French words in The Ambassadors

In order to give a point to the rather small focus I've set myself in this paper, I'm going to take up half my paper with a couple of large assertions about The Ambassadors, and about the significance of the novel as a turning point in James's oeuvre.

James's fundamental project in writing The Ambassadors is his juxtaposition of two different worlds, two different value systems, two different ways of seeing. Strether in trying to find a way of mediating between these two worlds occupies successive somewhat inglorious positions; he has to be ambassador for the New World's offended prudery, then spokesman for the Old World's licentiousness. In the cultural map that James is making in his writing, he is interested in differentiating the forms that the life of the leisured classes takes inside all the national cultures he touches upon; American ways from English ways, French from Italian (and, for that matter, also, Bostonians from New Yorkers, Paris from the French countryside). But at the bottom of this minutely differentiated complexity lies an argument which James is forever taking up and refining upon, and which he never closes, between the Old World and the New. Those very terms, of course, make the co-existence in geographical space of these cultural differences also work on another axis, between past and present, tradition and modernity. England shifts position on this axis, sometimes aligned with the new (as, for instance, in the analysis of afin-de-si�cle breakdown of the gender system based on the virginal sheltered innocence of girls, in What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age), sometimes opposing to a newer America its labyrinthine old corruption (in TheWings of the Dove ).

Such crude reductions cry out for complication; and the first complication is that in fact so many of these cultural differences are in fact played out in the novels between Americans and Americans; Gilbert Osmond and Mme Merle's dark Old World secret defined against the New World freshness of Isabel Archer; the American Misses Bourdereaux fighting for their precious old history against the American critic; Charlotte Stant partnering the (rare, authentic) Italian Prince in their Old Worldish adultery; little Bilham and Miss Barrace arguing for Paris against Waymarsh and Sarah Pocock. Even Marie de Vionnet - embodiment, as James insists over and over, of an old tradition of Continental womanhood - is half English. This must have been the solution James found to the problem of what feels crude and inauthentic in his treatment of the Old World/ New World theme in his novelThe American. He can enact the argument without having to pretend to render both sides with the same inwardness; the Old World can be encountered and its appeal and its potency evoked through the mediation of his crowd of expatriate conoisseurs, who represent no doubt both a reality in the period in question and also a superbly useful novelistic invention.

Again, England is the exception; James can 'do' England from inside as confidently as he can 'do' America. Maisie's London life, just to take one instance, can be confidently rendered in all its minute ordinary detail; but France in that novel, essential in its otherness to the novel's arguments about pleasure and judgement, is only tantalisingly seen and smelt and heard, through the carriage window or from the hotel balcony, by the appreciatively responsive and respectful sightseer. Maisie in the end, however, is able to construct out of her experience of France her freedom from the narrow values of a more or less hypocritical English pedagogy: she ends up, as Strether ends up, detached from either way of seeing things. The very juxtaposition itself, the vantage point overlooking the two mutually exclusive systems of arrangements for living, liberates them both; and perhaps consigns them both to a particular kind of loneliness.

The pivot upon which James's Old World/ New World argument turns in his writing is upon the sexual arrangements inside the different cultural spaces. Isabel Archer's American upbringing has done nothing to prepare her for her husband's Old World-style cynicism or his sordid secrets. Woollett won't tolerate the conventional Parisian arrangement by which an older married woman initiates and refines a younger man. The American critic in 'The Aspern Papers' contemplates the erotic life of the poet with a characteristic mixture of prurient fascination and distaste. Milly Theale won't, in the end, come to Merton's Venice room where Kate has already been. It seems to me that one of the crucial dynamics in the whole development of James's oeuvre is a process of radical revision in James's apprehension and rendering of the ethics of those different systems of sexual arrangement. In the course of his exploring the arrangements in his writing, he grows to inhabit eventually exactly that lonely and liberated vantage point between systems that Maisie and Strether inhabit at the end of their novels. In The Portrait of a Lady our sympathies, however qualified, are with Isabel's brave clean and rather virginal imagination, which has perhaps never completely outgrown the schooling she missed in the little Dutch House in Albany; the sexually experienced and exploiting villains are fairly unequivocally villainous, and even to some extent punished (Osmond loses advantage in his fight with Isabel; Madame Merle loses everything). In The Golden Bowl it is as though Mme Merle is given back youth and beauty - and our sympathy - to weigh in the scale against her rival, a good bright girl on the Isabel Archer model; the novel is structured around its unresolvable argument between the sins of the Old World (old-fashioned-Continental-adulterous) and the sins of the New (puritan-appropriative-infantilising).

'Old World' and 'New' are of course ideas and as such difficult to interrogate as realities external to the writing; but then the argument in James's fiction is also an argument between two novel traditions. The English-language tradition, evolved under the pens of so many women writers and in crucial relationship to its female readership, eschewed an improper sexuality and took form primarily inside what Ruth Bernard Yeazell has called the 'space of courtship between love and marriage'. On the other hand the Continental tradition, with its predomination of male authors, was centred upon the transgressive space of adultery; as Tony Tanner has it, on 'the tension between law and sympathy'. James's sceptical transitional fictions of the eighteen-nineties are interrogations of the traditional values of the English-language novel: an idealising chaste femininity; a problematical and sometimes even pathological propriety (I'm thinking of Maisie, The Awkward Age, 'The Turn of the Screw'). These fictions are about, precisely, the hold old ways of thinking about sex and old sexual taboos have upon imagination; they are about the processes inside a given culture for unlearning sexual superstitions, and about how those superstitions, once uprooted, shake the very foundations of a way of living and imagining.

It is this 'unlearning' of old ways of thinking that makes possible the liberated poise of The Ambassadors, in which James is able to hold both ways of seeing open inside the same novel. Strether's pivotal moment of recognition, when the lovers whom he had hoped against hope would be conveniently 'virtuous' for him, turn out to do after all the ordinary things that real lovers do, feels like the embodiment of the history of James's own writing: from his beginnings in a moralised English-language tradition, James has made something like Strether's journey to voluptuous imaginings of pleasure. The late novels seem to me to represent an acceptance of the force of desire, the power of bodies, and the beauty of pleasure; in contradistinction to that tradition of imagination which has always stressed the power of sacrfice, the beauty of suffering, and the noble ideal of chastity.

The reason that Frenchness - and, hovering as a shadow-presence behind the English utterance of the novel, French language and expression - is crucial to The Ambassadors, is because James is stretching and pushing Englishness to express something new; he wants reference to another range and register to help him make out in English a new way of taking things. He has always invoked France, in his cultural mapping of the North Atlantic leisure-class, to stand for the sensual and the beautiful; for pleasure. (Italy too has its special function in the writing; but it is never so sharply focussed as an alternative system to the moralising and conscientious English-language one.) The scattering of actual French words in the text as we have it is there to stand for a residue of untranslatable difference; and, at the same time, for the capacity of English to rise to express the difference.

Of course it would be difficult to find a novel written before 1950 that didn't have its sprinkling of French; French has had a special status as the European language reached for by the educated everywhere to express a certain range of apprehension: subtle, worldly, knowing, communicating cleverly the nuances of social performance. There's a whole history to be made out, of the role inside the novel of the French language in relation to other European languages, in that long period when, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it 'the enlightened, the worldly, the chasers of fashion, all wanted to know what had just happened in Parisian intellectual salons'._ In the Russian novel, of course, a fundamental and profoundly problematic East-West polarity expresses itself partly through this issue of the French language, and the so different worlds that French and Russian speak.

It is a gesture in very poor taste on my part to draw attention to the French in James's novel. There's absolutely nothing meretricious in James's sprinkling his text with French words; the very last effect he's aiming at is any sort of demonstration of his own fluency. Fluency in this world of sophisticated cosmopolites has to go without saying or it's not the real thing. The question of 'translation' at the most literal level simply does not arise: even Sarah Pocock presumably knows how to talk to her ling�re. (This is another thorny narrative problem solved by James's use of Americans to enact the qualities of his European cultures: even in The American the young Bellegardes have their mother, daughter of the Earl of St Dunstan's, to help account for their sounding so at home in English.) Attention in The Ambassadors is is only once drawn, in all the conversations Strether has with Marie de Vionnet, to any difficulty he might have in following her in French (I'll return to that once, later).

Strolling the boulevards in unaccustomed freedom, turning over on the street bookstalls the lemon-yellow paperbacks that in all James's writing stand for initiations French and literary and thrilling, or drinking beer in crowded cafŽs at 'populous midnight', Strether knows from the beginning that he's going to like Paris too much. There is an incantatory magic in his simply listing the Place de l'Opera, the Boulevard Malesherbes, the 'troisi�me', and so on; conjuring the power for the imagination of a given place in a given era. Maria Gostrey's little entresol in the Quartier Marboeuf, crowded with precious old things and the warm life of her intelligent interest, has to stay in French; likewise the porte-coch�re, redolent of past grandeurs, the significant threshold through which Strether has to pass in order to go up to Chad's apartment.

The French words are often an invocation of a social amenity, a sheer practised expertise in all those innumerable arrangements that keep the privileged classes pleasured with so little sign of sweat: the ouvreuse who shows Chad into their box at the Opera; the petit bleu, the telegrams which whizz about the city through pneumatic tube, sent off from the reliable Postes et TŽlŽgraphiques.. The omelette aux tomates in the Paris restauraunt, and the cotelette de veau ˆ l'oseille ordered at the country auberge, simply won't translate into tomato omelette and veal cutlets. There are aspects of Paris which even the least permeable visitors can't afford to resist; even Sarah Pocock buys her presumably exquisitely superior underclothes from the ling�re for whom there will be no equivalent back home.

The eminently permeable ones learn so much; Chad is so altered from the raw American youth he was, polished and competent and knowing, so that even his shade of shyness is 'mere good taste'. When these sophisticated Parisian-Americans reach for French expressions in their conversation, it's often where they want to express the nuances of 'good taste'; judgement doesn't make reference to conscience but rather to how something will go down, or how it will seem; often reversing the obvious, vulgar, likelihood. Miss Barrace says that Waymarsh will be a succ�s fou, when we might rather expect them to find him a dull flop. When Maria Gostrey comments on the coincidence of Strether's meeting the lovers in the country, she says ˆ quoi se fier?, meaning effectively 'what are the odds against that?', but literally, 'what can you trust in?': good taste requires a shrug of unsurprise, not displays of moral outrage.

Twice, Chad incites Strether to 'see', in French: Allez donc voir, and vous allez voir: and Strether has to learn not to understand, but to see. The novel makes us actually see embodied the whole difference between Paris and Woollett: it begins when Strether dines with Miss Gostrey in Chester by the light of pink-shaded candles, her dress cut low. Ladies in Paris all bare their shoulders, and they may also smoke (Miss Barrace does). When Strether first meets Marie de Vionnet he thinks for a moment that she would have passed at Woolett, until he notices that she wears more gold bangles than he's ever seen a lady wear at home. It's not, of course, that she isn't a lady, it's just that in order for her to be one he has to unmake his old idea of what a 'lady' is, or does, or wears.

The constituents of the love-tangle Strether uncovers aren't translatable because they don't have equivalents in the English language world that Strether knows. He has to learn for himself what it means that Marie de Vionnet is a femme du monde: a woman of the world, literally, but the English phrase has all the wrong weight in its implications of a dreary secure knowingness, while a woman of fashion is too trivial. Monde is an important social marker in this French social hierarchy: haut monde and beau monde , and hovering somewhere behind the possibility of the improper demi-mondaine that Woollett had imagined Chad must be entangled with, indispensible ingredient in the French novel tradition. At first Strether is ignorant: he thinks a femme du monde might be equivalent to a lady: a lady who by definition in Woollett couldn't be having an extra-marital affair with a younger man. He has to learn to imagine the possibility of a woman of high status not compromised by her secret, as long as she carries it off. He has to learn in fact that one of the functions of the femme du monde might even be the kind of initiation that Marie de Vionnet has given to Chad.

Another untranslatable ingredient in the tangle is Jeanne, the jeune fille. 'Young girl' doesn't come near what's understood here: a refined type, product of a very particular training in line with an evolved aesthetic involving infantilising white dresses and appealing guilelessness (James's readers know all about the type, from Pansy and Aggie). Mamie the so-different American girl understands at once, and with delicate sympathy, that the jeune fille is formed to please: to please men, of course, the consumers of this particular piece of brilliant French pleasure-making. Jeanne is a parti, a potential match, created in order to be desired and thence married. There's even a word that has to be in French - difficile - for the thing girls might be but thankfully Jeanne is not: the true jeune fille is compliant and easy (we see her agree, although she loves Chad, to an arranged marriage).

It is significant that, for all his advancing openness to new ways of seeing, Strether baulks at this marriage of Jeanne's. She stands, rather impersonally realised as she is, for some sacrifice buried deep within Parisian sexual culture, which Strether cannot bear to entertain nor to lend himself to, not in word or even in imagination. His relinquishment of the securities and simplicities of Woollett's moralising condemnation is not a simple of exchange of Woollett values for Parisian ones: his poise outside both systems makes him aware, as it were, of the sacrificial elements in each of them. The account he gets from Maria Gostrey of Marie de Vionnet's own life story affords a glimpse of the more or less brutal marriage arrangements by which the jeune fille abruptly commences her transformation into the knowing and sophisticated adult woman, managing her separation and her affair. Compared with Americans, foreign women are 'quite made over ... by marriage', Maria explains.

A whole social process, absolutely different to anything in Woollett, pivots through all its so different phases on the pleasing of men. What makes Marie de Vionnet 'wonderful' is this lifelong effort made to please; she can be fifty women; she can make herself a young girl of twenty; above all, she must never bore Chad. Sarah Pocock needn't be afraid of boring anyone, ever (if they're bored that's their problem). Sarah knows she's right; Marie only knows she's charming. When Marie at the end of her novel is sure she is going to lose Chad, all she can fall back upon for help is a language of old wisdom - vieille sagesse: such things have always been; women have always known. 'It's when one's old that it's worst: it's a doom...' and 'the only certainty is I shall be the loser in the end'. 'What woman was ever safe?' Maria Gostrey asks. This old wisdom moves and scares Strether; it's nothing like the righteous reasoning he has taken from Mrs. Newsome as the woman's voice. He reflects that: 'it took women, it took women, if to deal with them was to walk on water no wonder that the water rose...'

I have two last thoughts about the French words in The Ambassadors. The first is to note that the one place where we hear explicitly that Marie de Vionnet chooses to speak to Strether in an idiomatic rapid French he can only lamely follow is after the encounter on the river. And we know through this as well as through other things that we have penetrated here to the deepest Frenchest place in the novel, where the agrŽment of the river suggests a world of other agrŽments , and where English in a sense has to stop on the threshold.

And, a postscript: when Chad is making up his mind to go back to America, he's going to go into advertising, and he puts that in French to Strether: c'est un monde. Is this the lesson that Chad has taken from the French culture of pleasurable consumption: that he should be able to sell it to someone?

_ Witness of Poetry, p.6.