“When you presently meet her, all the same you’ll be meeting your mother’s representative – just as I shall. I feel like the outgoing ambassador,” said Strether, “doing honour to his appointed successor.”
Henry James writes notoriously impenetrable fiction, and with 1903's The Ambassadors, he upped the obtuse factor by conceiving a bit of a farce of manners: acting like ambassadors from distinct countries, characters rarely say what they mean to one another, sometimes contradicting themselves in subordinate clause after contrary subordinate clause, and after hundreds of pages of circumlocutious shenanigans, just as this reader's patience and eyestrain were reaching their limits, James makes a rather good point with it all, and it was worthwhile in the end. Ultimately, I more admired than liked this, but am happy I stuck it out.
Henry James wrote an Introduction to my edition, and states that his inspiration for The Ambassadors came from a conversation he had with a young friend, who reported that when he had recently been in Paris, an older gentleman made a speech during a garden party, which James recreates as this:
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old – too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me today, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!James had been so struck by this speech – and by the friend's description of the speaker and the setting within a Parisian garden – that The Ambassadors became his imagined narrative for what led this man to make this speech, and what happened after. And so, James' imagined reconstruction of events:
The book begins with Lewis Lambert Strether – a fifty-five-year-old widower, from the small town of Woollett, Massachusetts – arriving in Europe, where he had been sent by his presumptive fiancée (the rich widow, Mrs. Newsome) in order to retrieve her playboy son who was destined to take over the family business, and who had stopped answering his mother's letters. Strether eventually made his way to Paris in the company of friends new and old, and before he ever found the son, Strether was forcefully struck by the beauty of the city and the first real feelings of freedom he had ever known in his life. When he does encounter the son, Chad, Strether is struck anew by how mature and composed the twenty-eight-year-old had become in his three years abroad, and if it turned out that a woman was behind this transformation – as Mrs. Newsome suspected and decried – Strether failed to see the harm in any relationship that produced such results. Hundreds of pages follow, in which Strether neither directly states nor receives clear information about anyone's actions or intentions, but his extraordinary experiences prompt him to deliver the inspirational speech. When it becomes apparent back in Woollett that Strether was failing in his diplomatic duties, Mrs. Newsome sends her daughter – the formidable Mrs. Sarah Pocock – to take over as ambassador, which comes as a threat to the stability of (the decidedly not wealthy) Strether's future. “Our hero” will then go through several transformations of his own before deciding on his ultimate course of action.
I appreciate that the word games and obfuscation between the characters was rather the point, but I was still often impatient with the dialogue in The Ambassadors. (I also suspected that there was a lot of hanky-panky going on between all of these couples until the proof of one physical relationship sent everyone into a tailspin; am I really to believe that all of this flirty double-talk and intimate dining and men visiting women alone in their rooms after nine p.m. was all talk? The corruptibility of Paris was also one of James' points, according to the Introduction, but how corrupt is talk?) What made this worse was just how wishy-washy Strether himself was – even with an omniscient narrator giving us the benefit of his thoughts, I rarely knew what was going on with this character; which is also apparently the point (to my consternation):
• He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.Henry James wrote many such intriguing sentences in this book and made many perceptive comments on human behaviour; wrapping everything in a layer of obscurity to satisfy his own literary sensibilities. Reading The Ambassadors is work. But it all leads to Strether's transformations, which was ultimately satisfying for me; the payoff was worth the effort.
• Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
• “There were moments,” she explained, “when you struck me as grandly cynical; there were others when you struck me as grandly vague.”
• He was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course – him too a modest retreat awaited.
I'll reiterate that while I did find The Ambassadors to be a slog to get through, it paid off in the end. However, I don't know if I need to read any more Henry James; not quite my cuppa tea and I feel like Simmons has given me permission to accuse James of being too hard to read by design. And after reading The Ambassadors, and particularly its Introduction in James' hand, this fact seems undeniable. From the Intro:
Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for mere consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last “scene” of the book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other than itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure. Since, however, all art is expression, and is thereby vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount of delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of method—amid which, or certainly under the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of which, one must keep one’s head and not lose one’s way. To cultivate an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense. To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has everything to do with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully economic expression’s possible sake, as if it were important and essential—to do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a signally attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related question of expressional curiosity and expressional decency.Ah, that makes everything clear.
