This is definitely one I'll need to read again. It is so full of humor that I kept imagining P. G. Wodehouse crafting it. It's sad, though.

Blech... I couldn't handle this at all. Great story, badly told. Huge ideas in here that some may justify as needing difficult language to convey. I disagree.

That's it. I must accept this. I am chronically unable to understand what he's actually saying. It's as though he is writing in a language I haven't studied; some sort of pidgin that throws in a few words of English here and there. I freely admit defeat, and add James-lexia to my store of Kafkaphobia and Joyce-pathia.

Reading The Ambassadors is like progressing through a circular maze. The reader roams around the edges at first, coming up frequently against dead ends. Why is Chad Newsome so difficult to figure out? What are the author’s intentions for Maria Gostrey? Will Mrs Newsome, or even her more formidable-sounding daughter, Mrs Pocock, ever make a physical appearance in the story? The enigmas in this early stage are such that if the reader found herself accidentally back at the start she might be tempted to abandon the maze altogether. But it would be a difficult choice to make because in all her frustrated revolvings she has nevertheless passed through some exquisite passages. She continues, and little by little she finds herself circling a smaller space, and she tells herself that perhaps she is finally getting closer to the heart of the story. Yet even when a new direction seems full of promise, she still comes up against the same blind alleys as before and she despairs of ever getting to the centre.

At this stage she stops worrying about finishing. She's enjoying the convoluted paths, taking her time and appreciating every twist and turn. She is blissful in the face of the beauty of certain passages and asks for nothing more than to spend the rest of her life deciphering Jamesian sentences.

Her bliss is soon disturbed by a new preoccupation. In her circling she has picked up a companion. Lambert Strether, the main character in this third person narrative, seems to be walking in her footsteps or she in his. She may not understand all his thoughts and desires but she empathizes with him fully as he too circles the central facts of the story, enjoying the beauty along the way but encountering the same dead ends as herself. And while she enjoys Strether's company very much, her discomfort arises from a fear that he may come to grief before the end, and she herself alongside him.

There are many pitfalls in Strether's path: he is being used by almost every other character in the narrative while nevertheless trying to serve everyone to the best of his abilities. The reader wants to warn him of the dangers, to whisper, watch out, Strether. But she has learned something from Maria Gostrey. Silent support is what Strether requires at this point, especially as he is about to face the daunting Mrs Pocock, looming forth from what seems like another blind alley.

But Mrs Pocock’s bulk fails to hide the opening leading to the centre of the maze:

n  the jump was but short to supreme lucidity. Light became indeed after that so intense that Strether would doubtless have but half made out, in the prodigious glare, by which of the two the issue had been in fact precipitated. It was, in their contracted quarters, as much there between them as if it had been something suddenly spilled with a crash and a splash on the floor.n

The reader can only be in awe of the writer’s skill in delivering her, right alongside his main character, to the heart of the story—in one blinding flash. She looks back at the manner in which she read the earlier sections and realises she was an innocent then, incapable yet of understanding. Now it has all come to mean something different; she has grown and changed just as Strether has changed: He had heard, of old, only what he could then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past

If Lambert Strether and the reader finally reach the point of brutal lucidity, it is thanks to the unassuming character of Maria Gostrey. We wondered at the beginning about her role in the story. It is very simple: James needed her to keep the thread. Without her, there would be no way, happy or unhappy, for the reader to exit the maze that is The Ambassadors.

Are you a Henry James fan? Well, one has to be a bit possessed and a very good parser of the Jamesian sentence to qualify. I just finished The Ambassador one of his last three books: the other two are The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. No doubt he is the most intellectual and introspective of writers, but I adore him. He is absolutely his character, Lewis Lambert Strether sent as an ambassador by his New England Doyen friend to retrieve her wayward son from the clutches of an evil French woman. James does a soap opera plot? Well yes, but a big NO since it is Henry. The psychological reverberations are up there with Shakespeare's. I finished the last chapter today and dare not read another book until this one settles into my mind for good. I don't want to lose it. I also see clearly at last all the attractions this intelligent, worldy and, yes, passionate man might have had for the women of his circle. At the same time, if he is Strether, we also see the impregnable walls he built around the city of his soul and body.

I hurled this book away in disgust after the third attempt to wade through this unreadable treacle. I have tried with Henry James, and have managed three of his novels (Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, and The Turn of the Screw). I didn't really enjoy any of them, but I occasionally saw flickers of why others would rate them so highly. But this is just too much. His style is so absurdly affected, so deliberately obfuscatory, and so toe- curlingly tedious that I feel the energy being drained from me as I turn the pages. Those who can wade through this and derive pleasure and profit from it have my respect, but it's not for me. I didn't think my violent aversion to all things Joycean could possibly have a competitor, but after this all things Jamesian inspire me with equal revulsion. Life is way too short for this.

05/2019

Look, I read 35% on my Kindle. I read this because the book is brought up in The Talented Mr. Ripley. And I totally get why from the chunk of it I read. "Our Friend" Strether goes to Europe to convince someones son to come back to America . Just like Tom Ripley does for Mr. Greenleaf, who first mentions this novel. Henry James has a sense of humour and good dialogue.

n  “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.” n

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.

• 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.

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.

Okay, so I had a bit of a sour taste in my mouth after reading James’ The Wings of the Dove, but I truly went into The Ambassadors hopeful that I would enjoy something from his repertoire. Sadly, I did not. As a matter of fact, it was akin to being stuck at a party listening to a very dull person chattering on while trying to plan an escape route.

I again found my thoughts wandering and had to frequently reread several sentences and pages. I admit I may have missed some excellent prose as I was far away throughout my read of this novel.

The protagonist, Lewis Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to collect the son of his fiance so he may return to Massachusetts where it is hoped he will run the family business. I believe he was meant to be an aging gentleman who had reached a point in his life where he was questioning the value of his life. I found him to be somewhat of a dullard.

Maria Gostrey befriends Strether in Paris and becomes his confidante. She aids him in his endeavor and eventually falls in love with him (why is a mystery to me). This could and should have been a very alluring and interesting character, but James failed to bring substance to her.

Chad Newsome is the sought after son of Strether’s betrothed who is enjoying the artist’s life in gay Paris. The 28-year-old lad is having an affair with a 38-year-old French woman. His character lacks true substance. He inexplicably leaves his mistress and life in Paris to return to the family’s business without ceremony.

A book riddled with lifeless characters whose actions dumbfounded this reader.

Quotes:

Four of the letters were from Mrs. Newsome and none of them short; she had lost not time, he now could measure the probable frequency with which he should hear. They would arrive, it would seem, her communications, at the rate of several a week; he should be able to count, it might even prove, on more than one by each mail. If he had begun yesterday with a small grievance he had therefore an opportunity to begin to-day with its opposite. He read the letters successively and slowly, putting others back into his pocket but keeping these for a long tie afterwards gathered in his lap. He held them there, lost in thought, as if to prolong the presence of what they gave him; or as if at the least to assure them their part in the constitution of some lucidity.

He wasn’t there for his own profit–not, that is, the direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings.

I’m now not really so certain that I would enjoy speaking with Mr. James. Dare I say, If I saw him sitting in a corner alone at some such gathering, I think I’d have the wits about me to make a retreat, post haste!

My rating for The Ambassadors is a 4 out of 10.

I learned how to grow old.

My reaction to this novel was one mostly of frustration. Not for the “difficulty” of James’ style, I’m not afraid of difficulty, but for what small matter it went in service of here. I finally realized that unlike all the other novels, stylistically difficult or not (including other works by James) that I’ve found myself truly drawn to, called by, immersed in, this novel seemed to me to have no cosmological dimension, and in fact, not even any still-resonant (to me) social dimension– and what else is the defining subject of this ample form? I felt The Ambassadors was entirely constructed to show off its protagonist, who failed to fascinate me anything like as much as he obviously did James. So the experience of reading this dilatory work depended utterly on whether or not you found Strether’s personal dilemma consequential and/or sympathetic. I did not.

Even James’ technique, brilliant and revolutionary as it was, of centering a narrative intimately close to but not entirely inside a particular consciousness was, it seemed to me, antithetical to the invocation of any larger dimensions of reality, at least in this case. And (reading James’ Preface, included in this edition, very helpful) his emphasis on the supremacy of the artist’s control in every respect left no room for negative capability, which is an experience of the cosmological dimension as the source of inspiration. So how could his work not feel airless to me in some way, when he rules out the most fertile plane of discovery?

Whenever you dismiss something acclaimed a masterwork and a favorite of the author himself, by a writer as skilled as James, you are probably risking your own credibility as a good reader. But a good reader is allowed personal taste. We are not allowed to call it more than that, however. Or at least I won’t. (I was however, bolstered by reading the essays in this great edition - and by a couple of sharp quotes about James that I think are part of the experience of reading him. "This book was not quite worth the extraordinary trouble of reading it," said Arnold Bennett. "He often chewed more than he bit off," said one of his friends.

When I finished The Ambassadors last year, I felt too ambivalent to write a review. I still feel that ambivalence strongly, and am ready to hazard that its source is James' own ambivalence about his subject matter. I'm convinced there's a deep vein of romanticism in his make-up, by which I mean the conviction that life is a glorious and joyous affair if only one has the courage to hold fast, and live according to certain key values. As evidence, he loved the play Cyrano de Bergerac. But something in him reins in that romantic impulse. For example, [spoiler alert] nine-tenths of his early novel, The American, is a superbly nuanced romantic novel, in which an American businessman, Christopher Newman, sets boldly out for Europe to find a bride. He does find one, her family forbids marriage, and an exciting and suspenseful story is set in motion. At the end the family succeeds in intimidating the young lady, and with an "Oh, well!" (he says something very much like this), Newman shuffles off. Significantly, James changed the ending for a subsequent play version: Newman got the girl.

The Ambassadors follows a similar pattern, but with infinitely more pussy-footing and obfuscation. It does reveal an increase in novelistic skill, witness the masterfully suspenseful development of the primary situation of a young man's family trying to retrieve him from the temptations of a life in Paris. And if it really dramatized what James claimed was its theme ("Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular as long as you have your life. If you haven't has that what have you had?"), it would be a hands-down masterpiece. As it stands, it dwindles down to an ambiguous "plop" of disappointment, and all the main character can find to say, as a testament to being swept up by the drift of circumstances, is "Then there we are!" Indeed. One may as well add that other defeatist cliche: "It is what it is."