I can’t. Ok? I just can’t do this. I can’t spend hours reading through paragraphs that span pages filled with trivial contemplations. These paragraphs are comprised of sentences that second guess themselves before they end. Some may cheer this book as a literary accomplishment, but as a consumer of great stories, I can honestly say that this story is so overburdened by words that the story is hardly there.

If there could be a book I would like to have the opportunity to read again as if for the first time, this would be that book. It is charming, seductive, funny and just generally delightful. Like Lambert Strether facing Europe, I found myself utterly taken in by this most enjoyable book.

James is completely at ease and at home with this material and it lifts up and floats around the reader as easily as a silken scarf that has been spread out and lifted up on a buoying breeze. James holds the silk in hand, so it never gets away, and yet it lifts up, filled with light, air and life. And the work is as finely realized, as delicately nuanced as any fine fabric.

It is a book to be savored like the golden light of an afternoon in early autumn. Just the best!

Henry James might be the classic author I'm the most conflicted about. I loved The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. I liked Washington Square and The Awkward Age quite enough. On the other hand I really couldn't get into Daisy Miller, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove and now The Ambassadors.

Reading Henry James is an emotional rollercoaster: first you think he's a great author then you wonder why he kept writing so much, a story is keeping you on edge and the next one is making you drift off, a character is deeply touching you and you can't be bothered to remember the names of the ones of the next novel you read.

A funny thing is that many readers feel conflicted that way about Henry James, but not about the same books. I definitely recommend to read some of this author's books if you haven't yet, but I absolutely cannot predict which one will be the right one for you.

Originally published on my blog here in July 2000.

One of James' late novels, The Ambassadors is in some ways an experiment in minimalism. The plot is rudimentary (a rich woman sends emissaries from Wollett, USA to Paris to disentangle her son from an unsuitable relationship), background virtually non-existent (most chapters are principally dialogue), and the characters ciphers. It is only the interactions between the characters which are interesting - and even these tell us virtually nothing about them; hence the importance assigned to their meetings and conversations. It is an exercise in how little is needed to sustain a reader through nearly five hundred pages.

The temptation is to sit back and admire the technical skill with which this is done, on the small scale (the large scale structure is both rigid and simple - almost exactly half way through, the son is willing to return home, yet the ambassador has come to think it will be better for him to remain). I didn't find the novel very involving (though this might be because I was coming down with a fever while reading its second half).

Foolish ever to choose a single work of art as "the greatest," but if I had to choose a single novel this would be it. The reader needs patience to work through James' pages-long sentences, but by the end of the book, the complexities and detail of James' descriptions of the inner workings of his characters' minds creates an environment in which the fluttering of an eyelash feels like an earthquake.

Deceptively complex. This book will coax your preconceived notions from you before you realize it, before dining on them, and in always the most unexpected way.

I found myself wanting to apply certain biographic data of Henry James to the analysis of the story; but the Story resisted them. Perhaps a sign of a book's, as well as an author's, greatness is the ability to do this, to exist in spite of interpretation.

Yeah, so reading this novel is basically like driving through Indiana. That's the analogy I'm going to use. It's like driving through Indiana. You know, it's long, it's generally boring. You start drifting off. Instead of focusing on the road, you're mind begins to wander. You tell yourself to stay focused, but that doesn't work, because now you're just thinking about staying focused, you're still not paying attention to the road. But then once you get through it, once you're out of Indiana, you're happy, you're glad you made the trip, because now you're in Illinois, you're now approaching Chicago, and Chicago is really a pretty fricking amazing place. So yeah, that's what reading this novel is like.

I love Henry James, but he is an acquired taste. I have read the Ambassadors three times, and parts of it many times. While working in DC - 2005 - I got two copies: One for home and one for my office - a few years ago I added a third copy to my office at home.. I followed James advice and read it five pages a day being careful "not to break the thread." I did break the thread twice - so I read it in three extended chunks. (I read five pages a day at the State Department -- if anyone saw me I was reading a book about Ambassadors, so it seemed proper!) When even I start the book I just cannot stop. I found every re-reading very rewarding. I can see clearly now how James as really pared the novel to the absolute minimum - one hears just enough of the conversations between Strether and Chad to realize that they must see each other more often than the author lets on. How amazing that the most vivid characters are the ones seen least: Mrs. Newsome in particular, but even Chad and Waymarsh. James captures the appear of reading a book as rich as the Ambassadors when he has Strether describe Madame de Vionnet's home, or rather, its effect on Strether: "He liked the place she lived in, the picture that each time squared itself, large and high and clear, around here: every occassion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade." (Book 12, Chapter I.) Indeed, the pleasure in reading the Ambassadors squares itself each time.

Did Gaddis read this book? You’d might think so considering the multiple times that ‘recognition’ (s), (-ing), (ed), (etc.), come up throughout “The Ambassadors” even though it’s a word quite functional in any kind of novel exploring evolving personal relations. Having just also reread “The Recognitions” made me cognizant from the first sighting which repeated very quickly and thereby set my enumerative calculating apace as noted in:
Pgs: 18, 25, 62, 63, 69, 89, 95, 112 (2x), 117, 124, 136, 139, 154, 159, 161, 164, 175, 182, 204, 210, 213, 215, 221, 227, 229, 250, 275, 281, 283, 290, 303, 307, 310 (2x), 314, 315, 316, 322, 330, 335, 336.

So then that recognition became my watchword for all that takes place in “TA” as it does seem to me to be the central theme underlying the events and characters’ growing concerns as the novel’s trajectory plays out. Lambert Strether whom the story revolves around being the main recognizer of both his own sensibility and in relation to the recognizing of all the surrounding characters’ unfolding concerns according to plot.

Also on display throughout is the word ‘droll’ which was used to describe several characters’ take or attribute as befits their each adjusting to shifting circumstances wherein they are playing upon one another. This struck me as a bit odd considering the thorny web of jousting going on as each character’s revealing tendencies were slowly unraveled to fit the action. I didn’t sense that this was intended to be a ‘droll’ kind of novel.

Reading Henry James could hardly be characterized as light, and/or humorous reading by most including me. Nevertheless, on this my second go-round with this book I did espy some previously hidden moments of mirth where the awkward situations afforded a slightly different, less serious approach to the serious engagement of the page. Strether evinces a myriad of subdued emotional platitudes as he becomes aware of his untenable predicament and his final conclusion though not stated is life’s a mysterious punchline so: “Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?”

I read this in college, in a seminar on Dickens and James with Prof G Armour Craig (later interim Pres of Amherst College). I know I wrote one of my best papers on this novel, culminating in revelations at the ending: of course, Jamesian narrators are very surprised by sophisticated European affairs that more naive Americans are drawn into. Their "education" may include moral torment, as here, little Bilham, "But being in love isn't, here, thought necessary, in strictness, for marriage" (169, Norton Critical). Once home, I shall find my copy and look for my notes, to fill out a review.
I still haven't found my copy of the novel, though I did locate my essay on it for Armour Craig's Eng 68, AmColl '65, which I dust off and--beware--publish. Start with some quotations, "Was it after all a joke that he should be serious about anything?" (124, dif ed). There was "simply a lie in the charming affair"(311). "'Ah prepare while you're about it,' said Strether,"to be more amusing.'Well, you are amusing--to me.' 'Impayable, as you say, no doubt,'But what am I to myself?'"(132)
In my college essay, "James's education for Strether I suppose to work from a seriousness to an appreciation of art in human [French] terms, to a final, higher seriousness, the seriousness of personal core beyond art, known through revealing intimacy." "The critical problem with this novel focuses in the ending. I take the ending to be meant as 'serious,' a high American magnanimity manifested in final self-sacrifice. What Strether has learned is sufficient for his deepest happiness. But I think this is contrived. James ends the novel so completely that Strether is going back to a world which can in no way be seen in the novel; it is an 'other' world. 'Yes, he goes back other, and to other things," James says in his project for the novel.

Strether has been offered the opportunity to live, but he sacrifices it 'to be right.' "Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself" (last page) sums American generosity as HJ saw it. The woman he abandons points out, "but with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a great deal." Yes, for a novelist, for H James, who fills his novel with impressions, vision and double-vision. Strether sacrifices for no alternative; he is gaining nothing but an escape from the world he has rejected. His education is a joke; he has learned that he is 'grey,' but he chooses to become even greyer. It is a joke that James's highest seriousness fails to open Strehter's path to intimacy."

Oh, as for this edition I did not use in 1965, edited by Harry Levin, I once had a great discussion with him over lunch at the Shakespeare Association of America, or possibly the RSA. We happened to sit next each other at a round table for eight. I had quoted, depended on Levin as a T.A. in a Minnesota Joyce courses, as well as for my knowledge of comparative lit, and I had recently heard his fine talk on Shakespeare and certain other classics. But at the table we largely discussed my Amherst Coll Shakespeare prof, Theodore Baird, who had invented a great Freshman Writing course, he and my own freshman teacher, Armour Craig. On leave from Amherst, Craig had taught a Harvard novel course though his Ph.D. there had been in 17C lit. Baird was a renegade from Harvard, doubted its teaching of writing and sometimes its scholarly writing, too. Baird had been a student of Kittredge's, and always joked about his often dreaming of examinations: "Sometimes I do very well."

The AmbassadorsttttHenry James (1909) #27

January 25, 2008

tIf James were to get paid, say, a dime for every comma, and a quarter for every semicolon that he ever wrote, I’m sure that he would have made more money off this fictitious punctuation propriety than he ever got paid for all of his books. Check this out (form the second page of the novel):
t“There were people on the ship with whom he had easily - so far as ease could, up to now, be imputed to him – consorted, and who for the most part plunged straight into the current that set, from the landing-stage, to London; there were others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn, and had even invoked his aid for a “look round” at the beauties of Liverpool; but he had stolen away from everyone alike; had kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance, had been indifferently aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in being, unlike himself, “met”; and had even, independently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quite evasion, given his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible.”
tFuck. See what I mean? The whole book reads like this. Riches to be had beyond his wildest dreams. If I didn’t know Joyce, I would say that this guy was the king of run-ons (see Ulysses).
tMy copy of this book (a handsome hard dust-jacketed - for lack of the proper terminology) is also illustrated. I kind of found this amusing, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Maybe I associate illustrations with books that children may (although in this day in age probably would never) read. God help little children that would read this book. On an unrelated side note (actually becoming a theme in my rants on this list), the main character, affectionately referred to though out this book as “our friend” had the unfortunate name of “Lambert Strether”. Not as bad as “Dick Diver” or “Morton Densher”, but still….
tThis book was, admittedly, many times better than the last book I had an unfortunate run in with (see The Wings of the Dove). There was even a part of this book; I guess the climax, (oh my God, I’m beginning to use the same punctuation structure as James! – wait – do I get paid dimes and quarters for this too?) that I actually found to be a decent read. I guess it started in chapter 30 (a long tedious price to pay) when he started equating his visit to rural France to walking through a painting. That was a pretty interesting analogy, and he pulled it off well. Things kept me attention through chapter 34, when things started to wind down a little. The end of the book managed to successfully capture the mood of melancholy and disillusionment, but I found the ending rather weak.
tIf James wasn’t already deceased (and if I were a real literary critic instead of some smart-assed know-it-all) I would suggest that he drop writing and take up a job as a janitor or a factory worker. Tedium seems to suit James very nicely and there is a lot of tedious work to be done outside the literary realm. I sure hope that my next read is better than this one.

2.5
A,T,J

This one went up a star with me since I first read it 40 years ago. A main character that is completely lovable and a fascinating set of people. The words are put together with such subtlety and complexity that it often felt like nothing I've read before. I'm rereading a lot of James as I slide into old age and I'm glad that I am. This is now among my top two or three James novels. It you haven't read it, I say do so.