Shirley Jackson: Home as a Battlefield

Books on motherhood have always been written. What has happened is that the memory of the present is short - it is only memory of the present - and they have forgotten. They have been buried among hundreds of thousands of news and have been believed to be non-existent. But they have been there from the beginning. Because the writers, and especially the writers, have not been able to avoid, here and there, writing about what was happening around them while their children were growing up, and that is that, taking into account what has been given to the confinement of our profession, a reality is it has superimposed another since the beginning of time.

That is, while writing at home - think of the three children of Ursula K. Le Guin, or the daughter with whom Richard Brautigan went fishing, and even the baby who sways in his cuckoo in some moments in Paris it was a party , also by father Ernest Hemingway–, they lived together, like all of us today while we are teleworking, with children and often also with husbands, or wives who either wrote or did not leave the house as much as they would be expected to do. And how did that affect your work? Would it have been the same without that coexistence?

MORE INFORMATION

• The writing or the children?

• Shirley Jackson: 100 years of stories not to sleep

There are more or less illustrious examples in this regard, such as the story Couple of writers by the always advisable Raymond Chandler, in which there are no children but a couple of writers, he and his wife, despairing at a suffocating coexistence in which each one pretends draw more attention than the other - and in which, although the street is there to be trodden on, neither of them leaves the house, because the house is the castle of both of them, and only one can remain - but neither is as devourable as Life Among the Savages , by modern horror queen Shirley Jackson.

Published in 1953, this outrageous memoir - there is no page on which the reader is not invited to burst out laughing, or at the very least, to smirk complicit with the inexcusably unavoidable reality of the Jacksons - works, almost, like a novel by adventures in the style of My family and other animals , by Gerald Durrell, changing, yes, the powerful exterior, and the extravagant adventure of the family of zoologists for a leafy interior - that of the old family house of the writer, her 5,000 books , two cats, a dog - full of mother-to-child traps.

Thus, not only does Jackson relate the delivery of his second daughter, Sarah - affectionately called Sally, at the time when his two older brothers, Laurie and Jannie, made him eat all kinds of things when his mother did not look because she was, who she knows, trying to type something–, in which by the way, she was treated as a mere housewife by the nurse who attended her –she said up to three times, when she was admitted, that she was a writer, and the nurse corrected her: “ Housewife, ”she said. "No, writer," she said. "That is a housewife," said the nurse, "but her fireproof day to day.

The thing starts with the rent of the house in question, an old mansion that could have inspired any of his novels - especially, We have always lived in the castle , because it did not have as many corridors as that of The Curse of Hill House -, and that makes clear his obsession with space - it cannot be any house, it has to be a monstrous house - and the condition of refuge, and at the same time, of a maze in which to lose oneself, above all, mentally, which it confers on it. The Queen of Terror knew that he needed her on his part, he was going to spend more time on it, like everyone else today.

What was the influence of the battlefield in which, daily, your house became what you typed in your more or less dead moments if something like this is possible when you have four children? It would seem that the battlefield was what made his wit at the same time a shield against madness - his days, despite not leaving home, were the busiest, because wherever he was he was always late somewhere, including the Beckettian plays that her children staged and that had her as the only spectator - and the source of her apparently carefree, at times very funny and almost always playfully terrifying, or simply terrifying, literature.

Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter, at ten cents an hour, in the basement of a public library in the spring of 1950. He was also a desperate housewife - like Jackson, he had four children in his Anyway, all girls, and they required him all the time, because it was more fun playing with Dad than without him. It took exactly nine days to get the first draft ready, and another nine to complete the second. Until now, we could all be Ray Bradbury, but these days, the inability to leave home has made us Shirley Jackson.

Sometimes, the fact that there is no border between the familiar, the personal and the work brings forth a necessarily different self. Or would the houses have had the importance they have in Jackson's fantasy fiction, in which the multiple voices heard could be the infinite voices that came to the kitchen table while writing, had they not been his almost best friends? Like one more child, Jackson was only looking for a way out, but one that never left anyone out, one in which all its facets were welcome. "You never stop being a writer," she said. But neither of being a mother. Not a reader. Not everything else.

Now that everyone, writers and non-writers alike, is clearer than ever, perhaps we could take a look at, why not, The Night We All Had the Flu , one of the playfully frightening tales that inspired any given night at the Jackson, to discover how that border could never have existed, and in all probability perhaps never did, but we have insisted on building it, day by day, like someone building a wall that separates what we are. The story, by the way, is included in Selected Stories (Lowercase), and starts like this: "Everyone in our family is very fond of puzzle games."