“The Ambassadors”, by Henry JamesThis 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.
The AmbassadorsttttHenry James (1909) #27January 25, 2008tIf 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.2.5A,T,J
What do You think about The Ambassadors (1987)?
The Ambassadors is not a charming book, though it is full of charm. The syntax is notoriously difficult in places, though not beyond the pale of what was being done by more emotionally direct authors like Proust. The plot is simple and almost classical in its staging, with an elegance that is absent in the stereotypically sprawling, 'loose, baggy monsters' of 19th and early 20th century fiction. From one angle, this simple, almost predictable story (a predictability that James addresses in one of his characteristically rich but baffling prefaces) is a fault, and could be said to rely on the progressive contrasting of cliches in the form of characters that ultimately stand in for entire civilizations. From another angle - the one I see things from - the elegant simplicity of the plot allows the narrative to take on the enormous weight of James' psychological observations, while the risk of cliches is surmounted by his ability to portray the ambiguity of emotional relationships. The satisfaction of the novel is to be had in the appreciation of these relationships, and the uncertainty as to what they are based on, what they amount to, and where they are going. As with much of James' other fiction, he is escorting us into a world inhabited mainly by women, in which the male characters do their best to find their way. Unless you find yourself falling in love with Madame Vionnet, or Maria Gostrey, and hoping that Strether will, too, your interest will probably not carry through to the conclusion. And if you don't admire the fact that at the height of the Gilded Age, James made his main character an unsuccessful middle-aged has-been, or that in a deeply sexist period he chose for his heroine an older, unhappily married woman who loves a younger man, you probably just won't get James.From the start, James' book comes across as a sort of a deliberate experiment, almost a formalist exercise. His intent from the beginning is to tell his tale of an older man's late blooming solely through the mind of the man himself as recounted by an unobtrusive narrator. That imposes restraints, which ultimately generate some impressive results, but which are also constraining. While the first scene of the more conventional Portait of a Lady employs more conventional Victorian prose to describe an inviting English setting, The Ambassadors begins with one man wondering if he wants to meet another man when his ship docks in port: not particularly sexy. As the story progresses, however, James can't help but generate interest, partly because he begins to run lines of erotic tension between almost all of the characters, and partly because he can't help but charm the reader with loving depictions of a rainy night in London, or a cafe table in Paris. What is there not to like? That is precisely what James asks both his characters and readers throughout the book. Lambert Strether does his best not to succumb to these charms, but James sees to it that he does, and gives ample evidence for why he ultimately should.James' rigor in keeping within the bounds of Strether's skull, however, exacts a price. Though an enormous amount happens in The Ambassadors, it happens in thought bubbles that have become so large, in effect, that for long stretches of the narrative they block out the scenery. The lyrical moments on Parisian boulevards, the masterful evocations of private spaces or the French countryside, charged moments of dialogue between characters who sense that their mutual feelings extend well beyond what they are willing to express, all of this is frequently squeezed to the margins of what often reads like the self-conscious chatter of college roommates. It's useful again to draw a contrast here with The Portrait of a Lady, where by admission James spent much more time building out a world of concrete description with which to surround his characters. Here, much of that description is gone, and instead we are in the mind of Lambert Strether and his lady interlocutors as he tries to comprehend the irrepressible emergence of his inner slacker.There is some precedent for this: the book is a story of persuasion, as exercised primarily by ladies upon the men in their lives, as concerns the delicate interrelations of money and marriage. Jane Austen hovers like a muse through all the pages of the book, a muse disavowed by the author, but determined to trespass. As with Austen, this muse is verbal. It is preoccupied with social nuance and the constant jostling of relationships. It is, fundamentally, feminine. Whatever 'happens' will not be concrete; it will probably be a new arrangement of social relationships. Hemingway said stories end with either death or marriage. The Ambassadors can be credited as original for ending with neither.That may be, in fact, the source of its modernism, and James' success. Beyond the offbeat characters and the unseemly relationships, the novel offers little resolution other than the unraveling of a number of lives. The freedom they achieve comes with a large dose of uncertainty. Yet I would argue that the conclusion is unworthy of the characters it treats, and that Maria Gostrey in particular is woefully neglected, if not shamefully used as a narrative device. We never learn about Maria, Strether's confidant and fellow psychological ruminant; she simply humors him with her wit and moderate bohemianism. Her promising personality is the most tragic victim of the confinement of the story to Strether's head. And by turning away from Maria's ever-more explicit declarations of affection, Strether not only strains credulity, he approaches the Puritanical, New England stereotype that James has supposedly spent 500 pages criticizing. For all that, The Ambassadors is a brilliant achievement.
—David
What a tremendous load of over-articulated crap.The only reason to write such shite in the era of early Picasso, Freud, Einstein and many other giants of early 20th century is to try to carve out some sort of semblance of a reason to exist...when there really is none. It's one idiot writing about his brethren and sisters for his brethren and sisters. It was published as a serial in The North American Review for minor (read: wannabe) intellectuals in New England in 1903. Truly an example of the blind leading the blind.On top of that, the sentences...jeez.Why is this anyhing but pulp for tissue?
—Johan
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.
—William Ramsay
