← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
681 The Jolly Corner by Henry James - Part 3 | My Last Book by Colm Tóibín
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Jack Wilson
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You'll also get up to $2 million of award winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 first year. Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply. Hello. Today on the podcast, Part three of Henry James the Jolly Corner. You can listen to parts one and two if you haven't already, or just jump in here and do the best you can. We'll have a quick summary and get right to the story. Things are really happening now and they will continue until we conclude this fantastic story as we will do today on the history of literature. Okay, hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson, your host with the most. And by most, I guess I mean not much. The most, not much of anyone you've ever met. When it comes to not much, Jack Wilson reigns supreme. Ask all of my former teachers. And you thought I would say lovers, didn't you? Well, I don't. That's that kind of show. Maybe you even muttered it aloud. And your former lovers? Well, dear listener, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. Moving on. We are approaching the finish of the Jolly Corner and Henry James has a way of polishing off his stories, his narratives in a way that also polished me off. He leads me around by the nose all story and then just pummels me psychologically and leaves me for dead. So good. Even though he's hard to read, every time I read him I think, why Henry James? Why? I do kind of love his sentences. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to hear from another Famous writer talking about Henry James sentences. Sometimes it just feels unnecessary, but I persist, and I find it rewarding. I find the conceits of the story and the way he digs in and the way he pushes the psychological state, find it all invigorating. Okay, before we get back to Henry James's story the Jolly Corner, let's listen to Joan Didion talk about Henry James's influence on her. This is from her Paris Review interview. And don't worry, don't worry. I know you're probably eager to hear the conclusion of the Jolly Corner. I certainly am. We had kind of a cliffhanger ending at the end of Part two. But you know what? The third part is short. It's only about half as long as the first two. So we can take our time a little bit. We can breathe. The suspense was at a feverish pitch, but now we can pause a little bit, let our heart rate drop back to something approaching normal before we dive back in. Here's Joan Didion. Interviewer, did any writer influence you more than others? I always say Hemingway because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was 15 or 16, I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley, I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean, they're perfect sentences, very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes. Interviewer, you've called Henry James an influence. Let me pause there. This interviewer, what a. What's the right word? I'll use the word wag. What a wag. Who influenced you the most? Joan Didion. And she offers Hemingway because he taught her how sentences worked. She says, they're very direct, smooth rivers, clear water over granite with no sinkholes. And the interviewer's next question doesn't say, oh, interesting, Hemingway, tell me more. Or I can see that. I can see his influence on you. He said. He said. He says you've called Henry James an influence. You can imagine the smirk. Henry James is pretty much the opposite of Hemingway in terms of prose. Henry James is known for his long, sometimes convoluted sentences. His indirect sentence. It would be as if the interviewer, as if the interviewer had said, if you could be any animal, which would you pick? And the interviewee had said, well, I suppose a cheetah, because I value speed above all else. And the interviewer said, you've said you'd be happy as a sloth. Comment on that. Now, actually, it's a very good question because we all have multiple influences. We can be influenced by more than one person. And if you. We know what she means when she says she was influenced by Hemingway. She's already talked about it. Kind of nice to pivot to this next question, which is, well, you were influenced by that, but then you've also been influenced by this. How does that work? Were you influenced by his story or his character or something different or the prose? Let's hear how Joan Didion responds. Interviewer. You've called Henry James an influence, Didion. He wrote perfect century sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. True. Someone who's been reading them aloud for several hours now. I agree. Back to Didion. She says, I wouldn't dare to write one meaning a sentence. I'm not even sure I dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities, all that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down. I wonder if some of your nonfiction pieces aren't shaped as a single Jamesian sentence. This interviewer is really on a roll, Didion. That would be the ideal, wouldn't it? An entire piece, 8, 10, 20 pages strung on a single sentence. That's Joan Didion talking to the Paris Review. My mind is boggling at that. Not just the prospect of the essay that Didion calls ideal, but at what this says about the Jamesian sentence. There's so much refinement and subtlety in the Jamesian sentence, so much depth of observation combined with thought and what Didion calls his perfectly reconciled style. Well, are we ready for the Jolly Corner? I'm getting there. Let's recall our story thus far. Spencer Bryden, who's a bit of a narcissist, but we accept it in him because his pursuit is so fascinating and kind of humble. He's kind of half crazy, actually. He's been in Europe for 33 years and now he's returned to his native New York aged 56, much as James himself did in his early 60s after a similar 33 year absence. New York has changed in the interim. It's boomed and skyscrapers are popping up and there's a lot of activity. But for Bryden, Spencer Bryden, there's something gaudy and dismaying about all that. He thinks of it as modern and monstrous. He prefers his friend Alice Staverton, Ms. Staverton, who knows him quite well and has in Fact had a couple of dreams that are particularly relevant to what Bryden is going through right now. As Ms. Staverton knows, Briden owns two properties. One of them is a row house that he's renovating or overseeing the renovation of because the property values have skyrocketed as Manhattan has filled in with something like a million new residents just in these 30 years. The second property is the one closer to his heart. This is the one on what he's always called the Jolly Corner, a great big mansion that takes up most of a block with multiple floors and giant staircases and series of rooms, one leading into the next and windows and balconies. Briden has left this place completely empty with no furnishings, although for him the furnishings are all there because he can see the place in his mind's eye. This is where he was born. This is where he grew up. He could picture his parents and his siblings and the other deceased members of his family. The house is all his now. The other heirs have died and he prefers the house in this austere state. Fortunately, the second house is paying the bills, allowing him to keep this one as it is for sentimental reasons. He has a single housekeeper, Mrs. Muldoon, who comes over and sweeps it for an hour a day. She opens the windows, lets in the air. She thinks it's creepy. She doesn't want to come at night. And what James? Sorry, not James. What Bryden doesn't tell her or his friend Ms. Staverton is that he's been coming there at night too, to creep around the dark house from 11:30 to 2am Typically holding a candle for light and sometimes not even a candle. He sets the candle down and walks from room to room thinking about the ghosts, disturbing them, catching them off guard, seeing if he can catch a glimpse of them, trying to will them into being, forcing them to take form, a form in which he can see them. He's like a hunter looking for prey, seeing his memories, which might be spirits, which might be more than that. And he does this often enough. He wants to see them hard enough that he can kind of switch places with them. And he can imagine through this act of empathy how they must think, having him intrude on their world. He sees how he must appear to them, that they might be impressed with his diligence or afraid of his presence and so on. And there's one ghost, we'll call it a ghost, for lack of a better word, for the moment that he particularly wants to see. He calls him his alter ego. This is the Spencer Bryden, who never went to Europe, who stayed in New York for the past 33 years, and who grew up with New York and didn't go down the path of being a hybrid European American. A path, by the way, that Henry James told a friend had led him James to disaster. I should have stayed in America, he says. So there's part of him that. That wants to be here. On the other hand, part of him is glad he didn't stay because he finds New York kind of vulgar. In the story, Briden wants desperately to see this alter ego, this form of himself. He looks for him. He senses that he's there in the building on the jolly corner. He can almost. He feels his breath. But he also thinks about what this alter ego will think. Seeing Briden. It might be kind of scary for him to see the version of himself that went to Europe and so on. And Briden imagines at one point he imagines that maybe they'll fight if they encounter each other. He just doesn't know. Other times he wants to respect him, he wants to see him. But if the alter ego doesn't want to see Briden, maybe that's for the best. We readers don't know exactly what's happening. If Bryden has gone half crazed or has an impressive imagination, or if he's truly discovered these ghosts or has kind of willed them into being. If they're figments of his imagination, something deep in his psyche that lets him see them, or if they're just real. And I'm using the term ghost, but of course, it's a very particular kind of ghost to say it's the person you might have been. I mean, you can believe in ghosts, right? That your grandfather comes to visit you from time to time, or that he's nearby, or that a murdered wife might be haunting the house where she was axed in the head. That kind of thing, right? Real people who become ghosts. That's a little bit different from thinking that we can be visited by the spirits of the roads, that we ourselves didn't take, that there's multiple versions of ourselves and that we can see one of them. This all comes to a head one night during one of Briden's creeps. He himself calls it creeping. Creeping in Mrs. Muldoon's lingo. So I feel okay calling it that too. He's creeping around. It's creepy. It's a creepy house for sure. And what he's doing is creepy. He's walking through the house. And while he's doing that he sees a door that he's sure he left open, and now it's closed. And he imagines that his alter ego is inside that room and has closed the door. And he spends a lot of time just frozen, wondering if he should confront him, burst open the door, even applying his shoulder to it, his knee if he has to. And then he decides against that. And before long, he realizes it's dawn and he spent the entire night in this house. And we maybe wonder, we readers maybe wonder if the sleeplessness is making him hallucinate or if it's at least thrown him into some kind of state. And then suddenly, as he's almost out of the house, he encounters the figure, the one he's been chasing, the one that no one has ever seen, unless you count Ms. Staverton's two dreams about him, which she said, but she hasn't described them, so who knows what those are? But Bryden. Bryden sees him directly. The alter ego, the guy he might have been. His face looks just like Spencer Bryden's, but it's not him. He covers his face with his white hands, and two of his fingers have been blown away. A symbol, no doubt, of the many details of life that 33 years can produce. So many loves and losses and hopes and frustrations and triumphs, tragedies, accidents, maybe a duel, maybe some kind of fight, mysteries. Maybe this guy is the. The roughened character version of Spencer Bryden. Instead of the fop who went to Europe, didn't engage in this Wild west stuff that was going on in New York at this time. Comte Toybean tells us this about the Jolly Corner. It is Leon Adele has written a profoundly autobiographical tale. It is a reenactment of the battle which had taken place within James own self as he returned to New York and set out to describe the world he saw, seeking in his descriptions to destroy it, seeking to puncture its great power with the steel point of his great paragraphs. He wanted to restore life to the world that lingered within him. The old New York, which he had experienced before the complications of puberty and unsettlement and had left when he was 12. End quote. There's a sexual element in toy beans. Reading of it, James, the repressed gay man, never able to come to grips with his truest feelings, his truest self. And finding so many ways to explore that feeling and all of the fallout from it in his fiction, but always exploring it indirectly, that provides yet another layer here. No doubt it's present, but it doesn't substitute itself as the only layer. The story is way too complicated for that, just as James himself was way too complicated to be reduced to any single thing. And he was way too observant about human beings. He captures this central tension between our older and younger selves, the way we regret things, maybe, and the way we wonder. Certainly we all go through different doors, and the older we get, the more we look back and see how key decisions ended up playing out. But we wonder what else might have happened instead. And what if you truly confronted this different version of yourself? For Spencer Bryden at the end of Chapter two, it knocked him out. Doing that, he collapsed unconscious, which is where the story left him, still at the Jolly Corner somewhere near the staircase. He was going, he was gone. Let's take a quick break and then hear the conclusion, Chapter three of the Jolly Corner, with my annotations along the way. Don't worry, we'll walk you through this. We will do that after this. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like. Therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelphelp.com Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report Daredevil is Born Again on Disney why did you stop being a vigilante? The line was crossed. Sometimes peace needs to be broken. Chaos must reign. On March 4th, the nine episode event begins. I was raised to believe in grace, but I was also raised to believe in retribution. Marvel Television Television's Daredevil Born Again don't miss the two episode premiere March 4th only on Disney plus the Jolly Corner Chapter 3 what had next brought him back? Clearly, though, after how long was Mrs. Muldoon's voice coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed Presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him, while he lay looking up at her himself, not wholly on the ground, but half raised and upheld, conscious, yes, of tenderness, of support, and more particularly of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit, but half at his service. Then another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had, to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old black and white slabs. They were cold, these marble squares of his youth. But he somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness, the most wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him as it did so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet, as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation, dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon, he had come back, yes, come back from further away than any man but himself had ever traveled. But it was strange how, with this sense, what he had come back to seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it, slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself, he had been miraculously carried back, lifted and carefully borne, as from where he had been picked up the uttermost end of an interminable gray passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest. And what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long, mild motion it had brought him to knowledge. To knowledge. Yes. This was the beauty of his state, which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude, and has only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patience that he had only to let it shine on him. He must, moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne since. Why, and how else should he have known himself? Later on, with the afternoon glow intenser no longer at the foot of his stairs, situated, as these now seemed, at that dark other end of his tunnel, but on a deep window bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread couch fashion a mantle of soft stuff lined with gray fur that was familiar to his eyes, and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon's face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognized, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the more he took it, the more it seemed to suffice. He was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him. On Mrs. Muldoon's having plied at her usual hour, her latch key, and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house. She had been turning away all anxiety from worrying the Vane Bell handle, her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman's visit. But the latter blessedly had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together. He had then lain beyond the vestibule, very much as he was lying now, quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously, without bruise or gash, only in a depth of stupor. What he most took in, however, at present with this steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had, for a long, unspeakable moment, not doubted he was dead. It must have been that I was. He made it out as she held him. Yes. I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only, he wondered, his eyes rising to her only in the name of all the benedictions, how it took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him. And something in the manner of it and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips. Something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything. And now I keep you, she said. Oh, keep me, keep me, he pleaded, while her face still hung over him, in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation of which he tasted the impress for a long, blissful moment in silence. But he came back. Yet. How did you know? I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember? And you had sent no word. Yes, I remember. I was to have gone to you at one today. It caught on to their old life and relation, which were so near and so far. I was still out there in my strange darkness. Where was it? What was it? I must have stayed there so long. He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon. Since last night? She asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion. Since this morning it must have been the cold, dim dawn of today. Where have I been? He vaguely wailed. Where have I been? He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. What a long dark day. All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. In the cold, dim dawn, she quavered, but he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. As I didn't turn up, you came straight. She barely cast about. I went first to your hotel, where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back since, but they appeared to know you had been at your club. So you had the idea of this. Of what? She asked in a moment. Well, of what has happened. I believed at least you'd have been here. I've known all along, she said, that you've been coming. Known it well, I've believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago. But I felt sure. I knew you would, she declared. That I'd persist. You mean that you'd see him? Ah, but I didn't, cried Briden with his long wail. There's somebody, an awful beast whom I brought too horribly to bay. But it's not me. At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. No, it's not you. And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. No, thank heaven, she repeated, it's not you. Of course it wasn't to have been. Ah, but it was, he gently insisted, and he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. I was to have known myself. You couldn't. She returned consolingly, and then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done. But it wasn't only that, that you hadn't been at home, she went on. I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you, and she arrived as I've told you, while failing to bring anyone to the door. I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little if she hadn't come by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn't, said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions. It wasn't only that his eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. What more? Then she met it, the wonder she had stirred in the cold, dim dawn. You say? Well, in the cold, dim dawn of this morning, I too saw you. Saw me? Saw him, Said Ella Staverton. It must have been at the same moment. He lay an instant taking it in, as if he wished to be quite reasonable. At the same moment? Yes. In my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me then. I knew it for a sign. He had come to you. At this, Briden raised himself. He had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window bench, and with his right hand grasping her left. He didn't come to me. You came to yourself. She beautifully smiled. Ah, I've come to myself now, thanks to you, dearest. But this brute with his awful face. This brute's a black stranger. He's none of me, even as I might have been, Briden sturdily declared. But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. Isn't the whole point that you'd have been different? He almost scowled for it. As different as that? Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. Haven't you exactly wanted to know how different? So this morning she said, you appeared to me like him, a black stranger. Then how did you know it was I? Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn't have been, to show you, you see how I've thought of you. In the midst of that, you came to me that my wonder might be answered. So I knew she went on and believed that since the question held you too, so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw, I knew it would be because you had. And also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that. So why? She strangely smiled. Shouldn't I like him? It brought Spencer Briden to his feet. You like that horror. Okay, let's pause there. I haven't wanted to stop the dialogue, and maybe it's not necessary now. Have you caught everything Brydon came to? He finds himself with his head on Ms. Staverton's lap. The housemaid, Mrs. Muldoon, has let her in. Miss Staverton kisses him, relieved that he's not dead, as she had thought. And the kiss, James calls it an impress, lingers for a moment on his lips, but then he gets right back to work thinking about his obsession with this creature who represents the Person he never became but might have had he stayed in New York. Alice knows that Bryden was out all night. And she knew that he was going to the Jolly Corner. She knew, in fact, that he was going to see him, the alter ego who Bryden now calls the black stranger because he's so different. He's a beast. A beast that Briden brought to bay. He says he seems to hate him. He seems to deny it was himself, even the himself who might have been. But he also kind of accepts it, too. And Alice, Ms. Staverton has definitely accepted it. She says that this morning, in fact, she saw him too, dreamed of him a third time and knew that he would have made himself apparent to Bryden that Bryden has seen him. At the same time, Bryden is now wondering why she isn't recoiling in horror from this guy. And she says, no, why shouldn't I like him? There's an undercurrent here that we haven't really explored. That Ms. Staverton might have spent her whole life waiting for Brydon. At least that's how it seems. Looking back, she has a what might have been too. She stayed in New York. Her what might have been is what might have been if Bryden had stayed. Which would mean that the black stranger would have been the one she'd been with all these years instead of being alone. That's the weird thing about sliding doors and forking paths. They affect others, too. I've confessed some missed moments to people. And I've seen them wince as they suddenly thought about how different their own lives might have been had I not chosen the path I ultimately chose. We can all think about these things. James thinks about them harder than the rest of us. And his characters think about them so hard they kind of change reality, Right? Not all of us can will a ghost or a beast into being with such vividity that it causes us to collapse and die temporarily. That's pretty powerful stuff. So let's go back to the story where Spencer Bryden is brought to his feet and he says, you like that horror. I could have liked him. And to me, she said, he was no horror. I had accepted him. Accepted Raiden, oddly sounded before for the interest of his difference. Yes. And as I didn't disown him, as I knew him, which you at last confronted with him in his difference so cruelly didn't, my dear. Well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him. She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand, still with her arms supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light. You pitied him? He grudgingly, resentfully asked. He has been unhappy. He has been ravaged, she said. And haven't I been unhappy? Am not I? You've only to look at me ravaged. Ah. I don't say I like him better, she granted after a thought. But he's grim, he's worn, and things have happened to him. He doesn't make shift for sight with your charming monocle. No, it struck Brydon. I couldn't have sported mine downtown. They'd have guyed me there. His great convex pince nes. I saw it. I recognize the kind is for his poor ruined sight and his poor right hand. Ah. Briden winced, whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers, then he has a million a year, he lucidly added. But he hasn't you. And he isn't. No, he isn't you, she murmured as he drew her to his breast. Get the Angel REEF Special at McDonald's. Now let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? I participate in restaurants for a limited time. The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to Made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack WelchMBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia. Okay, we're back. So there we go. Our conclusion to the Jolly Corner. It's a tribute to friendship as much as love. If you're one of those people who are happily married for 50 years and then you experience the loss of your spouse and you take up again with the high school sweetheart whom you did not marry, and the two of you have another 10 or 20 years together, this story is kind of for you. Or if you have a soulmate who comes to your aid in time of need 20, 25, 30 years after you're together, this story is for you, too. Or if you've ever had that experience of being in sync with someone so that you both feel something at the same time. Maybe you're living on opposite sides of the country. But you both have a dream the same night and there's something in the ether, something in the. It's spooky action at a distance. Maybe something has caused the two of you to have the same thought patterns on the same day. Even without communicating with one another, you find out only afterwards, if that's you, then this story is for you too. Ms. Staverton is a very good friend to Spencer Bryden. Maybe she'll be a little more than that now, more than a friend, because it's clear that she understands him. So much so that that she sees in her dreams a figure that he sees too, or saw this one time. And we know that there's something more than just our general conception of reality that is at work here. She saw the alter ego's glasses and knew that his eyesight was worse than Spencer Bryden's. He only needed a monocle to see things. But. But the other guy needed something for both his eyes. His eyesight was worse. She also saw that he had lost fingers on his right hand, which is not something she ever could have known. Bryden himself didn't know that until just now. James is clear to confirm that for us when he says that Bryden winced for the proved identity at the same time, even though it means he was haunted by this figure, it brings him closer than ever to Ms. Staverton. Right. Wouldn't you feel close to the person? If you have a fantastic vision and then you find out that a person that you know has had that same vision, seen the same person, including down to the detail of fingers missing from a hand, wouldn't you feel very close to that person? If someone tells me you were in my dream last night, you think, well, okay, I'm not sure how important that is, but if you dream about something very important to you, something as important and fundamental as your vision of the person you could have been, and a close friend sees that exact same person in her dream, well, why would you give that person up? And then she also happens to bring you back from the dead. And she's been a wonderful person all along. We can think that we're pointed towards something of a happy ending here with the two of them getting together. What did it mean for Spencer Bryden not to live in New York all those years? Well, this guy that he sees this vision, the black stranger, has a million a year. He's rich. He was well positioned to get rich. And New York provided the conditions to make it happen. We can think that it would have happened to Spencer Briden? Had he been there? We know he has this talent for renovating houses. He started out well with good properties. If he hadn't gone off to Europe and just lived off the rent, he might have been a builder. He might have been a real estate tycoon with all of what that meant. A rough and tumble world in the late 19th century New York. But this guy, with the exception of a couple of fingers, came out pretty well got rich, has a million a year as Bryden was living comfortably but not with obscene wealth in Europe. And then Bryden clarifies. Well, this guy might be better in some ways. And he might have a claim to you, Ms. Staverton. In some ways, he's the guy who stayed. After all, he didn't abandon you like I did. On the other hand, he doesn't really exist in the world, does he? So it's not like he's a choice you could make over me. It's not like I really am competing with him. You get me. And that's it. And he says all those things he's got, but he doesn't have you. And she says, and he isn't you. James puts a neat little twist on this. He doesn't have you. And she says, he isn't you. That seems to close the story. And the neat little twist. I saw his hand without the fingers. That's maybe a little too neat. We're pretty familiar with that idea. But hey, and by that idea, I don't just mean the fingers. I mean, there's some detail that tells you how what I just experienced was real. It wasn't just me going crazy. It was real. Look, here's Zuzu's petals. But hey, it's a ghost story. And ghost stories often have these little twists to give the reader one last little icy drip down the spine. Oh, my. That wasn't just a crazy dream or something that somebody made up. There was something real going on. That's the little twist, which is fine with me. Because if we're going to have a ghost story at all, there's not much point to making everything just a fever dream. A good ghost story, one might argue, benefits from having a good story and a ghost. There wasn't too much left for James after completing the Jolly Corner. He returned to Europe, came back to the US for one last visit. His brother William died. Henry wrote some autobiographical pieces and oversaw the publication of the 24 volume compendium of his works, the New York edition. It was called World War I broke out. And James worked helping. He helped out in the war effort and he became a British citizen. A year after that he died. And pursuant to his wishes, his ashes were brought back to Massachusetts and Cambridge. He was a restless soul. Sex and his inability to come to grips with it. Whatever fear or anxiety or maybe loathing or guilt or indifference that he felt is present throughout his novels, but he was also artistically restless, humanistically restless, geographically restless. Changing citizenships late in life, dying in one place and being buried in another is par for the course for Henry James. He was consistently inconsistent, constantly inconstant. That makes me think again of poor Constance Fenimore Wilson. Ms. Constance met Mr. Inconstance. But he was a devoted writer and a caring, observant human being. He turned his eye on himself and the scenarios that grown ups feel and don't always explore. He explored them for us. We can now explore them 117 years later with him as our guide. Our Virgil. He might not be as reliable as Virgil, but then again, Virgil wasn't perfectly reliable either. Was he that pagan? He couldn't even go everywhere. He was flawed and he was bold. And that made him the right person to point us toward heaven and take us through hell. We have a little extra time, so how about a my last book? Since we've been quoting Colm Toybean, let's go ahead and hear from him directly. You might have wondered, did you really ask Colm Toybean the special question? Well, indeed I did after he and I discussed James Baldwin. Let's hear that right now. Okay. My guest now is Colm Tobin, award winning Irish novelist and author of the book on James Baldwin. Colm, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [49:30]
Colm Tóibín
I think you should go down howling, you know, I mean, I don't think that you should try that. If you said, oh, your last book should be, you know, the Bible or it should be some, you know, book by Shakespeare, something very worthy. I think you should find something light and funny as though you're going to have tomorrow or the next day to read something serious. So I mean, I would take something like by PG Roadhouse. I think it's just such a silly writer. There's nothing to be learned from his books, I think other than the silliness can be very entertaining. And there's a book called I think it's either Jeeves in The Offing or what Ho, Jeeves? But I'd like to read both of them, I think. But one of them is where Bertie Woosters decides to play the ukulele and drive Jeeves, his man servant, nuts. He wants him to stop playing the ukulele. Now, that really is the subject of the book. And there's a wonderful moment in the middle of the book. It's a passage I love where Jeeves has just disappeared in rage, and Bertie's now feels free to play the ukulele anytime he likes. And he lists a whole lot of songs that he plays, the silliest names for songs, you know, something, something. And I go, beep, beep. You know, he plays on his ukulele and you just realize, actually, that. That, you know, oh, yeah, I'm about to die. Tomorrow's my last day. But look what I'm doing now. I'm reading the silliest book.
- [50:47]
Jack Wilson
Well, that's a great answer. And it seems like I've done a lot of thinking about preparing oneself for the mental. The mental state for the transition you want to have and how do you want your soul to be at that moment. And it seems like laughing would have a kind of cleansing and purification effect that would maybe serve you well. Okay. Com Tobin, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [51:16]
Colm Tóibín
Okay, talk to you then. Okay, bye.
- [51:18]
Jack Wilson
Bye. Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. We have a repeat performance on Thursday, a little something something ad free for Black History Month. Then we have Marianne Moore, the poet. And Mike Palindrome will join us to discuss a fascinating story by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Charles Chestnut is coming up soon. And contemporary, or anyway, very recent Russian poetry. Post Cold War Russian poetry. How did the end of the Cold War affect the Russian poets? Great Gatsby turns 100 this year. We'll be covering that. And Sylvia Plath and Coleridge and the person from Porlock. How about that? We have so many good things on the calendar, it almost makes you forget the bad things that seem to happen every single day, doesn't it? Well, forget them for a little while anyway, hopefully. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.