donated to the Library in 1967 by SEH. Part II consists mainly of material transferred from the SEH Papers (see below) in 1993, plus small additional later gifts from Sarah Hyman DeWitt and Virginia Olsen. |
| SEH-LOC | Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. SEH’s archive was donated by Phoebe Pettingell, his second wife, in 1979. |
| AK-HRC | Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The Knopf archives contain correspondence between SEH and his editors at Knopf during the period preceding the publication of his book The Armed Vision (1948). |
| FSG-NYPL | Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, New York Public Library, New York, New York. SJ’s first seven books for adults were published by Farrar, Straus. The archive includes correspondence between SJ and John Farrar, Roger Straus, and Robert Giroux. |
| JW-BU | Jay Williams Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. The actor and author Jay Williams was a friend of both SJ and SEH. |
| KB-PSU | Kenneth Burke Papers, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, State College, Pennsylvania. Burke, a major literary critic, and his wife, Libbie, were close friends of SJ and SEH and corresponded regularly with SEH. Correspondence from SJ to Libbie Burke is presumed lost. |
| LH-AJA | Louis Harap Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Louis Harap, a magazine editor, corresponded frequently with SJ and SEH in the early 1940s. |
| NY-NYPL | New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York, New York. The New Yorker ’s vast archive includes correspondence between SJ and Gustave Lobrano, one of the fiction editors, as well as between SEH and William Shawn, SEH’s editor. |
| RE-LOC | Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Ellison was a close friend of both SJ and SEH and corresponded regularly with SEH. |
Several important collections of SJ’s letters are held privately. These include her letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt and to her friend Jeanne Beatty.
WORKS
| CAWM | Come Along with Me: Classic Short Stories and an Unfinished Novel , ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin, 2013. |
| JOD | Just an Ordinary Day , ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart. New York: Bantam, 1997. |
| LMTY | Let Me Tell You , ed. Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt. New York: Random House, 2015. |
| LOA | Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories , ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Library of America, 2010. |
| RTW | The Road Through the Wall . New York: Penguin, 2013. |
| Savages | Life Among the Savages . New York: Penguin, 2015. |
Editions of the other books by SJ referred to in these notes:
The Bird’s Nest
. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Famous Sally
. New York: Harlin Quist, 1966.
Hangsaman
. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Nine Magic Wishes
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Raising Demons
. New York: Penguin, 2015.
Special Delivery: A Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
The Sundial
. New York: Penguin, 2014.
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
. New York: Scholastic, 2001.
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
INTRODUCTION: A SECRET HISTORY
1
“I didn’t want to fuss”
: “Biography of a Story,” in
CAWM
and LOA. A slightly different version of SJ’s inspiration for “The Lottery” appears in “How I Write” in
LMTY
.
2
“I have read”
: “Lottery” scrapbook, SJ-LOC, Box 32.
2
“perhaps the only contemporary writer”
: The author’s note appears on the jacket of the first edition of
RTW
.
2
“Miss Jackson writes”
: W. G. Rogers, “Literary Guidepost” (a review of
The Lottery: or, The Adventures of James Harris
), Associated Press, April 13, 1949.
2
“a rather haunted woman”
: Oral history interview with Roger W. Straus Jr., 1979, Columbia University Center for Oral History, New York, N.Y.
3
“strange stirring”
: Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(1963; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1.
4
“One would sooner expect”
: Nathaniel Benchley, “Never a Dull Moment by This Family’s Not So Peaceful Hearth,”
New York Herald Tribune
, June 28, 1953.
5
“I’ll just put down housewife”
: SJ,
Savages
, 65–66.
5
“babies and bed and brilliant friends”
: Karen V. Kukil, ed.,
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 221.
5
“Some women marry houses”
: Anne Sexton,
The Complete Poems
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 77.
6
“the decade of Jackson”
: Linda Wagner-Martin,
The Mid-Century American Novel
(New York: Twayne, 1997), 107.
6
“faintly disreputable”
: Bernice M. Murphy, “ ‘Do You Know Who I Am?’ Reconsidering Shirley Jackson,” in
Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy
, ed. Bernice M. Murphy (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2005), 11.
7
“I have always loved”
: SJ-LOC, Box 14. This line comes from a document that Judy Oppenheimer, SJ’s first biographer, identifies (I believe incorrectly) as an unsent letter from SJ to Howard Nemerov; see chapter 16.
7
“since I hope”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [March 1960]. All of SJ’s letters to her parents can be found in SJ-LOC, Box 3. These letters are usually undated; I have given dates in brackets when possible.
8
“Her character”
: Libbie Burke to SEH, September 1965, SEH-LOC, Box 46, folder 7.
9
“hard / As it is”
: Howard Nemerov,
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 436.
9
“For all her popularity”
: Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Shirley Jackson,”
Saturday Evening Post
, December 18, 1965. Reprinted as the introduction to
The Magic of Shirley Jackson
.
1. FOUNDATIONS
11
“the witchery of a tropic moon”
: The description of the ship comes from United States Lines Company,
The New S.S. California
(New York: International Mercantile Company, 1927), unpaged pamphlet.
13
“which means a suburb”
: “Autobiographical Musing,”
LMTY
, 192.
13
“My grandfather was an architect”
: “The Ghosts of Loiret,”
LMTY
, 241.
14
Samuel Bugbee came
: The Bugbee family history is drawn from family trees and newspaper clippings courtesy of Laurence Jackson Hyman.
15
“It would start to play”
: Interview with Laurence Jackson Hyman, February 17, 2013.
16
“large and elegant mansion”
: “The Building Season,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 5, 1870.
16
Attorney David Douty Colton’s
: Details on the Colton house and the other Bugbee-designed mansions in this paragraph come from Patricia J.
Lawrence, “Four Mansions on Nob Hill in the 1870s” (master’s thesis, University of California, Davis, 1976).
16
Charles Crocker’s home
: Ibid., 30–38.
17
“an entertainment”
:
California Spirit of the Times
, October 21, 1879, quoted in ibid., 56.
17
The menu included
: Lawrence, “Four Mansions,” 67–68.
17
“All the old New England houses”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14, 1958, SJ-LOC, Box 3.
17
“possible architectural orgies”
: GJ to SJ, n.d. [January 1958]. All of GJ’s letters to SJ are in SJ-LOC, Box 2.
18
“Glad [it] didn’t survive”
: GJ to SJ, January 2 [1959].
18
“shadow of misfortune”
: “Palatial Houses: The Shadow That Rests on San Francisco’s Nob Hill,”
Morning Call
(San Francisco), October 5, 1891.
19
“an air of disease”
: “Experience and Fiction,”
CAWM
, 227-28.
19
“big old california”
: SJ to GJ and LJ, January 14, 1958.
19
a prayer book
: SJ to GJ and LJ, n.d. [early 1963].
20
“a cultivated, refined gentleman”
: Undated clipping, courtesy Laurence Jackson Hyman.
20
“You think things”
: Interview with Sarah Hyman DeWitt, February 17, 2013.
20
At its height
: The movement has since been in decline. As of 2000, there were fewer than 100,000 Christian Scientists in the United States.
21
President Woodrow Wilson
: Anne Grosvenor-Ayres, “The Mystery of the Ouija Board,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, November 24, 1918.
21
“ouijamania”
: “Residents of Contra Costa Found Crazed—Ouija Board Séance Drives 7 Insane,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, March 4, 1920. The
Chronicle
reported on the phenomenon nearly every day for a month. See, for instance, “Town of 1200 Faces Ouija Board Inquiry,” March 5, 1920; “Ouija Board Drives Two More Insane,” March 6, 1920; “Ouija Board Not Insanity Case, Says Professor,” April 18, 1920.
21
“Sickness is a dream”
: Mary B. Glover Eddy,
Science and Health
, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), 188.
21
“You could make a story”
: GJ to SJ, n.d. [November 1958].
21
A wealthy English family
: Ibid. LJ’s father, Edward Henchall, was reportedly a classmate of British prime minister Herbert Asquith. See Judy Oppenheimer,
Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson
(New York: Putnam, 1988), 13.