The Ambassadors Read Free

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’sview 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