Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (2 page)

Introduction

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO, A
carton of cobwebbed files discovered in a Vermont barn more than a quarter century after our mother’s death arrived without notice in the mail. Within it were the original manuscript of
The Haunting of Hill House
, together with Shirley Jackson’s handwritten notes on character and scene development for the novel, as well as half a dozen unpublished short stories—the yellow bond carbons she kept for her files. The stories were mostly unknown to us, and we began to consider publishing a new collection of our mother’s work.

Soon we located other stories, some never published anywhere, and some published only once, decades ago, in periodicals, many long defunct. Shirley’s brother and sister-in-law, Barry and Marylou Jackson, supplied more stories in well-preserved copies of magazines; other pieces our sister, Jai Holly, and brother, Barry Hyman, had filed away over the years. Many more were found in the archives at the San Francisco Public Library. A windfall came when we learned that the Library of Congress held twenty-six cartons of our mother’s papers—journals, poetry, plays, parts of unfinished novels, and stories, lots of stories. After a week spent there photocopying, we began to feel we had the makings of a book, the first new work by Shirley Jackson since
The Magic of Shirley Jackson
and
Come Along with Me
, both published shortly after her death in 1965 at the age of forty-eight. We hoped Shirley Jackson’s work could now be discovered by a whole new generation of readers.

We uncovered a wealth of early writing from the late thirties and early forties, but very little from her precollege years. She claimed to have burned all her writings just before she left home to go to the University of Rochester, in 1934, and she may have done so, although some of her high school journals are among her preserved papers at the Library of Congress. While we could place them in a general time frame, none of the new stories we discovered had dates on them or any indication of when they were first written. Rather than be inaccurate we have left the stories in Part One undated.

Later visits to the Library of Congress enabled us to find missing parts of incomplete stories or versions that we liked better. Soon we had assembled more than 130 stories, and of these we agreed on the fifty-four presented here, those that we feel are finished and up to Shirley Jackson’s finely tuned standards. When we approached Bantam we were met with considerable enthusiasm for the project, and the book began to take shape as a significant collection of Jackson’s short fiction. Of the stories included in this collection, thirty-one have never been published before. The remaining stories had been previously published in magazines, but never before included in a collection of Jackson’s short fiction; and of these, only two or three have appeared in book form at all, mostly anthologies. One of those anthologized (and very hard to find) is “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

Many of the stories we found untitled or with working titles, since she often waited until publication to name them. In these instances we have created titles in the best muted Jackson style we could manage. In other instances we decided to change repetitive character names, often arbitrarily assigned by Jackson and intended to be changed before publication. We decided not to alter the archaic money references in these stories, however dated they may be, feeling that the integrity and understanding of the stories ought not be compromised.

We include a full range of Jackson’s many types of short fiction, from lighthearted romantic pieces to the macabre to the truly frightening. We also include a few of the humorous pieces she wrote about our family, since those, too, were what Shirley Jackson pioneered with as a writer, as well as her shocking and twisted explorations of the supernatural and the psyche. We want this collection to represent the great diversity of her work, and to show the writer’s craft evolving through a variety of forms and styles.

Our mother lived and wrote in a time—the thirties through the sixties—when smoking and drinking were both widespread and fashionable. Her characters grimly and gleefully chain-smoke and throw down drink after drink, in between boiling their coffee and spanking their children. But underneath these literary folkways of her time the universal themes glitter.

The stories we include here are not all charismatic heart-stoppers on the level of “The Lottery.” Most of her short fiction was written for publication in the popular magazines of her day
(Charm, Look, Harper’s, Ladies’ Home Companion, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Reader’s Digest, The New Yorker, Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion
, etc.). She actually wrote very few horror stories, and not many stories of fantasy or the supernatural, probably preferring to develop those themes more thoroughly in her novels. She had the courage to deal with unfashionable topics and to twist popular icons. Some of the stories gathered here are so unusual in style or point of view that they resemble almost none of the rest of her work.

We discovered that some stories tried to get themselves written over and over throughout Jackson’s life. “The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith” is shockingly different in attitude, theme, and climax from the version it precedes here, “The Mystery of the Murdered Bride.” They are the same story, told years apart and from almost opposing viewpoints. This is the only instance—but a fascinating one for students of short fiction—in which we have chosen to include two versions of the same story. We have also included a few “feel-good” stories beloved by readers of the (mostly women’s) magazines of the fifties and sixties. They are tucked between tales of murder and trickery, among ghostly rambles and poetic fables, between hugely funny family chronicles and dark tales of perfect, unexpected justice.

Our mother tried to write every day, and treated writing in every way as her professional livelihood. She would typically work all morning, after all the children went off to school, and usually again well into the evening and night. There was always the sound of typing. And our house was more often than not filled with luminaries in literature and the arts. There were legendary parties and poker games with visiting painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, poets, teachers, and writers of every leaning. But always there was the sound of her typewriter, pounding away into the night.

This collection of short fiction, taken as a whole, adds significantly to the body of Shirley Jackson’s published work. These stories range from those she wrote in college and as a budding writer living in Greenwich Village in the early forties, to those she churned out steadily during the 1950s, to those nearly perfect, terrifying pieces crafted toward the end of her life in the mid-sixties. This collection demonstrates her lifelong commitment to writing, her development as an artist, and her courage to explore universal themes of evil, madness, cruelty, and the humorous ironies of child-raising. She took the craft of writing every bit as seriously as the subject matter she chose (the
Minneapolis Tribune
once said: “Miss Jackson seemingly cannot write a poor sentence”) and in the work presented here the reader will find the wit and delight in storytelling that were her trademarks.

L
AURENCE
J
ACKSON
H
YMAN
S
ARAH
H
YMAN
S
TEWART
San Francisco
August 1995

Preface

All I Can Remember

A
LL
I
CAN REMEMBER
clearly about being sixteen is that it was a particularly agonizing age; our family was in the process of moving East from California, and I settled down into a new high school and new manners and ways, all things that I believe produce a great uneasiness in a sixteen-year-old. I know that a chemistry class in the new high school was suspended so that I could see my first snowfall; the entire class stepped outside and amused itself watching my reactions to something I had never dreamed was real.

I also remember such a tremendous and frustrated irritation with whatever I was reading at the time—heaven knows what it could have been, considering some of the things I put away about that time—that I decided one evening that since there were no books in the world fit to read, I would write one.

After dismissing the poetic drama as outmoded and poetry as far too difficult, I finally settled on a mystery story as easiest to write and probably easiest to read. It occurred to me that if I wrote all of the story except for the end, I might put the names of all the characters into a hat and draw out one to be the murderer, thus managing to surprise even myself with the ending. I remember that I sat all day upstairs in my room, writing wildly in order to set up a situation in which one of my characters (all most unsavory, and given to adolescent wisecracks) could be chosen as the murderer. After the first two or three murders, the story got rather sketchy, because I had not enough patience to waste all that time with investigation, so I put the names of my characters together and took my manuscript downstairs to read to my family.

My mother was knitting, my father was reading a newspaper, and my brother was doing something—probably carving his initials in the coffee table—and I persuaded them all to listen to me; I read them the entire manuscript, and when I had finished, the conversation went approximately like this:

BROTHER
: Whaddyou call
that?

MOTHER
: It’s very nice, dear.

FATHER
: Very nice, very nice,
(to my mother)
You call the man about the furnace?

BROTHER
: Only thing is, you ought to get
all
those people killed.
(raucous laughter)

MOTHER
: Shirley, in all that time upstairs I hope you remembered to make your bed.

I do not remember what character eventually came out of the hat with blood on his hands, but I do remember that I decided never to read another mystery story and never to write another mystery story; never, as a matter of fact, to write anything ever again. I had already decided finally that I was never going to be married and
certainly
would never have any children. It may have been about that time that I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.

—S
HIRLEY
J
ACKSON