The Times

THE BAD CHILDREN

BY SHIRLEY JACKSON, author of "The Lottery," "The Haunting of Hill House," etc. MY CAREER as a playwright is over, thank you. I am going back to the writing of novels, where I belong. I have tasted the infectious joys of the drama, and it is not for me. I didn't want or mean or intend or even try to write a play. At first, I was only a not-very-interested observer; my children and a group of their friends thought that they would like to put on a play, a fever which I believe can strike any group of children at any time, and they went about it in the completely practical manner in which children do go about these things—first they chose their costumes, and then they decided where they would give their play and how much they would charge to get in, and then they quarreled for a while over who could be in it and who couldn't, and then went looking for a play. My older daughter came to me and asked me if I had any idea what play they could put on, and I, being engaged in some terribly important activity like frosting a cake, said absently that I believed they might try the library, where they would surely find a dozen volumes of one-act plays for children. My daughter went off. I finished frosting my cake and went out and got the evening paper and was sitting quietly reading when my daughter came back and stood compellingly in front of me. "Listen to this," she said, and lifted a book and read in a high singsong voice: "'I fear me, good husband, that this wretched hut of ours will not long withstand the rigors of the wintry blast.'" "What?" I said. "It means she thinks their house is going to fall down," Jannie said. "Why does she have to say it like that?" I asked. "Because it's in the play. If we want to do that play we have to say junk like that. Or listen to this one: 'I am Lafayette, a gentleman of noble birth, and I have left my homeland and come to this new country to aid General Washington in this great battle against tyranny.'" "Hard to get out in one breath," I said. "We want a play of our own," Jannie said. "We want something where we can talk naturally and enjoy ourselves. With a good part for everybody and not much trouble over costumes, and funny. You're a writer," she said. "You write a play for us." "No," I said. "You just write it. We'll put in all the acting." I had a strong feeling that this is how Shakespeare must have started—his kids came around teasing him to write them a play with a good big part for everybody, and funny. I said that I had never written a play before, and that about the best I could do was dramatize a familiar fairy tale, trying to make it funny and to make the language and action as unstilted as I could. They thought that would be fine. Since their acting group included a couple of ten-year-olds, as well as several older children, I thought that a story like Hansel and Gretel might be a good choice, providing at least two parts for the younger ones, and because I have always been particularly resentful of Hansel and Gretel anyway. I feel strongly that two children who go around eating other people's houses ought to be spanked, not rescued. I thought it would be nice to see Hansel and Gretel get what was coming to them. After all, that witch probably paid taxes on her gingerbread house and had to put out just as much money as the rest of us for mending leaks in the roof and getting the place painted, and here these two kids come along and do a tremendous amount of damage and then go off blithely and live happily ever after. I decided that I had better not make the witch altogether sympathetic, because that might get all the fairy tale people after me, so I made her into a kind of progressive-type witch, full of new ideas about using frozen magic potions (you just drop them into boiling water) and earnestly keeping up with all the new inventions in witchcraft. I had to put in an enchanter, to accommodate an older boy in our cast, and I thought I might do well to make the enchanter a lazy, old-fashioned type, so that he and the witch could quarrel c[?]stantly about whose magic was better. I made Hansel and Gretel into the two most objectionable children I could imagine, whining and insolent and greedy. Then I set up for the mother and father a pair of bewildered, helpless parents, who wanted their children to be well-mannered and nice, but nothing seemed to help. The parents pointed out that they had joined the P.T.A. and the Little League and bought Girl Scout cookies and paid for tickets to the Junior Prom and given the children bicycles for Christmas and gone to the Class Play and helped out with Home Ec., and still the children were bad. They were just kind of mixed-up and tired parents, like all parents. I had a wonderful time writing it. Every time I thought of something my children do that I can't stand—and there's a lot of it—I put it in for Hansel and Gretel. As I went along I thought of a little song that Hansel and Gretel could sing; it went like this: You're mean... you're mean... You're bad... you're bad... You're a pig... you're a pig... I won't play with you. I found that it went quite nicely to a simple little tune, and as I wandered around the house picking things up I caught myself whistling it. I brought a carefully-typed copy of the play into the kitchen where my children were sitting around the table, occupying themselves with homework, crayons, and building blocks. "Here," I said, and fled. After a few minutes I could hear them laughing, and I thought complacently that they had come to the quarrel between the witch and the enchanter which comes early in the play, and I was glad they thought it was funny. Then I heard Jannie saying "Hey, listen to this, everybody," and she read, in a dismal, tearful voice, a line which went, "Children, we'll never get our work done today if you don't stop quarrelling..." "No, no," I said, hurrying into the kitchen. "Jannie, that line is spoken by the mother—she doesn't whine like that."

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