The Ambassadors
Page 51
That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. “There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Oh yes—I know.”
“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”
“To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her. “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.”
She thought. “But with your wonderful impressions you’ll have got a great deal.”
“A great deal”—he agreed. “But nothing like you. It’s you who would make me wrong!”
Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
“That’s the way that—if I must go—you yourself would be the first to want me. And I can’t do anything else.”
So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. “It isn’t so much your being ‘right’—it’s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.”
“Oh but you’re just as bad yourself. You can’t resist me when I point that out.”
She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. “I can’t indeed resist you.”
“Then there we are!” said Strether.
HENRY JAMES
Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a whimsical, utterly charming, maddeningly open-minded parent—a Swedenborgian philosopher of considerable wealth who believed in a universal but wholly unformed society. He gave both Henry and his elder son, William, an infant baptism by taking them to Europe before they could even speak. In fact, Henry James later claimed that his first memory, dating from the age of two, was a glimpse of the column of the Place Vendôme framed by the window of the carriage in which he was riding. His peripatetic childhood took him to experimental schools in Geneva, Paris, and London. Even back in the United States he was shuffled from New York City to Albany to Newport to Boston and finally to Cambridge, where in 1862 he briefly attended Harvard Law School. “An obscure hurt,” probably to his back, exempted him from service in the Civil War, and James felt he had failed as a man when it counted most to be one and he vowed never to marry.
In search of a possible occupation, the young James turned to literature; within five years it had become his profession. His earliest story appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1865, when he was twenty-two. From the start of his career James supported himself as a writer, and over the next ten years he produced book reviews, drama and art criticism, newspaper columns, travel pieces and travel books, short stories, novelettes, a biography, and his first novel—Roderick Hudson (1876). Late in 1875, following two recent trips to Europe, James settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, and wrote The American (1877). In December 1876 he moved to London, where he produced The Europeans (1878). Soon afterward he achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of Daisy Miller (1879), the book that forever identified him with the “international theme” of the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.
Yet Henry James aspired to more than the success of Daisy Miller. Determined to scale new literary heights, James abandoned the intense social life of his earlier years and, with Balzac as his role model, devoted himself all out to the craft of fiction. Although The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was critically acclaimed and sold well, the other novels of James’s “Balzac” period—Washington Square (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886), and The Tragic Muse (1890)—were not popular with the public. As a result, he decided to redirect his efforts and began writing for the stage. In 1895, the disastrous opening night of his play Guy Domville—when James came onstage only to be hissed and booed by the London audience—forever ended his career as a playwright.
Rededicating himself to fiction, he wrote The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Awkward Age (1899). Then, as he approached and passed the age of sixty, James’s three greatest novels appeared in rapid succession: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). He spent most of his remaining years at Lamb House, his ivy-covered home in Rye, writing his memoirs and revising his novels for the twenty-four-volume New York Edition of his life-work. When World War I broke out, he was eager to serve his adopted country and threw himself into the civilian war effort. In 1915, after four decades of living in England, James became a British subject, and King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him in January 1916. Henry James died in London on February 28, 1916, and his ashes were buried in the James family lot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Commenting on the enormous contemporary interest in James, novelist Louis Auchincloss said: “How he would have loved his posthumous fame! One can imagine Emily Brontë and Herman Melville shrugging shoulders, faintly scornful, but James would have bristled with pride at every mention of his name.… It is pleasant to think that in the end he had at least a whiff of it and that the silent, grave, bearded young man should have evolved into the portly figure of the rolling, resolute gait, simple in emotion but quick and spontaneous in affection, leaving among his recording disciples a deep impression of majesty, beauty and greatness.”
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Harold Evans
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Jessica Hagedorn
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Azar Nafisi
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Carolyn See
•
Gore Vidal
MODERN LIBRARY IS ONLINE AT WWW.MODERNLIBRARY.COM
MODERN LIBRARY ONLINE IS YOUR GUIDE TO CLASSIC LITERATURE ON THE WEB
THE MODERN LIBRARY E-NEWSLETTER
Our free e-mail newsletter is sent to subscribers, and features sample chapters, interviews with and essays by our authors, upcoming books, special promotions, announcements, and news. To subscribe to the Modern Library e-newsletter, visit www.modernlibrary.com
THE MODERN LIBRARY WEBSITE
Check out the Modern Library website at
www.modernlibrary.com for:
The Modern Library e-newsletter
A list of our current and upcoming titles and series
Reading Group Guides and exclusive author spotlights
Special features with information on the classics and other paperback series
Excerpts from new releases and other titles
A list of our e-books and information on where to buy them
The Modern Library Editorial Board’s 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century written in the English language
News and announcements
Questions? E-mail us at modernlibrary@randomhouse.com.
For questions about examination or desk copies, please visit the Random House Academic Resources site at
www.randomhouse.com/academic.