“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages simply convert you.”
“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.” Henry James, The Ambassadors
“ If [my father’s] decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.” Leah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
As a kid, I was perpetually a diminutive apostle-in-training. Dad was a mainline protestant minister and mom was a graduate of the so-called “Harvard of the Evangelicals.” Consequently, many of my birthday and Christmas presents fell into one of two categories. There were James Dobson-esque devotional books jammed with advice on how to talk to unbelievers. And there were catchy Christian LPs that modeled Christlike humility and divinely sanctioned self-aggrandizement in the same unironic breath:
People smile at me and ask me what it is
That makes them want to be just like I am
So I just point to you and tell them, yes it's true
I'm no special one, I'm just one man
Keith Green, “Because of You”
Sometimes I would role play a witness opportunity in my head, but there was no one to witness to. I went to a suffocatingly small Lutheran grade school where belief in Jesus was as obligatory as German classes. By the time ninth grade unlocked that cage, I couldn’t wait to disappear into the secular anonymity of a 4,000-student high school. There, I finally started meeting kids who lacked the doctrinaire confidence of Martin Luther. My best friends were a Jew and a gay lapsed Catholic. The relief was palpable. Still, my training nagged at the back of my mind. Wasn’t I supposed to be finding a quiet moment to explain that Jesus was the reason they wanted to be just like me?
Even then the notion of persuading others to adopt my most intimate beliefs was completely alien to me. I simply did not have that kind of confidence.
For much of American history, confidence has been this nation’s chief domestic export. That is the mutual subject of The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Written from bookend vantage points on the 20th century’s experiment with American Imperialism (1903 and 1998), the two novels are so different in style and focus that the comparison seemed superficial to me until I noticed that they tell essentially the same story.
True, imperialism is the explicit subject of Kingsolver’s book and merely a hastily mentioned metaphor in James. Her novel is a historical epic covering the shifting power structure of Africa from colonial subservience to violent independence from the perspectives of five distinctly voiced first-person narrators. His is an intensely internalized navigation of individual choice told mostly through dinner party chitchat and obsessively reiterative third-person narration.
But each begins with Americans attempting to impose their confidently held values on older societies that already have fully formed ethical traditions. In both cases, the missionaries are converted by the natives, shattering the evangelical premise. In the end, however, Kingsolver’s heroines redeem epiphany for constructive change while James’s hero achieves the epiphany without actualizing its transformative potential.
Exporting Confidence
Although The Ambassadors is a resolutely apolitical book, it is set at a moment◆Henry James publishes The Ambassadors when America’s cultural chauvinism was snowballing toward its first colonial occupations. The period is documented by Empire, the 1987 entry in Gore Vidal’s seven-volume “Narratives of American Empire” historical fiction series. At the outset of that book, President William McKinley is winning the Spanish American War and reluctantly weighing whether to adopt the loser’s Caribbean colonies. Always one to challenge America’s overweening self-image, Vidal casts Henry James himself as the nation’s sesquipedalian conscience. Told in one scene that the world will be worse off if America lets Russia or Germany take over Spain’s colonies, James replies with modest sagacity:
“What then are WE given to, that is so immeasurably superior? … How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?” Henry James in Gore Vidal’s Empire: A Novel
Vidal’s use of James is not tangential to The Ambassadors. Rather, it illuminates the unspoken historical backdrop of its diplomatic mission.
What James explores through metaphor, Kingsolver dramatizes explicitly. The Poisonwood Bible started life as a memoir, with the author looking back on a family trip◆8-year-old Barbara Kingsolver travels to Africa to Africa. Kingsolver’s father was a doctor, and his mission was medical rather than religious. While living in Africa, the youthful Kingsolver wrote a striking entry in her diary:
“Even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard-pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That’s how it works.”
Barbara Kingsolver, “Writing the D.A.B.,” a postscript to The Poisonwood Bible
The CIA plot◆President Eisenhower authorizes Lumumba assassination to poison duly elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though eventually abandoned, is settled history to the extent that it is documented online by the State Department. Somewhat surprisingly, the incident has never tainted Eisenhower’s positive historical reputation. Eisenhower’s Democratic successor John F. Kennedy encountered political turbulence for the Bay of Pigs not so much because the president had contemplated assassinating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but because the attempt was sloppy. Many Americans shrugged; that’s what heads of state did at wartime, and this was during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s decidedly undemocratic efforts to promote global democracy opened a new interventionist era in American Imperialism, a label that was applied with ever less frequency.
That promotional mission is the setup of Kingsolver’s novel. She assigns that mission to Nathan Price, an abusively dogmatic Southern Baptist minister who relocates his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to spread Jesus’s love to natives by butchering their native tongue and belittling their traditions. Price is more than a religious emissary, however. Saving the savages from darkness means exposing them to American religious, political, and cultural superiority, for that is Price’s path from primitive confusion to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
The mission in The Ambassadors is narrower, but no less founded on cultural hubris. The offstage villain of The Ambassadors is the puritanical industrialist Mrs. Newsome, who sends Lambert Strether to Paris to preach good old fashioned American judgmentalism to her expat son Chad in the hope that he will take over the family business. Chad’s offense is his rapid assimilation to Old World values. He has been cavorting with an older French woman, and it is bad for business. James never identifies Mrs. Newsome’s exported commodity (American confidence?), but the company’s real estate is described as “a little industrial colony.”
“Savage” Conversions
Pair that colonial language with the quotation that opened this essay, about the French tendency to convert American missionaries to their permissive value system, and you have the controlling metaphor of The Ambassadors. The more Strether sees of Old World life, the more he embraces it.
The novel supports Vidal’s portrayal of James, who moved to Europe early in adulthood, as openly cynical about his birth country’s virtues. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fictionalized biography of James (The Master), argues in his introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of The Ambassadors that James wrote the book in part to distance himself from the imperious boosterism of its American characters.
The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction. Colm Tóibín, introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors
Similarly, the Price women soon learn the cost of their cultural chauvinism. The Price women share narrator duties, but the book’s moral heroine is middle daughter Leah Price, who starts as her racist father’s biggest fan but ends up marrying an African.
Leah declares familial independence after Rev. Price’s native congregation casts literal votes to reject Jesus’s authority in their community. “White men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” argues the village chief. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.” Price throws a temper tantrum, citing separation of church and state to invalidate the election in the same breath that he invokes divine authority. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”
But though most of the Price women join Leah in her rebellion, Kingsolver provides one notable holdout. If Mrs. Newsome is the calculating presence of capitalism in James’s book, Kingsolver’s Rachel Price, the minister’s eldest daughter, represents the bourgeois consumer who swallows her pitch like Mikey does Life cereal. (“Mikey will like it!”)
Droll but politically and intellectually apathetic, Rachel, who thinks Karl Marx heads the Kremlin, spends the early chapters wringing laughs from memorized American TV commercials. By the end, she sells out body and soul for creature comforts. She becomes the mistress of a murderous ambassador determined to profit from classified knowledge of Eisenhower’s Lumumba plot. When the family moves from Africa to Atlanta, one of the Price girls describes American life as “dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.”
Dictating Form
The lexicology of each novel reflects its thematic takes on American certainty. Kingsolver’s deftly constructed, melodious prose reflects her confident rejection of American confidence. Each of her five narrators has her own distinct syntactic rhythm, and each seems as accomplished a writer as Kingsolver herself. The careful craft of the prose expresses the author’s thematic and political clarity.
Take this passage, about a flood that disrupts the family garden, narrated by Nathan’s verbally proficient elective mute daughter Adah:
Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire. Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. … Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds. Adah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
If Nathan is “revising the earth,” changing the story to fit his agenda, Adah is already coming to terms with his belligerent good intentions. She rejects Nathan’s certainty but is unwilling to replace it with a hubristic narrative of her own.
Whereas Kingsolver’s craftsmanship shows that she knows what she believes, James’s proliferating prose embodies his constant caveats. He can’t write a clause without reconsidering it in the clause that follows. In Empire, Vidal lampoons James’s famously snaking, cannibalistic sentences:
“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; … “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”
“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
Gore Vidal, Empire: A Novel
Tóibín’s introduction to The Ambassadors argues that it is no coincidence that James’s sentence structure is at its most baroque in this late novel. Although partially a result of the author’s method—he verbally dictated his meandering prose to a secretary—the internal interrogations reflect his predilection for moral ambivalence at a time of American confidence:
In [James’s] own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply. Colm Tóibín, introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors
Another way that the two authors’ form is driven by their content is the arena of storytelling. The novelist E.M. Forster (Howards End) was less than charmed by James’s deferral of narrative excitement to thematic exploration. He argued that, in The Ambassadors, “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk.
By contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. Her story includes floods, covert intelligence on a global scale, and free-roaming lions. Sometimes, the plotting is so eventful as to strain the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, as when not one but two Price daughters are privy to classified information about Eisenhower’s assassination plan. The book’s histrionic emotional climax is the death of Ruth May, the youngest daughter. The emotional weight of her fatal snakebite is undercut by her near proximity to death’s door over numerous preceding chapters, but Kingsolver’s elegiac prose drives home the awful price of Nathan’s original sin. The family should never have come to the Congo.
“But you are here,” Leah’s African groom-to-be had allowed in a prior chapter, “So yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”
Mistakes Become the Story
In his preface to the novel, James declares The Ambassadors “the best, ‘all round,’ of all my productions” on the grounds that it is the purest expression of its thematic concept. That theme, he says, is expressed when his middle-aged hero rejects caviling puritanism in favor of passionate living: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”
Forster was frustrated by the microscopic scale of this conceit. He claimed James’s characters are “incapable of fun, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income.” If Strether and Gostry had a flesh-and-blood humanity to equal “Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon,” Forster says, James’s book would “burn to ashes” because they would substitute endless cogitation with action.
Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master offers an alternative take. Tóibín’s Henry James is paralyzed by his sensual feelings for men. He spends a night◆Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes sleep over in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s bed but remains chaste. He follows Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trial◆Oscar Wilde convicted of sodomy in strategic silence. He pines after painter Pavel Zhukovksy◆Henry James meets Pavel Zhukovsky . In other words, he steadfastly declines to “Live!”
Whether or not James’s sexuality sheds any light on Strether’s narrative arc, the Master ultimately declines to give him a happy ending. In the climactic scene, Strether refuses to pursue a romance with the woman he loves because to do so would be to profit from his ambassadorial project. He decides it is better to be right than to live.
“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Oh yes—I know.”
“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”
“To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her.
“That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.” …
Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
Henry James, The Ambassadors
The short clipped sentences, after 400 pages of meandering discourse, are striking. So is James’s evident admiration for his hero’s principled refusal. But isn’t Strether repeating the very mistake he lamented so fervently in the passage James identified as the book’s core? At the precipice of manifest destiny’s great expansion, Strether paces a tragically self-imposed cage. This feels like a retreat. His choice is principled, but wrong. Confidence is missteering Strether one last time.
With the historical consequences of confident zeal laid out behind◆Barbara Kingsolver publishes The Poisonwood Bible her, Kingsolver can be more generous with her characters’ imperialist “mistakes.” In the penultimate chapter, Adah Price remembers her father’s ministerial declaration that “Tata Jesus is bängala!” The Reverend’s intended meaning is “Jesus is precious,” but his mispronunciation translates to “Jesus is poisonwood.” Adah concludes: “The mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”
The pastor dies in isolation, but the women in his life build familial community around Leah’s burgeoning Black family. Their scars are real, but they will live.
The Bleached Bones of a Christian
America’s plot has experienced an unexpected twist in recent years.
The 44th American president was Jamesian in his capacity for nuanced self-appraisal. Barack Obama was mocked by his opponents for turning foreign visits into “apology tours” that weighed sympathy for American Exceptionalism against the nation’s repeated moral failures. Obama was temperamentally akin to Lambert Strether: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”
With Donald Trump, American confidence is back. The 47th American president openly threatens to tear open the sutures that were applied during the era covered by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. The nation’s chief executive officer, a self-declared “genius,” asserts his nation’s claim on some sovereign nations while enacting Eisenhowerian regime change in others. Strether has been succeeded by Nathan Price.
Throughout high school, I lacked both the confident Faith of my Fathers and the confident doubt of my friends. I told myself that it had been the size of my high school and not its cultural diversity that had made such a positive difference in my life. When the time came to choose a post-collegiate path, I opted for a school as densely populated as my secondary institution and almost as theologically small as my Lutheran grade school. By orientation◆I start college , I had outgrown my own decision. Dorm devotion culture—with some of my Lutheran school classmates—confirmed that sinking feeling. It took months to find friends who shared my distrust of “Dogs and Devos” (hot dog-fueled Bible study before bed). Sometimes a lesson is so important it bears repetition before we finally learn to live.
