Shirley's letters

Shirley Jackson

My review of The Letters of Shirley Jackson two days ago did not allow room for all the interesting tidbits I would have liked to have included. So I will mention some of them here.

— Except for formal letters, such as those to her publisher, Jackson did not use capital letters and she kept punctuation to a minimum. She typed most of her letters, and this style apparently allowed her typing to keep pace more closely with the speed of her mind.

— Both sets of parents disapproved of the marriage of Shirley Jackson to Stanley Hyman, although both came to accept it.

— She lied about her age because she was several years older than Stanley and wanted to minimize that age difference.

— Both she and Stanley were crazy about the Brooklyn Dodgers, listening to games on the radio and attending games whenever they were in New York City. After the team moved to Los Angeles, she doesn't mention the Dodgers again.

—The couple had many friends and acquaintances in the literary world, not surprisingly since they were both very much a part of that world. Ralph Ellison was a frequent guest in their home. Dylan Thomas once visited them in Bennington, Vt. They knew Peter DeVries, who lived near them for awhile. One of her letters was sent to James Thurber, who worked with Stanley at The New Yorker.

— They sometimes hired the daughter of Groucho Marx, while she was a student at Bennington, to babysit their children.

— An example of the light touch in her letters: She wrote to her agent, "I told all my children to go out and find plots for me." Her letters, in fact, often do reveal how the plots for some of her stories developed.

— Stanley spent much of his income on books. She writes that they once had 20,000 books in their home.

— Although he supported and encouraged her writing career, Stanley refused to read some of her stories. They were too scary for him. For the same reason he refused to see the film based on her novel The Haunting of Hill House.

— Stanley, a prominent literary critic, loved reading Ulysses by James Joyce, which "i frankly regard as a great bore," she writes. But she loved Jane Austen: "i always took PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to the hospital to have babies with."