448
PARTISAN REVIEW
wounds. John Ford carries on the figure by saying that even if he
grows a moustache, as he intends to do, he will be altering
his
face as
women do a misfitting garment-taking in on one side and letting out
on the other-insofar as he crops his head and cultivates his chin.
In general, then, the impression seems sustained that Henry
James's visit to America in 1904-1905, after twenty years of absence,
was largely actuated by an impulse to repair, if possible, the injury
and to complete the unfinished experience of his youth. He was, as it
were, haunted by the ghost of his own past and of this he wished to
disabuse his mind before actual death overtook him. Since the Civil
War had played so vital a part in his early blight, he now visited the
South for the first time and received there those impressions which
bear so strong a mark of personal projection.
The plausibility of this reconstruction and of the preceding in–
terpretation of "The Story of a Year" is strengthened by a psycho–
logical reading of the later supernatural tales, especially "The Jolly
Corner" (5). This short story was first published in the
English Re–
vzew
for December, 1908, shortly after his visit to the United States.
It
is the story of Spencer Brydon who as a man of fifty-six returns to
America after many years of residence in Europe. He has come to
look at his property-the house on the Jolly Corner-where he was
born and grew up. Before long he becomes absorbed in the old house
to the point of visiting it nightly in the strange hope of encountering
there his own alter ego-the ghost of his former self. When he finally
does succeed and is confronted by the specter he has been seeking, he
notes among other things that two fingers on its right hand are miss–
ing. He cannot endure to face the image before him-he refuses to
recognize himself there-and overwhelmed by the extremity of his
emotion, he falls unconscious. When he revives, Alice Staverton,
whom he had known in his early days before taking up residence
abroad and whom he has been seeing since his return, is standing over
him. She, too, has seen the ghost-in a dream-and thus knew that
Spencer had made the encounter. He protests to her that the shape
he has met was not himself till she quite simply declares, "Isn't the
whole point that you'd have been different?" (5, p. 483.)
It
is clea.r
from the context that the heroine could have been in love with the
rejected personality (the ghost) since she understood it. She is, how–
ever, equally ready to accept Brydon as he is today and reconcile him,
perhaps, to those unacknowledged aspects of himself which have
kept him from her all these years-which have driven
him
abroad to
escape himself.
