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Authors: Shirley Jackson
Come Along with Me
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COME ALONG WITH ME
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
The New Yorker
in
1948
. Her novelsâwhich include
The Sundial
,
The Bird's Nest
,
Hangsaman
,
The Road Through the Wall
,
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, and
The Haunting of Hill House
âare 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. She died in
1965
.
STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
was born in Brooklyn in
1919
and married Shirley Jackson in
1940
, the year they both graduated from Syracuse University. Hyman was a literary critic, a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, and professor of literature at Bennington College, as well as a noted critic of jazz music. He died in
1970
.
LAURA MILLER
is a journalist and critic living in New York. She is a cofounder of Salon.com, where she is a senior writer. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Los Angeles Times
,
Time
magazine, and many other publications. She is the author of
The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
and
The Salon
.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors
(Penguin,
2000
). She lives in New York.
SHIRLEY JACKSON
Come Along with Me
classic short stories
and an unfinished novel
Edited by
STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
Foreword by
LAURA MILLER
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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press, Inc.,
1968
Published in Penguin Books
1995
This edition with a new foreword published
2013
Â
Copyright © Shirley Jackson,
1948
,
1952
,
1960
Copyright © Stanley Edgar Hyman,
1944
,
1950
,
1962
,
1965
,
1968
Foreword copyright © Laura Miller,
2012
All rights reserved
Â
“The Lottery” reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from
The Lottery
by Shirley Jackson; Copyright
1948
,
1949
by Shirley Jackson; first published in
The New Yorker
.
“The Summer People” first published in
Charm;
“A Cauliflower in Her Hair” in
Mademoiselle;
“Pajama Party” in
Vogue
. Other selections have appeared in
Harper's, The Ladies' Home Journal, New Mexico Quarterly, New World Writing
, and
The Saturday Evening Post
.
Â
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Some of these selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Â
ISBN
978-1-101-61605-5
Â
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
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For Carol Brandt
Foreword
Few women with children and husband and householdâhowever happy they may be with all threeâhave not fantasized at least once or twice about the sort of radical freedom achieved by Angela Motorman at the beginning of
Come Along with Me
, the novel Shirley Jackson was writing when she died in
1965
. Angela has buried her (unmourned) husband, Hughie, sold her house, auctioned off her belongings, and “erased my old name and took my initials off of everything” before leaving town with no particular destination in mind. She arrives in a city, invents a new name for herself, takes a room in a boardinghouse, and begins to give séances. At the age (and dress size) of forty-four, with no connections except to the dead, she is making herself up as she goes along.
Come Along with Me
was a late and very welcome literary child for Jackson. She lived with her husband, the critic and academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and their four children in a big, rambling, book-crammed house in North Bennington, Vermont, and was the commercially and critically successful author of, among other novels,
The Haunting of Hill House
(made into an excellent film in
1963
). Her short story “The Lottery” caused a sensation when
The New Yorker
published it in
1948
, provoking more letters than the magazine had received about any other piece. She had transformed her children's high jinks into a series of popular, lucrative, and utterly charming humorous essays that appeared in women's magazines and were collected in two books titled
Life Among the Savages
and
Raising Demons.
(“Pajama Party” and “The Night We All Had Grippe” in this volume are examples of these pieces; the child characters are based on and named after Jackson's own kids.) Jackson and Hyman had a lot of fascinating literary friends, including Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, and Dylan Thomas. Their lives, though sometimes disorderly, were also interesting and often funâanything but the stifling routine associated with housewifery in the
1950
s. But to judge from the “fine high gleefulness” with which Angela launches into the unknown, even Shirley Jackson knew what it was like to dream of chucking it all.
Come Along with Me
marked a significant point of evolution in Jackson's work. Previously, her main characters tended to be mousy, neurotic young women who hardly anyone noticed: wallflowers, caretaking daughters, fifth wheels. Angela Motorman, however, is more like her creator, a woman of substance, giving as good as she gets. Yet, as the writings collected here illustrate, even this brave new project hewed close to Jackson's long-standing concerns and motifs. The twentieth century's great artist of domesticity and its terrors, her persistent theme was the unspoken and unanticipated prices we pay to belong, whether to a family or to a community.
The fourteen short stories in this volume were selected from Jackson's previously uncollected fiction after her death by Hyman, who felt they were “those best showing the range and variety of her work over three decades.” The first, “Janice,” may have been a sentimental choice; it was printed in a campus magazine at Syracuse University during Jackson's sophomore year, and Hyman, when he read it, announced that he would marry its author. (At that point they had yet to meet.) The story is very short, almost sketchy, like a collection of notes, but it has many of the stylistic traits that would later become Jackson's signatures: the breathtaking confidence that she can pull off a tragic or mad character in a few strokes; the airy, vernacular dialogue that darts at ominous subtexts, then darts away; the precocious awareness that a suggestion is always more disturbing than a shock.
In part due to “The Lottery,” Jackson was and is sometimes referred to as a horror writer. The Shirley Jackson Awards, founded in
2007
, honor “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” published the preceding year. Stephen King lists Jackson as a major influence on his own work, although their approaches to the supernatural are very different; where King writes epics, Jackson carved exquisite cameos. Jackson, for her part, clearly believed that fear should sneak up on a reader from behind and manifest itself as quietly as a discreet tap on the shoulder. The hauntings in her fiction aren't often recognizable as such until the end, and only after you think about it a bit. In this, she's the link between Henry James, who pioneered the same type of highly psychologized ghost story, and contemporary writers as diverse and unclassifiable as Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, and Neil Gaiman. It is her ability to link the homely and the uncanny, the cozy and merciless, that has made her literary vision unforgettable.
Then there are the houses: Jackson's women are always arriving at a big house, or trying to get out of one. Angela Motorman may have jettisoned the place she lived with Hughie, but in no time she's ensconced a new establishment, the boardinghouse presided over by the simultaneously hospitable and mercenary Mrs. Faun. Like Louisa in “Louisa, Please Come Home,” Angela seems more comfortable with the transactional relationship between landlady and tenant than she is with family tiesâthose, in Jackson's fiction, always seem to be secured with razor wire.
The impression that menace lurks in life's most familiar precincts, that intimate relations are filled with mortal peril, is the defining mood in the stories collected here. The helpful townfolk of “The Summer People,” the nice little old ladies from next door in “The Little House,” the upright minister father in “I Know Who I Love”âall are out to get the protagonists. Escape is just another a dangerous illusion, not least because without our old tormentors, identity itself can come unmoored. The housewife in “The Beautiful Stranger” rejoices in the belief that the man who comes home to her one day is not, thank God, the husband “who enjoyed seeing me cry.” But if he's not John, then can she be Margaret? Is she really entitled to another, better life? Among the best of the sinister wonders in this collection is “The Visit,” a variation on a romance or fairy tale, in which the big beautiful country house, a catalog of marvel-filled rooms presided over by a handsome prince, is actually a trap. There's a crazy old lady in the tower, and she seems to be you.
Then there's “The Lottery,” a story that has been freaking out readers for decades, with its depiction of a folksy New England town (that quintessential touchstone of American values) routinely turning on one of its own. Jackson's amused and amusing account of the initial response to “The Lottery,” “Biography of a Story,” shows that the letters forwarded to her by
The New Yorker
only confirmed her sardonic view of human nature and social relationships. You might assume that the readers of
The New Yorker
would be cultivated, or at least genteel, she implies, but think again: “What they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.” In an era before Internet comments threads, Jackson's correspondents gave her a creepily prescient intimation of just how much of the reading public is “gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at.”
Angela Motorman hasn't freed herself from people like this, but then who could? They are everywhere. She has, however, finally gotten the upper hand. She doesn't care if her neighbors pick over her belongings at auction, give her attitude on a streetcar, charge her for the tea and cookies she assumed were offered in friendship. She has her “fine high gleefulness” and (as she mentions more than once) plenty of money. She knows where she stands. Her voiceâjaunty, colloquial, and rich in black humorâis Jackson's. Unlike Flannery O'Connor's (to invoke a writer of similar temperament whom Jackson admired greatly), it is a voice less celebrated today than it ought to be. But its influence has never died out, and a slow-burning Jackson revivalâheralded by the recent inclusion of her work in the Library of America seriesâcontinues to grow. Where Jackson would have taken that voice next in
Come Along with Me
remains unknowable. Angela Motorman might have pulled a message from her out of the ether, but she too, alas, is gone before her time.
LAURA MILLER
