The Wings of the Dove - Couverture souple

James, Henry

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0812972112 ISBN 13 : 9780812972115

Editeur : Modern Library, 2004

A propos du livre

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Introduction

To Edgar Allan Poe the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetical topic in the world. Who would expect Henry James, a man completely unlike Poe, to agree? Yet, Henry James, a resplendent stylist and exacting critic, also thought the subject poetic, if for different reasons. True, to James, exploiting the death of a beautiful woman had been “from time immemorial” nothing more than the “shortest of all cuts to the interesting state,” a cheap, manipulative gimmick, lachrymose and facile. After all, the morbid appurtenances of dying—the taste of medicine, the smell of drugs—have little do with the creation of character, for only in its aliveness does character become real. To James, then, the heart of the matter lay in the question of life: how much a fatally ill young person could achieve, as he would write in the Preface to the New York edition of The Wings of the Dove, “the sense of having lived.” And having lived means having perceived, imagined, felt, and, above all, having loved.

The stricken young person had to be female, James continued in the Preface, because she had to be “the very best in the world,” resisting her fate with the full force of her exuberant character. Writing this, James was implicitly recalling his “very best” female cousin, Minny Temple, whom he had loved after a fashion in his discreet, distant way, and whom he never forgot. To him, Minny Temple radiated light, spirit, generosity, and grace; she was by turns contemplative and impetuous, direct and ironic, melancholy and bright. “She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder,” he was to remember in his autobiographical Notes of a Son and Brother. But she was also consumptive. In 1870, Minny Temple died at the age of twenty-four. James wrote that with her death, so ended his youth; he was twenty-seven.

More than two decades later, in the fall of 1894, he confided to his notebook “the idea that came to me some time ago” of a young heroine “who, at 20, on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suddenly condemned to death (by consumption, heart-disease, or whatever).” By then, James had also lost his brilliant, wry sister Alice, a semi-invalid, to breast cancer and, more recently, he had learned of the shocking suicide in Venice of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, a woman who may have loved James in ways he could not comprehend during her life. The deaths of these two women likely provided the final catalyst for what would become, in another few years, Minny Temple recast as Milly Theale, the ill-fated heroine of The Wings of the Dove. In her, James combined the vivacity and pathos of his cousin and sister with the restless passions, hidden and half-guessed, of Constance Woolson.

The year he began The Wings of the Dove, 1901, Henry James was a mature man of fifty-eight standing at the threshold of the twentieth century; he could now look backwards and forward: back, to his peripatetic youth or to his various ailments, or to the ample force exerted on his life by his Swedenborgian-soaked father, the theologian of radical stamp who had insisted his children not find something to do but rather something to be. He could ponder the injury (still a mystery to his biographers) that guiltily exempted him from fighting in the Civil War or his decision to make England, not America, his adopted home; he could contemplate the success of his charming elder brother William, the brilliant psychologist and philosopher who, like his novelist sibling, made consciousness his lifelong passion. And he could take stock of his own life, confronting, as did the middle-aged Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors, the question of whether he himself had lived “all you can.”

Looking ahead, James could imagine himself as he had long been, a prolific writer constantly at work, a voracious reader influenced by the likes of Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, and George Sand; a literary prestidigitator commercially unsuccessful, but widely celebrated and who earned moderately and lived moderately. He would recognize himself as a cosmopolitan, sensitive man who converted feelings to fluid prose, a loving man who lived alone. And in the new century, he used a typewriter, lived much of the year in a house in Sussex, took motor trips, and entered what is commonly considered his “major phase.” He had just finished The Ambassadors (though it was not published until 1903), when he began composing, in his ripest style yet, The Wings of the Dove. These two books, along with The Golden Bowl, published in 1904, comprise the premier novels of James’s last period. They cap a lifetime of achievement with intense inventiveness, acumen, and fluency, and are said, rightly, to usher in the twentieth century.

With the twentieth century comes the modern novel, replete with psychological verité conjured through the marvels of style—and this is traced to Henry James by, among many others, Edith Wharton, Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the indefatigable modernist Gertrude Stein. Another confirmed expatriate, Stein considered James a crack theorist as well as practitioner of fiction. In fact, mobilized by The Wings of the Dove, Stein composed her first novel, Q.E.D. (1903), after copying out long portions of James’s novel into her notebooks, studying the conscientiously composed blocks of material, as James called the various points of view dominating his book. (She apparently tried to meet with James, who pleaded illness, and thirty years later, included him in Four in America, where she imagined what he would be like if he had been a general.)

The dramatic, well-honed scenes that entranced Stein actually owed their power to James’s unsuccessful foray into the theater. The spectacular failure of James’s play Guy Domville in 1895 had dashed his hope of becoming a well-remunerated, well-known playwright, but when he returned to the writing of fiction shortly afterward, his career in the theater had proven salutary. On the stage, characters speak to one another but are not privy to one another’s thoughts. People seldom say what they mean, or all they mean. Characters talk past one another without the mediation of an overarching, omniscient narrator stitching together various points of view into a comprehensible whole.

Translating this technique into the novel, James spent his late, great talent on this crucial challenge of the theater, creating situations in which incident, as he had said years before, determined character and vice verse—but without recourse to explanatory narrative devices. In the novels of the major phase, then, James abjures the omniscient narrator who, like a gondolier, propels the reader through a recognizable, epistemologically secure world. For James, the world we inhabit is one of varying points of view, and each point of view implies a limited consciousness. (As Emerson commented in a non-transcendental outburst, “souls rarely touch their objects.”) We perceive separately, our perceptions colliding from time to time in epiphanic moments or, less happily, we misconstrue one another, which is why James counsels the aspiring novelist in the essay “The Art of Fiction” to try to be one upon whom nothing is lost.

Yet, to the extent that The Wings of the Dove is a tragic novel about self-interest, duplicity, and fatal circumstance, it is also high melodrama: a triangle of lovers, a fortune hanging in the balance, a death, a legacy. The cast of major characters is small, the plot readily summarized. A dying American heiress, Milly Theale, recently come to Europe, is embroiled in a scheme concocted by her English friend, Kate Croy. Kate intends that her secret fiancé, the journalist Merton Densher, make love to Milly so that when Milly dies, Merton will inherit her money. He and Kate will then be free to marry with Milly’s fortune at their disposal.

To Kate, the plan is eminently reasonable, wonderfully practicable. “I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing,” she declares, implying that through her, Milly will be able to enjoy what remains of her life. “We’re making her want to live,” she rationalizes to Densher. No sentimental heroine, Kate Croy is a calculating, forthright woman unwilling to suppress her hunger for a better life. Indeed, to Kate, a better life is one in which she can live comfortably with the man she loves unencumbered by the financial and moral improvidence represented by her father or sister and liberated from the stolid materialism of her Aunt Maud Lowder, that “Britannia of the Market Place.” But if Kate’s goal arches toward the romantic dream of freedom, her means of achieving it depend on a calculated, self-conscious ruthlessness, both sincere and brutal. “I’m the most honest woman in the world,” she claims. She loves Densher, of course. She is even willing to share him, deceiving both herself and Milly Theale, whom she also loves, at the same time.

Merton Densher, who acquiesces to Kate’s plan, is perhaps the more self-deceived, although his moral scrupulousness, especially by the end of the novel, strikes him as self-knowledge. Denying himself full recognition of his complicity, he nonetheless exacts from Kate his own price for his participation in her scheme, insisting she become his physical lover as well as accomplice. Observant and analytic though he is, he has come to resent being surrounded by a “circle of petticoats,” as if that epithet distanced him from the women whose attentions he seeks. After Milly dies, he admits his culpability—at least to himself. But he is willing to “chuck” Kate Croy, according to her, just to salve his conscience; it’s another moral tradeoff, and she is partly right.

One of the most chilling features of the novel is that it affords no unequivocally positive identification with any of the characters save, perhaps, the most unknowable and vulnerable of them all, Milly herself. Orphaned, immensely rich, lovely, and strange, when Milly smiles, says her enthusiastic traveling companion Susan Stringham, “it was a public event—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history.” The “dove” of the book’s title, she is alternately called a princess or a typically American girl, though she shares none of Daisy Miller’s brashness or Isabel Archer’s impetuousness. Unlike James’s earlier heroines, Milly Theale is luminous. And she is linked, albeit ambiguously, to a series of religious images that portend sacrifice, martyrdom, love, and transfiguration. Yet of all the characters, she most directly confronts the horror of mortality. “Dead, dead, dead,” she cries when viewing a Bronzino portrait that resembles her. She is not, James implies, a work of art or an icon; she is a young woman whose doom it is to live fast: she wants to love and be loved.

Milly Theale is therefore multifarious—ardent, charitable, perhaps even vindictive, and certainly single-minded: “Milly had her rent to pay, her rent for the future; everything else but how to meet it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters.” No ingenue, she reckons that much of her appeal derives from her fabulous wealth. “Wouldn’t her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage of her disease?” she wonders. “She mightn’t last, but her money would.”

Overall, however, relatively few passages in the novel provide access to Milly’s thoughts, and ultimately she eludes us. Not appearing at all until Book Three, she enters the scene late, she leaves early. Mostly, we see her from the outside through the eyes of others, or what James called the successive reflectors of consciousness, all of whom are indeed affected by her wealth. How much she sees herself, how she comes to regard herself or others, how far she extends trust or forgiveness—all these give her character heft and depth but not transparency. We cannot even interpret categorically the terms of the legacy she bequeaths to Densher, for we do not know what happened during their last interview. Does a merciful and loving Milly Theale stretch out her wings triumphantly to offer Kate and Merton absolution? Or is she a secret sharer, able to outmaneuver them at the last with her gift?

Indeed, The Wings of the Dove is a book of well-kept secrets: a secret betrothal, the secret nature of Milly’s illness, the unopened contents of her last letter. Scenes occur offstage. The narrative proceeds by concealment and silences. It pauses, hesitates; diplomacy conditions desire. We must deduce what Milly’s physician tells Susan Stringham and what he prescribes, the emotional tenor of Milly and Densher’s final meeting, how Kate and Merton’s engagement is discovered. An atmosphere of mystery suffuses even the physical landscape, especially when Densher finds himself in the decaying arms of Venice as Milly withdraws into the Palazzo Leporelli.

Such plaintive use of space—houses, villas, piazzas, even drawing rooms—evokes the plangent quality of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s subtle tales, which James knew well, and Hawthorne’s last novel, The Marble Faun, which James admired. In his brilliant study of the elder writer, James said Hawthorne tread lightly in realms psychological but kept its keys in his pocket, a genius James shared. One thinks of James’s own work, What Maisie Knew, for example, or The Turn of the Screw, those tales of partial knowledge, the only kind available to mortals in an unregenerate world. Both writers share what James famously called Hawthorne’s “catlike faculty of seeing in the dark,” a wariness of too much easy sunshine, especially in matters of the heart. As a consequence, James’s sympathy for the complex anti-heroine, Kate Croy, should come as no surprise. A canny pragmatist who takes pleasure in what she calls the refinements of consciousness, she utters the mordant truth at the end of the novel, “We shall never be again as we were.” And in her pronouncement, we discover what we may have sensed all along, that change is the embedded subject of The Wings of the Dove, time the embedded antagonist. Merton and Kate cannot return to the days when they sat outdoors together in an idyllic garden and the “realm of thought at least was open to them.” They are at odds. Milly Theale is dead. Merton Densher, who has inherited her money, presents Kate Croy with an untenable choice: him or it.

Kate believes Merton has fallen in love with his memory of Milly Theale, meaning he can consecrate himself to a changeless, timeless image free from the ravages of physical and moral disease. She can become to him a shrine, like Poe’s poor dead woman sacrificed on the altar of art. James understood this; to him, Minny Temple was the same sort of image whose ghost, he said, he lay to rest through art’s “beauty and dignity.” Not being an artist, however, Densher cannot convert his experience into anything but renunciation, which is not life.

As for Milly Theale, she remains the young woman with everything to live for. Yet, precisely because she is slippery and veiled, she manages to become more than the sum of the points of view surrounding her. She is all of them and more, the irreducible symbol of the novel itself, a prismatic structure, dynamic and shimmering. And ...

Biographie de l'auteur :

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York City.  He traveled and studied extensively in New York, London, Paris and Geneva, and returned to the States in 1860, enrolling in Harvard Law School two years later.  By 1865 he had begun to contribute reviews and short stories to periodicals in earnest.  His first major piece of fiction, "Watch and Ward," was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in 1870, and Roderick Hudson, his first major novel, was published in 1875.  James spent the following decades abroad, first visiting Paris, where he met Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, then settling in London, where he lived for over twenty years and wrote several novels, including Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima.  In 1897 he moved to Lamb House in Rye, where he wrote his later novels, including The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, and well as his popular ghost story, "The Turn of the Screw." James became a British subject in 1915.  Two unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, were published as fragments after his death on February 28, 1916.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Modern Library
• Date d'édition: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0812972112
• ISBN 13: 9780812972115
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 768