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  • Dencombe’s Final Moments: A Microcosm of Jamesian Philosophy
  • Garry L. Hagberg

The opening words of “The Middle Years” are “The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel . . .” (235). As we learned from Eliot, April is the cruelest month. Its cruelty lies in its double aspect, being both a month of a continuing winter in which one comes to long for the spring, and—sometimes—that very spring. It is one thing and looks forward to another; it continues the past of the winter, delivering it, wearily, into the present, just as it severs its ties to the past and inaugurates a new season. It is a month of bi-focal displacement, looking in two directions at once, displaying fluctuating identity. It seems to aspire to a condition of being, in a sense, better than it is. April, however, is hardly the only exemplar of bi-focal displacement, of double-aspect identity in this story. We meet Dencombe in a condition of recovery, and with it the faint promise of renewal. Yet he stands in the garden, James tell us, contemplating “the attraction of easy strolls” with, significantly, “a deliberation in which however there was still something of languor” (235). Languor hangs over from the past, delivering itself into the present, despite Dencombe’s explicit forward-looking intention of recovery and his inner psychological displacement—about which James, as moral philosopher in literary clothing, will show us a great deal in very small scope1—is mirrored now not meteorologically but geographically: “He liked the feeling of the south so far as you could have it in the north. . . .” Dencombe in short likes the idea of one place while in truth occupying another place of a very different kind. The north delivers the hint, or the faint promise, of the south when it changes its aspect. Dencombe’s inward self is one that likes (and as we shall see, longs for) the idea of a better self.

James leads us to think that this better self refers to a better physical self; this is explicitly shown in Dencombe’s reaction to his own quickness to tire. “He was tired enough when he reached it [the bench], and for a moment was disappointed.” [End Page 223] This flicker of disappointment at the clinging illness he hopes to leave in the past is accompanied by a preliminary reflection concerning the relative meaning of “better”: “he was better of course, but better, after all, than what?” This thought of relative terms is immediately followed by a far darker absolute assertion: “He should never again, as at one or two great moments of the past, be better than himself.” The plausibility of ever-new potentialities and actualities is something Dencombe is rapidly exhausting; as James puts it, the “infinite of life was gone,” and of the actual dose of life only a “small glass scored like a ther-mometer by the apothecary” remains. But again, this is only the physical mirroring of what is of primary interest in this story, the psychological meaning of Dencombe’s aspiration to be “better than himself.” James effects the transition from the concerns of the body to the preoccupations of the mind with characteristic ease. Resting on the bench, with a parcel he has been handed by the postman a little while earlier, Dencombe looks out at the sea. What he sees is “all surface and twinkle,” and what he thinks is that this is “far shallower than the spirit of man.” With the polarity of surface and depth directing his subsequent thought, he reflects, seemingly paradoxically, that the human abyss is indeed real, but that the reality of this very abyss is constituted of human illusion: “It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.”

Dencombe knows fully well what the parcel contains: an advance copy of his latest book, The Middle Years. Something keeps him from opening it, and it is more than another felt incapacity for full revivification: he took “for granted there could be no complete renewal of the pleasure, dear to young...

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