The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

I’ve been on something of a Henry James kick for the last couple of years: Washington Square, Daisy Miller, Death in Venice, The Aspern Papers, The Portrait of a Lady. Of James’ last three big novels, I had read The Ambassadors years ago, but never The Golden Bowl, or this novel. But I had been enjoying James recently, and then this novel came up in the final pages of Chasing Lost Time, the biography of C. K. Scott Moncrieff I read a few months ago. As Scott Moncrieff lay dying in Rome he abandoned translating the last volume of Proust and spent his remaining months tackling several long novels he wanted to get to before he ran out of time. This was one of them.

James wrote The Wings of the Dove in 1902, the same year his older brother William came out with The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Ambassadors followed the next year, and The Golden Bowl the year after that. Between 1907 and 1909, James revised much of his life’s work, including this novel, for a 24-volume “New York Edition.” The version I read (Everyman’s Library from 1997) is the text of the New York Edition, including James’ preface for that edition included as an appendix, and an Introduction by Grey Gowrie, who was a British Minister of Arts. The Introduction argues that late James is worth reading despite the obscure and long-winded style he developed. James’ own preface is apologetic, pointing out numerous flaws he sees in his own novel, particularly in the later chapters, having to do with the plotting though, not the prose.

I found the novel to be quite readable, and enjoyable, but must be approached on its own terms. It is very short on plot, and very slow on progress. Nearly nothing happens in almost 500 pages. (I’ll give a plot summary in a minute). And the most important scenes nearly always take place off stage, and then are only referred to elliptically by characters who sometimes weren’t even there. For instance, the novel hinges entirely on the main character, Milly Theale, slowly dying. But what she is dying of we are never told. That she even is actually dying is ambiguous for the longest time. She visits a doctor who seems to perform no examination nor run any test. Milly displays no symptoms, not even a cough, except in one scene where she’s too tired to come down to dinner. Nor is she prescribed any treatment, except for the doctor’s orders that she live fully. She does finally die, off-stage, the other characters and the reader find out through a telegram.

What’s enjoyable though, is the words. James, at this point in his career writes in what I would call a high English style. Sentences are very long and convoluted. Paragraphs are long. Every idea is observed from every possible angle. It doesn’t feel exacting so much as equivocating, or even dithering. The dialogue, too, comes in circumlocution. No one ever speaks directly. Behind a wall of manners and politeness everyone avoids and deflects. One hints, the other surmises. Conversations end without it being clear that anything was actually communicated to the characters or the reader. “What happened?” I kept asking. Why won’t the author tell me what’s going on?” Questions are always answered with other questions. Somehow, it must be bad form for this class of English person to openly declare how one feels about anything, which leaves little substance for drama.

In Gowrie’s Introduction he quotes James’ brother William in a letter William writes to Henry after reading the novel:

“You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling, (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre litteraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed, for I read with interest to the end (many pages, and innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean) and all with unflagging curiosity to know what the upshot might become.” (p. xiv).

The enjoyment then, if you can manage it, is simply to let the words fall over you, endlessly. James dictated his last novels, with a secretary taking down his speech as he talked. The novel feels true to this technique. Imagine a very erudite, eccentric, friend, pacing around a drawing room trying to get a story out, a story he clearly finds fascinating and wants to share, but by being so careful not to miss any of the delight, just cannot get on with it. It’s amusing, because he, our narrator friend, is such a curious person, but it’s an infuriating way to be told a story. I found The Wings of the Dove, in this way, to clearly point toward modernism. The Portrait of a Lady, from 1881, is solidly Romantic literature (and a better book in my estimation). The Wings of the Dove is at least a bridge toward something new if not already having reached the other side. The endless words made me think of Gertrude Stein, except without the repetition and with James’ much larger vocabulary. The obsessive turning over of every incident for possible psychological meaning is Proustian. The narrator speaks in a stream-of-conscious style as the moderns do. The foregrounding of technique and style while action is pushed off-stage, feels quite contemporary. I imagine many readers would find this all maddening, thus Grey Gowrie’s defensive Introduction, but I like that sort of thing.

The plot begins with a young English woman in London named Kate Croy. She’s come to her down-and-out father with an ultimatum. The father is a dead beat. Kate and her sister, Marian, are living off of a small inheritance from their deceased mother. Kate gives most of her share to Marian, who is a widow, raising several children. But they have a rich aunt, her father’s sister. The aunt, Maud Lowder, is willing to support Kate but for two things: one, Kate must cut all connections with her disreputable father, and two, Kate must not marry her working-class boyfriend, Merton Densher. Instead, Aunt Maud has her eye on Lord Mark as a match for her niece. Kate is willing to stick by her father, but the father tells her she’s a fool and sends Kate to her aunt.

Next, the book introduces a young American woman from New York, Milly Theale, traveling on the continent with an older woman friend of hers she met in Boston, Sally Stringham. Milly is extravagantly wealthy, though she doesn’t live much differently for it. Her parents and siblings are dead. She’s healthy enough to go hiking in the alps, but while there has a premonition of illness and she and Miss Stringham rearrange their plans so Milly can go to London and consult with a doctor. London is convenient because, besides the best doctors, Miss Stringham has an old friend from school who lives there. That friend turns out to be Kate’s aunt, Maud.

A further coincidence appears once Miss Stringham and Milly get to London and set themselves up in a hotel. Kate’s boyfriend, Merton Densher, works as a newspaperman and he had recently gone on assignment to visit America to write a series of letters of his observations for his newspaper. While in New York, Densher had met Milly and Milly was attracted to him. When Milly arrives in London, Densher is still in America. Milly meets Kate Croy through Miss Stringham’s connection to Kate’s aunt and the two young woman are fascinated by each other and become instant friends. The two young women soon realize that they both have a connection to Merton Densher but deliberately don’t speak of it to each other.

Aunt Maud wants Kate to marry Lord Mark. He’s of the appropriate class and has the money Aunt Maud wants for her niece. Aunt Maud likes Densher, too, for that matter, but just doesn’t want him for Kate. But Densher and Kate have fallen in love. Secretly they pledge themselves to each other knowing that Aunt Maud will never approve and they haven’t the money to support themselves.

But Milly has money. And Milly is mysteriously ill, maybe even dying. So when Densher comes back to London, Kate hatches a plot. She will pretend to Milly that she and Densher aren’t together – that he is interested in Kate but that Kate doesn’t return his affection, and that Milly could do Kate a favor by comforting Densher’s broken heart. Aunt Maud, unknowingly, is happy to help put Densher and Milly together, because with Densher becoming intimate with Milly, Kate will be available for Lord Mark.

Once the situation is set nothing else really happens. The depth of the deception becomes slowly more defined but it doesn’t advance. Kate publicly ignores Densher. Densher befriends Milly but he does nothing to romance her. Milly gets sicker, but not in an obvious way. About two thirds of the way through the novel, the scene switches to Venice. Milly rents a fabulous pallazzo on the Grand Canal. Aunt Maud, Kate, and Sally Stringham go with her. (Called Palazzo Leporelli in the novel, it’s actually the Palazzo Barbaro, which was owned by the family of John Singer Sergeant and became a center of artistic life for Americans and Englishmen at the turn of the century. Henry James wrote The Aspern Papers while staying in the house.) Later, Merton Densher comes to Venice, too, and rents smaller rooms farther up the canal. I had hoped there would be some wonderful descriptions of Venice, which I love, but unfortunately not. Kate finally admits to Densher that she wants him to marry Milly for her money. He agrees to go through with it but only if Kate completely commits to him by sleeping with him. (In the novel this is euphemistically phrased as “come to him” in his rooms). She does. Lord Mark arrives and (off-stage, of course) tells Milly to be suspicious of Densher, because he has guessed that Kate is actually engaged to Densher when Lord Mark proposed to Kate and she refused him. Milly eventually gets sick enough to tell everyone but Sally Stringham to go home to London. Back in London they hear the news that Milly has died. And, surprise, Milly has left a “stupendous” amount of money to Densher. But in a final reconciliation with his morals, Densher has it out with Kate telling her that she will either need to marry him without money, refusing the gift from Milly, or, if she insists he accept the money he will give it all to her but leave her. He says he simply wants the two of them to be again as they were. In the final, ambiguous words of the novel, Kate says, “We shall never be again as we were!”

The plot is similar to that of Washington Square and also The Portrait of a Lady: a rich girl, beset by a false suitor who wants her money. Like many of James’ novels, including both The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors and Daisy Miller, the plot features Americans in Europe. In so many novels of this time the plot relies entirely on the restrictions of class and sex roles. Kate has no means of making money for herself so without family money she’s entirely dependent on landing a rich husband. Of all the characters, only Densher works for a living, but once he gets back from his trip to America, his job with the newspaper is hardly mentioned again. He spends no time actually writing, or imagining that he could do anything to earn enough money to marry Kate. The simplest solution to Kate and Densher’s problem would be for them to simply ask Milly, their friend, to give them the money they need. She clearly would, as she gives it to Densher in the end anyway. But manners, I suppose, preclude them from speaking so directly about such a sensitive subject; so they plot to deceive their friend instead!

I do want to say one thing about Kate’s degenerate father. What did he do that is so embarrassing to the family and which prevents him from remaining in society? Henry James doesn’t say exactly, as he says almost nothing clearly in this novel. But the clues are there.

The first scene of the novel is Kate meeting her father, Lionel, in his rooms. James gives us this: “He had always seemed–it was one of the marks of what they called the ‘unspeakable’ in him–to walk a little more on his toes, as if for jauntiness, under the touch of offence.” (p. 12) Then this, in Lionel’s own words, after Kate says she doesn’t know what he’s like: “No more do I, my dear. I’ve spent my life in trying in vain to discover. Like nothing–more’s the pity. If there had been many of us and we could have found each other out there’s no knowing what we mightn’t have done.” (p. 15).

After that first scene, Lionel never appears, although he is mentioned twice. In the very last scene, Kate and Densher meet in Kate’s sister’s house and we’re told Lionel is there, too, in a separate room. And in an early scene, when Kate and Densher are first meeting and getting to know each other, Densher asks about her father. James writes, “What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr. Croy had originally done?” (p. 48). And Kate relates a long-ish, but ambiguous memory from her childhood. “Something or other happened that made him impossible.” Her sister finds out first and tells Kate, “Papa has done something wicked.” They aren’t to speak of it with their mother, but then her mother of her own comes out with it, saying “If you hear anything against your father–anything I mean except that he’s odious and vile–remember it’s perfectly false.” Which is certainly a confused message, but Kate gets the intended meaning; she recollects for Densher, “That was the way I knew it was true.” The rest of the family story about her father is silence: silence that surrounds her father, washes him out, and James has Kate say, “He doesn’t exist for people.” After all of that non-explanation, Densher pushes her a little further, “It doesn’t, my dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don’t, you know really tell me anything. It’s so vague that what am I to think but that you may very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?” (p. 49).

Well, what is the unspeakable vice of men that cannot be named in Victorian society? We know very well. The trial of Oscar Wilde had occurred in 1895, only seven years before James wrote The Wings of the Dove.