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In the opening page of The Ambassadors there is a phrase which seems, on the face of it, to have an aura of unusual simplicity. Lambert Strether, who has arrived at Chester having disembarked at Liverpool, and is concerned about what the “note” of Europe will be for him, allows that note already to include “such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn’t known for years.” The novel will now attempt to explore what this freedom might mean for Strether and for those around him, dramatizing its limits and extent, while rendering it also complex and ironic. The Ambassadors will operate using sensuously noted detail, the fine flickering of a refined consciousness, but will also use tones which are comic and subversive. It will play freedom as represented by Paris against restriction as represented by a place called Woollett in Massachusetts. James will ensure, however, that this play, which seems on the surface a simple one of easy opposites, becomes nuanced and filled with the density of urgent human needs and strange treacheries, loyalties, and uncertainties.
Strether, in the words of R. P. Blackmur, is “a man of the world without a world.” The novel will seek to give him a glimpse of an old world he might possess; the book will tempt him with it, but the narrative will remain, despite Strether’s “consciousness of freedom,” oddly unsure about the absolute value of this world Strether sees and samples; it will remain uneasy, open-minded, and curious about the idea that someone who is as intelligent and inward-looking as Strether can resist his fate. Its central exploration will be around the poetics and politics of duty; it will set the innocence of Strether’s quest for late self-realization against the loaded futility of such a quest. It will propose, indeed, that such a quest may amount to nothing more than the destruction or the darkening of the very imagination which felt a need for it in the first place. Such a need will be seen, or regularly glimpsed, as pure illusion; James’s genius is to make such illusion glorious, absorbing, filled with substance, closer to reality at times than the set of hard facts or dull demands which hover over the book; the quality of Strether’s illusion offers the novel a fiercely rich dynamic.
In Book Two, Chapter 1, James allows Strether to set out his story, his role and function as an ambassador representing the interests of Woollett. Strether has a dialogue with Maria Gostrey, whose role in the book is almost the same as Ralph Touchett’s in The Portrait of a Lady or Fanny Assingham’s in The Golden Bowl. She is a sort of novelist-within-the-novel, who will appear and disappear, and take the same interest in the unfolding story and the fate of the protagonist as an ideal reader. In his conversation with Gostrey, Strether manages not to be openly disloyal to his place of origin or those who have sent him on his mission, most notably Mrs. Newsome, the mother of Chad, the heir to the family business who has remained in Paris against his mother’s wishes, and who is in the clutches of a woman who seems less than virtuous. Despite his lack of disloyalty, Strether manages at times a tone about Mrs. Newsome and those who surround her so solemn that it leaves itself open to mockery, not least by Maria Gostrey, but also, by implication, by Strether himself.
By calling the town in Massachusetts where Mrs. Newsome lives by the almost comic name of Woollett, by naming Mrs. Newsome’s son-in-law Jim Pocock and his sister, who aims to marry Chad, Mamie Pocock, by refusing to name the article that the Newsomes, in their factory, produce, thus allowing us to feel that it is something comic and vulgar, Henry James gives Strether permission to move quite a distance from the very Woollett he represents.
Nonetheless, Strether has to remain ostensibly serious as he explains things to Gostrey. She feels entitled to ask, “Who in the world’s Jim Pocock?” knowing that the very question implies that Jim, viewed from Paris rather than Woollett, is nobody, or less than nobody. On the other hand, when Strether says that Chad Newsome, whom he has come to rescue, “has darkened his mother’s admirable life … He has worried her half to death,” he speaks “with austerity.” And when Maria Gostrey asks if Mrs. Newsome’s life is “very admirable,” Strether answers simply: “Extraordinarily.” The reader is entitled to feel here that Strether actually means this, that his newfound freedom has suddenly failed him, and that the austerity of his tone, the quality of his respect for Mrs. Newsome, will, from this point on, be subject to very great pressure.
If a “consciousness of personal freedom” is something Strether has not known for years, then the reader can feel that the impediment to this freedom has been the very admirable Mrs. Newsome herself, who, it emerges in this conversation, has not only sent Strether on a mission to rescue Chad, her errant son, but is bankrolling him as he edits an intellectual journal, “her tribute to the ideal,” in Woollett. Also, if he succeeds in his mission in Paris, the admirable matron will do him the favor of marrying him.
The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction.
But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.
It seemed to some who knew him that he took great satisfaction from his life in England, and in his book The American Scene, published in 1907 four years after The Ambassadors, he wrote with some intensity about the things he disliked in America. But at the same time as he wrote The American Scene, he confided in the American novelist Hamlin Garland: “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side. The mixture of Europe and America in me has proved disastrous. It has made of me a man who is neither American nor European. I have lost touch with my own people and I live here alone. My neighbours are friendly but they are not of my blood, except remotely.”
And yet he studied England and France with care, and enjoyed them enormously. In 1872 when he was not yet thirty he wrote an essay on Chester, where three decades later he would open The Ambassadors. “It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness.” It would have seemed almost natural to James to take his protagonist from there to a place even more gloriously crooked—Paris. James’s earliest memory, he claimed, was of the Place Vendôme when he was two years old. When he was thirteen, the family lived in the city for more than a year. During his travels in 1872 he also spent time in Paris.
He returned to the city to live at 29 rue de Luxembourg in November 1875. As Peter Brooks has written in Henry James Goes to Paris: “He spoke and wrote French perfectly. And he had been reading French authors from an early age.… It was probably Balzac’s Paris that lured James abroad more than anything else. He was like one of Balzac’s ambitious young men arriving in Paris from the provinces, to make their way by the power of the pen.” From his new address, James wrote to his father: “I think you would pronounce me well off: a snug little troisième with the eastern sun, two bedrooms, a parlor, an antechamber and a kitchen. Furniture clean and pretty, house irreproachable, and a gem of a portier, who waits upon me.” In this sojourn, which lasted a year, James met Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant, and Zola; he also met the Russian painter Paul Zhukovsky. While one of James’s biographers claims that he and Zhukovsky were lovers, Peter Brooks is correct when he says that the evidence for this “is truly non-existent.”
What is important, especially for readers of The Ambassadors, however, is how James described Zhukovsky to his family in Boston. To his brother William he described meeting him in the house of Madame Nikolai Turgenev, a house he described as “of a literally more than Bostonian virtue. They are an oasis of purity and goodness in the midst of this Parisian Babylon.” In this letter, he wrote that Zhukovsky’s father had been tutor to the Czar and then added “so you see that I don’t love beneath my station.” To his sister Alice he wrote about Zhukovsky “for whom I entertain a most tender affection … he is much to my taste and we have sworn an eternal friendship.” Later, when he spent a few days in Naples with Zhukovsky, who was involved by then with Wagner and his entourage—Zhukovsky painted the sets for the original production of Parsifal —James wrote about the manners and customs of the company to Grace Norton in Boston: “They are about as opposed to those of Cambridge as anything could well be—but to describe them would carry me too far.”
“That James was ‘in love’ with Zhukovsky in Paris in 1876,” Peter Brooks has written, “seems clear enough.” What is clear also is that he wrote to his family in Boston with enough warmth and openness about his friend for us to feel that he had nothing to hide from them. On the other hand, his tone left the James family free to read between the lines, and realize that, whatever he was doing, Henry James was enjoying “this Parisian Babylon” rather more than a citizen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, might be expected to. During the family sojourn in Paris in 1856, when James was thirteen, his mother had taken an intense dislike to the city which her son would grow to love. Her letters to him as he began to travel as a young man make clear that he was her favorite of her five children and emphasize that she had no intention of letting him go. She longed, she wrote, “to throw around you the mantle of the family affection, and fold you in my own tender embrace—It seems to me darling Harry that your life must need this succulent, fattening element more than you know yourself.” Like Mrs. Newsome, she knew what was best for her son: “I know only one thing that would solve the difficulty, and harmonise the discordant elements in your life—You would make dear Harry according to my estimate, the most loving and loveable and happiest of husbands. I wish I could see you in a favourable attitude of heart towards the divine institution of marriage.”
As James grew older and lost touch with America, and renounced the divine institution of marriage, Boston came to him in the guise of his older brother William, who having read The Golden Bowl, the third of the novels he produced in the early years of the twentieth century, wrote to complain of “the method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference” and sought to call his brother home, as it were, to write in a plainer style: “But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?”
William, it seemed, wanted his brother to write the sort of novel which would be well received in Woollett, to produce a novel which Jim Pocock might enjoy were he to read it, or that Waymarsh, Strether’s flat-footed, charming American friend, might recommend. Henry responded to William witheringly: “You appear even to assume that the life, the elements, forming its subject matter deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge.”
Thus The Ambassadors dealt with matters—such as the gap between New England and its wandering son—which were close to Henry James, which preoccupied him deeply. His Notebooks make clear that one of the seeds of the book was the remark made by William Dean Howells, who had lived in Boston for most of his life, on arrival in Paris, that one should “live all one can,” suggesting that he himself had not done so and was regretting it now. But the soil in which the seed grew is not mentioned in the Notebooks, since it did not need to be set down there; rather it was something which James lived with every day of his life.
As a young man in Paris in 1875 he was, for his family, a version of Chad. He was their son who would not come home, who seemed to be living a life quite distant in its moral tone from that lived by the citizens of Cambridge. Some of his letters must have been alarming, to say the least, to his loving mother, if not to the rest of the family who moved in a tight circle of old Bostonians of the most serious and respectable sort. Zhukovsky’s circle, as Leon Edel has written, “opened windows for Henry … so that moving among them, and among his compatriots, and gaining his glimpses of the French, the trans-Atlantic visitor found himself abandoning certain Cambridge rigidities, taking life a little less hard, giving himself over to the simple pleasures of genial living.”
As he wrote the book, James was living its actual afterlife. He had not returned to his own version of Woollett, to his own version of Mrs. Newsome. He had stayed away. He was alone in Lamb House in Rye with his servants and with occasional visitors. In three years he produced The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, as well as a collection of stories and a monograph in two volumes about the painter William Wetmore Story. The advice which Strether gives little Bilham in a garden in Paris: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” must have had a particular resonance for James, must have had an edge of deep personal regret, but also an edge of satisfaction that he had come far enough to be able to dramatize himself and his plight with such ruthless objectivity.
The richness and the dynamic power of The Ambassadors arise from James’s control of structure, tone, and form; he worked this against something he could not control, something deeply unsettled in his own conscience about his exile and his middle age, and about the idea of the sensuous life versus the life lived by the old rules.
Despite the use of material which was close to him and which deeply preoccupied him, Chad and Strether in The Ambassadors were not simply autobiography. James gave both Chad and Strether limits which he did not, for good reasons, recognize in himself. He made them into submerged versions of an imagined or remembered self. Many years after his own sojourn in Paris, he told both Hugh Walpole and Edmund Gosse of an event which occurred there decades before. Gosse wrote: “He spoke of standing on the pavement of a city, in the dusk and of gazing upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of a lamp on the third storey. And the lamp burned out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain, brushed by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.” This image of a figure on the street looking upwards to a balcony on the third floor was transformed in The Ambassadors from dusk to daylight. Although the scene was highly charged in the novel, it lacked the stark romantic drama of the scene from life which James recounted. Nonetheless, it was an essential moment in the novel, it carried with it a strange force which was almost erotic, but the scene was also filled with the sense of how open and curious Strether had become now that he was away from Woollett. He would look up for a long time at the male figure standing on the balcony. Then he would cross the street, deal with the concierge, and ascend the stairs. What he would find there—Chad’s apartment and Chad’s close friend Little Bilham—would fascinate him and begin him on his journey towards becoming an ambassador for something larger and more open than Woollett and its crude demands and narrow vision.
James’s method in these late novels was to find a story which was ostensibly simple and then create a fictional density and complexity within its confines, so that the novel’s power arose from suggestions, implications, and ambiguities. Despite his brother’s view that there was no decisiveness in the action of these novels, they were structured with great dramatic skill. They moved at times with speed, and managed constantly to usurp or play with the reader’s expectations. James used scenes, encounters between characters, or moments of heightened realization, with the force of a master dramatist.
In creating the book from the outline, it might have been easy to make Strether dreamy and ineffective at all times, a sort of middle-aged Hamlet from Woollett. And to make Chad headstrong or easily corrupted, and make Madame de Vionnet into a fortune hunter, or a Frenchwoman of easy morals. And to make the people of Woollett almost comically demanding and narrow-minded.
James came close to giving in to the last of these for good reasons. He could not give Jim and Sarah Pocock the same degree of subtlety and exquisite ambivalence as he did his other characters. In the creation of Chad, as observed by Strether, and indeed by Maria Gostrey, he moved with sly care and smooth understatement. Thus in the first encounter, when Chad arrived in the box at the theater and allowed himself to be studied in silence in the semidarkness by Strether, Gostrey, and the reader, he was a figure at ease in this world, a young American who had undergone some great change, which was seen here as almost spiritual as much as it was stylish. Strether, in recognizing the change and in appreciating the connection between spirit and style, moved away from the certainties of Woollett to some other realm but he did not always stay there. He would, throughout the book, be open himself to shifts and changes.
Thus he and Chad, in the way they lacked solidity, in their openness, stretched the very idea of the character in fiction. “You could deal,” Strether thought when he first saw Chad in Paris, “with a man as himself—you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else.” But dealing with both was the task which James set himself. This very idea of fluidity, unknowability, would inspire Strether as well as James, but it would also make him uneasy. James was careful to make Strether an odd mixture, at times asking crude questions whose tone came directly from Woollett, at other times becoming susceptible to the strange duplicities which went on around him.
That first evening, having met Chad and noted the change in him, Strether did not dither, as he might have done in the hands of a lesser novelist. He moved back into character. “I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything,” he said as soon they were alone, “neither more nor less, and take you straight home, so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it.” The tone here was businesslike, direct, as it would be at other times when Strether felt that he should make himself clear. But James had other plans for tone, as a painter might make the most realistic center for a canvas, each thing drawn with mathematical precision, and then produce the most gorgeous sky or exquisite landscape all around.
In Book Five, Chapter 1, James returned to a world which mattered in his memory. It was the Paris of his youth and it was filled with associations. Once he arrived in London in 1876 he would have a rich social life, but it would not be among artists or bohemians. In his London there would not be a Paul Zhukovsky or anyone like him. Thus, when he came to describe the garden of the artist Gloriani, he was dealing with a part of his own past which he treasured because he had lost it. Gloriani had also appeared in his novel Roderick Hudson, set in Rome, published almost thirty years earlier. Gloriani’s garden in Paris was clearly the garden of the painter Whistler which James had visited in 1875. Now he could place both Chad and Strether there, and Maria Gostrey and Madame de Vionnet. Strether could have a sense in that garden “of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.” It would not have escaped James that one of the ghosts at the windows was his younger self.
When Strether met Madame de Vionnet here for the first time, it would have been easy for James to have made her exotic, extraordinary; it was part of his plan, however, that no character in his fiction would move according to a design but rather according to a dynamic. Strether would feel Madame de Vionnet’s “common humanity,” her ordinariness, more than he would feel anything else. This meant that he would now have to deal with her, take her seriously, and it would also mean that he was more open than ever to misunderstanding her, and indeed, everything around her.
“He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest,” James wrote. What Strether was seeking was experience, the tender taste of life. In not seeking wisdom, he found knowledge instead, and he had no idea what to do with knowledge. He was ready to notice things, and wanted to notice more. As he moved slowly away from the rigidities of his background, he discovered, as did Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, that his only weapon was innocence, an innocence which became more exquisite as the novel proceeded, an innocence which was no use to him in this old world into which he had ventured.
James dramatized this idea of innocence and its opposite, put the conflict between them into one of the greatest scenes he ever created.
From early in his career, he knew the power of the recognition scene, the moment when a third person sees two people together and knows by something in their posture, in their gaze, in the aura they give off, that they are involved in some form of duplicity. Knowledge emerges gradually, silently, darkly, with subtlety, and then it is complete, more complete than if everything were explained in speech or set out clearly by the author in a paragraph. Earlier in The Ambassadors he had turned this trick on its head when he allowed Strether and Gostrey to observe Chad in silence, and learn everything about him. Towards the end of The Ambassadors James used it again to devastating effect when Strether, still in search of sensation, traveled out of Paris by train at random to sample the French countryside.
In eight pages, James managed to conjure up the scene in all its affecting detail, and Strether’s response to it he rendered exquisite and fine. But such things in James were always a preparation for the drama of human relations, and what Strether saw in that out-of-the-way place—the two people who appeared before him on the water and the unmistakable relation between them—had the same power as the scene towards the end of The Portrait of a Lady when Isabel entered the room and found Madame Merle standing close to the fire and Osmond, Isabel’s husband, seated. “Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected.” So, too, in this scene in The Ambassadors, Strether’s ability to notice became a way for his innocence to be darkened. His labor, James wrote, had been lost. But as usual the implications of loss in these late novels of James was not simple. It should not surprise us when the passage ended not with defeat for Strether, but a new opening for his imagination: “He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.”
COLM TÓIBÍN was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín is the Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies at Princeton University and lives in Dublin and New York.
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