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The turning point of the 1909 story “The Bench of Desolation” occurs when Kate Cookham returns to track down Herbert Dodd, sitting as she knew he would be on his favorite seafront bench, ten years after he broke off their engagement: a decision for which she made him pay dearly. The meeting involves a little textual memory on James’s part:
His eyes only, at last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That, however, didn’t relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another moment the odd desperate gesture of raising both his hands to his face and letting them, while he pressed it to them, cover and guard it.
(CT 393)
At the climax of “The Jolly Corner,” written 1906 and published 1908, the ghostly alter ego employs the same gesture in that moment of horrified confrontation, the suddenly exposed flash of kinship between sensitive, self-caressing Spencer Brydon and the coarse, dynamic business magnate haunting him and his childhood home. In the later story, one of the visions Herbert seems to be trying to hide from is a growing awareness that some kind of second self is emerging in Kate, a self not only refined but authoritative, even graceful, mysteriously co-existing with the rapacious mercenary whom he feels to have blighted his existence. Does this vision of unsuspected latent potential in his enemy have implications for him also, implications difficult for him to confront or articulate?
Herbert Dodd inherited his uncle’s bookshop, made a shabby living from it, and regarded himself as a little gentleman-like beacon of culture in the south-coast town of Properley (which sounds rather like the coastal town Morrissey sang about). When he broke with Kate, she threatened to take him to court unless he paid her an immediate £400, part of her threat being that, if he refused, a jury would certainly award her a much larger sum-£600 is the figure she names. Scared and helpless and seeing no alternative, he sets out to raise the money, a process that over ten years of torment costs him everything he owns-the shop, the woman he does marry (who dies, along with their children)-and brings him to penury, a clerical job in the gasworks, a...