This is the second piece in a three-part series featuring Shirley Jackson’s lectures on writing. They are drawn from “Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings,” a collection of Jackson’s work. Part one in the series is “Memory and Delusion.” Part three is “Garlic in Fiction.”
I think that the popular notion of the writer as a person hiding away in a garret, unable to face reality, is probably perfectly true. In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.
For instance, I went the other day into our local drugstore and asked them how I would go about getting enough arsenic to poison a family of six. I had expected that they would behave as people would in any proper Agatha Christie book; one of them, I thought, would engage me in conversation in the front of the store, while someone else sneaked out back to call the cops, and I was ready with a perfectly truthful explanation about how the character in my book had to buy arsenic and I needed to find out how to go about it. Instead, though, no one really paid any attention to me. They were very nice about it; they didn’t have any arsenic, actually, and would I consider potassium cyanide or an overdose of sleeping pills in stead? When I said I had my heart set on arsenic, they said then I had better get in touch with a taxidermist, since no modern drugstore stocks arsenic anymore at all. Now, you have to concede that such behavior is bewildering; if someone turned up with chronic arsenic poisoning, they probably wouldn’t even remember that I was in asking about it.
I actually wanted to talk, though, about the most irrational and annoying aspect of the outside world that is always infringing on a writer’s life, and that is what is loosely called “fan mail.” I don’t answer many of the letters I get, usually, even though most of them are very kind and polite and say they liked my last book; but there is a certain type of letter that makes me wonder who is crazy these days—me or them. There is the kind of letter that asks if I am the Shirley Jackson who taught fifth grade in Toledo, Ohio, in 1902. There is the kind of letter that says I have stolen the correspondent’s name for one of the characters in a book and I am going to be sued for libel unless I immediately forward all royalty payments. I got a letter recently saying that the correspondent had just noticed a picture of me in a magazine, and the picture showed me with a dog that was stolen from him several months ago; I was either to send him back his dog or a check for the dog’s sentimental value, which he set at two hundred dollars. Or, consider this letter:
Of course the only possible answer was:
Someday the English teachers of the world are going to be made to suffer for what they do to writers. Every spring—which is term paper time—I get, and every other writer I know gets, twenty or thirty letters, all of one kind. They vary only in the degree of misspelling, and they typically read:
As I say, I get twenty or thirty of these letters every spring, and they go into the wastebasket. In one case I had a follow-up letter from the English teacher of one of the girls who had written me; she was furious because her student had failed English for lack of a term paper. She wanted to know who did I think I was, letting that girl fail? The girl’s original letter had had eleven misspellings; the teacher’s had only three. I did answer several of these when they first started coming, asking to see a copy of the term paper. I finally got hold of one paper. The student had copied my letter word for word.
I would like to finish by reading you my two favorite fan letters. The first of them was sent not to me but to a friend of mine who writes children’s books. It reads:
Sadly enough, it was signed only “Linda” and gave no address.
There is one letter I never tire of reading over. It was sent to me shortly after the publication of my story “The Lottery,” and was addressed to The New Yorker, where the story first appeared. It came, naturally enough, from Los Angeles:
This letter was never answered.
_Read Shirley Jackson’s stories “Paranoia” and “The Man in the Woods,” an interview with her son _Laurence Jackson Hyman, and Ruth Franklin on the torrent of letters The New Yorker received upon publishing “The Lottery.”