Salon - “Brooksmith”
The salon in Mr. Offord’s house is a fundamental image in “Brooksmith.” Henry James writes, “I remember vividly every element of the place, down to the intensely Londonish look of the grey opposite houses, in the gap of the white curtains of the high windows, and the exact spot where, on a particular afternoon, I put down my tea-cup for Brooksmith, lingering an instant, to gather it up as if he were plucking a flower. Mr. Offord's drawing-room was indeed Brooksmith's garden, his pruned and tended human parterre, and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely owing to his supervision.” Perceptibly, the drawing room is undeniably comfy and accommodative. Henry James and the other consistent associates who visited Mr. Oliver Offord appreciated how Brooksmith unfailingly attended to them. The living-room’s aura stimulated the prevalent stopovers at Mr. Offord’s abode.
London Suburb - “The Altar of the Dead”
Henry James illuminates, “She had been buried in a London suburb, a part then of Nature’s breast, but which he had seen lose one after another every feature of freshness. It was in truth during the moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least. They looked at another image, they opened to another light. Was it a credible future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever the answer it was an immense escape from the actual.” The imagery of the cemetery sets ground for George Stransom’s Trauma of the Real which is epitomized in the rhetorical questions above. The cemetery occasions an unbearable trauma that encumbers Stransom from discerning whether he is beholding history or his future.
