26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

Year Published: 1902
Pages: 487
First Sentence: She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
Let's not beat around the bush. I enjoyed The Wings of the Dove far better than Henry James's other two books on The List, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors. This felt very much like a return to what I expect of his form, i.e. walls of descriptive text and characters giving each other meaningful looks in various European locales (chiefly London and Venice in this case). I can stop doubting everything that I thought I knew about my feelings on James's work.

The Wings of the Dove is the story of three young people and their various hangers-on. Kate Croy is a young Englishwoman whose father has shamed their family. Merton Densher is an attractive young Englishman who works for a newspaper. Milly Theale is a young American girl whose family has all died, leaving her with an enormous fortune. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are in love, but are in financial straits such that they aren't able to marry with any hope of staying in the society that they're both accustomed to, and thus they keep their engagement secret in hopes of figuring out a solution to their problem.

Enter Milly, who meets Densher in America while he's there writing dispatches or some such thing for his newspaper, and develops a bit of a crush on him. Milly first encounters Kate upon arriving in London, and the two of them become friends. Not good enough friends for Kate to mention the man she loves, but good enough for Milly to reveal to Kate that she is dying of some undefined malady.

It's at this point that things get interesting (about halfway through a tremendously long book, if you're keeping track), because Kate proposes to Densher that he seduce Milly in hopes that he might marry her and inherit her money, for his and Kate's future use.

I know, right!?

After my previous James List books, I took the unusual precaution of reading the introduction to the edition of this book that I got from the library, which was written by someone named Grey Gowrie who I have never heard of before. Anyway, I was prepared to be spoiled by the introduction if it meant that it might illuminate things to the point that I could actually understand what on earth was actually happening in the book. I can't say how much that action may or may not have helped, but like I said, I quite enjoyed this book, so I'll give Grey Gowrie a pat on the back regardless. (I'm not sure the 3/3 is quite deserved, and will once again lament my previous decision not to introduce a 2.5 rating.)

The introduction did reveal a few plot points, but a big part of this book is the journey, and that's impossible to spoil. That is to say, I was as much on the edge of my seat as it's possible to be reading an extremely dense century-old novel. How could Kate dare to propose such a thing to the man she loves? How could he possibly react? Would Milly suddenly get well and throw the whole plan into chaos? What might happen next?! It's rare that a book like this can sustain that level of tension.

As usual, the characters are all excellent. Poor doomed little rich girl Milly is described with so many superlatives in the book already that I couldn't presume to add any. I absolutely believed in Densher and Kate's romance and the sexual chemistry between them, and I'm frankly shocked at how good James was at depicting it. All of this in the kind of prose you might expect from a glacier.

I must say, reading three Henry James novels in one year is a marathon I never plan to repeat. Doubtless I would have liked this novel better if I weren't already exhausted from the previous two.

And finally, if you're curious about the issue of "hanging fire" that I mentioned in The Ambassadors review: the expression "hung fire" appears seven times in this book, and "hanging fire" appears twice, i.e. there's one of these things every 50 pages or so. Tsk tsk.

- - - - -

She tried to be sad so as not to be angry, but it made her angry that she couldn't be sad.

- - - - -

He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them and yet, as regards the rigour of it, pay no price.

- - - - -

This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks doubtless to rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence. When Milly smiled it was a public event—when she didn't it was a chapter of history.

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27. The Ambassadors by Henry James

Year Published: 1903
Pages: 639
First Sentence: Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
We come now to the second of three Henry James novels on The List. This one is about a middle-aged man named Lambert Strether. He's a widower of relatively slim means, who is engaged to a fabulously wealthy woman named Mrs. Newsome back in the town of Woollett, Massachusetts, but at the beginning of the novel, he's been sent to Europe to fetch Mrs. Newsome's son from the clutches of a presumably evil woman and bring him back to run the family business. Perhaps unfortunately for Strether, when he finds Mrs. Newsome's son in Paris, the situation is not at all clear cut. Chadwick, more commonly referred to as Chad (yes, really), is not living in some den of iniquity with a beautiful French prostitute, although he is engaging in some kind of relationship with a respectable woman who has had to flee her abusive husband. Strether and his friend Maria Gostrey, who he met upon landing at his English hotel, puzzle through this situation together.

At this point I'm really starting to feel like Henry James is gaslighting me. In my review of The Golden Bowl I was already beginning to doubt that I liked previous works of his that I'd read. But seriously, did I? I'd like to believe that I've never been so pretentious that I'd pretend to enjoy a classic novel, but after reading over 1000 pages of James's work in the last few months I'm questioning everything I thought I knew. I can only imagine that this will get worse when I pick up The Wings of the Dove.

In any case, as for the book at hand, I enjoyed it more than The Golden Bowl. While that novel felt extremely empty, there is actual content in this one. I got a sense of the plot happening in the background somewhere, even though it was obscured by James using about 500% more words than he really needs to, in the form of alternating walls o' text and long dialogues between characters in which no one ever says what they mean, instead communicating everything with dashes and exclamation points and rephrasing questions with the italics used on a different word this time. The one thing you can count on from James' prose is the use of the expression "hung fire" which appears here seven times plus one time as "hang fire." (It also showed up seven times as "hung/hang fire" in The Golden Bowl.) This repetition may seem innocuous in otherwise very long novels, but the fact is that it really jumps out at me as a Saskatchewan resident.

To get back on track, and this is the reason it rated higher than The Golden Bowl, if you wanted to spend a lot of time and energy reading The Ambassadors, I think you could get a lot out of it. I have neither time nor energy nor most importantly patience for this sort of thing, and so I found it more frustrating than anything. I loved many of the characters in this novel. The name "Chad" in a novel written in the early part of the 20th century is inherently hilarious. Mrs. Newsome is a wonderful villain. Strether is an excellent deluded sad sack. Best of all is Maria Gostrey, who I wished could have had her own series of novels in which she travels Europe befriending wealthy people and poking about in their affairs. She's honestly a bit of an aspirational figure for me, and I'm only kidding a little bit about that. The trouble with what James is doing with his prose and his obfuscation is that I didn't feel like I was spending time with the characters, I felt like I was watching them on a tv screen with the volume turned way down.

James throws in a touch more anti-Semitism here for good measure, in case you were wondering. He also, if you'll allow me to be facetious about one of the darkest communities on the internet, may have been the original incel, as evidenced by the name of the young man in the plot, and stuff along these lines:

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

If a vaguely dark comic story of a man having a turn-of-the-20th-century midlife crisis sounds appealing to you, and you want to work very hard for it, this novel might be the one for you. If you prefer for reading not to be work, I'd stay away.

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He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't a Pagan, and he found himself wondering now if he weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't at the same time be both.

- - - - -

"Well, the party responsible is, I suppose, the fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides. What I mean is that with such elements one can't count. I've but my poor individual, my modest human means. It isn't playing the game to turn on the uncanny. All one's energy goes to facing it, to tracking it. One wants, confound it, don't you see?" he confessed with a queer face—"one wants to enjoy anything so rare. Call it then life"—he puzzled it out—"call it poor dear old life simply that springs the surprise. Nothing alters the fact that the surprise is paralysing, or at any rate engrossing—all, practically, hang it, that one sees, that one can see."

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32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James

Year Published: 1904
Pages: 596
First Sentence: The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.
Rating: 1/3 (don’t bother)

Review:
Henry James has three books on The List, and The Golden Bowl is ranked lowest but still in the top third. (Which, let's just pause for a moment and acknowledge how exciting it is that I'm two thirds of the way through my project!) The other two, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove are side by side just at the edge of the Top 25. After reading The Golden Bowl, I'm a little bit unsure of how that will go for me.

In some ways I feel like I've read a lot of James prior to picking up this book, although I've actually only read two of his novels (The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady) and two of his novellas (The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller). Given who he is as a writer, however, it may only take one book to make you feel like you've read a lot of James, which is to say that he is maybe the most longwinded writer in the entire canon. His reputation precedes him when it comes to that. Also if you just pick up one of his books and flip through it you will see how longwinded he is because you will see all the paragraphs that go on for multiple pages. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed most of what I read by him previously, with the exception of The Turn of the Screw (an extremely frustrating work, because James is so good and he just falls down on writing a ghost story).

But we're not here to talk about his other work. I think the point I'm trying to make is that James has this reputation for being impenetrable and I never really got that before, but boy I sure do now.

I did some reading about this before writing the review. Was I hallucinating when I enjoyed The Bostonians back in my early twenties? No. The fact is that as James got older, his work got more.. intense. The Bostonians was published almost twenty years before The Golden Bowl. In other words, all three books on The List are late period Henry James and I will need to strap in for some nonsense.

In this case, the nonsense consists of a very simple premise: a father and daughter's spouses start an affair with one another. American-in-London Maggie Verver marries an Italian named Amerigo who is never given a last name but who is implied to have a very good pedigree, such that he can be called a Prince. I imagined to myself that he was a member of the Borgia, although they probably aren't Italian enough. In that case, maybe a Medici. Anyway, Amerigo is basically marrying for money (but likes Maggie well enough). Maggie's father, Adam, is fabulously wealthy. The two of them are close due to the death of Maggie's mother at an early age. For various reasons, Adam Verver ends up marrying a friend of Maggie's named Charlotte Stant, not realizing that she and Amerigo had a romance before Amerigo and Maggie met. The two couples spend a lot of time together. Things go bad.

Sounds good, right? Well, it kind of is. I didn't hate this book. My reading experience was marked by a lot of frustration, though. This is a simple story that another writer could tell with maybe only a third of the pages that James takes. My previous reading made me feel that the whole point of James is to plumb every last thing to its depths, but that's unfortunately not what's happening here. In this case, the characters are so vague in their dialogue and thought that I often wasn't quite sure what was going on. Maggie and her father have three big scenes together: one before his marriage, one after she's discovered their spouses' betrayal, and the third at the end. In the second and third scenes, especially the second, I had literally no idea what transpired between the two of them.

There were two characters in the book that I loved, Fanny Assingham and her husband Bob (I doubt I need to, but I will also point out that Fanny has one of the great names in literary fiction). These two kind of disappear after a certain point, which is a shame, but they serve to provide commentary on the situation at some points. Fanny is a busybody. Here is a little bit of dialogue from a scene between her and Maggie which I hope will illustrate my point:

"Can she?" Fanny Assingham questioned.
"Can’t she?" Maggie returned.
Their eyes, for a minute, intimately met on it; after which the elder woman said: "I mean for seeing him alone."
"So do I," said the Princess.
At which Fanny, for her reasons, couldn't help smiling. "Oh, if it's for that he's staying—!"
"He's staying—I've made it out—to take anything that comes or calls upon him. To take," Maggie went on, "even that." Then she put it as she had at last put it to herself. "He’s staying for high decency."
"Decency?" Mrs. Assingham gravely echoed.
"Decency. If she should try—!"
"well—?" Mrs. Assingham urged.
"Well, I hope—!"
"Hope he'll see her?"

And I mean you're missing a few hundred pages of context from that scene but trust me, it doesn't help. I complained about the dialogue in Green Grass, Running Water (albeit for a different reason), but I'd take that any day over this.

Quick aside to also mention a gross line that James apparently had to throw in about a vendor acting on a rare scruple that is "almost unprecedented in the thrifty children of Israel." Like, get out of here. I didn't even know that the character was Jewish until the appearance of the racial slur!

I wish I could've loved this. I was so looking forward to reading more Henry James. After six hundred pages, though, I feel like I deserve clarity rather than ambiguity. Besides the next two of his books on The List, I'll stick with his earlier work in the future.

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"You've seemed these last days—I don't know what: more absent than before, too absent for us merely to go on so. It's all very well, and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the very brim, begins to flow over. That's what has happened to my need of you—the cup, all day, has been too full to carry. So here I am with it, spilling it over you—and just for the reason that is the reason of my life. After all, I've scarcely to explain that I'm as much in love with you now as the first hour; except that there are some hours—which I know when they come, because they almost frighten me—that show me I'm even more so. They come of themselves—and, ah, they've been coming! After all, after all—!"

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NB: This book is one of the entries on my Classics Club list! -M.R.