A book in my life
Peter Quennell
kart from George Sand's marvellously haunted Nohant, few literary sites Make so strong an appeal to the imagina- tion as Henry James's house at Rye, for which he signed a 21-years' lease in September 1897. Unlike the Château de Nohant, Lamb House is not an especially attractive building — a plain, sound, sensi- ble Georgian structure, yet 'really good enough (the tenant himself thought) to be a kind of little becoming, high-door'd, brass- knockered facade' that would protect him while he planned and wrote. Today, under the National Trust's wing, it has still a staid, protective air, though the Garden Room, where, among other works, he created The Ambassadors, with its threefold bow window, classic pediment and modest oeil-de-boeuf, was totally demolished at the beginning of the last war living-rooms an unaimed German bomb. Its panelled living-rooms are pleasantly light and lofty; some rather unremarkable pictures - engravings, water-colours, family Photographs — decorate the ground floor; and near the bottom of the spacious stair- case stands an interesting collection of the great man's sticks and stout umbrellas. The umbrageous garden covers slightly less than a square acre; and the gables of ancient neighbouring houses look over the red- brick garden-walls. It is the house of a bachelor, not an aesthetic or sybaritic bachelor or a man who Particularly valued taste, yet the scene, we ,know, of some tremendous efforts. Here :lenrY James completed a masterpiece, dic- 'ating The Ambassadors day after day to a Patient woman secretary, the music of Whose modern typewriter, he said, always encouraged him to think. The result was a novel worthy to take its place beside The Portrait of a Lady, 'the most proportioned of his books', published 22 years earlier, but an achievement that he believed had 'a superior roundness', since it showed a keener sense both of dramatic unity and of the 'scenic consistency' at which he aimed. Yet The Ambassadors is a far more dif- ficult book; and I must admit that my first attempt to read it through from the opening to the closing page was not immediately successful. The narrative demands con- tinuous attention; and, owing perhaps to What businessmen call 'pressure of work', Mine would now and then flag, until I
found that I was losing my way in the
labyrinth of Lambert Strether's psychological vicissitudes — 'his percep- tions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture ... of his braveries and his fears' — as, confronted with the delicate problem presented by Chad Newsome's and Marie de Vionnet's relationship, he struggles gradually towards the truth.
Yet the story that the Master sets out to unfold — the tale of a sharp domestic con- flict between American innocence or ig- norance and European knowledge and sophistication — is, after all, a relatively simple one. Strether, a cultivated middle- aged man from a prosperous manufactur- ing town named Woollett in the depths of New England, revisits Paris (a city he has seen only once before) at the behest of the imperious Mrs Newsome, Woollett's social, intellectual and, indeed, financial queen, having agreed to run down and reclaim her errant son Chad, who is rumoured to have fallen under the spell of a designing older woman. He must ensure that Chad returns home. But the ambassador soon forgets his mission, succumbs to the charm of Euro- pean life, notably the charm of Paris, discovers that Chad, the spoiled, rough youth he knew in Woollett days, has been miraculously civilised, meets and admires — almost falls in love with — the alleged siren, and decides that, although he has probably left it a little too late himself, to live freely, boldly, courageously should be a wise man's chief ambition.
James is said to have picked up the germ of his story from a fellow American novelist, William Dean Howells, who an- nounced in Whistler's Parisian garden that he had wasted the better part of six decades by submitting to the claims of duty, and ad- vised the young friend at his side that, rather than share the same fate, he should resolutely 'live all he can'. This is the gospel that, in a similar French garden, Lambert Strether preaches to another young disciple:
Live all you can ... it doesn't so much matter what you do ... so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? ... Now I'm old; too old at any rate for what I see ... It's as if the train has fairly waited for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.
Such is the first of the two carefully prepared scenes that provide the focal points of James's story; 'the material of The Ambassadors', he wrote, 'is taken ab- solutely for the stuff of drama ...' The last, close to the end of the novel, describes how Strether, on a solitary expedition through the country near Paris, as he is resting at a waterside inn, sees gallant Chad and the beautiful Madame de Vionnet come gliding gently down the stream, and, although Chad's crony, the clever young artist Bilham, has assured him that theirs is 'a virtuous attachment', cannot help con- cluding that they must be lovers.
That memorable episode, which has a peculiarly vivid scenic background — 'the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of the sky' — besides being a delightful addition to the narrative, serves a shrewd dramatic purpose; as does the minutely detailed account of Madame de Vionnet's quiet Napoleonic salon — the room 'squared itself, large and high and clear, so that every occasion of seeing it was a pleasure of a different shade'; while Strether's impression of its' owner's physical appearance is developed stroke by stroke: She was dressed in black, but in black that struck him as light and transparent; she was exceedingly fair, and though she was markedly slim, her face had a round- ness, with eyes far apart and a little strange. Her smile was natural and dim ... He had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear.
The pictorial and dramatic aspects of James's narrative are balanced by some ad- mirably comic touches; he was a novelist who, despite his deep seriousness, had a splendid taste for fun. When, from far-off Woollett, Mrs Newsome despatches a se- cond embassy to investigate Strether's unexpected change of heart and, if it can still be managed, to recapture Chad, and Chad arranges a magnificent evening party for his naive relations' benefit, his sister assumes a brand-new crimson dress that af- fects Strether's nerves like 'the sound of a fall through a skylight'. Mrs Pocock, Woollett's arrogant crown-princess, is a daunting blend, we are informed, of 'inten- sity with ignorance'. She is never 'shy or dry', but has a 'thin-lipped smile ... as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety- match'. Mrs Pocock, in short, is the social antithesis of Madame de Vionnet (whom she, of course, both despises and resents) the perfect European femme du monde.
Given the richness and variety of the writer's material, and his gift of scenic presentation, it is odd that The Am- bassadors should not be an easier book to read. Particularly troublesome is James's oblique approach. In private conversation, I remember hearing, he would employ the most elaborate periphrases before he felt entitled to ask a direct question or make the simplest of straightforward statements; and this habit he has attributed even to his loquacious minor personages, who, through paragraph after paragraph of dialogue, pursue any subject they happen to be discussing in an equally tentative and delicately allusive vein.
Critics, I think, have already sometimes suggested that his transition from the use of a pen to the employment of his secretary's typewriter may have influenced his later style. In her valuable essay Henry James at Work, Theodora Bosanquet records that he would begin a book by 'breaking ground', repeatedly talking to himself about his characters, and thus producing a 'prolong- ed soliloquy' that his amanuensis took down, to form at least the groundwork of his finished text.
As he dictated, he was accustomed to walk to and fro across the Garden Room; and it seems possible that a novelist who walks and talks and slowly meditates aloud, instead of sitting opposite his page and watching his story grow up line by line, may reach at last a state of solipsistic detach- ment that gradually blinds him to the limitations of his less percipient readers. Certainly The Ambassadors lacks the well- proportioned design of The Portrait of a Lady. But it is still a masterpiece; the ageing novelist remained a giant. Art, he once told H. G. Wells, 'makes life, makes interest, makes importance'; and the novel he com- posed in the Garden Room fully justifies his dictum.
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