Travel in The Ambassadors

Intimacy, at such a point, was like that—and what in the world else would one have wished it to be like? It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like lying.

Henry James, The Ambassadors

The ambassadors tells of the visit to Paris, from Woollett, Massachusetts, of Lambert Strether. Part tourist, part ambassador with a mission—to bring home the son of the woman he expects to marry—Strether's story continues James's examination, throughout his writing career, of American travelers in Europe and the cultural differences they confront there. In this essay I will examine the ways that, as Strether wanders off course during his visit, James reconceives modern tourism and its motivations.¹

Strether, like Mrs. Newsome, assumes initially that Chad Newsome is living a corrupt life in Paris with a wicked woman from whom Strether must save him. Strether meets and not only likes the woman, Mme. de Vionnet, but soon promises to try to save her (152). Yet he eventually discovers that she and Chad are not involved in what Strether thought was "a virtuous attachment" (114) but are lovers. This discovery occurs after he accidentally meets them at an inn in the country, where they pretend, when they see him, to be out only for the day. Deeply disappointed, Strether realizes that evening that Mme. de Vionnet has lied to him and put on a "performance" (311), but that the very "readiness" and "assurance" with which Chad and she agreed to do so signal "the other feature of the show, the deep, deep truth of the intimacy revealed" (312, 313). This is followed by the assertion, quoted in the epigraph to my essay, that "intimacy, at such a point, was like that," and then the recognition that intimacy is also "like lying."

The intimacy of Chad and Mme. de Vionnet is recognized in two likenesses, which, despite their "otherness" to one another, are combined "features" of a composite construction of meaning. This composition, moreover, entails multiple likenesses for a phenomenon, intimacy, that also combines disparate elements having no evident or explicit connection. Chad and Mme. de Vionnet act together, Strether sees, having had no time to agree to do so or on how to do so (312). They both reveal and lie about their intimacy at this time, moreover, because Strether forces them to take notice of him and so they have to explain their presence in the country. "He had made them" do it, "and must he not therefore take it now, as they had had simply, with whatever thin attenuations, to give it to him?" (313). Strether himself, therefore, participates in the composite construction of intimacy he views.

None of these participant elements can be excluded from the composition. Recognizing its likeness to lying does not alter intimacy's deep truth. To say that intimacy is "like that" is to assert a likeness which is definite and also inextricable from intimacy, and which remains so even when very different likenesses appear. Similarly, Strether cannot separate Chad from Mme. de Vionnet in their intimacy, nor can he distinguish what she does from what he himself does. Intimacy, indeed, in its implicit relations, characterizes the scene as well as the lovers, with multiple components intimating one another.

This peculiar construction of intimacy becomes, I will argue, emblematic of the reconceptions of experience which Strether practices in France. He comes to view the culture he finds in Paris as composite relations, understood only in terms of partial likenesses among various elements, so that knowledge, definition, and difference are suspended. Strether loses track of the tourist's aims as he deviates from his own plans.² Becoming involved in what initially appears alien to him, Strether also implicates others in perhaps unwanted relations as he moves not only beyond the position of the tourist but beyond the possibility of...