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· 149 ·· CHAPTER 4 · Lambert Strether’s Belatedness: The Ambassadors and the Queer Afterlife of Style Body, remember not only how much you were loved, not only the beds you lay on, but also those longings for you that shone clearly in the eyes, that trembled in the voice—and some random obstacle put them off. Now that everything is in the past, it almost seems that you have also given in to those longings—how they shone, remember, in the eyes that gazed at you; how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body. —Cavafy, “Remember, body . . .” (translated by Anna Seraphimidou) Critics of James’s work have been less circumspect about the search for “the Man” in “the Poet”—less attentive to the search’s paradoxes and perils—than is the author himself in the late essays. And thus the tale of belatedness and equivocal aesthetic recompense offered by The Ambassadors has often served to reinforce a current in James studies that— more or less explicitly and to vastly different effects—understands James’s style in biographical terms: its opacities or seeming evasions point to the way the man himself diffused, postponed, avoided, sublimated, or more or less missed “life.” The novel is particularly available to such readings because of Strether’s strikingly rigorous—and, for many critics, frustrating—renunciation , which has often been read as a failure to be adequate to his experience: Strether, the “exemplar of the life of the senses,” Richard Blackmur argued, is “not finally up to that life,” a diagnosis that is often extended to the author who created that temporizing American pilgrim.1 F. W. Dupee suggested that if James “drew on Howells for Strether’s sentiments, he drew far more on 150 LAMBERT STRETHER’S BELATEDNESS himself”; F. O. Matthiessen wrote that the “passive rather than active scope” of Strether’s desire “is one of the most striking consequences of James’s own peculiar conditioning” as he describes it in Notes of a Son and Brother and A Small Boy and Others.2 Strether, according to Matthiessen, speaks for James as well (28), and “neither Strether nor his creator,” he argued, “escape a certain soft fussiness” (39). For Arnold Bennett, he is like the provincial damsel taken to task by Walter Besant for daring to write about barracks life, and his claim that James knew a lot about “cultured” people but very little “about life in general,” that his “fastidiousness” led him to “[repudiate] life,” leaving him unmarried and “ignorant of fundamental things to the last,” is echoed by more subtle readers.3 Allon White’s The Uses of Obscurity argues that James’s style allowed him to evade sex, the vulgarity of which distressed him; Maxwell Geismar’s immoderate condemnation of James’s suspicion of passion, his fear of women and sex, finds a more sophisticated rationale in White’s reading.4 Even writers who do not assume the synonymity of passion , life, and “satisfied” heterosexual desire make similar assumptions about art’s relation to life when they attempt to redeem James’s homosexual desires from a repression attributed either to his critics or to him (aspiring to undo the repression, and to redeem both the shame ostensibly felt by artist and critic, and, I suppose, the shame of having ever submitted oneself to shame). However noteworthy the homophobia animating the more or less cultivated obliviousness to the evidence of gay eroticism in James’s self-understanding, as in his relations with men, that has often marked considerations of James’s life, later antihomophobic readers risk taming the queerness of James’s style by countering such considerations merely with new accounts of that life. When Colm Tóibín’s The Master rewrites Strether’s gaze from the street at Little Bilham on Chad’s balcony as James’s own longing vigil under the windows of Paul Zhurkovski, in the translating (after the fact) of art “back” into a life understood to be originary, the revised account of James’s biography, and even the attention to the homoerotic aspects of The Ambassadors—whatever their value in themselves—are of perhaps less moment than what the recovery ,preciselyasrecovery,misses:theeroticsofbelatedness,thepowerofstyle to create life by submitting individual existence to an impersonal becoming. In the logic of substitution or obfuscation that, for both of these types of readings, links an opaque style to a missed experience, “life” stands in—implicitly or explicitly—for direct representation, for the mimetic capturing of experience.Atsomelevel,bothtypesofreadingsrespond...

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