What I'm Reading: Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson
I preordered Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson in 2015 when it came out, and for all that effort (which really isn’t much but still) I only just read it this year. At that point I had read her 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and maybe a couple short stories that appeared in The New Yorker. In 2017 I read The Lottery and Other Stories, and yet this collection continued to stand on the shelf, a hefty 400 pages of short fiction, essays, anecdotes on family life, and lectures on writing as a craft.
Well, I finally got to it. The pandemic made me do it.
The foreword of this collection is written by Ruth Franklin who released a biography on Jackson entitled Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life just the following year. Let Me Tell You is split into five sections, each uniquely different than the others: short fiction, essays and reviews, early short stories, humor and family, and lectures on the craft of writing. Jackson’s family released a collection of unpublished and uncollected short stories in 1996 entitled Just an Ordinary Day which they say they got much of the material for from the Library of Congress as well as “a cobwebbed carton discovered in a Vermont barn more than a quarter-century after Jackson's death” (Oates) (although in the afterward of Let Me Tell You it’s stated “Laurence opened his front door to find a carton with no return address. After some hesitation, he peered into the box and found a stack of manuscripts.”) Fans of Jackson seem to love this 1996 collection, although the reviews I read seem to end with the conclusion of, probably don’t need to read it.
Oddly, Jackson’s family used the dregs of that 1996 compilation to put together Let Me Tell You, and again they combed the Library of Congress to find more material.
We found that we had copies of a great number of partial stories and fragments. Sometimes we were able to match disconnected pages by noting small technical details, comparing Shirley’s typewritten pages or carbon copies with others beating similar degrees of textural clarity or fuzziness, or that had apparently been typed with the same tired ribbon, in our effort to spot missing pages and put stories back together.
I find that story interesting, and the method sounds to me like somuchfun; imagine if Ancestry.com paid for all the work our parents and grandparents are doing! But the image that comes to my mind is of someone quickly emptying the drawers and the shoving all the papers on the top of her desk into a big box and shipping it to the Library of Congress because what else to do with it? In fact, in the forward to LMTY, Franklin states the only reason Jackson’s work was there at all is because in 1966 the library requested her husband’s manuscripts and papers and “[a]s an aside, the letter mentioned that the library would be interested also in the papers of Human’s late wife, the writer Shirley Jackson.” Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson’s husband, actually quickly married a classmate of his daughter, and a student of his at Bennington College in 1966, so it’s entirely possible that the shoving into a box is actually what happened. ;) I’m just kidding, it’s over 50 boxes.
Look, I don’t love that these books are put together from the scrap materials that were left in decomposing boxes. What quality can be found there? I also think it’s really interesting - what quality can be found there!? It’s maybe what we picture, though: an author who so abundantly using words that they leave boxes and boxes of documentation and after they die and- look! - this amazing story here in the scrap heap! Isn’t that what we hoped would be the result of Salinger tucked away all those years in his little New Hampshire home? And there are some good stories and essays here. …There are also many pieces where, a page or two in, I would flip forward to see how much I had left (one page? OK. Three pages? Moving on.) Anyway, I think her family probably made some good money off this book, probably had a GREAT time putting it together, probably increased some awareness to her other published work, etc etc. Franklin states that “Jackson’s star is steadily rising” and it is, it has been; Netflix came out with a film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle just in 2018, and the Haunting of Hill House is the inspiring piece for many, many other movies.
The personal essays and lectures included here give the reader a behind-the-scenes glimpse into her mind’s wiring, and thus we can extrapolate on HOW these daily imaginings weave their way into the more significant pieces she is known for. The main points, which she emphases again and again even in this one collection, is that 1, Jackson is constantly telling herself stories, making things up; and 2, she writes at any spare moment she can (and occasionally in her sleep). We frequently read about her kitchen utensils and appliances getting into arguments and needing to be separated (“Here I Am, Washing Dishes Again"), but also the house itself tending to the items in use by it’s occupants (“Good Old House”).
Once, buttons appeared, newly sewn onto my son’s jacket, and another time my daughter’s stuffed lamp had a blue ribbon removed and a pink one substituted. A day or so later the blue ribbon was back, washed and ironed."
The concept of a house and the items that belong within it is significant to Jackson’s work, in part, I assume, because her day-to-day life revolved around these items. There’s a loneliness in many of these pieces, from seclusion or lack of connection, both, perhaps. Her role as “mother” takes up most of the day what with the “time spent vacuuming the living room rug, or driving the children to school or trying to find something different for dinner tonight” (“How I Write”). Indeed the tidier the home the crazier the people in it, as in “The New Maid” or “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” two of my favorites from this collection.
In all, this compilations includes 30 short (and shorter) fiction pieces, one of which is unfinished (the title piece), and two that were previously published, “Paranoia,” in the August 5 issue of The New Yorker, and “It Isn’t the Money I Mind” in the August 25, 1945 issue of The New Yorker. I found the final section entitled “I’d Like to See You Get Out of That Sentence” which includes her lectures on writing to be the most impactful. You can read a few of the chapters here, here, and here (The New Yorker). If this were you first foray into Jackson’s work, I wouldn’t begin here, with this book, or Just an Ordinary Day. That being said, I’m so glad I read this; I enjoyed several of the short fiction, and I learned a lot (about Jackson as a writer/mother, and to listen to my tolerance begging me “to skip the rest” of any given piece).
The New Yorker has also The Man in the Woods from this collection. You can read Jackson’s 1948 short story, “The Lottery” on the New Yorker’s website.
Jackson, Shirley. Let Me Tell You. New York: Random House, 2015.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Distress Signals.” The New York Times. December 29, 1996. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/nnp/20569.html?scp=8&sq=shirley%2520jackson&st=Search