The Ambassadors
on reading in the worst of circumstances
When I was nineteen and spending my first summer away from home, I overheard a conversation that had an outsized effect on my reading life. An upperclassman whom I admired was working in the campus bookstore, and one day she was telling her boss, fortunately pretty loudly, that she always liked to read heavy victorian fiction in the heat of July. There’s something about the intensity of grammar and story that, if you can still make it through despite the soul-dragging effects of heat, lack of regular school company, and general summer dishevelment, you can retain the density of attention that often seems impossible to attain in this recalcitrant season. I’m almost certainly reading a few of my later thoughts into her remarks here, but the truth is, she was completely right; and I’m extraordinarily indebted.
My source for this specific sort of pleasure this summer has been to read Henry James’ The Ambassadors for the third time. Not as a beloved book as a matter of fact, but one I’ve kept failing to read aright. The first time I attempted it was in high school, for an actual book report, a genre I hated and had great difficulty understanding, and for which I attempted to read it through actually the night before the report was due. I was successful (wish I could find that paper) but you can well imagine my confusion, once I found out how difficult the book really was. And what on earth could I really have said about it at the time. (It sits in my top three moments of realizing a book was truly of a different order of difficulty, the other two being the first chapter of Aristotle’s De Anima at eighteen, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch the year before. I read it because Deacon Viau, who I’ve talked about here before, had us read Turn of the Screw, and I assumed I’d be jumping straight into something like Daisy Miller.)
The second time was for a paper for Robert Sokolowski, whose book on the phenomenology of the human person as an agent of truth I took in my first full semester of philosophy at CUA; tracking him down after August mass to tell him of my love of HJ. I understood so little of what grad school was at that point, that while his observations on the grammar of experience seemed pretty obvious, I had no idea why it was so important to him to make them. (I learned later on how he felt about Descartes.) In the paper, I argued that he hadn’t said enough, per Henry James, about why lies are important to human beings, and not just truth. His brief comment as I recall, scrawled across the top, was something like, ‘many distinctions that deserve to be thought more through.’ Fair enough! Myself, at twenty-three.
The third time reading was this month in Mexico City, in the middle of a start-and-stop-again love affair. I certainly have been paying more attention this time around, although I remained still distracted, though this time at least from more than the exigencies of deadline. Fully distracting was the parallel reading and correspondingly pleasant exegesis of Moby Dick taking place next to me, a book I read during the worst period of my life, when my memory was not exactly keeping score; myself, at thirty-five.
But this time, at least, reading The Ambassadors (past the thirties) was more than an exercise. And while I am one hundred percent certain I’ll have to read it at least one more time to understand what’s going on—in fact no other book has encapsulated so well pure distraction for me—this time what’s left unsaid began to make sense.
To me the problem of the lies in The Ambassadors is that the main character, extraordinary phenomenologist as he is, devoted to pure sensing, childishly loving precisely what he can experience and no more, is that he wants that which Eros can bear the fruits of, but cannot face up to the presence of Eros itself. Strether, a fifty-five year old man visiting Paris for the second time, disappointed in life, marriage, artistic work, his last hope marriage to a Boston brahmin who is the personification of nineteenth century feminine hysteric coldness, is set the task of bringing back the son of the brahmin, to divorce him away from his unaccountable descent into the arms of a french mistress, to bring him back to profitable, ordinary, money-making life in Massachusetts. That’s the set up; Strether’s consequent failure (and then, not to spoil, but also his partial success) is to believe that the son could be transformed by the frenchwoman, without the remaking and self-exploding consequences of love, and of physical love. It’s his failure, his wish to lie to himself at any cost, that you can have one thing without the other, that brings about his own personal failure, leaving France at the last, and his own possibility of love on its own real terms, without, as he says, having “taken anything for himself.”
I love Henry James. I love his misdirection and his commitment to a precision of ambiguity, and I love the illumination he gives to our most ordinary conversations, where we believe we speak to the truth as best we can, and often do—the best trouble being, we usually admit more than we meant. Why did Strether want to lie about Eros? And why was it equally important to him to tell the truth in his middle age, and yet to shield himself from the fullness of it? A question for, I believe, the next reading. And who knows what a summer that will be?