There are those who believe Henry James's big novels are an extra proof of the existence of God. And then there are those with a vague idea that the great 19th-century writer is a highbrow type, with an impossibly convoluted prose style, who writes vast and sluggish tomes about very little happening in the lives of a few exceptionally cerebral people. But that's not how it is.
He was, after all, an American, and he wrote for money. He was a plot-maker of the highest skill, and a virtuoso of the developing character - an entertainer before the entertainment industry began.
So it is not as surprising as it may seem that two adaptations of novels of his should hit Ireland at the same time: the play The Heiress, now running at the Gate, based on his novella Washington Square; and the new film of his novel The Wings Of The Dove which opens next month. (A new film version of Washington Square is also on the way, having already opened in the US.) James's work has long been a resource for others.
The Wings Of The Dove has been filmed before, with Dominique Sanda and Isabelle Huppert. William Wyler's version of Washington Square won seven Oscars in 1949 and had the gorgeous young Montgomery Clift as the fortune-hunter very understandably desired by the heiress, Olivia de Havilland. (Aaron Copland, by the way, wrote the music for the film.) Susan Hayward and Lee Remick and Cybill Shepherd and - recently - Nicole Kidman have all played James heroines, than whom there are no more interesting women in literature.
And everyone has been in James's great ghost story, The Turn Of The Screw. Benjamin Britten made it into an opera. Jack Clayton turned it into the film The Innocents with Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave. Michael Winner directed a version of it with Marlon Brando. And only a few years ago, one Rusty Lemorande directed another version, starring - or featuring, anyway - Marianne Faithfull and Mrs Liam Gallagher - Patsy Kensit.
Henry James always wanted success in the theatre himself, and perhaps he would have looked kindly on The Gate's The Heiress. The audience, certainly, seems to find a lot of pleasure in this tale of the unloved daughter of a wealthy New York doctor, and her throwing off of a previously perfect submissiveness, because she believes the beautiful young man who is wooing her loves her for herself, and not her expectations. We all grew up on stories about love and money. They grip still.
But the original - the novella Washington Square - though it has the same plot, is not merely plot. It is about the corruption lying in wait for patriarchs such as the father when they deal with trapped dependents, such as the daughter. It is about the pity of the growth of self-belief, when warmed by even a false flame of love.
In the book, the great moments are quiet and internal - as, for example, when Catherine tells her father her first lie. She is transferring allegiance to her suitor, only to discover that her suitor shares her father's values and that the men have understood each other throughout, and are alike in their valuation of her. Her lover abandons her when she seems likely to be disinherited: after very many years, her father disinherits her anyway; and long after that, when Catherine is middle-aged, the lover returns, because she is wealthy in her own right and has refused all offers of marriage. Catherine sees the story of his life defined in his eyes: "He had made himself comfortable, and he had never been caught".
What she does next, Gate-goers will discover for themselves. At the end of the original book, "picking up her morsel of fancywork", Catherine "had seated herself with it again - for life, as it were".
Compelling as the twists and turns of Washington Square are, and fascinating as is the character of Catherine - not least in Donna Dent's fine performance at the Gate - these were just warm-up exercises for Henry James. The real thing arrives in all its magnificent complexity in his three last novels, one of which, The Wings Of The Dove, will open in its latest film adaptation in Dublin on January 2nd. It is an even more challenging proposition for the filmmaker than Portrait Of A Lady, which in Jane Campion's bravura version had a not very successful run here earlier this year.
Wings has plot to spare. But only a part of it is visible. The scene is the formal world of the upper classes in high Victorian England. Kate is a superb but penniless young woman whose guardian, wealthy Aunt Maude, does not want her to marry the man she loves, Merton Densher. Merton, on a trip to America, meets and attracts the beautiful and frail young millionaire, Milly, who is the "dove" of the title. Milly visits London with her companion, who is an old friend of Aunt Maude's, and the two wonderful young women become friendly. The first really important thing to happen is that during that friendship, neither tells the other about Merton.
Milly's health gets worse. In her passion to experience as much life as she can, she moves to Venice, and Merton, who joins her, seems to be beginning to love her, too. Milly doesn't know that Kate has come to his lodgings there, and both egged him on and pledged herself to him by giving him her body.
In the book, this is a profoundly eloquent event. In the film, where the era has been moved forward to 1910, and Kate smokes and drinks and visits Merton's London lodgings anyway and they embrace ad lib, it means nothing much. Here and elsewhere the film spells out in gross, physical terms what in the book is perceived and felt in exquisite gradations. Thus, by the end, one of the trio of young people has died, one has riches to dispose of, and one is loved. The ending of the book reverberates with meanings. The film plumps - through a for-idiots flashback - for one meaning.
We're going through the golden age of revivals of the classics. Costumes and sets couldn't be more sumptuous. Locations, like Venice in Wings Of The Dove, look like cognac ads. But if the outer world of the past has never been better invoked, the inner has gone missing, perhaps for ever. The idea that there is an intensely exciting life on the level of intelligence, and that there are such things as moral adventures and moral denouements, does not know how to express itself in contemporary culture. Still, it says a lot for Henry James that even when sacrificed to one thing - in this case Helena Bonham Carter's undeniable sultriness - some of the shape of his stories survives. He seems destined to attract adapters who then can't deal with him. But they do keep on trying: a film version of Washington Square, the basis of The Heiress, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney, is on the way.
The Heiress runs at the Gate until the end of January. The Wings Of A Dove opens in Ireland on January 2nd.