Shirley Jackson's unpublished works, and why finishing a story might be an overrated virtue

Week in Books column

An American family reading a newspaper circa 1950 (George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images)

Harper Lee’s old/new novel focuses the mind on posthumous publications. The draft of Go Set a Watchman remained in a safety deposit box from 1957 until its “discovery” in 2011, and might just as easily have been published posthumously, or never seen the light of day. Speculation around a third part of the Mockingbird trilogy was sounded again this week on whether The Long Goodbye might exist, and be published after Lee passes away.

The shorter works of another outstanding American author are posthumously published this month; the stories, essays and humorous writings of Shirley Jackson. Let Me Tell You (Penguin Classics, £20) is a good starting point for those who are not familiar with Jackson, though her first published short story, “The Lottery”, is not in it. It should be, for the fantastic furore it raised among New Yorker readers in 1948. There was so much indignance over its final paragraph (highly recommended for the sudden blow of its last lines!) that the magazine, and the author, received record amounts of hate mail.

Many of her early pieces, unpublished or unfinished, feature here; some are polished while others are imperfect, and fascinating in the same way as Go Set a Watchman in revealing the author’s process and showing us the growing shape of a story. Sometimes she ventures into the surreal and macabre, sometimes she gives us domestic satire, and sometimes there are all these things in one story or essay. The work has breadth enough to have been praised by Stephen King on the one hand and Donna Tartt on the other.

Jackson was writing the lives of privileged middle-class Americans, mainly women, but also teenage girls and neurotic men, all with humanity alongside a brilliant wit. Her unpublished short fiction that comprises the first section of this book describes an era on the cusp of change, and her characters capture the restlessness in the air as the stuffy conformity of the 1950s morphs into the rebelliousness of the 1960s.

“I Cannot Sing the Old Songs” features a teenage girl scolded by her parents for an inappropriate boyfriend. She is silent, seemingly respectful, but her rebellious thoughts are divulged quietly, contemptuously, to the reader, and we feel her generation’s insolence building within her. In another few years, she will, in all probability, be slamming a door in their faces to live, long-haired and bra-less, in a hippie commune.

There is a particularly intriguing unfinished story called “Let Me Tell You” that captures the infatuated voice of a teenage girl who describes her best friend, Hilda, which begins: “Let me tell you about this girl, she’s prettier than I am, but she’s my best friend.” The breathless voice becomes dark as Hilda’s influence moves towards the criminally dangerous, switching from shoplifting and telling daring fibs to planning a robbery. It ends abruptly, and leaves us wishing Jackson more life to have been able to finish it. Jackson is also adept at capturing the confusions of children at the trivialities and snobberies of the adult world. “The Arabian Nights” dramatises a birthday night out for its 12-year-old protagonist with her parents, which, for her, opens a window into the alarming shallowness of adulthood after Clark Gable walks into the restaurant and her parents attempt to force her to approach him, under innocence of childhood, and demand an autograph.

When adult snobberies are absorbed and repeated by children, they sound crude and tinny. In “Let Me Tell You”, the 14-year-old narrator says: “My father’s a lawyer. It’s important what your father is. Also it’s important to have a swimming pool, only not the biggest swimming pool. One family moved into our part of town and right away they built the biggest swimming pool of all and of course no one would dream of going near it.” We can hear her parents’ preoccupation with class and vulgarity here, without her full understanding.

Jackson’s non-fiction on family life might be seen as a precursor to Nora Ephron’s short writings for its wit, warmth and observation. Here she excels in making the uninteresting, domestic and banal appear interesting, odd and unnerving – so washing cutlery or looking for the sewing scissors or family tiffs at dinner. Her reflections on this often frazzling family life and motherhood make her the inventor of the modern-day “mommy blog”, according to Ruth Franklin, in the book’s foreword. It is a collection that leads to an appreciation of unfinished or unpublished works. Jackson’s writings make us see the value of leaving some things incomplete.