I saw Kennedy again the following November at a crowded, elegant party one Friday night in New York. I'd thought, before going, that we might get a brief glimpse of him and nothing more. But Rose and I, entering the dinner, discovered him at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking momentarily lost and abandoned. As if arrested in an instant's solitude, he was talking to no one and pondering his cigar. He had a splendid Palm Beach tan. He threw his arms around us and uttered a line so cornily ingratiating that it gave blarney new meaning: “How did they get you to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me!” He asked me how the novel was coming, and once again he began to talk about race. Did I know any Negro writers? Could I suggest some Negro names for a meeting at the White House? And so on. Finally someone distracted him and he disappeared into the crowd. Sometime later, on his way out, he caught my eye and, smiling, said, “Take care.”
They were words I should have spoken to him, for exactly two weeks later, on another Friday, he was dead in Dallas.
I smoked the Partagas in his memory.
[Vanity Fair, July 1996.]
Les Amis du Président
In 1948, when I had just become old enough to participate in an election, I cast my first vote for that durable old socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. This, of course, was a protest against both Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey—a throwaway vote—and I have always cast a Democratic ballot since then, although many times despairingly. And so, this past May, when I received a personal invitation to attend the inaugural of François Mitterrand as the president of France, my great surprise was accompanied by a fleeting wonder whether the honor was not perhaps acknowledgment of that lonely vote cast thirty-three years ago. But of course not: François Mitterrand, perhaps alone among chiefs of state of our time, cares for writers more than the members of any other profession—more than lawyers, more than scientists, more even than politicians—and his invitation to me and to six other writers was a simple confirmation of that concern. This nonpolemical account is that of a partisan.
It is interesting, I think, that among les amis du président—the small group of 125 or so of us who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe for the inaugural ceremony—there were no representatives whatever of the diplomatic corps, no members of international officialdom, and a very minimum of pomp and circumstance. Interesting, too, that there were no French writers—obviously to avoid factionalism and jealousy. Two American writers stood with me, all of us dressed informally in ties and jackets: the playwright Arthur Miller and Elie Wiesel, novelist and essayist, chronicler of the Holocaust. The others, dressed similarly, were the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar from Argentina, and Yachar Kemal of Turkey. Having gathered early, a little after noon under a gray sky threatening rain, we were able to observe the other guests as they arrived beneath the great arch with its engraved roll call of battles.
What these personages represented was unequivocal: the heart and marrow of world socialism. They came almost at random, without ceremony. Willy Brandt arrived, followed by Felipe González, head of Spain's Socialist Workers’ Party. There was Olof Palme of Sweden. After him came socialist leaders Mário Soares of Portugal and Bettino Craxi of Italy. Léopold Senghor, the president of Senegal and also a poet and writer, arrived, and shortly after came Andreas Papandreou, leader of the Socialist Party of Greece. But this was not an all-male gathering. Papandreou walked side by side with a radiant Melina Mercouri, whose post as member of the Greek Parliament now competes with her career as actress. Finally, in rather somber reminder of the tragic events of Chile and the eclipse of democracy there, Hortensia Allende appeared. The widow of the slain president was accompanied by another widow, the wife of Pablo Neruda, Chile's great poet. All in all, it was an extraordinary sight, this gathering of iIluminaries and votaries of a cause which had been lost so often throughout European history that its unexpected triumph here had left everyone looking a little bit stunned and solemn. Plainly the mood was celebratory, but the shock of the win was too great and the people seemed to move unsteadily, a little as if at a funeral.
The arrival of Mitterrand was rather anticlimactic. The new president is the quintessential Frenchman: in his plain dark business suit he would merge into a Parisian crowd as indistinguishably as yet another rather well-fleshed lycée professor or lawyer or even the patron of a good restaurant. Thus he looked undeniably the common citizen when he bent down and placed flowers in front of the Eternal Flame, but the sound of “La Marseillaise” played by the army band raised in all of us, I could tell, the same old familiar chill.
At the luncheon at the Élysée Palace I found myself seated next to Claude Cheysson, who had not yet been named foreign minister but who, in an unpretentious way, gave the impression that he knew he was about to be tapped. He is an engaging and articulate man, and he asked me what I thought of the occasion, especially what my feelings were in regard to having been invited, along with the other writers. I said I was certain that all of the writers felt they were paying their respects to a man who, more than any other leader of a major Western nation, seemed prepared to insist on fuller measures on behalf of human rights, and that his presence on the world stage would be a significant corrective to the general rightward drift of power. In a lighter context, I added, writers were very rarely accorded this kind of recognition, especially in the United States—where, since John F. Kennedy at least, such honor was usually heaped upon rock stars, stand-up comedians, and golf champions—and that it was simply fun to help celebrate this day with a president who was so obviously and passionately in love with the written word. (Richard Eder, Paris correspondent of The New York Times, later alluded to our literary presence as part of the “froth” of nouveau radical chic surrounding Mitterrand, but he is wrong. A concern for culture and the intellect is not mere style with Mitterrand but central to his being.) As for Reagan, I told Cheysson, who seemed puzzled by our leader, it was not at all surprising that Americans would finally elect a movie actor as president. To the contrary, it was inevitable, since the American people have glorified movie stars to the point of lunacy and ever since the dawn of the cinema have yearned for a matinee idol to run the ship of state. Cheysson looked depressed but seemed to understand.
The socialist leveling process did not, at this luncheon, extend to the food, which began with pâté de foie gras truffé des Landes (a delectable dish originating in Mitterrand's native region), accompanied by a Château d'Yquem 1966, and ended, after an incredible raspberry dessert, with Dom Pérignon champagne 1971. Time magazine had reported that Mitterrand is indifferent to food, but here again the reporting was wrong. I was sitting only a few seats away from the president, and one could tell from the gusto with which he put away the elegant white spears of asparagus that he cares at least as much about eating as he does about attractive young women—all of these admirable tastes transcending party politics.
Afterward we stood in the garden of the palace and chatted with Mitterrand. For better or for ill, I was aware of no cordon of security guards, only Mitterrand himself looking a little withdrawn and ill at ease, but enjoying himself nonetheless as he talked with the well-wishers. There was a remarkable atmosphere of casualness. It might have been a garden party almost anywhere in France. The conversation, while not exactly momentous, sticks in the mind. When we spoke of America, Mitterrand seemed as mystified about the country as Cheysson had been about Reagan. “A vast, strange continent,” he said, “so enormous and mysterious, so difficult to understand. But the people are wonderful. I wish I could say the same for your foreign policy.”
When Elie Wiesel asked what it felt like to be president, Mitterrand paused, and a look of honest surprise came to his face. “I still can't believe it,” he murmured. Such fine candor required from me—the old Norman Thomas rooter—a compliment, and I told him that I had voted for him in my heart. He spoke in English for the first time. “I appreciate that,” he said.
Toward the end of the afternoon we were scheduled to join with the other amis du président for a triumphal walk up the short street that leads at a right angle from the boulevard Saint-Michel to the Pantheon. Miller, Wiesel, Fuentes, and myself set off in our car, but the driver became confused and let us off not at a point where we could gain admission to the intersection but at a corner in the midst of the crowd. The throng in the streets was enthusiastic, noisy, wildly cheerful, and unbelievably huge. Both Fuentes, who had been Mexican ambassador to France in the mid-1970s, and Wiesel, who had lived for a long time in Paris after World War II, said they had never seen such droves of people in the streets. Only the very cheerfulness of the mob prevented it from seeming menacing. People were everywhere—along the curbs, in the alleys, and on the sidewalks, waiting for the presidential motorcade to cruise up the boulevard to the intersection.
Meanwhile, the four North American writers were unable to penetrate the crowd or to get past the barricades that firmly lined the boulevard. Over and over again we tried to push through, waving our cards of admittance, but there was simply no way to penetrate the throng. In despair, we were about to give up and go to a bar and look at the proceedings on television when we spied Melina Mercouri in her car, accompanied by Andreas Papandreou, also hopelessly blocked. It was she who saved the entire situation. After a hurried conference with the four of us, she debarked from the car and pushed her way to the barricade. There, with pleading, with Greek gesticulations, and with overwhelming charm, she persuaded a very senior police official to let us through the barricade.
And now ensued the most remarkable procession any of us could remember. The broad boulevard Saint-Michel, utterly deserted but lined on either side by tens of thousands of people. Starting up its center four writers, the president of the Socialist Party of Greece, and Melina Mercouri, whose presence brought forth a vast roar from the crowd as she grinned gloriously and brandished a socialist rose. A heady and thrilling moment indeed, even when—as Fuentes pointed out—the crowd surely thought that the five gentlemen in their raincoats were Mercouri's bodyguards.
This is not the place to reflect on the future of socialism in France. That night at dinner some very rich Parisians I know dined on lobster as if at a wake, casting bleak auguries for the future, their voices heavy with bereavement. The history of the Socialist Party in Europe is hardly one of unalloyed success, and who knows what vicissitudes of the future might mock François Mitterrand's day of glory, as they might mock Ronald Reagan's or, for that matter, that of any man bold and brave enough to seek power. But as a fellow writer I found it very difficult—as we all stood in drizzling rain on the ancient gray steps of the Pantheon, listening to Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” while Mitterrand basked serenely in his hard-earned triumph—not to reciprocate the feeling of the inscription to me he wrote that day in one of his own books: “In gratitude and in hope.”
[Boston Globe, July 26, 1981.]
François Mitterrand
A truth worth repeating is that the quality of being intellectual does not guarantee excellence, or even competence, in a political leader. Nonetheless, it would be hypocrisy to say that, in their secret hearts, intellectuals do not wish to see authentic members of their kind ascend to seats of power. With what passion the souls of thinking men and women were stirred when John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy, of course, was no intellectual; but he was the first American president in many years to give the impression that a book was not an alien object. Also, in fairness to the Kennedy image, which has become much tarnished in recent years, it has to be said that at least he had a touching and—for a president—perhaps unique concern for what intellectuals thought of him. During one of the two conversations I had with Kennedy he was gloomily preoccupied, and clearly much hurt, because Alfred Kazin, in an American Scholar article, had belittled his pretensions to a place among the intelligentsia. With real pain, like a jilted lover, he spoke of Kazin and while his somewhat callow discomfiture if anything helped validate Kazin's conclusions, it also revealed to the writer in his presence something quite appealing about the Kennedy sensibility. A president fussing about the animadversions of a literary critic: after the Eisenhower doldrums, it was fresh and a little amazing.
It was not publicized that, on the day after his inaugural, one of François Mitterrand's first official acts was to grant citizenship to Julio Cortázar of Argentina and Milan Kundera of Czechoslovakia, two exiled writers who had long and vainly petitioned the preceding administration for the right to become Frenchmen. Mitterrand's act was both symbolic and fraternal—the gesture of a politician who is also both an intellectual and a literary man. Mitterrand would doubtless object to the latter designation for, as he tells us in his remarkable book The Wheat and the Chaff, he always insists upon being called a politician, preferring action to words.
Yet, one feels a certain lack of commitment in this—at the very least an ambivalence—for although he says, “I could never have been an imaginative writer,” he immediately adds: “I observe—and I write. I like the written word. Language, philology, grammar. I believe that real literature is born from the exact correspondence of word and thing. I was brought up in that classical school where essays in French and recitations in Latin taught me the proper order and cadence of words and phrases.” This concern with literary style is very much in evidence in The Wheat and the Chaff, which is a free-flowing account of Mitterrand's life and thought during most of the years of the 1970s. Mitterrand calls the book a hybrid, neither diary nor chronicle; but if so it is a hybrid in other interesting ways.
Written in the days when the idea of a Socialist victory in France was a daydream, the book is in part an underdog's view of contemporary events and at the same time a blueprint for Socialist action. These passages are deft, abrasive, resolute, and (one realizes with something akin to shock) prophetic. An uncanny feeling comes over one with reflection that such matters as the nationalization of commerce—an ideal which, when Mitterrand was brooding on it, must have seemed millennial in its improbability—have begun quietly to be realized. But if the book were a mere political document it would, I suspect, despite the admirable contours of the writing, appear dated already, and could not possibly seize our attention.
What distinguishes the work, and makes it the exciting “hybrid” it is, is precisely that multifaceted literary gift that Mitterrand deprecates in himself, but which makes page after page spring into vivid life. Mitterrand may not be an “imaginative writer,” but among the attractions of his book—removing it light-years from the lackluster volumes of most of the world's politicians—is the way in which so much that is observed seems filtered through the sensibility of a first-rate novelist. Whether it is nature that he is writing about, or his basset hound Titus, or encounters with such figures as Mao Tse-tung or Golda Meir or Pablo Neruda, Mitterrand has the good novelist's knack of looking past the obvious for the immanent, the particular, the revealing detail. It is relatively rare, in the writing of politicians, to experience colors and smells and the actual presence of human flesh; thus how refreshing it is to come upon this description of Mao in 1961: “…of medium height, wearing a gray Sun Yat-sen uniform, with one shoulder lower than the other, slow of step, his face round and seemingly quite at peace, short of breath and soft of voice…his small, well-manicured hands, his laugh…the serenity that pervaded the room. By comparison what a bunch of marionettes our Western dictators are, with their flashy uniforms, their strident voices, their theatricality.”
As one who aspired to the presidency, Mitterrand has been perhaps more than normally fascinated by power and those who wield it. His longtime position as First Secretary of the French Socialist Party allowed him propinquity to the movers and shakers of his time—both at home and abroad—and some of the most engaging passages of the book are those having to do with these figures. It must be painfully difficult for any political leader to write without rancor about his rivals, past or present, especially after years of defeat, near-miss
es, and repeated disappointments. It is all the more impressive, therefore, to view the large-hearted fairness with which Mitterrand treats the character and career of two whose ideals he has the most strenuously opposed: de Gaulle and Malraux. To feel a certain irony in Mitterrand's retrospective treatment of his predecessor is nonetheless to admire the civilized restraint he employed in his analysis of Gaullism, as well as the sympathy he displays for the General's faults, even extending to his chauvinism and megalomania. These Mitterrand can understand even when he cannot condone. Hating de Gaulle's ideas or, as he implies, lack of them, he can still respect the man for some ineluctable historical presence.
His experience in the Resistance during the war was plainly a pivotal perception in Mitterrand's life—just as the war, in a different way, was crucial to de Gaulle's. Mitterrand is able to vibrate sympathetically to certain aspects of de Gaulle's personality because of this shared experience; one feels that Mitterrand's love of France is as passionate as that of the General, though mercifully shorn of its mysticism. “I live France,” Mitterrand writes. “I have a deep instinctive awareness of France, of physical France, and a passion for her geography, her living body. There is no need for me to seek the soul of France—it lives in me.” One feels no chauvinistic fever in these honest lines.
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