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A review by donato
The Ambassadors by Henry James
5.0
What would you do if you hit mid-life, en plein crise, with the realization that you hadn't really lived your life up until then, and you had to opportunity to finally live it? To get a second chance, to expiate your sins, to take things as they come (rather than as they don't come), to recreate yourself, and to end your "dreadful cheerful sociable solitude"?
If your answer is "Let me think about it", then you're a character in a Henry James novel; a character who is put into "relations" with other characters ("types"), studying their "cases", finding "connexions", having "impressions", "coming out" -- all in the name of creating a "fictive picture" [1]; a picture, however, which is indistinguishable from reality.
Here, for example, is our poor friend Lambert Strether [2] at the theatre in London with a new relation, having one of his impressions: "...it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage...the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true..." (Project Gutenberg edition, so just search for the text [3]). He's been penetrated by art (and so will you be) because it's the same as life.
That quote is also a nice display of James's style (which was hard for me to get into at first): opaque [4] and allusive; everything seems to be described through metaphor, simile. In my notes I wrote that it was like a stifling blanket; beautifully made, but impeding freedom, openness. The language is... well, I think only Henry James writes like this: it's like... embroidery, language looping, connective juxtapositions, invented phrases that are not only "beautiful", but somehow carry meaning. At first you're like, what? And then you're like, ohhhh. Oh yes, it's all so wonderful, splendid, and magnificent! [5]
So what would you do if you were an ambassador of the ideal and you realized that your mission was much more complicated than you thought, that the supposed ideal was the opposite of life? To make a moral choice or not to make a moral choice. But what is a moral choice? What is right? That is the question.
And so, in the end, like Strether "living out" a painting [6] just before his unexpected but of course expected scène à faire, we realize that, no, we are not a character in a novel, we are human, and we are free.
UPDATE 1: I must admit that this book that I at first found annoying keeps coming back, like the waves coming up onto the beach. It contains depths, like the ocean, despite what might seem like "meagre material", information held back, kept hidden, secret. One of these things that keeps coming back is how the character of Mrs. Newsome is fully realized despite the fact that she neither appears nor speaks in the entire novel. She's always there, though, watching, her "fine cold thought" permeating the air.
UPDATE 2: I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars. Because of those waves from Update 1, and because good books need better ratings on this site.
[1] In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode quotes James's preface to Portrait of a Lady, approving of Turgenev's idea of the "origin of the fictive picture" as coming from character, not from story (pg 75).
[2] Lewis Lambert Strether (as in that "awfully bad" Balzac novel), what a telling mouthful of a name.
[3] The Ambassadors
[4] Kermode would of course remind us that this is not a bad thing; in fact, a necessary thing.
[5] Of course Eliot said it better than I ever could (not talking about Henry James). Here's Kermode quoting Eliot: "...a quality Eliot always praised: ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations’, allowing a fusion in a single phrase of ‘two or more diverse impressions’..." (Eliot and the Shudder) Examples: "long slow rush", "crowded empty expensive day", "picnic on a coral strand", "monstrous alien altars", "smothered in flowers", "interpretive innocence".
[6] "The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it."
If your answer is "Let me think about it", then you're a character in a Henry James novel; a character who is put into "relations" with other characters ("types"), studying their "cases", finding "connexions", having "impressions", "coming out" -- all in the name of creating a "fictive picture" [1]; a picture, however, which is indistinguishable from reality.
Here, for example, is our poor friend Lambert Strether [2] at the theatre in London with a new relation, having one of his impressions: "...it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage...the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbour, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense; and he recognised by the same law, beyond the footlights, what he was pleased to take for the very flush of English life. He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true..." (Project Gutenberg edition, so just search for the text [3]). He's been penetrated by art (and so will you be) because it's the same as life.
That quote is also a nice display of James's style (which was hard for me to get into at first): opaque [4] and allusive; everything seems to be described through metaphor, simile. In my notes I wrote that it was like a stifling blanket; beautifully made, but impeding freedom, openness. The language is... well, I think only Henry James writes like this: it's like... embroidery, language looping, connective juxtapositions, invented phrases that are not only "beautiful", but somehow carry meaning. At first you're like, what? And then you're like, ohhhh. Oh yes, it's all so wonderful, splendid, and magnificent! [5]
So what would you do if you were an ambassador of the ideal and you realized that your mission was much more complicated than you thought, that the supposed ideal was the opposite of life? To make a moral choice or not to make a moral choice. But what is a moral choice? What is right? That is the question.
And so, in the end, like Strether "living out" a painting [6] just before his unexpected but of course expected scène à faire, we realize that, no, we are not a character in a novel, we are human, and we are free.
UPDATE 1: I must admit that this book that I at first found annoying keeps coming back, like the waves coming up onto the beach. It contains depths, like the ocean, despite what might seem like "meagre material", information held back, kept hidden, secret. One of these things that keeps coming back is how the character of Mrs. Newsome is fully realized despite the fact that she neither appears nor speaks in the entire novel. She's always there, though, watching, her "fine cold thought" permeating the air.
UPDATE 2: I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars. Because of those waves from Update 1, and because good books need better ratings on this site.
[1] In The Genesis of Secrecy, Kermode quotes James's preface to Portrait of a Lady, approving of Turgenev's idea of the "origin of the fictive picture" as coming from character, not from story (pg 75).
[2] Lewis Lambert Strether (as in that "awfully bad" Balzac novel), what a telling mouthful of a name.
[3] The Ambassadors
[4] Kermode would of course remind us that this is not a bad thing; in fact, a necessary thing.
[5] Of course Eliot said it better than I ever could (not talking about Henry James). Here's Kermode quoting Eliot: "...a quality Eliot always praised: ‘that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations’, allowing a fusion in a single phrase of ‘two or more diverse impressions’..." (Eliot and the Shudder) Examples: "long slow rush", "crowded empty expensive day", "picnic on a coral strand", "monstrous alien altars", "smothered in flowers", "interpretive innocence".
[6] "The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river—a river of which he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the name—fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short—it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking about in it."