Again, Mitterrand's treatment of Malraux is a measure of his magnanimity and amplitude of vision. (Even as I write these words I am brought up short by the improbable idea of presidential concern with a novelist: imagine Ronald Reagan in serious meditation about the career of even so public a writer as Hemingway!) However, lest it be construed that Mitterrand is possessed of angelic forbearance, it must be said that his intellectual judgments can be as tough as rawhide. For Malraux's poorer work he has nothing but distaste, just as he loathes the grandiose posturing of his “official” life. But—having uttered his scathing observations—how warm-hearted he is when, shortly after Malraux's death, he finds himself assessing that long, contradictory, and complex career. His final tribute to this man is a fine example of the generosity that seems to animate Mitterrand's private and political life. Even his detailed response to the character and vocation of Georges Pompidou, for whom he has almost unbounded contempt, is shot through with a rueful compassion. One keeps marveling at the sheer patience Mitterrand exhibits during these years of disappointment and waiting.
I was among several writers invited to Mitterrand's inaugural in May of 1981. After lunch on that day, as we stood in a small informal group in the bright springtime garden of the Élysée Palace, Mitterrand spoke of America. He spoke of it, I felt, with something of a feeling of mystery, alluding to it as that “vast continent, quite incomprehensible.” Mitterrand has been an indefatigable traveler; America has become a frequent way station on his itinerary during recent years. Some of that same incomprehensibility and mystery which he mentioned to us will be found in this book, along with his sense of ever-renewed wonder. He has an undisguised fondness for the United States, and even in 1972—haunted by the awareness of our bombers then devastating Vietnam—he could meditate with eloquence on the land and its destiny. Like all sensible Europeans, he seems to temper his fondness with profound unease over our perpetually alarming foreign policy; but even here there is a certain philosophical patience in his point of view—his description of a long conversation with Henry Kissinger in 1975 is fascinating, both in its scope of exchanged ideas and in the sympathy (or at least lack of acrimoniousness) brought to bear on his portrayal of a statesman opposed to nearly everything socialism stands for. (In an earlier passage Mitterrand notes the appalling irony inherent in the award to Kissinger of the Nobel Peace Prize; even then, however, one feels Mitterrand's justified animus is directed more against official idiocy on the part of the bestowers than against Kissinger.)
Mostly, one cannot help being beguiled by Mitterrand's reflections on the United States: perplexed and troubled, one feels, by America's collective mind, wryly aware of the mediocrity of its political leaders (Ronald Reagan, not yet elected president, has received his reputation “thanks to the qualities he revealed in the exercise of his profession as television master of ceremonies, and has seduced the old machine that produced Lincoln”), Mitterrand still regards us with affection and hope. From near the top of Rockefeller Center he notes a flight of mallard ducks ascend from the East River; in the midst of this “poetic geometry” of the city which so moves him, the wild birds are a reaffirmation of the natural order of things, even here.
There are certain passages in The Wheat and the Chaff that will perhaps appear less compelling to the American reader than those that I have just described. Those having to do with the aspirations and programs of the Socialist Party during the 1970s, and Mitterrand's own musings upon certain current events, may now lack the urgency they once had. But the same could be declared, let us say, for some of the meditations of George McGovern or Adlai Stevenson on the policies in their times of the Democratic Party. What finally gives this book its extraordinary savor is the range of curiosity of its author, its mirror-bright reflections on people and places, its often intense feeling for nature, and its ubiquitous and passionate concern for the destiny of human beings in a calamitous century.
In saying this I do not want to minimize Mitterrand's justifiable preoccupation with Socialist principles, which everywhere energizes the book and is, after all, the prime reason for its being. About socialism, Mitterrand is passionate, but at the same time unpretentious. He is wary of Socialist dogma, which he sees as being as potentially dangerous as any other dogma.
“Socialism does not represent values that are superior to the humble truth of facts,” he writes. “Nor yet does it constitute truth in itself. It argues, seeks, approximates. It knocks down idols and taboos.” Which is as modest, eloquent, and appealing a description of a political ideal as one could imagine. But as I say, The Wheat and the Chaff is anything but a tract. In it the play of intellect and the range of curiosity and interest constantly fascinate. Is it an ingenuous reaction on my part—the reflex of an American anaesthetized by contemplation of one chief magistrate after another who more or less thinks and looks like Gerald Ford—that I have to pinch myself from time to time to realize that the president of a great nation has written this book? Perhaps so; perhaps such a connection is in the end of little importance. Nevertheless, it is a happy surprise to come across Mitterrand's sardonic reflections on certain bizarre funeral rites beginning to be practiced in France (and imported from the USA), and his gleeful scorn modulating beautifully into this final conclusion: “A society which hides death from the eyes of the living…is not magnifying life but corrupting it. Birth and death are the two wings of time. How can man's spiritual search come to fulfillment if he ignores these dimensions?”
The sensibility that produced such lines is rare not alone in a politician but in anyone, and this is what helps give The Wheat and the Chaff its commanding vigor. It is to be expected that a man whom nature touches so poignantly, and who writes about natural things with such sensitivity and affection, should express a constant concern with the environment and the proliferation of ecological blights and horrors. But even so delicately attuned a person as Mitterrand can hardly claim to be alone in these perennial anxieties. The superb moments in the book come when the thoughts of the political creature and those of the artist (I do not think that too extravagant a word) merge together, creating insights which it may be of critical importance for the present-day reader to attend to. I am thinking not only of Mitterrand's loving appreciations of two poets who were also his friends—Theodorakis and St. John Perse—but in particular of his description of Pablo Neruda, old and dying, his own agony refracted in the murder of Salvador Allende and the terrible betrayal of Chile. It was none other than Neruda, Mitterrand tells us, who urged him to read for the first time Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, that dark yet dazzling masterpiece whose pages open up so many doors of perception about Latin America and its prodigious destiny. Mitterrand remains haunted by the book, and throughout his own work there is a concern with Latin America—especially the outrages perpetrated there—that amounts almost to an obsession. But what a splendid obsession! As much an outsider to that world as, say, Alexander Haig, Mitterrand has acquired touchstones to the secrets of our southern hemisphere that may transcend the brute demands of Realpolitik. Neruda. Gabriel García Márquez and the tragic village of Macondo. How exhilarating it is to discover a man of politics gleaning new insights from these poetic visions. It may be naive, as I implied at the outset, to think that the world can be saved by men who respond with passion to these visions. But I for one feel cleansed, at least briefly, by the notion of such grace and tenderness dwelling together with the exigencies of power.
[Introduction to The Wheat and the Chaff, Seaver, 1982.]
Family Values
None of the members of my family is a cheerleader for the values so stridently celebrated at this past summer's convention in Houston. But I want to describe how the rescue team they organized on Christmas Day of 1985 helped ensure my survival and, perhaps paradoxically, confirmed a lovely statement by Barbara Bush at the same event.*
For weeks I had been confined to a room in a mental hospital, suffering from one of the darkest pains known to h
umankind—clinical depression. They burst into that grim green cell at noon, all twelve of them, my wife and son, three daughters and their extended families. They had brought with them an enormous turkey dinner complete with napkins and silver which they laid out on my bed. Cajolery or bribery had created this miracle, along with the very presence of such a mob—regulations stipulated no visitors in excess of two.
Even more impressive was their feat of muscling past the custodians a television set and VCR. My oldest daughter, a movie director, had pieced together—out of 8 mm film I had shot—a ribbon of scenes from the distant past, much childish mugging and antic tomfoolery set to Mozart. How delicious it was, in that chill and laughterless place, to hear the sound of pure hilarity and feel appetite stir again, and perceive the first glimmer of light in the dungeon of madness. I had a long way to go, yet months afterwards it was possible for me to situate recollections of this noisy explosion of love at the very start of my recovery.
That Christmas Day my family presented, by most common American standards, an unorthodox profile. One of my daughters was living in sin with her lover, who was present. Another daughter's stepson—he was also on hand—was born out of wedlock and had been reared with great proficiency and tenderness by a single mother who happens to be a lesbian. A favorite godson was likewise illegitimate. Had I been able to take a poll among them I would have found that then, as now, none of the members of my family believed in the power of prayer, or the need for it in or out of school (or hospital). All of them at one time or another have smoked pot, and inhaled it. None considers homosexuality to be either wrong or unnatural, and they all support a woman's right to abortion. They can take pornography or leave it but in any case do not judge it to be evil. Family values? The phrase would make them hoot. Family, as Barbara Bush said, “means putting your arms around each other, and being there.” This was the only consideration which had value on that day of the beginning of my own rebirth.
[Previously unpublished. Styron wrote this reminiscence in 1992 at the invitation of Time magazine for a projected series on “The Family.” The series was canceled; Styron's statement is preserved among his papers at Duke University.]
* * *
* Styron refers to Barbara Bush's speech on “family values,” delivered on August 19, 1992, at the Republican National Convention, held in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.—J.W.
Clinton and the Puritans
In France the Clinton Tragedy—no longer too strong a word, in English or French—has prompted commentators to try out every possible variation on the theme of American puritanism. For years I’ve been attempting to convince my friends in France that Americans are collectively quite as broadminded as the French. In fact, the tenor of public opinion in respect to our president's sex life has proved the point that Americans are generally as tolerant as the French in matters like lust and its capacity to unhinge otherwise reasonable human beings. What the French don't possess is the equivalent of the American South, where a strain of Protestant fundamentalism is so maniacal that one of its archetypal zealots, Kenneth Starr, has been able to really dismantle the presidency because of a gawky and fumbling sexual dalliance. No wonder that the French, along with much of the rest of the world, view Clinton's Tormentor as the embodiment of America's terrifying puritanical spirit.
Absent too from the French scene is a media with fangs bared to go to work on the presidential throat. Newsweek’s early rooting about for dirt in the Lewinsky affair would not have found a French equivalent. Nor would a French paper have printed a preposterous headline about Clinton's wretched little liaison such as that which ran above Peggy Noonan's column in The Wall Street Journal: “American Caligula.”1 While the French press is as celebrity-sodden and, in certain ways, as prone to sensation-mongering as our own, and while its members can behave like attack dogs in political affairs, almost all journals have continually honored the privacy of those in high office; their restraint has helped them avoid the sins of their American counterparts, some of whose indecent prying helped lay the groundwork for Clinton's ghastly public denuding at the hands of Kenneth Starr.
In May of 1981, on the day of François Mitterrand's inaugural, I stood amid a small circle of people gathered near the new president in the bush garden of the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand had a fondness for writers, and I, along with Arthur Miller and Carlos Fuentes, had been invited to the occasion. The sunny weather was almost perfect, the historic nature of the moment caused people to speak in excited, mildly alcoholic murmurs, and Mitterrand himself rocked back and forth on his heels, wearing his new grandeur with a look of numb surprise. But mainly I recall a subtle and hovering eroticism. Sex drenched the air like perfume. Seven of the admirers surrounding Mitterrand were lovely young women in their spring dresses; as time wore on and they left his side, one by one, each twittered, “A bientot, François!” A French journalist whom I knew, standing next to me, whispered amiably, “And you can bet they will be back soon.”
Mitterrand had a wife and he had a mistress, who bore him a daughter—this is old news by now—and he also had a slew of girlfriends. Everybody knew about it and nobody gave a damn, least of all the members of the press, who had been aware for years of Mitterrand's robust appetites. They never mentioned his diligent womanizing. In a touching memoir about Mitterrand's last months of life—published this past spring in English under the title “Dying without God”—the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert spoke with the ex-president about numerous matters—politics, literature, history—but the subject of women came often to the fore. Giesbert knew Mitterrand in the days before his presidency and he recalls mornings when he would run into this avid lover, resembling “not so much a night owl as a wolf that had been out on the prowl until dawn.” Giesbert adds that women “were not merely his passion but the only beings on the face of the earth capable of making him abandon his cynicism.”
Mitterrand liked and admired Bill Clinton (as opposed to Reagan, whom he called a “dullard” and a “complete nonentity”) and was especially fascinated by what he described as his “animality,” which doubtless meant something steamier. It's easy to perceive a kinship between the two chiefs of state. Clinton's own tumultuous sexual past—the Arkansas bimbo eruption, “the hundreds of women” he spoke about to Monica Lewinsky—might find a correspondence in the wonderfully candid remark uttered by the dying Mitterrand: “To be able to yield to carnal temptation is in itself reason enough to govern.”
Mitterrand was a deeply flawed character—many Frenchmen still hate him—but his presidency was creative and illustrious. Clinton's self-admitted wrongdoing, his lies and his nearly incomprehensible recklessness, helped produce Starr's inquisition—an ordeal that has left his career and his ambitions in wreckage. But if Clinton is the victim of a sexual “addiction,” whatever that means, so clearly was Mitterrand; the difference is that in France a compact between the press and the public allowed the president to deal with his obsession, and even perhaps to revel in it, so long as he governed well.
In America a complicity between the public and the media has generated an ignoble voyeurism so pervasive that we have never permitted a man like Bill Clinton to proclaim with fury that his sex life, past and present, is nobody's business but his own. Long before Kenneth Starr set up his cruel and indefinable pillory there had begun to evolve a climate where privacy—la vie privée—to be cherished above all rights—was all but gone, leaving the way clear for the Starr Report itself, and its invincible repulsiveness.
[New Yorker, October 12, 1998. The text published here is the full version, preserved in a handwritten draft in the Styron collection at the Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina.]
Reports
Chicago: 1968
It was perhaps unfortunate that Richard J. Daley, the hoodlum suzerain of the city, became emblematic of all that the young people in their anguish cried out against, even though he plainly deserved it. No one should ever have been surprised that he
set loose his battalions against the kids; it was the triumphant end product of his style, and what else might one expect from this squalid person, whose spirit suffused the great city as oppressively as that of some Central American field marshal? And it was no doubt inevitable, moreover, a component of the North American oligarchic manner—one could not imagine a Trujillo so mismanaging his public relations—that after the catastrophe had taken place he should remain so obscenely lodged in the public eye, howling “Kike!” at Abe Ribicoff, packing the galleries with his rabble, and muttering hoarse irrelevancies about conspiracy and assassination, about the Republican convention (“They had a fence in Miami, too, Walter, nobody ever talks about that!”) to a discomfited Cronkite, who wobbled in that Oriental presence between deference and faint-hearted suggestions that Miami and Chicago just might not be the same sort of thing.
That is what many of us did along about Thursday night in Chicago—retreat to the center, the blissful black interior of some hotel room, and turn on the television set. For after four days and nights in the storm outside, after the sleepless, eventually hallucinated connection with so many of the appalling and implausible events of that week, it was a relief to get off the streets and away from the parks and the Amphitheater and the boorish, stinking hotel lobbies and to see it as most Americans had seen it—even if one's last sight was that of the unspeakable Daley, attempting to explain away a shame that most people who witnessed it will feel to their bones for a very long time.
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