Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel. “Henry James and the Movies.” London: Secker & Warburg, 2002. 200-233.

HENRY JAMES & THE MOVIES (2)

 Most of these changes have an erotic content, and one could say that the general effect of Amini’s screenplay and Softley’s direction, like Jane Campion’s in the Portrait, but even more boldly, is to bring the implied sexuality of James’s story to the surface, at the expense of considerable anachronism in the representation of manners. The filmmakers moved the implied date of the action forward by about ten years, but this was done mainly for design reasons and does not make the invented behaviour of the characters any more plausible or consistent. James’s Kate Croy would not, for instance, have dreamed of visiting Densher unchaperoned in his lodgings: the essence of the lovers’ dilemma in the novel is that they can’s marry because of a lack of money and they can’t meet in private because they aren’t married.

   The result of this very free adaptation is a rather vulgar, but very watchable, version of the novel. Two examples follow, from the beginning and the end of the film, both of which derive from scenes in the novel but deviate significantly from them. In the novel James explains, through Kate

S internalized reminiscence, that she had met Densher long before her mother’s death and before she moved in with her Aunt Maud—first at a party, and then by chance some weeks later, when they caught sight of each other in the crowded carriage of a London Underground train (it is one of the first literary novels in English to use such a setting). As the seats emptied, Densher moved closer to Kate so he could exchange some polite greeting. She guessed that he was staying on past his intended destination to keep her company, and indeed he got out at her stop and accompanied her home. So their mutual attachment began.

    The film begins with a moody, atmospheric credit sequence set in the Underground, overlaid with a plangent sound track. Standing in a crowded carriage, Kate catches the eye of a young man who, politely but expressionlessly, gets to his feet to offer her his sat. She takes it wordlessly. At the next stop she gets out and he follows her until they are alone in a lift. As it rises to the ground level they suddenly turn to each other and passionately embrace. The fact that they don’t speak to each other up to this point implies that this is their first encounter, and that the embrace must be read as the explosion of some sudden and irrepressible sexual chemistry between two strangers (rather like the first meeting of the lovers in Last Tango in Paris). But when Densher’s fondling becomes overtly sexual, he murmurs, “Kate,” and she says, “No, Densher”—then it is apparent that they know each other, and we can only infer that the way they behaved up to that point was some kind of sexual game to heighten the excitement of the meeting. There was no social reason why they shouldn’t have greeted each other in the train, or pretended that they didn’t know each other. It goes without saying that James’s characters would never have behaved in either of these two ways. In the published script, incidentally, they don’t say anything to each other in the lift, maintaining the ambiguity to the very end of the opening sequence. It cannot be denied that this succeeds in the primary task of an opening sequence: to seize the audience’s attention, and draw them into the world of the film.

The ending of The Wings of the Dove provides one of the great moments in James’s late work. There are in fact two key scenes after Milly has died, leaving Densher and Kate feeling unhappy and uneasy. In the first, Densher gets a letter written in Milly’s hand which he shows to Kate. Together they burn it without reading it. Then Densher gets a letter from a New York law firm, and sends it to Kate, unopened. She brings it back to him, opened. They both know it contains news of a bequest to Densher—what they had plotted to achieve all along. But now Densher does not feel he can accept the money. Kate won’t marry him without it, except on one condition:

       “Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”

       “Oh—her memory!”

       “Ah”—she made a high gesture—“don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. I could in your place; and you’re one for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. Your want no other.”

       He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”

       “As we were?”

       “As we were.”

       But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”

In the film these two scenes are conflated. Kate comes to Densher’s lodgings because he has been avoiding her. He shows her the unopened letter from Milly. She throws it on the fire. Then she goes into his bedroom, takes off her clothes, and lies down on the bed, curled up like an unhappy child. Heavy rain streams down the windowpane and darkens the room. Densher undresses and joins Kate on the bed. After some verbal fencing about Milly, they make love. After their climax, the screenplay reads as follows:

       For a moment neither speaks.

       MERTON: I’m going to write that letter.

       KATE: Do whatever you want.

       MERTON: I want to marry you, Kate. (There’s a long silence.) Without her money.

       KATE: Is that your condition?

       MERTON: Yes.

       KATE: Am I allowed one too?

       MERTON: Of course you are.

       KATE buries her face deeper in his chest. She kisses it softly. Her eyes are wet.

       KATE: Give me your word of honour…Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory…?

       MERTON stares out, he doesn’t reply. They stay there a moment loner in each other’s arms.

       KATE rolls away from him and gets out of bed. She takes her clothes and walks into the next door room.

       MERTON doesn’t follow her, he lies in bed and listens to her put her clothes back on, he hears her walk out of the door and close it behind her, he hears her footsteps on the stairs. He makes no attempt to follow her.

         He lies back and stares at the ceiling, there are tears in his eyes. He rolls over on his front.

       EXT. FLASHBACK. VENICE DAY.

       A black and silver funeral barge moves like a silent arrow through the water.

MERTON (off): “My heart is sore pained within me, and the terrors of death are fallen upon me, Fearfulness and trembling are 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.”

This sequence is rather different from the other examples I have considered in that the problem of rendering consciousness doesn’t arise: in James’s text the thoughts and motivation of the characters are all out in the open, articulated in dialogue. Amini has, however, used this dialogue sparingly, has deliberately discarded the great curtain line of the original, “We shall never be again as we were” (presumably as too the atrical), and has instructed the actors to convey the emotions they are feeling by their expressions and their body language. Kate’s wordless offering of herself to Densher is a displacement of a sexual consummation that James refers to, but never of course describes, in the novel: it is the price Densher exacts from Kate in Venice for pretending to be in love with Milly. So it is dramatically appropriate, though it would have been even more effective if it had been their first lovemaking—Kate keeping her side of the bargain even as the prize slips from her grasp—and the implausible coupling beside the Venice canal had been omitted. The scene has a powerful erotic charge, but it is a sad, doomed kind of sexuality. Helena Bonham Carter’s thin, white, naked torso, writhing above the prone Densher in what looks more like pain than ecstasy, is reminiscent of the paintings of Egon Schiele.

   The finished film omits the quotation from the psalm, and adds another brief scene showing Densher returning to Venice, looking fairly prosperous and cheerful, presumably using Milly’s legacy to dedicate himself to her memory. This seems to be another mistaken effort to provide a slightly more upbeat ending than the original, and is certainly much less effective than either Amini’s or James’s conclusions.

In their long-lasting partnership Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have developed a distinctive, but conservative, style of adapting classic and modern fiction that is sometimes unfairly derided by young cineastes as “heritage” cinema. In commenting publicly on his film of The Wings of the Dove, the director Iain Softley cited Merchant-Ivory as a model he didn’t wasn’t to follow, and in that respect he certainly succeeded. I have faint but agreeable memories of Merchant and Ivory’s lively version of The Europeans (1979). The Bostonians (1984) was an honourable failure at adapting what James himself acknowledged is a flawed novel (he excluded it from the New York edition of his work). Their adaptations of Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End, and of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day are, however, benchmarks of the genre: beautifully acted, ravishing to look at, produced with scrupulous attention to period detail, and intelligently respectful of their sources. All of them were scripted by the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, as is their production of The Golden Bowl.

    The first few minutes of this film suggest that the team has deviated drastically from its usual style—either that, or you have taken a wrong turning in the multiplex and are watching a different movie entirely. It seems to be a Websterian melodrama about aristocratic sex and violence in Renaissance Italy: a lady ahs been discovered in flagrante delicto with her stepson by her older (and allegedly impotent) husband and is dragged off, spitting defiance, to summary execution by his soldiers. Cut to 1903, and this lurid tale turns out to be an episode in the family history of Prince Amerigo, which he is relating to Charlotte as he gives her a guided tour of his dilapidated palazzo—and, in the nicest possible way, the push, because of his forthcoming marriage to Maggie.

   This invented prologue develops what is a mere hint in James’s text—that the Prince’s family history has its dark and scandalous passages—into a kind of parallel narrative evoked and alluded to several times in the course of the main action, which takes place in England. For example, a ballet enacting essentially the same story is performed at a private party attended by the principal characters, causing them some discomfiture (“Just like Hamlet!” as one of the guests exclaims), and Amerigo and Maggie’s little boy dresses up with a toy sword and paper helmet that recall the shadows of the soldiers in the opening sequence. There are several hints (not to be found in James’s text) that Adam Verver might take violent renenge on the Prince if sufficiently provoked by jealousy.

    This strand in the film was obviously designed to add some extra excitement, colour, and suspense to what is essentially a psychological study of characters constrained by the manners of their time and class from any overt display of violent passion. After the initial surprise (for those who know the book) it doesn’t have the disruptive effect of the gestures to modernity in Softley’s Wings of the Dove or Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady, but is full assimilated into the period illusionism of the film. To Jamesians it will inevitably seem a distracting and unnecessary embellishment, but others may well find that it enlivens what is otherwise a restrained and deliberately paced movie.

    James’s novel is divided into two parts, entitled “The Prince” and “The Princess” respectively, and the author, who regarded it as his masterpiece, was particularly proud of the “manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters” (Preface to the New York edition). This is not strictly true: we get glimpses into what some of the other characters are thinking and feeling in both parts, and there are choric interludes in which the Assinghams analyse and interpret the enigmatic behaviour of the principals. But it is vital to the effect of the book that in the first half we experience the story mainly from the Prince’s point of view, and have no privileged access to the Princess’s mind, while in the second half the reverse is true.

   In the film, because of the nature of the medium, all the characters are equally transparent—or equally opaque. The actors can only reveal their thoughts by what they say, or by their facial expressions and body language. Happily The Golden Bowl is extremely well cast, and James Ivory has drawn from his performers ensemble acting of a very high order. Uma Thurman is outstanding as Charlotte—though admittedly the effect of adaptation, as well as the story itself, gives her a wider range of emotions to display than the other principals (Jeremy Northam as Amerigo, Kate Beckinsale as Maggie, and Nick Nolte as Adam Verver) are afforded. Anjelica Huston and James Fox give excellent support as the Assinghams, together with Madeleine Potter as the frisky Lady Castledean. All are adept at acting with their eyes, implying layers of unspoken thoughts. A good example, early in the film, is the quick oblique glance that Charlotte gives the Prince over Maggie’s shoulder as the two women embrace at their first meeting after Charlotte and Adam’s engagement. It combines triumph with a certain trepidation; it promises discretion about the past as it invites complicity in the future.

    Another instance is the scene at Matcham, the country seat of Lord and Lady Castledean, when Charlotte coolly informs Fanny Assingham that she and Amerigo, in spite of the absence of their respective spouses, are going to stay on together at the house party for an extra day. Fanny stares her disapproval, and the Prince has to face down her barbed civilities. What we don’t get—what we can’t possibly get—is the tumult of emotion he is brilliantly described as feeling in the corresponding passage in the novel, his admiration for the social beauty of Charlotte’s perfectly judged tone and his intuition of “some still other and still greater beauty” that it promises for them both:

       She had answered Mrs Assingham quite adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the smallest that would serve, ad she had, above all, thrown off for his stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun. The measure of everything to all his sense, at these moments, was in it—the measure especially of the thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself—the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. (chapter 21)

This is a good example of how James’s late style achieves a kind of slow-motion representation of consciousness, enabling us to follow and relish every nuance in a complex interweaving of thought and feeling that occupies only a few fleeting seconds in real time.

   The few hours which the lovers spend together at an inn in Gloucester on the following day, on the pretext of visiting the cathedral before returning home, is the pivot on which the action turns. It is not only the moment at which the Prince yields to temptation (for all along it is Charlotte who is doing the seducing); it is also the point from which the Princess at last begins to suspect there is something not quite right or normal about the relationship between her husband and her father’s wife. Part Two of the novel begins with Amerigo’s somewhat embarrassed late return from Gloucester, as registered by Maggie’s troubled, but typically generous and self-critical consciousness. Even when the scales finally fall from her eyes—when she discovers that the golden bowl she has bought for her father was considered years earlier by Charlotte as a wedding gift, but rejected on the advice of the Prince because it was flawed, thus revealing that they were intimate before her marriage—even then Maggie refuses the role of the righteously vengeful betrayed wife. Instead she fights to preserve her marriage, and her father’s happiness, by lying. That is the novels remarkable assertion, which the filmmakers have fully understood: that deception, which is the basis of adultery, can also be used to neutralize its destructive effects. Maggie lies when Charlotte asks her if she has done anything to offend her, and she lies to her father to keep him ignorant of her own unhappiness. But when he proposes to take Charlotte back to American City, to build a museum to house his collection, Maggie realises that he too has been feigning innocence and ignorance, and that he is sacrificing their precious father-daughter relationship to preserve both marriages. When Charlotte then claims that it is she who is taking Adam back to America, to remove him from Maggie’s dominating presence, Maggie nobly accepts the lie, and the insult. Everybody is lying to everybody else most of the time, out of good motives or bad, and as long as the lies are not exposed the fabric of civilized society is precariously preserved. It is much to the credit of writer, director, and actors that the film manages to dramatise this endemic prevarication without dissolving into confusion or unintentional comedy.

   Charlotte’s increasingly desperate efforts to discover how much Maggie really knows about her relationship with the Prince is a kind of punishment, as Maggie recognizes, vividly figuring her rival and former friend as a bird in “a suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself” (chapter 35). But whereas Maggie emerges very clearly as the triumphant moral heroine of the novel, in the film our interest and sympathy are drawn steadily towards the tormented Charlotte, aghast at the prospect of parting from her lover and banishment to the social and cultural desert of American City. In a moving scene (not in the book), Charlotte relieves her grief and anger in a paroxysm of sobbing, then allows herself to be cradled like a child in the arms of her patient, paternal husband. It is all the more effective because she is lying on her bed in dishabille that recalls the scene (also, needless to say, absent from the novel) of her abandonment to sexual pleasure with Amerigo. In the closing sequence, which deftly splices old newsreel footage with the fictional narrative, we see Charlotte accepting her role as Mrs. Verver in the New World with good grace and a certain regal dignity. If the final emphasis of the novel is on the reconciliation of the Prince and Princess, the film ends by affirming the solidarity of Adam and Charlotte Verver, but James’s imaginative vision is not thereby betrayed. The Master would not be displeased by this thoughtful and carefully crafted film.