Henry James, The Ambassadors and the Dithering Hero
This cover depicts Strether, the hero of The Ambassadors, doing what he does best: dithering.
HOBOKEN, APRIL 19, 2025. Two things kept me hacking my way through the tangled verbiage of Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors. First, I thought I might squeeze a column out of it, as I did with another jungly Jamesian opus, The Golden Bowl. Second, a friend said there’s a sex scene toward the end of Ambassadors, which I had to see for myself.
Anyway, here’s my column:
I like contemplating the contrast between Ambassadors, released in 1903, and Ulysses, a chunk of which hit the streets just 15 years later. Joyce rubs our faces in humanity’s animality. His characters gobble, swill, piss, shit, fart, jerk off, fuck. Near the finale of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom sniffs his wife’s ass!
You can’t imagine anyone in Ambassadors sniffing anyone else’s ass, because James’s characters don’t have asses. They’re as inorganic as Ken and Barbie. You’re startled when one fellow is described as “fat.”
Ambassadors is archaic in other ways. Its men and women are hyper-civilized, upper-class swells with vague sources of income. Lewis Lambert Strether, the protagonist, through whose eyes we see the “action,” is 55 years old, editor of an obscure literary journal, and James gives us no reason to think he has ever—how shall I put it?--lain with a lady.
And get this plot: Mrs. Newsome, a wealthy, puritanical American widow, suspects her son, Chad, of galivanting in Gay Paree. Mrs. Newsome sends Strether, her poor but presentable fiancée, to Europe to bring Chad home to run the family business and marry a nice American girl. Strether makes his way to Paris, where he hobnobs with Chad, his male and female pals and a few other folks.
That’s it. Oh, wait, the sex scene. Strether runs into Chad and Madame de Vionnet, a beautiful older woman, at a country inn. The 55-year-old virgin deduces that Chad and his “friend” might have slept together at the inn. Yeah, that’s the novel’s big reveal: Chad might have had sex with a woman who is married (but long separated from her husband).
This might all sound laughably anachronistic and boring. So is what some critics claim is James’s big theme: the clash between American innocence and European decadence. Ugh. Who cares?
But Ambassadors is as radical and modern in its way as Ulysses. James’s plot, and the whole America-versus-France schtick, is just a McGuffin, an excuse for James to push Strether hither and thither and make him dither. That is James’s real focus: the incessant dithering of a decent, intelligent man trying to do the right thing.
Doing the right thing requires judging other people, which requires understanding them. What are Strether’s companions thinking? Are they good or bad? Honest or dishonest? Poor repressed Strether can’t be sure what’s going on in his own mind, let alone others’.
Paris’s pleasures force Strether to rethink what is right and wrong. What is our primary duty? Pleasing others, or ourselves? Strether is gentle and kind, a nice guy, so he’s inclined to think that other people are good, even “wonderful.”
Strether is neither cowardly nor dumb. He’s gifted, or cursed, with “imagination.” He can imagine endless meanings of a friend’s remark, and endless ramifications for each decision. No wonder he dithers!
But Strether’s imagination is blinkered. He has a hard time imagining his friends behaving badly. And sex? Fuhgeddaboudit. We readers might suspect his friends, beneath their polished manners, are lustful, greedy, mean, but Strether doesn’t. He squelches his moral doubts about everyone but himself. He’s sort of heroic.
James, in his own odd way, is as much a master of stream-of-consciousness narration as Joyce. James straps his avatar, Strether, into an exquisitely sensitive mind-reading machine, which translates cognitive oscillations into twisty prose. Strether veers this way and that over the course of a single sentence! As soon as he nears a decision, he second guesses himself--and third, fourth and fifth guesses.
I’m probably making Strether sound miserable and socially awkward. He isn’t. He has fun, in his own uptight way, he enjoys his friends’ company. And they “adore” him, because he flatters them, and he’s a clever conversationalist.
On the other hand, his friends might be gaslighting him, pretending to like him to get something from him. Gaslighting Strether is easy, because he gaslights himself.
Strether’s psyche displays something akin to Brownian motion. Zoom in close enough, and you might discern a friend’s stray remark bumping Strether’s judgement in a certain direction. A clear-cut case of cognitive cause and effect.
But zoom out on Strether’s psyche, and his cognition appears as random as dust jiggling in sunlight. How can free will, or even meaning, possibly emerge from all this chaotic, subliminal jostling?
Free will is perhaps too crude a concept for James. How can you freely choose what to do when you can’t be sure what you feel? Or what is right? Strether finally decides at the book’s end what he should do, but he thereby denies himself the possibility of late-life love. Yeah, he’s a tragic hero.
The world through which Strether wanders is hidden behind a veil. Except “veil” implies that an objective reality, a ground of being, lies behind the veil. By the time you’re done reading Ambassadors, you suspect it’s veils all the way down.
I recently gave a talk at my school in which I questioned the claim of Socrates that “examining myself and others is the greatest good.” I expressed doubt that literature, arguably our most potent mode of examination, makes us happier, or nicer to others. I stand by that statement.
Critics call The Ambassadors a comic novel. And it is light-hearted in a turgid, Jamesian way. It is nonetheless a disturbing work, because it reveals how hard it is to be good, to be happy, to know yourself and others.
But reading Ambassadors, and writing about it, makes this life-long ditherer feel less lonely. And for that I’m grateful.
Further Reading:
If you like this foray into literary criticism, see also The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind; Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?; My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever; Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox; Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”; Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge.
I also riff on the Henry James novels Portrait of a Lady and What Maisie Knew in my book Mind-Body Problems. And I take a stab at stream-of-consciousness narration in my lightly fictionalized memoir Pay Attention.