Henry James
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New
York, the son of Henry James senior, a
distinguished American philosopher. He was
given a liberal education which included
prolonged visits to Europe, and when he left
Harvard he felt compelled to leave America
for Europe, a continent which for him
offered a maturity and sophistication which
he felt was missing in his homeland and
which, in his view, was crucial for the
nurturing of the highest form of literature.
He lived in Italy, France and Britain, but in
1876 he settled permanently in Britain, and
in 1915 he became a British citizen.
Henry James’s life spanned a time of vast
literary change. He was born into the age of
romanticism when Wordsworth was Poet
Laureate, and yet by the time he died he
was very much a twentieth century writer
and, stylistically, was anticipating the
modernist movement.
Henry James wrote twenty-one novels
which fall broadly into three phases. The first
is characterised by Roderick Hudson (1876).
This book deals with themes that were to preoccupy James for the whole of his career:
the impact of a sophisticated European
ethos on a naive American, and the
insidious nature of evil. It was written as a
traditional narrative with a certain
picturesqueness of style. The second phase,
and in the view of many critics his most
accomplished, is best characterised by The
Portrait of a Lady. The same themes are in
play but stylistically James shows a maturity
and complexity of style which combine
observable events with inward experience.
For a time James tried his hand as a
playwright, but the interior nature of his
writing was not suited to the demands of
theatre. In 1895 one of his plays, Guy
Donville, failed so miserably that he
determined to give up writing for the theatre
and to use what he had learnt to strengthen
his novels.
It is to this third phase of writing that
The Wings of the Dove (1902) belongs,
together with The Ambassadors (1903) and
The Golden Bowl (1904). Now James began
to experiment with a much more labyrinthine style. He tried to express
thoughts which are seldom precise, and to
investigate motives which are often
ambiguous, even to the protagonists. His
sentences became longer, with more and
more reservations and qualifications. James
often dictated his work and therefore wrote
as he spoke, with complex extenuated
sentences. Thomas Hardy called them
‘infinite sentences’; this would suggest a
baggy superfluity, but in fact James was
aiming for a ‘deep breathing economy’.
In The Wings of the Dove James deals
with his traditional themes. The wealthy,
naive American, Milly, is used and manipulated by Kate Croy and her vacillating
lover, Merton Densher. But their duplicity is
subtle, not always really understood even by
themselves, and the novel deals primarily
with the power of self-deception and the
insidious nature of materialism. James’s
great skill was in withholding frames of
reference, whether moral, spatial, temporal
or psychological. This can at times make for
a challenging read, but the end result is a
book of profound insight into the human
psyche.
Notes by Heather Godwin
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS and MARCO POLO catalogues
BRAHMS Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2 Op. 87
8.550746
Vienna Piano Trio
PIZETTI String Quartets
8.223722
Lajtha Quartet
DVOŘÁK String Quartet Op. 96
8.553371
Vlach Quartet Prague
GRIEG String Quartet in G minor
8.550879
Oslo String Quartet
Music programming by Nicolas Soames
