One of my favorite books while growing up was Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, a chronicle of an unusual mother raising four boisterous children in a decrepit house in rural Vermont. Since the book is so humorous, I didn't realize that the author also wrote horror stories until I was in high school and read "The Lottery," which is Jackson's most famous story about a small town that turns against someone in a brutal and shocking way.
According to the Bennington, Vermont, Village Website:
On a bright spring morning in 1948, she walked down the Prospect hill with a baby stroller for a round of village errands. An hour or so later, Shirley Jackson pushed the stroller up the hill with newspapers, the mail, groceries -- and a story in mind. Once home, she set her toddler into the playpen and wrote "The Lottery" in less than two hours. It was posted to her agent that evening, and published in The New Yorker three weeks later (June 28, 1948).
The story created an immediate uproar. "The Lottery" describes a communal rite in a tidy Yankee village quite like the author's own. As generations of readers were shocked to learn, community order in the fictional village is nourished by solstice blood. The New Yorker's inbox was filled with complaints and subscription cancellations. Shirley Jackson became a national sensation.
Jackson is also known for her creepy novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle, so it probably comes as a surprise to some readers that she had a very domesticated life as an eccentric stay-at-home mother married to a snarky college professor.
In Life Among the Savages, and again in the sequel, Raising Demons, the voice is not that of the perfect mother stereotype of the 50s and 60s - her children and critics alike agree on that point. According to her biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, which I highly recommend, Shirley drank every afternoon, often lost track of just where her children were, and was surely not the world's best housekeeper - but then she never claimed to be. In some ways she reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men, classically educated and intelligent, leaning towards plump after childbearing, definitely living in the over-sized gothic house. But unlike the rather shallow and perfectly coiffed Betty, as well as the Donna Reeds and Mary Tyler Moores depicted on TV at that time as motherly stereotypes, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only woman at that time in Bennington Vermont who also had a job that paid money. She was a writer. And she was a famous writer of unusual talent - the Stephen King of her day. Yes she made tuna casserole, sorted socks and cleaned out drawers, but then she would sit down at a typewriter, light a cigarette, and write amazing stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's.
Pages from Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
About one thing there's no doubt: Shirley Jackson enjoyed the hell out of being a mother, and she was rather ahead of her time in writing down exactly what her children were saying and doing, no matter how odd or unnerving that was. She wasn't afraid of being honest, so her dialogue is timeless, and that makes these stories of family life refreshing even today.
...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.
...There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.
...From the girl's room, small voices rose in song and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was to hear a brother and two sisters playing affectionately together; then, suddenly, the words of the song penetrated into my hot mind, and 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.
...Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting "O-U-T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea, with a dirty dishrag turned inside out" . . .
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