The New Jerusalem is the New Babylon enslaving the former masters.
So finally, James came to the realization that his New York, revisited after years abroad, had changed as much, become as alienated a maggot-ridden corpse, as Lovecraft’s New York of the near and distant Future; returning now to the beginning of Lovecraft’s story, do we not hear the Jamesian voice?
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned tranquility came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.—“He”
One measure of how the cultural climate has changed—and not to Lovecraft’s advantage—is that such passages as the ones in James could be published not by some squalid pulp magazine, but by Harper in 1904, and republished by Scribner in 1944, and today in the Library of America, and reprinted and excerpted in critical works ever since—without any real outrage or even notice (even from Auden, in his introduction to the 1944 reprint) except from the aforementioned Geismar, who sneers at James’s unmanly whining about his elite group being shoved aside, rather than joining the New Americans on the right side of History. (Before attacking the effete James “cult” in the ’60s, Geismar had been instrumental in returning Jack London to critical favor, in the process needing to provide a similar though more forgiving Freudian interpretation of his “racism”—see Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel 1890–1915.38)
“Lovecraft’s racism,” by contrast, is a research theme in itself, constantly condemned or exculpated; Joshi’s short note to “He” in the collection cited finds room to warn that it is “disturbingly racist,”39 and dealing with an earlier story he denigrates Lovecraft’s obvious distinction between earlier English and Dutch immigrants, what might be called the Founding Race, and the later “wretched refuse” as a “sophism” that allows him to recast the latter as “maggots.”40
James’ New York experience produced, of course, stories of his own, one of which, “The Jolly Corner,” is not only perhaps his last good work, but also one of his “ghost stories,” frequently anthologized alongside Lovecraft. In this tale, the narrator does not so bluntly “gasp” at the swarming aliens; in good WASP fashion, he has retreated to his ancestral townhouse, where he directs his loathing inward. By this time, his loathing of what New York had become had extended to a loathing of what—he—might have become if New York had claimed him.
But that will be the subject of another essay.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
October 17, 2011
THE CORNER AT THE CENTER
OF THE WORLD:
TRADITIONAL METAPHYSICS IN A LATE
TALE OF HENRY JAMES
“The human individual is, at one and the same time, much more and much less than is ordinarily supposed in the West; he is greater by reason of his possibilities of indefinite extension beyond the corporeal modality, . . . but he is also much less since, far from constituting a complete and sufficient being in himself, he is only an exterior manifestation, a fleeting appearance clothing the true being, which in no way affects the essence of the latter in its immutability.”
—René Guénon41
“Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.”
—H. P. Lovecraft42
“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be sure of improving, and that’s your own self . . . [by] the sacrifice of self-will to make room for knowledge of God.”
—Aldous Huxley43
When last we looked in on James and Lovecraft, we found them occupying rather similar positions: wandering the streets of New York, “almost gasp[ing] with a sense of isolation”44 in a city transformed by immigration from a colony of the Nordic race to some loathsome futuristic Babylon.
Returning to their respective home bases, they were in quite different situations. Lovecraft returned to Providence and was taken in by his aunts, living in an increasingly shabby series of genteel houses, James, however, had not merely the funds of a reasonably successful writer45 to provide for a comfortable residence; his share in the family real estate was making considerable gains under the surprisingly wise management of his nephew, Harry James (New York attorney and budding money manager, not the big band trumpeter).
After receiving some particularly good investment news (“Very interesting & valuable to me is your news of the new Syracuse arrangement. . . . I feel as if it has placed my declining years a l’abri of destitution”46) James turned his hand to what would be his last great ghost story—“The Jolly Corner”47—that re-imagines his recent homecoming through the egotistical musings and nocturnal wanderings (in his luxurious family mansion on once-fashionable Irving Place, not in the street, like Lovecraft, whose “declining years” would also not escape destitution either) of a character who seems to combine Henry‘s imagination with Harry‘s grasping business sense—exactly what Lovecraft lacked in order to make his way in the new, capitalistic world.
Spencer Brydon returns to the city and house of his birth, after years of typically Jamesian vague epicurean wanderings in Europe, in order to look over his property—one building in the middle of the street, suitable for a lucrative remodeling, the other abutting the avenue, which he thinks of as the “Jolly Corner.” Finding his fellow Americans boring, he spends his time exploring his properties, occasionally indulging in gossip and assurances of mutual admiration with his chaste confidante, Alice. She it is, however, who sets the weird plot in motion:
Once Alice Silverton’s conditional words—“if [you] had but stayed at home”—fix themselves in Brydon’s consciousness, he responds to them by imagining that, somewhere within the recesses of the deserted birthplace on the jolly corner, his alter ego, the might have been self, lurks. With his newly discovered business acumen working as a catalyst for curiosity, Brydon yearns to track him down, confront him.48
What’s going on in this uncanny story? Of course, there have been all the usual interpretations; Freudian (James confronting, or not, the childhood “wound” which kept him out of the army, and perhaps marriage as well), Jungian (an elderly man—56!—seeks wholeness by confronting his shadow), Marxist (James realizes the true face of American capitalism isn’t his family’s genteel wealth but the grasping robber barons49), and so on.
I think that here, once again, we can profit from looking at things from a Traditional point of view. To do so, let’s lay out some of the puzzling, or at least noticeable, elements in this tale.
The first thing we need to notice—we can hardly avoid it, it dominates the text of the first part—is Brydon’s extraordinary egotism. Right from the start, he tells us of how silly everyone is, asking for what he “thinks” about New York—“my thoughts [are] almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” Why is he here at all? “He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,” sounding a Stirnerite note. And he freely admits to coming home from “a selfish, frivolous, scandalous life. And you see what it has
made of me.” Indeed, ‘me’ is what it is all about: “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 [a financial career] up.”
And fortunately, for such a massive egotist, he has a confidante, Alice, who can assure him, if he had “turned out” differently, even as a “brute, a black stranger,” a “monster,” even: that he was “good enough,” for, sounding like Seinfeld’s mother, “How should I not have liked you?” Besides, she notes with approval, “You don’t care for anything but yourself.”50
Armed with such support, Brydon affirms his curious whim as if he were a Grail knight swearing to perform some Quest for his Lady: “But I do want to see him. . . . And I can. And I shall.”51
But at the last moment, he hits on different, rather more “cunning” plan, as Blackadder’s manservant Baldrick might say: rather than confront the spectre, he will one-up the spirit by exercising the supreme upper-class WASP virtue: discretion. No coward ever retreated from the battlefield with more self-respect intact, even enhanced:
. . . though moved and privileged as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce–never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever–and let me!
After all, he goal all along was to have “saved his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the papers. . . .”
Although the spectre won’t, as it happens, let him leave without confrontation—resulting in another cowardly act, fainting—Alice arrives to rest his head in her comforting lap, and assure him that:
“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,” Brydon sturdily declared . . .
[W]ell, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.” . . . “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. [All emphases here and in the previous quote are James’]
End on note of domestic bliss.
Lovecraft’s narrators, by contrast, seem to err on the opposite side, foolhardiness. They may faint, but only after a determined facing of the truth, no matter how many warnings they may have gotten, and how much they latter hope for sweet forgetfulness or death.
Next, what is the house? The very first impression we are given of the house, as he begins to make his nocturnal rounds, evokes the traditional symbolism of Universal Manifestation as a graph of indefinite points along horizontal and vertical axes, or as a tapestry woven of warp and woof.
Traditional Metaphysics, as presented by René Guénon in a series of works that began appearing shortly after James’ death,52 envisions the Totality of Existence, or ‘Universal Manifestation,’ as, symbolically, a three dimensional grid, formed by the intersection of three planes, representing an indefinite series states of being. The individual being, the human being, for instance, is as it were a line drawn from the center to the periphery, along one possible state of being. But there are, of course, other and higher states, the acquisition of which is the goal of spiritual development. This can be thought of as a return from the periphery to the Center, so that the individual being has manifested all the possibilities of one level, and from which it can ascend to higher levels. In Sufi terms, the being who has actualized these possibilities is Primordial Man, in effect, the New Adam (the old Adam having left the Center, the Garden, and its central axis, or Tree) while the being that has further achieved all the higher states is Universal Man (the Adam Kadmon of the Qabbala).
As Brydon enters the house each night:
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style.
There is an analogy between Universal Manifestation and personal development, though like all analogies it is inverted: physical manifestation entails diversity and a spreading out; personal development a return to simplicity. This is because by returning to the Primordial State, the Garden of Eden, one reaches the Center of the horizontal world, from which the vertical assent to higher possibilities and forms can be made.
This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner–feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities.
The image of a bowl of precious crystal, within which is manifested a pathetic little tone, by the tracing of a finger along its rim, is remarkable, and sounds like it ought to be a Traditional symbol of Universal Manifestation, but I can’t really place it anywhere; here, Henry may have made a more original contribution to mysticism than either his father Henry or brother William!
The house itself clearly embodies the horizontal and vertical dimensions of universal manifestation, the three-dimensional unfolding of indefinite possibilities on each of an equally indefinite hierarchy of levels, forming an indefinite multiplicity of stages or stations. Such symbolism is often fairly explicitly manifested in the design of traditional buildings or dwellings, such as the Native American teepee (the hole in the apex of which allows smoke, or the soul, to escape) or the Muslim house built around an courtyard open to the sky.53
As Brydon “crapes” about his house (Irish servant dialect humor!) he finds himself confronting his obsession:
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.
The Center of the Primordial State is indeed associated in the world’s traditions with erect presences of one sort or another, especially trees or castles, planted in the center of a Garden—as in Genesis—or an invisible or inaccessible Island—as in the Grail Legend. Dusk, of course, is the preeminent symbol of the liminal state where transformations can take place. And do we not have hear an echo of Lovecraft’s “The Shuttered Room”?54
Reaching the top floor, where “the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword”—again, the ironic Grail note—he finds his goal:
The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save through the preceding.
Here one also recalls the three stages of reality or consciousness, analogous to waking, dreaming and deep sleep, and the fourth, Turya, of primal bliss.55
He had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction, been closed since his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had been subsequently closed—that is i
t had been on his previous passage indubitably open! [James’s emphases]
As we have seen, his smug, self-regarding “discretion” allowed him to refuse to open that door, to pass, it would appear, a test set up for him since he had last seen the open door, and instead to retreat back to the lobby, only to faint when the spectre does appear, unwanted, and block his exit.
And as we also saw, after his failure and faint, he awakens in the lap of his motherly confidante:
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 travelled; 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.
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