{"id":75694,"date":"2014-08-20T16:34:17","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T20:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75694"},"modified":"2014-08-20T16:38:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-20T20:38:10","slug":"paranormal-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/20\/paranormal-activity\/","title":{"rendered":"Paranormal Activity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Washington_Square,_New_York_1897\"<\/a>

Fernand Lungren, Washington Square<\/i>, 1897<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

James\u2019s writings about New York disclose, more than anything, an anger, quite unlike any other anger in James, at what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew. It is not an ordinary anger at the destruction of beauty and familiarity; it is much stranger and more complex than that, and it deserves a great deal of attention.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s from Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s introduction to\u00a0The New York Stories of Henry James.\u00a0<\/em>It\u2019s a great primer on the writer\u2019s hometown ambivalence\u2014a quite explicable turn of events when one considers that any visit to the Village would have brought James face to face with the death of childhood, with constant overhaul, Mammon, and rampant sexuality on nearly every block. And with bad food, to boot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On a constitutional in Washington Square Park today, my thoughts turned to James\u2014they generally do, when I see the intact row houses fronting the park. (Well, James and NYU.) The man titled a novella after it\u2014even if, as a friend recently pointed out,\u00a0Washington Square<\/em>\u00a0gives less sense of the neighborhood than of interiority. (He\u2019s said to have modeled the Sloper residence on memories of his grandmother\u2019s. And if you want to see that<\/em>\u00a0brought to life, take a tour of the\u00a0Merchant\u2019s House Museum<\/a>, one of the small treasures of the city, listed on any compendium of NYC\u2019s haunted spaces.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps my favorite of James\u2019s New York stories is \u201cThe Jolly Corner.\u201d Like\u00a0The Turn of the Screw<\/em>, it is a ghost story and more than that. It concerns a man returning to his empty childhood home, which is about to be subdivided into apartments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell\u2014so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious\u2014all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now,\u00a0that<\/em>\u2019s what I call psychological horror. And James would have known full well of Washington Square\u2019s reputation for being haunted: its predevelopment history as a hanging yard filled with swinging bodies\u2014and, before that, a Native American burial ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I was walking down Washington Square North, I saw a large tour group pausing before one of the row houses. I thought, How fun!\u00a0Were they on a literary or architectural tour of the area? Perhaps a ghost walk? I saw several pose for pictures; were they re-creating scenes from\u00a0The Heiress<\/em>, or the TV adaptation of\u00a0Washington Square<\/em>? Then I heard the tour guide:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd this, of course, is the house from\u00a0I Am Legend<\/em>. I know you\u2019ll all want pictures. I\u2019m happy to take them for you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James\u2019s writings about New York disclose, more than anything, an anger, quite unlike any other anger in James, at what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew. It is not an ordinary anger at the destruction of beauty and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[8892,2199,153,125,3506,15046,5596],"class_list":["post-75694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-childhood","tag-greenwich-village","tag-henry-james","tag-new-york-city","tag-the-jolly-corner","tag-washington-square","tag-washington-square-park"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nParanormal Activity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on Henry James\u2019s New York stories.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/20\/paranormal-activity\/\" \/>\n<meta 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