69. Aliens: UFO Report, Henry James, and “Chips” Channon, reviewed by Sandy
It is my sad duty to report, having read the just-released UFO Report by our government, that the Aliens have won and we the People have lost. What a disaster the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence has produced after months of evidence-gathering and analysis! And to think that taxpayers’ funds were used to produce this farrago. As Madame Sesostris points out, all the agency had to do was watch MUFON every day and night (especially nights with firework displays!) for plenty of internet reports and video clips showing suspicious aerial phenomena, most of which would fit easily into the “Other” category which the DNI approaches so gingerly in its skimpy Report. As Madame puts it, “We are regularly being observed and investigated from beyond: Cosmic Surveillance. Get over it!” I am afraid that my own faithful following of MUFON over several seasons has made me certain that various forms of alien “spyware” are indeed being used on the earth’s citizens on a regular basis. Perhaps our planet’s inhabitants are little more than a tourist stop or nature preserve for interstellar cruise ships offering folklorico glimpses of our culture for their rapt passengers. Perhaps the proper term for such comings and goings would be “interdimensional” since many of the phenomena regularly appearing on your own private computer screen can seem to dock and depart in ways that are not limited to our local conceptions of space and time, entrance and egress. I am particularly entranced by certain MUFON videos that suggest forms of energy display unknown to received conceptions of design and technology on our orb. All you have to do is watch MUFON regularly. Too bad our government’s eyes are closed.
In disgust with the pusillanimous prose of the Report, I turned to the suave language of that comedy of manners master, Henry James, specifically to his short, witty 1878 fiction, The Europeans (edited by Susan M. Griffin, Cambridge University Press, 2015). James knew how to deal with aliens. The subtitle of the fiction is “A Sketch” – and that should tell you how lightly his entertainment achieves its aims. (The author did not include this novel in his definitive 1907-09 New York Edition.) James deals with two characters who are “aliens” twice over, sister and brother Baroness Eugenia Münster and Felix Young, who have lived in Europe since childhood but who are now visiting various cousins near the Boston of the mid-nineteenth century. Eugenia has recently suffered the failure of a “Morganatic” union with the “ninny” brother of the Prince of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein, and her own younger sibling is a near-Bohemian painter of portraits. Both will be in need of fresh income. Eugenia is looking in the Boston suburbs for a potential husband. Felix, as his name suggests, will let come what may. James contrasts these two worldly, witty outsiders with their American family relations, the stoic, homebound Wentworths. There are the patriarchal Mr. Wentworth, his two daughters Gertrude and Charlotte, and his young son Clifford, recently ejected from Harvard for his drinking habit. There is also another nearby pair of sibling cousins, Robert and Lizzie Acton, and since Robert has made a fortune in China (apparently from importing its goods), Eugenia spends some time auditioning him as a replacement for her princeling. Felix is drawn to young Gertrude Wentworth, who longs to see the world. Much of the action of the novel involves comic misunderstandings – and a few successful alliances – between and among natives and foreigners.
At one point in Felix’s courtship of Gertrude, the fascinated young lady describes him to his face as “fantastic”. Felix has been an actor in his youth, appearing briefly with a traveling band of players before plying his skills as a painter of portraits, and the ascribed term immediately reminded me of the tradition of the fantastico, the immemorial Italianate figure in dramas and comedies who sets narratives in motion and then retires behind the scenes. You see this character in Alfred de Musset’s Romantic drama Fantasio, and its modern version would be found in the character of El Gallo in the long-running off- Broadway musical The Fantasticks (adapted from Edmond Rostand). Shakespeare employs a version of the fantastico type in his Oberon of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Duke in Measure for Measure.
Felix’s function in The Europeans is catalytic. He allows Gertrude to fall in love with him. He plots to have her sister Charlotte fall in love with Mr. Brand, a local Unitarian minister who is induced to renounce his own amatory ambitions for Gertrude. (Felix encouragingly tells Brand that Charlotte is in love with him.) Felix also suggests to Mr. Wentworth that he allow Eugenia to “educate” Clifford in Continental manners, and the eventual shock of those evening rituals may eventually speed the youngster into the arms of Lizzie, his long-term candidate for matrimony. As a result, thanks to Felix’s influence, the novel ends with three marital unions either immediate or planned.
The narrative circles around the hopes of Eugenia in regard to the candidacy of Mr. Acton as her potential husband. Because Eugenia is a witty, ironic European, Acton is hesitant to commit to her, although he is mightily attracted. “She is not honest”, he concludes. (This may result merely from the lady sometimes deliberately saying the opposite of what she means.) The crucial test is a central scene in which Acton returns one night from a business trip to find Eugenia post-tutorial, hiding Clifford in a side room. Eugenia pretends to Acton that young Clifford is in love with her, perhaps to supply an excuse for their meeting or possibly to make Acton jealous at the thought, however amusing, that he has a rival. When Acton later asks Clifford if he is “sweet” on Eugenia, the fellow denies the charge. Thus, Acton sees Eugenia as “playing” with him through dissimulation. This central pairing of the novel does not result in a marriage. Eugenia returns to Europe, and Acton eventually will wed a “nice”, always honest American girl.
The great scene in the novel is the ensemble demand made by Charlotte upon Mr. Wentworth to give his consent to the marriage of Gertrude and Felix. The elder grants his permission only when Mr. Brand arrives and asks if he can perform the ceremony himself. The melodrama of the group appeal is brilliantly “built” by James into a theatrical coup, with wonderful hesitations, awkwardness, and revelations, capped by Brand’s handsome renunciation and blessing. James loved such theatrical machineries, especially the French examples, and he has constructed his novel expertly for maximum suspense, nowhere better than in this climactic scene. What is curious is that the reader should invest such hopes in the destinies of characters “sketched” so lightly by their author. We are pierced with an instrument so very fine.
One has to be struck by the suggestive presence in this novel of cousin-bands and cousin-marriages. The recent work of Joseph Henrich has argued that European cultural advances since about 500 C.E. can be explained by Western Christianity’s abandonment of kinship-based institutions, including the general banning of cousin-marriages up to the sixth-degree. Henrich claims that this resulted in a European character type willing to travel to find a mate. And this led progressively to greater worldliness and individuality in the centuries-long genetic run. How interesting that James may have seen his nineteenth-century homeland not only as parochial and Puritanical but as innately resistant to such civilizing “advance”. Goodness knows, James the man traveled far and wide, just like his questing Eugenia. Perhaps Eugenia’s fictional fate will be to return to Europe and reoffer her American ancestral lines to some forward-looking European male keyed to cultural progress. James, of course, never married.
I enjoyed The Europeans’ portrait of successful and failed cultural assimilation so much that I immediately watched the Merchant-Ivory film from 1979. It is available free on a streaming service. I recommend the movie to anyone who has read the novel because it shows the interiors of actual New England homes from the period and because the nineteenth century costumes by Judy Moorcroft are especially beautiful. The film itself is bland. That final scene of the appeal to Mr. Wentworth is wrung for only some of its pathos and hilarity. What we would give to see a D. W. Griffith version of that narrative crisis.
What the Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adaptation omits is some equivalent of the Jamesian tell-tale comedy of language. In the novel, when Gertrude sees how Eugenia has decorated the interiors of her Little House with draperies, lace, and various frills, the girl senses for the first time that she has been leading “an existence singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.” In that one terminal word – festoons – James sums up a poignant way of life. And when Clifford is told by Eugenia that his young intended is charming, he replies, “She is the prettiest girl in this place.” That “in this place” maps a mental topography with unsparing precision. It is for this kind of genius that one turns again and again to The Master.
The Merchant-Ivory film does not attain that kind of linguistic authority. Lee Remick is too pretty for Eugenia (the character is referred to at one point as “ugly”, as seen by Mr. Wentworth), but the actress writhes convincingly before Mr. Acton’s amatory indecisions. The two wittiest performances are by Tim Woodard as Felix and Nancy New as Charlotte. They are very funny in the scene in which Felix appeals for Charlotte to promote his possible marriage to her sister by praising him to Mr. Wentworth. Felix broadly argues his case, and New’s Charlotte is perfectly silent except for many mimed apprehensions. The general weakness in Ivory’s direction, as usual, is the absence of a sense of period style in the acting. The younger performers can come across as twentieth-century spoiled brats.
And that brings us to Henry “Chips” Channon and his unexpurgated Diaries 1918-38 (edited by Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, 2021). (The 1000-page Volume One will be followed by the end of this year with Volume Two, and Volume Three will appear in 2022.) What is fascinating about Channon’s account of his public and private affairs, day-by-day, month by month, decade by decade, is the reader’s vivid illusion of living the life of a wealthy, spoiled Chicagoan who made it to Paris during the 1918 bombing of the city in World War One, was furiously active in London society during the 1920s, observed at close hand the abdication of Edward VIII (he was a devoted friend of Wallace Simpson), served as MP and under-secretary of state in the Foreign Office on the side of appeasement in the 1930s, married into a fortune with the brewery heiress, Lady Honor Guinness, partied in Berlin with the Nazi elite (he adored Hitler, hated Churchill), and watched Britain descend into yet another global war from his ringside seats. A determined anti-American from a very young age, Channon loved royalty, architecture and interior design, fawn-like young men and politically Conservative influential women (even wife Honor is conscripted for such backroom duties), palatial country living, and the parties, balls, and salons of London. As a young man, he always seems to be either planning a lavish social event, attending a brilliant occasion into the early hours, or recovering in bed the next day from a high life’s rigors. Seldom has an American “alien” been so embraced by London high society. Seldom was high society so embraced! And the spoiled brat has a gift for not only being in the right spot at the right time but for summing up character and incident in prose with telling details. He has an eye and an ear. Once you start following Channon’s rise, you can’t stop.
The reader comes to realize that Honor is married to a skilled and dedicated social climber, a snob, and a bisexual with a masochistic tendency to accept long-term relations with male paramours who never return his affection with the intensity he requires. In self-defense, Honor has an early affair with her ski instructor in the Italian Alps, who then falls to his death via a nasty snow trap. “Chips” laments the loss of his wife’s affections but seems unable to imagine how he appears to her in his courtship of British society. He accuses her of lack of focus, forms of madness, and thyroid problems. Perhaps he did not notice that his own style of life might induce all three in close bystanders.
You find him dining with Cocteau and Proust in Paris. You are there in the bomb shelter basement of The Ritz as the City of Lights is under aerial attack. He provides lists of guests at the London parties he has arranged; among the attendees is Cole Porter. Chips mentions seeing Fred and Adele Astaire on stage in a revue, Stop Flirting. Later, they turn up at an exclusive supper party, where the two entertain with what is referred to as a pas seul. (Perhaps Chips thought it meant “one number”.) Somehow, discovering these visiting Americans in the British social whirl bestows upon them a reality, an immediacy, that is immensely touching. Channon creates a context and then drops certain names, and you shiver. You can’t help it.
The emphasis, of course, is on those British society leaders who might adopt Chips and treat him as one of their own. He is close to the family of Lord Curzon, who was then foreign secretary. The Cunards and the Astors are his bread and water. According to Chips, the love of his life was Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. In The Europeans, Gertrude mistakes Felix for a prince at their first meeting. Life always imitates Art.
The Channon journals will be of interest to any balletomane who is aware that there may be a connection between upper class party-giving and a vibrant ballet culture. Any society that can manage several costume and masquerade balls per season may also generate stage fantasies with music, dance, and stage design. And what a contrast Chip’s description of the London season makes to our own current New York social round! Even without the influence of a worldwide pandemic, the season here can’t begin to compare. I recently happened to see a documentary on Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote with a sequence on the Black-and-White Ball which the latter gave in 1966. The newsreel images appear rather desperate and tacky in contrast to the luxe celebrations described by Chips Channon. Clearly times have changed. Party boys are not what they used to be.
It would be hypocritical of me to come down hard on Channon’s admiration for Hitler since I hail from a South Carolina family that included a grandfather who built an airport-style landing strip on his South Forty to facilitate the expected Nazi invasion in 1941, his small native gesture to encourage the Storm Troopers. (One reads that Channon changed his mind about Der Führer, eventually. I’m not sure that my relation ever did.) I await Volumes Two and Three.
Tonight is the Fourth of July, and that means fireworks. The pyrotechnics usually draw UFOs, which seem to enjoy the spectacle from the vantage of hovering ships. Let’s hope the weather holds for sightings. “Oh, say, can you see?”
S.
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