.
"Our house is old, noisy and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books . . ."
This is the beginning of the curiously powerful--and stealth-assault funny--LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES (1952), memoirs of a Mommy, a Daddy, and a powerhouse-ful of children who give up post-World War II's overcrowded Manhattan housing market for roomier digs in a remote Vermont town. These are certainly life-with-kids family memoirs of the late 1940s and early 1950s, but to leave it at that would miss the point--like saying that Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is an anthropological study of a ritualistic New England town, or that THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a treatise on rafting the Mississippi River before the Civil War.
The author of LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES is, in fact, Shirley Jackson, and this is the first half of her two comic novels about life with small children. (The latter half being the later, and unfortunately more difficult to find RAISING DEMONS, published in 1957.) I'm not revealing too much to pass on that the hick town just happens to be Bennington, Vermont, the one with the all-female college; and that the harried Papa taught there. And when Mommy climbed into bed late at night "with a mystery" there's a good chance she was working on one of her own stories and a portable typewriter, a pack of cigarettes and a snifter of brandy climbed into bed with her.
In LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES, even the most please-don't-eat-the-daisies events usually hide a shiv or a shiver somewhere amidst the sitcom. When the financially strapped family scrapes up enough cash for some day help, they interview and hire an escaped felon; later they tangle with a motorcycle mama, the ultimate Effie Klinker of negative IQ, and an over-the-top fundamentalist who frosted her cookies with "Repent, Sinner." Not to mention: "From the girls' room, small voices rose in song, and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was," reminisces la Jackson. "[Just later] I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. 'Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider,' was what they were singing."
Maybe it's just the mixed blessings of heredity--and all those thousands of books--that the marriage of a college professor and a celebrated author would produce a growing family of kids so bright, inquisitive, creative, and, um, let's call it individualistic. "I frequently call [daughter Jannie] Anne and her father very often calls her Jean. Her brother calls her Honey, Sis, and Dopey, Sally calls her Nannnie, and she calls herself, variously, Jean, Jane, Anne, Linda, Barbara, Estelle, Josephine, Geraldine, Sarah, Sally, Laura, Margaret, Marilyn, Susan, and--imposingly--Mrs. Ellenoy. The second Mrs. Ellenoy. . . [M]y husband . . . is addressed in all variants of father from Pappy to Da, even--being a man not easily thrown off balance--Mr. Ellenoy." Son Laurie was so incensed by his temporary amnesia following his bicycle's crash with a car that he made the ambulance driver run HOME with the lights and siren on, "an extremely proud Jannie sitting beside him and traffic separating on either side."
Was life fair to Shirley Jackson? Well, she did produce (and by this book's end) four radiant children, two boys and two girls, all spaced an even three years apart. And she hung her laundry in the basement to dry, just like her neighbors told her to, after the backyard clothes line had flung it indignantly to the ground several times. But the nurses at the hospital were SO cross at her for yelling when she was in deep labor with Sally. And she got blacklisted by the PTA when Jannie said there was a woman at the door who wanted a dollar and Shirley, upstairs painting, assumed it was just another of Jannie's invisible friends . . .
Sadly, Shirley Jackson, person and author, later on became too dependent on chocolate, liquor, cigs and even amphetamines and did not live to see her fiftieth birthday. But while she was alive she gave us a treasury of suspense and horror fiction. Equally worth celebrating, I think, are LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES and RAISING DEMONS. Funny as Hell, and occasionally funny like Hell. My lit-chat group ran into LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES two years ago and despite initial misgivings based on its genre, unanimously loved it.
