Shirley Jackson Might Have Been a Mommy-Blogger

Shirley Jackson might have been a part-time mommy-blogger, had she lived in the internet age. I think I was looking for We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the library and, as so often happens, they didn't have it, so I scooped up something else by the writer instead. In this case, it was Life Among the Savages, a memoir of her life raising three small children in Vermont. It is a direct ancestor of the current crop of mothering memoirs -- someone should put together a history of the genre -- and it shares their frequently jokey "if I didn't laugh, I'd cry" tone, a tone so different from that used in "The Lottery" that I had to check to make sure this was the same Shirley Jackson. The beginning sucked me in completely:

   Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without  children and without books, going on soundlessly in an apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch -- and as I say, I cannot think of a preferable life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told.
   I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living -- sandwich bags, typewriters, little wheels off things -- and marvel at the complexities of civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder, at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then -- this happening usually in the springtime -- I begin throwing things away, and it turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things, new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They can make new little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least faster than I can throw them away.

Very modern, isn't it, in its arch breeziness about wanting simplicity -- and not having it? The book was published in 1953.

Comments

[daysgoby]

I really, really didn't like We Have Always Lived In The Castle. REALLY didn't like.

But I loved (snorted my way through) Life Among The Savages. And I too did the doubletake. I hope Savages is her authentic voice.

[zan]

This is precisely what I love about Shirley Jackson: she can turn children into lovable ruffians ("Charles", Life Among the Savages) or horrific little monsters (The Sundial, The Road Through The Wall) with a flick of her pen. How fantastic to be able to do both.

And I love how she talks about smoking all the way to the hospital in the cab. Very 1953.

[genevieve]

HEH, my mother stopped smoking during her third pregnancy and started again in the labour ward.

Thanks so much for the reminder to look for this lady ASAP.

[babelbabe]

I read both of Jackson's family memoir type books and loved them. They are truly hilarious.

[Rona Maynard]

As a daughter of the 50s, when women smoked on the way to the delivery room (as one poster just remarked), I'm delighted to see the magnificent and underrated Shirley Jackson introduced to a new audience through her "mommy blogger" voice (how well put). On paper she created a rollicking life that contrasted sadly with the real one: alcoholism, lousy marriage and alienation in the small academic town where her professor husband was the star. I'm still sad for Shirley Jackson but I cheer for her creative revenge.

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