What derailed me yesterday wasn't a doorstop but a slim, quick book: I read Shirley Jackson's memoir of raising children, Life Among the Savages. I haven't read "The Lottery" since middle school, but I loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle and always intended to read more. Monday was her birthday, and a post on the Barnes & Noble blog gave chilly hints of her real life and made me curious to read the memoir.
Life Among the Savages begins when Jackson, husband, and two children are forced by high rents to exile themselves from New York City into the untamed wilderness of Vermont. By the end of the book, there are four children and the wilderness appears to have won. Memoirs of the terrors and trials of raising children still thrive these days as a genre, but in 1953 Jackson's was one of the first to tell these tales with such pointed humor, and certainly there aren't as many drinks, cigarettes, and sharp kitchen implements in the hands of most of today's memoir-writing moms.
It's also a blast to read, because its scattershot organization reflects the subject at hand. In yesterday's unintended absorption in the book, I was comforted by her praise of lists: "You can start from any given point on a list and go off in all directions at once, the world being as full as it is, and even though a list is a greatly satisfying thing to have, it is extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused on the subject at hand" (p. 79). "Extraordinarily difficult to keep it focused," indeed, in 1953; how much more so, then, in the age of Google? Like Umberto Eco, I'm a big fan of lists. (Eco's new book, tied to his show at the Louvre, looks interesting; here's an interview with Eco on the topic.) But I won't dive in to some scholarly analysis, which would end up with Foucault and Borges, because 1) it would take too long; 2) you wouldn't read it anyway; 3) I wouldn't actually know what I'm talking about; and 4) I don't want to analyze lists, I just want to appreciate them.
Another unexpected pleasure in Life Among the Savages: the section which begins on page 133 with "We are all of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles." Over the next ten pages, without pausing for narrative breath, Jackson develops a set-piece about one night's movements of the family (including the dog) and their accompanying blankets and bedside objects from bed to bed as everyone seeks a warm or cool or quiet spot to suffer "the grippe." It's a great parody of the story problems in logic which ask you to deduce who lives in the blue house and drives the red car and works for Mr. Green. In Jackson's puzzle, the question is "what became of the blanket from Sally's bed?" I don't know whether it's solvable or not, and I don't care.
For the first twenty pages, it also looked like Life Among the Savages would be to Vermont what The Egg and I is to the area hereabouts: a reminder of just how close we still are, in the 21st century, to the days of pioneer homesteading, both physically and culturally. I have family not too far from where Jackson lived, and those twenty pages do ring true—but alas, that's all there is.
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