Back in 2012, I read Jean Kerr’s best-known book, apparently turned into a beloved film, Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. She followed it in 1960 with The Snake Has All The Lines – a curious title that apparently comes from her son being cast as Adam in a school play about Eden, but complaining that the snake has all the lines.
Like the previous collection, a lot of The Snake Has All The Lines covers the experience of being a put-upon wife and mother – and, like that collection, it is episodic. The separate comic essays don’t have any overarching narrative, which makes her writing perhaps a little less satisfying to curl up with than something like Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson – but certainly very diverting to dip into. Or, if you’re doing A Book A Day In May, read in one rush.
Kerr is very pithy, and the lines she opens essays with are well-crafted – e.g. ‘I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.’ She is gifted at observational comedy about domestic life, and does it with a precision and rhythm to her sentences that is always enjoyable. What I will say, though, is that those observations have become truisms over the years. Even in 1960, I suspect it wasn’t the peak of freshness to say that children are a handful and given to chaos, or that husbands are absent-minded and a little bit useless – in the six or so decades since, most comic writers would choose to put a little bit more of a spin on it.
Here she is on married life:
When a man calls you from Tulsa, he invariably makes the mistake of calling either from a public bar or from his mother’s living-room. Neither setting is exactly conducive to a free exchange of ideas. There, within earshot of his fellow revellers or his mother, he can hardly say the one thing you want to hear, which is that he misses you terribly, it’s been a nightmare, a nightmare! and he’s never going to make a trip alone again. For that matter, you can’t tell him you miss him either, because the children are there with you and they become downright alarmed at any hint that their parents have preserved this degrading adolescent attachment so far into senility.
And here’s an example of her take on children:
I know that small children have a cetain animal magnetism. People kiss them a lot. But are they really in demand, socially? Are they sought after? Does anybody ever call on them on the telephone and invite them to spend the week-end on Long Island? Dot heir own grandmothers want them to spent the whole summer in Scranton? No. For one thing they bite, and then they keep trying to make forts with mashed potatoes.
It’s all very entertaining, if not the most original. But there is more variety in The Snake Has All The Lines than I remember there being in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. As well as wife-and-mother scenarios, Kerr is writing as a successful author and playwright – so there is an essay about dealing with bad reviews, for instance, and one about travelling with a show you’ve written. Most unusually of all, she dramatises Lolita and Humbert Humbert at marriage counselling, which I daresay I’d have understood better had I read more than one and a half pages of Lolita.
Kerr isn’t writing great literature and she isn’t pretending to be. But this is an example of a genre I love – self-deprecating domestic memoirs with an exaggerated tone and a clippy pace – and a very enjoyable example at that.
