Life Among the Savages

Life Among the Savages is a domestic memoir by Shirley Jackson about raising her family in rural Vermont.

Jackson opens by introducing her crowded, noisy household, filled with children, books, and domestic clutter. She describes this way of life as one she and her husband fell into inadvertently, and while she cannot imagine anything she would prefer, she has had to make many compromises. The memoir begins in earnest when their New York City landlord called to inform them that their apartment lease had expired and the unit had been rented to someone else. At the time, Jackson's son Laurie was three and a half, and her daughter Jannie was six months old. Though the couple had vaguely planned to move, they were furious at being forced out. City rental agents offered no help, and the family's dream of relocating to Vermont became their only option.

Jackson and her husband left the children with grandparents and traveled to Vermont to house-hunt. They encountered a series of comically unsuitable properties: houses without plumbing, houses inaccessible in snow, a house priced at $50,000, and even a barn still occupied by two cows and a tractor. Mrs. Black, a local woman, repeatedly urged them to buy rather than rent, but by the second day they were desperate. A tip from the local grocer led them to the Fielding house, the third-oldest in the township, built around 1820 with four massive white pillars across its front. The house had stood empty for four years since the last Fielding occupant died there. Inside, they found a dusty kitchen table set with a cup and two petrified doughnuts, which deeply unsettled Jackson. She spent two weeks insisting she would never live there. Sam Fielding, the cousin who managed the property, renovated the house and offered it at $50 a month, then lowered the price to $40 when the family did not respond. Jackson's husband, feeling guilty, wrote back accepting $50.

Jackson arrived by train with the children to find the house transformed: newly wallpapered, scrubbed clean, fitted with a new electric stove and refrigerator. Their city furniture spread thinly through the large rooms, and the old furniture that came with the house seemed to settle into its preferred spots, resisting rearrangement. Over the first year, the family adjusted to small-town life. Laurie entered nursery school, Jannie took her first steps, and the seasons cycled through Christmas trees, leaf-raking, and sledding.

When Laurie began kindergarten, he came home daily with stories about a misbehaving classmate named Charles, who hit the teacher, threw chalk, and yelled so loudly that a first grader was sent to intervene. "Charles" became a household byword for bad behavior. At a Parent-Teacher Association (P.T.A.) meeting, Jackson eagerly sought out Charles's mother but could not find her. Laurie's teacher revealed there was no Charles in the kindergarten: Laurie had invented the character to mask his own misbehavior.

Jackson's husband bought an air gun, ostensibly to deal with a rat in the cellar, triggering a chain of domestic disasters. When the cat Ninki brought a chipmunk into the kitchen, Jackson's husband tried to shoot it but accidentally fired through the kitchen window, letting the chipmunk escape through the broken glass. When Ninki later brought in a live bat, Jackson fled to the porch while her husband stalked it, knocking over a lamp and the fireplace andirons. Ninki caught the bat herself, and Jackson confiscated the gun.

The memoir follows the rhythms of domestic life across several years. Jackson reflects on how housewives think in lists, tracing the tangential logic of her own thought patterns as a compliment about a neighbor's kitchen linoleum branches into digressions about dirt, bathroom tiles, and demitasse cups. She recounts the birth of her third child, Sally, with characteristic humor: She heated coffee in a frying pan while in active labor and endured the admissions clerk who recorded her occupation as "housewife" rather than "writer."

With three children, the household grew more chaotic. Jackson describes disastrous household helpers: Hope, who made excellent fried chicken but disappeared after one week with her salary and Jackson's overshoes, turning out to be wanted for grand larceny; Amelia, who baked cookies decorated with "Sinner, repent" in pink icing; and Phoebe, who arrived daily on a motorcycle but vanished to Kansas City. Laurie's persistent questioning about why the family had no car led Jackson to learn to drive. She took 10 lessons and passed her test despite stalling on a hill. They bought a used car, but a mechanic named Tony identified an escalating series of repairs that required borrowing money.

Jackson captures the shifting identities within her household. Jannie adopted the persona of "Mrs. Ellenoy," a woman who had inherited seven stepdaughters all named Martha from the former Mrs. Ellenoy, who died in a sword fight with her husband. The shifting names caused confusion when Jackson scolded the wrong identity. Jackson presents "the Great Grippe Mystery," in which the whole family fell ill with influenza and spent a night migrating among bedrooms, everyone waking with someone else's belongings; a blue patchwork quilt from Sally's crib vanished and was never found.

Two days before his eighth birthday, Laurie rode his bicycle around a bend into the path of a car. He woke in the hospital with no memory of the accident, a concussion, and a broken hand. He was so upset at having ridden in an ambulance without knowing it that the ambulance was hired again to bring him home with sirens screaming. During recovery, he interrogated Jackson about every detail with obvious relish and returned to school a month later embellishing the story with 10 doctors and a fainting mother.

Jannie entered first grade under her formidable teacher Mrs. Skinner, whose rigid opinions reshaped family life. Mrs. Skinner declared paper napkins vulgar, cats unsanitary, and men with hands in their pockets improper. Jannie relayed each pronouncement with unwavering authority, policing the household until Laurie fled the dinner table. Jackson's husband attended Parent's Day to confront Mrs. Skinner, who praised Jannie as charming and refined. He returned to the car and told his family that curiosity is unwomanly. Within two weeks, Jannie contracted measles, and upon recovery, Mrs. Skinner's influence had evaporated.

Meanwhile, Jackson's husband and Laurie took up coin collecting, which gradually consumed the family's finances. A package arrived containing 150 assorted coins and 100 counterfeit coins, but the boxes broke in transit, mixing them indistinguishably. As the family awaited a fourth child near Christmas, friends organized a betting pool on the baby's arrival date. Jackson visited the bank to negotiate a loan from Mr. Andrews, a skeptical banker. While she waited, the bank's Santa Claus lavished promises of bicycles and dolls on Jannie and Sally. When Jackson rushed to see Mr. Andrews, she discovered that Santa, now behind his desk, was Mr. Andrews himself, who selected her loan slip with a familiar agate eye and asked what brought her in again so soon.

The memoir closes with the birth of Jackson's fourth child, a boy named Barry. The three older children waited on the front porch. Jackson's husband unwrapped the baby on the living room couch, and Sally asked, "What is it?" Laurie examined the baby doubtfully: "Is that the best you could get?" Jackson told them the doctor said this was the only one left. After greeting Barry, Laurie drifted off to examine coins with his father, pausing to offer his mother a consolation: "I guess it will be nice for you, though. Something to keep you busy now we're all grown up."