One night nearly thirty years ago, in a legendary New York boîte de nuit et des arts called Tony’s, I was taking part in a running literary gun fight that had begun with a derogatory or complimentary remark somebody made about something, when one of the participants, former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett, whose “The Maltese Falcon” had come out a couple of years before, suddenly startled us all by announcing that his writing had been influenced by Henry James’s novel “The Wings of the Dove.” Nothing surprises me any more, but I couldn’t have been more surprised then if Humphrey Bogart, another frequenter of that old salon of wassail and debate, had proclaimed that his acting bore the deep impress of the histrionic art of Maude Adams.
I was unable, in a recent reinvestigation, to find many feathers of “The Dove” in the claws of “The Falcon,” but there are a few “faint, far” (as James used to say) resemblances. In both novels, a fabulous fortune—jewels in “The Falcon,” inherited millions in “The Dove”—shapes the destinies of the disenchanted central characters; James’s designing woman Kate Croy, like Hammett’s pistol-packing babe Brigid O’Shaughnessy, loses her lover, although James’s Renunciation Scene is managed, as who should say, rather more exquisitely than Hammett’s, in which Sam Spade speaks these sweetly sorrowful parting words: “You angel! Well, if you get a good break you’ll be out of San Quentin in twenty years and you can come back to me then.” Whereupon he turns her over to the cops for the murder of his partner, Miles Archer (a good old Henry James name, that). Some strong young literary excavator may one day dig up other parallels, but I suggest that he avoid trying to relate the character in “The Falcon” called Cairo to James’s early intention to use Cairo, instead of Venice, as the major setting of his novel. That is simply, as who should not say, one of those rococo coincidences.
“The Wings of the Dove” is now fifty-seven years old, but it still flies on, outward bound for the troubled future. Since 1902, it has become a kind of femme fatale of literature, exerting a curiously compelling effect upon authors, critics, playwrights, producers, and publishers. Seemingly, almost every playwright, from hack to first-rate talent, has been burned by the drama that glows within the novel’s celebrated triangle, and has taken a swing at adapting it for stage or screen, usually with less than no success. It was James’s own original intention to present his plot and characters in play form, but guardian angel or artist’s insight caused him wisely to refrain from diverting into the theatre his delicately flowering, slowly proliferating history of fine consciences, which belongs so clearly between covers and not between curtains.
This doesn’t keep people from adapting it, though. In 1956, Guy Bolton made a play out of it, “Child of Fortune,” which was produced on Broadway by the usually canny Jed Harris, who had earlier touched with art (“art schmart,” he himself once disdainfully called it) his directing of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Square.” The Bolton “Dove” died miserably after twenty-three performances. That debacle did not deter television’s “Playhouse 90” from having a go at dramatizing the novel just last January. This adaptation, made by a young man named Meade Roberts, seemed to me closer to the James tone and mood, closer to perfection of total production, than any other dramatization I have seen, and I have seen plenty. (The first one I ever encountered was shown to me by a young professor of English in Ohio forty-one years ago.) The success of “The Dove” on television lay in a discipline that gave it Henry James’s key and pitch, if not his depth and range. Because my sight has failed, I could not see Inga Swenson, who played Milly, and this was probably fortunate, since I was told she looked as healthy as one of Thomas Hardy’s milkmaids. But her words fell persuasively upon the ear, and she was the dying Milly to me. The direction gave the play a proper unhurried pace (“sluggish,” wrote one restless newspaper critic), and there were moving offstage effects—the sound of distant bells in one scene, the haunting cry of gondoliers in another.
In my own college years, 1913-17, the literature courses in the modern English novel that were offered west of the Alleghenies included Hardy and Meredith, and sometimes Trollope, Samuel Butler, and Conrad, but rarely James. My own professor in this field, the late Joseph Russell Taylor, of Ohio State, rated James higher than the rest, and assigned “The Wings of the Dove” as required class reading, with this admonition: “If you can’t make anything at all out of the first hundred pages, don’t let it worry you.” It was James’s method to introduce his principal characters late, or, as John McNulty once put it, “to creep up on them in his stocking feet.” Since only about one student in every thirty could stand, or understand, Henry James’s writing, there were few persons with whom you could discuss the Old Master in those years. It was in 1930 that the Modern Library first introduced Henry James to its readers, with its edition of “The Turn of the Screw,” which has sold to date ninety thousand copies. The so-called Henry James Revival did not take place until the nineteen-forties, and centered on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. In 1946, the Modern Library brought out “The Wings of the Dove,” which has sold more than forty-one thousand copies. In 1958, “The Dove” lost its American copyright and fell into the public domain, and in January, 1959, Dell’s Laurel edition of paperbacks printed seventy-five thousand copies of the novel, a little more than two-thirds of which either were sold or are out on the newsstands or in the bookstores.
The James Revival deserves the capital “R,” because the increased sales of his books and the rapidly expanding literature on the man and his life and his work began crowding library shelves all over the country. In 1932, I bought the complete 1922 edition of James, issued by Macmillan of London, but it had not been easy to find. It was available in no New York bookstore then, and I finally got my set through a collector. It came from a private library on Park Avenue, which was then being sold, and not a single page of any of the more than thirty volumes had been cut. It was as if the owner of this particular edition had said, “I want to buy about two and a half or three feet of the works of Henry James.” Interest in the Revival spread from Broadway to Hollywood. For years, David O. Selznick held the movie rights to “The Dove,” but he never produced an adaptation of the novel, unquestionably because of the difficulty of casting the three principal roles and of finding an adapter who could satisfactorily cope with the dramatization.
This seems the right place to describe briefly the “game,” as James called it, that is afoot in his masterpiece.
Kate Croy, then, an ambitious young Englishwoman, emotionally intense and deeply amorous (James dresses her in such words as “ardor,” “desire,” and “passion”), is eager to marry a struggling young writer and journalist, Merton Densher in the novel but, mercifully, Miles Enshaw in the television play. Having developed, because of a penniless life with a wastrel father, what would now be called a neurosis or psychosis, Kate, with her “talent for life,” is determined to enjoy money and marriage, and neither without the other. Into her predicament and preoccupation drifts the American girl Milly Theale, attractive, enormously wealthy, naïve, and genuine, but perceptive (“mobile of mind”), in the best Henry James tradition, and dying. She falls in love with Densher, and the possessed, designing Kate perceives how she can use Milly’s situation for her own selfish ends. She deliberately throws Milly and Densher together in Venice, and then reveals her scheme to him. He shall marry Milly, thus killing, you might say, two doves with one stone—Milly’s final months on earth will be made happy ones, after which Kate and Densher will live happily ever after on the dead bride’s millions. But Milly, again true to the James tradition of innocent American girls entangled in European society intrigue, discovers the true situation—that Kate is in love with and secretly engaged to Densher and that Densher is in love with Kate. Milly dies and, in her “copious will,” leaves much of her wealth to the lovers, but they can never be happy with it, or without it. They are shadowed and separated forever by the wings of the dead dove, by the presence of a girl who is gone but everlastingly there.
Lest my oversimplification in this summary cause the ghost of Henry James to pace and mutter, I shall let him insert here a typical elucidation of the “conspiracy” of Kate and Merton: “The picture constituted, so far as may be, is that of a pair of natures well-nigh consumed by a sense of their intimate affinity and congruity, the reciprocity of their desire, and thus passionately impatient of barriers and delays, yet with qualities of intelligence and character that they are meanwhile extraordinarily able to draw upon for the enrichment of their relation, the extension of their prospect and the support of their ‘game.’ ”
There has probably been no other major novelist whose work has been so often criticized not so much for what it is but for what certain critics think it should have been. One critic, whose name I do not know, becoming impatient of the carpers, once said that they criticized Henry James as they might criticize a cat for not being a dog. These carpers are given to attacking, at the same time, the involved James style and his viewpoint on love, sex, women, affairs, and marriage. One reviewer of the “Playhouse 90” production insisted that no woman as passionately in love as Kate would hand her lover over to another woman, even temporarily, however great the promised compensation. The sensitive novelist never got used to the assaults upon him—understandably enough, for many of them were brutal. He was accused of “bombinating in a vacuum” and, by H. G. Wells, of laboring like a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. It was not a pea but a pearl, a James defender pointed out, and the hippopotamus had unbelievably skillful fingers.
As James’s novels everywhere show, and his prefaces repeatedly declaim, he was caught unceasingly between the “urge to dramatize! dramatize!” and his passion for indirection—an ambivalence that must present both challenge and handicap to the adapter, however ingenious, of his work. In the last chapter of “The Dove,” James observes that walks taken by Kate and Densher were “more remarkable for what they didn’t say than for what they did.” The book ends with a hopeless headshake by Kate and then the final speech “We shall never be again as we were!,” which is scarcely the way a born dramatist would bring down his third-act curtain. And what can the helpless adapter do when confronted, as he frequently is, by such lines as this: “The need to bury in the dark blindness of each other’s arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn’t undo.” Incidentally, few artists with the physical ability to see appreciate the truth known to all those without sight, that there is a dark blindness and a lighted blindness. Henry James was at home in the dark and in the light and in the shadows that lie between.
The theme of “The Dove” had germinated in what Edmund Wilson has called James’s “marvellous intelligence” (and Wells his “immensely abundant brain”) upon the death of a first cousin extremely dear to him, Minny Temple, who departed his world and our world (they are in many ways distinctly different) at the age of twenty-four. He became so absorbed in his theme that he was moved to prefigure Milly’s death as dragging everybody and everything down with it, like a great ship sinking or a big business collapsing. This massive contemplation of effect belongs to the mind and scheme of the novelist, but it can’t very well be encompassed in a dramatization, because one can’t get stream of consciousness into a three-act play. It is a commonplace of the ordeal of Henry James that the presentation of his work on the stage, to which he devoted many years, has been invariably better managed in the theatre by other hands than his own. A few years ago, “The Turn of the Screw” was turned into “The Innocents,” and much earlier the unfinished novel “The Sense of the Past” shone upon the stage as “Berkeley Square.” Among the failures on Broadway (“It didn’t just close, it flew closed,” said Richard Maney) was an adaptation, nearly three years ago, of James’s “The Europeans,” called “Eugenia” and starring Tallulah Bankhead, of whom Louis Kronenberger wrote, in a preface to his “Best Plays of 1956-57,” “only Mae West as Snow White could have seemed more unsuited to a part.” Finding an actress, however gifted, who can play a Henry James woman convincingly must be a nightmare to any producer. One such rare lady is Flora Robson, now starring in London as Tina in Sir Michael Redgrave’s recent dramatization of “The Aspern Papers,” a substantial hit and, I am told by a man who has seen them all, the finest presentation of a James work ever brought to the stage.
It had always seemed a wonder to me, until I got involved myself, that practically everybody wanted to write about “The Dove.” In the preface to the new paperback edition, R. P. Blackmur says, “By great luck I had been introduced simply and directly, and had responded in the same way, to what a vast number of people have thought an impossible novel by an impossible author and a vast number of other people have submitted to the stupefying idolatry of both gross and fine over-interpretation.” Recently, Dr. Saul Rosenzweig, a psychologist and student of Henry James, dug up the opinion of the novelist-psychiatrist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell: “I have read his [H.J.’s] last book with bewildered amazement. Since I played cat’s cradle as a child, I have seen no tangle like it. To get the threads of his thought off his mind onto mine with the intermediation of his too exasperating style has been too much for me. A friend of mine says his ‘Wings of a Dove’ [sic] are unlike any dove she ever saw, for it has neither head nor tail. However, I am too old to learn a new language and still struggle to write my own with clearness.”
Dr. Rosenzweig discovered a reply to the Mitchell objections in the correspondence of Owen Wister, creator of “The Virginian” and of the sundown gun duel on the deserted Western main street. “Henry James is in essence inscrutable,” Wister wrote to Mitchell, “but one thing of him I know: our language has no artist more serious or austere at this moment. I explain to myself his bewildering style thus: he is attempting the impossible with it—a certain very particular form of the impossible; namely, to produce upon the reader, as a painting produces upon the gazer, a number of superimposed, simultaneous impressions. He would like to put several sentences on top of each other so that you could read them all at once, and get all at once the various shadings and complexities, instead of getting them consecutively as the mechanical nature of his medium compels. This I am sure is the secret of his involved parentheses, his strangely injected adverbs, the whole structure, in short, of his twisted syntax. One grows used to it by persisting. I read ‘The Ambassadors’ twice, and like it amazingly as a prodigy of skill. One other thing of signal importance is a key to his later books. He does not undertake to tell a story but to deal with a situation, a single situation. Beginning (in his scheme) at the center of this situation, he works outward, intricately and exhaustively, spinning his web around every part of the situation, every little necessary part no matter how slight, until he gradually presents to you the organic whole, worked out. You don’t get the organic whole until he wishes you to and that is at the very end. But he never lets the situation go, never digresses for a single instant; and no matter how slow or long his pages may seem as you first read them, when you have at the end grasped the total thing, if you then look back you find that the voluminous texture is woven closely and that every touch bears upon the main issue. I don’t say that if I could I would work like this, or that the situations he chooses to weave into such verbal labyrinth are such as I should care to deal with so minutely and laboriously, even if I had the art to do so; but I do say that judged as only any works of art can ever be judged; viz., by themselves, by what they undertake to do and how thoroughly they do it, Henry James’ later books are the work of a master. . . .”
This magazine’s Wolcott Gibbs, to get back to the Guy Bolton adaptation of “The Dove,” found “Child of Fortune” ineffably tedious and dull, and Louis Kronenberger concluded that “The Dove” on the stage “can only succeed as something quite trashy or as something truly tremendous.” It can, that is to say, succeed only on the scale of soap opera—“Milly Faces Life,” “Death Can Be Bountiful,” “The First Mrs. Densher,” “Wings of Riches”—or on that of grand opera, with such arias as “O gentle dove!,” “This heart to thy swift flight,” “Fold now thy tender wings,” “Ah, passion but an hour!”
Thus, Meade Roberts’s “Playhouse 90” dramatization was a unique achievement. I sat before my television set that night last January hoping for the passable, fearing the worst.
The worst is a perverse tendency, exhibited by at least one adapter in the past, to twist the plot into low, ironic comedy by saving the life of Milly Theale. Densher, that is, marries the rich girl only to find, to his dismay, and that of Kate, that Milly becomes a rose, no longer choked in the grass but fresh-sprung in the June of salutary happiness. We are a sentimental, soft-hearted nation, prone to lay violent hands upon death in art by calling in play doctors and heroine specialists of the kind that “saved” the doomed Lena, of Joseph Conrad’s “Victory,” forty years ago, when it was made into a silent movie that was a combination of Pollyanna and Jack Holt. This saving of heroines, for a more recent instance in another sphere, was rudely accomplished by the Andrews Sisters in the case of the old Irish ballad “Molly Malone.” The ballad has it that “She died of a fever and no one could save her,” but the sympathetic Andrews Sisters did save her by cutting out that line, fitting her up with an artificial husband, and removing “Now her ghost wheels a wheelbarrow” and inserting “Now they both wheel her barrow,” to the sorrow of millions who love Molly Malone not only alive, alive O, but dying and dead. When the resurrected Molly was crying her cockles and mussels over the airwaves a few years ago, I began fearing that the heroine specialists would go on to resurrect Shakespeare’s Juliet, Verdi’s Violetta, Wordsworth’s Lucy, Browning’s Evelyn Hope, Tennyson’s Elaine, Poe’s Annabel Lee, and Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley. My fears gave rise to a terrifying nightmare in which I picked up a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” to discover that its title had been changed to “Over the Fever and Through the Crise.” It was during this period of apprehension that I went about muttering “I am mending, Egypt, mending.” But “Playhouse 90,” bless its young heart, let Milly Theale die in the beauty of the Henry James lilies.
The profound and lasting effect upon Henry James of Minny Temple’s untimely death shows up in many ways and places in his novels and stories. The simple, faintly comic name Minny Temple is reflected not only in Milly Theale but, in varying degrees, in the names of such other James heroines as Maggie Verver; Maisie, of “What Maisie Knew;” Mamie Pocock; Daisy Miller; May Bartram; Maria Gostrey; and Mary Antrim. Even Madame la Comtesse de Vionnet was named Marie. More than one of the girls in this “M” category die in the novels and novellas. I have set down the foregoing names from memory, and I am sure a research through the books would turn up many more. Probably dozens of seniors in English literature courses—like one I met at Yale a few years ago—have devoted their theses to a study of the proper names in Henry James. He had something more than a gift, almost an impish perversity, for the invention of plain, even homely feminine names, and by no means all of them were for his American women. The weediest of all is, I think, Fleda Vetch, of “The Spoils of Poynton.” As for his best-known American females, only a few, such as Isabel Archer and Caroline Spencer, do not grate upon the ear. This is partly because the voices of American women, from coast to coast, as he once said, were a torture to his own ear. Some fifty years ago, in Harper’s Bazar (this was before it became Harper’s Bazaar), he wrote half a dozen pieces about the speech and manners of the American Woman, which have never been brought together in any book. They might conceivably throw some light upon the James names for women, and upon his complicated, ambivalent attitude toward the ladies themselves. In any case, he usually took them up tenderly, fashioned so slenderly, young and so rich. What feminine reader has not wept over the death of poor dear Daisy Miller? And what sensitive gentleman can read the closing pages of “The Beast in the Jungle” and ever forget the anguish of John Marcher, to whom nothing whatever had happened, who through life had love forgone, quit of scars and tears but bearing the deep, incurable wound of emptiness? This story tells the tale of its author’s loss of “the wings of experience,” the burden and beauty and blessing of the love of a woman—something that was denied to Henry James for a complex of reasons, upon which the Freudians, especially during the nineteen-thirties, liked to get their eager fingers. Basically, he deliberately chose a loveless life because of his transfiguring conviction that the high art he practiced was not consonant with marriage but demanded the monastic disciplines of celibacy. He loved vicariously, though, and no man more intensely and sensitively.
It has always seemed to me that Henry James plunged into the theatre to escape, perhaps without conscious intention, from the lifelessness of the silent study and the stuffy ivory tower. But no one can simply, or romantically, account for any novelist’s taking on the theatre at intervals. There is always the lure of contact with an audience and the immediate response of appreciation, and there is also always what James called “the lust of a little possible gold.” He supported himself by his writings, and he had the hope of making a killing on the stage for the sake of his budget and coffers. What resulted was an unequal struggle—his “tussle with the Black Devil of the theatre.” He wrote a dozen plays in all, but only four were produced, and none were outstanding, and none made any money to speak of. And around him, all the time, bloomed, to his envy and usually to his disdain, such successes by his colleagues as “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” “An Ideal Husband,” and “The Passing of the Third Floor Back.” James’s theatre pieces have been collected by Leon Edel, one of the most eminent living Jamesians, in “The Complete Plays of Henry James.”
Edel’s swift and fascinating account of what was probably James’s most hideous hour, the first night of his play “Guy Domville,” at the St. James’s Theatre, in London, one January night in 1895, is itself worth the price of the volume. What happened that terrifying night would take too long to tell, and could not be done by anyone as well as Edel has done it. The evening might have grown out of the conjoined imaginations of Agatha Christie, Ed Wynn, and Robert Benchley. It began with the receipt of a mysterious telegram of bad wishes, and, after a compelling first act, abruptly changed gear and color in the second, with the entrance of an actress wearing a strange and comical hat. If James had, up to that night, still toyed with the idea of dramatizing the story of Milly Theale, he must have given up all thought of such a venture the moment he was dragged out upon the stage, at the end of the play, to the boos and catcalls that dominated the applause of an audience containing, among its host of celebrities, three comparatively unknown literary men—Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. Incidentally, there have been few literary feuds so fascinating, and few so voluminously documented, as that between James and Wells, the introvert against the extrovert, the self-conscious artist versus the social-conscious novelist. The history of this long bicker and battle has been done by Edel and Gordon N. Ray in their “Henry James and H. G. Wells,” published, in 1958, by the University of Illinois Press.
Admirers of literature’s hippopotamus with the skillful fingers and the sensitive soul must always mourn his having missed “The Heiress” and “The Innocents” and “Berkeley Square,” but their sorrow is compensated for by a sense of relief that he didn’t have to experience the rigors and rigidities of Broadway. Anybody can survive editors and publishers, one way or another, but it takes the constitution of a Marine sergeant major to stand up under the bombardment of producers and directors, not to mention actors and actresses. Ellen Terry once promised to appear in a Henry James play in America, but never did, with the result that he called her “perfidious.” He did manage to get the great Forbes-Robertson to appear in a play of his, but it is a now forgotten succès d’estime, a dim footnote to the record of that actor’s achievements in the theatre. Once, James decided to turn a long one-act play of his into three acts by “curtain drops,” dividing it into what he called stanzas or cantos. I can see now the faces of Jed Harris, Herman Shumlin, and Kermit Bloomgarden listening to the Old Master’s “polysyllabic ponderosities” about that.
I think it is safe to say that television’s voracious gobbling up of the literature of the past, which it regurgitates as Westerns, will leave Henry James’s works uneaten, and even unbitten. There are now so many Westerns on television that their writers may soon be forced to adapt even the more famous Bible stories, and we may expect before long a bang-bang based on this distorted text: “Whither thou goest, I will go, God and the Cheyennes willing.”
The learned John Lardner, head of this magazine’s department of television investigation, recently viewed with sound alarm and insight the Westernizing, among other things, of de Maupassant’s sardonic classic “Boule de Suif,” in which the fat French prostitute of the original was transmutilated into a slender and virtuous Apache princess, while quotations from Shakespeare flowered all over the desert till Hell wouldn’t have it. That distortion of an indestructible piece of literature alarmed me, too, coming, as it did, only nine days after my happily groundless fears about the debauching of Henry James’s “Dove.” When de Maupassant’s famous coach was diverted from its journey between Rouen and Le Havre and rerouted across the Indian country, I began fretting about what might happen to other celebrated coaches of literature—the one in “Vanity Fair,” all those that rumble through Dickens, and even the one that carries Cinderella to the ball. Then I began worrying about Lewis Carroll’s coachless Alice. I could see her being driven, behind four horses, from a ladies’ finishing school in Boston to California in order to be joined in unholy matrimony with a disturbed ex-haberdasher, one Mat Hadder, now a deranged U.S. marshal. Down from the hills, at the head of his howling tribe, sweeps Big Chief White Rabbit, but out of the West, the Farfetched West, to the blare of bugle music, rides Captain Marston (“March”) Hare, who falls in love with Alice through the gun smoke, and— Ah, the hell with it. (For the sake of the record, it should be noted, in passing, that “Boule de Suif” was once dramatized for Broadway, with reasonable reverence, in a play called “The Channel Road.”)
I keep thinking of other possible—nay, probable—television corruptions: “Trelawny of the Wells Fargo,” “Lady Windermere’s Gun,” “She Shoots to Conquer,” “Fanny’s First Gunplay,” and even “The Sheriff Misses Tanqueray.” This Tanqueray is the fastest draw in English literature, and can outshoot the notorious desperado Long Gun Silver (and a heigh-ho to you, Long Gun, says I). To get all this frightening phantasmagoria off my mind, I have begun rereading, and hiding in, Henry James’s “The Sacred Fount,” a story that will, I feel sure, forever foil the bang-bang transmutilators. For such small and negative blessings let us thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods may be.
One thing that I can’t yet dismiss from my waking thoughts and dawn dreams is the impish, tongue-in-cheek compulsion of the Western televisionaries to commingle the Bard and the bang-bangs. The other morning, I woke up with this line, from “Have Gun, Will Shakespeare,” chasing through my head: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this—bang!”
Thataway, stranger, lies madness, so let us iris out on a quieter and safer area.
H. G. Wells, long-time friend and finally enemy of Henry James, once wrote, “For generations to come a select type of reader will brighten appreciatively to ‘The Spoils of Poynton,’ ‘The Ambassadors,’ ‘The Tragic Muse,’ ‘The Golden Bowl’ and many other stories.” His prophecy was right, if you change “type” to “types,” but his list of the stories he apparently liked best himself is unconvincing to me. I doubt, for instance, whether he ever got through “The Golden Bowl,” but if he did he left me somewhere in the middle of it. It is hard to understand how he could have left out the most controversial of all James’s creations, “The Turn of the Screw.”
The undiminished power of the great “ghost story,” after more than sixty years, was proved again, this time on television, when Ingrid Bergman starred in a dramatization by James Costigan, put on by the Ford “Startime” series just last month. I put “ghost story” in quotes because of the controversy that still rages, as rage goes in literary and psychological circles, about the true meaning of the narrative. Critical minds, in practically all known areas of research and analysis, have got answers, dusty and otherwise, when hot for certainties in this, one of the greatest of all literary mysteries. Even with a merely competent cast, it would be hard to mar, or even dilute, the effectiveness of any dramatization, but Miss Bergman brought a memorable performance to a well-written, well-directed “Turn of the Screw.” She was equalled in every way by the performances of Alexandra Wager and Hayward Morse, as the two children of the eerie household.
One New York critic called it an “honest to God ghost story,” and most viewers must indeed have been haunted and chilled by the strange goings on in the great house of the wide circular staircase and the gloomy corridors. Dramatic and theatrical effectiveness aside, the question that has fascinated literary critics and psychoanalysts for six decades is this: Were the apparitions of the dead ex-governess, Miss Jessel, and of the violently dead ex-valet, Peter Quint, actual visitations from beyond the grave, or were they figments of the inflamed psyche of the new governess? The literature on the subject is extensive. Watchers of the television show who want to pursue the mystery into the library could turn to Edmund Wilson’s “The Ambiguity of Henry James” in his “The Triple Thinkers,” James’s own preface, and the narrative itself. Mr. Wilson pays tribute to Edna Kenton, one of the first psychographers to put forward the theory of hallucination instead of apparition. The James preface, in the manner of the Master, weaves a glittery web around his intention, at once brightening and obscuring it. He speaks of fairy tale and witchcraft, touches lightly on psychic research, and, of course, jumps over Freud completely. He can set so many metaphors and implications dancing at the same time on the point of his pen that it is hard to make out the pattern in the fluttering of all the winged words. I myself have never had the slightest doubt that he was completely aware of almost every latent meaning that has been read into the famous story. Henry James was not a student of Freud; he was a sophomore in psychology compared to his distinguished brother William, and I once read a letter of Henry’s in which he somewhat pettishly dismissed the assumptions of Freud as akin to those of spiritualism. But when it came to pondering his plots, turning over his characters and incidents the way a squirrel turns over a nut, he was the pure artist, less susceptible than almost any other to unreasoned impulse.
Some years ago, in a little town in Connecticut, I had the pleasure of meeting, at a party, a gracious lady whose mother was the sister of Minny Temple. She told me a wonderful tale of something that happened at twilight in England many, many years ago, when she was a young girl. I like to think that the incident took place at the very time Henry James was working out, in his conscious mind, the tricks and devices of “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, the venerable figure of the distinguished novelist, wearing opera hat and cape, stood outside a house, in the fading light, and peered through a window at the young lady and one or two other girls, to give them what he might have called “the tiniest of thrills.” And so to me, if to no one else, it is clear that this gave him the idea of the apparition, at a window, of the ghostly figure of Peter Quint.
Alas, I am now told that the gracious lady not only has forgotten the incident but does not believe it happened, and cannot recall telling me about it. And so this rambling flight into the past ends, as perhaps it should properly end, on a faint, far note of mystery. ♦
