A Summary and Analysis of ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is a short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65). The story, which runs to just a few pages, involves just two characters: an unnamed husband and wife. The husband has received a letter from an associate simply identified as Jimmy; the wife seeks to know what the contents of the letter are, but the husband hasn’t opened it.

Summary

‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is told by a third-person narrator but the story is heavily focalised through the character of the wife, so we have access to her thoughts in reaction to the events of this brief narrative.

The husband tells his wife that he received a letter from ‘Jimmy’ that day, but he hasn’t opened it and plans on sending it back to Jimmy unopened. The wife thinks that she wouldn’t have been able to keep the letter for five minutes without tearing it up.

The husband then changes the subject and says he had lunch with Tom today. His wife is shocked that he is trying to change the subject. But she’s having none of it. She tells him he should open Jimmy’s letter. When he asks her why she wants him to, she tells him she’s curious to know what’s in it. She also tells him that it’s silly not to open a letter just because he holds a grudge against the man who wrote it.

The husband counters that he isn’t interested in anything Jimmy has to say. He challenges her to open it instead, and she refuses to rise to the bait, knowing he’d break her arm if she did try to open it. So she decides to try to get him off the subject again. When he mentions his lunch with Tom again, the wife wonders to herself whether her husband is merely feigning a lack of interest in the contents of Jimmy’s letter or whether he genuinely doesn’t care what it says.

She even goes so far as to say to herself that she would kill her husband if he really did just throw the letter in his briefcase and forget about it. Later that evening, she asks him if he intends to show the letter to John. She fantasises about killing John, too. The husband says he will show John the letter. From this, the wife deduces that her husband is still angry with Jimmy and wants to share his anger with John.

With a sense of triumph, she reminds her husband that he’d said earlier that he intends to send the letter back to Jimmy unopened. The husband says he forgot he’d said this, and he probably will send it back unopened, in that case. She realises that he genuinely did forget all about his plans for the letter and he’s really not interested in what it says. The story ends with her fantasising about bashing her husband’s head in and leaving him under the cellar with the letter in his hands.

Analysis

‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ is one of Shirley Jackson’s shortest stories, running to just three pages. It is more of a sketch or vignette than it is a traditional narrative, focusing as it does on just two characters at home as a wife endeavours to find out whether her husband is as nonchalant about the contents of the letter he has received as he is making out to be.

Who ‘Jimmy’ is remains a mystery – it’s possible, though hardly certain, that Jimmy is a reference to James Harris, a sinister figure who recurs in many of Jackson’s stories – as does the letter itself. We don’t even know the names of the husband and wife who feature in the story.

Indeed, in some ways a story like ‘Got a Letter from Jimmy’ reveals Shirley Jackson’s affinities with earlier modernist writers such as Kate Chopin, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf: the emphasis is on character rather than action, the scene is ordinary and domestic, and we are given intimate access to the main character’s thoughts and feelings. Jackson’s narrator is repeatedly taking us inside the wife’s head and telling us what she is thinking in response to her husband’s supposed indifference to the letter.

But as this is a Shirley Jackson, there’s a dark, even macabre edge to the story, too. The wife’s thoughts and fantasies seem hardly to be a proportionate response to her husband’s comments and behaviour, and her daydreams about violently bashing in his head and leaving him for dead, purely because he refuses to show an interest in what the letter might say, only makes us more intrigued by their relationship. It also, of course, makes us question further what the precise relationship might be between the husband and this elusive figure of Jimmy.

In the last analysis, although this is a brief and even minor piece in the Shirley Jackson canon, it does nevertheless act as a kind of microcosm of Jackson’s thematic concerns and style found in her work more generally. The undercurrent of brutal violence, the brooding desire to do others harm, is once again placed into an ordinary domestic setting, making the juxtaposition between the supposed safety of the home and the dark violent impulses of the characters all the more stark and unsettling.