Laurence Hyman has selected some three hundred letters written by his mother (some abridged but most intact) to some twenty recipients. Jackson wrote an enormous number of letters, often at some length, though there are large gaps in the chronology where letters are no longer extant. As Bernice Murphy notes (in a first-rate introduction), some of her friendships were entirely epistolary. While some of her letters are run-of-the-mill, others are little works of art in their own right, rather than merely resources for understanding their author (or indeed other writers whom she knew well.) As Murphy suggests, Jackson was originally overlooked as a serious writer because she avoided conventional genre categories. While her novels are now regarded as Gothic classics, she also wrote two hundred short stories, plays and comic tales of motherhood (the forerunner of today's “mommy blogs”) which were a staple of women's magazines. Her reputation has soared since her death, with two monographs, a biography, the selection for the Library of America, several collections of essays, a plethora of journal articles, two volumes of unpublished or uncollected works, plays, a ballet, films, television series and a graphic adaptation of “The Lottery.” The letters here begin in 1938 and continue until a week before her death in 1965. The volume is also liberally illustrated with a selection of her own cartoons, provided by her son Barry, who trawled through the eight hundred available in the Library of Congress. Many are sharply satirical at the expense of her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, notoriously unfaithful, apparently handless in the kitchen, a nondriver in rural Vermont and often portrayed here with his feet up. In contrast, merely reading about Jackson's activities is exhausting.
In three weeks in 1958, she wrote a children's play, three short stories and a third of The Haunting of Hill House, which she finished while unable to move because of a back injury. All this while wrangling four children and a Great Dane. The major breadwinner, she is frank about her money worries. In one week in winter the septic tank clogs, the plumbing gives up and the boiler dies, while one child has a brush with tetanus. As an image of the life of a working mother in the 1950s, and of the print culture of that decade, the letters are invaluable. What is not so valuable is the first chapter, dominated by love letters to Hyman. Fervent, needy and besotted, and also much occupied with the minutiae of living at home with her parents, these letters turned the current reviewer into a curmudgeon. Jackson wrote to her parents all her life and they frequently bailed out the improvident family, but there were tensions. Her father (ardently anticommunist) forbade her to read The Grapes of Wrath, formed a citizens’ committee which compiled lists of names and addresses of local communists, and opposed her marriage to Hyman (Jewish and left-wing).
Ironically, Stanley insisted that her parents save all her letters for posterity, hence the large number reproduced here. Letters to her closest friends are, however, few and far between – for example, Ralph Ellison who wrote Invisible Man in her living room, helped her move house by driving the dog on his knee, and assisted her in drinking castor oil and cream soda to induce labour (before realizing that she was not quite seven months pregnant.) Jackson had a real gift for friendship and numbered many literary figures among her friends (Bernard Malamud, Howard Nemerov, Langston Hughes and Kenneth Burke, for example.) Others have walk-on parts: Dylan Thomas came to dinner. Unfortunately, the volume has no index, though it is well annotated. The love letters are also difficult to read because they are largely unpunctuated. Jackson wrote in lowercase, overlapping words and inventing others, and her son reproduces the letters just as she wrote them. This may be authentically spontaneous and playful, but 150 pages of it is a tall order for the reader.
Jackson knew that she often wrote stories primarily for money and Hyman discouraged her more literary works in favour of the immediately remunerative. He refused a college teaching post because he only wanted to work in alternate years. Some stories sold like hot cakes. The government ordered 1,500 copies of The Lottery and Other Stories to go into all army and navy libraries. In 1949 her stories about children sold so well that they paid off ten years of accumulated debts. A contract with Good Housekeeping for eight stories a year and $15,000 every three months was a game changer. Jackson nevertheless stuck to her literary guns (six novels), while also spending time on poker, bridge, cocktail parties, listening to bullfight music, attending baseball games and coping with hordes of houseguests. She was extremely versatile. While researching poltergeists for her fiction, she also contributed to a lighthearted book about new babies and their mothers. Many of her letters are extremely funny, with a gift for well-shaped anecdotes and for perceiving the uncanny in the everyday. She had no shortage of material – from the “help” in the house who went suddenly insane in the middle of the night, to lunatic letters from fans, the pretensions of Hollywood directors (she refused to write a film for Lucille Ball), and the ins and outs of sixteen-year-old Laurence's career as a jazz musician. Her insights into her own novels are fascinating and her accounts of the agoraphobia and depression of her later years unflinching. She wrote only three sharp letters, one to an uninvited guest who stayed for six hours, one asking her mother to cease commenting adversely on her appearance, and one to her husband reproaching him for belittling her continually and undermining her literary career. Alas, only the first letter was actually sent.
