"Prismatic and Profitable": Commerce and the Corporate Person in James's "The Jolly Corner"

In 1904 William James wrote excitedly to his brother Henry about a chance lunchtime sighting, in a New Jersey restaurant, of the notorious John D. Rockefeller "on exhibition":

R. you know, is reputed the richest man in the world, and he certainly is the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen. A man 10 stories deep, and to me quite unfathomable. Physionomie de Pierrot (not a spear of hair on head or face), flexible, cunning, quakerish, superficially suggestive of naught but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the greatest villain in business whom our country has produced.¹

Just a few years before William described his difficulty reconciling Rockefeller's reputation as a villainous tycoon with his stark ascetic appearance, Frank Norris had staged a similar bewilderment in The Octopus (1901). When Presley, the poet, confronts the mythic Shelgrim, president of the Pacific and Southwestern Railway, he is responding to a desire to "see, face to face, the man whose power was so vast . . . whose potency for evil so limitless." But instead of "an ogre, a brute," Presley discovers a shabby, seventy-year-old man, working late in a monastically barren office, "a sentimentalist and an art critic." "[C]onfused, all at sea, embarrassed," Presley finds that "[n]o standards of measurement in his mental equipment would apply to the actual man."²

That William James and Norris would use the same metaphors of immeasurability—inverted skyscrapers, unplumbable depths, vast oceans—to describe a corporate millionaire and his reputation is not altogether surprising, for the turn-of-the-century corporate magnate was little more than the collective myth-making that his epistemological elusiveness precipitated. On one hand, the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Carnegies were the real figures of the new plutocracy at the end of the nineteenth century, seeming to offer material proof of the success of the American myth of self-making and laissez-faire capitalism. On the other hand, they were, like Shelgrim, only symbols or figureheads for a faceless corporate power that threatened ideals of competitive individualism and republican theories of wealth distribution.³ The monopolies, as John Tipple suggests, posed a quandary to Americans "accustomed to thinking primarily in terms of individuals": the "diminutive Andrew Carnegie came to represent the entire steelmaking complex of men and decisions which bore his name, the lean, ascetic John D. Rockefeller to personify Standard Oil, the bulbous nose and rotund figure of J. P. Morgan to signify the whole of Wall Street."⁴ Not only were the men synecdoches for a complex of men and decisions, but their wealth and power were disconnected from standard measures of success. Instead of property, big businessmen had shares and dividends, cornered markets, and negotiable securities; instead of laboring themselves, they merely, as Carnegie argued, "assemble[d] thousands of operatives . . . of whom [they knew] . . . little or nothing, and to whom [they were] . . . little better than a myth."⁵ And what they traded in were, according to one cynical Wall Street commentator "[m]agnificent bubbles . . . blown into prismatic and profitable radiance with nothing more substantial than borrowed phials of oil and deeds of property."⁶

Like the "prismatic" bubbles he mobilized for exchange, like the architecture that at once announced and occluded his affairs—the steel-strutted skyscrapers laminated with neoclassical facades—and like the enormous wealth that was not quite locatable as money or property, the figure of the turn-of-the-century businessman simultaneously invited and resisted interpretation. As Henry Adams remarked of the "new man" behind the great Trusts, "the longer one watched, the less could be seen of him."⁷ Both William James and Norris's Presley do their own watching: they look hopefully to either Rockefeller's stark baldness or Shelgrim's massive immobility for visual evidence of the toll of commercial struggle, as if the businessman might have a transparent legibility—"seamed all over," as Henry...