He was not simply in the new city while remembering the old. The old city had never ended for him; it lived as an aspect of the imperative of his genius. Now the lights in his rooms were flickering madly, almost blinding him. To protect himself, he heaped insult upon insult on New York.

For a writer, the blurring of time present and time past is a way of freeing the imagination but it has also a way of making the personality both troubled and willful. What he saw in 1905 in New York caused James to use imagery wildly disproportionate to his experience, but apt for the battle going on within him between a past which clung to him and the terrible novelty of modernity. Writers die when they grow up; New York that year was asking James for too much.

It should be possible, also, to argue that the case was much simpler, that James found more decent, human, and civilized values in the city of his childhood and genuinely disliked the city he found in 1905, and expressed himself robustly on the matter, having done so in a number of stories also. But one of the last stories he set in New York, and one of his last pieces of fiction, tends to favor the opposite argument, that there was something unresolved and haunting in James’s dislike of New York and in his fear of it. This story is called “The Jolly Corner.”

James, like many of his contemporaries in London, was interested in doubles. His story “The Private Life,” published in 1892, mirrored the world of Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. In it, James dramatized his own life in society and company and his own vocation as a solitary man, a writer. In the story he manages to place his writer in two places at exactly the same moment; he is both in company and alone at his desk. Now in early August 1906, James wrote to his agent, “I have an excellent little idea through not having slept a wink last night all for thinking of it, and must therefore at least get the advantage while the iron is hot.” In “The Jolly Corner,” written after his American sojourn of 1905, James found a new doubled self to dramatize, the man who had left New York and lived in England, and his double, still haunting him, who had never left, who still wandered in those same rooms which would fill James’s autobiography and had filled his novel “Washington Square.”

Brydon in the story has been thirty-three years away from New York. He shares James’s view of it. The city now seems to him reduced “to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures.” He sees his old friend Alice Staverton and muses on what a great man of business he might have become had he stayed in New York. He has kept his old house downtown empty all the years, having it cleaned and cared for every day. He now goes there to be haunted by a figure moving in its dark rooms, the figure who has never left them, just as James himself in part of his mind has never left them.

Both men then engage in a tussle throughout a long night, a battle to turn off the light in these rooms. “Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.” Two fingers on his right hand which cover his face have been shot away. “The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter.” “It is,” Leon Edel has written, “a profoundly autobiographical tale.” It is a reenactment of the battle which had taken place within James’s own self as he returned to New York and set out to describe the world he saw, seeking in his descriptions to destroy it, seeking to puncture its great power with the steel point of his great paragraphs. He wanted to restore life to the world that lingered within him, the old New York, which he had experienced before the complications of puberty and unsettlement, which he had left when he was twelve. It is significant that at the end of “The Jolly Corner,” Brydon, who has come unscathed through his dark night with his double, is rescued by his old friend called Alice—James’s sister and sister-in-law and the wife of his nephew were all called Alice. In the last sentence of “The Jolly Corner,” he draws her to his breast. His reward for turning off the light has been a hint of love, the possibility of an uncomplicated sexuality as enjoyed by his brother William. “The Jolly Corner” leaves its protagonist stranded between a presexual past and an implausible present.

Two of the last stories James wrote were also set in the New York he had explored and deplored for The American Scene. The city as viewed in both “Crapy Cornelia” and “A Round of Visits” is almost sinister, quite vulgar, and deeply unsettled. Theodora Bosanquet, James’s typist, to whom he dictated his fiction, noted on December 17, 1908: “Mr James going on with ‘short’ story for Harpers which extends mightily—& is, I think, dull.” Once more in “Crapy Cornelia” James is working with an idea of a returned exile, a man who dislikes the new city and remembers, with great nostalgia, the old. His protagonist notes the house of Mrs. Worthingham in which “every particular expensive object shriek[ed] at him in its artless pride.” He also makes what is James’s most eloquent attack on the lack of social cohesion in the city: “This was clearly going to be the music of the future—that if people were but rich enough and furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and sanitated and manicured ...all they had to do for civility was to take the amused ironic view of those who might be less initiated.” He railed against the lack of modesty in New Yorkers’ display of their advantages: “In his time...the best manners had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some art of not insisting on one’s luxurious differences, of concealing rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be ‘in the know.’”

The city in “A Round of Visits,” which was the last short story James wrote, is even more inhospitable than usual as Mark Monteith, another exile, returns to New York, where he has been swindled by a New Yorker. As in “A Most Extraordinary Case,” written forty years earlier, the protagonist is ill in a New York hotel.