Great essay. Looking forward to reading your book! You asked for stories, so here's mine: when I was working on my dissertation on Louis Kahn (American architect), I befriended his first "mistress" Anne Tyng, to try to get more information on a period in his artistic development that all the male scholars had pooh-poohed and ignored. After several months of interviews, Tyng read aloud to me the letters Kahn had written to her in the early 1950s, when she self-exiled to Rome to carry their daughter to term (Kahn was married to someone else, and Tyng raised their child as a single mom). Tyng stood in her little kitchen in a townhouse in Center City, Philadelphia, and read me Kahn's letters ("Dearest Annie"), tears streaming down her face. She'd never shown them to anyone -- now they're published-- and it led to my arguing, successfully, for a complete reassessment of Tyng's influence on that period of Kahn's work. A small triumph, but important to me.
This is incredible. Reviving silenced voices (women’s) is one of my favorite things to read about. I have a dear friend who loves Kahn’s buildings and this will help me think differently about them now. How many mistresses did he have?
He had a lot of one-offs, one wife, to whom he remained married to the end, and two long-term mistresses with whom he had out-of-wedlock children. //Tyng convinced Kahn that Eudclidean geometry was based in and structured organic forms (which is correct, at least in some cases), and that using them in architecture connected the architecture to nature in a profound way. She was central to his artistic development.
Sarah this is a great story. I love the film “my architect.” The interview with Anne Tyng in the film is so moving, especially when they go to that little restroom in New Jersey that she designed a mixture of pleasure and pain.
As a fan of A Very Haunted Life and a nearly lifelong reader of Shirley Jackson, I’m grateful for this essay. It’s personal for me. My mother was a writer and a brilliant teacher of literature. I watched her teach “The Lottery” to a night school class at a nearby air force base; those men practically levitated with astonishment. I also witnessed my mother’s long epistolary friendship with a fan, an aspiring writer who consoled me after my mother’s death. I have these letters (Mother kept carbons). What will future biographers do without letters?
I wonder this a lot too! But if archivists find a good way to preserve email, that would be even better, since there you always have both sides of the correspondence.
I did make my own luck for my own book, and was just considering writing about this, so I feel like it is a stroke of luck (!) that I'm reading this essay right now. It was during Covid when all the libraries were closed. I decided to order a very expensive book that I had worked with in Europe and had no way of working with in the US under Covid conditions. When it arrived, after its own long journey across the Atlantic, it was different from the book I thought I was getting ....and far more bountiful than I had ever expected.
I loved this essay, how it interwove archival finds with the texture of letters with the emotional lives those letters reveal. Thank you.
I am so intrigued, as a longtime Shirley Jackson fan, and I have been meaning to read your biography for a few years now. Did you ever find out why Jeanne stopped writing to Shirley?
Firstly Ruth this is a phenomenal story and a lovely read! And so glad you found them!
And thank you for the question at the end because you’ve reminded me just how many incredible and “impossible” lucky experiences I had researching my grandparents stories - writing to people at the right time so they could send me things they’d only recently found, reaching out to a person who posted a family tree online that included the man my grandmother worked for while hiding in berlin during the war - and being sent his personal notes that had been sent to an archive and almost lost! and there in finding my grandmother, the story of what happened during the bombing of berlin, and her false name (she never told her story except very small snippits)… finding an entire archive of photography in my grandmothers hometown - the literal plates. Gaming new friends and speaking in Poland… And, most recently, gaining a new biological uncle, which even late in life can have a profound effect… Time is fluid and the “ghosts in my computer”* absolutely aided me beyond….perhaps when you go on a hunt like this we are rewarded with riches indeed!
thanks for your beautiful words
natalie
*”ghosts in your computer” is what amy tan’s mother said to her to explain the secrets amy wrote about that no one had told her
I kept thinking about how much of women’s interior lives we only know by accident—because someone kept a letter, saved a box, decided something was worth preserving. There’s something so haunting about that. The archive is never neutral!
Years and years ago I wrote a biographical sketch of Sergei Nabokov, Vladimir's brother, who was gay and died in a concentration camp. Sergei had had an Austrian lover whose name had never surfaced in bios of Vladimir, but I knew the lover's family was wealthy and owned a castle, and I ended up having a hunch about his identity I tracked down the name of a surviving niece in Milan and cold-called her ... I vividly remember the long pause on the other end of the line before she said, "I wondered when somebody would find me."
As against that another Nabokov cousin claimed to be sitting on a bundle of 60 letters from Sergei, in Paris, but I could never get him to show me. You never get them all.
This was a wonderful read and makes me think of all the times I have been so lucky, while also creating my own luck, in my research. The most important for my career was when I tracked down the daughter of fashion designer Thea Porter while I was in grad school, and she told me she had just come across 20 boxes of her mother’s papers. I flew to London to go through them, and used that research to write my MFA thesis, and then to write the first book and curate the first museum exhibition on her. Those papers are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection.
Sadly, there have been just as many times that I’ve come to dead-end after dead-end, but I keep persisting!
I am so looking forward to reading your book about Jackson when it is complete. She fascinates me. I love everything about this post. Nothing could be more exciting than coming upon those letters after all that effort. And to read them "in the flesh" even with the mouse droppings etc. had to be a thrill.
It took a few years for me to find an unpublished manuscript by the late journalist Chris Chase (ghostwritten on behalf of Reese Schonfeld, CNN co-founder) continaining invaluable relections by/interviews with the founding staff of CNN. Someone (Chase's nephew, who inherited her papers?) dug it up on a crusty old floppy disk they delivered to me. Then, to have it transferred...
Once I had to buy a VCR to see a tape for a different biography. In my case that meant I also needed to buy a TV. Many public libraries now have maker spaces, and ebay proliferates w obsolete tech for sale. So many gems are not in the domain of prof. archivists but these crusty decaying one-offs that can make or break the work of people like you & me!
Great essay. Looking forward to reading your book! You asked for stories, so here's mine: when I was working on my dissertation on Louis Kahn (American architect), I befriended his first "mistress" Anne Tyng, to try to get more information on a period in his artistic development that all the male scholars had pooh-poohed and ignored. After several months of interviews, Tyng read aloud to me the letters Kahn had written to her in the early 1950s, when she self-exiled to Rome to carry their daughter to term (Kahn was married to someone else, and Tyng raised their child as a single mom). Tyng stood in her little kitchen in a townhouse in Center City, Philadelphia, and read me Kahn's letters ("Dearest Annie"), tears streaming down her face. She'd never shown them to anyone -- now they're published-- and it led to my arguing, successfully, for a complete reassessment of Tyng's influence on that period of Kahn's work. A small triumph, but important to me.
Wow! That is a great one.
This is incredible. Reviving silenced voices (women’s) is one of my favorite things to read about. I have a dear friend who loves Kahn’s buildings and this will help me think differently about them now. How many mistresses did he have?
He had a lot of one-offs, one wife, to whom he remained married to the end, and two long-term mistresses with whom he had out-of-wedlock children. //Tyng convinced Kahn that Eudclidean geometry was based in and structured organic forms (which is correct, at least in some cases), and that using them in architecture connected the architecture to nature in a profound way. She was central to his artistic development.
Sarah this is a great story. I love the film “my architect.” The interview with Anne Tyng in the film is so moving, especially when they go to that little restroom in New Jersey that she designed a mixture of pleasure and pain.
this is such a powerful story and what a beautiful restoration you were part of for their family
As a fan of A Very Haunted Life and a nearly lifelong reader of Shirley Jackson, I’m grateful for this essay. It’s personal for me. My mother was a writer and a brilliant teacher of literature. I watched her teach “The Lottery” to a night school class at a nearby air force base; those men practically levitated with astonishment. I also witnessed my mother’s long epistolary friendship with a fan, an aspiring writer who consoled me after my mother’s death. I have these letters (Mother kept carbons). What will future biographers do without letters?
I wonder this a lot too! But if archivists find a good way to preserve email, that would be even better, since there you always have both sides of the correspondence.
I did make my own luck for my own book, and was just considering writing about this, so I feel like it is a stroke of luck (!) that I'm reading this essay right now. It was during Covid when all the libraries were closed. I decided to order a very expensive book that I had worked with in Europe and had no way of working with in the US under Covid conditions. When it arrived, after its own long journey across the Atlantic, it was different from the book I thought I was getting ....and far more bountiful than I had ever expected.
I loved this essay, how it interwove archival finds with the texture of letters with the emotional lives those letters reveal. Thank you.
That's a great story - the wrong book actually turned out to be the right one!
Cannot even imagine being married to someone who didn’t read your best-known work.
He wasn't the most supportive husband ...
I am so intrigued, as a longtime Shirley Jackson fan, and I have been meaning to read your biography for a few years now. Did you ever find out why Jeanne stopped writing to Shirley?
The short answer is, no. But I might write more about it in an upcoming post.
Please do!
Firstly Ruth this is a phenomenal story and a lovely read! And so glad you found them!
And thank you for the question at the end because you’ve reminded me just how many incredible and “impossible” lucky experiences I had researching my grandparents stories - writing to people at the right time so they could send me things they’d only recently found, reaching out to a person who posted a family tree online that included the man my grandmother worked for while hiding in berlin during the war - and being sent his personal notes that had been sent to an archive and almost lost! and there in finding my grandmother, the story of what happened during the bombing of berlin, and her false name (she never told her story except very small snippits)… finding an entire archive of photography in my grandmothers hometown - the literal plates. Gaming new friends and speaking in Poland… And, most recently, gaining a new biological uncle, which even late in life can have a profound effect… Time is fluid and the “ghosts in my computer”* absolutely aided me beyond….perhaps when you go on a hunt like this we are rewarded with riches indeed!
thanks for your beautiful words
natalie
*”ghosts in your computer” is what amy tan’s mother said to her to explain the secrets amy wrote about that no one had told her
Loved this. Patsy Cline also wrote very personal letters back and forth with a fan who became a friend.
I kept thinking about how much of women’s interior lives we only know by accident—because someone kept a letter, saved a box, decided something was worth preserving. There’s something so haunting about that. The archive is never neutral!
Years and years ago I wrote a biographical sketch of Sergei Nabokov, Vladimir's brother, who was gay and died in a concentration camp. Sergei had had an Austrian lover whose name had never surfaced in bios of Vladimir, but I knew the lover's family was wealthy and owned a castle, and I ended up having a hunch about his identity I tracked down the name of a surviving niece in Milan and cold-called her ... I vividly remember the long pause on the other end of the line before she said, "I wondered when somebody would find me."
As against that another Nabokov cousin claimed to be sitting on a bundle of 60 letters from Sergei, in Paris, but I could never get him to show me. You never get them all.
How amazing!
This was a wonderful read and makes me think of all the times I have been so lucky, while also creating my own luck, in my research. The most important for my career was when I tracked down the daughter of fashion designer Thea Porter while I was in grad school, and she told me she had just come across 20 boxes of her mother’s papers. I flew to London to go through them, and used that research to write my MFA thesis, and then to write the first book and curate the first museum exhibition on her. Those papers are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection.
Sadly, there have been just as many times that I’ve come to dead-end after dead-end, but I keep persisting!
Wow--this is fascinating. Great detective work!
Incredible story, and job well done.
Love Shirley Jackson. We share astrology and so much else. Read my piece with Lottery in the title if you get a chance!
Can you link it here? I don't see it
https://kellythompsontnwwy.substack.com/p/the-lottery-of-girlhood-groomed-before?r=1fhxt&utm_medium=ios
I am so looking forward to reading your book about Jackson when it is complete. She fascinates me. I love everything about this post. Nothing could be more exciting than coming upon those letters after all that effort. And to read them "in the flesh" even with the mouse droppings etc. had to be a thrill.
My book came out 10 years ago! I’m celebrating its anniversary.
Thank you. I'm sorry I missed that. I will go find It. Happy Anniversary!
It took a few years for me to find an unpublished manuscript by the late journalist Chris Chase (ghostwritten on behalf of Reese Schonfeld, CNN co-founder) continaining invaluable relections by/interviews with the founding staff of CNN. Someone (Chase's nephew, who inherited her papers?) dug it up on a crusty old floppy disk they delivered to me. Then, to have it transferred...
Fantastic find! I would love to know more about how archivists are preserving stuff like those crusty old disks.
There are archivists who specialize specifically in saving materials from old computer disks! It's fascinating work involving forensic hard drives. (I focus on mostly physical archives but my coworker is a digital archivist and it is verrry techy! Plus sometimes you need a conservator to clean up rust on disks or weird melted plastic goo.) This article has some good info on that type of work! https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/floppy-disks-forgotten-systems-and-fragile-knowledge-insights-from-the-retro-computing-community-b036806f5a57
Once I had to buy a VCR to see a tape for a different biography. In my case that meant I also needed to buy a TV. Many public libraries now have maker spaces, and ebay proliferates w obsolete tech for sale. So many gems are not in the domain of prof. archivists but these crusty decaying one-offs that can make or break the work of people like you & me!
So cool. I love a good treasure hunt.