The threat lessens for those who are vaccinated – The threat resumes for those who are not – The departure of Angela Merkel – Merkel contrasted with our statesmen – A new lawsuit against the ex-President – A literary disquisition about “The Ambassadors,” which the judicious reader is advised to skip – Evening statistics
There are some hopeful signs, despite the warnings that the CDC Director issued yesterday. About 36% of the population in the U.S. has received at least one vaccine dose. Even one dose has an efficacy rate of about 80%; the second dose is merely a booster that decreases the chances of infection still further. At this point more than 50,000,000 people are considered fully vaccinated (about 15% of the national population). Moreover, this rate of effectivity applies to asymptomatic cases as well as symptomatic ones, which means that the risk of vaccinated people transmitting to others is minimal – just as my friend BF maintained yesterday. In addition, the U.S. is somewhat less vulnerable than many other countries on account of the large number of people who have been infected already and have since produced an antibody response. The official number of these is over 30,000,000 but the real number may be as much as three times that amount.
Rochelle Walensky’s concerns are by no means misplaced, however. Even if, for example, 75% of the population is protected by vaccination or previous exposure, the remaining 25% is at grave risk. The B.1.1.7 variant (the most common one at this point) is more transmissible and has a higher mortality rate than the earlier ones. We can expect to see more deaths among younger people in the current surge, as has been occurring in most European nations. Not all of the unvaccinated will be holdouts. Significant distribution inequities are appearing in many areas. In Michigan, as of mid-March, 28% percent of black people over 65 had received one dose of vaccine and only 15% in Detroit – even though more than 60% percent of all senior citizens in the state have been at least partially vaccinated. I have seen examples of this close at home. Various friends of mine who are outside the 1A or 1B categories have made arrangements to get appointments for their doses far from their residences – in rural areas or even in other states. I certainly don’t blame them. Virginia’s rollout rate has accelerated, but it is still behind the overall national level; in Fairfax County vaccination rollout will not advance to the 1C category until mid-April. But the fact remains: my friends, the overwhelming number of whom are white, have the leisure and the opportunity for such an option, whereas a black or Hispanic person in the DC metro area is somewhat less likely to have the means for it – less likely to have access to a home workstation on which the necessary information can be obtained, less likely to be able to afford a day or several days off from work to travel to a distant vaccination site, less likely (if living in downtown DC) to have a car of one’s own, and so on.
Angela Merkel will be stepping down from her position as Chancellor of Germany. An astounding 67% of the national population said that they wanted her to serve to the end of her term instead of stepping down earlier, even though she has retained the position for 18 years. It is easy to see why. Regardless of her policies, Angela Merkel has not given any of her relatives positions in the government; she has lived a lifestyle in which yachts, private jet planes, huge parcels of real estate, and expensive cars are, for some inexplicable reason, strangely absent; not being an overgrown child, she has no household servants to clean up after her or to prepare her meals; she lives in an apartment of moderate dimensions instead of an ornately furnished mansion; her private life has not been touched by a breath of scandal, either on the personal or the financial level.
Why can’t we get statesmen like this one? Even the well-meaning ones here are quickly sucked up into the whirlpool of television interviews, photo shoots, book deals, extravagantly paid speeches for academic and corporate events, lavish houses requiring an incredible amount of upkeep, fashion-model-style wardrobes, and all the rest of it. Trump of course is the most egregious example, but even Obama is working on a new memoir (Michelle’s having already reaped millions), earning 6-figure speaker fees, and striking a deal with Netflix. Political leaders who were content to lead lifestyles very different from those of Hollywood actors and sports team athletes were not uncommon a century ago; now they have virtually vanished from the American political scene.
And while I’m on the subject of American political leaders, I will mention that yet another lawsuit has emerged against Donald Trump. Officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, members of the Capitol Police, have filed charges that Trump deliberately encouraged the insurrectionists of January 6th and thereby transformed the police officers into targets of attack. It is to be hoped that other officers whose lives were placed in danger will be prodded into taking similar action.
I know that at times I seem to obsess on the matter, but by now nearly three months have elapsed since the wanton and seditious attack on the Capitol as part of a failed coup d’état; and so far its perpetrator has undergone no substantive penalties for his treasonous actions. Yes, certain organizations have withdrawn their support from him and his corporations; yes, he has been ordered to pay a few fines here and there; yes, he has been deprived of access to his beloved Twitter. But up to this point he has not been directed to pay any amount that could make a dent in his financial holdings and he is in no immediate danger of serving the slightest amount of the prison time that he so amply deserves. He still in short has the potential to wreak a great deal of damage; and I am anxious to see this savage wild beast declawed and toothless.
On this rainy afternoon I have been trying, without success, to plow through Henry James’ “The Ambassadors,” which admirers of The Master would have one believe is his crowning achievement. The sad truth of the matter is that it is poorly written, lamely narrated, and morally askew. For those unfamiliar with the novel – a group whom I greatly envy – it should be explained that the plot centers about the efforts of Lambert Strether, the protagonist, to reclaim Chad Newsome from living an idle and extravagant life in Paris back to the family business firm in Woollett, Massachusetts. Chad is the son of Mrs. Newsome, a wealthy widow with whom Strether has a relationship that falls just short of an official engagement. Mrs. Newsome makes it clear to him that they will marry only if Strether is successful in his mission to retrieve her son. Within the course of the first few chapters I found myself scratching my head as to how she could imagine he would be capable of it. He is so hesitant and timid in anything he undertakes, or even in anything that he says, that I began to wonder whether he would be capable of tying his shoelaces without assistance.
To continue, however: In the course of his inquiries, Strether comes to find that Chad is currently associated with two French ladies, Mme. de Vionnet and her daughter Jeanne. At first glance Chad seems to be on the verge of becoming engaged to Jeanne, but it soon becomes clear that he in fact is involved with the mother. However, Strether is assured by one of Chad’s friends that this relationship is “a virtuous attachment”; and, implausible as this claim is, Strether desperately wants to believe it. He is, as James makes clear (and I will admit that the portrayal of this aspect is one of the strengths of the novel), a deeply traumatized man. He has lost his wife after a few years of marriage, and, unable to cope with being a single parent, has sent his young son to a boarding school, where the latter has contracted a fatal attack of diphtheria. His professional career has floundered as well. At the age of fifty-five, he is nothing more than the editor of a provincial review, which is barely kept afloat by Mrs. Newsome’s financial support. It is no wonder that he wants to flee from his hometown and, as he begins to realize, from his prospective marriage as well. When he comes to Paris he is dazzled by its variety and joie de vivre, and he quickly finds himself hoping that Chad’s defection from the plodding American businessman’s lifestyle is justified.
However, the introduction of Jeanne de Vionnet invalidates the entire premise of the novel. It is possible, I suppose, to argue that the influence of a sophisticated older woman can be thoroughly beneficial for a young man, and in particular for a provincial youth reared in a restrictive Calvinist small town. It follows that Mme. de Vionnet’s influence over Chad is more wholesome than his mother’s and by extension that – and this is the main theme of the novel – the apparently corrupt European tradition she represents is superior to the hard-and-fast straitlaced American morality that goes hand-in-hand with rampant commercialism. It is an appealing theme, one that can provoke a great deal of debate on either side of the matter.
There can be no argument, however, that it is preferable to be a child of Mrs. Newsome than a child of Mme. de Vionnet. The influence of Woollett may be stifling and rigid, but Mrs. Newsome herself does not appear unduly tyrannical. Chad is allowed a fair amount of freedom and plenty of money when he travels abroad. He can have his fling, without too many questions being asked, and afterwards he can come back to be welcomed with open arms. Sarah Pocock, his sister, comes into the novel later and she proves to be a raucous harridan; but that is much better, on any count, than being the spineless doormat that is Jeanne de Vionnet.
This unfortunate young woman is deeply to be pitied, for two reasons. First, she is shamelessly used by her mother and her mother’s lover as a screen for their liaison; and second, she is peremptorily married off, without having the least say in the matter, to a certain M. de Montbron, a man of whom we know nothing except that he has an extremely eligible income. Mme. de Vionnet herself has been married off in the same way to her husband. The marriage has not turned out well and the two have been living apart for years, but that does not prevent her from treating her daughter as badly as her own family treated her. The odd thing is that James, in other novels, shows some degree of awareness of how misguided a system this was. “The Awkward Age,” a novel written just four years earlier, contains the characterization of Little Aggie, whose chocolate-box style of prettiness appears to correspond with her apparently sweet and submissive nature. The moment she is married off to a wealthy commoner, she promptly flings aside all restraint, cuckolds her husband, takes her own aunt’s lover for herself, and becomes a loud-mouthed chatterbox speaking nothing but the empty social jargon typical of her set.
When Sarah Pocock, therefore, succeeds in doing what Strether signally fails to do – that is, persuading Chad to dump Mme. de Vionnet and return to the U.S. – I cannot feel the regret that James evidently intends me to feel. I think that Chad has been embarked on very murky waters indeed, and that, in disentangling himself from Mme. de Vionnet and her dysfunctional family, he has had a lucky escape.
James could have made a stronger case for his theme if he had allowed Strether to link himself with Maria Gostrey, a clever and charming woman who is kind to him. She is, in her own way, as sophisticated as Mme. de Vionnet, but without any of the latter’s turpitude (it’s a harsh word to apply to her, but I do not look kindly upon parents who abuse their children), and thus is a better-qualified representative of the beneficial European influence. But Strether in the end will have nothing to do with her. She is not a glamorous woman, and for that reason alone he rejects the love that she offers him. In other words, he is every bit as superficial as the compatriots whom he condemns.
I have concentrated primarily on the thematic failings of the novel, and have said little about the narrative ones. These, however, are legion. James writes such clumsy and dreary prose! Here is a typical sentence, early in the novel when Strether chats with Maria Gostrey for the first time:
“Though he was not shy – which was rather anomalous – Strether gazed about without meeting her eyes; a motion that, in talk, was frequent with him, yet of which his words often seemed not at all the effect.”
The first part may pass as a rather roundabout way of saying that Strether has a mannerism in conversation that makes him seem nervous even when he isn’t. But, oh, that miserable final clause! – enough to set any grammarian’s teeth on edge. The novel is full of broken-backed sentences such as this one. One is continually halted by the effort to parse the sentences in an attempt to extract some kind of sense out of them.
Such passages, however, are positively sprightly in comparison with the leaden dialogue. The sentences spoken by the characters, it is true, are generally less convoluted than the descriptive ones. But they are equally circuitous. Maria and Strether at one point discuss the qualifications Americans expect from marriageable young women:
“’I suppose that at Woollett you wanted them – what shall I call it? – blameless. I mean your young men for your pretty girls.”
“”So did I,’ Strether confessed. ‘But you strike there a curious fact – the fact that Woollett too accommodates itself to the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness of manners. Everything changes, and I hold that our situation precisely marks a date. We should prefer them blameless, but we have to make the best of them as we find them. Since the spirit of the age and the increasing mildness send them so much more to Paris –‘
“’You’ve to take them back as they come. When they do come.’”
According to Edith Wharton, Henry James spoke in real life exactly in the manner that Maria and Strether do here, with a seemingly endless stock of circumlocutions and digressions. But surely no one else has.
Then there is the lack of specificity, which injures the thematic point of the novel still further. It is impossible, from the absence of any genuinely evocative passage, to visualize the city whose attractions Strether finds so irresistible. In this I am not complaining that James makes no set descriptive passages in the style of earlier novelists who at times sounded like tour guides. When Ford Madox Ford advised Jean Rhys “to introduce some sort of topography of that region [Paris], bit by bit, into her sketches,” she not only refused to follow this advice but “once her attention was called to the matter, she eliminated even such two or three words of descriptive matter as had crept into her work.” Yet there is no doubt, from the numerous sharp observations of the turns of speech and of types of behavior exhibited by the various characters, that the stories of “The Left Bank” could not take place in any city other than Paris. In contrast, the “Paris” of “The Ambassadors” could equally well be Cayenne or Yamoussoukro or any other city in which French is the main spoken language. It is quite a comedown from the author of “The Bostonians,” who was able to give vivid impressions of Boston, New York, and a small Cape Code town, or of “The Aspern Papers,” with its brilliant evocation of Venice. The enlarged vision Strether receives from his sojourn in this featureless “Paris” is sufficient to make him renounce the security of life in the U.S. forever, but for the reader it is simply a blur.
Why has this work been praised so extravagantly? It is destitute of the qualities that could endear it to most readers. Sentences so limp and so tortured as to be positively painful to read, paragraphs that run on for pages, characters who seem more like wraiths than living human beings, attempts at wit that result in tedium, settings that resemble nothing more than the blank wall seen in productions of “Waiting for Godot,” conversations that go round and round because no one seems capable of making a direct statement, let alone a straightforward answer to any question – it is almost like a primer in How Not to Write a Novel.
I suppose that it is the theme that causes its adherents to overlook the novel’s glaring defects. The theme is potentially a powerful one. Capably rendered, it could stand as a thought-provoking challenge to the concept of The American Dream. But it is too badly executed in this instance for the novel to be of much importance. Die-hard Jacobites may laud “The Ambassadors” as much as they please, but the remainder of the reading public, as I believe, will continue to give it the cold shoulder.
Today’s statistics as of 10:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 129,454,440; # of deaths worldwide: 2,827,426; # of cases U.S.: 31,166,344; # of deaths; U.S.: 565,256.