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Late James’, in The Great Tradition (1948) – a crucial influence on post-war English literary criticism that was being superseded by the ‘new criticism’ when I started my undergraduate studies in literature in the early seventies.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.