Shirley Jackson named her first typewriter Ernest. And she decided that Ernest was going to be someone not too trustworthy. Someone who tended to want to laugh at her. She talked about him in her letters as if he were a guy she lived with. Someone who, like the Doctor from ‘Doctor Who’, was changing his body, but was still the same. Because the great lady, the queen, of psychological terror, had a lot of other typewriters – she didn’t write by hand or ever wanted to put a finger on an electric typewriter – but they were all called Ernest. Jackson blamed Ernest for every last typo in his letters, in one of his charming displays of the way fiction can make reality a more endlessly interesting and, of course, fun place.
“My mother was a kind of comedian, a traveling vaudeville. Reading her letters you realize how writing was always a game for her, and a fun one, but so was life.” The one who speaks is her son Laurence, the protagonist, burlesque and sly, of some of her stories, including the classic ‘Charles’. Hers, by Laurence Jackson Hyman, has been the task of bringing together her letters, just published by Random House New York, under the title, simply, ‘Letters of Shirley Jackson’. Letters that she, she says, “bring her back to life somehow” because her “voice of hers” is in them. “My mother talked like she wrote, it was all gags. In reality, there was no distinction for her between writing and life. She was always typing, letters, stories, novels,” she says.
supernatural and exquisite
Laurence Jackson Hyman is 79 years old. He has done nothing else in his life than manage the legacy of his mother. And he knows that part of Shirley Jackson’s literary renaissance has to do with his work. She said, a few years ago, that she had never understood why she was never taken seriously, although there were those who called her, in an untranslatable play on words with the highly respected Virginia Woolf, a sort of “Virginia Werewolf”, equating the idea of the supernatural in his work with that of lofty literature. And he added that there were two reasons why her work had been reborn. One had to do with her work: she fought for years for all of it to be republished properly. The other, with the sign of the times. “Evil stalks us today as in his stories,” he said.
As happened to Catherine Camus, daughter of the Nobel Prize for Literature who has also dedicated her life to managing her father’s legacy, one fine day Laurence received a box full of letters. It was her grandmother, Shirley’s mother, who held it out to her. She told him that he would know what to do with them. The box contained the letters her daughter had sent them, regularly, since she left the family home to go to college. “I have to admit that it was hard for me to read them. I didn’t dare. But when I finally did, it was like going back to my childhood home. Suddenly, it was like being with her, again,” he says, in the very powerful prologue that opens the volume that can be read as an autobiography, in pieces, completely improvised, of the author herself.
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Because not only does the volume of the letters he sent to his parents make up, of course, there are also the ones he exchanged with Jeanne Beatty – and this is something that his biographer, Ruth Franklin, who Laurence gave access to everything with, came up with. , a fan who wrote her a letter that looked like a love letter and that Shirley, addicted as she was to writing letters – “always on yellow paper, which made it possible to distinguish the texts of possible stories”, says her son, “because everything was always everywhere»–, he could not help answering, giving rise to an excitingly happy correspondence, the one that can only occur in that perfect relationship that is the one between the reader and his favorite writer, when one and the other they recognize each other, because no one understands each other like they do.
When María Casares called Catherine Camus to tell her that she had to sell the letters that her father, Albert Camus, had sent her to repair the holes in the roof of her house, Catherine told her to go ahead. And she then she thought better of it. She did not want those letters, love letters, a clandestine love – but, Catherine admits, “the love of her life” – to fall into the hands of just anyone. So she bought them. “She gave them to Me in a traveling bag. I spent the next 22 years without opening it,” she once said. In the end, she opened it. And the one she found inside her was her father. “Dad,” as they called him. That is why it is not a curse for the writer’s son to take over his legacy. Because no matter what happens, his legacy will always bring him back. And first he will do it for himself.