Flying Visits

by Clive James

  The State Department occupies a large building called Foggy Bottom. With every new administration there is a mass influx of brilliant appointees, accompanied by a mass exodus of the old ones, who wave goodbye to the rented furniture in their Georgetown houses and go back to the universities. In fashionable Washington only the hostesses and the journalists are permanent.

  Foggy Bottom is haunted by a particularly in-the-know species of journalist whose chief glory is to be first-named at daily briefings. I went to a daily briefing. Assistant Secretary of State George Tratner was answering, or rather not answering, questions. ‘Are these reports about the Cubans in Afghanistan internal reports?’ ‘I wouldn’t want to characterise them, Bernie. Let’s call them reports.’ ‘Have PLO people gone to Nicaragua to train Nicaraguans on Eastern bloc weapons?’ ‘I don’t have any information on that, John.’ Bernie and John looked satisfied.

  The Carter administration is unpopular with the Washington hostesses because the boys from Georgia can’t find the time to attend dinner parties. But the hostesses can wait. They have always been there. In Lincoln’s time their pretty daughters toured the Virginia battlefields and posed for photographs with the young officers. The average Washington hostess can still muster a dazzling table even if Hamilton Jordan’s feet are not on it. The table tends to be beside a swimming pool on the back lawn of a Georgetown house that looks small from the front, but unfolds into a tastefully appointed mansion inside.

  In just such a house I had the great privilege of watching the Miss America Pageant on television. Sponsored by Silkience Self-Adjusting Shampoo (‘It beats the grease without beating the ends’), the contest was won by a small-town girl who convincingly sang a Menotti aria. ‘For me,’ she told the world, ‘success is important, and can only be attained by keeping my feet firmly on the ground while reaching for the stars.’ Some of our beauty queens have longer legs but fewer qualifications as opera singers. The show was hosted by the latest Tarzan. A very tall man with even shorter legs than the winner, he managed to smile and talk at the same time, a feat of strength which caused hair-line cracks to appear in his sun-tan. Nevertheless I was impressed with the air of striving which the programme exuded. The productivity of America never ceases to amaze.

  Some of the results are in the Air and Space Museum, which I infested on Sunday afternoon. The Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager flew through the sound barrier is hanging from the roof, and up there beside it is the Douglas Skyrocket that Scott Crossfield flew to Mach 2. In 1953 I used to collect photographs of the Skyrocket and paste them on my bedroom wall, so that I could lie there and imagine what it would be like to fly in something so beautiful. Seeing the actual machine nearly thirty years later gave me the same thrill. We should always remember that when the Americans talk about being in a slump, they mean a slump by their standards. For the visitor, the sheer wealth of the country must always remain the abiding impression.

  And how all that energy should be governed remains the abiding question. The best event of my trip happened on the last day when I met I.F. Stone, the greatest journalist ever to make Washington his beat. Still in fighting form at seventy-four, Stone has been for a good part of his life the conscience of America. He got at the truth not through being first-named by politicians or hanging around hostesses but by reading the Congressional Record. ‘The virtue arose from necessity,’ he explained. ‘I’m so deaf that I can’t hear what anybody says.’

  Stone is a perpetual autodidact of staggering prowess. Delighted to find me reading Cicero, he took me through his classics library book by book – the most educational two hours I have ever spent. ‘The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA,’ Stone contended, ‘is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog. In America he sets the tone. This is the first country where the common man could stand erect. I prefer it that way, even though we have a leadership crisis right now. The country was in far worse economic shape in the Thirties, but the reason we didn’t have Carter’s famous malaise under Roosevelt was that we had more leadership.’

  So there it is. If even such an acute analyst as I.F. Stone thinks the problem lies with Carter, the problem lies with Carter. But supposing a strong leader were something to be wished for, where would he come from? It is doubtful if Abraham Lincoln would submit himself to the modern electoral process. I went to visit him in the Lincoln Memorial. He wasn’t saying anything, but two of his speeches were up on the walls: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address.

  It is impossible to read such unadorned eloquence without a tightening of the throat. But some of his most penetrating remarks have never been carved in stone. One of them is in the Reply to a Serenade of November 10, 1864. ‘It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies.’ Lincoln thought the trick could be worked, but he was a great man. With less great men in charge it begins to look as if we want more from America than it can give: we want it to be the embodiment of freedom, and we also want it to be firmly led, so that it will not frighten us with its unpredictability.

  With only a few hours left I had barely enough time to begin being stunned by the National Gallery, which just on its own would have made the trip worth while. Then I walked down the Mall to the Washington Monument and turned north towards the White House. As the joggers steamed past me in the heat, the first big cold front of the fall was moving east across Montana. Soon the leaves would be browning southward at twelve miles a day. My plane and the first football of the new season left the ground at the same time. The Washington Redskins were at home to the Dallas Cowboys. Dallas, not Dulles.

  September 28, 1980

  Mrs T. in China

  1 The Dragon Lady Flies East

  IT WAS Wednesday in Peking. Out of a pale sky as delicately transparent as the finest ch’ing-pai ware of the Sung dynasty came the wolf-grey and sharktooth-white RAF VC-10 bearing the great British War Leader Margaret Thatcher and her subservient retinue.

  The British Media, who were along for the ride, tumbled down the rear gangway and took up their positions in a tearing hurry, because the War Leader would be among the first of the official party to deplane. Hands in China have to be shaken in order of precedence. Alphabetical order is out of the question, especially when you consider that the Chinese version is calculated by counting the number of brushstrokes in the surname.

  The British Ambassador introduced his illustrious visitor to the Chinese official greeters and to the British military attaché, whose particular job, it was rumoured, was to make sure that the War Leader’s Husband didn’t run into difficulties with the mao tai. A clear white local fluid in which toasts are drunk, mao tai has the same effect as inserting your head in a cupboard and asking a large male friend to slam the door.

  Every world power, down to and including the Fiji islands, likes to think that its indigenous liquor can rob visiting dignitaries of the ability to reason, but let there be no doubt about mao tai. China runs on it. Without it, the Chinese hierarchs would be forced to listen to one another. It was therefore plainly advisable that the War Leader’s Husband should be limited to a single crucible of the stuff per banquet, if necessary by military force. The Media, needless to add, were under no such compulsion.

  Moving a discreet step behind his all-powerful wife, the Husband was looking ravishing in a silk tie of Ming underglaze blue and a smile of inlaid ivory, but it was the War Leader herself who captured all eyes. Her champagne and rhubarb jersey suit recalled painted silk of the Western Han period, her shoes were dawn carnations plucked at dusk, but it was her facial aspect that must have struck the first thrill of awe into her prospective hosts.

  Nothing like that skin had been seen since the Ting potters of Hopei produced the last of their palace-quality high-fired white porcelain with the creamy glaze; her hair had the frozen flow of a Fukien figurine from the early Ch’ing; and her eyes were two turquoise bolts fr
om the Forbidden City’s Gate of Divine Prowess, an edifice which, it was clear from her manner, was just a hole in a wall compared to the front door of 10 Downing Street.

  The official greeters having been dealt with, the War Leader’s party climbed into the waiting limousines and howled off towards town, followed closely by the British Media in a variety of specially arranged transport. The basic Chinese written character for any wheeled vehicle looks like a truck axle viewed from above. I was thinking this while standing there alone. The only Media man to watch the plane land instead of being on it, I was now the only Media man left behind at the airport: a bad augury for my first stint as a foreign correspondent.

  By the time I reached town in the back of a Mitsubishi minibus laden with ITN camera boxes, the War Leader had lunched privately and was already due to arrive at the Great Hall of the People in the Square of Heavenly Peace, there to press the flesh with the inscrutable notables of the regime’s top rank.

  The War Leader’s transit through China was competing with a simultaneous visitation by Kim Il-sung of North Korea. Despite respectful articles about Mrs Thatcher in the daily papers (both the English-language China Daily and the Chinese-language Renmin Ribao carried the official No. 10 handout glossy that makes a Shouchou bronze mirror look relatively unpolished) there was a general feeling that Kim was being given the more effusive welcome, possibly as a tribute to his prose style, by which he has already, single-handed, outdone those Chinese encyclopaedists who codified the classic writings into 36,000 volumes nobody ever read.

  But if Kim was hogging the local television time, it could only be said that he was, after all, the leader of a fraternal Socialist country attuned to the way of Lenin and Mao, who have the same embalming fluid flowing through their veins even though they now lie in separate mausoleums. The War Leader was something else, something alien. And yet, somehow, something familiar. Where had the Chinese seen that icy strictness before?

  There were only a few thousand people in the Square of Heavenly Peace, which meant that it was effectively deserted, because it can hold half a million spontaneously cheering enthusiasts on a big day. The armies of eight different Western countries paraded there in 1900 without even touching the sides. But they did leave a lasting feeling of humiliation, and when you take into account the fact that it was the British who actually burned down the Summer Palace in 1860 it will be understood that the Chinese were under no obligation to go berserk with joy. They hung out a few Red flags and laid on a Combined Services honour guard of troops all exactly the same size, like one of those terracotta armies buried by Qin Shi Huangdi in Shaanxi Province, a district which was even at that moment being toured by the heavily publicised Kim.

  While the War Leader checked the honour guard for any deviation in altitude, Peking’s only remaining large portrait of Mao looked down from the Gate of Heavenly Peace across the thinly populated square. Some Young Pioneers suddenly slapped their tambourines but the War Leader didn’t flinch. She didn’t smile at them either. She was a mask, no doubt practising her inscrutability for the encounter with Premier Zhao Ziyang, whom she accompanied inside, there to begin the opening dialogue which instantly became famous as the Great Fog Conversation.

  Among the gilt friezes and cream plaster columns of the Great Hall, far below a ceiling full of late-Odeon period light fittings with frosted globes, Zhao Ziyang, the man whose name sounds like a ricochet in a canyon, asked the War Leader whether the cause of fog in London had anything to do with the climate. His guest said that it was due to the burning of coal but now there was no coal burned, so there was no fog. But people in Peking, her host countered, burn much coal, yet there is no fog. Clearly he had no intention of letting the point go, but her tenacity equalled his, and as the Media were ushered from the hall the War Leader was to be heard giving Zowie a chemistry lesson. Apparently the coal smoke had been more concentrated in London than it ever could be in Peking.

  The Welcoming Banquet that night was in the Banqueting Hall of the Great Hall of the People: different room, same light fittings. The War Leader was in a long dress the colour of potassium permanganate, thus to drive home her superiority in chemistry. Zowie’s speech was tough on the Hegemonists, meaning the Soviet Union and Israel. Of China’s hegemonial activities in Tibet, not a mention. He sat down and she stood up, to deliver a speech ten times as Chinese as his, both in its subtlety and range of cultural reference. She quoted ‘one of your T’ang poets’ to the effect that distance need be no division. The T’ang poet in question was, I am able to reveal, Wang Wei, but for her to name him would have sounded like showing off.

  She was far enough ahead already, since Zowie had neglected to quote even a single Lake poet. There was also the possibility that she was making an arcane reference to Mao, who was, in his own poetry, much drawn to the T’ang style. Out there, hovering above his mausoleum, his immortal spirit was no doubt wondering whether his successors would be up to handling a woman of this calibre. Inside the mausoleum, his wax-filled corporeal manifestation lost one of its ears some time ago but it was rapidly sewn back on, thus restoring the physical integrity which had been denied to his fellow artist Vincent van Gogh. Mao was out of it, but Zowie was in the land of the living, where the real decisions are made.

  There were two main toasts, both taken in mao tai. The Media watched the War Leader’s Husband, and pooled their observations afterwards. The consensus of their data was that he had scored a hole-in-one on the first but had settled for a par four on the second. Behind the flower-and-frond, yellow-dove-decorated centrepiece of the main table, the War Leader and the Premier kept talking. Nobody knew what they had said during the afternoon, but it seemed possible that the War Leader had now shifted the subject of casual conversation from fog to the light fittings. She spent a lot of time looking at them, when not eating. The military orchestra played a rhythmically questionable cha-cha, but the food was sensational, especially a crispy noodle pancake which the Westerners attacked futilely with chopsticks until they noticed the Chinese sensibly picking it up with their fingers.

  Next morning, before more talks with the War Leader, Zowie told the assembled Media that there was no prospect of the Chinese yielding on the very point at issue, namely Hong Kong. Since the assembled Media included the Hong Kong Media, there was some consternation at this show of inflexibility, but as far as I know only one foreign correspondent, myself, formed the opinion that it might have been prompted by fear. Even without the Falklands Factor, Mrs Thatcher would have been perceived by the Chinese as a strong woman. Indeed they call her the Strong Woman. But in addition to her already renowned strictness she had fought and won a war. That rings a bell with the Chinese – a large bronze chung bell of the Western Chou period, decorated with projecting knobs and interlaced dragons.

  The Chinese think historically at all times, and in their long history there have been at least three notoriously tough women: the Empress Wu of the T’ang dynasty, the Empress Dowager Ci Xi of the Chi’ing dynasty, and Jiang Qing of the Mao dynasty, otherwise known as Madame Mao. Though none of these women, especially the last, could be considered precisely sound from the modern Socialist viewpoint, they had undoubtedly shared the virtue of decisiveness.

  The Empress Wu, for example, had ascended from the status of Grade Four concubine (massage and hot towels) all the way to the throne, partly through having a child by the Emperor, smothering it, and pointing the finger at his favourite. Having attained unchallenged rule, she dealt with any potential criticism by depriving its perpetrator of all four limbs and keeping what was left alive in a jar of pickle, or hanging it up on a hook.

  Mrs Thatcher had not been quite so firm with Norman St John-Stevas, but there could be little doubt that she belonged to a great tradition. She was the Fourth Strong Woman in Chinese history, an invader from the strange kingdom of the Two Queens, in which one Queen stayed at home minding the palace while the other came marching towards you carrying a severely cut handbag like an Anyang Shang dagg
er-axe with a jade blade. Give her an inch and she would take the whole of Chang’an Avenue, from the Dongdan intersection to the Babaoshan Cemetery for Revolutionaries (number 10 bus).

  After further secret conversations with Zowie about fog and light fittings, the Strong Woman arrived at the British Embassy to meet the British and Chinese communities. This was the second big party of the year for the diplomats of the China station. The first had been the QBP (Queen’s Birthday Party), but that was an annual event, well understood. This one was for the other Queen, the one that gets out there and wins wars.

  For many of the minor diplomatic faces it was a big moment in a hard life. The Strong Woman gratified them by looking her best, in a plum-blossom and quince-juice silk dress finely calculated to remind Chinese guests of a mo ku painting of the Late Northern Sung, although the Chinese might equally have reminded her that William the Conqueror successfully invaded England during that period.

  But the garden party was not an occasion for confrontation. Instead she socialised, meeting, inter alios, the delightful Katherine Flower, presenter of BBC TV’s Follow Me, which teaches English to the Chinese. Francis Matthews, the star actor in the programme, is the most famous British face in China. Katherine comes second and Mrs Thatcher third, but by this time she was catching up fast, although getting barely half as much air time as Kim Il-sung, who was still checking out that terracotta army. Perhaps he had at last found the ideal audience for his brand of oratory: statues don’t shuffle. Also present at the garden party was the Hong Kong shipping magnate Sir Y. K. Pao. Destined to crop up everywhere in the itinerary, Powie is a name you should note. He and the War Leader go back a long way together, to the time, one gathers, when he was before the mast and she was being called to the bar.