The ambassadors

439 Pages·2011·1.95 MB·English

by  Tóibín

2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Introduction copyright © 2011 by Colm Tóibín
Biographical note copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.
A note on the text copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-67964408-8
www.modernlibrary.com
Cover design: Emily Mahon Cover painting: Gustave Caillebotte, The Boulevard Viewed from
Above, 1880 (Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images)
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
I by Colm Tóibín
NTRODUCTION
A N T
OTE ON THE EXT
P by Henry James
REFACE
T A
HE MBASSADORS
Book First
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Second
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Book Third
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Book Fourth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Book Fifth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Sixth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Seventh
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Eighth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Ninth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Tenth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Book Eleventh
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Book Twelfth
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
B N
IOGRAPHICAL OTE
I
NTRODUCTION
Colm Tóibín
In the opening page of The Ambassadors there is a phrase which seems,
on the face of it, to have an aura of unusual simplicity. Lambert Strether,
who has arrived at Chester having disembarked at Liverpool, and is
concerned about what the “note” of Europe will be for him, allows that
note already to include “such a consciousness of personal freedom as he
hadn’t known for years.” The novel will now attempt to explore what
this freedom might mean for Strether and for those around him,
dramatizing its limits and extent, while rendering it also complex and
ironic. The Ambassadors will operate using sensuously noted detail, the
fine flickering of a refined consciousness, but will also use tones which
are comic and subversive. It will play freedom as represented by Paris
against restriction as represented by a place called Woollett in
Massachusetts. James will ensure, however, that this play, which seems
on the surface a simple one of easy opposites, becomes nuanced and
filled with the density of urgent human needs and strange treacheries,
loyalties, and uncertainties.
Strether, in the words of R. P. Blackmur, is “a man of the world
without a world.” The novel will seek to give him a glimpse of an old
world he might possess; the book will tempt him with it, but the
narrative will remain, despite Strether’s “consciousness of freedom,”
oddly unsure about the absolute value of this world Strether sees and
samples; it will remain uneasy, open-minded, and curious about the idea
that someone who is as intelligent and inward-looking as Strether can
resist his fate. Its central exploration will be around the poetics and
politics of duty; it will set the innocence of Strether’s quest for late self-
realization against the loaded futility of such a quest. It will propose,
indeed, that such a quest may amount to nothing more than the
destruction or the darkening of the very imagination which felt a need
for it in the first place. Such a need will be seen, or regularly glimpsed,
as pure illusion; James’s genius is to make such illusion glorious,
absorbing, filled with substance, closer to reality at times than the set of
hard facts or dull demands which hover over the book; the quality of
Strether’s illusion offers the novel a fiercely rich dynamic.
In Book Two, Chapter 1, James allows Strether to set out his story, his
role and function as an ambassador representing the interests of
Woollett. Strether has a dialogue with Maria Gostrey, whose role in the
book is almost the same as Ralph Touchett’s in The Portrait of a Lady or
Fanny Assingham’s in The Golden Bowl. She is a sort of novelist-within-
the-novel, who will appear and disappear, and take the same interest in
the unfolding story and the fate of the protagonist as an ideal reader. In
his conversation with Gostrey, Strether manages not to be openly
disloyal to his place of origin or those who have sent him on his mission,
most notably Mrs. Newsome, the mother of Chad, the heir to the family
business who has remained in Paris against his mother’s wishes, and
who is in the clutches of a woman who seems less than virtuous. Despite
his lack of disloyalty, Strether manages at times a tone about Mrs.
Newsome and those who surround her so solemn that it leaves itself
open to mockery, not least by Maria Gostrey, but also, by implication, by
Strether himself.
By calling the town in Massachusetts where Mrs. Newsome lives by
the almost comic name of Woollett, by naming Mrs. Newsome’s son-in-
law Jim Pocock and his sister, who aims to marry Chad, Mamie Pocock,
by refusing to name the article that the Newsomes, in their factory,
produce, thus allowing us to feel that it is something comic and vulgar,
Henry James gives Strether permission to move quite a distance from the
very Woollett he represents.
Nonetheless, Strether has to remain ostensibly serious as he explains
things to Gostrey. She feels entitled to ask, “Who in the world’s Jim
Pocock?” knowing that the very question implies that Jim, viewed from
Paris rather than Woollett, is nobody, or less than nobody. On the other
hand, when Strether says that Chad Newsome, whom he has come to
rescue, “has darkened his mother’s admirable life … He has worried her
half to death,” he speaks “with austerity.” And when Maria Gostrey asks
if Mrs. Newsome’s life is “very admirable,” Strether answers simply:
“Extraordinarily.” The reader is entitled to feel here that Strether
actually means this, that his newfound freedom has suddenly failed him,
and that the austerity of his tone, the quality of his respect for Mrs.
Newsome, will, from this point on, be subject to very great pressure.
If a “consciousness of personal freedom” is something Strether has not
known for years, then the reader can feel that the impediment to this
freedom has been the very admirable Mrs. Newsome herself, who, it
emerges in this conversation, has not only sent Strether on a mission to
rescue Chad, her errant son, but is bankrolling him as he edits an
intellectual journal, “her tribute to the ideal,” in Woollett. Also, if he
succeeds in his mission in Paris, the admirable matron will do him the
favor of marrying him.
The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain
nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could
transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America
richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such
as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome
austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only
pleasure but satisfaction.
But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him
pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there
was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards
subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged
him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence.
Nothing came to him simply.
It seemed to some who knew him that he took great satisfaction from
his life in England, and in his book The American Scene, published in
1907 four years after The Ambassadors, he wrote with some intensity
about the things he disliked in America. But at the same time as he
wrote The American Scene, he confided in the American novelist Hamlin
Garland: “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I
would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. I would
study its beautiful side. The mixture of Europe and America in me has
proved disastrous. It has made of me a man who is neither American nor
European. I have lost touch with my own people and I live here alone.
My neighbours are friendly but they are not of my blood, except
remotely.”
And yet he studied England and France with care, and enjoyed them
enormously. In 1872 when he was not yet thirty he wrote an essay on
Chester, where three decades later he would open The Ambassadors. “It is
full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the
unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight
lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery.
An American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect feast of
crookedness.” It would have seemed almost natural to James to take his
protagonist from there to a place even more gloriously crooked—Paris.
James’s earliest memory, he claimed, was of the Place Vendôme when
he was two years old. When he was thirteen, the family lived in the city
for more than a year. During his travels in 1872 he also spent time in
Paris.
He returned to the city to live at 29 rue de Luxembourg in November
1875. As Peter Brooks has written in Henry James Goes to Paris: “He
spoke and wrote French perfectly. And he had been reading French
authors from an early age.… It was probably Balzac’s Paris that lured
James abroad more than anything else. He was like one of Balzac’s
ambitious young men arriving in Paris from the provinces, to make their
way by the power of the pen.” From his new address, James wrote to his
father: “I think you would pronounce me well off: a snug little troisième
with the eastern sun, two bedrooms, a parlor, an antechamber and a
kitchen. Furniture clean and pretty, house irreproachable, and a gem of
a portier, who waits upon me.” In this sojourn, which lasted a year,
James met Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant, and Zola; he also met the
Russian painter Paul Zhukovsky. While one of James’s biographers
claims that he and Zhukovsky were lovers, Peter Brooks is correct when
he says that the evidence for this “is truly non-existent.”
What is important, especially for readers of The Ambassadors, however,
is how James described Zhukovsky to his family in Boston. To his
brother William he described meeting him in the house of Madame
Nikolai Turgenev, a house he described as “of a literally more than
Bostonian virtue. They are an oasis of purity and goodness in the midst
of this Parisian Babylon.” In this letter, he wrote that Zhukovsky’s father
had been tutor to the Czar and then added “so you see that I don’t love
beneath my station.” To his sister Alice he wrote about Zhukovsky “for
whom I entertain a most tender affection … he is much to my taste and
we have sworn an eternal friendship.” Later, when he spent a few days
in Naples with Zhukovsky, who was involved by then with Wagner and
his entourage—Zhukovsky painted the sets for the original production of
Parsifal—James wrote about the manners and customs of the company to
Grace Norton in Boston: “They are about as opposed to those of
Cambridge as anything could well be—but to describe them would carry
me too far.”
“That James was ‘in love’ with Zhukovsky in Paris in 1876,” Peter
Brooks has written, “seems clear enough.” What is clear also is that he
wrote to his family in Boston with enough warmth and openness about
his friend for us to feel that he had nothing to hide from them. On the
other hand, his tone left the James family free to read between the lines,
and realize that, whatever he was doing, Henry James was enjoying
“this Parisian Babylon” rather more than a citizen of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, might be expected to. During the family sojourn in Paris
in 1856, when James was thirteen, his mother had taken an intense
dislike to the city which her son would grow to love. Her letters to him
as he began to travel as a young man make clear that he was her favorite
of her five children and emphasize that she had no intention of letting
him go. She longed, she wrote, “to throw around you the mantle of the
family affection, and fold you in my own tender embrace—It seems to
me darling Harry that your life must need this succulent, fattening
element more than you know yourself.” Like Mrs. Newsome, she knew
what was best for her son: “I know only one thing that would solve the
difficulty, and harmonise the discordant elements in your life—You
would make dear Harry according to my estimate, the most loving and
loveable and happiest of husbands. I wish I could see you in a favourable
attitude of heart towards the divine institution of marriage.”
As James grew older and lost touch with America, and renounced the
divine institution of marriage, Boston came to him in the guise of his
older brother William, who having read The Golden Bowl, the third of the
novels he produced in the early years of the twentieth century, wrote to
complain of “the method of narration by interminable elaboration of
suggestive reference” and sought to call his brother home, as it were, to
write in a plainer style: “But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit
down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot,
with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the
dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in