Sounds of Silence: James's dialogue in The Ambassadors

A few observations on reading further into Henry James's "The Ambassadors" (named after my junior-high rock band?): I continue to be amazed that James in any way shape or form thought that he could become a successful playwright. Despite all the strengths of his novels and stories - his skill at dialogue is horrendous, or, perhaps more charitably put, his dialogue is well suited to the meandering pace of his novels but would (and apparently did) feel interminable when actually uttered by human beings. No person (other than James?) spoke or speaks the way his characters do - they speak as he writes, they are literary creatures above all else. Not only does the dialogue seem or sound nonhuman, but the conversational passages to on forever - for pages and pages, anyway - and cover very little ground. This characteristic would be infuriating anywhere else but in a James novel - but the tortured dialogue is in fact very appropriate to the James milieu. In The Ambassadors, for example, the two male protagonists, old friends Strather and Waymarsh, if I have the spellings correctly, talk at great length on first reuniting in England in oblique phrases, nuances, broken statements - they imply a lot but say nothing directly to each other, and they should have so much to discuss. Of course, that is the James world, so little said and so much left unsaid. You want to jump into the page itself and grab these two guys and shake them and say: just ask one another how it's going, tell him about your ex-wife and your troubles, tell him about the woman from back home who's sent you here to "rescue" her son from Europe, open up a bit! They can't and won't; they're Jamesian, but not typically American. This reserved quality becomes infuriating in the final James novels, but there's enough subterranean drama in The Ambassadors to push this work forward: two men, each on a mission, with two mysterious women on their periphery.