Anyone know where we were going with Shirley Jackson?

Cafe Society
1

I was recently rereading Come Along With Me, specifically the unfinished novel, and wishing I knew what Shirley Jackson planned to do with it.

(Synopsis: Forty-four-year-old widow stashes her late husband’s paintings in the barn [we learn he was a lousy painter, but he might want them back], sells her house, travels by train to a new city, takes a room in a boarding house owned by another widow, has a seance but finds her clients too cheap, and decides to try shoplifting [ending up with a set of birth announcements]. We also learn that as a child she would see things no one else could see, sometimes rooms full of things. And that, sadly, is pretty much as far as we get.)

2

Anyone? If no one has a well-researched response or educated guess, idle speculation is fine. Hell, just pop in with a cat picture and I’ll be happy.

3

It’s hard to tell without having read it, but based just on what you said, maybe her child is going to be her husband reborn - how else could he, deceased, get his paintings back?

4

Was she depressed at her husband’s death, or relieved?

Who’s the medium in the seance – our widow or the other lady?

Is there any doubt her husband is dead? Does she say how he died?

The theft of the birth announcements probably is a sign of regret that she and her husband didn’t have children.

5

Thank you! I feel much better seeing someone posted!

I don’t think Mrs. Motorman was pregnant. I probably should have mentioned the birth announcements were an apparently random item meant for her landlady who also is probably not pregant. (She had already failed in her attempts to take a candle and a bottle of perfume; it appears the birth announcements were something she was able to grab and stash.)

As for the other questions, she seemed maybe just a bit relieved by her husband’s death. She (not her landlady) was the medium at the seance. Her husband’s cause of death was not given. Seeing as another Shirley Jackson novel (We Have Always Lived In The Castle) had a narrator whose entire family had mysteriously been poisoned after someone put arsenic in the sugar, there is really no telling what exactly did him in. I think he was actually was dead, though. If you’re a medium, it would probably make perfect sense to make preparations in case your late husband came back for his paintings.

Thank you again for your speculations!

6

I’d be curious as to why she wants to contact her dead husband, and I think it’s important to know how he died.

The title “Come Along With Me” is kinda spooky. (Shades of the classic “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.)

Was he a suicide? Does she think he wants her to join him? Who is coming to whom? Is the reader coming along with her, or is she making her way to her husband? Rhetorical questions, and we’ll never know the answer.

No clue about the shoplifting. It could show she’s coming unbalanced, or that she’s taking risks in a new life. If she was a homebody, unhappy, stifled, always followed the rules, shoplifting is a thrill that won’t get you in as much trouble as some.

7

Well, I didn’t get to exercise the Ball much in the last NaNo thread, so let me see what shakes out for this. (Note, this is unlikely to be anything like what Jackson had in mind, it’s just a Bad Plot I might use if handed these scraps and had to run with them.)

The things the widow saw as a child, plus whatever real mediumistic abilities she may seem to have, are alternate outcomes, alternate worlds. “Ghosts” of what might have been. Her husband wasn’t much before he died, and now he’s even less, but he could have been more, or she could have married someone else. Frustrated by the wasted potential of her life, she’s chasing those ghosts, trying to find a way into a world where her life is not so empty–one with a still-living version of her husband she could be happy with, perhaps. Or just a more exciting one.

She’s reviewing choices she and others made in life, and trying to change her life to “correct” them. She moved to a city she believes she would have ended up in, had she made a different choice somewhere along the line. She tries to steal seemingly random objects because her visions suggest that she would have had those things in the life she’s trying to reach.

Eventually–preferably about when the reader will conclude she’s just crazy–she will succeed. She’ll manage to walk through just the right place at precisely the time her alternate self would have, wearing and carrying the same items, and take a sudden turn into her new/old life. She finds her husband alive, and better in many ways. She has grown children, and a grandchild on the way (hence the birth announcements). It may not be a perfect life, but it’s about the best she could have hoped for.

From there, the possibilities diverge, depending on what sort of story it is. It can’t stay where it is, of course–too upbeat for Jackson, I’d say.

  1. Scene ends with her holding her grandchild. Next scene has the landlady finding her dead in her room, smiling.

  2. She and her “new” husband are killed together in an accident of some sort. (She could only see that the alternate present was better than hers, not what its future held.)

  3. She didn’t just step into an alternate world, she traded places with her alternate self, who is now trapped in the “real” timeline…and understands what has happened. She knows she has no real chance of switching back, so instead she starts making adjustments that push the widow’s stolen life farther from reality. It starts to unravel, pieces of her past simply disappearing, leaving her more alone than ever. Eventually, she disappears herself.

Final scene is of the man who might have been her husband. He’s in a reverie, putting the last few brushstrokes on a portrait of a middle-aged woman. It’s not a very good portrait, but he smiles at it anyway. It’s not that bad, for a portrait done with no model.

8

Balance, that works for me. Well done!