I’ve always loved reading, even though I’m very slow at it. Reading big novels – or big books of any kind – has been a formidable task, which I’ve often shied away from. I spent much of tenth grade reading War and Peace. It took me months, a few pages a day. But I loved it, so I was in no hurry. I’ve noticed, when reading novels I really enjoy, a tendency to slow down as I get closer to the end. I don’t want the story to be over.
As a consequence of my slowness as a reader, at some point, in high school or soon thereafter, I turned from novels to short stories, often in paperback collections – modern short stories, short short stories, Russian short stories, English short stories, and the like. That’s how I discovered O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, de Maupassant, Katherine Anne Porter, and many other fine 19th and 20th century authors. Some of those stories I’ve never forgotten. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” is one of them. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is another.
When I went to the library last week, to return a couple of historical novels I’d just finished reading and to check out the last one in Bernard Cornwell’s “The Last Kingdom” series, I took a long look, as I usually do, at the recent acquisitions shelves. One book immediately caught my eye, The Letters of Shirley Jackson. Published just last year, it’s a big, fat, 600-page book, the kind you can open at random and easily fine a gem, like this short paragraph from the middle of a long letter, dated November 2, 1960:
“i do not think you will believe this: laurie writes that he has been reading the oz books at college because some girl lent him several. he says they have been having oz-and-jazz readings and especially dig the munchkins. i do not believe it either, but i have written urgently to know more about what kind of girl brings oz books to college and passes them around.” (p. 482)
It turns out that the jazz-loving Laurie, the subject of these lines, is Laurence Jackson Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s eldest child, who edited his mother’s book of letters. He is a writer, editor, photographer, and, according to his bio at the back of the book, “He has also worked as a professional jazz trumpet player for more than sixty-five years.”