Book Report

I have spent the last two weeks carefully and slowly re-reading "The Ambassadors" by Henry James.  Audaciously, I made the case to select this book as the next assignment for the Occasional Reading Group of which I am a founding member.  (We call it the ORG because we don't meet regularly but the real reason, I think, is that we snobbishly didn't want to think of ourselves as just another women's book group.  I think, unfortunately, that I forced it down their throats and there was REBELLION.)

I became a devotee of Henry James my senior year at Brandeis when I took a one on one seminar with Philip Rahv, the one time famous editor of the one time famous Partisan Review. (Does anyone in college today remember who he was or the magazine he edited?  And does anyone still read Henry James?)  I'd sit in his cramped office watching him smoke and eat a corned beef special at the same time, smoke and Russian dressing coming out of his mouth while he talked to me.  Mostly I remember his telling me not to bother with graduate school because all I was going to do was get married as soon as I graduated.  And one year later he was right.

I still have my original copy of "The Ambassadors," the margins scribbled with mostly illegible notes, whole passages underlined.  This time through I've underlined even more.  I read it really slowly, letting the words unfold--and there are so many of them!  It took patience and persistence, qualities that most contemporary novels don't call for.  The story or the plot is a really simple one but told with such intensity and discrimination, nuance upon nuance. And, of course, it takes place exclusively in Paris, that most magical of cities. 

The whole experience was exhausting in the process but exhilarating by the end.  Maybe this should be the summer of Henry James.