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Friday, October 5, 2012

The most beautiful passage in James's work?

The Pocock clan and their assorted followers head off from Paris to send some time in Switzerland or who knows where - leaving the protagonist, Strether, back in Paris in mid-summer to lick his wounds. Actually, he's pretty happy to be left behind: he ponders the various couplings and couplings off that are possible among the Pococks and their beaux - I honestly can't keep all the matches and mismatches straight - but the key point is that, by their departure, they leave Strether more or less isolated in Paris except for Chad (not sure if Mme de Vionnet stayed in the city with him, I think she did - Waymarsh goes off to Switzerland loosely attached to Mrs. Pocock, if I'm remembering right) and, most important, Miss Gostrey. Strether has one of those long Jamesian dialogues with Miss Gostrey, and it's probably the most important in the novel: he comes as close as he, or any James protagonist perhaps, can ever come to declaring his love. It's only just now dawning on him that he loves her - it's been obvious to us all along - and that his engagement to the never-seen Mrs. Newsome was a terrible mistake and that, in being "dished" as they put it by her via her ambassador, Mrs. Pocock, he's been "saved" - he can, if he has the courage to accept it and the brains to realize it, have a new life with Miss Gostrey. She in turn tells him why she disappeared from Paris suddenly and without explanation for several weeks: she has some kind of past that she was afraid the newly arrived Mme de Vionnet would reveal. To Strether's credit, he doesn't ask her to explain - the one time is indirections and demurrals are apropriate. Then Strether, wanting to get away for a while, takes a train ride out to the country, eats a meal at an inn, and walks through some parklike grounds - this pastoral interlude is by far the most beautiful passages in the book and one of the most beautiful in all of James - whose descriptive passages tend to be trenchant and detailed but cold, without feeling: this (and opening scene of Portrait, to site another example), is an exception and has the warmth and emotional content of some of the beautiful passages in Flaubert.

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