Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  Lunch with Diana Cooper. She says that it is necessary for a happy marriage that husband and wife should sally forth separately into the world so that each can bring home something fresh “to put into the vase.”

  21 February 1963.

  Another old friend who is staying with us is Alastair Buchan. I first met him when he was a schoolboy at Eton and spending the holidays with his parents at Government House in Ottawa. I was his best man when he married Hope at Oxford during the war. Then he was a young officer in the Canadian Army; now, after a successful career in journalism, he is becoming known as an expert in international studies. I saw a lot of him during the war in London. We used to have those long, uninhibited conversations, the kind of endless, engrossing talk, well-laced with whisky, which one had with friends in those days when one was unguardedly experimenting with ideas and indiscreetly revealing one’s own affairs. Now we are both married, sobered (he more than I, as he drinks nothing), and our friendship is in another key. He has both shrewdness and wisdom and is widely informed on what is going on here and in London, and also in Ottawa. He knows Canada and Canadians from the inside as few Englishmen do and he has an instinct for the country, as his father John Buchan11 had before him.

  The cook has given notice. She could not stand Colin any longer, with his bossy, butlerian ways. Indeed, Sylvia can hardly stand him herself. He despises all womankind. His only devotion is not to me, but to my clothes, of which he is a stern but loving critic, proudly attached to certain of my suits and shirts, contemptuous of others. Himself a natty dresser, he is insistent that however I may feel inwardly I must make a good outward appearance. A cocky, curly-haired Scottish introvert, he makes few visible friends, but may have his own resources. It is sad about the cook. She was a good cook, too. Who was it – Saki? – who said “She was a good cook as good cooks go, and as good cooks go she went.”

  22 February 1963.

  Dined at Bill and Mary Bundy’s, with her parents Dean and Alice Acheson, and Bruce Hutchison. Bruce is a voice of integrity in Canadian journalism. If this sounds pompous, he isn’t. If I had to point to a man who represents what I think of as embodying Canadian qualities, it would be Bruce. He makes friends with those in power but never gives an inch in his estimates of them. And he has a salty, quirky side to him. Dean has a bee in his bonnet about the British – that they are a useless lot who have lost their way in the contemporary world. When I first knew him before the war he was a familiar of the British Embassy; in style, in appearance, even in his London-looking clothes, he is the nearest of all Americans to an upper-class Englishman or Anglo-Canadian. Perhaps that is why he feels free to castigate the British as though he were a member of the family, sitting in a London club among his peers. But his attacks will not be seen like that in London. The mixed feelings that the English arouse among those who have too much admired them are of little interest to the English. They want practical results and do not care whether they get them from someone who does not know one school tie from another. I have seen this operating in Canadian terms. Canadian Tories have, or used to have, a devotion to the “British connection.” When they went to London, as Diefenbaker did, they were more at odds with the British Establishment than Liberal politicians who have no devotion to “Crown and Altar.”

  After dinner Dean Acheson attacked the concept of a multilateral force and said it was all nonsense. He said what was needed was sixty divisions of Europeans. As to the commander, he could not be either American or French and might well be a Canadian. Dean says he would put all possible pressure on the Germans to provide military forces. The English would be reluctant to join, he thinks, but might do so if they saw the Germans getting in there first. The Europeans should leave no ground role to the United States. Their sixty divisions could exert pressure on the East bloc and would change the whole picture and lead to, if not reunification, at any rate the withdrawal of twenty Communist divisions from East Germany. He puts all his money on the German contribution and says that NATO is at present a machine without a purpose because we have no intelligible German policy. At any rate he says that if the Europeans will not defend themselves, the United States will not continue to do so.

  24 February 1963.

  Day before yesterday there was a silly flap in the press about my interview with Rusk. Harold Morrison printed a story that Rusk had “refused to pose with me” for a photograph, and this was spread all over the Canadian newspapers. People will say I have an unlucky touch, but I feel an almost lighthearted fatalism about these misadventures.

  1 March 1963.

  John Watkins is here, retired from the Service and setting off to Europe to live a little in Paris and follow the sun to Marrakesh. He is an ageless creature, with his crinkled face, small almost-black teeth, and the gleam of intelligence and amusement in his sharp glance. I am fond of him, but there is something impersonal and detached about him that would prevent my claiming to be his friend. I stayed with him when he was Ambassador in Moscow. He said to me, “If you want to understand the Russians, come with me to the railway station tonight.” We drove down to the station and there on the platform were dozens of recumbent bodies, wrapped, some of them, in what appeared to be old sacking to keep out the cold, while others stomped up and down, hands in pockets, collars turned up, whistling and talking. Whole families with small children were encamped in corners. “All these people,” John said, “have been waiting for their train for twenty-four hours, and they may be waiting for another day and night. They take all this cold and discomfort quite philosophically. They are without impatience, and the passage of time does not affect them. They have a different time sense from us. Russians are always waiting.” When he was in Moscow, John knew more Russian artists, musicians, and members of the intelligentsia than anyone else in the diplomatic corps. He is himself by taste and temperament more a member of the intelligentsia than an ambassador, and eschews formality. He is a curious by-product of the Ontario farm where his old aunts still live (or did till recently). Himself an incorrigible bachelor, they seem his only family attachments.

  2 March 1963.

  I have been reading Blake’s poetry all morning and now am off to lunch with George Ball of the State Department. I want to get on a steady even keel with him, but my own government rocks the boat every time. Only a little more than one month before the election. Today I decided not to go to the Gridiron Club dinner in case someone made an unflattering reference to Diefenbaker and created a further incident. This is indicative of the artificially poisoned state of our relations with the United States. Read The Loved and the Lost by Morley Callaghan. At last, a novel not “about Canada” but which takes place in Canada and which shows men and women as walking, talking Canadians, and not written by a visiting Englishman or an expatriate Romanian, but by a real live Canadian. It is not the greatest novel in the world but it does bring us into the territory of literature and so adds a dimension to living in Canada. One thing that makes for thinness in the air at home is just the lack of this dimension. A cityscape remains a private world until it has been put into words. But winter Montreal, thanks to Callaghan, and Halifax, thanks to Hugh MacLennan, are now on the literary map.

  5 March 1963.

  The world of Carpaccio … What is the meaning of that figure who appears so often in his pictures, of a young man with long blond hair, sometimes as a bowman, sometimes a courtier, sometimes one of a crowd? His back is always turned to us. What is his face? The face of violence? So it must be in the bowman when he looses his arrows at some suffering saint. And why do those whom he faces in these pictures always avert their gaze from him? Or perhaps he is just a stock figure from a drawing book, chosen to illustrate the tensions of back leg muscles and the turn of the neck. It is sad to see Carpaccio, with his curiosity, his joy in faces, forms, animals, and colours, turn into an old bore in his later pictures. His Christs are repulsive from the start – barber’s blocks with somewhat wig-like hair parted in the middle and epicene lips showing in a c
hestnut beard. Yet his figure of Christ dead is quite different – an elongated corpse with a dark, unshaven face of a young man killed in an accident.

  8 March 1963.

  One more month before the Canadian elections. For the first time since I joined the Service I am toying with the idea of getting out of it. No, I never shall – I am too inured to it, and perhaps softened by the luxuries that go with it. Yet I seem powerless to prevent the multiplying incidents which are worsening relations between Washington and Ottawa.

  10 March 1963.

  Sylvia is away and I am in the house alone. This is a house of reflections, green in summer and now, in spring, reflections of cloud moving and light changing. It is a house of many windows. These upstairs rooms are very quiet, just the swish of traffic on Massachusetts Avenue and of branches moving in the slight spring wind. But early in the morning there is the nerve-tapping noise of the woodpecker in the garden, and later Popski begins barking and goes on and on. I wonder if the spring is driving him mad.

  To look around and not always see the same things – it’s impossible but it would be heavenly to shift the angle of vision.

  17 March 1963. Snee Farm, South Carolina.

  We are staying here with Tommy Stone and Alix.12 Tommy is in tremendous form. He gets and gives so much fun in life. He is more than the Life of the Party (that would be a desolating description of a friend). Like all performers he is moody and can be pugnacious in a cause, as he was during the war when he espoused the Gaullist cause and pressed it on a reluctant Canadian government. This is the plantation house which he lent to Sylvia and me for our honeymoon. It is a very beautiful place and we were very happy here, except that Sylvia took against the Spanish moss which hangs from the live oak trees round the house – but that did not spoil the honeymoon.

  Today there was a luncheon party here. A Southern gentleman with a very loud laugh told stories which he himself found uproariously funny. Jack Wheeler-Bennett was at lunch. He is on a visit to this country. He and I talked about Germany. (His book on the Nazi war machine is by far the best thing ever written on the subject.) Today he was describing his visits to Kaiser Wilhelm at Doorn Castle in Holland and his interviews with Goering before the war. He is a fascinating talker, but his slight stammer gave the opportunity for the anecdotalist to interrupt with another story.

  Much as I am enjoying this visit, I do not think that I should have relished plantation life in the Old South. Some of my Johnston forebears had a place called Annandale outside Savannah and were driven out as Loyalists in the American Revolution. They put in claims for compensation to the British Treasury, enumerating their slaves and acres, I suspect much inflated. The Treasury gave them derisory compensation. The British have never been generous with Loyalists when they were liquidating imperial possessions, as the Anglo-Irish know. Too much loyalty can become an expensive bore. Now the name Annandale has survived as a trade name for a paper company in Savannah and the Southern plantation owners who supplanted the Loyalists are ousted by Northerners. Moral: Don’t be on the losing side. Incidentally, one of the Johnston ladies of Annandale set a record for carrying propriety to the point of imbecility. Her flounced dress caught fire from a lighted candle. She needed help to get out of the dress but alas there was at that moment only a man-servant in the house. Modesty forbade her to call him in lest he see her disrobed. The flounces flared and she died from the effects of the burns.

  3 April 1963.

  I took Michael and Andrew Ignatieff,13 ages fifteen and eleven, to lunch at the Jockey Club. There was no difficulty about conversation, as when any gap threatened we talked about food, in which both of them are passionately and discriminatingly interested. Andrew is an ageless original and a comic. Michael is a young Russian gentleman of the liberal school, with perhaps a touch of the youthful prig. But that will wear off, and he is intelligent, interested in everything, articulate – his father’s son. But the observant young are on our heels and can’t help noticing our vanities and absurdities.

  8 April 1963.

  Election day. Everyone seems to feel that this is no ordinary election. For some of my fellow civil servants the Liberals seem a sort of normalcy which is called stable government and seems to mean a return to the old middle-class, middle-of-the-way, reasonable, responsible, familiar Canada. But in the process of the election campaign, what is happening to the good name of Canada and the unity of the country? Have we begun to destroy this, and how long is the destruction to continue?

  Princess Hohenlohe explained to me at lunch that there was one word of which she did not know the meaning, and that one word was “fear.” So fond was she of animals and so confident in their understanding of her love for them that she believed that she could easily walk into a lion’s cage, if necessary. I explained that I thoroughly understood the meaning of the word “fear” unless temporarily distracted by interest or desire. The Admiral and a senior State Department official listened to this exchange in silence.

  13 April 1963.

  In the morning in this house there is a concert of smokers’ coughs, Sylvia and I and Colin the butler. Colin was attacked in the street the other day by a man who was attempting to steal his money. He says he threw himself on his back on the pavement and kicked out at the man’s stomach. His technique was successful, and the man fled. A woman we know slightly was raped in Rock Creek Park just outside our house at 9:30 in the morning. Instead of concealing the fact, with great pluck she went straight to the police, gave her name and all the details, and said they were welcome to publish them if it led to the apprehension of the rapist.

  14 April 1963.

  The government is out. Diefenbaker is gone and Mike is in. The wreckage is strewn all around – Ministers with whom I have been dealing in these past years now are relegated to powerlessness. I must at once write to Howard Green to express my respect for him and my gratitude for his steady support. I shall not be writing to Diefenbaker. I consider his disappearance a deliverance; there should be prayers of thanksgiving in the churches. And these sentiments do not come from a Liberal.

  23 April 1963.

  The new government has been in office less than a week but already one can register a change of atmosphere. So far as I am concerned, I am dealing with someone familiar. Mike Pearson has already telephoned me three or four times. This change does not mean that everything is going to be simple and straightforward in Canadian–American relations, but at least I understand and share Mike’s objectives in international affairs. Of course we are still in the honeymoon period. The danger lies in the political weakness of the government and its need for quick political returns.

  28 April 1963.

  Just one year today since we came to Washington, so Colin tells me. He seems to have a phenomenal memory for past dates and events. Perhaps, like myself, he keeps a diary.

  Behind Massachusetts Avenue, if you take a turning up to the left, are the houses of the well-to-do, pink brick in the shade of their trees. Up and down, the well-heeled streets wander into Crescents and Places, peaceful in the sunny morning. On the sidewalk four delivery men stand gazing at a new desk to be moved through a too-narrow gate. A red-headed boy is now jumping from foot to foot, to land on alternate squares in the pavement. Alternations of tree shade and sunlight as you approach the escarpment of flats, and then, downhill, into the rawer sunlight of Connecticut Avenue. Staring through a peephole into a waste of shit-coloured mud where the bulldozers nozzle, I see a workman poised on the edge of a crater in the stance of Donatello’s David. Unexpectedly, I have already arrived at the church. Inside, the dark brownness of crossbeams and high-backed pews, the muffled air at first seeming cool, then stuffy. The eye is drawn to the coloured windows, small and low-set, blue and saffron and the red of throat pastilles. Not a mote is moving in the stillness. Behind closed eyelids the hangover operates – plunging into the subsoil, jetting up into an implausible stratosphere. When the eyes are open they rest on the silent glow of the coloured windows, the ro
ws of dark pews, and the paler vista of the aisle.

  4 May 1963.

  I am going to Hyannisport with Mike for the meeting between him and the President, and tomorrow I leave for Ottawa for a week’s consultations with the government.

  10 May 1963.

  Back from Hyannisport. The meeting between the President and Mike was tinged with euphoria. The atmosphere was that of clearing skies after a storm – the clouds of suspicion covering Canada–U.S. relations had parted, the sunshine of friendship shone. There was also an undercurrent of complicity between them, as though they had both escaped – like schoolboys on a holiday – from under the shadow of an insupportably tiresome and irrational Third Party and were now free, within limits, to crack jokes at the expense of the Absent One. Indeed, it was mutual relief at the departure of Mr. Diefenbaker from power which gave added savour to the encounter between them. The President and the Prime Minister have much in common – at any rate on the surface, for their natures are different; Kennedy is more ruthless. As companions they are congenial – perhaps the Irish touch in both. They enjoy the same style of humour. More important, they talk the same political language. Their views on international affairs are not widely different, allowing for the permanent difference between the world view of a Great Power and that of a Middle Power. On Canadian–American issues both share the will to achieve solutions to problems in a cool climate without the inflamed rhetoric of the last years. The working sessions at Hyannisport were brisk and businesslike. The log-jam of pending issues was broken. It became possible to make progress on a whole range of questions from balance of trade and the Columbia River to air-route agreements for trans-border flights. We have made a new start; it remains to be seen whether the sweetness and light last.