Henry James literally did not write ‘The Ambassadors’. He dictated it. Yet as he turned to dictation his prose became increasingly baroque. (“The tapeworm sentences.”) The exact opposite of what you (or, at least, a layman like myself) might expect. A remarkable weird result.
Perhaps revision of the transcripts played some part?
Then there’s the persistent bizarre ambiguity in the situations, characters’ motivations and (what we now might call) power dynamics of the later work. Edmund Wilson hit on this quality when he used the word “ambiguity” in the title of his essay on James. An essay that, in essence, asked “My God! Are we even sure there are ghosts in James classic ghost story ‘Turn of the Screw’?”
My philistine take is that James’ last three novels are inferior to ‘The Bostonians’ and ‘Washington Square’, but enjoy an inflated reputation, in part because their very difficulty seems to anticipate and align them with modernism, in part because their difficulty & strangeness makes them more interesting for academics to study & write about, and in part because genuine lovers of James are delighted to indulge him as he pursues his idiosyncrasies & vision past commercial considerations. His late novels thus become to James’ admirers what ‘Exile on Main St.’ is to Rolling Stones fans.
There’s a story about one of Dickens’ daughters. I’m, no doubt, getting details wrong, but, I believe, she had a mild illness and instead of going to lessons she was home and in a room she wasn’t usually in at that time of day. She thus was able to hear her father write. He was acting out the characters as he wrote, speaking their lines in their voices.
The podcast is fantastic, btw. The fact that’s there’s not a broad underlying structure and a listener doesn’t know where you’re going to go is a real plus I hadn’t anticipated. It comes across like a compilation of the very best bits from several projects.
Very interesting that he dictated the novels, according to commenter below.. That aligns with a surprising discovery I made recently. I found it easier to listen to his novels than to read them. I tried an audiobook not expecting it to be listenable. But the page long sentence I’d been dreading amazingly became clear. The actor had the rhythm down. The tone. That helped a lot. I did have to refer to the text, but the audio version was a revelation. True, it was only Portrait of a Lady, not a late novel. But I’m going to try this out with the Ambassadors.
Unlike the writer above, I love James’s late novels. I am not an academic. And find it interesting that the above writer makes snide remarks about people who like these books. It is just a matter of taste, i think. These are books that reward re-reading and discovering new aspects and complexities. He is particularly skilled at describing how each character has only a partial or limited idea of what is the situation. I thought the episode excellent in describing some issues reading books from another time or another language. The books are character driven, and there are many characters to get to know, more than a single reading can explore.
On the comma, I think James is creating a description in which the person, say Mamie, is all of those adjectives at once, combined, not each one separately. So, to me, no commas makes sense..creates an image.
The way James used the term “wonderful” reminds me of Jonathan Edwards essay on the “awful sweetness” of a walk with god. Interesting the awful and wonderful were once synonyms!
Your comment on the verb "pick up" reminded me of a similar phenomenon in Canadian French where the verb "pogner" has dozens of meanings that derive loosely from the original meaning of to catch, which is its sole meaning in European French. For more on "pogner" I recommend an episode from one of my favorite YouTubers, maprofdefrançais, entitled "Le mot le plus utilisé au Québec?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJbNIAdILeo
Really interesting stuff as always. I've always been uncertain about how to talk about dialogue. I know people who are very focused on making sure a character sounds very specific whereas I often trust that an actor will do what they want. Yet you're making me rethink it about the idea of use of the word ain't.
Thanks for the shout-out to Ned Sparks -- your vocal impression was perfect! He also graced my favorite film of the period, "Gold Diggers of 1933," made the same year as "42nd Streeet."
This is quite a wonderful -- In James' sense -- introduction to the intricacies of "The Ambassadors", a novel I love. Two very minor mentions: Waymarsh aligns himself with the Wollett faction in the novel, but he's from Connecticut (which is certainly close enough). And indeed, he's educated; he's a lawyer.
I can't help wondering what you make of what many, including me, think is one of the novel's most thrilling sentences, the one about Maria Gostrey's apartment filled with precious collectors' objects: "The flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault." Would you have preferred "like"? I go to battle for "as".
Thanks for pointing others to this astonishing book.
Henry James literally did not write ‘The Ambassadors’. He dictated it. Yet as he turned to dictation his prose became increasingly baroque. (“The tapeworm sentences.”) The exact opposite of what you (or, at least, a layman like myself) might expect. A remarkable weird result.
Perhaps revision of the transcripts played some part?
Then there’s the persistent bizarre ambiguity in the situations, characters’ motivations and (what we now might call) power dynamics of the later work. Edmund Wilson hit on this quality when he used the word “ambiguity” in the title of his essay on James. An essay that, in essence, asked “My God! Are we even sure there are ghosts in James classic ghost story ‘Turn of the Screw’?”
My philistine take is that James’ last three novels are inferior to ‘The Bostonians’ and ‘Washington Square’, but enjoy an inflated reputation, in part because their very difficulty seems to anticipate and align them with modernism, in part because their difficulty & strangeness makes them more interesting for academics to study & write about, and in part because genuine lovers of James are delighted to indulge him as he pursues his idiosyncrasies & vision past commercial considerations. His late novels thus become to James’ admirers what ‘Exile on Main St.’ is to Rolling Stones fans.
There’s a story about one of Dickens’ daughters. I’m, no doubt, getting details wrong, but, I believe, she had a mild illness and instead of going to lessons she was home and in a room she wasn’t usually in at that time of day. She thus was able to hear her father write. He was acting out the characters as he wrote, speaking their lines in their voices.
The podcast is fantastic, btw. The fact that’s there’s not a broad underlying structure and a listener doesn’t know where you’re going to go is a real plus I hadn’t anticipated. It comes across like a compilation of the very best bits from several projects.
Very interesting that he dictated the novels, according to commenter below.. That aligns with a surprising discovery I made recently. I found it easier to listen to his novels than to read them. I tried an audiobook not expecting it to be listenable. But the page long sentence I’d been dreading amazingly became clear. The actor had the rhythm down. The tone. That helped a lot. I did have to refer to the text, but the audio version was a revelation. True, it was only Portrait of a Lady, not a late novel. But I’m going to try this out with the Ambassadors.
Unlike the writer above, I love James’s late novels. I am not an academic. And find it interesting that the above writer makes snide remarks about people who like these books. It is just a matter of taste, i think. These are books that reward re-reading and discovering new aspects and complexities. He is particularly skilled at describing how each character has only a partial or limited idea of what is the situation. I thought the episode excellent in describing some issues reading books from another time or another language. The books are character driven, and there are many characters to get to know, more than a single reading can explore.
On the comma, I think James is creating a description in which the person, say Mamie, is all of those adjectives at once, combined, not each one separately. So, to me, no commas makes sense..creates an image.
If you were polling most-liked episodes then I'd put this in my top 10 of all time.
The way James used the term “wonderful” reminds me of Jonathan Edwards essay on the “awful sweetness” of a walk with god. Interesting the awful and wonderful were once synonyms!
Your comment on the verb "pick up" reminded me of a similar phenomenon in Canadian French where the verb "pogner" has dozens of meanings that derive loosely from the original meaning of to catch, which is its sole meaning in European French. For more on "pogner" I recommend an episode from one of my favorite YouTubers, maprofdefrançais, entitled "Le mot le plus utilisé au Québec?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJbNIAdILeo
Really interesting stuff as always. I've always been uncertain about how to talk about dialogue. I know people who are very focused on making sure a character sounds very specific whereas I often trust that an actor will do what they want. Yet you're making me rethink it about the idea of use of the word ain't.
Thanks for the shout-out to Ned Sparks -- your vocal impression was perfect! He also graced my favorite film of the period, "Gold Diggers of 1933," made the same year as "42nd Streeet."
This is quite a wonderful -- In James' sense -- introduction to the intricacies of "The Ambassadors", a novel I love. Two very minor mentions: Waymarsh aligns himself with the Wollett faction in the novel, but he's from Connecticut (which is certainly close enough). And indeed, he's educated; he's a lawyer.
I can't help wondering what you make of what many, including me, think is one of the novel's most thrilling sentences, the one about Maria Gostrey's apartment filled with precious collectors' objects: "The flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault." Would you have preferred "like"? I go to battle for "as".
Thanks for pointing others to this astonishing book.