Life Among the Savages

Table of Contents

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES

Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. She first received wide critical acclaim for her short story “The Lottery,” which was published in 1949. Her novels—which include
The Sundial, The Bird's Nest, Hangsaman, The Road through the Wall,
and
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(Penguin), in addition to
The Haunting of Hill House
(Penguin)—are characterized by her use of realistic settings for tales that often involve elements of horror and the occult.
Raising Demons
and
Life Among the Savages
are her two works of nonfiction.
Come Along With Me
(Penguin) is a collection of stories, lectures, and part of the novel she was working on when she died in 1965.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

 

First published in the United States of America by
Farrar, Straus and Young 1953
Published in Penguin Books 1997

 

Copyright Shirley Jackson, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 Copyright The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, 1953 Copyright renewed Lawrence Hyman, Joan Schnurer, Barry Hyman, and Sarah Webster, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981 All rights reserved

 

Portions of this book have appeared in other forms in
Charm, Collier's,
Good Housekeeping, Harper's, Mademoiselle, Woman's Day,
and
Woman's
Home Companion.
The section which was originally published as
“Charles” in
Mademoiselle
and
The Lottery
is included here at
the request of the author's older son.

 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 53–7087

ISBN : 978-1-101-54954-4

 

 

For the Children's Grandparents

O
UR 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 way of 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.

I remember the morning, long ago, when the landlord called. Our son Laurie was three and a half, and our daughter Jannie was six months old, and I had the lunch almost ready and the diapers washed, along with the little shirts and the nightgowns and the soakers and the cotton blankets, and they were all drying on the line (and I don't care what
any
one says, that's a morning's work, when you consider that I had also made brownies and emptied the ashtrays) and then the landlord called. He was a kindly man, and a paternal one, so that he asked first about my health, and my husband's health, and then he asked how was our boy? and how was the baby? and when I said that we were all fine, fine, he said that of course we were aware that our lease was up? I said well, no, we hadn't really known that our lease was up. So he said well, he supposed that we hadn't looked at the lease recently and I (wondering if that was the paper Laurie had torn up and eaten) said that it had been quite a while, really, since we sat down together and read over our lease. That was too bad, he said. Wasn't it, I said. Because, he said, his voice gentle, the apartment had been rented to someone else. After a minute I said rented? to someone
else?
Then I laughed and said what were
we
supposed to do—move? He said well, yes, we were supposed to do just that.

“Naturally,” he went on, “we could evict you if we wanted to.”

“You could?” I was thinking of letters to the president, appeals for the sake of our two small children. “We'd much rather you'd just move out,” he said.

“But where?”

He laughed genially. “Ask me another,” he said. “Apartments are mighty tough to find these days.”

“I suppose we could take a look around,” I said dubiously. Letters, I was thinking, sue them for the piece of plaster that fell on my husband while he was shaving: lawyers.

“We'll expect to take possession around May first,” he said.

“Today is March twenty-fifth,” I said.

“That's right,” he said. “Rent almost due,” and he laughed again.

The next day we got a letter saying that it was “first notice of warning to evict.” I began to think in terms of pouring boiling oil from the windows and barricading the doors with the dining room table. What made both of us even angrier was the fact that we had never had any intention of renewing our lease, but had planned vaguely on moving as soon as we found another place. “The very idea,” I told my husband indignantly, “renting this apartment to someone else without fixing that broken step. The one on the stairs.”

“Leave a note for the new people about the cockroaches,” my husband advised. He also advised strenuously against bringing suit for some undetermined reason (the piece of plaster? the neighbor's radio?) and said, patting me on the shoulder, that he knew how anxious I had been to find another place.

Our fondest dream had been to move to Vermont, to a town where a couple we knew had settled and from which they had written us glowing accounts of mountains, and children playing in their own gardens, and clean snow, and homegrown carrots, and now suddenly it looked overwhelmingly as though we moved either to Vermont or to a tent in the park. I called half a dozen city agents, and they all laughed as gaily as our landlord had laughed; “Got any relatives you could move in with?” one of them asked me.

Finally, two hardy adventurers making for unexplored territory, we left the children with their grandparents, got ourselves and our suitcases and our overshoes onto a train at the station, and set out, an advance scouting party, for the small town where our friends lived, and where the mountains were so high and the snow so clean. There was no doubt, we discovered, about the snow. Our city overshoes went in over their heads as we stepped off the train, and for the three days we were there we both went constantly with damp feet and small bits of ice melting against our socks.

One nice thing was, there were lots and lots of houses available. We heard this from a lady named Mrs. Black, a motherly old body who lived in a nearby large town, but who knew, as she herself pointed out, every house and every family in the state. She took us to visit a house which she called the Bassington house, and which would have been perfect for us and our books and our children, if there had been any plumbing.

“Wouldn't take much to put in plumbing,” Mrs. Black told us. “Put in plumbing, you got a real nice house there.”

My husband shifted nervously in the snow. “You see,” he said, “that brings up the question of . . . well . . . money.”

Mrs. Black shrugged. “How much would
plumbing
cost?” she demanded. “You put in maybe twelve, fifteen hundred dollars, you got a real nice house.”

“Now look, if we had fifteen hundred dollars we could give an apartment superintendent—” my husband began, but I cut in quickly, “You must remember, Mrs. Black, that we want to
rent.”

“Rent, did you?” said Mrs. Black, as though this proved at last that we were mere fly-by-nights, lookers at houses for the pleasure of it. “Well, if
I
was you folks, small children and all, well,
I'd
buy.”

“But money—” my husband said.

“Money?” said Mrs. Black scornfully. “Two, three thousand dollars.” She thought. “On the other hand,” she said brightly, “if you was to fix it up
yourselves
—set in the plumbing, do a little painting, fix a few things maybe, you might cut your price down considerable.”

She was looking directly at my husband as she said this, and he smiled weakly and nodded, obviously for that brief moment taken in by the notion that he might himself set in the plumbing. “You got to
figure
,” Mrs. Black pursued, “you put down maybe two, three thousand dollars, you get a first mortgage from Henry Andrews down to the bank, you sign to put in a few improvements—all you got to figure
there
is title, I think, and maybe equity, Henry Andrews can tell you just exactly
what.
Taxes, o'course. Insurance, you'd want, and then you figure heat and electric, and maybe you could get Bill Adams to put in the plumbing for you for less on account it's his wife's sister owns the house, and there you are. Ten, fifteen years, you got a real nice house here, and you
own
it. Other way, you'd still be paying rent.”

“But money–” my husband said.

Mrs. Black continued smoothly, “Other hand,” she said, “you might like the McCaffery house. Now
there's
one with plumbing.”

The McCaffery house may have had plumbing for all we ever knew; we could not get to it because the dirt road leading up to the top of the hill where the house sat was impassable with snow. “Have to clear
this
out some,” Mrs. Black said, as we all stood at the bottom of the hill looking up at the house.