A Singles Ad

I just discovered this singles ad in my files:  you may have seen it a few years ago, but it bears rereading.  The ad appeared in the Atlanta Journal.

"Single black female seeks male companionship.  Ethnicity unimportant.  I've a very good looking girl that loves to play.  I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping, fishing trips, and cozy winter nights lying by the fire.  Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand.  I'll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me.

Call xxx-xxx-xxxx and ask for Daisy."

Over 15,000 men found themselves talking to the Atlanta Humane Society about Daisy, an eight-week-old Black Lab.

Just What Is A Leisenring Lift?

James ("Big Jim") E. Leisenring of Allentown, PA, was a tool maker by trade whose expertise at fly fishing led to him becoming known as the Wet-Fly Wizard of the Brodheads.  He published The Art of Tying the Wet Fly in 1941 and died ten years later. His name has endured among fly fishers because he invented the "Leisenring Lift," a technique of fishing a wet fly or nymph underwater.

I thought I understood this technique: you fished the fly in the typical manner, casting it upstream and letting it drift down as drag-free as possible.  At the end of the drift, you raised your rod tip so that the nymph rose in the water column, thereby imitating a nymph swimming to the surface to metamorphose into a dun.  I had tried this lift from time to time, but never had enjoyed success with it.

Earlier this spring, while reading William C. Black's engaging survey, Gentlemen Preferred Dry Flies:  The Dry Fly and the Nymph, Evolution and Conflict (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2010), I came across a quotation from Leisenring that stopped me in my tracks. What I thought I knew about the Leisenring Lift seemed to be altogether mistaken, so I decided to read what the Wizard himself had written.  Leisenring's book was reprinted by Crown with additional material by Vernon ("Pete") S. Hidy in 1971 as The Art of Tying the Wet Fly & Fishing the Flymph ("Flymph" is Hidy's coinage for a nymph near the surface or in the surface film that is about to become a dun).

Leisenring describes the lift in his last chapter, "Fishing a Wet Fly". His technique is based on first spotting a trout and then casting a fly upstream some fifteen feet or more above the trout. As the fly sinks to the bottom, the angler follows it with his rod, allowing no slack but being careful not to make the fly move unnaturally.

"Now watch the fly," Leisenring instructs the reader, invoking a dramatic scene: "It is almost to him, and would only have to travel about four more feet to pass right by his nose without his looking at it unless it can be made to appear alive and escaping.  At this point the progress of the rod following the fly is checked, and the pressure of the water against the stationary line and leader is slowly lifting the fly."

As the fly rises in the water current, Leisenring continues, its movement attracts the attention of the trout.  As Leisenring explains, "Now the fly becomes slightly efficient or animated and deadly, and the trout notices it.  The hackles or legs start to work, opening and closing, and our trout is backing downstream in order to watch the fly a little more, because he is not quite persuaded as yet.  Now you can see the fly become even more deadly.  As more water flows against the line, the fly rises higher off the bottom and the hackle is working in every fiber.  It will jump out of the water in a minute, now, and the trout is coming for it. Bang! He's got it" (p. 123).

The Leisenring Lift, then, is not caused by the angler raising the rod tip after the wet fly or nymph has come to the end of its drift.  Instead, the angler stops tracking the nymph's movement with his rod tip  partway through the drift, some four feet or so upstream from a specific trout's position.  Stopping the rod makes the current begin lifting the fly to the surface.  From the trout's point of view, it seems to be alive and to be escaping, and so the trout goes after it.

In the next to last paragraph, Leisenring repeats that elevating his rod tip is not what makes the fly seem alive and therefore desirable to the trout:  "I do not try to impart any fancy movements to my fly with my rod but simply allow the fly to advance naturally with the current over the stones and gravel until I check its progress gently by ceasing to follow it with my rod.  Then the slight tension from the water pressure flowing against my leader and line causes the fly to rise slowly, opening and shutting the hackles, giving a breathing effect such as a genuine insect would have when leaving the bottom of the stream to come to the surface.  The water will do all that is necessary to make a fly deadly if it is properly tied" (p. 124).

Twice, therefore, Leisenring states that checking his rod's movement causes the water current's pressure to move the fly upwards.  He does not elevate his rod tip to perform the Leisenring Lift.

That much seems clear.  One complicating factor is that apparently Leisenring practiced other techniques as well.  Dave Hughes knew Pete Hidy, commenting in Wet Flies (Stackpole Books, 1995) that Hidy had told him that Leisenring and he had meant to write another book on fishing the wet fly.  "'The Lift,' Pete said, 'was just one of many techniques that Jim used.  It's too bad that today everybody believes it was the only method he used'" (p. 29).

I believe we can see another method in an account by Ed Zern. Leisenring gave Zern a demonstration of nymphing one day on the Brodheads. As Zern tells the story in The Masters on the Nymph (ed. J. Michael Migel and Leonard M. Wright, Jr.; Nick Lyons Books, 1979), he was sitting on the bank, fishless, when Leisenring appeared (pp. 257-58).  Zern told him he had been reading The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and didn't understand how one could let the fly drift freely in the current and still maintain contact with it. "I'll show you," Leisenring said.

Leisenring then proceeded to stand quite close to a run and flipped the fly upstream, holding the rod tip high as the fly swept down beside him and then downstream. Zern comments that the fly traveled no more than fifteen feet. It was obvious to him that it drifted freely and Leisenring would have felt, and probably seen, any trout that touched the fly. The demonstration over, Leisenring went on downstream.  Zern stepped into the river, cast as Leisenring had, held the rod tip high, and proceeded to catch one brown trout after another!

Several points seem worth noting about this episode. First, Zern did not ask Leisenring to demonstrate the Lift (perhaps because the term was as yet unknown in the early '40's?). Instead, Zern asked him how he maintained contact with the fly as it came drifting down the bottom. We can't tell from Zern's description whether Leisenring let the water current raise the fly or not. I'd say perhaps not, as the fly continued to drift downstream. He wasn't trying for a specific trout but fishing the water.  So why was the rod tip high? I'd guess, and it's no more than a guess, that first Leisenring and then Zern had to hold the rod high to avoid drag from other currents, much indeed as one must when fishing a dry fly.

It's a shame Leisenring and Hidy never managed to write their book on fishing the wet fly. We have Leisenring's own words describing the Lift, and we can extrapolate from Ed Zern's account that Leisenring also fished a nymph on a short line with rod tip held high when he was fishing the water and not targeting a specific trout. What his other techniques for fishing a nymph or wet fly consisted of is a question that can't be answered.

But now I know that I was wrong about how to do the Leisenring Lift, I'm going to see what happens when I do it the right way. What worked once should work again.  I'd also like to hear from anyone who has used the Lift successfully.  Please comment.  Stay tuned, and tight lines!

Handplane Essentials by Christopher Schwarz

In a time when books often provide less than their titles promise, Christopher Schwarz's revised and expanded Handplane Essentials (Cincinnati, OH: P+W Media, 2017) does the reverse:  it is a compilation of his articles from the last fifteen years that goes well beyond what a beginning woodworker needs to know.

Sensibly, Schwarz doesn't go over the history of hand planes, already well described by books like Seth Burchard's translation of Josef Greber's The History of the Woodworking Plane (1991), John M. Whelan's The Wooden Plane:  Its History, Form, and Function (1993), and Garrett Hack's The Handplane Book (1999), which also deals with how to use planes.  Instead, he divides his book into five sections, dealing successively with Basics, Sharpening, Techniques, History & Philosophy, and Reviews of high-end planes.

Because the book is a compilation of articles, there is some repetition.  For example, we read a bit too often about the three essential bench planes, a jack, a jointer, and a smoother.  And there are a few minor inconsistencies in this repetition, as in mentioning the availability of differently angled plane beds for the Lee-Neilson smoothing plane in one place but not in another (cf. p. 41 and p. 178).

But so much information is here, in fact, that a more accurate title would be Hand Planes: Essentials and Beyond.  I can imagine someone who just beginning to use hand tools becoming overwhelmed.  (That person might be better served by John Sainsbury's Planecraft:  A Woodworker's Handbook, 1989.)  Conversely, anyone with some experience is bound to learn some new things from Handplane Essentials.  Including an index would have been useful (and might have called attention to instances of repetition), but one can make notes on the blank end pages.

Handplane Essentials is a relatively large book, 8 1/2" by 12", weighing in at nearly 3 1/2 pounds.  Thankfully, Chris Schwarz's talents as a writer plus the excellent black and white photographs make Handplane Essentials a pleasure to read, if a bit heavy to hold while reclining.  I rarely finish a 350 page book and wish that it had been longer, but I did so here.  Highly recommended.

Knife, by Tim Hayward

Tim Hayward's Knife:  The Culture, Craft and Cult of the Cook's Knife (Quadrille Publishing, London, 2016) is an appealing book, with excellent photography by Chris Terry, first-rate illustrations of knives by Will Webb, and Shokunin Manga by Chie Kutsuwada.  But the more one reads of the text, the more one is put off by its over-the-top rhetoric.

Hayward is clear that he intends Knife not to be comprehensive but selective, reflecting his own personal views.  It's not surprising, therefore, that he never mentions the Inuit ulu, a wonderful chopping and cutting tool, nor the existence of ceramic knives, despite his avowed love of technology.  But he seems not to know how handy a small knife with a serrated edge is:  not only does it slice tomatoes easily, it saws through corrugated cardboard and plastic clamshell packaging.

His own views owe less to personal experience than to the desire to write vividly.  The result is pretentiously vacuous. Take the sentence from the last paragraph of his introduction:  "A knife has a beautiful purity of purpose, it's almost the perfect expression of form that precisely follows function, and yet it is at once a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities."  Some knives have a purity of purpose, agreed, but knives are too varied (as the book itself illustrates) to be lumped together and then abstracted as "a knife."  Form in a knife can indeed follow function, so what is the quality that calls for "almost" and hinders or prevents that "perfect expression of form"?  And if to some degree these claims are valid, how can "a knife" at once be "a seething mess of elusive, impalpable qualities"?  A seething mess?  In a knife?  Give us a break!

In like fashion, a horizontal cut is described by Hayward as "the utterly lethal and desperate 'last slice' cut, in which a piece of (usually) bread or meat is squashed flat to the board with the palm of the hand, the fingers stretched back and up in fervent but usually futile hope, and the blade sawn between hand and board" (p. 15).  Ever since I first read Marcella Hazan nearly forty years ago, I have been using that cut to slice a chicken breast horizontally in half so it cooks faster and stays tender.  I've never, ever cut myself.  So what are we to make of  "Utterly lethal"?  "Desperate"? "Fervent but usually futile hope"?  This is a seething mess of feverish rhetoric.

Let me just touch on other problems with Hayward's statements:

Steel is not "a metaphor for permanence, solidity and purity" (p. 18).

Slicing a lemon with a carbon blade will not turn the lemon black, as he asserts (p. 45). The citric acid of the lemon will discolor the blade, however, unless you clean it promptly.

Making a knife blade from steel involves two heat treatments, not one:  he ignores tempering the steel.

A newly purchased Chinese cleaver does not arrive "with a lifetime of patina and dripping with butch chic" (p. 78)--at  least none of mine ever has.  

His first rule of carving, "Rest the Meat," contains an amusing mistake:  let the meat rest until its core temperature has dropped to 50 degrees Centigrade or 32 degrees Fahrenheit (my italics, p. 174).

Leaving aside the empty rhetoric, Hayward's major shortcoming is ignorance about sharpening knives:  not only does he misunderstand wire edges, he doesn't realize what steeling and honing a blade accomplish.  As a consequence, he abrades his knives to get them sharp.  That is a waste of good steel.

Sharpening poses a problem for many people, but the solution is not to be found in Hayward.  Rather than spend the money for Hayward's Knife, buy a book or video on how to sharpen knives.  One book I can recommend is Ron Hock's The Perfect Edge (it's also available in video).  You'll learn about steel from a master blade smith as well as learn how to sharpen a knife properly.

Millers Falls Hand Drill No. 1, Before and After a Paint Job

Hand tool woodworkers are periodically confronted with a dilemma:  either the tool you want is no longer in production, or, if it is once again being made, it's pretty expensive. Tools manufactured to a handyman's price point are almost never of adequate quality. Buying a cheap tool and then having to replace it because of its defects wastes both time and money.

One way out of this dilemma is obvious:  buy used tools.  Yes, you will make mistakes, but typically those mistakes will cost you less than buying a new tool of poor quality and then having to replace it with a better one.  One old tool I especially like is an eggbeater hand drill with double pinion gears made nearly 100 years ago by Millers Falls.  Here is a picture of my well-used Millers Falls No. 1.

My reasons for liking this drill are simple:  if I'm restoring a piece of antique furniture, I try to take it slow and carefully.  An electric drill is indispensable, but it can go zzzzzp! and suddenly you have a hole to patch, one that due to Sod's Law is always in the worst possible place.  Cranking a hand drill, you proceed slowly, so you have ample time to realize you are on the verge of making a mistake.  

These eggbeater drills are pretty straightforward, but I don't recommend buying one sight unseen.   One or more of the three jaws in the chuck can be missing, screws can have vanished, and the handles of older ones--they started being made in the late 19th Century--can be cracked.  If the drill is otherwise fine, cracks in the handle can be re-glued with Hot Stuff, a glue with no surface tension that wicks into cracks.  The No. 1 has a bit container in the handle, but the eight bits may or may not be there.  For me, that's not important because the chuck accepts drill bits up to 13/64". 

At some point, you may consider repainting the drill.  I rather like the indications of honest use on a wooden tool:  they remind me of the better woodworkers who used this tool before, and imitation is the first step toward mastery.  But badly worn paint seems a different matter, and I recently felt the urge to restore the paint on my Millers Falls.  After all, these drills when new were meant to call attention to themselves:  the wood on my No. 1 is cocobolo; what now appears to be a brass collar was nickel plated; and the iron frame was splendid in glossy black with the drive wheel in glossy red. 

A local hobby store had a wide selection of gloss enamels, including a red that replicated what the now faded remnants must have looked like when new.  I unscrewed the drill's handle, unscrewed and lifted off the drive wheel, and scraped the chipped black paint off the frame.  After lightly sanding the metal and degreasing it with brake cleaner, I applied two coats of enamel.  To my eye, it looks much better than it did:  decidedly not new, but better cared for.  Some Break-Free CLP in the two lubrication holes on the back of the frame and some dry lube on the gears made it run even more smoothly.

If you want to have the ultimate version of this kind of drill, check out two websites.  One is Wiktor Kuc's website.  According to Christopher Schwarz, when Wiktor Kuc has finished restoring a Millers Falls drill, it's better than new.  The other is Ted Hoeft's at Lone Pine Toolworks:  he restores a variety of tools, charging according to the amount of work involved.  Judging by his photos, he does beautiful work.

For myself, I'm happy with the middle road between buying a remade drill meticulously restored and buying a ratty one and leaving it alone:  that five dollars I spent on gloss enamel and the few hours I spent cleaning, painting, and lubricating it have resulted in a Millers Falls No.1 that looks as good as it works.  Come to think of it, a couple of coats of Tru-Oil would bring up the sheen of the cocobolo handle and knob and make it look even better.

Republican vs. Democrat: A Longer Perspective

My wife and I recently acquired an antique sideboard.  The surfaces are made of walnut, and the interior woods are yellow pine and tulip poplar.  These interior woods strongly suggest a Southern origin.  Mahogany was readily available at this time in coastal cities of the South, but the use of walnut indicates it was probably made in the "backcountry" of the South.

Hoping to find out more about the furniture from this area, I borrowed though Cornell’s library Southern Furniture 1680-1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown (1997).  Their book wasn't helpful in regard to our sideboard, but Prown's description of how the Southerners living in coastal cities regarded the people living inland started me thinking of the way Democrats tend to regard Republicans today and vice versa.

The longer-settled, more urban, better educated, and more mercantile inhabitants of the 18th and early 19th centuries in the South were unquestionably prejudiced about the inhabitants of the backcountry.  As Jonathan Prown comments, "Regarded by outsiders with a combination of fear, fascination, amusement, and contempt, the backcountry represented a place of cultural chaos.  Nonurban and noncommercial, the early backcountry rarely is hailed for its cultural achievements.  Instead, the region more often is cited for its cultural anomalies--whiskey stills, minimal education, family feuds, desolate living conditions, first-cousin marriages, and rowdy behavior."  It's much to the point that these aspects resonate even more strongly today.

As David Hackett Fischer has persuasively argued in Albion's Seed:  Four British Folkways in  America (1989), the settlers in the Southern backcountry were different from those who had come to the colonies earlier because they came from a different part of Great Britain and determinedly kept to their own traditions.  Caricatured--think of Ma and Pa Kettle, Hee-Haw, or Justified--these anomalies soon were appropriated.  With a reversed kind of pride, "backcountry" became "country."  Jeff Foxworthy’s red-neck jokes going viral are an obvious example.  Those in the backcountry looking outward toward the coastal population probably saw themselves as embattled defenders of traditional values of hearth and home, family and kin, the Bible and the rifle.  They were the pioneers of what became known as Manifest Destiny, those who made America great.  And they are still with us as those who passionately believe that Donald Trump will indeed make America great again.

From the Republicans’ point of view, the best government is the least government (as long, of course, as reformers don't touch their Medicare benefits).  In the 18th century, this backcountry distrust of government and the governing class was rational:  North Britons wanted to escape oppressive regulation by the government; French Huguenots and German Protestants wanted freedom of religion.  They all wanted land of their own and to have like-minded people as neighbors.

But, as my son used to say as a five-year-old, "That was then and this is now."  In our time, regulation by the federal government is the only hope of preventing the excesses of 21st century capitalism, be they fraudulent investment practices, pollution of air, ground, and water, the crippling cost of medical operations, or the obscene pricing of medications.  As Trump and the Republican majority in Congress make government (except for the Defense Department) smaller, it is a near certainty that they will destroy America in order to save it.

What used to be a cultural divide in the South has gone national, and it cannot be overcome by ever more narrowly pointed political targeting of fly-over country.  We have far less to fear from terrorists from without than from fanatics within.  Cultural chaos is at hand.  Unfortunately, we need something more than "a combination of fear, fascination, amusement, and contempt" to restore a moderate balance of power.  I have no suggestions for a solution, but I can say that unless one is found quickly, we are entering the last days.  It's one thing for America's greatness to wane; it's another for it to implode.

The Need for Revision in James' The Ambassadors

Henry James’ The Ambassadors may well be the world’s worst-written great novel.  His prose calls out for for an editor with a red pencil.  At best, a number of his sentences have to be read twice to be comprehensible; at worst, some remain incomprehensible.

Here, in a least-to-worst listing, are nine faults I see in The Ambassadors.

1.  Confusion over pronoun references.  Some of the dialogue so mixes “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” that one has to mark up the text to figure out who is saying what.

2.  Comma omissions.  The story goes that when the novel was going to be printed James systematically removed commas from the text that had been published in serial form in The North American Review.  As a result, we are faced with many unpunctuated heaps of modifiers:  Mme. de Vionnet makes a remark with a look of  “refined disguised suppressed" passion on her face (IX.1).  The similar endings in “ed” in that sentence come through strongly in another heap: “He was . . .easy and acute and deliberate—unhurried, unflurried, unworried, only at most a little less amused than usual” (VIII.i).  Here the “ed” endings chime strongly, while James’ habitual use of negatives in this novel—“un-, un-, un-” plus the internal rhymes of “hurry, flurry, worry” together form a sentence that pleads to be rewritten.

3.  Telling, not showing.  Often, James uses lists to convey information about a character.  These lists are almost like getting something down in brief, a kind of shorthand that he would come back to and expand--except he doesn't do so.  Take his description of Mamie on the balcony in IX.iii:  a second look presents her as “beautiful brilliant unconscious” Mamie, a Mamie used rather shabbily, but “absorbed interested and interesting.”  This pattern of listing reaches its extreme in James’ statement when Strether thinks about the cessation of Mrs. Newsome’s letters.  In her silence, Strether reflects, she demonstrated a greater intensity:  "deep devoted delicate sensitive noble” (VII.iii).  For this reader, his listing is unpersuasive:  we may know what James wants us to think, but there's no context to make us respond accordingly.

An even greater problem concerns Strether's characterization.  Near the end of the novel, we have character after character telling Strether how "wonderful" he is.  The problem is that saying so doesn't make it so.  James simply has other characters testify to this without providing the context for such a view.

4.  Odd locutions.  In their first meeting (I.i), Maria Gostrey remarks to Strether, “My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it.”  “Too many”?  Another, Strether to Chad:  “You see therefore to what tune I’m in your family” (IV.1).

Another example:  “He [Chad] was modestly benevolent, the boy—that was at least what he had been capable of the superiority of making out his chance to be; and one had one’s self literally not had the gumption to get in ahead of him” (III.ii). 

5.  Excessive Repetition of significant words and phrases.  “Came over” in the fourth paragraph of II.i is an example.  How many times does “case” occur?  So many times it becomes a crutch.  Equally overused are “in” versus “out.”  “Save” occurs so often it becomes tedious.

6.  Mysterious allusions that remain mysterious.  Waymarsh seems to function primarily as a foil to Strether.  Rather than being open to what Europe in general and Paris in particular have to offer, Waymarsh glowers grandly at what’s before him.  This glowering is described as Waymarsh's sacred rage.  “It’s the sacred rage, Strether had had further time to say [to Maria Gostrey]; and this sacred rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the description of one of his periodical necessities” (closing paragraph of I.iii).  Repeated periodically (II.i; IV.ii; VI.ii; X.ii), this phrase “sacred rage” never becomes comprehensible, let alone conveniently so.

The term “pagan” is another.  Strether realizes relatively early on that Chad must be a pagan:  “Pagan—yes, that was, wasn’t it? what Chad would logically be.  It was what he must be.  It was what he was” (IV.1). But what does this mean?  And why does James capitalize it near the end of this chapter?

7.  Excessive rhetoric.  Some extended metaphors simply expire from their own weight.  For example, in II.ii, Strether is taking a walk:  "He wasn’t there for his own profit—not, that is, the direct; he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth.  He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings.  They were folded now over the breasts of buried generations; but a flutter of two lived again in the turned page of shock-headed slouch-hatted loiterers . . . "[and off the sentence goes in another direction.]

Perhaps aligned with “pagan” are the sacrifices to strange gods on alien altars.  Strether comments to Bilham, “I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own.  I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars—of another faith altogether” (X.i).  Are we meant to respond to such phrases with appreciation of Strether's facetious irony?  I don’t believe so.  If this is the case, James is altogether too heavy handed.  And if it’s not the case, why is James employing “embrued with blood,” the kind of heightened rhetoric derived from Senecan tragedy and delightfully parodied in the Pyramus and Thisby episode in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

8.  Strether’s incomprehension that love can be carnal.  Strether’s realization that Chad and Mme. de Vionnet are physically intimate is set up as the climax of the novel, and he is shocked, truly shocked, by this knowledge.  But, as indeed Maria Gostrey asks in effect, What did he expect?  She herself wondered if Strether were grandly cynical or grandly vague (XII.iii).  Perhaps the most we can say to excuse Strether’s incomprehension is that he took Bilham’s reassurance that their relationship was “virtuous” to mean “chaste,” but that only ducks the question of why James chose to have Strether be so credulous.

9.  Inept portrayal of women.  James is not good at portraying women in this novel as anything other than perceptive listeners who can help a man formulate his thoughts about other issues.  Mamie Pocock is a good example.  Her role in the novel appears to be the person who can save Chad (II.i).  For Strether, she represents the best of American womanhood:  “she was handsome and portly and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring” (IX.iii).  Even her teeth are lovely.  And, unlike her sister-in-law, she turns out to be altogether on Strether's side.  But what does James make Strether reflect?  “Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty; but she would always be the person who, at the present sharp hour, had been disinterestedly tender” (IX.iii).  Why on earth would James include the dismissive attitude of the first half of that sentence?  Might it tell us more about James than about Strether?

Maria Gostrey starts off as someone attractive, but her function in the novel is soon reduced to being a sounding board for Strether.  Were she more, we might be bothered by Strether’s paying no attention to her  assertion,“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you,” and then following that with:  “There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world” (XII.v).  The scheme of the novel demands that Strether finally stand on his own two feet and face an uncertain future with less than adequate financial resources, so we can understand why James has to have Strether insist on his own disinterestedness.  Whether we are persuaded that is what someone like Strether actually would do in these circumstances is a different matter.

Sarah Pocock is almost completely unrealized.  The second of the two ambassadors, she exists only as the real presence in Paris of Mrs. Newsome's unyielding will in Woollett, Massachusetts.

Mme. de Vionnet fares much better, in part because Strether has to ascertain who she is and her status.  Even when he has, however, James is careful to keep her at a remove from Strether.  When Strether meets her accidentally, it’s in the sacred precincts of Notre Dame.  Strether appears to be afraid of entanglements with her, even though he is determined to “save” her.  As I noted above, he has a less than accurate notion of how Chad relates to her until, in a pastoral scene that owes much to landscape painting, he finally sees them on the river.  After that episode, James has Strether lecture Chad on how he should treat her:  if Chad were to leave her, he would be “a brute,” “guilty of the last infamy,” “a criminal of the deepest dye” (XII.iv).  At the risk of appearing insensitive to the text, I detect no irony here on James’ part.  He appears to believe what Strether says but, unfortunately, what Strether says is not only hyperbolic but absurd.  Like saying to a child, “Don’t even think of putting string beans up your nose,” Strether's condemnation implants the very idea he means to prohibit.

This is a long list of negative aspects, I realize.  What, then, are we to make of this novel?  At moments, it is wonderful.  I daresay that no one who has read it ever forgets Strether lecturing Bilham:  “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to” (V.ii).  At its best, the novel represents a relatively cultured older American trying to come to terms with a European mode of life he doesn’t understand.  If he makes some mistakes in enlarging his comprehension, he imagines most of it correctly, and through this sustained effort of imagination he gains his own independence.  

I have never read a biography of James, so I have no idea about what was going on in his own life while he was composing The Ambassadors.  Did he write it in his own version of a hurried, flurried, worried state of mind?  If so, why didn’t he revise it when it was going to come out in novel form?  There’s no question he could write better prose:  The Beast in the Jungle was also published in 1903, and its prose is deft, direct, and to the point.  (It’s also possible, I suppose, that a good editor went over that piece before it saw print.)  As the old saying has it, writing is comparatively easy; it’s revision that’s hard.  Good as The Ambassadors is, it would have been even better if James had spent more time revising.