Back in college I loved Henry James, but in the intervening 20+ years I haven't read anything by him. In a particularly Jamesian way, my memory of reading James in my early adulthood was a sort of beacon of the type of reader I thought I was then - erudite, literate and quite grown up. Well, now that I'm an actual grown-up, I see a lot more in James's work than I did at 21, and I find it somewhat disappointing.

The Ambassadors is the story of Lambert Strether's return to Paris at age 55. He is on a mission - his "particular friend" back home, Mrs. Newsome, has sent Strether to rescue her son, Chad, from the arms of "that sort" of woman. If Strether, a somewhat washed-up non-businessman, is successful, he will marry the wealthy Mrs. Newsome. If not, well, that's that. Upon his first arrival in Europe, in Liverpool, he meets Miss Maria Gostry, an American expat who lives in Paris.They immediately form a cozy, friendly relationship and Miss Gostry offers to see Strether when he gets to Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Strether finally sees Chad and meets Chad's friends. He finds that, rather than being dissolute and depraved, they are worldly, artistic and extremely interesting. He becomes drawn into their world, so much so that he recommends that Chad stay in Paris. When it becomes evident to Mrs. Newsome that Strether has not succeeded in convincing Chad to stay home, she sends her daughter, son-in-law, and son-in-law's sister to convince everyone to come home and do their duty. However, Chad has taken up with the lovely Marie de Vionnet (who Strether also finds quite attractive), and Strether has been somewhat seduced by Paris and the sophisticated people he has found there. SPOILERS In the end, while Chad decides to stay in Paris with Marie, Strether has found that he is really too old for this - he feels uncomfortable and must go home. He has one last chance at happiness with Maria Gostry, but he rejects even this.

After reading my plot synopsis, I find that this novel could have been a great novel of Edwardian manners. Unfortunately, though - at least for me - James's writing style gets in the way of the story. The Ambassadors is an early work in James's late period writing. As James got older, his writing seems to have become more convoluted and obscuring. There are sentences here that I don't think I could ever parse - and perhaps James couldn't, either.

And then his use of commas . . . . I know I use too many commas, and I should remember this novel every time I want to use one. Here are the first few sentences of the third paragraph (when Strether sees Miss Gostry for the first time in the Liverpool hotel):

"After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him, across her counter, the pale pink leaflet bearing his friend's name, which she pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and whose features - not freshly young, not markedly fine, but expressive and agreeable - came back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her, the day before, at his previous inn, where -- again in the hall -- she had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship's company."

The genius of James is that the start and stop effect of all this punctuation directly reflects Strether's hesitant start and stop approach to life. However, the affect on the reader (or at least this reader) is a stuttering, halting failure. I could never get momentum, never get lost in the story - there was no flow.

SPOILER Most disappointing for me, however, was the ending. Although Strether is seduced by Europe, and although by losing Chad he has lost Mrs. Newsome, he decides that he must return to America - back to his small and inconsequential life. It seems that a lot has changed in a century. Strether's sense of duty, his sense that he doesn't really deserve to be happy, seems at odds with what one might expect today. Perhaps today we have too much of a sense of entitlement towards searching for happiness, and not enough satisfaction with what we have right before us. On the other hand, though, perhaps Strether went home with a somewhat more open mind - more willing to partake of the creativity he once loved as a young man. Who knows. What I do know is that instead of finding the ending sad (or at least poignant), I found it frustrating and unsatisfying - which is perhaps the idea. ( )

An image began to emerge of James as I read this that never quite gelled, but was something like "a man in a dickey, stirring an invisible pot of oatmeal in a dimly lit room, staring at the wall through too-weak bifocals and telling a story about people you never knew in a summerhouse you never visited, perpetually unable to decide whether it was Old Jim or Young Frank that made of Miss Sedgwick or the widow Daintry a comment of which the motive and significance were unclear,but who keeps insisting 'come on, you remember'." And there's spaghetti on his shirt.

It should surprise nobody that HG Wells was more succinct, comparing James to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea that has rolled into a corner of the room. But I flatter myself that I was a bit more accurate, captured a few more of the intricate vicissitudes of trying to read this book--and then I think "ah, but look where intricate vicissitudes got this book". The Ambassadors is dull. It is ponderous, turgid, pedantic, almost autistic in place, terrified of sex. And alongside that terror, obsessed with the hidden and imagined meanings behind every lightly or significantly dropped little flirt or flurry, in the manner of two sensitive fourteen-year-old boys writing each other mannered letters in chemistry class, to discuss what Sharon and Alexis said that day when they know they'll never, ever get the courage up to ask them. I think James' audience in the oatmeal-stirring story above is probably being told to those two boys. I think that would be his idea of heaven.


The basic idea is all right--"small-town American, upright because timid, goes on a mission of small-town American moral rectitude to Paris, where his mind is opened and he realizes he has wasted his life. He tries to intervene in the affair to the benefit of his charges--as he never really ceases to think of them, even as they try to provide for him like a eunuch uncle--does a certain amount of good, but doesn't manage to seize the day for himself because it is too late and he is too old and timid. He goes home." Pathos, (the good kind of) bathos, the clash of worlds, turn-of-the-last-century drawing-room manners, &c.

And Strether is a decent sort, if immensely frustrating and ultimately pusillanimous (James loves this word, and while I'm not comfortable with the across-the-board dismissal of Latinate vocabulary when an Anglo-Saxon alternative presents itself, allow me to suggest that "pusillanimous" instead of "weak" or "timid" probably has potential as a sort of litmus test for smalling out when you're attaining an exquisite realm of semantic subtleties and when you're just being a pompous git: if it doesn't add more than "pusillanimous", you're the latter. On the subject of language let me also say that much as I hate James' style, it is a pleasure to find, amidst the cloud of adjectives and prepositional phrases that he spews out onto the paper, the occasional pithy Americanism, in a context and a mode you'd never expect. I really like it when Strether settles his own hash).

But OH GOD this guy can't write for shit. By anyone's standard. I hope I can justifiably call myself a fairly well-read and open-minded fellow who can make allowances for the complex-composite octopusing of the 19th-century realist sentence, and understand its potential for evoking the "complicated vagueness" of a real-life psychological state, and acknowledge James' deep insights into human nature, although he only seems to know how to draw them from a certain kind of human, and even see how the flaws of the prose are analogous to the flaws of the protagonist, and how that's kind of neat. I can cut James slack for all of that and still not have enough slack left to excuse this:

"His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting as tired as he wanted."

"She knew her theatre, she knew the play, as she had known, triumphantly, for three days, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim, for her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now to its limits his brief opportunity."

Vocab over style, like the letters of those fourteen-year-olds, like an intelligent and bookish kid in a backwater town or a backwater country--or most accurate of all for James, I think, a backwater bourgeois family, superficially "of the world" but never really interested in excising their inner Woollett--who nobody ever told he couldn't write, but instead indulged and called "our little professor". Only the guy was 60 when this was published. But you can still hear him smugging smugly to himself with each of those superfluous commas: "Mumsy wouldn't, perhaps, it must, and will, be acknowledged, put a comma there, but I must take more care, in my very serious work, for it, unlike her very charming occasional letters to Auntie Isadora, on the subject of her garden, and sundry similar topics, is for the ages."

I have a phone call to make, and I am tired of thinking or writing about this book, and so I will just also note that it is way gross how ultimately the self-satisfaction of Woollett wins out on so many levels, and the narration takes so seriously the assbuttoned Waymouth with his Old Knickerbocker-style rectitude, and Chad (Chad!) with his flared nostrils and impeccable pedigree, and makes snide "Jewess"-type remarks about the French aristocrats, because the only good bloodline is a US American Protestant bloodline, and all the worries in this are US American protestant worries, like about keeping yourself pure vs. having the enjoyment incumbent on your class and stature, and ohhhhhhhhhhh, I'm tired of that stuff. One of the most (only) enjoyable bits is toward the end, when Strether goes for a walk in the country and finally gets away from all those dull fucking awfuls, and your heart leaps, and then sinks again when Chad and Mme. de Vionnet show up, but you're still like "Strether has a plan! Maybe he will bring all their problems to a soothing catharsis and I will never have to think about them again!"

And he sort of does, I guess. Anyway, I'm done with this crapulence. ( )

The reader must be intrepid, but it's worth the challenge. The close observation of psychological processes is amazing, Proustian. My favorite James. ( )

Very dense book, but once you get the rhythm of the prose it makes sense and flows with eclat. All of the characters were drawn wonderfully. We never meet Mrs. Newsome but I didn't want to anyway. The largest disappointment is the ending. Poor Maria Gostrey. While I appreciated Strether's desire and determination to return to Woolett, he should have taken Maria with him. In my opinion, that would have completed his transformation and gave him his liberty. ( )

The Ambassadors was one of James' last novels and the literary world considered it to be the most perfect.

The main character, Lambert Strether, is a fifty-five year old man engaged to a wealthy woman from New England, Mrs. Newsome. He is sent to France as an ambassador by Mrs. Newsome to convince her only son Chad to stop carrying on romantic affairs with "those wild French women" and return home to run the family business. Lambert arrives in Europe with every intention of following orders, but is quickly seduced by the beautiful and exotic old world surroundings. And he is stunned to find out that Chad has not been carrying on affairs with "vulgar" French women but has grown into a sophisticated young man and has made many charming friends, especially the lovely, graceful, refined, and oh so captivating, Madame de Vionnet.

Mrs. Newsome, stubborn and stoic, is used to having her way, and when she realizes Lambert is procrastinating, she sends her daughter, son-in-law, and son-in-law's sister (whom she hopes to persuade Chad to marry) as ambassadors to bring home both Chad and Lambert.

Written in 1903 this is a story of social decorum at the turn of the century. Social formalities and refined conduct are evident at all times, which often lead to ambiguous conversations, misconceptions, and at times humorous predicaments and painful realizations. James can skillfully elude to all reference to anything remotely associated with sex or inappropriate intimacy leaving much to the reader's imagination. A lot of the opinions and character analysis are expressed though dialogue and wordy descriptions of the typical elaborate slow-paced Jamesian style. ( )