The Betrayal of Henry James

The Wings of the Dove on Screen

I.

Prompted by my great experience in a recent Catherine Project reading group on The Wings of the Dove, I sought Iain Softley’s 1997 film adaptation. I knew, long before I pressed “play,” that the film would be unable to recapture the experience of reading the novel. This is not a tired claim that “the book is always better” (since there are many cases where it is not) but, in this case, a fact: as a medium, film cannot do to a viewer what James’s prose does to a reader. James’s novel takes place more in the minds of its three major characters than it does in London or Venice and a film cannot dramatize the kind of sustained thinking and plunges into a character’s consciousness that James’s readers enjoy. It would be like filming the events described in Molly Bloom’s interior monologue: you could get the actors, costumes, sets, and even events perfect, but not the mind at work. Yet I was hopeful that the film would contain flashes of Jamesian moments in which the viewer, like the reader, questions a character’s motives. And while The Heiress (1949) is a terrific adaptation of Washington Square and The Innocents (1961) is a nearly-perfect adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, those short novels are early in the James canon and a distance, stylistically, from Wings. But I thought I could at least learn something by seeing what many regard as James’s masterpiece through someone else’s eyes.

Watching the film reminded me of two statements about translation. I heard the first in 2005, while talking to a beloved professor of mine, Ronald Christ, about Edith Grossman’s recently-released translation of Don Quixote. (He was the expert and translator, not me.) “I wrote Edith a letter, urging her to do it,” he told me. “But I also know it can’t be done. That’s the first rule: it can’t be done.” I read the second in 2017, when I came across David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament: in his Introduction, he calls another translation of the New Testament “probably something of a foolish venture,” considering all the theological approaches, scholarly assumptions, and raging debates about fidelity to the original. “It is a game,” he states, “in which no player prospers.”

The Wings of the Dove is untranslatable to the screen. The film is a disappointment but an illuminating one, for it reminds us of what is lost and gained when filmmakers attempt their translations from pages to frames. The most satisfying directors offer a version of the source material that shows the viewer what they saw and heard while reading the original: we can all read No Country for Old Men and then see what the Coen brothers saw when they read it—and marvel at how well they translated what’s on the page into images on the screen. We can also read The Short-Timers and then see what Kubrick saw when he read Gustav Hasford’s forgettable novel and turned it (with Michael Herr) into Full Metal Jacket. In murder mysteries we match wits with the detective; in film adaptations we match our imaginations with the director’s. How the director translates the original into a different medium is a large part of the pleasure: we read about an adaptation being cast and think so-and-so will be great in a role. We love stories about how directors envisioned an actor for a role that in hindsight seems obvious and perfect but, at the time, was questioned or even mocked. Coppola had to fight for both Pacino and Brando.

(Worth noting is that this is a one-way valve: we are interested to see how directors translate novels into film, but almost never how films are translated into novels. A novel with “Based on the Motion Picture” on its cover will not be taken seriously by readers; one with “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” bestows a kind of clout. In the United States, at least, having one’s pages translated into frames is a stamp of approval.)

The first hindrance to translating Wings for the screen is that the plot could be retold in a few sentences, yet the novel is five hundred pages of dense paragraphs in which sentences seek their end punctuation like rivulets of water seeking its own level. When you begin a sentence, you aren’t sure when it will stop or where it will lead you and often need to concentrate on pronouns and predicates more than you usually do. Here is one chosen almost at random:

It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he had seen her at a loss; he judged the next instant moreover that she didn't like it—either the being so or the being seen, for she soon spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence.

Here’s another:

When Kate and Densher abandoned her to Mrs. Stringham on the day of her meeting them together and bringing them to luncheon, Milly, face to face with that companion, had had one of those moments in which the warned, the anxious fighter of the battle of life, as if once again feeling for the sword at his side, carries his hand straight to the quarter of his courage.

The pleasure of James is found in his prose, not in his plots. As Samuel Johnson said of Clarissa—which he admired—“If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.” H. G. Wells described James’s later works as ones in which “vast paragraphs sweat and struggle” all “for tales of nothingness” and compared the author’s efforts to “a leviathan retrieving pebbles” and “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.” That style, the means by which the reader is brought closer to the minds of other people, is what makes some readers enjoy James and others run. Love it or hate it—you just can’t adapt it. And if you can’t adapt it, you’re left with ten minutes’ of action spread over two hours.

The Maltese Falcon works so well when translated to the screen because both Dashiell Hammett and John Huston have Spade doing things. In James, what the characters do more than anything else is think, observe, feel, suspect, judge, reconsider, imagine, dwell, evaluate, and make decisions. Things “happen,” of course—they aren’t waiting for Godot—but what happens is an excuse for the sentences. The dove dives more deeply into consciousness than the falcon, which doesn’t make it a better bird, but a different species. Robert Frost reminded us that poetry is what’s lost in translation—and what’s lost in the translation of Wings is the presence of Henry James. Everything else is there: the casting is perfect, Venice is wonderfully lit, and the furniture is perfectly indicative of characters’ social stations. But it’s like watching a documentary about The Beatles without any of their music on the soundtrack or reading a long biography of Sinatra by someone who has never heard him sing.

II.

The first thing anyone learns in a creative writing class is, “Show, don’t tell.” James, however, often inverses the commandment, telling us the meaning of a scene and leaving the reader to imagine how the actual scene occurred. For example, when describing the freedom that the American millionaire Milly Theale enjoys because of her wealth in contrast with the stress felt by Kate Croy because of her deprivation, James writes:

It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of expenditure that [Kate] appeared to charge [Milly], but with not having the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree the habit of a conscious dependence on others [. . . ] Milly’s range was thus immense; she had to ask nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her, she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, in these days, was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on together, she would abide in that generosity.

This is a state of awareness, of consciousness, that other novelists would dramatize with a concrete scene of Milly and Kate shopping and Kate looking at price tags while Milly simply says what she wants, or of the two women ordering lunch and Milly ordering the most expensive bottle of champagne while Kate’s eyes widen just a fraction. Telling more than showing is how James often works and once a reader is attuned to this, he spends less time visualizing action in his mind (as we all do when reading anything with even a trace of narrative) and more time penetrating those of the characters. That’s why his readers adore him.

Here’s another example, with Merton Densher reflecting on how much his beloved Kate knows about his having previously met Milly (“his little New York friend”) in America:

He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent’s Park; and though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly, from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it added—and he might positively have occupied the same bench—various troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather than fewer between them.

The “various troubled fancies” that irritate Densher would be dramatized, rather than named, by other writers, who would use dialogue to show how Densher had “practically not pressed” Kate during those “first hours” or what “more things rather than fewer between them” looks like in action.

Late Henry James abounds in these moments. But he is not averse to dialogue and ends the book with a conversation (and final sentence) as interesting and as strong as any in literature—the Jamesian equivalent of a mic-drop. When his characters do speak, they often burst into conversation as those in musicals do into song. The net result of James’s style is a kind of emotional suspense, where the mystery is how people will adjust their loyalties and imaginations in light of new experiences. It’s as if John LeCarre were writing about heiresses and potential suitors.

Alison Elliott as Milly and Linus Roache as Densher

This emotional suspense builds without the reader noticing how it’s done or where it first began and pays off in the reader’s considering why people are behaving as they are. About halfway through the book, a first-time reader wonders, “Is Kate suggesting that Densher actually … ? No, that can’t be it. But still …” And when Kate’s plan on how to solve her financial problem is made clear to Densher and the reader, the suspense increases because the reader is not sure how much Densher understands or how much he is willingly avoiding the truth, like an ostrich with his head in the sand at the very thought Kate could mean what she is implying. Monumental things that affect characters’ lives do happen, but they happen slowly, to mimic on the page the ways in which we gradually shift our assumptions. When we watch the film, however, we are told what to think at every moment, instead of that we should think, which is what happens when we read the novel.

In the film, Kate is almost a mustache-twirling villain because a two-hour run time forces her and other characters to become less three-dimensional and therefore more clear in their motives. Aunt Maud in the novel doesn’t see Densher as a threat to her plans for Kate because she sees him as wholly inconsequential; in the film, she’s a turbaned sorceress who issues an ultimatum to Kate that propels her to start thinking about Milly’s millions more quickly and clearly—and once Kate hears Milly cough in the night, that’s that. In James’s hands, Densher’s moral sense grows over time, leading him to have, maybe, the upper hand at the end; he can play Willy Wonka and test Kate’s morals with the inheritance, but there’s an argument to be made that the high horse on which he sits is a Trojan one, filled with self-delusions about his rectitude. In Soflie’s version, Densher does what he’s asked by Kate, apologizes to Milly, and looks wistfully at the camera. There’s a point in the novel where Densher admits to Milly, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and he’s correct. On screen, however, everyone knows what they’re doing and have been reduced to their lowest terms. In this translation, people are less complicated on the screen than on the page.

There’s also a maddening (and puzzling) attempt to improve James’s vision in ways small and large. The film contains very little of James’s dialogue and even a revision of one of his best lines: when Milly’s companion and caretaker Susan Stringham tells Densher that Milly learned he’s “been all the while engaged to Miss Croy,” Densher responds as if from “the touch of a lash” and says, “idiotically, as he afterwards knew—the first thing that came into his head: ‘All what while?’” In the film, “all the while” and “All what while?” are changed to “All the time” and “All what time?” This may sound petty, but it prompted me to wonder why the change was made in the first place. Besides, “while” is better for its alliteration and implication of recent events. In the novel, we never learn the reason for Kate’s father’s disgrace; in the film, he languishes in an opium den. (Yes, he may have resorted to opium because of an unnamed disgrace, but the film doesn’t hint that the drug is a symptom and not the disease.). In the novel, Milly is mysterious: does she try to emotionally avoid what she might suspect about Densher? Does she leave the inheritance to frustrate Kate as a rival—or is it a gesture of grand forgiveness? In the film, she acts like a smitten teenager and makes the first move. And when the film gets to the novel’s incredible final conversation between Densher and Kate about money and memory—a scene so perfect that it could simply be transferred from the page to the frame as faithfully as Sam Spade talking to Brigid O’Shaughnessy—it takes place as they have sex in Densher’s room. There’s an implication here that they are defeated and trying to (as Densher proposes) “be again as we were,” but it hits all the wrong notes; it’s an attempt to make “edgy” what needs no assistance.

Linus Roache as Densher and Helena Bonham-Carter as Kate

III.

When the title is heard on screen, it comes from the mouth of Densher, who recites part of Psalm 55 as he thinks about Milly’s death:

My heart is sore pained within me, and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling have come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove for then I would fly away and be at rest.’

His guilt prompts him to think of Milly as someone who deserved better than his machinations. In the novel, however, Kate first makes the comparison: when Milly asks her why she feels the need to warn her about other people, Kate replies, “Because you’re a dove.” Kate thinks she has contained Milly in a perfect metaphor—but, as with Densher’s growing moral sense, the greatness of the book is Kate’s gradual understanding that Milly is more complicated than she had assumed. In the final scene, Kate tells Densher regarding the inheritance, “I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.” She’s attempting to convince Densher that they can enjoy the money, that the inheritance is a gesture of forgiveness, that they can have each other and the money. But his deadpan response—“They cover us”—suggests Densher’s view of the wings as less embracing than confining. The film makes the title maudlin; the novel makes it ironic. The film commits the one sin of which even H. G. Wells could never accuse James: that of being obvious.

In his 1893 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” James states, “A work of fiction is a thing that is born of a particular language and time; and its reproduction in another language is, I think, to be regarded as a form of betrayal.” The same holds true in this case, where the attempt to reproduce—that is, translate—The Wings of the Dove into another medium betrays the original because reproduction and translation are impossible. It can’t be done and no player prospers.