a book report, I mean review: Henry James' The Ambassadors

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The date stamp on the library book tells me I checked out The Ambassadors around the First of December, 2008, which was the very day I listened to an inspiring NPR radio essay by Ann Patchett about it. (I do some things quickly, immediately.) I renewed the book twice, six months each. Henry James himself said this novel is his finest work of art, but it is well down his own list of the order in which you should read his novels. He knew it was opaque (Patchett's word). Portrait of a Lady, for example, is farther up his read in this order list.*

I am no book reviewer. I will leave that art to my friends DS at third-storey window, Arti at Ripple Effects, and others. But after leaving foreshadowing comments here and there about my long slow progress through this book for the past year, starting here, I sort of feel I owe you at least my own version of a review. Plus, posting its completion here is a celebration. Warning: There will be mixing of metaphors.

The fact that I stuck with this book tells you something. My friends know how averse I am to reading novels, even though I was an English major. I tell myself I am quite a literary person for someone who reads so little. If Jane Austen were still writing, I would be the first to read her latest.

I'm not going to tell you much about the tale itself, which James published in 1903 as a serial in the North American Review. The plot is tame, no murders or espionage. No deadly collisions - though there are human collisions. It's the human part that kept me with it. It's about an American named Lambert Strether who goes on a mission to Paris to retrieve the son of his fiancée, a widow we never really meet in a scene. Her son Chad should be home learning to run the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts, but instead he is off doing who knows what in that worldly City of Light. What James manages to show in this wonderful book is how even a fifty-something man like Strether can learn profoundly enlightening things about himself and others, and the assumptions he makes about both.

Henry James' style both daunted me and kept me going. Not the easiest of books to read, I couldn't take many pages in one sitting. But I didn't shelve it for good, as I often do when a book doesn't arrest me.

James writes a paragraph with more words, clauses, commas and longer more compounded sentences and descriptions than you might think necessary or possible and still keep a thought alive. But when you're finished with that paragraph, you recognize that had he described the same event or thought in one succinct straightforward statement, you may have known what transpired, but you would not have arrived at the same point of human discovery. Not that he doesn't leave you constantly asking, "what the heck did that mean?" and a re-read of the same sentence three or more times to see if you can figure it out. But, if you just let the question babble on temporarily unanswered, you will eventually find what you need. His idea has to travel down the page through elaborate channels and locks for the river to deposit it into your ocean of understanding so satisfyingly.

He lays out words of detail in the tiniest attentions spread out on the bed, as if the elements of each paragraph will be packed into a travel trunk for a long extensive journey, and you must be prepared for every contingency. Or, each paragraph is a journey itself, magnifying the terrain of miniscule human flutterings deep down in their psychological interior. And at the end of one, or a collection of many, you do not feel that you traveled far for nothing. Rather, you wonder how you could have lived this long and only through this trunkful of words arrived at this destination, this understanding of a human emotion, as if you had yourself experienced all that led to it. Over and over I found myself relating to Strether - in his lack of confidence and sense of being an outsider looking in.

This craft seems to me a symbol of what James himself pointed out as the crux of the book on page one hundred and thirty-two:

"Live! . . . Don't . . . miss things out of stupidity."

Later, on page one hundred and sixty-five, little Bilham, the addressee in the dialogue I shortened with ellipses above, continues the thought in this scene:

Strether was silent a little. "Ah but he doesn't care for her--not, I mean, it appears, after all, in the sense I'm speaking of. He's not in love with her."

"No--but he's her best friend; after her mother. He's very fond of her. He has his ideas about what can be done for her."

"Well, it's very strange!" Strether presently remarked with a sighing sense of fulness.

"Very strange indeed. That's just the beauty of it. Isn't it very much the kind of beauty you had in mind," little Bilham went on, "when you were so wonderful and so inspiring to me the other day? Didn't you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to see, while I've a chance, everything I can?--and really to see, for it must have been that only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I'm doing my best."

Quite literally, James' writing slows you down in real time, so that you don't miss things. You have looked so closely, it is as if you revolved things on a digital screen, rising and falling like a telescoping robotic camera, hovering slowly and methodically over each grain of texture. This slow time allows his meanings to sink in like a long deliberate marinade - tenderizing and flavoring the final bite to perfection, which means our dear Strether gets just exactly where I myself have gotten by reading: a transformation. To write so well that a work leaves the reader feeling herself to be Strether embodied whenever an "ahh aha" comes on a page is an everlasting treasure. What multiplied the emotional impact of the book on me was the fact that I had felt a similar opening into freedom upon my own visit to Paris after my mother's death in 1997.

That voice, he had to note failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he could then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about--it was the way they sounded together that wouldn't let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed.

I warned you I would mix metaphors. You humored me and pretended you were traveling in a trunk, floating down a river, eating tasty food inside and filming the whole thing with expensive film equipment. Thank you for that.

I'm glad it took more than a year to read The Ambassadors. It stretched my brain's close reading capacity, and the pace suited the penetrating writing of Henry James. Maybe I'll renew it for another six months and read it again. I think I could finish it in half the time this go 'round. Or maybe I should read Portrait of a Lady next, which is #2 on his read in this order list in a letter he wrote. (Or, if I'm really adventurous, I'll read a different author, like maybe Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto has been on my reading list for about, oh, eight years.)

*Here are both lists James himself recommended as the order for reading his novels:

1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.

The second, more "advanced" list, includes two from the first:

1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
   
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.
   

Cover illustration for Oxford World's Classics edition of The Ambassadors; I wish I knew who the artist was. Maybe Childe Hassam?

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