Book Review: Life Among the Savages

Title: Life Among the Savages

Author: Shirley Jackson

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (hardcover); Scholastic Book Services (paperback)

Date: 1953 (hardoover), 1968 (paperback)

Length: 236 pages

Quote: “We don’t have any Charrles in the kindergarten.”

This was, of course, the punch line to the section in which Shirley Jackson's first little "savage" went to kindergarten. Day after day, Laurie described the bad behavior of Charles, who behaved so badly that, when he was kept after school as a punishment, others stayed to watch him. Over time Charles settled down; the teacher said he was her helper. At the first P.T.A. meeting, the teacher reported that Laurie had had some problems at first, but now he was a fine little helper. The teacher must have had her hands full with that Charles, Shirley Jackson said sociably...

Of coure, even "Charles" was more naughty than bad. In most of the stories in this book the children aren't even naughty so much as they're seen through the tension and anxiety that were part of Shirley Jackson's cardiovascular disease. Jackson felt tense about interactions with adults and objects too. When she interviewed prospective cooks, for instance, one of them overplayed the interview: "Dishes. I love to wash dishes. If I didn't stop myself I could wash dishes all day long." 

Looking at the familiar Scholastic edition of my childhood, I remember noticing, even then, the oddly (it was meant to be comic) ambivalence the older generation displayed toward mine. The back jacket shrieks in all capitals, "Don't let kids get their hands on this book!" But it was a Scholastic book, marketed directly to children, at school...

I wasn't much older than Laurie when I first read the 1968 editions of Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, but I knew Laurie was nowhere close to "delinquency,' even when he was pretending to die from the effects of eating candy off the coffee table. The generation gap was exploited. In most families I knew, parents and children saw each other as allies. It was the commercial media that insisted we were all enemies. 

Shirley Jackson, even then, came across as prone to exaggerate her anxieties. I didn't know in 1968 that she had already died, "old," from what was considered an old person's disease, not even close to age fifty. Cardiovascular disease was poorly understood, often unrecognized in women back then. In the 1970s I had a relative, who wasn't much fun to visit but who bribed my parents to leave the siblings and me at her house some days, who had an aneurysm. I look back and can't remember much that she said that was not a textbook symptom of atherosclerosis. Nobody, not even Grandma Bonnie Peters, recognized her disease, though about the only she could have made it easier to recognize would have been to hang a sandwich board reading "I have atherosclerosis and will die before age 70" around her neck. Shirley Jackson was similar. People who had met her remembered her by her cardiovascular symptoms but apparently nobody ever thought that more exercise and less smoking might have increased her lifespan. 

What happened to the copies of her books I read when they were new? I don't remember. Thirty years later I found the same editions at a book sale. The "Charles" sequence had lsot all suspense and comic value for me because it was reprinted so many times. I'd found it in at least one anthology every year since 1972. The rest of the book was as funny as ever. I understood, now, what was really going on when such mundane events were described in such ominous terms. I thought Jackson had been awfully brave, not realizing how ill she was, writing out her anxiety and laughing at herself.