Gotham Diary:
The text’s the thing
29 January 2014
Reading The Wings of the Dove, I’m almost knocked over by the theatricality of the text. The text is a theatre, complete with play in progress; all you have to do is to open the book, and you are there. This is not to say that the novel is the adaptation of a play that might be performed in a conventional theatre by human actors. It isn’t. It is the play, complete with theatre to house it. It could never be staged otherwise. But it works like a play.
It might help to remember George Bernard Shaw. If you’ve ever read one of Shaw’s great plays, you’ll recall the lengthy stage directions. I remember hearing, in college, that actors hate those stage directions, because they’re so confining, but they certainly make the plays easy to read at home. Strip them out, however, and you have drama of more or less conventional length. Speaking the lines, getting on and off stage, and so on, will take a few hours. And no one in the audience is likely to miss the stage directions.
I wonder how many people have become fond of filmed adaptations of Henry James’s novels without having read those novels first. Not very many, I should think. Merchant/Ivory produced the best ones that I’ve ever seen, the ones most likely to make an interesting impression upon viewers who haven’t read the books; I’m thinking especially of The Golden Bowl, which, despite its many eccentricities of casting and scripting, I should be sorry to be without. But the run of earnest BBC productions that began appearing in the Sixties is rather starchy. They have their fascinating moments, but they remain somewhat pale reflections of more powerful originals.
My point is that, if you strip away everything that isn’t dialogue in Henry James — and a great many of his conversations are not quoted, as it were, but rather indirectly reported by the narrator himself — if you boil his books down to the words between quotation marks, you lose most of the book, and what’s left is fairly lifeless.
In my Penguin edition of The Wings of the Dove, the first part of Book Second begins on page 85. The first line of quoted dialogue appears on page 94. Everything leading up to that line might well be considered as a kind of stage direction, with the narrator arranging the stage just so. He does this by telling you things that you can see with your mind’s eye. Consider the second paragraph.
He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on certain sides, to classification — as for instance by being a gentleman, by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally sound and generally civil; yet, though to that degree neither extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed play straight into an observer’s hands. He was young for the House of Commons —
in today’s English, we would say “too young for the House of Commons,” and it might be helpful to read in the intensifier at the appropriate spots in the following string of ruled-out possibilities —
He was young for the House of Commons, he was loose for the Army. He was refined, as might have been said, for the City and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, sceptical, it might have been felt, for the Church. On the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry and yet too little in them for art. You would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas themselves. The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak — idle without looking empty. It was the accident, possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves, of his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly smooth, and apt into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable periods in communication with the ceiling, the tree tops, the sky. He was in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what was near and to take up what was far; he was more a prompt critic than a prompt follower of custom. He suggested, above all, that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety — a law that in intercourse with him it might be of profit, though not easy, to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises of tolerance as well as of temper.
This is superb example of James’s late-stage approximations of straightfowardness. The syntax is dense, but it is complete. The last two sentences — I very nearly left them out — are not quite as clear as what precedes them; we’re told nothing about the “law” of Densher’s temperament save that it is subtle. But everything else is quite clear. It is the portrait — we can be frank about this now — of a young man on whom Henry James might have a great crush.
There is simply no other way to present all of this information, this deftly woven network of the professional possibilities open to an Edwardian gentleman that at the same time foregrounds Densher’s predilection for thinking. Nor could Densher’s unconcern with material success be so pointedly hinted at. But observe that James never refers to anything that we couldn’t see for ourselves if Densher were standing before us. James makes him stand before us, all the more substantially, I should argue, because James sticks to the apparent surface of the man. What Densher thinks about when he stares at the ceiling is elided so suavely that we are quietly assured that we don’t need to know. James tells us everything that we do need to know; he presents it for us to see.
An actor charged with impersonating Merton Densher in an adaptation of the novel for the screen — I can’t be brought to call such thing a “dramatization”; de-dramatization would be more like it — would be only doing his job to absorb as much as possible of the paragraph that I have extracted in shaping his role; at a minimum, he ought to strive to represent Densher’s as yet unstamped character, for it is this “fusion and fermentation” that makes Densher the right man for the scheme that Kate Croy will unfold. But no staged “version” of The Wings of the Dove will ever afford us a dramatic experience to rival the one provided by the novel.
It’s very much a question of language. To get the most out of Phèdre, you have to understand French. To get the most out of Henry James, you have to be a close reader. The only difference is that nobody is a born speaker of the latter tongue.