"The Jolly Corner" (1908)

It's not his last story, but "The Jolly Corner" is a nice end-piece for Henry James. It's a ghost story, like The Turn of the Screw though more wistful, and again reverberates with the tensions of New World and Old—in this case, between a life lived in Europe or the States. Our hero, Spencer Brydon, left for Europe when he was 23. Now he is 56, returning to New York after a Jesus' age to deal with the properties that have supported him, including what he insists on calling "The Jolly Corner," the house in Manhattan where he was raised. He wonders what his life would have been if he'd stayed. He imagines an "alter ego" (James's italics), an ambitious and successful businessman, who seems to become ever more real as we go. In the wonderful (or exasperating) ambiguities of James, in the end it's not clear whether Brydon is alive or dead. It might work either way. It all turns on a nightly tour Brydon takes of his homestead, and a closed door that should be open. On such slender reeds are these things made. James's evasive allusive style is suited to a certain type of horror, where in many cases it's to the narrator's purpose to keep us in the dark, and blind. A lot of time is spent on that door. The path through three adjoining rooms is charted. We come away with a reasonable schematic in our heads for much of that section of the building. The room with the closed door is a strange architectural feature, and the door is the only access to it. Brydon is a man of habit and never shuts doors. Yet the door is shut. He is so filled with dread he cannot bring himself to open it. He takes his leave, then faints and falls, and comes to with his friend Alice Staverton cradling his head in her lap. Is it the afterlife? We'll never know. What's most haunting about "The Jolly Corner," its main charge for me, is the sense of a life that could have been, the road not taken, etc. This sense only increases and grows more complex as we age, growing apart by the vectors we have taken. We are many of us literally haunted by our own alter egos by the time we reach age 56. As it happens, I'm also someone who is a little haunted by the house I grew up in, much more so in fact than Brydon. He may have had it thrust on him, but I share his sense for the power of these physical locations, and not just in memory. They are places where ghosts dwell, and James is great at turning all that into a piece that is equally suggestive, mysterious, and powerful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 35 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)