“The Ambassadors”, by Henry James

This is Daisy Fuentes Miller, reporting to you live from the set of MTV’s “Real World Gay Paree”. Six strangers, from totally different backgrounds, thrown together, forced to live under the merciless glare of the Hankcam, which documents their every move for posterity. Let’s see what happens when the gloves come off, and things get real.

Strether: Hi. I’m Strether. I’m engaged to Chad’s mom. She’s pissed at him, and sent me over to bring him back to Connecticut to run the family business. Paree sure seems like an awesome party town.
Chad: This is the Chadster. I don’t wanna go back to Connecticut. I’m dating this totally hot older lady. Who’s a countess. She’s been giving me some private life coaching lessons. If you know what I mean.
Countess: ‘allo. Zis is Marie. you can call me Countess Cougar. Sacre bleu, but you American boys are fine!
Strether: Damn, that countess is one hot MILF. Chad – no rush about going home. We should just hang out here in Paris and par-tay!

6 weeks later:

Sarah: This is Sarah, Chad’s older sister. What the f*** is going on here? Strether, you’ve been over six weeks already. Mother sent me over. She wants you both to haul ass back to Connecticut, pronto. (You can ignore my fat philistine slob of a husband, Jim. He’s only here to provide a cheap diversion as a lazy stereotype and adds nothing to the plot)
Chad: Chill, sis. This is my girlfriend Marie. Ain’t she smokin? Did I mention she’s a countess?
Sarah: Filthy French slut! Chad, Mother expects you to do your duty.
Strether: Dude, don’t go! It’s a trap.
Sarah: You be quiet! And you can forget about marrying Mother. Which means you’ll die lonely and poor.
Strether: Bite me. Your mother always was one uptight bitch, anyway. I’ll just stay on here. Maybe catch a little menage-a-trois action with Chad and the Countess.
Chad : Not gonna happen, dude! Sis, tell Mom to take the job and shove it. I’m having too much fun tapping aristocratic ass here in Paree. Screw Connecticut.

2 weeks later, Strether, alone in the confessional room:
So Sarah and Jim are on the way back home, with no hanging Chad. My life is totally screwed up. But at least I can be happy about getting Chad to do the right thing, to avoid the money trap, and to choose life!

2 weeks later, Chad, alone in the confessional room, very drunk:
You know, I’ve always thought that advertising was where the future is at..... And, there's no two ways about it, Marie's boobs have definitely been showing some major saggage .... Operator! Get me the number for the Cunard line, please.

Fade, to the sound of Strether whimpering pathetically, off-camera.
(Marie, of course, goes on to star in the breakout Bravo series, “Real Housewives of the 4th arrondissment”).

********************************************

OK, I'll come clean and admit that I’ve had a definite prejudice against Henry James for as long as I can remember. But reading Colm Toibin’s “The Master” last month made me think I should give him another try. “The Ambassadors” certainly confirmed my belief in the brilliance of Toibin’s accomplishment. It also changed my opinion of James – though I doubt I’ll ever achieve fanboy status, it was a far more interesting read than I had anticipated.

In “The Master”, Toibin gives us a portrait of James in mid-career, focusing on the period between 1895 and 1900. It’s eerily well done – it’s almost as if he were channeling the spirit of James. Although Toibin is an avowed fan, his depiction of the author seems scrupulously honest and right on the mark. The picture of Henry that emerges is not entirely flattering – that of someone who is fascinated by the workings of the very privileged segment of society into which he was born, with a keen, almost obsessive, eye for the subtleties and complexities of the relationships among the various players, and the talent, determination (and free time) to document it in his writing. Even if that came at a certain emotional cost. In James’s case, that cost appears to have been an inability (or unwillingness) to form truly deep emotional attachments. There seems to have been a pattern of his withdrawing emotionally whenever another person threatened to come too close. This was a man who lived far too much of his life in his own head.

It shows in the writing, of course. Every detail of every character’s action, no matter how minor, is picked apart and analyzed. Characters are presented as being engaged in endless analysis and speculation about how to interpret the actions and motives of others. And if it takes a page and a half to pin down the precise nuance of A’s reaction to a casual snub by B, then so be it – James always assumes that the reader has both the time and interest to stay with him. The odd thing is that, although this can be a little offputting at the beginning, ultimately it becomes kind of hypnotic. He is so clearly fascinated by the inner world of his characters that he ultimately draws you in. The plot of “The Ambassadors” is wafer-thin. But the author’s focus on the psychology of his characters is so intense (and so believable) that one is motivated to keep on reading. This was not a dull book.

Much is made of Henry James’s style, and I just don’t get it. This is a man who never met a subordinate clause he didn’t like, with a definite preference for the baroque. Hemingway he’s not. But his penchant for convoluted sentences means that he’s not particularly easy to read. On any given page, there is likely to be at least one sentence that you will have to read three times over, and still not be sure you understand what he was trying to say. (He has a way of nesting negative particles in his various subordinate clauses that is particularly evil – I’d find myself counting them on my fingers, trying to figure things out). Stylistically, the writer he reminds me most of is Thomas Mann, who also had a penchant for long, complicated sentences. At least James wasn’t writing in German, so there is a limit to how convoluted things get. Personally, I don’t consider opacity to be a virtue. YMMV.

A book that was far more interesting than I had anticipated, and which definitely changed my mind about Henry James.

I'd read that Henry James had a very distinct split in styles, and that accordingly readers often differ greatly in which style they like. The only other book by Henry James I had read before this was Washington Square, one of his early novels, and it's a favorite--but that made me all the more reluctant to try one of his later novels and feel disappointed. I don't know if disappointment describes how I feel about The Ambassadors, one of his late and most celebrated novels. Bored and frustrated at times, admiring at others--but I definitely prefer the more straightforward, more simple in style Washington Square.

Late Henry James features some of the most convoluted sentences I've encountered in literature. I wouldn't go so far as to say this sported the kind of sentence where you are lost before you get to the end, and at times I did admire how much James could pack in--this is a novel very dense in meaning--but it probably did at the least slow the pace when you have lines filled with semi-colons, commas, dashes and other punctuation tricks to keep sentences like this one aloft:

Melancholy Murger, with Francine and Musette and Rodolphe, at home, in the company of the tattered, one--if he not in his single self two or three--of the unbound, the paper-covered dozen on the shelf; and when Chad had written, five years ago, after a sojourn then already prolonged to six months, that he had decided to go in for economy and the real thing, Strether's fancy had quite fondly accompanied him in this migration, which was to convey him, as they somewhat confusedly learned at Woollett, across the bridges and up the Montagne Sainte-Genevieve.

Also, in comparison with Washington Square, let alone, say Dickens, The Ambassadors has a paucity of plot. Not much happens here. Stether comes to Paris as the "ambassador" of his fiancee, to convince her son Chad to come home and becomes entangled with the people around him and is seduced by their charms and that of Paris. That's the core of theme and plot. The climax of the book turns on interpreting a fleeting expression seen from afar. The dialogue is simpler than the narrative, to the point of frustration at times because there are such underplayed subtle currents you have to strain to figure out what is really going on between people. And though at times I did find those challenging nuances fascinating, especially whenever Maria Gostrey appeared, in the end I felt unmoved by these characters--a very different reaction than how I felt at the end of Washington Square.

I've decided to read Henry James. He's considered one of our greatest writers, after all. Up until now I've found him almost impenetrable. But I've decided to try. This is the first in the eight books I've chosen.
Two impressions came to mind as I was reading. One was remembering as a young man my friends telling me I just had to meet these certain people who were oh so interesting and advanced. Meeting them never lived up to expectations. They were always just ordinary - or worse utter bores full of themselves. The other impression was of a group of teenage girls gossiping endlessly about their friends, squealing wildly about every factor of their lives. Both of these impressions are probably unfair to James.
The story in question concerns a man who is sent to Paris to 'rescue' the son of a leading Massachusetts family who has fallen into the clutches of a French woman. The hero, a staid 58 year old, soon finds himself falling into the clutches of Paris itself. And he finds the son much improved by his relationship with a married countess.
Of course, in James' time there was no talk of sex in novels - and more than likely none period. He has to sort of beat around the bush about what is really going on. I would think at the time this must have been a rather shocking novel. The problem with it is that there is too much beating around the bush. I think the story could have been told in half as many words.
The ironical part is that as I waded through the squealing gossip and gave the 'oh so very interesting people' the benefit of the doubt, I actually began to LIKE the book. It was a struggle, however.
I'll keep you posted on how I do with the rest of the list.

A Perched Privacy

I finish reading this novel feeling exalted and cowed by what a man may accomplish in a work of fiction. Human relationships, so various, so changing, so beautiful, are so variously, changeably and beautifully conceived here that they constitute a cause for moral uplift and terror. Flying from an apparent bedrock of ethical certainties, fine discriminations flutter in the air, and cannot find a sure place to land. All (a word that punctuates the novel like an orgasmic cry) is guesswork: who is the "wicked" Frenchwoman holding Chad Newsome back from returning to Woollet, Massachusetts, to take up his responsibility as heir to a great manufacturing concern? how is Lambert Strether, himself a fiance and supplicant to Chad's formidable mother, to convince the prodigal son of his duty? what, really, is one's duty to life?

The third person narrative, told entirely through the perspective of Strether, dramatizes the changes in his consciousness wrought by the atmosphere of the city of Paris. Yet, he does not bring nothing to the alchemical experiment; he carries a sense of advancing age and professional failure, a sense that is old with him, true, but also young enough for its modification, and, even, transformation. For in Chad, Strether sees a younger self that he never had. I use "had" deliberately. The fine women Strether encounters in Paris are described with deep admiration, but young man receives the only extended description of physical person. Arriving at Chad's house, Strether saw another young man smoking on the third floor balcony:

He was young too then, the gentleman up there--he was very young; young enough apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at his moment in everything but his own business; and Chad's thus pronounced association with youth had given the next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. The balcony, the distinguished front testified suddenly, for Strether's fancy, to something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light--that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the shadow of a claim.

I find this passage extremely moving in its contrast of youth and age, its double seeing, its longing for transcendence and domicile ("perched privacy"), and its tenuous claim of belonging in a great ironic city. The style may be impressionistic--seeing the balcony in one light which may, and will, rapidly change to another--but it is also profoundly human.

I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out. For example, he might start off with “The effect of the man’s speech was as if he were a tippler who…” then meanders here, there, and over there to the other bar, and then wanders back toward you, but veering off at the last second, borrows several drinks (by which I mean to imply words) off surrounding tables (by which I mean, words that ought to belong to other sentences entirely), and then, seeing the end of the sentence approaching (which, by continuation of our metaphor, would be meant to suggest the end of the night, or bed, or the end of drinking festivities, which drunk would prefer at all accounts to avoid and so stalls to keep off at a distance), he throws any number of adverbs, barstools, prepositions, gerunds and the like in between himself and that end, and once you are fully convinced he has lost all sight of his aim in telling you the original anecdote he had introduced, he sometimes arrives back at that point, but other times, he does not, and if you were to map his meanderings, it would take a smarter person than most readers nowadays to derive any sense from it, and at that point, the other woman whirled right out of the room, and the first, though not affected by the same thing to the same degree of the latter, or rather, it was the same thing, but she did not derive from it the same intent, but was nevertheless affected in a different way of her own, said, “My word, what a lot of…” but then hung fire.

So, that’s what reading The Ambassadors is like all the way through. The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was. The premise of the book is that the narrator has been sent to bring back his fiancé’s son, who is having an illicit affair with a married (she’s permanently separated from her abusive husband) woman in Paris, but when he gets there, he really likes the woman and he really likes Paris, and he really likes the son more than he did before, and so he decides the son might be better off there. But he convinces himself (somewhat) that maybe the son’s relationship with the married woman isn’t technically sexual, and then (spoiler alert…?) at the end, he has this big realization when he can’t pretend anymore that it isn’t. Except, being a modern young woman, I didn’t get that AT ALL, and read the whole thing assuming that he knew they were a full-fledged couple, but that he didn’t, in these particular circumstances, think it was immoral. So then, when his grand realization came, I was all, “Oh, wait, hold on. This was a thing? Oh, I guess it was THE thing. Where have I been?”

JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN, HENRY JAMES!! Actually, this is a really hilarious novel when looked at in hindsight, but as you’re thwacking through the jungle of it, it’s pretty tiresome, and also, I think I am far too stupid to understand this book.

"Leviathan moving a pebble." --H.G. Wells

I found this a real chore to read. I find the style very dense and difficult to understand wh long sentences and convoluted metaphor. I also found it boring as there is very little action and most of the plot is only reported as various characters gossip about the others. The characters are all rich and therefore have no real cares in the world other than what others might think of them and therefore they were not sympathetic or interesting. I am obviously not a fan of James.

The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. ~ Lambert Strether regarding Notre Dame Cathedral

This is the first time I’ve read The Ambassadors or Henry James. The novel is the third-person narrative, told in realist style, and at times is nearly stream of consciousness. The story is told exclusively from the point of view of Lambert Strether who is sent to Paris, by his wealthy fiancée, to persuade her son to return to the Massachusetts and take up his responsibility in the family business.

Henry James is one of the most prolific authors on my list with 4 novels in the top 100, and 3 more in the next 250. I thought it was surprising that in spite of so many works making the list, this was his highest at #71. Nevertheless, I was impressed with his numerous “Great Novels” and I was looking forward to my first experience with James. To be perfectly honest, I was quite disappointed.

My full review: http://100greatestnovelsofalltimeques...

Whenever I think of Henry James (and that does not happen too often), the words obfuscating & convoluted come to mind besides WTF is this supposed to be all about?
Maybe I will give him another try in years to come ....

I'm a big James fan. Have read and relished him early and late: "The Bostonians," "What Maisie Knew," "Portrait of a Lady," "The Spoils of Poynton," "The Europeans," "Washington Square," "Daisy Miller," "The Turn of the Screw," "The Aspern Papers," and also (late) "Wings of The Dove" and "The Golden Bowl." So was surprised how many times I had to restart "The Ambassadors," how many times I wanted to throw the book aside.

And was it worth it, finally? Only in exposing a crack in my admiration--which now, in retrospect, runs through many of his other novels too. ayayay! (What still remains in tact: "Portrait," "The Bostonians," and probably my favorite, "What Maisie Knew.")

The novel seems to me thin, with James guilty of the worst sort of opacity. He doesn't really have a mystery to offer so must withhold what should be said straight out. I wish I felt confident he was just making fun of his characters' own pretensions rather than sharing them. They are always saying things, like ""She has done everything," and "Isn't he wonderful?" a pileup of placeholder exclamations and judgements, when you cannot figure out what is so "wonderful" and what "everything" anyone has done. And yet if the characters are delicate and circumspect in certain respects, they, like their author, miss the boat entirely in others. That is, the novel picks out the most tiresome moral quandaries among a constellation that includes piercing ones. In short, I ended up disliking Strether, our main guy, and James in equal measure for getting all the proportions wrong and for taking so long about it.

ত্যানা পেঁচান, কঠিন কঠিন শব্দ ঠেসে দেন, এমন জবরজং ভাষায় লিখুন যে পাঠোদ্ধার করতে নেপোলিয়র কাছে চাকরী নিতে হয়, কি দীনমজুরের কণ্ঠে তুলে দিন সুব্রত অগাস্টিন বা সিকদার আমিনুলের কবিতা, আমি আঙুল তুলবো না। শেষেরটা বাদে প্রতিটাই করেছেন জেমস সাহেব, আমিও নির্দ্বিধায় মেনে নিয়েছি। ভাষাটা খটমট, কিন্তু বিশ্রী না, বরঞ্চ স্বাদু। ইংরেজিতে যা কিছু বলা কঠিন, জেমস দেখা গেলো জানেন, কী করে বলে যেতে হয়। একটু পড়া কষ্ট, জেমস নিজেই বলেছেন, তার বই দিনে পাঁচ পাতা করে পড়ুন, পড়ুন।
আমার সমস্যা হয়েছে যে এই বইয়ের পেছনের গল্পটা ভালো না। ভালো হয়ে উঠতে পারত, একটু একটু করে, কিন্তু হয়নি। একেবারেই হয়নি। চরিত্রগুলি ফিনিয়াস এন্ড ফার্বের চরিত্রদের মত, সারা বই জুড়ে ছুটি কাটায়, আর কথা বলে স্টার জলসার চরিত্রদের মত, বিয়ে করবো, মা কষ্ট পাবে, করবো না, প্রেমিকা কষ্ট পাবে, এইসব এইসব। হেনরী জেমসের ভাষা যেমন সুন্দর, গল্প সেরকমই ঝুলন্ত, আমি ভেবেছিলাম হয়ত মাথায় ভালো কিছু ছিলো, লিখতে গিয়ে পোয়াবারো হয়েছে, কিন্তু ভূমিকা পড়ে আর অ্যাপেন্ডিক্স পড়ে মনে হলো, নাহ্‌, ঢের আশা করা হয়ে গেছে।
অবশ্য ভালো বয়ান বাজে গল্প হলে যে ভালো লাগতই না তা না। এটাও নেহাত বাজে লাগে নাই, পড়তে একটু সময় লাগলো আর কী, প্রায় সপ্তাহ তিনেক। কিন্তু বাজে লাগছেও কিছুটা, এই যে ল্যাম্বার্ট স্ট্রেথার শালা একজনের দিকে তাকাইলো, সেই তাকানোর বর্ণনা জেমস দিয়েছেন পাঁচ পাতা ধরে, সই, তারপর যখন তাকানো শেষ করে তারা চ্যাডের বিয়া দেই কার লগে নিয়ে কথা বলে, বিরক্ত করে দেবার জন্য যথেষ্টই। কিছু না ঘটলে আমারে আটকা অন্য কিছু দিয়ে - নাহ। ত্যানা পে ত্যানা, ত্যানা পে ত্যানা।

আরো কয়েকটা হেনরী জেমস পড়তে হবে। লোকজন বাজে ঢঙে লিখে ভালো গল্প নষ্ট করে, আমি দেখতে চাই এই ভদ্রলোক বাজে গল্প লিখে আর কয়টা ভালো ঢঙ নষ্ট করেছেন। চমৎকার ইংরেজি ভদ্রলোকের, স্বীকার মানি।

I have been reading quite a bit of James. Last year, I audio’d The Bostonians and Washington Square. I read The Aspen Papers, reread Beast in the Jungle, and read Turn of the Screw (which I disliked -- found it excruciating). And then this spring read a large collection of James’ stories (ed. Fadiman), then Wings of the Dove, and now The Ambassadors. I love the late James... Even though these books are long, and there is a certain degree of artificiality in the dialogue (much worse in Dove; much more economical in The Ambassadors), these two late novels represent a form of psychological thriller, the patient unraveling, layer by layer, of the inner drives (and narrative outcomes) of some remarkably rich characters. Kate Croy…, Strether…, Madame de Vionnet – all remarkable, and none more so than the latter two. It is shocking to find James creating a female character that one actually has the hots for! (And Maria Gostrey is a close second…!!). And Strethers… what a character HE is…!

I am surprised at the ambivalence about this book. It is an absolute masterpiece, in my opinion. I found nothing flabby or any excess in Ambassadors – while it is a slow and patient read – it is nearly perfection.

The one thing I would add – that makes the Ambassadors a bit difficult -- is that it is NOT (as Dorothea Krook correctly saw) actually a tragedy (as one expects from James). It is utterly tragic AND utterly comic… and it is not until the very end that one sees precisely how.

I’ll have to rest now from my James feast, and leave the Golden Bowl for a future repast, while I catch my breath.