The Jolly Corner

JAMES, Henry (illustrated by Peter MILTON)

Edité par Aquarius Press, 1971

A propos de cet article

First free-standing edition, after issues in magazine and collection formats. Dark grey-brown linen double clamshell case with letterpress text and 21 resist-ground etchings with engraving by Peter Milton, case 20-1/8 x 16-1/2 in., text leaves 19-1/2 x 15-7/8 in., etchings 10 x 15 in. on Heavyweight Buff 15 x 19 in. One of 150 copies on Rives from the limitation of 184, signed by Milton and numbered 3/150 on the colophon. The text fascicle collates 9 loose folios: 1 l. (front cover, title recto, copyright verso), 1 l. (half-title recto) and [1 l.], a folio folder for Plate II-2 as frontispiece (repositioned from second print fascicle), 6 ff. (pp. 7-28, with two blank pp.), 1 l. (p. 29 recto) and 1 l. (colophon recto), 1 l. (rear cover, half-title recto). Three print folios I, II and III correspond to the chapters (text excerpts on each first leaf recto), each fascicle containing seven loose prints (but plate II-2, signed by Milton, inserted as frontispiece in the second text folio). The etchings were pulled under the artist s supervision at Impressions Workshop in Boston. The Press of A. Colish in Mount Vernon printed the letterpress. The front cover of the case is embossed with the double door motif taken from Plate III-3, each half with a gilt-ruled black morocco label lettered in gilt respectively "HENRY JAMES" and "PETER MILTON." Slight scuffing and rubbing of case cover cloth, all else fine. McNulty 62-82. "The Jolly Corner" was first published in The English Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (December 1908), and was included as parts of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909) and The Uniform Tales of Henry James (Martin Secker, 1919). This magnificent production of the Aquarius Press and Peter Milton is the first free-standing edition of this "ghostly tale," given concluding place in Harold Bloom's archetypal selection in The Daemon Knows (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015). "Henry James," Bloom prefaces, "the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales." "The Jolly Corner" is built around juxtaposition, the old world and the new, the hard "'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things," confronting the "spirit," "the perfection nothing else could have blighted," of "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." The questing, layering introspective tension, set overtly as a clash of architecture (always admirable symbol for the craft of authorship), is palpable: "If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine." James's protagonist Spencer Brydon is visiting ancestral "annals of nearly three generations" after 33 years. (Emerson and Hawthorne stand as Brydon's stern forebears in Plate I-1.) The same number of years before writing "The Jolly Corner" James was at work on The American, at the onset of his transplant into "Europe." The decade of the 1900's beheld James's glorious triad The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. On the tails of Twain and Crane it was, as well, the muscled "swagger" decade of Dreiser, Norris, London, the Muckrakers. Milton's Brydon is James himself at the time of writing (compare Coburn's 1905 photograph and Sargent's 1913 portrait), stalking his daemon, "the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality that fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous." Uniquely in James, the denouement is just perhaps a requited love story, an awakening "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.".

N° de réf. du vendeur ABE-1506445241447

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Jolly Corner
• Éditeur: Aquarius Press
• Date de parution: 1971
• Reliure: No Binding
• État de l'article: Near Fine