Well, that was a slog. I mean it: a slow, long, heavy slog. If Henry James is to be celebrated, and if The Ambassadors is to represent some of his finest work, then count me out: either I've missed the appeal entirely, or I've understood what his fiction is about, and I've rejected it as ineffective.
It's shocking to think that less than 25 years separate The Ambassadors from Hemingway's Sun Also Rises. I don't mean this in terms of the topics engaged (though those were certainly different) as much as by the style and rhetoric. Reading Henry James is wearying: the number of commas, semi-colons, and sub-clauses is astounding. True, you might read him as a technician, a tactician, as a master of English prose. But I would question that presumption: there's so much stop and start here that the story itself becomes a challenge to follow. After more than 400 pages, it's enough: the syntax overwhelms. The characters cannot breathe.
Speaking of which: a great irritation of mine with The Ambassadors is how James approaches dialogue. Everything here is so oblique, so indirect. James's characters refer to "it" and "that" with frustrating regularity. The result is dialogue in search of itself: characters go back and forth, begging one another to define what "it" could be. Perhaps they were limited by social convention: maybe we grant James this point. But I find that hard to believe: people don't speak this way today, and they didn't speak that way in 1903 either. The sheer amount of allusion infuriates; the style is badly affected.
My sense, by the end of The Ambassadors, is that James wants to talk of sex, but can't bring himself to do it. All of the references to "it" and "that" are, by and large, unspoken attempts to chart the sexual relationships between characters. This novel could have been cut in half had James been willing to honestly confront the power of sexuality. Instead, the novel hides behind observation and analysis: characters are attracted to each other, but they seem, for some reason, not to become intimate. All they seem to do is think.
For that is what this novel is: an extended foray into observation, into reflection. Very little happens in The Ambassadors, but a great deal is thought. Maybe that's the modern condition: maybe that's where James carved new space as a novelist. But for my part, all of this thinking struck me as tiresome and out of balance. I'd be very confident arguing, for instance, that the emotional and physiological complexity of The Sun Also Rises at least equals that of The Ambassadors, and does so in a fraction of the words. Thought and action, thought and action: it's two steps forward, one step back. This is The Ambassadors, on repeat.
I haven't read it since college, when I was quite impressed. You might like W.M. Spackman's essay "James, James", collected in On the Decay of Criticism. I gather from the afterword of Spackman's Collected Fiction, that he wrote A Difference of Design to be what The Ambassadors should or might have been; but his A Presence With Secrets wore me down, and I have not got around to it.
ReplyDeleteThanks, George, for this. I appreciate your insights.
ReplyDeleteThe other day I came across this quotation at the beginning of a book about Madame Bovary by Mario Vargas Llosa:
ReplyDelete"Criticism would perhaps be simplified if, before setting forth an opinion, one avowed one’s tastes; for every work of art contains within itself a particular quality stemming from the person of the artist, which, quite apart from the execution, charms us or irritates us. Hence only those works which satisfy both our temperaments and our minds arouse our unqualified admiration. The failure to make this fundamental distinction is a great cause of injustice." Preface to Dernières chansons by Louis Bouilhet. It gave me an understanding for why I do not quite enjoy Muriel Spark or Iris Murdoch, even though I do see they are good; perhaps the same is true for you and Henry James. I also remember talking with my brother about Philip Larkin; when I said that I liked Larkin but found his poems a bit too "on the surface" and not lyrical and strange enough, my brother pointed out that I was perhaps judging his poems on what I wanted them to be, rather than what Larking had intended them to be.
A fair point. Thanks for this. Appreciate the thoughtfulness and candor.
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