73 results
Chapter 17 - ‘All the unspoken’: James’s Style
- from Part II - Authors
- Edited by Daniel Tyler, University of Cambridge
-
- Book:
- On Style in Victorian Fiction
- Published online:
- 23 December 2021
- Print publication:
- 06 January 2022, pp 296-308
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Nicola Bradbury’s chapter on Henry James notices the force that comes from simple diction even as it expresses subtle, complicated thoughts, feelings and occasions in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and What Maisie Knew (1897). At times in these novels, a bold, clear style plays against the more verbose, analytical style we expect from late James. A style such as this repeatedly gestures towards an apprehension that is not fully expressed, something that goes behind and beyond the immediate statement. Here, style is measured at the level of the sentence and it is shown to comprise of a range of devices including alliteration, assonance, diction, syntax, rhythm, and cadence.
Chapter 24
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 275-284
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THERE they were yet again, accordingly, for two days more; when Strether, on being, at Mrs. Pocock's hotel, ushered into that lady's salon, found himself at first assuming a mistake on the part of the servant who had introduced him and retired. The occupants had not come in, for the room looked empty as only a room can look in Paris, of a fine afternoon, when the faint murmur of the huge collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely garden. Our friend looked about and hesitated; observed, on the evidence of a table charged with purchases and other matters, that Sarah had become possessed— by no aid from him—of the last number of the salmon-coloured Revue; noted further that Mamie appeared to have received a present of Fromentin's Maîtres d’Autrefois from Chad, who had written her name on the cover; and pulled up at the sight of a heavy letter addressed in a hand he knew. This letter, forwarded by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been placed in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome—for she had been copious indeed this time—was writing to her daughter while she kept him in durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight into the so frequent question of whether he were not already disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp downstrokes of her pen had not yet had occasion to give him; but they somehow, at the present crisis, hinted at a probable absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined to relax.
Part I
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp -
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 17
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 197-206
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
HE received three days after this a communication from America, in the form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not reaching him through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a small boy in uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge, approached him as he slowly paced the little court. It was the evening hour, but daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The scent of flowers was in the streets; he had the whiff of violets perpetually in his nose; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions, vibrations of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were not in other places, that came out for him more and more as the mild afternoons deepened—a far-off hum, a sharp, near click on the asphalt, a voice calling, replying, somewhere, and as full of tone as an actor's in a play. He was to dine at home, as usual, with Waymarsh—they had settled to that for thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before his friend came down.
He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time where he had opened it and giving five minutes, afterwards, to the renewed study of it. At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to get it out of the way; in spite of which, however, he kept it there—still kept it when, at the end of another turn, he had dropped into a chair placed near a small table. Here, with his scrap of paper compressed in his fist and further concealed by his folding his arms tight, he sat for some time in thought, gazed before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and approached him without catching his eye. The latter, in fact, struck with his appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then, as if determined to that course by some special vividness in it, dropped back into the salon de lecture without addressing him. But the pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene from behind the clear glass plate of that retreat. Strether ended, as he sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he smoothed out carefully again as he placed it on his table.
Appendix C - Preface to New York Edition
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 545-560
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces are collected in Volume XXXIII of The Complete Fiction of Henry James. The editor of that volume,OliverHerford, has excerpted and prepared the text for this Appendix, and has supplied essential annotations; more extensive notes can be found in The Prefaces.
The Ambassadors: NYE XXI, v–xxiii
Nothing is more easy than to state the subject of “The Ambassadors,” which first appeared in twelve numbers of The North American Review (1903) and was published as a whole the same year. The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader's benefit, into as few words as possible—planted or “sunk,” stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, overgrown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an independent particle. The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young friend's enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance contain the essence of “The Ambassadors,” his fingers close, before he has done, round the stem of the full-blown flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously to present to us. “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? I’mtoo old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion.
Contents
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp vii-vii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 10
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 119-129
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE Sunday of the next week was a wonderful day, and Chad Newsome had let his friend know in advance that he had provided for it. There had already been a question of his taking him to see the great Gloriani, who was at home on Sunday afternoons and at whose house, for themost part, fewer bores were to be met than elsewhere; but the project, through some accident, had not had instant effect. It had now, however, revived in happier conditions. Chad hadmade the point that the celebrated sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the weather—spring at last, frank and fair—was propitious; and two or three of his other allusions had confirmed for Strether the expectation of something special. He had by this time, for all introductions and adventures, let himself recklessly go, cherishing the sense that, whatever the young man showed him, he was showing at least himself. He could have wished, indeed, so far as this went, that Chad were less of a mere cicerone, for he was not without the impression, now that the vision of his game, his plan, his deep diplomacy, did recurrently assert itself—of his taking refuge from the realities of their intercourse in the offered bribe, as our friend mentally phrased it, of panem et circenses. Our friend continued to feel rather smothered in sensations, though he made in his other moments the almost angry inference that this was only because of his odious inbred suspicion of any form of beauty. He periodically assured himself—for his reactions were sharp—that he should not reach the truth of anything till he had at least got rid of that.
He had known beforehand that Mme. de Vionnet and her daughter would probably be on view, an intimation to that effect having constituted the only reference again made by Chad to his good friends from the south. The effect of Strether's talk about them with Miss Gostrey had been quite to consecrate his reluctance to pry; something in the very air of Chad's silence—judged in the light of that talk—offered it to him as a reserve he could markedly match.
Chapter 28
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 317-328
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
HE went late that evening to the Boulevard Malesherbes, having his impression that it would be vain to go early, and having also, more than once in the course of the day, made inquiries of the concierge. Chad had not come in and had left no intimation; he had affairs, apparently, at this juncture—as it occurred to Strether he so well might have—that kept him long abroad. Our friend asked once for him at the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, but the only satisfaction there was that everyone was out. It was with the idea that he would have to come home to sleep that Strether went up to his rooms, from which, however, he was still absent, though, from the balcony, a few moments later, his visitor heard eleven o’clock strike. Chad's servant had by this time answered for his reappearance; he had, the visitor learned, come quickly in to dress for dinner and vanish again. Strether spent an hour in waiting for him—an hour full of strange suggestions, persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted. The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal by Baptiste—subtlest of servants; the novel half uncut, the novel lemoncoloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like a dagger in a contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circle—a circle which, for some reason, affected Strether as softer still after the same Baptiste had remarked that, in the absence of a further need of anything by Monsieur, he would betake himself to bed. The night was hot and heavy, and the single lamp sufficient; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour and never with a relish quite so like a pang.
Part VI
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp -
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Frontmatter
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp i-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Textual Introduction
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp lxxxvii-xc
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
What genetic criticism calls the avant-texte of The Ambassadors consists of two items unpublished in James's lifetime: the notebook record of the ‘germ’ of the novel, and the document called ‘Project of Novel by Henry James’ signed and dated 1 September 1900, which was sent to Harper’s. There are then four published texts: the periodical (here P) which came out in the North American Review in twelve parts from January to December 1903; the first English edition (here E) published by Methuen on 24 September 1903; the first American edition (here A) published by Harper and Brothers on 6 November 1903; then the revised text published in 1909 as volumes XXI and XXII of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, published by Scribner's and generally known as the New York Edition (here NYE). These four texts may be regarded as stages of composition. They are followed by the New York Edition ‘Preface’ that records and comments on this process as well as the novel itself.
For a detailed account of the genesis of the three early texts and the relations between them (P, E and A), see the Introduction, pp. XL–LV. In a textual situation so fraught, the selection for this edition of E as copy text is self-evidently open to debate. Although E predates the first American edition by six weeks, that was accidental, not the author's design. James prepared A from P with the intention of using proof copy from A for Methuen, his English publishers, and was only prevented from doing so by the slowness of Harper's in supplying material from America and mishaps in postal delivery. Moreover, a few years later, James chose A as the basis for his definitive New York Edition, only occasionally reverting to variants from E. Subsequent authorial preference, or at least convenience, apparently privileges A.
Nevertheless, there is at least as good a case for E. This is uncontroversially the first edition of the text published as a book, and it was prepared and seen through the press by James himself.
Chapter 2
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 13-20
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
HE had none the less to confess to this friend that evening that he knew almost nothing about her, and it was a deficiency that Waymarsh, even with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and inquiries, by their having partaken of dinner in the public room in her company, and by another stroll, to which she was not a stranger, out into the town to look at the cathedral by moonlight—it was a blank that the resident of Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill. He had no recollection of Miss Gostrey, and two or three questions that she put to him about those members of his circle had, to Strether's observation, the same effect he himself had already more directly felt—the effect of appearing to place all knowledge, for the time, on this original woman's side. It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her with his friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be marked altogether in Waymarsh's quarter. This added to his own sense of having gone far with her—gave him an early illustration of a much shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped—a conviction that Waymarsh would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her.
There had been, after the first interchange among the three, a talk of some five minutes in the hall, and then the two men had adjourned to the garden, Miss Gostrey for the time disappearing. Strether, in due course, accompanied his friend to the room he had bespoken and had, before going out, scrupulously visited; where, at the end of another half-hour, he had no less discreetly left him. On leaving him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the effect, very soon, of feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition. There he had, on the spot, the first consequence of their union. A place was too small for him after it that had seemed large enough before.
Chapter 13
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 151-159
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
IT was quite by half-past five—after the two men had been together in Mme. de Vionnet's drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes—that Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said genially, gaily, “I’ve an engagement, and I know you won't complain if I leave him with you. He’ll interest you immensely; and as for her,” he declared to Strether, “I assure you, if you’re at all nervous, she's perfectly safe.”
He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether was at first not sure Mme. de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high, homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the grayish-white salon into which he had been shown. He seemed to see her, at the outset, in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary, cherished, charming. While his eyes, after a little, turned from those of his hostess and Chad freely talked—not in the least about him, but about other people, people he didn't know, and quite as if he did know them—he found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the first Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.
Notes
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 399-445
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
General Editors’ Preface
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp xv-xxii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (hereafter CFHJ) has been undertaken in the belief that there is a need for a full scholarly, informative, historical edition of James's work, presenting the texts in carefully checked, accurate form, with detailed annotation and extensive introductions. James's texts exist in a number of forms, including manuscripts (though most are lost), serial texts, and volumes of various sorts, often incorporating significant amounts of revision, most conspicuously the New York Edition (hereafter NYE) published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York and Macmillan & Co. in London (1907–9). Besides these there are also pirated editions, unfinished works published posthumously, and other questionable forms. The CFHJ takes account of these complexities, within the framework of a textual policy which seeks to be clear, orderly and consistent.
This edition aims to represent James's fictional career as it evolves, with a fresh and expanded awareness of its changing contexts and an informed sense of his developing style, technique and concerns. Consequently, it does not attempt to base its choices on the principle of the ‘last lifetime edition’, which in the case of Henry James is monumentally embodied in the twenty-four volumes of the NYE, the author's selection of nine longer novels (six of them in two volumes) and fifty-eight shorter novels and tales, and including eighteen specially composed Prefaces. The CFHJ, as a general rule, adopts rather the text of the first published book edition of a work – unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice – on the ground that emphasis on the first context in which it was written and read will permit an unprecedented fullness of attention to the transformations in James's writing over five decades, as well as the rich literary and social contexts of their original publication.
There are inevitably cases where determining ‘the first published book edition’ requires some care. If, for instance, James expresses a preference for the text of one particular early book edition over another, or if the first edition to be published is demonstrably inferior to a later impression or edition, or if authorial supervision of a particular early edition or impression can be established, then a case can be made for choosing a text other than the first published book edition.
Chapter 23
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 268-274
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
SO far as a direct approach was concerned, Sarah had neglected him, for the week now about to end, with a civil consistency of chill that, giving him a higher idea of her social resource, threw him back on the general reflection that a woman could always be amazing. It indeed helped a little to console him that he felt sure she had for the same period also left Chad's curiosity hanging; though, on the other hand, for his personal relief, Chad could at least go through the various motions—and he made them extraordinarily numerous—of seeing she had a good time. There wasn't a motion on which, in her presence, poor Strether could so much as venture, and all he could do when he was out of it was to walk over for a talk with Maria. He walked over, of course, much less than usual, but he found a special compensation in a certain half-hour during which, toward the close of a crowded, empty, expensive day, his several companions struck him as so disposed of as to give his manners a rest. He had been with them in the morning, and had called on the Pococks again in the afternoon; but their whole group, he then found, had dispersed after a fashion of which it would amuse Miss Gostrey to hear. He was sorry again, gratefully sorry she was so out of it—she who had really put him in; but she had always, fortunately, her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned there, in her cave of treasures, like a lamp in a Byzantine vault. It was just now, as happened, that for so fine a sense as hers a near view would have begun to pay. Within three days, precisely, the situation on which he was to report had shown signs of an equilibrium; his look in at the hotel confirmed his judgment of that appearance. If the equilibrium might only prevail! Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was out with Chad, and Jim was out alone. Later on indeed he himself was booked to Jim; was to take him that evening to the Varieties—which Strether was careful to pronounce as Jim pronounced them.
General Chronology of James’s Life and Writings
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp xxiii-xxix
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Chapter 12
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 140-150
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
CHAD was not in fact, on this occasion, to keep his promise of coming back; but Miss Gostrey had soon presented herself with an explanation of his failure. There had been reasons, at the last, for his going off with ces dames; and he had asked her, with much instance, to come out and take charge of their friend. She did so, Strether felt as she took her place beside him, in a manner that left nothing to desire. He had dropped back on his bench, alone again for a time, and the more conscious, for little Bilham's defection, of his unexpressed thought, in respect to which, however, this next interlocutor was a still more capacious vessel. “It's the child!” he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and though her direct response was for some time delayed, he could feel in her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might have been simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence, altogether, of truth spreading like a flood and not, for the moment, to be offered her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove to be but persons about whom—once thus face to face with them—she found she might from the first have told him almost everything? This would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of giving her their name. There could be no better example—and she appeared to note it with high amusement—than the way, making things out already so much for himself, he was at last throwing precautions to the winds. They were neither more nor less, she and the child's mother, than old school-friends—friends who had scarcely met for years, but whom this unlooked-for chance had brought together with a rush. It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted, to feel herself no longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope and, as a general thing, he might well have seen, made straight enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. “She's coming to seeme—that's for you,” Strether's interlocutress continued; “but I don't require it to know where I am.”
Part IX
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp -
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Appendix A - Project of Novel by Henry James
- Henry James
- Edited by Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading
-
- Book:
- The Ambassadors
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 497-540
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
I am indebted to the Morgan Library for permission to provide here a transcript of the ‘Project of Novel by Henry James’ (see Introduction pp. XXXIX–XL, XLII–LIII and LV–LVI). The correction of errors has been kept to a minimum and indicated in square brackets; the presentation of dashes and inverted commas has been regularized.
It occurs to me that it may conduce to interest to begin with a mention of the comparatively small matter that gave me, in this case, the germ of my subject—as it is very often comparatively small matters that do this; and as, at any rate, the little incident in question formed, for my convenience, my starting-point, on my first sketching the whole idea for myself.
A friend (of perceptions almost as profound as my own!) had spoken to me, then—and really not measuring how much it would strike me or I should see in it—something that had come under his observation at short time before, in Paris. He had found himself, one Sunday afternoon, with various other people, in the charming old garden attached to the house of a friend (also a friend of mine) in a particularly old-fashioned and pleasantly quiet part of the town; a garden that, with two or three others of the same sort near it, I myself knew, so that I could easily focus the setting. The old houses of the Faubourg St.-Germain close round their gardens and shut them in, so that you don't see them from the street—only overlook them from all sorts of picturesque excrescences in the rear. I had a marked recollection of one of these wondrous concealed corners in especial, which was contiguous to the one mentioned by my friend: I used to know, many years ago, an ancient lady, long since dead, who lived in the house to which it belonged and whom, also on Sunday afternoons, I used to go to see. On one side of that one was another, visible from my old lady's windows, which was attached to a great convent of which I have forgotten the name, and which I think was one of the places of training for young missionary priests, whom we used to look down on as they strolled, always with a book in hand, in the straight alleys.