The problem of James' style:

'Style - it is the man himself'

Writing recently about Henry James' nouvelle, 'The Beast in the Jungle', reminded me of his novel, 'The Ambassadors', written in the same year, 1903. When I first read it I came to the conclusion that it was James' finest novel and said as much to MI Kuruvilla. He, however, disagreed sharply and suggested that my opinion was influenced by a degree of self-projection, ie., identifying excessively with the novel's hero, Lambert Strether.

'The Ambassadors' had not, in fact, found favour with the critics who ruled the roost at the time. FR Leavis, for whom James was solidly part of the great tradition of English novelists, had dismissed the work as 'wholly boring'. For James himself, on the other hand, 'The Ambassadors' was his favourite work and this, coupled with a desire to review my original opinion, decided me to reread the novel. Now, though no longer inclined to identify with Strether nor to consider the book James' greatest novel, I still regard it as a remarkable achievement and therefore feel that I should come to its defence.

Henry James

'The Ambassadors', like 'The Beast in the Jungle', is in James' late style which is admittedly difficult. In the shorter work this difficulty is mitigated by its thematic concentration and narrative momentum, to say nothing of its minimum of personae and far greater brevity. But here, amid the leisurely pace and the vaster canvas of a novel of nearly four hundred pages, the difficulties loom much larger and seem almost overwhelming. James' late style has incurred the impatience, if not the disapprobation, even of those who admire his earlier works, notably 'Portrait of a Lady', which is clearly his greatest work. Here is the opening paragraph of 'The Ambassadors' with a few sentences excluded in the interest of space:

"Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted....The same secret principle, however, that had prompted Strether not absolutely to desire Strether's presence at the dock, that had led him thus to postpone for a few hours his enjoyment of it, now operated to make him feel he could still wait without disappointment....

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first 'note' of Europe. Mixed with everything was the apprehension, on Strether's part, that he would, at best, throughout, prove the note of Europe on quite a sufficient degree."

What James is saying is that Strether, on finding that his friend Waymarsh has still not arrived at the hotel, is relieved just as he had been relieved to find that Waymarsh was not waiting for him at the dock, since, eager as he was to meet him after such a long interval, he did not want anything to distract him from his first impression of Europe. I have compressed into a single sentence what James has sought to convey in four not counting the two I had left out.

The style is obviously prolix and complex, and the reader has undoubtedly to make some effort to persevere with it. So, it is not surprising that some of James' contemporaries and successors have been tempted to make fun of it. Hardy, for instance, referred to James's style as "a ponderously warm manner of saying nothing in infinite sentences." His style has also been parodied by other writers, one of them being Auden who in 'The Sea and the Mirror', a long poem that is a commentary on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', makes Caliban give the audience a lengthy post-performance prose address in the manner of James. Here is its first paragraph:

"If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly responsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I - my reluctance is I can assure you co-equal with your dismay - who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all explaining master you would speak to, who at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about."

Caliban is saying that now that the audience have expressed their various opinions about the performance they doubtless wish they could hear from the playwright, but will have to content themselves with listening to him, Caliban, as representing Shakespeare. The parody is perfect, from the prodigious length of the single sentence to the multiplicity of appositional expressions that we have already seen operating in the authentic Jamesian passage quoted above.

But before we hasten, if I may be permitted my own attempt at late Jamesian expression, to acquiesce readily, if not delightedly, in the general and manifestly prejudiced and deprecatory view of the multitude that constitutes the majority of our author's detractors - for this is how his critics are surely more appropriately to be characterised - before, as I say, we become too precipitate in our readiness to contemn, or even go so far as actually to condemn, his style as not merely ponderous but positively portentous, it would surely be in keeping with the demands of dispassionate literary criticism (to say nothing of simple justice and, if one may be permitted to invoke that gracious quality, of mere magnanimity), to allow the unfortunate subject of our discussion to speak, as it were, for himself or, since that is manifestly no longer feasible, to consider in his behalf, his stead, whether there might not be some rationale, which is to say some guiding principle, to the formation of his style and to our comprehension of it.

"Le style" - said Buffon - "c'est l'homme meme." 'Style, it is the man himself.' If James wrote as he did in his later years it was because of what his personality was at the time, how his mind worked and how his imagination functioned. And it was very much how he must have expressed himself not only in formal speech but in casual conversation. Consider this anecdote of the novelist Edith Wharton, with whom James was very friendly and in whose motor car he often travelled about the English countryside. On one occasion they had lost their way:

"While I was hesitating and peering into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. 'Wait a moment, my dear - I'll ask him where we are', and leaning out he signalled to the spectator. 'My good man, if you'll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer -so,' and as the old man came up: 'My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.'

"I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old grizzled face at the window; nor to have James go on: 'In short' (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications,) 'in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would not have been on our left hand but on our right) where are we now in relation to..'

'Oh, please,' I interrupted,' feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, 'do ask him where the King's Road is.' 'Ah-? The King's Road? Just so Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King;s Road exactly is?' 'Ye're in it', said the aged face at the window."

Clearly, James was incapable of putting anything, despite his profession of doing so, "in short" or "in a word" or "in two words".

The question is whether his creative imagination enabled him to turn this personal eccentricity of expression into an artistically justifiable and successful style of writing. This is what we hope to investigate in the next article.