Good For You

After reading this chapter (twice), I was left with such a feeling of sadness at Strether's assessment of his life as one of lost opportunities and missed connections. What summed it all up most succinctly for me was the following:

Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world--the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett--ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done anything for Mrs Newsome, have been still more ridiculous--as he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet; which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.

Later, he he asks himself whether 'the fate after all decreed for him hadn't been only to be kept', an interesting thought given what we have thus far learned about his relationship with Mrs Newsome.

Strether may feel a sense of escape, but I wonder what he has escaped (apart from the geography of Woollett)--certainly not Mrs Newsome, the prolific letter-writer and underwriter of his journey; certainly not the sentiments of Woollett, which lead him to worry that he may like Paris too much to be able to exercise any degree of authority over Chad; and certainly not his past failures, which seem to be so much more vivid to him in Paris. Perhaps he is really only on the verge of escape?

Book First, Chapter 2 plunges us into great sadness. The air of sparkling, somewhat comic mystery that give the first four chapters the feeling of very drily witty conversation is replaced by a cloud of regret. (Miss Gostrey is mentioned at the end of the chapter, but as she has remained in London, she hands Strether over, as it were, entirely to us.) Strether's life, in his latest reckoning, amounts to failure. His labors have produced nothing satisfactory; even the green covers of the Review that bear his name contain "specious contents." His failure to achieve great or even noteworthy things has been a dull sensation at Woollett and even in England, but once on the other side of the Channel it takes on the vitality of Paris itself. That vitality is what saves Strether from the utter depths of a funk. He doesn't focus on bottom lines, on the net of bad news, but adds the contemplation of his hopes, his loves, and his efforts with an appreciation of his own good intentions, into the accounting, and the wisdom to make this addition is something positively good that he has extracted from the "hinterland" of his lack of accomplishment.

The chapter frames the sunlight hours of a day in the Parisian March. We begin at what seem to me to be the offices of American Express, near the Opéra, and proceed from there (leaving Waymarsh to burrow into American newspapers) down the Rue de la Paix and into the Tuileries, where Strether almost takes a seat, in order to read the four letters from Mrs Newsome that he has just collected. The Tuileries Palace is mentioned. This edifice - which had closed the great arms of the Louvre, or would have done had the long aisle along the Rue de Rivoli been built - had been destroyed in the aftermath of France's defeat by Prussia in 1870, a brief repetition of the Terror known to history as the "Commune." Strether's remembering it dates his honeymoon to the late Sixties. Instead of stopping at its foundations (today a busy roadway), he continues along the River, which he crosses, and proceeds up the Rue du Seine to the Jardins du Luxembourg. Here he takes a seat, reads the letters, and reflects on things. Stretching his legs again, he strolls through the Latin Quarter, a neighborhood that the younger Chad had announced his intentions of moving to, in order to frequent artistic Americans and learn the best French. The announcement had perhaps been a ruse, buying Chad time to establish himself more firmly in Paris and in the very different neighborhood of the Boulevard Malesherbes, at that time a propserous but newish quarter. Thither Strether repairs, determined to start at once on the mission of persuading Chad to return to the city on a hill of Woollett.

The chapter is shot through with notes of an uneasy conscience striving to avoid actual bad faith. There is the sense of escape mentioned in the extract above. There is Strether's sense that Mrs Newsome's reassurances about the relief of his responsibilities at Woollett has about it the "hum of vain things." (We learn that the Review covers many serious topics, but that "letters" is not among them.) Suspecting that he ought not to be hearing this hum, Strether eventually pounces on the rationalization that he is, after all, dead-tired from overwork. There is a prolonged assessment of just what Strether's mission means for the kind of pleasure that he can permit himself in Paris. What sort of play, for example, is it appropriate for a crusader such as himself, charged with rescuing the Holy Chad from the Infidel's clutches, to see, even unaccompanied? There is, everywhere, the danger of liking Paris too much. What this means is put quite nicely when Strether stands opposite Chad's "high broad clear" house:

Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognize the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it."

An ability to launch the imagination is characteristic of beauty, and if Americans of Strether's day (and many Americans today) preferred the beauty of great natural vistas to the beauty of cities, that was surely because nature prompts the imagination to soar to the divine. Cities, in contrast, celebrate very human delights. As with the passage in the preceding chapter that compares Strether's excitement at being together with Miss Gostrey in public to another (more normal) man's excitement at being alone with a woman, James strikes a chord that resonates with the issues of closeted homosexuality. I don't think that Strether's sexuality is anything but hetero; sexuality is not the issue. Nationality is. Strether's bad faith springs from the suspicion (never voiced) that he is not a good, or perhaps even a real, American. Consider, for example, that Strether's response to beauty corresponds to his failure to make headway in American commerce.

The reader may well suspect that Strether is dead-tired not from overwork but from futility.

"And to that end I'm yours----til death!" Maria tells Strether.

Until that moment Strether had been completely on Mrs Newsome's clock; his sense of time was regulated by his sense of progress being made on her projects, or the present mission. During one of their first strolls together at the hotel, Strether keeps checking his watch as if he were being distracted from the true path.

Perhaps this is one thing he has escaped from.

You're definitely on the right track, Richard.

And Strether is also, at least for a time, escaping Waymarsh (and all that Waymarsh means vis-a-vis American sensibilities):

Waymarsh not only undiluted but positively strengthened, struck him as the present alternative to the young man in the balcony. When he did move it was fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at last and passing through the porte-cochère of the house was like consciously leaving Waymarsh out.

Although this escape is only temporary, as Strether plans to 'tell him all about it.'