Good For You

Two introductory comments: first, I have read 'The Ambassadors' before, so my comments on Book I/Chapter 1 are colored by my (dimly-remembered) impressions (refreshed by the synopsis printed on the back cover of my copy of the book) of what occurs later in the novel; second, I have never participated in a book club of any sort and am unfamiliar with the protocol but, following the instructions of our illustrious leader, I will jump in and hope that my approach to this exercise does not constitute a major faux pas.

What I enjoyed most about chapter 1 this time around (of which the posted quote, as I read it, seems to be an excellent summary) is the way James lays the foundation for what I recall is to come. Strether has clearly not come to Europe for pleasure; the business he must attend to is something he obviously feels is worth the effort; yet he's not anxious to get started on his mission quite yet or to be reminded (via the meeting with Waymarsh) of the place he has temporarily left behind. It seems to me that the 'detachment in his zeal' is an indication that his task, while being one he feels it necessary to undertake, is not one that carries much personal significance. The 'curiosity in his indifference' is something I'm still struggling to interpret to my own satisfaction: is it an indication that, while coming to Europe for a purpose other than pleasure (and thus being ostensibly indifferent to the pleasures the trip may provide), he nonetheless wants to discover and experience whatever pleasures this new environment might afford; or is it that he wonders why he is unable to enjoy the pleasures of a change of scene; or is it a combination of the two? His encounter with Maria Gostrey suggests all three possibilities to me--he has declined sightseeing invitations from his shipmates and delayed his meeting with Waymarsh only to go on a stroll with a woman he knows virtually nothing about, something I doubt he would ever feel free to do in Woolett; he seems to want to enjoy himself yet seems unable to do so, and is stopped in his tracks by the 'unjoyful' appearance of Waymarsh. In any event, the sense I was left with at the end of the chapter is that Strether is beginning to feel mightily conflicted: while he cannot escape the commitment that brought him to Europe, he seems to be showing signs that he would, in his heart of hearts, prefer to let Maria Gostrey take him by the hand and show him all the new and different (and unconventional) things Europe has to offer.

And we're off. My deep thanks to JKM for breaking the champagne bottle and venturing the first post. Her comment makes for an auspicious beginning.

I don't know how many times I've read this novel; latterly, I've been dipping into its later chapters and reading for a while. But just as JKM read the novel long ago, so Lambert Strether has been to Europe once before, thirty years earlier. He is, however, anything but jaded; the prior visit has served as a cue, pointing not to what he has experienced before but to what he ought to experience more attentively. This is made clear in a lovely little passage about walking on the walls of Chester; that he has been here once before "instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling..."

The theme of revisiting is a useful one to bear in mind. If you're reading this book for the first time, don't try to untangle its densities, don't go after elusive references with the determination of a terrier. Let things go, and serve, as Lambert's first trip to Europe now does for him, to enrich a second reading, which, I am fairly sure, you will regard as your first. Don't be impatient with this now; don't wish that you could put a first reading under your belt while you slept. Accept, as Maria Gostrey insists, your fate. When you read The Ambassadors next time, and come across the following,

"Well, she's more thoroughly civilized - !" If "More thoroughly than whom?" would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

you will hear a muffled thud in the recesses of your memory.

The Ambassadors is a very fateful book. The quiet gleam of expectant pleasure that peeps out everywhere here does little to presage what fate has in store for Strether. It would be better not to fix on his momentary happiness, in the company of the charming younger American woman, but to look rather to his wakening senses - which is the same thing, in James, as to speak of his wakening intelligence. Maria Gostrey lights him up because she attends to him, and if she is an unostentatious Sherlock Holmes at quick character inference, Strether will prove to be a far more receptive and capable Watson.

On their walk through Chester, Maria gently dares Strether to enjoy himself more. Strether is enjoying himself, but he is also feeling very guilty about doing so. At home, in Woolett, he has no doubt spent his contented hours by the fire, or on country walks. But the pleasure at hand is of a different order; it is both more intense and more particular than an American pleasure. It is above all not erotic. Whatever Maria's entanglements might be, Strether's commitments, even though they're as yet unspecified, palpably prevent his looking forward to more than the odd hour of Maria's sparkling companionship. The possibility of a romantic engagement with her is never breathed, and James does what he can to keep it out of imaginative view. The surest way of doing this, of course, is his presentation of Maria as a cicerone, an experienced (read "used") guide to Europe for clueless Americans. She is both too young for Strether and too sophisticated - more civilized, as he has said, than an unnamed someone else. So the scope of Strether's pleasure is confined to what is right before him: Chester and Maria's knowingness. Thus confined, it is nevertheless immense - guiltily great. Strether is at some risk of floating off like a helium balloon, not because he's falling in love with Maria but because Maria has opened his pores to Europe.

No, rather than thinking about Strether's high spirits, it is better to bear in mind this chapter's last word: "joyless." It refers to Waymarsh, the old but no longer very close friend of Strether's who will accompany him on his mission. Strether's joylessness, as we shall see, is not simply an American's unhappiness at finding himself outside of America, but also a judgment on European surroundings. To this upright and decent American lawyer, they give no joy at all. The baleful implication is that Strether would be wrong to take delight, and of this doom our friend is all too aware.

This is my first reading of Ambassadors. I've read other James -- Portrait, of course, and What Maisie Knew. But I'm not an experienced James reader, so most of the first chapter went by in a muddle of learning how to read him again.

After reading the first three chapters, i understand why you chose this book. Americans abroad, indeed. I don't know if you consider it to be tangents to make connections between one's own experiences in Europe and those of the characters in the novel, but I hardly see how I can read and comment on it otherwise.

But before I talk about any of that -- it fits better into chapter two or three, anyway, there's the issue of Mr. James' language. It's so convoluted that I begin to forget what I have read even before I've finished reading it. Convoluted, opaque, indirect. He never refers to a character by name if they can be called "our friend" or "his friend's companion" or "her compatriot" or some other pointer once or twice removed from the actual character so instead of a simple triangle of people, there's a web of relationships and redirects, always arriving at the same three points, but as though reflected in a mirror from slightly different angles. And with time and place, the same thing. It's dizzying. At the beginning of the post I meant to ask why this is so, why James writes that way, but now I think of course, it's meant to induce vertigo and confusion. James wants me to feel muddled, and slightly nauseated, and spun all around, just as an American does when set down in Europe. Just as I've felt many times (though I fancy myself cosmopolitan) upon arrival there. Strether was burdened only by his double-consciousness; the poor reader has a consciousness multiplied by funhouse mirrors.

"I come from Woollett, Massachusetts." ... "You say that," she returned, "as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst."

This is so precisely how I feel about where I come from, and exactly the tone that I use when telling it to people. A hundred years after James wrote, I still feel the embarrassment of the provincial. And I'm glad of it. Our country is far too full of Waymarshes, who are not at all interested in what they do not know and what they have not seen.

Biscuit - Try reading the book aloud. This, I think, is the key to the late James style: it is spoken, not written (as indeed it was - to a stenographer). You are quite right about James's indirection, but wrong, I believe, to attribute it to a desire to confuse. On the contrary, the substitutes for characters' proper names, invariably prefaced by a possessive pronoun, reinforce a relationship, whether between characters or between a character and the reader.

Now that I think of it, this is where the complexity of James's style really has its center. There are few, if any, genuinely free-standing entities in the later novels. Everything exists in relation to something else; everything is qualified. There is no "Paris." There is the Paris of Strether's youth (with Tuileries's smoking ruins), and the Paris of the novel's present; there is Strether's Paris and there is Waymarsh's, and none of these multiple cities is the same.

Consider the way James winds up his description of Strether's person, as Strether crosses the hotel garden to join Maria.

A perpetual pair of glasses astride of the fine ridge, and a line, unusually deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to Strether's appointment.

In order to comprehend such writing, you have simulate the fictional topography; you have to stand where each of the three persons mentioned here are standing, and see the world from all three perspectives. The hypothetical observer is a device of which James is quite fond; nothing in the world would have induced him to commit the vulgarity of replacing it with "you." Notice the echoes of attentiveness: Miss Gostrey's, the observer's. Everybody is watching everybody else very closely. The curious thing is that this attentiveness is anything but "psychological." James's people don't try to figure one another out; rather, they let a firm understanding rise up on a mountain of discrete observations. Motive means nothing; behavior is everything. James might say that his novels are condensations, vast reductions of the real-time stream of impressions; his selection, at any rate, of the important items in the "catalogue," presented in the interest of helping "the attentive reader" (you) to understand what he is showing you.

Actually, I find it even more difficult to focus on difficult text when spoken aloud; I'm a terrible listener, even to myself. Also, I use up my voice reading aloud to the toddler, so I have none to spare for Mr. James. In any case, it's possible that you meant "read the book more carefully, biscuit" and just said "out loud" because for most people that will make them read more carefully as well, and it seems more polite than telling me point-blank I'm not paying enough attention...

Of course I'm not paying enough attention. We left "enough attention" behind in the last millennium. All of us, even when paying our best attention, can't hope to pay as much attention as one of James' contemporaries, paying their best attention.

So I accept, to some extent, your contention that James did not intend to confuse the attentive reader, that the confusion is primarily a side effect of my not being as attentive a reader as he intended to read his books.

You say the novel's not psychological, but from what I've read so far, it seems very psychological indeed. James makes all kinds of statements about Strether's psychological state, including the very quote you've used for this chapter! And look at the very beginning of the book, in the very first paragraph:

The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment. They would dine together at the worst, and, with all respect to dear old Waymarsh—if not even, for that matter, to himself—there was little fear that in the sequel they shouldn’t see enough of each other. The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive—the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first “note,” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe in quite a sufficient degree.

So many words to say that Strether thought he wanted to see his friend but actually didn't (or at least had mixed feelings about it). (And no wonder, since the friend's so joyless...). That's all motive, no behavior at all. It isn't that I object to all the words, not at all, but what's inside Strether's head is a lot of confusion, yearning mixed with guilt mixed with duty mixed with memory. So it seems to me that at least some of the confusion of which I wrote, above, is not due only to my lazy 21st century lack of attention, but also the effect of being inside Strether's confused head. And James is the person who put me inside of Strether's confused head. Therefore, he must intend, in part, to make me feel confused; not to be mean, but to make me feel like Strether.

Now, if he put me inside Strether's head for a while, and then dumped me suddenly out on the side of a highway in New Jersey -- that would be plain mean.

R J Keefe advises against a "psychological" reading of James's people, and I take that as good advice. Of course, I was about to do just that with "... he (Strether) both wanted extremely to see him (Waymarsh) and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay ...." which is neatly sidestepped as the prescribed text for Chapter I, and for good reason: it exposes some emotions, or a mixture of emotions that would be best avoided. On this my second reading of The Ambassadors, I take "... he both wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay ...." as the full, exploded form of James's " he hung fire," " he hung poised" which can be seen as a "condensation", R J's apt expression. James uses that curious phrase "hang fire" at least half a dozen times further in The Ambassadors (and other novels, beginning with Portrait), and it seems he does so with the admonition, apparently: Stay away from the psychology. My first time through I did little more than mark the "hang fires", not making the above connection.

Thank you, Richard, for making such a useful connection - for finding the "full, exploded" sense of "hanging fire." I don't know where this locution comes from - it sounds military; James can't have made it up - and it took several novels to teach me its gist.

As for taking the phrase to mark a moment of standing back from understanding, I thank you even more. I can't say often enough that James's fiction is "about" paying attention, and/but this means avoiding speculation - which is, of course, what "psychologizing" amounts to.

Yes, it has to do with the failure of firearms and explosives to fire or explode; and it was picked up and used in the same sense in the field on civilian hunting expeditions. And then in the latter half of the 19th Century after Nobel's introduction of dynamite, the expression was used in the mining and construction industries. What I find curious is: Where did James pick it up? During James' time the blasting science, materials and techniques were being perfected, and early, pioneering workers developed the techniques resulting in the death of workers investigating "hang-fires." Was this reported in the newspapers? I'd like to think that James was sympathetic to such reports, but haven't found any evidence to support it. A few years ago I searched The New York Times of the period for "hang fire," but found it used only in the extended sense of a tension-filled delay as in (and I quote from memory) "Contractor hangs fire about plumbing upgrades in City Hall." I remember that because "plumbing upgrades" is in my area of expertise. Nothing about blasting disasters.

Sorry to go off on a tangent like this.

Many thanks, Richard, for sharing your research on "hanging fire"!

It has always been my assumption that Henry James picked up this phrase - which, even though I didn't know what it meant, I took to be military or at least gun-related - from one of his younger brothers, both of whom served (unlike Henry and William) in the Civil War. It's not that he wouldn't have heard it from anyone else, but rather that it came from thoroughly "normal" siblings whom he loved. Adopting the phrase might have conferred a speck of the "manliness" that was otherwise so conspicuously absent from his makeup.

American lawyer Waymarsh disembarks at Liverpool; he is not bothered by the absence of his long-time friend and coworker, Strether, on the dock. Without hesitating Waymarsh telegraphs ahead to Strether for a room reservation at what, apparently, is understood to be the next stage of their joint itinerary, a hotel in Chester. He then (or after a short wait for a "paid reply"?) boards a steam-engined river boat (is this "the nearing steamer" of paragraph one?) for the trip up the River Dee(?) to Chester.

I ask these basic, housekeeping questions because I think the first two paragraphs of Chapter One contain important information, info that impinges on everything else in the story; and I'm having difficulty getting past Chapter Three without continually returning to a poorly understood opening. Besides, I've never been good at keeping house.

Strether is elated, or, perhaps I should say, reassured by Waymarsh's telegram, by its lack of anxiety: he asks for a room "only if quiet"---that's the old Waymarsh! Is this part of their "secret principle," their long-time understanding of each other, the fact that they require few verbal reassurances from each other?

And "the nearing steamer": how is that the first "note of Europe"? Were such river boats only to be seen in Europe?

How is Miss Gostrey's presence at the glass cage in the hotel at the very moment of Strether's arrival to be explained? I can only guess that passenger lists of those on board departing and arriving ships were transmitted back and forth through the Atlantic Cable; and the grapevine must have been very effective tracking the movements of the relatively few Americans coming and going.

And thanks for the James background information concerning the mysterious expression: yours is a much more plausible explanation.

Richard - Waymarsh has been in England for some time before Strether arrives at Liverpool on the steamer from America. Liverpool was the usual port of entry until the development of Southampton; it is very near to the much older city of Chester, which is where "nice" people might spend a few days if they weren't heading straight for London. The "secret principle," which of course James doesn't spell out, seems to me to be a respect for the other's autonomy, and Waymarsh's not being at the dock means that something else will strike the first note of Europe for Strether. Waymarsh, in short, will not be his guide - an important trifle. Waymarsh and Strether are very old friends who have fallen somewhat out of touch; they are not co-workers. Indeed, Waymarsh has piled up a small fortune as an attorney, while Strether has been making do as the editor of Mrs Newsome's little "review."

The initial encounter with Miss Gostrey is, I believe, a coincidence.

" With which they walked on again together while she answered, as they went, that the most "hopeless" of her countryfolk were in general precisely those she liked best. All sorts of other pleasant small things--small things that were yet large for him--flowered in the air of the occasion; but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations. Two or three, however, in truth, we should perhaps regret to lose. The tortuous wall--girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands--wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walk in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his due. He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up. "You're doing something that you think not right."

Having to go back so often to Chapter One is embarassing. At each reading I picked up on the Wordsworth echoes (especially at "Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things for Strether.") of this passage, but was too lazy to go back and read the (longer) Ode from beginning to end. Wordsworth's Ode must be the source of Strether's "obsession," and result in his "terror." My God! what would Mr Waymarsh, Esq., of Milrose, Connecticut think or say if Strether (involuntarily) started spouting:

"O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!"

What I don't understand, here, is:"It was with Waymarsh he should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was his due." I can see Strether's sharing it with Waymarsh thirty years ago, but now there is only his terror of sharing anything at all.

I sympathize with Strether, in part. During my Wordsworth days, which extended for one or two or three years:), I had several stanzas ofOde: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by heart. I preferred, however, reading it out loud---out of earshot, of course. Despite some stilted language, the words of the Ode really flow.