Monthly Archives: May 2025

Henry James, The Ambassadors: part 2

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Last time I tried to set out how my initial negative response to this late James novel turned much more positive as I started rereading it. Here I’d like to take a closer look at some early passages in the text to try to show the kinds of qualities that changed my mind.

Just a few pages into Book 1 of The Ambassadors Strether has landed in England before setting off for Paris on his mission to bring back Chad, the errant son of his fiancée Mrs Newsome, because he’s assumed to be embroiled in a sordid affair with a bad woman. In a hotel in Chester, near Liverpool, where he is to meet his countryman, the staid lawyer Waymarsh, he encounters Maria Gostrey, an American woman of about 35 who tells him she heard him ask at the hotel for Waymarsh, and that he is a mutual acquaintance. They arrange to meet in the hotel garden.

When he walks towards her when they meet there later, Strether assesses her appearance: she looks to him ‘almost insolently young’ (he’s 55). Her eyes

had taken hold of him straight away…measuring him up and down as if they knew how…Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it [but of course he doesn’t! Penguin edition (from which all of my quotations will be taken) p. 60; all ellipses hereafter are mine.]

There’s so much going on in that passage. At the beginning of this long novel about seeing, perceiving and discriminating, with varying degrees of insight and success – and Stether is largely not gifted in this area – James sets out how shrewdly perceptive Miss Gostrey is, while Strether not only isn’t, but doesn’t even suspect it, or recognise it in others. This is brought out from the start of my quotation as James emphasises how adeptly her eyes take his measure, assess and categorise him, sifting through the ‘types’ she’s encountered in her experience. Even though Strether is 20 years older, the implication is that he’s nowhere near as sharp an observer of people as she is.

That image of the compositor ‘scattering type’ was what arrested my attention initially. James’s imagery in this novel is often as vivid and unusual as this, and it’s something I intend to return to. Here I think it adds a shade of irony in Miss Gostrey’s appraisal of him: there’s something a little, I don’t know, mechanical about her assessing of Strether here. Yes, she’s a much more perceptive observer than him, but there’s something a bit chilling about her systematic scrutiny and ‘pigeon-holing’ of him.

Here also James sets out from the start of the novel how lacking in analytical capacity Strether is; he’s the ‘reverse’ of her in terms of perception, and he doesn’t even ‘suspect’ that this ‘opposition’ between them should perhaps have given him pause (‘might well have shrunk from submitting to’ if he had). The portrayal of Strether then here is critical, it emphasises his shortcomings – and doesn’t bode well for the mission he’s on (to determine whether Chad Newsome has gone to the bad in Paris) – but it’s also sympathetic, I feel; his cluelessness is endearing, unworldly (whereas Maria’s sharp eyes are slightly scary, her free-handed pigeon-holing just a touch heartless).

The sentence structure in this passage is, I’d say, about low-to-medium in the scale of complexity in the novel as a whole. As I said last time, there were whole pages where at the end of them I had little idea what had been expressed. The reader, as Leavis complained, has to work hard to understand; he describes the late novels as ‘alembicated’ specimens – a splendid word I had to look up: it means ‘over-refined, excessively subtle, precious’, and I wouldn’t entirely disagree with this assessment of James’s late style. But unlike Leavis, I think the effort demanded of the reader to make sense of these elaborately qualified and hedged sentences is worth the rewards accruing.

A few pages later we see another example of Strether’s character that will become increasingly apparent in the novel: his inability to ‘enjoy’ his life experience, to ‘live’, in fact. He and Maria are walking the ancient city walls of Chester, and he’s postponed arranging to meet up with Waymarsh to do so. She notices him repeatedly looking at his watch:

“You’re doing something that you think not right.”

It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as that?”

“You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”

“I see” – he appeared thoughtfully to agree. Great is my privilege.”

“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with yourself. Your failure’s general.”

“Ah there you are!” he laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett [his home town in New England]. That’s general.” [p. 64]

Miss Gostrey’s analysis of him here is again perceptive and accurate, but although James shows it with some sympathetic irony – she seems to be urging him to allow himself to enjoy an experience, to relax into it – there’s also a whiff of sharpness in it once more.

Stether’s reaction is initially to blush because she’s perceived what’s going on in his mind: his sense of guilt. This embarrassed reaction is something we’ll see in him repeatedly as he deals with the more sophisticated and worldly set of Chad Newsome in Paris. He’s out of his depth in this mission. And again I feel we don’t dislike or disparage him for his failings; he’s just a flawed, floundering human being – like the rest of most of us, as Betsy said in a comment on my previous post on this novel.

His awkward, slightly apologetic excuse, that his inability to enjoy is due to his Woollett upbringing – that of a puritanical, commerce-fixated and narrow-minded social circle dominated by Mrs Newsome – is both naïve and evasive, and we surely feel more for him here than we smile at Miss Gostrey’s abrasive challenging him. His blush is at least natural, unlike her singling out his ‘failure’.

Strether goes on, trying to dig himself out of the hole he’s in:

“Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn’t, poor thing,” Stether continued, “any one to show it how. It’s not like me. I have somebody.”

They pause, and Miss Gostrey ponders these words, ‘full of an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of understanding the effect of things.’ She agrees with him, and wishes he would let her ‘show [him] how’. His reply is charming: “Oh I’m afraid of you!” This is one of his better qualities, even though it’s displayed here with some irony on his part. He can be disingenuously honest about his deficiencies when it comes to human interaction. He’s not completely hopeless.

She laughingly disagrees with him – otherwise they wouldn’t so quickly have fallen into each other’s company as they have. He must, she concludes, trust her.

“I think I do! – but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind if I didn’t. It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say,” Strether continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

Despite the semi-colon in that bit of dialogue – a structure usually seen as something to be avoided in prose fiction –  works to humorous effect here. Strether has enough gumption to point out to his companion’s teasing that his lack of sophisticated confidence disconcerts him, and his confession highlights the difference between them to his advantage, strangely. This exchange also further develops the lightly comic but subtle dynamic in this developing relationship. Are they flirting? If so, who is setting the pace? How can Strether succeed on his mission with Chad if he’s so easily wrong-footed by a much younger person? We realise, surely, that he’s doomed to failure, and we feel for him. His rueful acknowledgement that he falls far short of her in terms of social poise, self-confidence and perception redeems him.

There I’d better stop. I’ve only reached a few pages into the narrative, and I have so many more examples I plan to explore that demonstrate, I hope, why I disagree with so many commentators’ criticism of this novel. Its linguistic complexity is an essential part of its overall effect; I can’t think of another writer who can convey so much, with such subtlety, delicacy and wit, in passages of this kind. It’s amazing to think that James didn’t physically write this prose: he dictated it to his secretary.

Henry James, The Ambassadors: initial thoughts

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Henry James, The Ambassadors. Penguin Classics, 2003. First published in 1903 in 12 instalments in The North American Review, then in book form the same year.

 This is not going to be a review of Henry James’s The Ambassadors – one of his notoriously ‘difficult’ late novels. It’s more an account of my experience of it. On reading it for the first time I found it such heavy going; I would read a page or two and find I’d taken in almost nothing of what was written. The style was so convoluted, there was so little happening – most of the text consists of highly civilised people having long conversations in which the characters’ meaning was almost never clearly or overtly stated.

When I’d finished the novel I reread (for the first time in many years) FR Leavis’s essay, ‘The Late James’, in The Great Tradition (1948) – a crucial influence on post-war English literary criticism that was being superseded by the ‘new criticism’ when I started my undergraduate studies in literature in the early seventies. Here’s a sample of his response to this novel.

The energy demanded for its reading, he begins, is ‘disproportionate to the issues…presented.’ As in the other late James novels, his technique had come ‘to exhibit an unhealthy vitality of undernourishment and etiolation…a tendency towards “overtreatment”…with its complexities and exhausting delicacies and its incapacity for directness’.  He suggests that the ‘trouble with the late style is that it exacts so intensely and inveterately analytic an attention that no sufficient bodied response builds up’. The reader doesn’t feel in this late style ‘a rich and lively sensibility freely functioning.’

Yes, I thought, that echoes and vindicates my own difficulties (and what I presumed to be deficiencies) in reading The Ambassadors.

In Leavis’s The Common Pursuit (1952) he’s even harsher. ‘The Ambassadors still seems to me so feeble a piece of word-spinning that I should have been inclined to dismiss it as merely senile if James hadn’t himself provided an explanation in telling us that it had been conceived as a short story [which James was then led mistakenly into] fluffing out…to the bulk and pretensions of a major work…[it remains] wholly boring.’ [Those ellipses are all mine.]

Yet James, in his Preface to the New York edition of the collected fiction, reproduced in this Penguin Classics edition, proclaimed it his personal favourite, ‘frankly, quite the best, “all round”, of all my productions.’ What was I missing? And as I read Leavis again I thought, no, that’s too harsh; this novel needs further scrutiny.

I started dipping into the text again to gather some thoughts and remind myself of the novel’s elements. As I did so my response to what I was rereading was very different from the negativity first time round, an initial reaction that chimed very much with Leavis’s. Returning to it was like reading a different novel – and confirmed, perhaps, the spirit of a statement I recall from my student days along the lines of ‘literary criticism is a reasoned discussion of one’s response to a second reading of a text’ (not an exact quotation, and I can’t remember who came up with the original, but I think that’s a reasonable approximation to the essence of the thing.)

So I shall now attempt to explain what I learned from this very different second reading.

The plot of The Ambassadors isn’t in the least complicated, and it’s not a spoiler I hope to summarise it here. Lambert Strether is a refined, buttoned-up New Englander dispatched by his formidable fiancée Mrs Newsome (she’s a widow) as her ‘ambassador’ to Paris to bring home her son Chad (who’s in his late twenties); she fears he’s been lured into a seedy relationship with a bad woman, and needs to be taken back to his rightful place at the head of the family manufacturing business. What could be simpler?

But once in Paris, Strether falls under its spell, and begins to have doubts about his mission – and the narrow-minded attitudes that sent him on it. He finds Chad to be more distinguished, sympathetic and kind than he remembered him as a younger man in New England – he’s become a true gentleman. And the woman with whom Chad is indeed involved, Comtesse Marie de Vionnet, he thinks is ‘wonderful’; he’s charmed by the two of them, and by the city (and woman) that he believes have brought about this transformation and improvement in the young man. He believes what he’s told: that theirs is a ‘virtuous’ relationship. Only when he chances upon the ocular evidence that they are, in fact, in a sexual liaison – sees them as they really are – is he forced to acknowledge the reality.

But that’s when the shape of the novel further develops what EM Forster called, in Aspects of the Novel (first published in 1927), the symmetrical shape or ‘pattern’ of an ‘hour-glass’ – a process that had already started to take shape when Strether began to have misgivings about his mission. He decides not to follow Mrs Newsome’s instructions, and urges Chad to stay in Paris, and not to abandon Mme de Vionnet – with whom he seems at times almost in love himself. To his dismay, Chad announces that’s precisely what he intends to do; he’s going willingly back to New England and will happily throw himself into his mother’s staid world of commerce and polite society. Strether realises that his hopes of marriage to Chad’s mother are now neither feasible nor desirable.

As I said at the start, I hope that summary doesn’t spoil any potential new reader’s enjoyment of the novel. I’d contend that its plot is its least interesting feature. What is of importance, it seems to me, is the way, to use one of Leavis’s favourite critical terms, it’s ‘realised’: the way Strether’s capacity for discrimination undergoes a radical shift. Although he never truly ‘sees’ other people and situations with full understanding, he does undergo a kind of epiphany. His famous advice to Chad’s young friend Little Bilham to ‘live’, enjoy his youth and life to the full, not to make the mistakes he himself had made in letting life pass him by, joyless, takes on a new significance. Although it may be too late for Strether to find the ‘reparation’ he hoped for, he can at least now acknowledge where (and how, perhaps why) he went wrong, and starts to see the likes of Chad, Marie, and, more especially Mrs Newsome, for who they really are.

Now I find I’ve gone on so long I haven’t adduced any evidence from the text to illustrate how I came to my own reading epiphany in responding to this novel, and came to appreciate its subtlety and intelligence. Second time round I also found it remarkably witty, at times very humorous and funny. Yes, the style will always seem over-elaborate and requiring hard work from the reader, but I’d urge you to persevere, if you struggle with its often baffling, meandering syntax, to find the rewards of the ‘genius’, as even Leavis acknowledged, in James’s fiction. Not for nothing did he place Henry James prominently among his top three novelists in the great tradition of literature written in English. So I’m going to need at least a second post to try to show what it is in the text, the language and technique of James that caused the scales finally to fall from my eyes – in a way rather like they did for Strether.

Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs

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Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs, Faber 2016; 20151

The only other fiction by Edna O’Brien (1930-2024) that I recall reading is The Country Girls trilogy of novels, published in the early 1960s. They famously caused outrage in establishment Ireland for their frank depiction of sexuality, and in particular female sexuality. At that time the deeply Catholic country wasn’t ready for such transgressive and challenging fiction about social and religious restrictions and attitudes that she portrayed as stifling and unhealthy – especially for women.

The Little Red Chairs is one of her last novels, and is very different from that early trilogy, not surprisingly. It’s formally inventive, with a narrative that shifts tenses and focus abruptly. Thematically and in content it also veers from one apparent genre to another, producing some startling contrasts.

It begins with what could be described as an old-fashioned comical account of goings-on in a sleepy rural Irish village. There are bar bores and eccentrics that wouldn’t be out of place in the fiction of James Joyce (albeit not with the mindset of Dubliners). Into this unsuspecting setting arrives a charismatic East European self-styled faith healer who calls himself ‘Dr Vladimir’.

Here the narrative develops into an offbeat romance. His landlady, Fidelma, unhappy in her unfulfilling marriage, unwisely falls for him, and sets out to seduce him. He’s unchivalrously open to her advances.

Then things take a very sinister turn. His true identity is revealed, and Fidelma’s life is blown up. She finds herself working as an office cleaner in London, at times sleeping rough or in insalubrious hostels. Some people show her kindness, but others are happy to exploit her. This section is a powerful indictment of the iniquities of urban capitalism and endemic racism/sexism.

The final part of the novel moves into yet another mode – which I won’t go into here to avoid spoilers. I hope it’s not giving too much away to point out that the title refers to the placing, in April 2012, of 11,541 red chairs on a Sarajevo street to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the siege of that city by Bosnian Serb forces – one empty chair for every citizen killed during the 1425 days of that terrible time. The children who died were represented by 643 smaller chairs.

It’s a novel that I found difficult to place. Maybe because of these subversive shifts of tone and plot, and the slippery narrative voice(s). The powerful impact of its central and final sections was undermined by the incongruously comical opening. It was too much of a stretch for me, ultimately, to accept the central plot premise – although it’s also, oddly, a brilliant concept. Perhaps that’s the problem: it’s too high-concept. It was very highly praised on publication, so I’m in a minority in responding less enthusiastically.

April

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Just back from a month in Spain, house- and cat-sitting for our son and his family while they visited his in-laws in S. America. It was good to have a change of scene, culture and climate. This is what I’ve been reading en route and while there:

Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson. Translated from the Spanish (as usual) by Margaret Jull Costa. Penguin, 2024; 20211. I’ve read a good deal of this author’s work (links to posts about them can be found by searching his name in the search box), and this was sadly his last novel: he died in 2022. This was not his finest; at over 600pp it sprawled a little too much – but Marías even when sprawling is always entertaining and bracing. Most of the characters have appeared in his earlier spy thrillers – the eponymous Tomás, who’d been recruited to MI5 as a student at Oxford, then trained by the urbane Bernard Tupra. His semi-estranged wife, Bella, featured centrally in Bella Isla.

Tomás is tempted by Tupra out of retirement and an edgy reconciliation with Bella – one last assignment. He’s given details of three women living in a northwestern Spanish town, one of whom is a member of the IRA who’d been involved in bomb attacks while liaising with the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA in the eighties. His mission is to get to know all three and…well, deal with her (‘take her out of the picture’ is how the sinister Tupra puts it). Much of the subtlety and complication of the narrative involves Tomás grappling with his finer feelings and sense of betrayal and duplicity as he gets to know the three women more intimately, in conflict with the imperative to stop this person a) getting away with mass murder, and b) committing another such act. Besides, what if he takes out the wrong woman?

There are the usual layers of literary allusion and quotation, especially Shakespearean (and in particular that sanguinary play, Macbeth); a recurring phrase, that haunts and taunts Tomás, is ‘Nought’s had, all’s spent’. The significance of this enigmatic statement shifts and reforms itself as Tomás’s compromised position develops.

I shall miss these flawed characters and the nuanced narrative poise of this fine author.

Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and her German Garden. VMC 1985; 18981. The author moved with her husband, the German aristocrat Count von Arnim, to his rural estate, 90 miles north of Berlin. At its heart was a 17C castle, later a convent, but it and the estate had been uninhabited and neglected for over 25 years. The building was semi-derelict, and the grounds overgrown and weed-filled.

The Elizabeth who narrates this slightly fictionalised account of that period of her life loves the solitude the estate provides, and the haven it provides for her to read and tend the garden. There are rather too many detailed accounts of what plants she cultivates and how she arranges the borders; there’s a semblance of plot and narrative variation in the sequence of demanding female guests she entertains – much to the consternation and disapproval of her husband, whom she unflatteringly refers to always as ‘the man of wrath’. He expounds some pretty horrible misogynistic views about the status and shortcomings of women: they are just below ‘children and idiots’ in his estimation.

It’s a strange, meandering novel/memoir, and a touch too whimsical for my taste.

Kate Grenville, Restless Dolly Maunder. Canongate, 2024. This was one of the novels Mrs TD brought with her to Spain. I’d read and enjoyed this Australian author’s earlier novel The Secret River; this one also arises from the history of her ancestors after emigration (or transportation) to Australia.

Its theme is presented in a more sustained and overt way than von Arnim is prepared to commit to: the terrible restrictions and humiliations imposed on women in patriarchal late-19C – early 20C society. Dolly is a clever, spirited girl, but her ability to make something of her life is severely curtailed by societal and familial expectations. That’s why she’s so restless, always questing for a new venture, a new challenge.

Unfortunately I found this led to a repetitive narrative structure: she moves from one business to another (hotels or hospitality – considered acceptable for a woman) with her feckless husband. It’s nevertheless an interesting account of Dolly’s struggle for some kind of autonomy in a world where women are considered second-class (as Elizabeth found with her ‘man of wrath’). The last few pages provide much-needed background and context – I might have responded more positively to the novel if this had come earlier.

Catalonia was as lovely as ever, and we had a memorable trip to the dramatic mountaintop basilica and monastery of Montserrat to see ‘la Moreneta’ – the black Madonna.