The Ambassadors (2 page)

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 the style?”

William, it seemed, wanted his brother to write the sort of novel which would be well received in Woollett, to produce a novel which Jim Pocock might enjoy were he to read it, or that Waymarsh, Strether’s flat-footed, charming American friend, might recommend. Henry responded to William witheringly: “You appear even to assume that the life, the elements, forming its subject matter deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge.”

Thus
The Ambassadors
dealt with matters—such as the gap between New England and its wandering son—which were close to Henry James, which preoccupied him deeply. His
Notebooks
make clear that one of the seeds of the book was the remark made by William Dean Howells, who had lived in Boston for most of his life, on arrival in Paris, that one should “live all one can,” suggesting that he himself had not done so and was regretting it now. But the soil in which the seed grew is not mentioned in the
Notebooks
, since it did not need to be set down there; rather it was something which James lived with every day of his life.

As a young man in Paris in 1875 he was, for his family, a version
of Chad. He was their son who would not come home, who seemed to be living a life quite distant in its moral tone from that lived by the citizens of Cambridge. Some of his letters must have been alarming, to say the least, to his loving mother, if not to the rest of the family who moved in a tight circle of old Bostonians of the most serious and respectable sort. Zhukovsky’s circle, as Leon Edel has written, “opened windows for Henry … so that moving among them, and among his compatriots, and gaining his glimpses of the French, the trans-Atlantic visitor found himself abandoning certain Cambridge rigidities, taking life a little less hard, giving himself over to the simple pleasures of genial living.”

As he wrote the book, James was living its actual afterlife. He had not returned to his own version of Woollett, to his own version of Mrs. Newsome. He had stayed away. He was alone in Lamb House in Rye with his servants and with occasional visitors. In three years he produced
The Ambassadors
,
The Wings of the Dove
,
The Golden Bowl
, as well as a collection of stories and a monograph in two volumes about the painter William Wetmore Story. The advice which Strether gives little Bilham in a garden in Paris: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” must have had a particular resonance for James, must have had an edge of deep personal regret, but also an edge of satisfaction that he had come far enough to be able to dramatize himself and his plight with such ruthless objectivity.

The richness and the dynamic power of
The Ambassadors
arise from James’s control of structure, tone, and form; he worked this against something he could not control, something deeply unsettled in his own conscience about his exile and his middle age, and about the idea of the sensuous life versus the life lived by the old rules.

Despite the use of material which was close to him and which deeply preoccupied him, Chad and Strether in
The Ambassadors
were not simply autobiography. James gave both Chad and Strether limits which he did not, for good reasons, recognize in himself. He made them into submerged versions of an imagined or remembered self. Many years after his own sojourn in Paris, he told both Hugh Walpole and Edmund Gosse of an event which occurred there decades before. Gosse wrote: “He spoke of standing on the pavement of a city, in the dusk and of gazing upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of a lamp on the third storey. And the lamp burned out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain, brushed by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.” This image of a figure on the street looking upwards to a balcony on the third floor was transformed in
The Ambassadors
from dusk to daylight. Although the scene was highly charged in the novel, it lacked the stark romantic drama of the scene from life which James recounted. Nonetheless, it was an essential moment in the novel, it carried with it a strange force which was almost erotic, but the scene was also filled with the sense of how open and curious Strether had become now that he was away from Woollett. He would look up for a long time at the male figure standing on the balcony. Then he would cross the street, deal with the concierge, and ascend the stairs. What he would find there—Chad’s apartment and Chad’s close friend Little Bilham—would fascinate him and begin him on his journey towards becoming an ambassador for something larger and more open than Woollett and its crude demands and narrow vision.

James’s method in these late novels was to find a story which was ostensibly simple and then create a fictional density and complexity within its confines, so that the novel’s power arose from suggestions, implications, and ambiguities. Despite his brother’s
view that there was no decisiveness in the action of these novels, they were structured with great dramatic skill. They moved at times with speed, and managed constantly to usurp or play with the reader’s expectations. James used scenes, encounters between characters, or moments of heightened realization, with the force of a master dramatist.

In creating the book from the outline, it might have been easy to make Strether dreamy and ineffective at all times, a sort of middle-aged Hamlet from Woollett. And to make Chad headstrong or easily corrupted, and make Madame de Vionnet into a fortune hunter, or a Frenchwoman of easy morals. And to make the people of Woollett almost comically demanding and narrow-minded.

James came close to giving in to the last of these for good reasons. He could not give Jim and Sarah Pocock the same degree of subtlety and exquisite ambivalence as he did his other characters. In the creation of Chad, as observed by Strether, and indeed by Maria Gostrey, he moved with sly care and smooth understatement. Thus in the first encounter, when Chad arrived in the box at the theater and allowed himself to be studied in silence in the semidarkness by Strether, Gostrey, and the reader, he was a figure at ease in this world, a young American who had undergone some great change, which was seen here as almost spiritual as much as it was stylish. Strether, in recognizing the change and in appreciating the connection between spirit and style, moved away from the certainties of Woollett to some other realm but he did not always stay there. He would, throughout the book, be open himself to shifts and changes.

Thus he and Chad, in the way they lacked solidity, in their openness, stretched the very idea of the character in fiction. “You could deal,” Strether thought when he first saw Chad in Paris, “with a man as himself—you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else.” But dealing with both was the task which James set himself.
This very idea of fluidity, unknowability, would inspire Strether as well as James, but it would also make him uneasy. James was careful to make Strether an odd mixture, at times asking crude questions whose tone came directly from Woollett, at other times becoming susceptible to the strange duplicities which went on around him.

That first evening, having met Chad and noted the change in him, Strether did not dither, as he might have done in the hands of a lesser novelist. He moved back into character. “I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything,” he said as soon they were alone, “neither more nor less, and take you straight home, so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it.” The tone here was businesslike, direct, as it would be at other times when Strether felt that he should make himself clear. But James had other plans for tone, as a painter might make the most realistic center for a canvas, each thing drawn with mathematical precision, and then produce the most gorgeous sky or exquisite landscape all around.

In Book Five,
Chapter 1
, James returned to a world which mattered in his memory. It was the Paris of his youth and it was filled with associations. Once he arrived in London in 1876 he would have a rich social life, but it would not be among artists or bohemians. In his London there would not be a Paul Zhukovsky or anyone like him. Thus, when he came to describe the garden of the artist Gloriani, he was dealing with a part of his own past which he treasured because he had lost it. Gloriani had also appeared in his novel
Roderick Hudson
, set in Rome, published almost thirty years earlier. Gloriani’s garden in Paris was clearly the garden of the painter Whistler which James had visited in 1875. Now he could place both Chad and Strether there, and Maria Gostrey and Madame de Vionnet. Strether could have a sense in that garden “of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and
tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination.” It would not have escaped James that one of the ghosts at the windows was his younger self.

When Strether met Madame de Vionnet here for the first time, it would have been easy for James to have made her exotic, extraordinary; it was part of his plan, however, that no character in his fiction would move according to a design but rather according to a dynamic. Strether would feel Madame de Vionnet’s “common humanity,” her ordinariness, more than he would feel anything else. This meant that he would now have to deal with her, take her seriously, and it would also mean that he was more open than ever to misunderstanding her, and indeed, everything around her.

“He was moving verily in a strange air and on ground not of the firmest,” James wrote. What Strether was seeking was experience, the tender taste of life. In not seeking wisdom, he found knowledge instead, and he had no idea what to do with knowledge. He was ready to notice things, and wanted to notice more. As he moved slowly away from the rigidities of his background, he discovered, as did Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady
, that his only weapon was innocence, an innocence which became more exquisite as the novel proceeded, an innocence which was no use to him in this old world into which he had ventured.