Good For You

It strikes me, from the hints Strether drops, that, despite his comments to the contrary, Mrs. Newsome is very strong, at least when it comes to controlling the others around her (and getting them to do her dirty work). She's an invalid, all right, paralyzed by her provincial views but not by any physical condition. The spectre of Mrs. Newsome is so much less appealing than Maria, with her more open mind, as demonstrated by her response to Strether's conviction that the 'wicked woman' in Paris is really bad for Chad: 'Oh I don't know. One never does--does one?--beforehand. One can only judge on the facts.'

One of the most interesting things in this chapter, to me, is Strether's contrast between Mrs. Newsome, as Queen Elizabeth, and Maria, as Mary Stuart, particularly following on Waymarsh's equation, in Book I: Chapter 3, of the Catholic church with the 'monster' of Europe. Now we are presented with the Protestant Queen vs. the Catholic Queen, with Strether once again torn between the religion in which he was raised and the new religion with which he is being confronted in Europe.

As I reread this chapter, which is rather longer than the chapters of Book First, and which consists entirely of a single conversation, between Strether and Maria, and very nearly a single setting, a theatre, I was reminded with mounting excitement of the serpent in the garden. Maria, of course, is the serpent, and Strether is the man who succumbs to the temptations of a questionable type of knowledge - self-knowledge. Self-knowledge requires us to look in the mirror, and looking in the mirror courts the risk of vanity. Better not to know! (Waymarsh is a walking manifestation of this philosophy.) Maria asks Strether questions that have never been asked, and in answering them he discovers what he knows, and like all discoveries this one cannot be reversed. If you have the time, reread the chapter from the start with this idea in mind, and watch Strether glimpse, for the first time, the contents of his own mind.

Of course, James has reversed all the polarities. The serpent and the knowledge are good. And the final exchange, in which Strether confesses that he stands to lose "everything" if he fails to bring Chad back to Woolett at last - now we know what he's doing in Europe - and to which Maria replies that he will, with her aid, succeed - this is deeply ironic; James has pulled the ground out from under Strether's conception of what it would be to fail generally.

JKM is right to point to the comparison to the battling faiths of famous queens. The Ambassadors is shot through with the echoes of those hostilities. Why, an important scene takes place inside Notre-Dame itself!

In my last comment, I proposed to re-read this chapter with an eye out for references to Strether's enlarged consciousness, especially those charged with discomfort or menace, and to Maria Gostrey's role in this enlargement. Although James never comes out and says so, it becomes clear to me, well before the end of the chapter, that the matters under discussion here - Chad's wickedness in Paris, Mrs Newsome's elevated character, the respective allures of Sarah Newsome Pocock and Mamie Pocock, even of the "rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use" (i e, the source of the Newsome fortune) - that all of these matters are handled, back at Woollett, with conversational formulas. No matter how often something or someone may be mentioned, it is no more than mention; there is no analysis, no probing, no doubting. Doubting jars with the note of Woollett. That's why the Strether's dinner-table talk with Maria Gostrey is so disturbing. Of course, it doesn't look disturbing to us; we're altogether used not only to talking about personal matters but to doing so while looking at them from new angles. There are no new angles at Woollett.

This is what is meant by the following passage from the beginning of the chapter:

... but our friend had meanwhile to find names for many other matters. On no evening of his life perhaps, as he reflected, had he had to supply so many as on the third night of his short stay in London...

On this night, Strether has dinner with Maria before proceeding to see a play. (The play, I'll note now, has been well chosen by Strether's friend: it concerns "a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress to do the most dreadful things." The action sets Strether to making awkward comparisons with his own mission; he expects that Chad will not prove to be "weak.") Everything about the evening is unusual, if not wholly novel. For one thing, it is so softly agreeable. This itself cracks the complacent safety of his trunkful of Woollett-related thoughts.

He had been to the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary: one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself why there hadn't.

James opens this story so slowly, forcing us to understand it from within, that instead of interpreting this sentence in light of what we know about Mrs Newsome, and about Strether's relationship to that lady, we must on the contrary mine the sentence for what we don't know. We are made to share Strether's discomfort, moreover, with the intimation that evenings out with Mrs Newsome do not compare quite favorably with this evening out with Maria. We may have suspected it before, but now we're all but sure that Mrs Newsome is a fierce lady, not gifted with pleasant good humor. She is too earnest for that! (Perhaps she is another version of The Bostonians' Olive Chancellor.) She is too earnest for little confronted dinners. And she would never wear a red velvet band around her neck, as Ms Gostrey does. The worst thing about this band, in Strether's view, is that he himself has noticed it:

What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands?

The sting here is light but reverberant, and should set a mind that hasn't confronted this recognition throbbing. Men are not supposed to notice the details of ladies' finery. They're to be charmed by the whole indivisible effect, mystified by what amounts to nothing but the swipe of their own inattentiveness. Strether feels ridiculous to recall that he once complimented Mrs Newsome - or tried to compliment her - by observing that a frill on her gown made her resemble Queen Elizabeth; the remark now seems "vaguely pathetic":

...for it seemed no to come over him that no gentleman of his age at Woollett could ever, to a lady of Mrs Newsome's, which was not much less than his, have embarked on such a simile.

Poor Strether! There is one last preparatory detail that I want to seize on before passing to the conversation. It brilliantly embodies James's immense worldliness, his acute sensitivity to the contingencies of shame and desire.

It came over him that never before - no, literally never - had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, he rare strange thing: it affected him almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience.

One might almost venture that Strether finds himself outed - as a votary of soft dinners with charming ladies.

Because I'm not sure that comments can be indefinitely long, I'll break this one up here.

James's account of Strether's conversation with Miss Gostrey, which takes place during the intervals of the play and immediately afterward, while waiting for a cab, is launched from a description of Strether's uncomfortable premonition that Chad Newsome in Paris is going to prove more difficult to deal with than the weak man on the stage. Having read The Ambassadors several times, I can never be quite sure of the point where James makes Strether's mission clear. It is probable that he never does, and that only a veteran can infer from this chapter's Q & A that Strether has been sent by Mrs Newsome to persuade her son Chad to break of his extramarital liaison and return to Woollett, both to take over the family business and to marry Mamie Pocock, his sister's sister-in-law. All of this comes out in this evening's talk, but perhaps it does not come out with bold clarity. If I have cleared up any mystifications, good for me. It is of the essence of Henry James's fictional project, however, that he has a far more ambitious objective than the retailing of plots, and if he dribbles out information for which the reader has been waiting with some impatience, it is only for the sake of showing us how his hero takes receipt of the same information.

Maria begins so provocatively that Strether's very answering is bold. She asks if he is sure that Chad's lover - we don't yet know anything about her - is "very bad for him." How can anyone ask? To entertain the possibility that a concubine might be good for a man - that softening his rough edges, teaching him conjugal manners, at the very least improving his wardrobe could begin to dissolve the terrible stain of a sinning attachment - is to set oneself utterly apart from the good people of Woollett. When Maria deprecates Strether's sputtering to say,

"Oh I don't know. One never does - does one? - beforehand?"

One can imagine Mrs Newsome's tight-lipped asseveration of disagreement. Truly, Strether ought to stop here; there is nothing that Maria can say that will dissolve the terrible stain of her open-mindedness. In response to further questions, Strether produces the crudest of clichés to describe the fallen woman; we will learn, of course, that she is anything "venal - out of the streets," but we ought to remember to ask ourselves where Strether might have got the idea that she was. As I say, the hotter the topic, the more formulaic Woollett's handling of it would be bound to be. And Woollett might be forgiven for overlooking foreign possibilities, there being no ancient, impoverished aristocracy fishing the banks of the Charles. Maria moves on to the young man, and when she asks what sort of temper he has, Strether fairly burps with discomfort.

"Well - the obstinate." It was as if for a moment he had been going to say more and had then controlled himself.

That was scarce what she wished. 

They move on to his family back at home: to his mother and his sister. To Strether, these ladies are above discussion, at least at first. It is not hard to detect the whiff of sarcasm in Maria's bland conclusions.

"He has also a sister, older than himself and married; and they're both remarkably fine women."

"Very handsome, you mean?"

This promptitude - almost, as he might have thought, this precipitation, gave him a brief drop; but he came up again. "Mrs Newsome, I think, is handsome, though she's not of courses, with a son of twenty-eight and a daughter of thirty, in her very first youth. She married, however, extremely young."

"And is wonderful," Miss Gostrey asked, "for her age?"

Strether seemed to feel with a certain disquiet the pressure of it. "I don't say she's wonderful. Or rather," he went on the next moment, "I do say it. It's exactly what I say she is - wonderful. But I wasn't thinking of her appearance," he explained - "striking as that doubtless is. I was thinking - well, of many other things." He seemed to look at these as if to mention some of them; then took, pulling himself up, another turn. "About Mrs Pocock people may differ."

Once again, Strether evades the awkward and uncertain. I would wager that thinking is precisely what he was not doing; cataloguing would be more like it. The fencing presently leads to the exchange that I have bracketed within this chapter's entry proper. It is very witty, or at any rate Maria is almost a scamp to propose that Mrs Newsome wants so to be an invalid that she would be an American if that's what it took; Strether's point is that Mrs Newsome is high-minded enough to court illness if that's what it takes.

After a breather of sorts in which Strether finds that he can parry all of Maria's thrusts, the conversation turns to the family business. It is here that he - or James - famously refuses to specify the product that the Newsome factory manufactures. James's reticence has been dismissed as coy, as thought he could never bring himself to sully the pages of his novel with the mention of some banal household item as a drain plug. And there is doubtless some merit in that judgment. But let's look at Strether's earlier assertion,

"Unmentionable? Oh, no, we constantly talk of it; we are quiet familiar and brazen about it."

It can be talked about at Woollett in the familiar and brazen ways of Woollett, but Strether is not about to sully the freshness of his evening with a pungent reminder of the rude thoughtlessness of home. In refusing to name the product to Maria, he is keeping the way it is spoken of out of his own ears.

From this reluctance Strether is pushed to another, when Maria suggests that perhaps Chad stays at Paris because he is ashamed of the not-unmentionable source of his wealth. What she is leading to, of course, is the wider suggestion that Chad is ashamed of the very aspects of Woollett that Strether is half-conscious of wishing to keep out of view. This is perilously close to imputing shame to Strether himself, and in all candor it must be said that at this point in his moral development, nothing could make Strether admit to shame on the subject of Woollett. From sensing its drawbacks to feeling ashamed of it covers a very long distance, but it is here that Strether takes the first step.

Maria grills Strether further on the true source of the Newsome fortune, behind the busy factory, and Strether acknowledges that Chad's grandfather was a dark character, one guilty of "practices." Having insisted that he himself has nothing to do with the family business, Strether is obliged to state the nature of his connection to Mrs Newsome. It is a Review, a little magazine. He edits it and she pays for it. Nobody much reads it. He insists that his name appears on the cover because

It seems to rescue me a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failure, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.

If Strether has confessed as much to himself before, he has probably never said it to anyone else, for its implied derogation of Mrs Newsome is so immediately striking. If he is such a wreck, what does that say about her? Maria feels this at once.

On this she looked at him as to say many things, but what she at last simply said was: "She likes to see it there. You're the bigger swell of the two," she immediately continued, "because you think you're not one. She thinks she is one. However," Miss Gostrey added, "she thinks you're one too. You're at all events the biggest she can get hold of." She embroidered, she abounded. "I don't say it to interfere between you, but on the day she gets hold of a bigger one - !" Strether had thrown back his head as in silent mirth over something that struck him in her audacity or felicity, and her flight meanwhile was already higher. "Therefore close with her - !"

"Close with her?" he asked as she seemed to hang poised.

"Before you lose your chance."

Although written of as partaking of "audacity or felicity," this flight of Maria's will be simply chilling to the veteran reader of The Ambassadors.

The deadliest thing that Maria has to say to Strether - if we may speaking of eye-opening speech as deadly - is perhaps her series of remarks about Chad's Parisian milieu, and the possibility that it may have improved him. This is an amplification of her opening salvo, but the conversation has already transformed Strether, who "really felt he could imagine it better now than three hours before." Perhaps the lady isn't venal. Maria spells it out:

"But there are all the same," she went on, "two quite distinct things that - given the wonderful place he's in - may have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalized. The other is that he may have got refined."

Strether stared - this was a novelty. "Refined?"

An acrobatic passage of deft ripostes soon has Strether stating that he feels in bones that the worst thing to be said about Chad is that he believes that he can do what he likes with Strether. Aside from the reference to feelings in his bones, the exchange is denuded of clues to the tone in which Strether makes this discouraged prognostication. Does he already expect to fail? Or does he believe that a successful outcome - Chad's returning to Woollett will not be his, Strether's, success? Maria doesn't enlighten us, either, but she does make another one of her own predictions.

"Nothing for you will ever come to the same thing as anything else."

In other words, Strether will not only make discriminations but fall their victim as well. It is another chilling remark, and it is not entirely erased by the somewhat forced, and very theatrical bravado, of the chapter's last couple of lines - by which point the very notion itself of what might constitute "success" for Strether has been pitched into a sea of ambiguity.

And it is only at this point that Strether gets around to sharing the nature of his mission with Miss Gostrey.