The Jolly Corner and Other Tales

by Henry James, Roger Gard

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910 includes the final ten stories James wrote. Many involve satirical critiques of an increasingly narcissistic, acquisitive society - from 'The Papers', with its attack on celebrity culture, to 'The Birthplace', offering a sardonic view of the Shakespeare industry, and 'A Round of Visits', which conducts a horrified tour through selfishness and swindling in early twentieth-century New York. The title story itself was in James's own view 'a miraculous masterpiece in the line of the fantastic-gruesome, the supernatural-thrilling … the best thing of this sort I've ever done'. With its extensive textual history and wide-ranging notes, this volume will interest not only James scholars, but all students of early twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories

320 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really lovely collection of slow, stately late James stories, linked together by their shared focus on age and regret. His mature style, once you're locked into its tortuously winding rhythm, is full of elegant and elaborate metaphor:

"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 for ever."
- 'The Jolly Corner'

James is at his very best in many of the stories here - 'Broken Wings', 'The Beast in the Jungle', 'The Jolly Corner' and 'The Bench of Desolation' in particular are 5-star stuff (and it strikes me that the cover of this edition perfectly catches the haunted drawing-room unease of their tone). These tales are poised somewhere between mannered Victorian irony and Modernist fusion of sensory description with the hallucinatory rhythms of the conscious mind; in his introduction, Roger Gard points to the influence of developing cinematic techniques (the zoom, the cross-fade, etc) on James' first-person perspective. Some of the lesser stories in here (the first and the penultimate, particularly) are those which feel less powerfully like they're charting a path towards the Joycean/Woolfian/Fordian styles which take up James' reigns in the next few decades.

I'm never sure how much I should be identifying with the old, unfulfilled, tendentious men that populate these stories. Sometimes, like in 'Broken Wings', I feel absolutely in step and in sympathy with its characters. Sometimes, though, like in 'The Velvet Glove', I can't help but find John Berridge ridiculous and idiotic: his concluding rejection of the 'Olympian' aristocrat who asks him to write a preface to her middling novel is as overbearing and demeaning as it gets. This never ruins them wholesale, though - surely part of the collective effect of these stories is to feel and agree with their protagonists that they have somewhat whittled or worried away their lives. James certainly (if perhaps incorrectly) felt that himself.

(long but lovely quote incoming...)

What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was as if, being nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even for himself, he were just everything here, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life, there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence—not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus in short he settled to live—feeding all on the sense that he once had lived, and dependent on it not alone for a support but for an identity.
- 'The Beast in the Jungle'

[Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of color, some watery under-world. He tried to think of something noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers - they might come as soon as they would."

[raniaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’ll give it a 3.5 if you push me

i love a good gothic doppelgänger shit, but not gonna lie, despite loving the plot, reading it felt like dragging a dead body… god it was sooooo slow, it kind of irritated me at times, like how tf can you make me feel like that with a story 33 pages long??? rude.

however, i must say, the alter ego thing stuck with me. It just made me spiral into all this “what if” self… he really got me there.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the first story, "The Third Person." Top notch. Woolfian-predecessor. But the remaining stories failed to enchant, as much as I wanted to like them.