Good For You

Ah, another serpent in the garden providing another new experience for Strether: in London, he finds himself for the first time having dinner with a woman in a public place; now, in Paris, he takes up smoking, something he never did before because 'he had never had a lady to smoke with.' Strether seems to view Miss Barrace as something of a femme fatale; her presence at what Strether supposed would be an all-male déjeuener suggests to him that the occasion may be 'in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps.' But who set the trap and to what purpose? Chad (or so Strether believes) has no idea of precisely when (or even if) Strether will visit Paris; even if, after Strether's first visit to the Boulevard Malesherbes, little Bilham immediately telegraphed to Chad of Strether's arrival, it seems curious that Chad would choose, at the outset, to encourage little Bilham to introduce Strether to a lady who smokes--quelle horreur! Or perhaps it is all quite innocent and little Bilham is simply trying to make Strether feel at home in a foreign place; after all, as Strether muses,

It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations, and that evidently here were a happy pair who didn't think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought. Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively quite as one.

Regardless of the purpose of Miss Barrace's presence, Strether is no closer to knowing anything about anything, insofar as Chad's situation is concerned, than he was before and seemingly even more confused about the approach that will be most successful in persuading Chad to come home. Perhaps he should have enjoyed a few more cigarettes with Miss Barrace on the terrace.

Despite Strether's comment of feeling 'comparatively quite as one' with Waymarsh, there are, of course, so many ways in which Strether and Waymarsh don't think at all alike, and one of the more curious (to me) examples in this chapter is Waymarsh's attitude towards Strether's mission and, if that mission is successful, his marriage to Mrs Newsome. Over dinner the evening before the luncheon with Miss Barrace and little Bilham, Waymarsh encourages Strether to 'Quit the whole job'; Strether responds 'If I miss my errand I miss [my marriage]; and if I miss that I miss everything--I'm nowhere;' to which Waymarsh replies 'What do I care where you are if you're spoiled?' Waymarsh seems to be saying that in marrying Mrs Newsome, Strether is selling out, and he will finally lose his 'teeth.' (Or perhaps there is a more cynical interpretation: Waymarsh is such an old curmudgeon that the thought of anyone being happy is abhorrent to him, i.e., misery loves company.)

Strether is now a nervous nelly when it comes to anything related to Chad: What will Chad look like when he first sees him? Will he be patched, or peeled, or what? And what will be Strether's initial reaction; how will that appear to all the observers? Strether now aspires to some kind of magnetic personality which will draw Chad through thin air permanently to his side. This all seems comical to me, specially since it all takes place in the presence of (to use jkm's expression) that old curmudgeon, Waymarsh, who has attracted Miss Barrace's attention.

The comedy begins at the beginning of the Chapter, and reminds me of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. At dinner with Waymarsh, Strether "confesses" his foray into Chad-territory. He has been "captured" (I would say "captivated") by two exotic flowers, Little Bilham and Miss Barrace, found growing there. Waymarsh cross-questions Strether about details of the "crime scene," and after receiving a series of "I-don't-know's" he says in exasperation: "Then what the devil do you know?" The fun doesn't end there. Finally:

'Waymarsh--but all relentlessly--took this in. "What do I care where you are if you're spoiled?" Their eyes met on it an instant. "Thank you awfully," Strether at last said. "But don't you think HER judgement of that--?"

"Ought to content me? No."

It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again laughed. "You do her injustice. You really MUST know her. Good-night."'

Maria Gostrey's magic is at work in Strether.

I should have noted above that "HER" refers to Mrs Newsome: they are discussing Strether's motivation for pursuing Chad. In his relaxed, even gay (as the narrator says) manner, I feel Maria's handiwork.

This chapter will present the sophisticated contemporary reader with many difficulties, all of them revolving around the question, "What's the matter?" Strether and Waymarsh, having agreed to breaKfast with Little Bilham, and expecting to take this repast at a restaurant, are scandalized when Little Bilham feeds them on "Chad's mahogany," and in the company of a Parisian lady called Miss Barrace. That Miss Barrace is a lady is quite pointedly never in doubt, and that's at the heart of the American visitors' enormous surprise. To Little Bilham and the high official's daughter, nothing could be simpler or more charming than getting to know these gentlemen in a very pleasant dining room that just happens to belong to an absent friend. They seem to have no sense of the place as a den of sin, a den that any man might enter but forbidden to all ladies.

And the worst of it, of course, is that Strether is genuinely charmed. Waymarsh, for all that he makes the room "thick and hot" with his radiant disapproval, manages nonetheless to charm Miss Barrace, but Strether sees that he himself, all susceptible, stands at the verge of a very slippery slope. He resolves to act quickly and masterfully with Chad, but as we shall see in the next chapter, he is not holding enough of the right cards to trump the trick. And his encounter with Chad's apartment, with the lovely things in Chad's apartment, and with Chad's good friends ought to have taught him that he is in over his head.

He is also fatally if exaltedly frivolous. During the conversation with Waymarsh that he has had the night before, Strether keeps pointing out the temptation that he's running of "being squared" - of being seduced by the local charm and gulled into forgetting what to call a spade. Thinking of dangers very different from the ones that will eventually beset Strether, Waymarsh actually advises him to give up the mission. (He also doesn't think much of Strether's self-interest in the matter, which he regards as likely to "spoil" Strether.) But the two men continue to diverge; at the very beginning of the chapter, we're told that "Strether hadn't yet got quite used to being so unprepared for the consequences of the impression he produced."

JKM: I don't think I'd see Miss Barrace as a femme fatale. Described in another unpunctuated rush of adjectives as "mature meagre erect and eminently gay," Miss Barrace is not, apparently, pretty, and if she has a lover, it will be on the most discreet terms imaginable. Nice women who smoked were a trope at the time: don't forget Il Segreto di Susanna, the opera about the husband who's driven into murderous, jealous rages by the sniff of cigarette smoke at home. It never occurs to him that his wife smokes; she must have a lover. Of course she is in fact innocent of everything - save smoking.

Nor do I see Waymarsh as a "curmudgeon." He's grand in the rough-hewn American way, certainly, but he's also on guard. To him, Paris isn't "fun," it's a sink, and you never know what will crawl out of the drain. It's interesting to watch this aversion turn into something else as the book goes on.

Richard - Steady on. When Strether makes his "confession," he has met only Little Bilham, not Miss Barrace.

And while I think that you're right to see the hand of Maria Gostrey in Strether's responses to new circumstances, it seems plain to me that Strether is simply breathing for the first time since his honeymoon.