Let Me Tell You Read Free Page A

waiting for the right moment to deploy it: as a symbol of destruction (“what I can remember is the way the little pieces of the bowl lay there so quietly after they had been for so long parts of one unbroken whole”), or as an illustration of a sudden shock, or to represent the loss of a treasured possession. This image would appear, in different form, in
We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
her last completed novel, when one of the characters discovers the family’s heirloom sugar bowl—an important symbol—in pieces.
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    Let Me Tell You
contains a multitude of Shirley Jacksons. The whimsical fantasy of pieces like “Six A.M . Is the Hour” (about a poker game played by the Norse gods in which the jackpot is Earth) and “Bulletin” (a science fiction depiction of how a future society will understand life in 1950) may surprise readers who are expecting more fiction in the suspenseful mode of the Kafkaesque tale “Paranoia.” Some of the pieces here are alternate versions of published material: “Company for Dinner,” in which a man accidentally comes home to the wrong house, anticipates the more complex spin Jackson would give to a similar theme in “The Beautiful Stranger,” and both “Still Life with Teapot and Students” and “Family Treasures” are variations on scenes she would develop differently in
Hangsaman
, her second novel. A notable absence from the fiction in this collection is the interest in the supernatural that would characterize so much of her work: There is nothing here along the lines of “The Daemon Lover,” her retelling of the James Harris legend, in which a woman is jilted by a fiancé who may or may not actually exist. Only “The Man in the Woods,” a fable incorporating different strands of mythology, hits some similar notes.
    As her biographer, the question constantly on my mind is which Shirley Jackson was—as one of the pieces here is titled—“The Real Me.” This collection alone offers a multitude of possibilities. The professional who stood at the lectern, delivering confident advice to her rapt audience? The housewife dreaming up a paean to her fork? The mother who laughs over her children’s idiosyncrasies even as she chides them for their bad behavior? The amateur witch who lovingly enumerates her collection of curiosities (“I have a crystal ball and a deck of tarot cards and a lot of tikis and eleven Siamese gambling house tokens and a book by Ludovico Sinistrari listing all the demons by name and incantation”) and writes only half-jokingly of digging for mandrakes in the backyard? The engaged parent who cheerfully creates and produces a play for her children’s school, or the semi-recluse who confesses at one point, “I don’t think I like reality very much”? In an early diary, Jackson once referred to “this compound of creatures I call Me.” Of course, they are all one—which is the central mystery of any personality.
    In the end, I return to the mental image of Jackson that has come to me over the years I have spent examining her papers. I imagine her at her overstuffed desk, its surface crowded with all the usual tidbits: an old postcard or two, drafts of three different stories, part of an unfinished letter. She might have only a few minutes—perhaps the children are about to arrive home from school, or her husband might call out from his study to ask for her opinion on something, or she has to start dinner. Absently she pulls out a note from the pocket of her dress and examines it. Then she rolls a blank sheet of yellow paper into her Royal typewriter and begins.
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    R UTH F RANKLIN is a book critic and author of
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,
which was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. She has written for many publications, including
The New Republic,
The New Yorker,
The New York Review of Books,
The New York Times Magazine,
Bookforum,
and
Granta
. She is at work on a biography of