The Wings of the Dove (Penguin Classics)

6 comments

1. 

   Karen P. Street
   

   September 13, 2009

   Rating

   Henry James at his best. The understatement is wonderful throughout. The plot is thin but the characterisations make up for it.

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2. 

   Talia Carner
   

   October 2, 2009

   Rating

   Sorry, Henry James. In today’s market, which I do not expect you to have known, we contemporary writers use clear words, write sentences that make sense, and do not repeat ourselves over and over again, circling around the same idea, feeling, or description, until the reader is dizzy–yet still fails to understand what the author is talking about. What did you actually want to say?

   Today, only writers who are so full of themselves–to the point that they forget their readers–use the exccessive language you used like a peacock fanning its feathered tail for the whole world to see.

   Oh, and the obscurity of the telling. You were purposely vague, I hear. You said so in your conversations with your conteporaries. It’s great that you wanted readers to use their brains to think; we still do that these days. Today’s novelists want to trust their readers to get certain things, to connect the dots, without feeding them the conclusions. But to choose to be so vague that even you (as you wrote to your friends) are not certain where the end meanders to?

   The story, when one finally gets to the beginning of it after page 140, is pretty good. It was smart for later generation of artists to make it into a movie, and by doing so, anchored some of your loose ends.

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3. 

   Bill R. Moore
   

   June 28, 2010

   Rating

   I had read about a dozen Henry James works before The Wings of the Dove – novels, short stories, and critical articles – and found them good to masterful. I thus had very high hopes for Wings, often hearing that it was one of his best pieces or even his masterwork. However, I was bitterly disappointed – more so than I have almost ever been with a book, and there are few I have enjoyed less. I will try to explain my disappointment so that I may both warn others and avoid being automatically dismissed by Jamesians.

   Wings is drastically different from any James I had read because it is the first work of his last period, previously untouched by me. It and the novels immediately following – The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, apparently in a similar style – are generally called his best. Those who like prior James works should be aware that there is little reason to think they will like this; it is not so much the opposite as an extreme version. James is famous for being difficult, complex, indirect, and vague, which has always been controversial; few writers fall more fully in love/hate camps. Such things are not to my particular taste but never previously bothered me; I generally found them interesting or even fresh. However, Wings pushes them nearly to absurdity. James is often said to shine a light around his subjects’ edges rather than directly illuminating, but Wings does so to the extent that it hardly tells a story. The first two books are entirely prefatory, and the novel is nearly half over before the real story starts – to the extent that it ever does. It is incredible how little happens; to call the plot thin is a drastic understatement. The action could easily be summarized in half a page; the other five hundred are the worst kind of filler. James clearly put a lot of work into the unusual structure but later admitted it did not work – an admirably honest admission that almost no one seems to share. A very high percentage of the book is dialogue, but James is not content to let characters speak for themselves. He not only says what they think while talking but prefaces a large number of sentences with intrusive comments that at best add little or nothing and at worst distract or obscure. This often happens even in the middle of quotes. Even worse, he overuses certain phrases – “hung fire,” “took it up” – to a criminal degree. All this is greatly annoying and almost fatally distracting. The dialogue itself is also a problem. James’ brother William once told him that no one talks the way people do in his books; I immediately saw this as true, but it never bothered me. Here, though, the dialogue is so artificial that it is positively strained; it is very hard to believe that James expected us to take it seriously. What makes this so bad is that Wings is ostensibly hyperrealist. Adding to the problem is the lack of likable or even sympathetic characters. We may pity Milly, but even she is hardly likable, not least because she is overly self-pitying, however tragic; others vary from annoying (Mrs. Stringham) to thoroughly loathsome (probably everyone else). The (seemingly unintentional) lack of realism extends to the characters themselves. For example, Densher is supposedly a writer but is never shown writing, and his doing so is indeed hardly mentioned. Worse yet, he is ostensibly poor but seems to have unlimited time for society and tramps around the world with no apparent means of support. Perhaps the wealthy, upper class James was unable to portray or even imagine a truly poor person, but this does not pop up so grossly in other works I have read. Such things not only bring the book down but undermine its intention.

   The problems boil down to James’ indirection obsession. He seems determined not to let us see something interesting; maddeningly, the few significant events take place offstage. The idea is novel, even revolutionary, and James had used it to various extents before, usually with great success, but Wings abuses it so much that we can hardly be anything but frustrated. The dialogue is again a case in point. Characters virtually never speak directly of what they think or mean; this has some interest in that it demands close reading, and it can be fun to figure out at first, but the charade quickly degenerates into a one-sided game. James appears bent on making us work hard but gives very little in return. This extends even to punctuation; his overuse of commas and dashes borders on perverse, making the reading far harder than necessary. Few books are more difficult; I have read hundreds, perhaps thousands by a myriad of authors from all over the world and throughout history, but only a handful at most have been so wearisome. I lost count of how many times I wanted to give up, persevering only because my cheapskate ways compel me to finish a book after buying it.

   This is not to say Wings is all bad. Characterization is strong, even superb, and the psychological insight is both vivid and valuable. James also does some interesting things with point of view, but we can easily debate whether they serve or harm the book. More importantly, such things, at least to me, do not make a book; they may add greatly but are insufficient in themselves. Relatedly, James does a good job of creating suspense; once the story finally gets going, there is a strong sense that something vast will occur and arguably even an overwhelming feeling of doom. This belatedly gives a reason to keep reading, but the problem is that nothing really ever happens; drama’s near absence means Wings is extremely anti-climactic. That the book has been made into a play and multiple films is truly mind-blowing; adapting it requires not merely dramatization so much as making up the drama altogether. Wings is perhaps not beyond repair; the central idea that James’ Preface tells us he was getting at is interesting, and he acknowledges that his execution is poor – though again few agree. A short story would perhaps have been preferable or at least a much shorter novel; those who make it through must feel as if they have run a marathon, and I fail to see how so many claim to think it worthwhile.

   All told, anyone who likes earlier James is strongly cautioned; all prior major works should probably be read first. Those who dislike Wings would do well to avoid the next two novels also – though anyone who likes it is advised to continue. Certainly it should be no one’s introduction; The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, “Daisy Miller,” and some of the other major short stories are more typical and far superior in my view. Similarly, anyone unfortunate enough to read Wings first should not give up on James; I can hardly blame anyone tempted to do so, but he has much to offer. That he did not clip the novel’s wings is highly unfortunate, but at least he had already soared high enough to spread them.
   

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4. 

   J. Breithaupt
   

   August 11, 2010

   Rating

   All I can say, Tania and Bill (previous reviewers), is that you’re too kind. Not just “in today’s market,” Tania, are such flaws considered unacceptable, but in James’s market as well…perhaps moreso then, considering the masters from whom he was taking his cue. That’s why it’s so astonishing to me that this thinly plotted, atrociously incomprehensible tangle of verbiage ever earned its reputation as a great work. Sadly, this was my first reading of James, and I’m powerfully dissuaded from wading any further into his inky depths. What a craven mess. I am a prolific reader and a lover of classic literature, including works by many authors James claims as influences. What George Eliot, one of literature’s most supernaturally gifted interpreters of human behavior, would have said about this compendium of knotty prose, I can only imagine. Having ranted that, however, I’m still open to the idea that “The Wings of the Dove” is an egregious exception to an otherwise worthy canon: anyone care to recommend something by James that even somewhat succeeds? Having understood this to be his great masterpiece, I’m skeptical but game. Meanwhile, Tania and Bill, for a far superior example of American fiction in the immediate post-Victorian era, try Edith Wharton’s brilliant and deeply moving “The House of Mirth,” which appeared just three years after “Wings…” With the former, you’ll occasionally re-read its sentences because you’ll want another taste of their construction and underlying wisdom, not – as with the latter book – because you are trying to decipher their unintentionally elusive sense.

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5. 

   Tim Ellison
   

   August 22, 2010

   Rating

   The Wings of the Dove, on Amazon, has an absurdly low rating, much like most of James’s other novels. To all readers seriously interested in purchasing a James novel for the first time, I urge you not to be frightened by all the reviews that say something like, “exhausting,” “overrated,” “flaccid,” “unbearable,” and so on. It’s the eternal critique of James; the readers who find James “unbearable” are simply not meant to read James. They will forever bear a grudge against him, and we can do nothing about that.

   If you’re approaching James for the first time, know that “The Ambassadors,” “The Wings of the Dove,” and “The Golden Bowl,” often referred to as the novels of his “Major” (late) phase, are his greatest works, but the style of these novels, while full of rewards, is challenging. There’s no doubt about that. Use Amazon’s “look inside” feature and read a few pages; if you’re intrigued, by all means, buy the book. If you’re turned off, don’t buy the book, at least right now. If you’re mystified but still interested, consider reading the books in a different order.

   It may be a bad idea to start off your reading of James with “The Wings of the Dove” or “The Golden Bowl.” These are works of an artistic genius who has been meditating on some of the same themes, ethical dilemmas, situations, and the representation of changing consciousness for a lifetime. As such, they are prose texts of great complexity, and readers need to expect that a novel written by a reader, writer and thinker of age 60 is rather different from the product of a man of age 35 or 40. Age often brings complexity: by the time we come to W.B. Yeats’s last poems, for example, we are simply expected to know a few things about Yeats: Maud Gonne, say, some of his key symbols and poetic forms. I remember hearing Helen Vendler lecture on Yeats’s late “Among School Children,” she says: “this is a poem of a man, 60, who expects us to tolerate the well-stocked furniture of a 60 year-old mind.” “The Wings of the Dove” is a novel of a man, 60, who expects us to tolerate the thorny intellectual and representational crises that have haunted his 60 year-old mind.

   If you are interested in reading “The Wings of the Dove,” which is a gorgeous novel of severe choice, eros, tragedy and liberation, but you are afraid to jump into the late James, I suggest you train yourself on some of James’s earlier texts that are just as great but are a bit more accessible. “The Portrait of a Lady” (1881, written 20 years before “Wings”), is a great place to start; in fact, some consider it James’s finest novel. “The American” (1877), though rather imperfect, is also worth looking into. Or you might read some of James’s stories – “Daisy Miller: A Study” (1878) – is a thematic precursor of many of his larger novels. (Note: “The Turn of the Screw,” (1898) while also great, is great for different reasons. It is a ghost story, and in this phase of his career, James was intrigued by the supernatural. So, while it is a great read, it is not in any obvious way a precursor to something like “The Wings of the Dove”).

   This is just some advice for new readers who aren’t ready to plunge right away along with Kate Croy into the depth of a moral miasma. But if you feel ready, by all means, plunge! It is not for me to explain why you should read “Wings,” but if questions of betrayal, knowledge, deception, innocence, experience, desire and transcendence interest you in works of fiction, then, what a lark, what a plunge is this text!

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6. 

   Giordano Bruno
   

   September 10, 2010

   Rating

   … to ‘read’ their characters, I mean, or intentions, and particularly in a scripture, a stricture or structure if you will, of Life as a narrative wherein duplicity and evasion are pervasively ‘read’ as good breeding and proper manners, so that even those who persuade themselves of intimacy are liable to the misreading of each other’s character, not to mention of their own, an ambiguity which is, of course, both the usual modus operandi of Henry James’s later fiction – the illegibility, as it were, of each unto each other -and the essential topic of The Wings of the Dove. [It's not so easy to read Henry James, either, as that little parody of his style is intended to demonstrate. 'The Wings of the Dove' is undeniably -- indefensibly, some might say -- a 'difficult' novel. In fact, it's the epitome of what many readers dislike about James's work. It's as difficult, on every level, as anything ever written in English, short perhaps of Finnegan's Wake. The sentences are knottily syntactical, the whole narrative is manipulatively oblique, and the central theme appears to be that any interpretation of persons real or fictional must ineluctably remain provisional until proven wrong.]

   The persons are six: the beautiful but penniless Kate Croy; the personable but penniless Merton Densher; Kate’s purse-proud and domineering Aunt Maud; Lord Mark, whom I cannot characterize without serving up a ‘spoiler’; Milly Teale, an American heiress of ineffable … well, precisely of what sort of ineffability our author is loath to specify; and Milly’s devoted companion Susan Shepherd. Each of them serves, in various portions of the novel, as the interior protagonist, the mind that the author purports to ‘read’ while perversely withholding any explicit insight. Their mutual deceptions and confidences — all six of them have wildly inaccurate perceptions of their interrelationships — remind me strongly of a six-voice polyphonic madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo. replete with false cadences, shockingly dissonant suspensions, and bizarre chromaticisms. It would be a disservice to the reader to summarize the plot of this novel; one is not meant to have a clear sense of its directions, let alone its denouement.

   As I said, James withholds. “Withholding” is his strategy, I think, for compelling the reader to experience the ‘illegibility’ of existence moment by moment. Milly, for instance, is purportedly afraid that she has a grave illness. But is she really ill, or neurotically hypochondriac? And if really ill, how seriously and immediately? And can anything be done for her, ill or not? Don’t wait for me, or for Henry James, to answer! Then there’s the question of what to make of Kate Croy’s unsavory father, the second personage introduced into the novel. Surely Kate’s relationship to her father is the key to her character? Surely there’s a secret in their past? But Kate denies Merton Densher’s – and the reader’s – right to enquire about it, and Henry james complies. Metaphorically, this book is like an unopened letter, tossed impulsively into the fire, which contained the very piece of knowledge that would make everything fall in place but which can now never be retrieved. In fact, such a letter WILL figure in the narrative. James is determinedly unhelpful, methodically vague, craftily obscure. Every adverbial thicket is part of his scheme to enmesh the reader in complexity. In short, he MEANS to make your reading painful. As my personal trainer says: No Pain, No Gain! That was, come to think of it, more or less what my college literature professor meant also, when he declared The Wings of the Dove to be a great novel.

   Is it too arrogant of me to suppose that ‘Wings’ will perplex, annoy, and ultimately bore the average reader? Very well, I’ll risk being arrogant. Even the above-average reader may find it hard-going. Some critics have asserted that it’s James’s best. James himself, in later years, regarded it as unsuccessful. It’s tremendously ambitious, stylistically, structurally, psychologically. I admire ambition in a novelist.

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