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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. What if there were a medicine that could heal almost anything? That would be great, but they didn't want you to know about it. Sorry, who's they? Some people are following me and I brought my tortoise.
- [00:21]
Alice Staverton
From executive producers Mike Judge and Greg Daniels and co creators Joe Bennett and Steve Healy comes an animated comedy thriller about what it takes to change the world. Common side effects. New episodes Sundays at 11:30pm on Adult Swim. Now streaming on Max.
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Jack Wilson
Welcome to the White Lotus in Thailand.
- [00:42]
Alice Staverton
The Emmy award winning HBO original series returns.
- [00:45]
Jack Wilson
What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. What does that mean? It means we're not dead yet.
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Alice Staverton
A new season of the White Lotus Premieres tonight at 9:00pm on Max.
- [00:55]
Jack Wilson
Hello. Today on the podcast we enter the mind and heart and soul and deepest fears of one of our heroes, maybe the subtlest writer, and on the surface, at least one of the most limited human beings who ever lived. A limited human being living in many ways a cramped and pinched life, but also a writer who can take hold of me and shake me like some demonic force shaking the flesh loose from a skeleton. Henry James confronts the Jolly Corner. And we confront Henry James, Part one today on the History of Literature. Hello everyone. Welcome one and all to the podcast. Your host is here, Jack Wilson, and I am he. Thank you for joining me today. Henry James had terrible bleeding blind spots. And yet he was one of the most self reflective people you'll ever encounter. That's the beauty of him. Somehow the self reflectiveness speaks for itself. In the right hands, that's a gold mine for a fiction writer. But his blind spots, which can sometimes frustrate and which can make us scratch our heads when trying to come to grips with him as a person, well, that's part of the bargain too. If James didn't have his blind spots, he might not be as interesting. This story comes late in his career. He had left America for Europe. He was gone for 33 years, like the character in our story. Then he goes back to Britain, kind of shaken by what he'd seen. Three years later, Henry James wrote this story, the Jolly Corner, and you'd think he might say maybe with a shudder. I can't believe I ever grew up in America. In New York, in such a greedy, striving place. It was all boy. When I went back there, it was all slumlords and robber barons. Great progress, but also great sources of dismay. Sometimes James seems to think of New York as a kind of Pretender, A city with aspirations to be more like a European capital, with world class museums and opera houses and so on, but without the history, the centuries of cultural refinement. He talks in language that conjures up the difference between a great beauty, a European princess or a duchess, and a vulgar woman who buys expensive clothes and wears too much makeup and tries to look fancy. And you'd think that this man, Henry James, might then return to England and say, thank goodness I'm back here. I'm home. But James is too unpredictable to give us that. Instead, he says, if I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America. I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side. The mixture of Europe and America which you see in me has proved disastrous. That was his mindset. What did he mean by that? Is this like the guy who doesn't want to fly first class because he'll ruin himself for Coach or me, thinking, I'd rather not taste a bottle of $250 wine, thank you. Because what if it's so good I could never drink a $15 bottle again, which would basically take wine off the table for me, so to speak. My time in Europe has spoiled me and made me unable to appreciate the beauties of America. Is that what James is saying? I would know no other land, he says, if I could do it over again. What I am now, this hybrid is a disaster. He says. It was in this frame of mind that he wrote today's story, the Jolly Corner, late in his life. Let's jump right into the story and I'll give you some more notes along the way. What this means for you as a listener is that I'll stop when I think James is getting hard to follow, or if there's anything worth discussing further. We want to know how this story works and also how it works on us. And for that we turn to the man who had written his major works, Portrait of a Lady and more recently, the Wings of the Dove and the golden bowl and all of his other novels and even most of the other shorter works. This was late in his career. He had another 10 years or so to live. It was a time to look back and reflect, to explore and perhaps exorcise some demons. And so we get the Jolly Corner. Here we go. The Jolly Corner by Henry James. Chapter One. Everyone asks me what I think of everything, said Spencer Bryden, and I make answer as I can, begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't Matter to any of them, really, he went on. For even were it possible to meet in that stand and deliver way, so silly a demand on so big a subject, my thoughts would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself. He was talking to Ms. Staverton. Okay, I'm going to pause there. He was talking to Ms. Staverton. This is a format James loved for his stories. We already see it coming into place. The man of action. But let's say thoughtful action. Or even more appropriately, a man for whom thought is a kind of action, who has an interlocutor, a confidant, a friendly ear. Most likely a woman. James loved these exchanges, these setups, and remember his own friendship with women like Edith Wharton. And above all, Constance Fenimore Wilson. We did a series of episodes on her. On his love for her, his regard for their friendship, his private limitations that kept him from pursuing their relationship further. His shock at her death, probably by her own hand, his guilt. And the scene in Venice where he's in the canals in a boat, trying to drown. Her dresses. And they keep reemerging, floating back up to the surface. So this time in this story, we have Spencer Bryden, who's talking to Ms. Note. Carefully note well, that it's a miss, not a Mrs. Ms. Staverton. And we know that Spencer Bryden is a thinky kind of person. People keep wanting to know what I think, he says, but they wouldn't care if I responded. Because my biggest thoughts are about something that's private to me. But we can assume that he's going to make it Ms. Staverton's business. And by doing so, he'll make it ours, too. Pretty nice little neat setup for Henry James. Very Henry Jamesian setup. Back to the story. He was talking to Ms. Staverton, with whom, for a couple of months now, he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk. This disposition and this resource, this comfort and support as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise. And that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than 30 years, 33, to be exact, and they now seemed to him to have organized their performance quite on the scale of that license. He had been 23 on leaving New York. He was 56 today. Unless indeed he were to reckon, as he had sometimes since his repatriation found himself feeling, in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton. It would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked. We'll pause there. Okay. What do we know about Spencer Bryden now? He's returned to America after a long absence. Everything here in America somehow surprises him, and maybe that's expected because he's been gone for so long. He set this up himself, hasn't he? To be gone from a place for 33 years. It's his strangely belated return, as James puts it. He left at age 23 and returned at age 56. Now I'm feeling a bit personally connected to the story here at this point. I left home at 18 and I haven't lived there in more than 30 years. I know what it's like to go back and see things differently, to see houses of old friends that now belong to other families and the new families have painted the place, or maybe they even knocked the old house down and rebuilt it something completely different. And my friend, my friend and his parents, let's say, where. This house was once so familiar to me, so much so close to being like my own, that I could walk in the front door without knocking. But now it's been lived in by two or three new families since I left. People I've never even met. It's strange to go and say, oh, oh, look, there's the Dickinson's house. And have people who live there now who've maybe lived there for 10 years, even 20, say who? And I say, oh, my goodness, the Dickinsons. Nancy, who worked at the school, and Fred, who worked at gm. Darcy, the teenage beauty who could sing like a bird and play every instrument. The slightly odd brother. And the people there shrugged. There are no Dickinsons. There are no Peltons here, or Meltons or Pankauskises or Carrolls or Hairdolls or Runnes's. They've all moved on. The Cartwrights too, and the Kellers and the Kramers. They're gone. And I think this was their town. They breathed this air. They walked on this earth. Their houses are here. Their bodies are not. Their spirits aren't either, except they are for me. I see them still they left an imprint on this place that's in my mind. Is it anywhere else? Now, enough about Jack Wilson. We'll get back to him, I'm sure. Spencer Bryden is returning to New York City, and it's been 33 to be precise. And New York City has seen one of the biggest and fastest growing periods of any city in history. The story Jolly Corner was published in 1908. So let's start the clock at around 1870 or so. James was writing the story in 1905, 1906, 1907. That's when he started thinking about it. Start the clock around 1870 or so. And we should probably specifically look at Manhattan. In 1870, the population in Manhattan was about 942,000 people. It was the biggest city in America by 1900. So roughly now, the period when James leaves to the period when he returns. By 1900, the population had doubled to 1.8 million people. By 1910, it would be 2.3 million people. 500,000 people arriving in 10 years to an area of land that's 20 square miles. Where did all those people go? Well, they started going up, up into the sky. The first skyscraper was built in the 1880s. So Spencer Bryden leaves. He returns 30 some years later and in the meantime, the vibrancy of a city that's doubling in population and increasing its density through tall buildings, that's what happens. Jack Wilson, when he visits his old, small Wisconsin town, sees mostly decay. The neglect and decay, with a few bright spots here and there, of a new house, a new subdivision, small park. But mostly he sees people who have been scrabbling along as best they can, living cheap, poorer and getting poorer. Spencer Bryden, visiting Manhattan in 1905 or so, sees something quite different. He sees a boom town. Everything feels bigger to him. I see a place that's. That's naturally inhabited by ghosts. My old town. I see old houses that are crumbling and boarded up. Spencer Bryden is in a different world. He sees a place where his ghosts have been replaced by something new and fancy and impressive. Where do the ghosts go? How do his memories feel when they're so outdated? What does he do with this past and the new overlay of a modern metropolis that's replacing his past? Well, let's find out. We go back to the story. The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability. Since he had supposed himself from decade to decade to be allowing and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change, he actually Saw that he had allowed for nothing. He missed what he would have been sure of finding. He found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside down. The ugly things. He had expected the. The ugly things of his faraway youth. When he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly, these uncanny phenomena placed him, rather, as it happened, under the charm. Whereas the swagger things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly like thousands of ingenuous inquirers every year come over to sea, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. Pause there. That paragraph was a mouthful, but it essentially makes one point. Spencer Bryden came to see the famous new buildings, the developments, the swagger. What would those have been at this time? Well, tall buildings made of steel, with elevators inside, for one. A newly rebuilt Brooklyn Museum. If he traveled across the water to see that. A new opera house for the Metropolitan Opera, which opened in 1883. The Metropolitan Museum moving into the building where it still resides that opened in 1880. The New York Public Library had opened in 1877. In that same year, the American Museum of Natural History moved into its new building. These buildings are impressive now, even surrounded by skyscrapers that would have boggled the 1908 mind. Imagine seeing them rise out of meadows and shanty towns, arise out of ugliness. All this happens while Spencer Bryden is gone in Europe, and he comes home to see them, and he says, well, these swagger things, I hate them. Modern and monstrous. This whole show might be interesting, but it's disconcerting too. They fill him with dismay. And in fact, he likes the old stuff, the ugly stuff. The new stuff fills him with dismay. Why? Because maybe he's used to a New York without such grandiosity. Busy, sure, when he left, but a little less noisy, a little less crowded, a little less dramatic. And then the end of the paragraph previews for us there's one redeeming quality, one finer truth that saved the situation. Let's hear what that finer truth that saved the situation is. Back to the story. He had distinctly, not in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities. He had come not only in the last analysis, but quite on the face of the actual, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had Come putting the thing pompously to look at his property, which he had thus for a third of a century not been within 4,000 miles of, or expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the Jolly Corner, as he usually and quite fondly described it, the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another not quite so good, the Jolly Corner, having been from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated, and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting in these later years of their respective rents, which, thanks precisely to their original excellent type, had never been depressingly low. He could live in Europe as he had been in the habit of living on the product of these flourishing New York leases. And all the better since that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in renovation at a high advance, had proved beautifully possible. Okay, pause for some thoughts. So, Europe. When he says Europe, he lived in Europe. He puts that in quotes, by the way. Live in Europe. A way of being as much as a place, a lifestyle. He didn't just live in Europe like as if it's a location. He was a person who lived in Europe. That was a thing. How did he manage it? Well, he had two New York leases, two properties at a time of a huge boom. One which was not quite so good, but still made a ton of money. When everyone is looking to build, build, build, Manhattan's an island. Space is at a premium. That property was bringing in a lot of rent. It was a number in a row. We can imagine. It's a place to rent out in the middle of a row house. So his other property, of course, is the one on the Jolly Corner, as he calls it. He was born there, he grew up there. He has memories of holidays, social gatherings. As a teenager, his family members lived and died there on that corner in this property, a superlatively extended and consecrated place. He says all around him are the new, too big, too gaudy, even monstrous construction sites. His Jolly Corner, the property there, is what brings him back. That's what's on his mind when the people say, what are you thinking about wanting to hear him talk about the boom, the buildings, the new institutions that had arisen in his absence. What do you think of New York? What are you thinking about being here? And he says, you don't really want to know my thoughts because the jolly corner, my beloved home on the jolly corner, which I now own outright because my brother, my brothers have died. That's what I'm thinking about. Henry James has many great qualities and his works have so much richness to them. Can we just pause and say that one of the great things about Henry James is that he writes about characters who are older then 20 or 30 or 10. Life gets exceedingly complicated and mellow and well toned as we get older. Literature, well that does better than Hollywood in giving us great characters in their 50s and 60s and 70s. But it's still mostly a young person's game. Let's face it, Henry James was 65 when this story came out. He's giving us a man, a 56 year old man who feels like a real 56 year old man with all of the complexity that that entails. Let's take a quick break and then we'll keep going with the jolly cor.
- [24:11]
Alice Staverton
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- [24:38]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [25:02]
Narrator
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- [25:26]
Jack Wilson
We are back. We've launched into Henry James's 1908 story the Jolly Corner. Spencer Bryden has been talking to a Ms. Staverton. We're privy to his thoughts. He's returned from Europe as James himself did after a 33 year absence. He finds the progress to be impressive in its own way, but also monstrous much of the time. But he's enjoyed the return to his own properties, which have greatly increased in value during his absence, the benefits of a booming New York. He's just now discussing his favorite of the two properties, the one that sits on what he calls the Jolly Corner. Back to the story. These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats. He had acceded some time before to overtures for this conversion, in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism, where it might be said of them perhaps, that they had slept the sleep of the just at present in the splendid autumn weather. The autumn at least, was a pure boon. In the terrible place. He loafed about his work undeterred, secretly agitated, not in the least minding that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions and challenge explanations and really go into figures. We'll pause there with the paragraph break just to make sure you're following what's happening. James, as usual, doesn't always make it easy. He has two properties. The one he likes is the one on the Jolly Corner. The other is a row house within a street, and he recently had that one renovated, or he authorized it being renovated. And now he's there and the renovation is happening, and he's found that he's good at overseeing a renovation which he had no idea that he could do. He's good at the figures, at the decision making, at exercising authority, walking around looking like he knows what he's talking about. He didn't really know he had this talent and he's kind of enjoying it, kind of surprised by it. Okay, back to the story. It amused it, verily, quite charmed him, and by the same stroke it amused and even more Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better off for it as he was, and so astonishingly much nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better off than she found herself in the afternoon of life as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career, if he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger page, overgrown, fantastic of ruled and criss crossed lines and figures. If he had formed for his consolation that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognized in the vast wilderness of the wholesale breaking through the mere gross generalization of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades all delicate things kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver. She stood oft in the awful modern crush of when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to spiritthe spirit she, after all, confessed to proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the streetcars when need be the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic stricken at sea scramble for the boats, she affronted inscrutably under stress all the public concussions and ordeals, and yet with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference, with her precious reference above all to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower, a rarity to begin with, and failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge. Their knowledge this discriminating possessive was always on her lips of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid in his case by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her just by Europe, in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted. Okay, we'll pause there. Can you follow all that? I had to read it two or three times. Don't feel bad if you didn't follow it. I'll summarize it for you. We HEAR More about Ms. Staverton. Alice is her name, which of course was Henry's sister's name. He had a few Alices in his life, but I think it's significant. He gave his female protagonist in the story the name of his sister. And there's something sibling like about the pair. They have this shared past, a knowledge of younger days. He goes to see her a lot on this trip to New York. He likes seeing her house. It's a small, still scene that calms him. She's a property owner too. But while he's getting rich from his properties, from renovating the second best property, profiting from the newness that he's putting into it, even if he's not fully embracing that property, it's going to make him a lot of money. She, on the other hand, is more like someone who's clung to the past with hers. This is a place for her to live. She dusts her relics by herself, takes care of things, and he finds this comforting. He likes seeing the old style decor, the atmosphere of her place and her in it. And while she has a thin grace and while he's shocked by all the newness and change, he sees how she has slowly adapted herself to it. Even if she's kind of a fish out of water. Her water is the past. The days when he lived there too. 33 years ago and longer. She's willing to go out and scramble for the streetcars like those panic stricken passengers at sea headed for the boats after a wreck. She's willing to do it. But he knows who she really is. She's the person she was 33 years ago and even before, the person he knew. Just as he's the person that she knew in those days, their days, she often says. Back to the story. She had come with him one day to see how his apartment house was rising. He had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there, had happened to have before her a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite standing up to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions. And had so lucidly argued his case, that besides ever so prettily flushing at the time for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him, though to a slightly greater effect of irony, that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home, he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper. If he had but stayed at home, he would have discovered his genius in time, really, to start some new variety of awful architectural hair and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine. He was to remember these words while the weeks elapsed for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own. Lately, most disguised and most muffled vibrations, it had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight. It had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment. It met him there, and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least not a little thrilled and flushed with it, very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form, that of his opening a door, behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room, shuttered and void, and yet so coming with a great suppressed start on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction, he walked with his companion to see the other, and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed one of the corners, the jolly one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonored and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative avenue. The avenue still had pretensions, as Ms. Staverton said, to decency. The old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray all vaguely like some very aged person out too late whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow in kindness for safe restoration, to shelter. Very quick pause here. Ms. Staverton visits the construction site. She sees him, Spencer Bryden, solve a problem with the construction for person, and marvels at his heretofore unknown talent for overseeing renovations. Meanwhile he encounters a kind of presence, as he has before an unexpected occupant. Feels like he's entered a darkened room and he's not alone, very eerie. So he hustles Ms. Staverton over to his preferred property, the one he's always liked best, over on the jolly corner. Back to the story they went in together, our friends. He admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring for his reasons to leave the place empty under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighborhood, and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Bryden had his reasons and was growingly aware of them. They seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't name them all to his companion any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms that absolute vacancy reigned, and that from top to bottom there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick in a corner to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes, all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell, where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space the style of an age of ampler allowances had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message affecting him as some good old servants, some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character or even for a retiring pension. Yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark, she would just tell him, if he plased, that he must ask it of somebody else. The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy woman against what one might see, and she put it frankly to Ms. Staverton that no lady could be expected to like could she, creping up to them top stories in the evil hours. The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great gray rooms, so many of them as there were too, with her glimmering taper. Ms. Staverton met her honest glare with a smile, and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Bryden meanwhile, held his peace for the moment. The question of the evil hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to crape, and he knew just why. A packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand three weeks before at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied as a fixture the deep recess in the dining room just now he laughed at his companions quickly, however, changing the subject for the reason that in the first place his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance, he scarce knew how to qualify it that sounds made while he was there alone, sent back to his ear or his fancy, and that in the second he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant, on the point of asking him with a divination if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts. Okay, I have to stop there. Things are starting to happen now. Mrs. Muldoon is there to clean. She comes for an hour, she sweeps, she opens the windows, and she happens to be there when Ms. Staverton and Spencer Bryden show up and she says, you know what? I don't want to be here after dark with no lights except my candle. Who wants to creep around a house this day this big and empty, when it's dark it's frightening. And Ms. Staverton agrees, yes, that would scare me too, and this is why I love Henry James so much. Dear listeners, Spencer Bryden laughs, but he quickly changes the subject because he himself has been creeping around at night, so much so that three weeks ago he stowed a pack of candles in the drawer of one of the built in pieces of furniture. He doesn't want to answer Ms. Staverton's question, which he thinks she's about to ask, if he ever so prowled, because he does so he makes sure that she doesn't have time to ask it. So what is he doing prowling around this empty old house hearing odd echoes? Let's go back to the story. There was happily enough to say on so consecrated a spot that could be said freely and fairly so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out after a yearning look round. But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull this to pieces. She means turn it into apartments. His answer came promptly, with his reawakened wrath. It was of course exactly what they wanted and what they were at him for. Daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to decent feelings, he had found the place just as it stood, and beyond what he could express an interest and a joy there were values other than the beastly rent values. And in short. In short. But it was thus Ms. Staverton took him up. In short, you're to make so good a thing of your skyscraper that living in luxury on those ill gotten gains you can afford for a while to be sentimental. Here her smile had for him with the words the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused. An irony without bitterness. And that came exactly from her having so much imagination, not like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people about the world of society bid for the reputation of cleverness from nobody's really having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered after a brief demur, well, yes, so precisely you may put it, her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house, he would nevertheless cherish this one. And he dwelt further while they lingered and wandered on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create end. Ms. Staverton has seen right through him. Advisors are telling Spencer Bryden to break this great old house on the jolly corner into pieces, turn it into apartments, rent it out. You'll make a. You'll make a ton of money. And he doesn't want to because he's sentimental about it. This is where he was born and grew up. He likes it unchanged. She sees that. She points that out to him. You're making so much money on the renovation of the second best house, your skyscraper, that you can afford to indulge yourself in this way. And he knows that she's right. Let's take our last break and then come back with what we will see is a rousing conclusion to part one of the Jolly we are back. Spencer Bryden is telling his friend Ms. Staverton just why he's so sentimental about this grand old house on the jolly corner and why he doesn't want to break it up into apartments. Back to the story he spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel in his hand of the old silver plated knobs of the several mahogany doors which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead, the 70 years of the past in fen that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations counting his grandfathers, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long extinct youth afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything. She was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered abroad, therefore no cloud of words she could assent, she could agree. Above all she could encourage without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. And then how do you know you may still, after all, want to live here? It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words. You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it? Well, with such a home. But quite beautifully she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an ice, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could anyone of any wit insist on anyone else's wanting to live in New York? Oh, he said, I might have lived here since I had my opportunity early in life, I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enough, and I dare say funny enough, but that's another matter. And then the beauty of it, I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a deal, is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all, it would have to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars. There are no reasons here but of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever. Not the ghost of one. They were back in the hall then, for departure. But from where they stood the vista was large. Through an open door into the great square main saloon with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. Are you very sure the ghost of one doesn't much rather serve? He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come, for he made answer, he believed between a glare and a grin. Oh, ghosts. Of course, the place must swarm with them. I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in. Ms. Staverton's gaze again lost itself and things she didn't Utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might, even for the minute off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering, simplified like the death mask of a handsome face. It perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the set commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been, she produced instead a vague platitude. Well, if it were only furnished and lived in. She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished. He might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule as if to leave her words behind her. And the next moment he had opened the house door. And was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door, and while he repocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the desert. On the traveler emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked, before they stepped into the street, his gathered answer to her speech. For me, it is lived in. For me it is furnished. At which it was easy for her to sigh. Ah, yes. All vaguely and discreetly, since his parents and his favorite sister, to say nothing of other kin in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented within the walls ineffaceable life. Okay, we're starting to explore just what this place on the jolly corner means to him. Ms. Staverton says, well, why not come here and live in it? You might want to. She catches herself, and he sort of tweaks her. Because it feels vulgar to suggest that anyone like Spencer Bryden would move back to New York, the vulgar place. She blames it on the house. It's so nice. It's such a grand place. That's all I meant. Maybe if you furnished it, you'd really want to live here. And he says, well, no, no, no, no, no, no. And by the way, by the way, there's no reason to move here. I'd be moving here for dollars, and that's not a reason. And she says, well. Well, we don't know exactly what she's after, do we? Does she have feelings for him, Want him nearby? Is she taking this as an insult? He says, why? And she says, well, that's where I've been all my life, almost uninterrupted. Or is she just observing something about him and his relationship with this house. And she wants to point it out to him? It's a beautiful old house. You seem attached to it. Why not furnish it and move in. But in any case, his mind is elsewhere as they leave. And he says, well, furnish it, live in it. It is lived in, it is furnished. For me, it's all of that. And she understands what he means because he has the memories of the family members who have lived and died their ineffaceable life, in James's phrase. Back to the story. It was a few days after that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity among the people he met about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible. And as for that matter, of his thinkingthinking the better or the worse of anything there he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was, moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and turned out if he had not so at the outset given it up, and confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation, which, but proved also, no doubt the habit of too selfishly thinking, he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal, what would it have made of me? What would it have made of me? I keep forever wondering all idiotically, as if I could possibly know. I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me to the point of exasperation that it would have made something of me as well, only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt once or twice after judging best for reasons to burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry. I've hated it. I've never known what was in the letter. You may, of course say it's a trifle. I don't say it's a trifle. Miss Staverton gravely interrupted. She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection through his single eye glass of the dear little old objects on her chimney piece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. I shouldn't care if you did. He laughed, however. And it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel not to have followed my perverse Young course, and almost in the teeth of my father's curse, as I may say, not to have kept it up so over there from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang. Not above all to have liked it, to have loved it so much. Loved it, no doubt with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference. Some variation from that I say must have produced some different effect for my life and for my form. I should have stuck here if it had been possible and I was too young at 23 to judge pour du sue whether it were possible. If I had waited, I might have seen it was and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire them so much. The question of any charm in them or of any charm beyond that of the rank, money, passion exerted by their conditions for them has nothing to do with the matter. It's only a question of what fantastic yet perfectly possible development of my own nature I mayn't have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me as the full blown flower is in the small tight bud. And that I just took the course. I just transferred him to the climate that blighted him for once and forever. Let's pause there. We know Henry James was thinking about his own life. What would it have been like? What would I have been? What would he have become had he stayed in America? He gives that same curiosity to Spencer Bryden. I was headed for a money making path. I could have stayed here and been hammered by circumstance and condition like all of these people I see around me. What would that have been? Was that in me? Was that possibility in me? And did I, Did I ruin it? Did I nip it in the bud? He's got a companion, Ms. Staverton, with whom he can explore it. I have this other person inside me, or I did have. He thinks that person could have grown like a flower. But I didn't let that person grow. I moved to Europe and instead let a different person grow. And I have this intense feeling that I need to know that there's something that I want to know. I want to know who that person was or would have been. My life as a New York resident, a permanent New Yorker, never grew. But I'm curious. Was there a seed in me that would have become something completely different? Back to the story. And you wonder about the flower. Ms. Staverton said so Do I? If you want to know. And so I have been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower, she continued. I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous. Monstrous above all, her visitor echoed. And I imagine by the same stroke quite hideous and offensive. You don't believe that she returned. And if you did, you wouldn't wonder. You'd know. And that would be enough for you. What you feel. And what I feel for you is that you'd have had power. You'd have liked me that way? He asked. She barely hung fire. How should I not have liked you? I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me a billionaire. How should I not have liked you? She simply again asked. He stood before her still. Her question kept him motionless. He took it in so much there was of it, and indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that I know at least what I am. He simply went on. The other side of the metal's clear enough. I've not been edifying. I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshiped strange gods. It must have come to you again and again. In fact you've admitted to me as much that I was leading at any time these 30 years a selfish, frivolous, scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me. She just waited, smiling at him. You see what it has made of me? Oh, you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are anywhere anyway, you've the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how without my exile I shouldn't have been waiting till now. But he pulled up for the strange pang, the great thing to see, she presently said. Seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking. She also, however, faltered. He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. Do you believe then, too dreadfully, that I am as good as I might ever have been? Oh, no, far from it. With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. But I don't care. She smiled. You mean I'm good enough? She considered a little. Will you believe it if I say so? I mean, will you let that settle your question for you? And then, as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away. Oh, you don't care either, but very differently. You don't care for anything but yourself. Spencer Bryden recognized it. It was, in fact, what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified. He isn't myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him, he added, and I can, and I shall. Their eyes met for a minute. While he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. Quick break here. This is extraordinary stuff. She's talking about the two of them. How can she not? Why would he be the only person to have changed? If he'd stayed in New York all those years and become a wealthy and powerful figure, Things might have been different for her, too. She suggests Mrs. Bryden instead of Ms. Staverton. Mrs. Henry James instead of Ms. Constance Fenimore Wilson. Can we think that? I think we can. But Brydon rather like James, one suspects. Although James is aware of it, as we see in his writing the story. Bryden just races past this because he's busy thinking about himself. The ungrown flower that he snuffed out when it was still just a bud. And she says, you only think about yourself. And he says, no, no, no, no. I'm thinking about this unbutted flower. And that guy's not myself. He's the other person. What a narcissist. How narcissistic is that? Imagine that a person says to you, we could have had a life together. And you say, not now. I'm thinking about the self I could have been. And the person says, you only think about yourself. And you say, that's ridiculous. The other self I'm imagining is a completely different person. I'm not selfish. I don't just think about me. I also think a lot about the other me. But James doesn't stop there. Because I said James. I should say Spencer Bryden. Spencer Bryden doesn't stop there. Because he says, I do want to see him. And I can, and I shall. And if you aren't like me and wondering at this point just what Bryden is up to. Well, I don't know what to tell you. It's moments like this where I think for all the difficulties I have with James, the fuddy duddy quality to his prose, for all the aching subtleties, the moments when you want him to just get on with it or say something in 10 words instead of a hundred. James can also ratchet up the tension. There's no violence here. There's no damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks. Or there's no hero hanging by his fingernails from the edge of a cliff. But there's the soul of this guy, Spencer Bryden, clinging to something just as precarious, it seems, this intensity of his longing to know who he would have been if he had stayed in New York. It sounds simple, but I am all in. And then James has these two characters look at each other, and Bryden sees or guesses what his old friend has divined. That his old friend has divined the strange sense with which he means he can see this other person, and he shall. And we readers are watching all of this. What's the strange sense? What do you mean? You're going to see the other version of you. How can you do that? How could any of us do that? Well, maybe if we cared as much as Spencer Bryden, we'd come up with a way, but we. We haven't. So we'll watch Spencer Bryden and see what way he's come up with. Back to the story. Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense, but neither of them otherwise expressed it. And her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything, yet constituting for his stifled perversity on the spot, an element that was like breathable air. What she said, however, was unexpected. Well, I've seen him. You, listener. I'm pausing there. Are you as shocked as me and as shocked as Spencer Bryden? Ms. Staverton, hello. She beat him to the punch. I've seen him, this guy you so intensely want to see. Well, I have seen him, and all he can say is you. Oh, this is so good. Back to the story. You. I've seen him in a dream. Oh, a dream. It let him down. But twice over, she continued. I saw him as I see you now. You've dreamed the same dream twice over, she repeated. The very same. This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. You dream about me at that rate? Ah, about him. She smiled his eyes again sounded her. Then you know all about him. And as she said nothing more, what's the wretch like? She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting, for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. I'll tell you some other time. Oh, theme song. Interrupting us, telling us that it is also time for us to go. We will need to tell you some other time what Ms. Staverton will tell Spencer Briden some other time because we have concluded Chapter one of the Jolly Corner. She has seen the hymn that never existed but might have. She's seen that guy twice in a dream. Spencer Brian is desperate to know what's he like? What's the wretch like? But she holds him off. End Part one We will be back next time with part two of this three part story. The Jolly Corner by Henry James. I hope you'll join us for that. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
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Narrator
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