‘The Golden Bowl’: from James to Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The Golden Bowl (2000), based on the 1904 novel by Henry James, is a complex and challenging film about secrets, lies and the presence of evil in two closely connected marriages.  Prawer Jhabvala, who maintained a fine balance between artistic restraint and intense emotions, explained her flexible and effective creation of the film: “I have no compunction about radically changing scenes or inventing new ones.  The Golden Bowl is a prime example.  The novel is told entirely obliquely, with nothing stated directly but only by hints, guesses, flashes.  Nothing is explicit, but a lot is implied.  The film had to work the other way around and turn what was so deeply implicit in the novel into scenes where people attempt to explain their extremely complicated
feelings.” ¹

She also revealed how she invented the opening scene — a scene that was not in the novel.  She asked herself: “How am I going to show who this prince is and where he comes from?  So I read a lot of books about the Renaissance and I came across a story in which a duke actually does kill a stepmother who was involved with her stepson, so I thought, well, that’s a good background for this film!” ²  This bloodthirsty scene, in which a jealous aristocrat captures and murders an unfaithful wife who’s been intimate with her younger relative, appears in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1869).  The book-length poem narrates the story of an impoverished nobleman, Count Guido, who in 1698 was found guilty of murdering his wife, Pompilia, whom he suspected of having an affair with a young man. ³  The film shows that the impecunious but courteous and irresistibly handsome Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam), though not murderous, is almost as rapacious and ruthless as his ancestor.  In the violent Prologue to the film the duke’s young wife and his son are captured by Renaissance henchmen, armed with helmets and pikes, who cast long shadows on the wall as they drag the victims to their deaths.

The young Amerigo has another connection to the theme of cruel revenge: he owns the Palazzo Ugolini near Rome where the murders took place.  The name of the palazzo recalls Canto XXXII of Dante’s Inferno, where Ugolino is trapped in the ice with his enemy Archbishop Ruggieri, who betrayed him and left him in a dungeon to starve to death.  Ugolino punishes him and reenacts his hunger by gnawing at Ruggieri’s skull, while both are condemned to Hell for eternity.

The film’s actors are superb.  Uma Thurman (whose first name means “light” in Sanskrit and is the daughter of Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University) plays the passionate and stunning seductress, Charlotte Stant.  Kate Beckinsale (Maggie Verver) has been since childhood Charlotte’s sweetly innocent best friend.  Nick Nolte, with a long leonine face, is Adam Verver, whose name suggests verve, fever and fervor.  He’s America’s first billionaire and collects people as well as art.  In a brief silent pantomime, with dancers in Turkish costumes based on the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the pasha—like the Prince and Verver—captivates and dominates the women.  Anjelica Huston is Maggie’s friend and advisor Fanny Assingham, whose first and last names suggest a fundamentally sound bottom.  (Marian Condrip’s name in The Wings of the Dove is even more outrageous.)  Peter Eyre, Jarvis the jeweller — who sells and delivers the golden bowl — is suitably superior and deferential.

In his Notebooks of November 28, 1892, Henry James sketched his first design for the novel: “The daughter—American of course—is engaged to a young Englishman [changed to an Italian], and the father, a widower and still youngish, has sought in marriage at exactly the same time an American girl of very much the same age as his daughter.  Say he has done it to console himself in his abandonment—to make up for the loss of the daughter, to whom he has been devoted.” ⁴  In the film women make the sacrifices; men, connoisseurs of both female beauty and art, reap the rewards. When Charlotte marries Verver and continues her affair with the Prince, the lovers assume the perverse and slightly incestuous roles of stepmother and stepson.  Verver and Maggie, both with unfaithful spouses, have a sexual thrill in their well regulated lives, and all four continue to bond with each other in their deceptive marriages.

Charlotte is “penniless” compared to her wealthy friends, but she wears fashionable clothes and can afford to live in high society. The Prince declares “you are made for a grand life”, which she achieves as she pretends to love her fabulously rich husband and becomes his prisoner—a caged bird tied by a silken thread and unable to escape.  Maggie, who has a powerful bond with her father, is good and kind and must not be hurt.  So the Prince, Charlotte and Verver all conceal the truth to protect her innocence.  But when Jarvis delivers the golden bowl that she’s bought for her father’s birthday, the jeweller recognises the photo of the Prince and Charlotte in Renaissance dress taken at a weekend costume party.  He tells Maggie that they once considered buying the golden bowl as a wedding present for her, and she realises — though they’ve pretended to be unacquainted — that they’ve actually been lovers.

Maggie pours her heart out to Fanny: “They were too intimate to let me know about it, even to let me know they had ever met.”  She’s now sure “of what I’ve been suspecting, doubting, fearing these many months. . . . They know I know.”  But Maggie still loves the Prince, is willing to accept his lies and doesn’t want to destroy the two easily shattered marriages.  She finally confesses: “One must bear many things for love . . . I love him so that I’d die for him.”

Charlotte aggressively pursues the Prince, who tries to restrain her and maintain their “crooked symmetry”. He tells her “all that’s in the past”, but it’s still alive for her and she’s determined to stoke the old flame.  The Prince tries to be faithful, but he’s bored by the rather childish and clinging Maggie, leads an empty life and needs distraction, is frequently left alone with Charlotte when Maggie and Verver are cloistered together, especially when the Prince and Charlotte go to the costume party. Though the Prince tries to put the past behind them, he’s finally seduced by Charlotte, in a sexual scene in a Gloucester inn, where she releases her pent-up passion and trembles under his touch.

Telltale contradictions appear when Maggie and Verver question the lovers, who didn’t visit the nearby Gloucester Cathedral, about whether Edward II or Richard II is buried there.  Charlotte says that the actually entombed Edward II, the subject of Christopher Marlowe’s play of 1592, “died a horrible death”.  The notorious homosexual was murdered in 1327 with a red-hot poker shoved into his anus to replicate his crime of sodomy.

The ominous and morbid title of the novel and film comes from Ecclesiastes 12:6-7: “[If] the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern.  Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”  In “The Book of Thel” (1789), William Blake also suggests the ambiguous good-and-evil meaning of that precious object: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod, / Or Love in a golden bowl?” ⁵

The Byzantine golden bowl is both a gorgeous artifact and perfect symbol.  The gilt binds the characters, the crystal represents their faults.  The Prince notices the fatal crack, symbol of his flawed love; Maggie does not.

Prawer Jhabvala offered a perceptive analysis of the greatest scene in the film, when Maggie finally learns the truth and hopelessly pleads with the Prince to restore their lost happiness:

“The moment when the golden bowl is delivered [by the jeweler] in the film is also the moment when Maggie discovers the relationship between Charlotte and her husband.  The golden bowl itself has a crack, it’s damaged, and [her friend] Fanny says, “Who would think?  It looks so perfect.”  And Maggie says, “yes, a perfect fake.”  That’s how she sees the situation that has been created for her, her marriage, and her father’s marriage [to Charlotte].  In fact, it’s a perfect fake.  Like the golden bowl.  And shortly afterwards Amerigo asks, well, “What do you want?” and she says, “I want a happiness without a hole in it, I want the bowl without a crack.”  So it’s a perfect symbol for us, and in the film we do see it.” ⁶

When Maggie finally discovers the truth, Fanny deliberately drops the golden bowl, which crashes to the ground, in a futile attempt to destroy the evidence of the betrayals.

Henry James modeled the acquisitive bituminous coal tycoon, Adam Verver, on the great American collectors—Isabella Stewart Gardner and Henry Clay Frick—who captured great quantities of European art and built their grand museums to display it.  One of Prawer Jhabvala’s unusual settings reveals a new aspect of Verver’s menacing character.  She observes that “often the chosen location offers unprecedented new angles.  In The Golden Bowl the father delivers his warning to the errant son-in-law inside a huge noisy steam engine which acts as a sort of giant punctuation mark.” ⁷  The pounding factory machine, so different from the Prince’s tranquil palace, symbolizes Verver’s coal mines and economic power.   Verver warns the Prince that he is capable of inflicting the severest punishment if Maggie ever discovers the truth and is deeply wounded by the Prince’s deception: “I’m afraid, afraid of myself, too.  I don’t know of anything I might be capable of if she were ever hurt.”

The film’s director, James Ivory, recalled that John Singer Sargent, who “painted all those transplanted American millionaires hobnobbing with English aristocrats”,  influenced the costumes and settings of the film. ⁸  The lavish palaces and mansions, the slide show of Italian castles and the costume ball, emphasize the contrast to the jerky contemporary black-and-white clips of streetcars swaying down the dismal streets of American City and the Ververs’ ship heaving through the rough Atlantic.  The name Amerigo connects the Italian with an American wife to the ugly Midwestern town.  The Prince’s ancestors collected art; Verver collects him for Maggie and secures a title for his grandson.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence describes the infernal sounds, sights and smells of the English coal mines that are exactly like the American ones.  Connie Chatterley “took in the utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands. . . . She heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clink of the shunting trucks, the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives.  The pit bank was burning. . . . And when the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combination of the earth’s excrement.” ⁹

Verver’s home, the hideous American City, represents the clash between industry and art, between a zealous donor and his reluctant recipients.  His museum is modeled on the neoclassical Pergamon Museum, with its pillars and wide front steps, in Berlin.  He builds the museum to display his refined taste, satisfy his ego and enhance his prestige rather than to educate the miners who have no interest in high culture.  The miners work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and Verver says he wants to give something back to them.  They would much prefer higher wages, shorter hours and healthier working conditions.  When Verver threatens to tear up the main street to make way for his ambitious project, Charlotte insists, “They want your streetcar, not your museum.”  To which he stubbornly responds: “They may not want it but they shall have it. . . . The workers will learn to like it.”

Charlotte tells the Prince, “I can’t stand America.”  Her punishment for betraying Maggie is her marriage to Verver whom she pretends to love, her forced separation from Amerigo whom she does desperately love, and her repatriation with Verver to his ugly coal-mining hometown and site of his museum that will enslave her.  The very name of American City sounds to Charlotte like “the edge of doom” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.  She describes Hans Holbein’s painting of Henry VIII (1537), which they own, as “a chilling portrait of the masculine ego in all its brutal strength and hardness”—as if it portrayed Verver.  His mines are the dangerous underground in which Charlotte, Verver’s greatest trophy and now separated from the Prince, is metaphorically buried alive.  But when he dies, she’ll be fabulously rich, desirable and still young enough to marry again—this time for love.

All the characters are ruthless in their ambition: the Prince and Charlotte to marry wealth, Verver to collect art and protect his beloved daughter.  Maggie, still in love with the Prince, struggles to maintain the illusion of perfect harmony.  Gore Vidal observed that in both novel and film “the woman must always be made to suffer for sexual transgression while the man suffers not at all or, in the case of the Prince, very little.” ¹⁰

Despite the film’s leisurely pace and swirling emotions that are suggested rather than spoken, the reviews were favourable.  Stephen Holden in the New York Times (April 27, 2001) wrote that Ivory and Jhabvala have made a “handsome, faithful, intelligent movie that’s an ambitious, profoundly ambiguous statement about their own passion for the cultivated, high-culture sensibility epitomized by Henry James.”  Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (November 2, 2000) recognized the tremendous achievement of recreating the complex novel: “Ivory and Jhabvala have made a  very honourable and intelligent stab at filming one of the greatest, as well as one of the most difficult books of the 20th century.  The result is a sophisticated drama for grown-ups, handsomely designed, sumptuously furnished, and featuring a stunning performance from Uma Thurman, for whom The Golden Bowl might well turn out to be her finest hour.”  The film eventually earned $5,750,000; and Steuben Glass made an $8,500 replica of the Golden Bowl to commemorate the film.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in August or September 2024, both with Louisiana State University Press.

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Notes

1. Merchant-Ivory Interviews, ed. Laurence Raw (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 160.
2. Ibid., p. 140.
3. See Henry James, “The Novel in The Ring and the Book” (1912), Literary Criticism (NY: Library of America, 1984), pp. 791-811.
4. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall Powers (NY: Oxford UP, 1987), p. 74.
5. William Blake, “The Book of Thel,” Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 3.
6. Merchant-Ivory Interviews, p. 141.
7. Ibid., p. 163.
8. James Ivory in Conversation, ed. Robert Emmet Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 247.
9. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (NY: Signet, 1962), p. 13.
10. Gore Vidal, “The Golden Bowl of Henry James,” United States: Essays,1952-1992 (NY: Random House, 1993), p. 181.