“The Jolly Corner” by Henry James is an examination of the poetics of personalized space, a meditation on how our old haunts can be so psychologically charged that they possess a sort of daemonic force. Maybe you can’t go home again, but even if you can, this tale warns, you probably should not. This short story also muses on the misgivings we all feel about whether or not we are the person we were “meant to be.” What about the better version of ourself that didn’t make it through, that fell through the metaphysical cracks? Is “The Jolly Corner” actually a ghost story, as it is often described? Well, it’s a sideways ghost story. That is, if we can count the tale of a doppelganger’s emergence as a bona fide ectoplasmic thriller, then yes, it is.
The theme, the crux of the tale, is the contingency of identity itself. The narrator of “The Jolly Corner” is haunted not by any “ordinary ghost” but rather a version of himself that he comes to believe exists in some parallel universe. [SPOILER ALERT] The protagonist ultimately experiences a strong sense of depersonalization which may or may not be attributable to a supernatural occurrence. Perhaps this is actually what brings his doppelganger into “existence.” I use scare quotes because one is ultimately unsure of the reality of the double’s manifestation in the old house. The story leaves open the question of whether or not anything supernatural has actually occurred. Readers familiar with James’ The Turn of the Screw will remember the author used the same approach in that novella. Nothing which is related to us is certain veracity, since the narrator of “The Jolly Corner” is demonstrably unreliable. He admits as much, and even tells us that he is deliberately cultivating an alternate sort of perceptual schema by spending nearly half his earthly hours wandering nocturnally through the expanse of a vacant mansion. He goes on a strange diet of the liminal, teaching himself to see shadows within shadows in the darkened house. He is, one senses, on a ghost diet.
Spencer Brydon has retained his family home while living abroad, an ersatz European for decades, but has not rented it. Indeed, it is wholly empty, sans furnishings, a shell of a mansion. Now that he has returned to New York, he starts to haunt this former home, visiting it alone, preferring the twilight hours and late nights. All of the members of his immediate family, including his siblings, are dead and long buried. He is a solitary figure who doesn’t seem to overmuch mind his solitariness. He spends long hours moving through the darkness of his familial estate, its fertile emptiness. He carries a small source of light. Brydon has begun to be haunted by an image of a man he might have been, had he lived a different sort of life. This alter ego begins to take on the force of a possession. He searches constantly for this other man throughout the house. Many nights he walks his rounds like a security guard, hoping to catch a glimpse of this doppelganger he is sure will materialize. An inner obsession is projected into an outer haunting. The house lying in abeyance seems to be complicit in this fantasy, a weird abettor.
This work of fiction is yet another example of a tale wherein James successfully redefines the very concept of the ghost. He was after the quintessence. The flower is nice, but how much more so is the attar. James was fascinated by how we manufacture ghosts, how we give them substance and how we texturize them. What sort of nourishment are they, really? His methodology is not that far afield of phenomenological analysis. Henry James, William James. They really are two sides of a coin.
Here the protagonist enters the empty mansion on one of his many nocturnal visits:
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? — in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner — feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them — before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.
One has to wonder to what degree this particular ghost story is autobiographical excoriation. Here, the facts of the author’s life roughly correlate with those of the expatriate protagonist. One wonders whether or not this is the punctilious Mr. James questioning his lifelong vocation as author.
Jamesian Ekphrasis Dept.: A really beautiful series of etchings-engravings by American artist Peter Milton, inspired by this short story, was released in a very limited edition in 1971. You can see Milton’s stunning portfolio here: https://www.davidsongalleries.com/art...
It is heartening to see the surreal liberties Milton took with his elaborations of James’ prose into new imagery. The fantastic scenes in the etchings are often wild exaggerations of quite pedestrian metaphors employed by James. I wish the house in the tale had been haunted to the degree that Milton’s etchings are. Or do I? I appreciate the subtle things James has done with this meditative tale. Maybe I mean I like the tale Milton’s work suggests and wish someone would write that one too. But there is a concinnity to Milton’s ekphrasis. His artwork is true to the feeling of the baleful house and the disorienting influence it exerts over the narrator (and the reader).
You can read “The Jolly Corner” in its entirety at Gutenberg.org: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1190/1...
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