Come Along with Me (SSC)

238 Pages·2013·1.54 MB·English

by  Jackson Shirley

penguin classics
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 novels—which
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—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. 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
penguin books
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne,
Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue,
Parktown North 2193, South Africa Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center,
27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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

Copyright © Shirley Jackson, 1948, 1952, 1960
Copyright © Stanley Edgar Hyman, 1944, 1950, 1962, 1965, 1968
Foreword copyright © Laura Miller, 2012
All rights reserved

“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.

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.

ISBN 978-1-10161605-5

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means
without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only
authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of
copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Carol Brandt
Contents

About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by LAURA MILLER
Preface by STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
COME ALONG WITH ME
FOURTEEN STORIES
Janice
Tootie in Peonage
A Cauliflower in Her Hair
I Know Who I Love
The Beautiful Stranger
The Summer People
Island
A Visit
The Rock
A Day in the Jungle
Pajama Party
Louisa, Please Come Home
The Little House
The Bus
THREE LECTURES, WITH TWO STORIES
Experience and Fiction
The Night We All Had Grippe
Biography of a Story
The Lottery
Notes for a Young Writer
Foreword
Few women with children and husband and household—however happy they
may be with all three—have 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 fun—anything but the stifling routine associated with
housewifery in the 1950s. 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 ties—those, in Jackson’s fiction, always seem