OUR JOLLY CORNERS

 

Henry James could have written “The Jolly Corner”, one of his last short stories, only at the time of life he did and I had the fortune to find it at just the right time in my life. It is, however, a story that could speak to all of us for, no matter our lives in later years, who does not have their own jolly corner deep back in their memory from what often are or at least ought to be the best years of our lives? No matter where or how we spent our childhood there was a place we called home where our wonders and dreams were formed, where we spent our years of innocence and optimism and made it our own jolly corner.  

In the 1900s, his last full decade alive, James was reflecting on a life that to most would seem like a life exceptionally well spent. And yet, in 1903 came his most revealing tale, “The Beast in the Jungle”, about a blue-blooded American ex-pat who at old age and at the death of the woman who stood by him for decades reflects on a life wasted awaiting a grand but superficial turning point when the opportunity of starting a life with a loving woman was before him all along.

“The Jolly Corner” is also about an aging ex-pat, Spencer Brydon, returning to New York after nearly thirty years in Europe, mirror James’s own return to the city after spending the majority of his adult years across the Atlantic. There is also in this story a loyal woman, Alice Staverton, by his side who cannot seem to get close to him; Brydon cannot open his heart.

The purpose of his return to America is to decide the fate of the house in which he started life before embarking for Europe; once the income sustaining his life abroad now a desolate abandoned mansion in a city that has developed and expanded to a point almost beyond recognition for a man who left it in his prime.

There is another element at play here. James once more returns to the realm of ghosts but like “Turn of the Screw” and, to a lesser extent, “The Friends of the Friends”, the ghosts of James’s stories haunt our minds more than tingle our spines.

The ghost or, more accurately, the apparition that manifests itself is, in a sense, a symbol of what John Marcher, the protagonist of “The Beast in the Jungle”, came to realize just too late at the end of that story, the “ghost” of a life lost, missed through pride, willful blindness and selfishness.

“The Jolly Corner” came on the heels of James’s return to America and found his home country almost unrecognizable, a journey chronicled with much bitterness in his American Scene. “Jolly Corner” acts as a postscript. With his parents, siblings and even parts of his home city gone, did James mean this story as something of a cry of remorse? He would go on to say that if he could do it all over again he never would have left the States for so long.

The apparition he sees (or thinks he sees) in his old house is a manifestation of what he left behind there, the life he never lived and the life he could have lived. In the scant details he notices about the specter haunting the darkened halls which years earlier had been filled with the sound of his laughter he is able to recognize that the apparition is merely himself in an alternate timeline, in a timeline where he stayed behind with his family. He is haunted not only by his past but by a life that never was.

“The Jolly Corner” could not have touched me on so personal a level had I not read it at 40, a cross road in life between youth and middle-age. I’ve done much reflecting on my life and the life that could have been, sometimes with haunting results. Those memories are sparked the most vividly when I visit my own jolly corner either physically or mentally. So many of the people who were a part of my happiest years have gone as has the child I used to be when life was free (for me) of cynicism and imagination dictated my plans. Much like New York City did for Spencer Byron so has Boston changed for me. More than a century later the cause was gentrification rather than urban sprawl. Yes, visiting our jolly corner can be sobering but they are there to remind us of where we came from and, maybe, in doing so, guiding us to who we want to become.