This is dedicated to the one I.....

In a review of the new Library of America edition of Shirley Jackson’s work in Slate, Laura Shapiro duly notes that the series includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, and Eudora Welty, but then goes on to ask: “James Thurber and no Dorothy Parker? Alexander Hamilton and no Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Manny Ferber on film and no M.F.K. Fisher on food? I know, I know, it’s all women’s fault, too many kitchen tables and broken engagements, not enough whales and wars – which is why it is such a pleasure to welcome Shirley Jackson’s work into the ranks of chunky, black-covered books with pages as thin as strudel dough….Jackson took that kitchen table and ran with it.”

I’m wondering if high school juniors are still reading “The Lottery” in their language arts class and if that is still blowing their minds with its portrait of the lethal undertow of the currents of tradition and social conformity in a picture-perfect small town. Knowing her for that, and for The Haunting of Hill House I was surprised to discover Jackson’s Life Among the Savages which shares stories of raising four children in a rambling pile of a house in a Vermont town -- unlike the haunted houses of her stories, this one seems to share its secrets gladly, cuing its inhabitants on where to hang the wash in wintertime and such. Life Among the Savages includes the most perfect story “The Night We All Had the Grippe” which speaks of that fateful night by depicting the constant circulation of sick, solace-seeking family members between different beds with blankets, pillows, glasses of juice, jiggers of brandy, cigarettes, and the family dog in tow, presented as an exercise in logic.

Our household paperback edition of Life Among the Savages fell apart from repeated rereadings, so I’m constantly on the lookout for other copies at secondhand book stores, for myself and for others contemplating or experiencing parenthood, since it strikes me as sharing what really should be contained between the pages of all those tomes with titles like What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I found “The Night We All Had the Grippe” in the posthumous collection Come Along With Me, which was edited by Jackson’s husband and which appeared three years after her death from cancer. At the end of his introduction, he thanks “my present wife…for help in assembling, selecting, and editing the contents of the book,” which struck me as a bit…off, in a very Shirley Jackson kind of way.

This kind of contemplation/speculation about the baroque dynamics of authors’ personal lives is the kind of thing that the folks associated with the school of new criticism tried to wring out of literary analysis; here, one might turn to Jackson’s essay on “Experience and Fiction” where she notes that she wishes to quarrel with a statement made by a young writer that a particular experience “cannot be improved upon because that is the way it really happened. The only way to turn something that really happened into something that really happens on paper is to attack it in the beginning the way a puppy attacks and old shoe. Shake it, snarl at it, sneak up on it from various angles.” A strict formalist would say that to dwell on the life of an author would be to create a frame for a work that takes your attention away from the actual work on the page.

I’m also thinking of the desire to know more about an author’s life as part of a drive to think about the interrelations between stories, that to understand something about another’s experiences – the bad batch of strudel dough, the bedtime ritual, the broken engagements – that may open one’s imagination rather than shut it down, the way that I am forever intrigued by the life evoked in M.F.K. Fisher’s dedication to her book With Bold Knife & Fork: “For my grandmother, born Mary Frances Oliver, July 14, 1838, Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland; died Mrs. Bernard David Hobrook, April 15, 1920, Whittier, California, U.S.A”