Recent Reading: Life Among the Savages

 

I am continuing my dive -- I don't think it can be considered a deep dive after the second book -- into the work of Shirley Jackson. I have seen the movie Shirley (fictional and only loosely based on her life), the anthology Let Me Tell You, and, now, I have finished her book Life Among the Savages. 

Here, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we might call the book a memoir, although I do not think such a term was in vogue when Jackson's book was originally published in 1953. So the book is much more of a collection of narratives about her life as a wife and mother (who happens to also be an author) rather than practical advice for other mothers or an autobiography, strictly speaking. 

And, about the fact that Jackson was a published author, that seemed to be a difficult idea for people to accept. When Jackson checks into the hospital to deliver her third child, the admitting clerk asks her occupation. Jackson says author and housewife. The clerk says something like, "I'll just put housewife."

It is curious to see some of the social changes in the last 70 years:

Her husband was definitely NOT encouraged to attend labor and delivery when she had her third child. And, on the way to the hospital, to deliver her third child, Jackson talks about smoking a cigarette.  Jackson does mention television once or twice in the book, but it seems to hardly exist in the Jackson home. I get the impression that it was not watched very much -- a very different situation from my own family in the 1970s and 1980s. When she has some free time at the end of the day, and there are only a few minutes of such time, Jackson likes to try to make some progress on a mystery novel or story. Yes, she tried the end the day by reading a book.

Life Among the Savages is mostly about the challenges of raising small children in Bennington, Vermont in the early 1950s. Jackson has two children at the start of the book and four by the time the book ends. 

Here Jackson describes an incident with her son riding a bicycle.

Two days before his eighth birthday, Laurie rode his bike around a bend, directly into the path of a car. I can remember with extraordinary clarity that one of the people in the crowd which gathered handed me a lighted cigarette, I can remember saying reasonably that we all ought not to be standing in the middle of the road like this, I can remember that high step up into the ambulance. When they told us at the hospital, late that night, that everything was going to be all right, we came home and I finished drying the breakfast dishes. Laurie woke up in the hospital the next morning, with no memory of anything that had happened since breakfast two days before, and he was so upset by the thought that he had ridden in an ambulance and not known about it that the ambulance had to be engaged again to bring him home two weeks later, with the sirens screaming and an extremely proud Jannie sitting beside him and traffic separating on either side (p. 156).

When he returns to school a couple of weeks later, Laurie is convinced he remembers everything.

We entered  the classroom in triumph; Laurie threw open the door and stood for a moment in the doorway before advancing with a swagger Cyrano might have envied. "I'm back," he said into the quiet of the spelling lesson....

"-- And I guess there were five hundred people there," he was saying, "they came tearing in from all over. And the street -- you oughta seen the street -- covered with blood --"...

"--And my good shirt, they had to cut it off me, ten doctors, and there was so much blood on it they had to throw it away because it was all cut to pieces and bloody. And I went in an ambulance with the sireen and boy! did we travel. Boy!"...

"And my mother fainted," he was saying, "and my father ..."(pgs 162-163).

Jackson ends the book describing her family's reaction to the newest member of the family -- a baby boy.

"Is that it you're carrying?" Laurie demanded sternly, "that little thing?"

"Did you bring it?" Jannie insisted.

"Come indoors and I'll show you," their father said.

They followed him into the living room, and stood in a solemn row by the couch. "Now don't touch," their father said, and they all nodded together. They watched while he carefully set the bundle down on the couch and unwrapped it.

Then, into the stunned silence which followed, Sally finally said, "What is it?"

"It's a baby," said their father, with an edge of nervousness to his voice, "it's a baby boy and its name is Barry."

"What's a baby? Sally asked me.

"It's pretty small," Laurie said doubtfully, "Is that the best you could get?"

"I tried to get another, a bigger one," I said with irriatation, "but the doctor said this was the only one left."

"My goodness," said Jannie, "what are we going to do with that? Anyway," she said, "you're back."

Suddenly she and Sally were both climbing onto my lap at once, and Laurie came closer and allowed me to kiss him swiftly on the cheek; I discovered that I could reach around all three of them, something I had not been able to do for some time.

"Well," Laurie said, anxious to terminate this sentimental scene, "so now we've got this baby. Do you think it will grow?" he asked his father.

"It's got very small feet," Jannie said. "I really believe they're too small." 

"Well, if you don't like it we can always take it back," said their father.

""Oh, we like it all right, I guess," Laurie said comfortingly. "It;s only that I guess we figured on something a little bigger" (pgs. 224-225).

At least for me, Among the Savages reminded me of the work of Erma Bombeck. Bombeck was a popular name in American culture when I was young, now I think she is largely forgotten.

 

Jackson's narratives are much longer than the ones I remember Erma Bombeck writing twenty or thirty years later in books like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. Bombeck's book was published in 1976 and I remember my mother reading this book. At least I remember seeing this book sitting in the bathroom for weeks at a time. However, now that I have done a little research, I see that Bombeck's book was probably a collection of her syndicated newspaper columns -- so that explains whey they tend to be shorter pieces than Jackson's.