I had a letter today from Anne in which she wrote to me of the time when we were young in the twenties. Few of my contemporaries, male or female, married young. She was an exception. In those days we would have thought it a premature descent into the dreary world of middle-aged domesticity. As politics did not interest us, nor religion nor money unless it fell into our laps, we must now wonder what did interest that generation. I can only speak for myself. I was after Experience. I lived in the private conviction that intense, strongly poetic, dramatic Experience lay in wait for me. I longed for a condition in which reality lived up to literature. Meanwhile I did little to bring this state about. I was a “mirror dawdling down a lane,” but I was a talking mirror. I only loved solitude when I knew that company was round the corner.
As I was thinking of those days a scene swam into my mind. It is Paris, some time in the twenties. Here is a random group of friends and acquaintances picked up in night-clubs, joy-rides in borrowed cars, and casual couplings. We had all been together for days and nights, spinning about the town in a nonsensical saraband, intoxicated with our own youth and with the cocktails of the time – Alexanders, Sidecars, White Ladies. Now we stood drinking, talking, and laughing together in some bar, making a noise, showing off, under the eyes of a disapproving couple of men who are quietly shooting dice in a corner of the bar. (That is what we wanted, disapproval and attention – insufferable and enjoyable behaviour.) There was Basil, the enfranchised son of a rural dean, a rubber-faced joker and lecher; Jo from Missouri, a bright-eyed, solemn girl who knew better but wanted to savour dissipation in Paris; a silent, wooden Scottish textile millionaire in a checked jacket; a pale, plump White Russian who could do card tricks and was employed in the perfume business; and of course Lavinia, skinny, flat-chested, lovely long legs, hyperthyroid eyes, skirts to her knees, the Lady Lavinia, a lost lady in the Michael Arlen fashion, a Bright Young Thing now a trifle tarnished, heroine of endless escapades, figuring in a fashionable novel. Her gaiety now gone a trifle shrill, her wit blurred with drink, yet eager for enjoyment, she could still spark a party. There was a gramophone in this American bar and we kept pestering the bartender for our favourite tunes, moaning jazz laments, “Sweet Chee-ild, You’re Driving Me Crazy” – the tunes of futility and longing.
22 February 1957.
I have been seeing a great deal of Brentano, the German Foreign Minister, in the last weeks. We seem to get on rather well and this may prove useful. I am beginning to speak German quite fluently but only social German. I never speak it when I go to the Foreign Office. It is very risky to do business in a foreign language and my German is certainly not up to it. Even in “social” German I mistrust myself for fear of giving just the wrong emphasis, greater intimacy than I feel, a cruder judgement than I intend, or just a joke that does not come off.
17 March 1957.
Went to the airport to meet Sylvia on her return from Canada. What my life would be without her I cannot imagine. She was so sweet and looking beautiful. She rises to all occasions, never fusses or nags. I am a lucky man and I know it.
5 April 1957.
I have a spring cold in the head and the spring goes on without me. This morning began badly by my throwing a ball for Popski which scored a direct hit on one of the china urns which we bought in Marseilles. It came crashing onto the black and white stone tiles of the hall, making a splendid row.
In the afternoon a German in jackboots came to see me. He has been pestering me for an interview for days. He says that he has been wrongly arrested by the Canadian police as a former Nazi, whereas he claims that he was only a driver in a transport division. He stood very straight and it was a question whether in his emotional state he would hit me on the head with a blunt instrument or burst into sobs. I felt sad and weary for his desperation and I gave him ten marks. His battered pride moved me. He probably should have been shot long ago and would get scant sympathy from his fellow Germans. Karl, the butler, said, “Yes, he was lucky before in the Nazi days. Now things are not good for him. What does he expect?”
I wonder whether the Air Attaché should have given my secretary a book called The Strangler in the House of Lust, with illustrations.
23 June 1957.
Zetsé Pfuel, Aga’s friend, told me last night that he and his wife had escaped from Berlin on the last train which left for the West when the Russians had already entered the city. He said that on the morning of their departure his wife informed him that she was going out to have her hair done. He protested and said that it was very likely that she would never get back through Berlin to the station in time for departure and that the Russian troops were moving into the centre of the city. She said, “If you think that I am going to stay with your rich cousins in the Rhineland and arrive at their house as a poor refugee with my hair straggling down my back you are very much mistaken.” Zetsé then went back to his Ministry, burned various files, and went to the station where his wife was to join him. He said he never put in such an agonizing hour as the hour he spent waiting for her. She arrived exactly two minutes before the departure of the last train, with her hair done.
Then the talk turned to life in Germany during the war. One couple who had a country house in Westphalia said that, while they were not Nazis, they went along with the régime. There was nothing else that they could do. The garage proprietor in the neighbouring village was a Nazi official. All the villagers were under his control. If they had not kept on good terms with him it would have been impossible for them to buy anything in the village. As it was, their lack of enthusiasm was already suspected and they were treated with great coolness by the local people. If they had openly opposed the régime they would have been at once deported to a concentration camp. This had already happened to their cousins in the neighbourhood. They said that most people knew something of the horrors of the concentration camps but by no means everything. It was very dangerous to try to find out any more, as the only result would be to land up in one of the camps oneself. I often wonder whether we Canadians would have been much more willing than the Germans to defy Hitler once the country was in his power.
5 January 1958.
A few months ago when we were coming back from the weekend in Paris and the train was coming in to Cologne station, I looked out at the bulk of the Cathedral looming against the grey evening sky and found myself saying, “We are home again.” How inconceivable it would have seemed to me, nearly four years ago when we came here, ever to have this feeling of familiarity verging on affection for this place and these people. One senses in the Germans a controlled neurosis, admires the control and mistrusts the neurosis. They have such immense potentialities for achievement and such a contribution to make to Europe. They are like a friend of whom one could say, “He will go far if he does not go too far.”
1 German parliament.
1 Pearson was then Secretary of State for External Affairs.
1 Frank Giles, British journalist, since Editor of the Sunday Times, and his wife, Lady Katherine Giles.
1 The eighteenth-century palace outside Cologne used by the German government for official entertainment.
1 I had been awarded an honorary D.C.L. by my old University of King’s College.
1 Couve de Murville, the French Ambassador. He succeeded François-Poncet and was later Foreign Minister of France.
NEW YORK
1958–1962
In January 1958 I took up my new appointment as Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations. During that year Canada was a member of the Security Council and I served a term as President of the Security Council. I remained at the United Nations from 1958 to 1962.
When I arrived in New York in 1958 it was as the representative of a country well-known as a strong supporter of the United Nations. Mike Pearson, the former Minister of External Affairs, had been the embodiment of this policy. With the coming to power of the Conservative government in 1957 there was no falling off in Canadian support for the United Nations, which
was backed up by widespread favourable opinion in the country. The Conservative ministers of External Affairs, first Sidney Smith and then, in 1959, Howard Green, were active in United Nations affairs. Howard Green devoted much of his time and energy to the United Nations and, in particular, to the cause of disarmament. The position of Canadian Permanent Representative to the United Nations was thus considered by the government to be an important one. I had had a fairly extensive experience of the United Nations since 1945, when I had been an Advisor to the Canadian Delegation to the San Francisco Conference, which founded the Organization. Since then I had served as Advisor, Observer, or Alternate Delegate at a series of sessions of the General Assembly and the Security Council and I had taken an active part in United Nations disarmament negotiations. I looked forward to the pressures and excitement of my new job and to the change of scene from Bonn to New York, and I was not disappointed. The years I spent at the United Nations were the most stimulating, if sometimes the most frustrating, of my diplomatic career.
For me the attraction of the United Nations was as a centre for international negotiation – a unique meeting-place of diverse groupings and interests and a framework for the resolution of problems or at least the papering-over of cracks and the averting of explosions. I was less impressed by the global ideology, the “one world” language of some of its more Messianic supporters, and I had few illusions about its ultimate effectiveness in peace-keeping or disarmament. I enjoyed the combination of public and private diplomacy, the open sessions of the General Assembly and the Security Council, and the long-drawn-out bargaining behind the scenes which preceded every public declaration. All of this was of absorbing professional interest to any diplomat, particularly one who like myself preferred negotiation to representation. It is true that the eons of boredom endured during speeches in the General Assembly took a heavy toll, but at least one did not have to speechify oneself. That was best left to one’s political masters. Indeed, to seek – worse still to obtain – personal publicity at the United Nations is, for the career diplomat, the kiss of death. It is resented by the politicians and deplored by one’s fellow members of the Service.
I had many friends among journalists accredited to the Organization. I had, in my youth, aspired to journalism and had served a turn on Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard. I never could understand the mistrust and alarm with which some diplomats viewed the press, for in the two-way relationship between diplomat and journalist the diplomat often has quite as much to gain as the journalist. I was to find this even more true later, when I was Ambassador in Washington. Certainly I learned more, not only in information but in wisdom, from that great man Walter Lippmann than I could ever repay, and James Reston knew more of American political life and politicians than any Ambassador could absorb in a lifetime.
Although I found the United Nations job a fascinating one, it was not good for the diaries. The attempt to combine the pace of work with the pleasures of New York meant that I had less time to write the diary regularly. I notice too, in these diaries, an increasingly caustic note. The close association with my colleagues in the hothouse atmosphere of the United Nations building, while it led to close friendships, could breed irritability. If I sometimes wrote disparagingly about my profession and its practitioners, allowances should be made for temporary exasperation. I would never myself have exchanged the diplomatic career for any other. Diplomats have never, as a group, been much loved. They are accused of many things – starchy manners and over-supple consciences, secretiveness and deviousness. In fact they are a hard-headed, knowledgeable, tolerant lot, often more long-sighted than their political masters. Of course, there are joke figures among them, petty-minded and pretentious, but that is true of every occupation. As for our own Foreign Service, it stands comparison with any I have ever encountered. Certainly the men and women who worked with me at our Mission in New York were among the ablest and most respected at the United Nations. Naturally a diplomat’s effectiveness is ultimately determined by the confidence he inspires in his own government. It is sometimes supposed that there is an inbred mistrust between the permanent civil servant and the politician. Having served under five prime ministers I cannot subscribe to this notion. The worst case is the combination of a suspicious or insecure Minister and an unimaginative or smug official. Those who are safely ensconced in the permanent civil service may sometimes forget that politicians, however temporarily powerful, and at times arrogant, are always walking a tightrope of risk from which the fall is oblivion. My own sympathy tended to be with the risk-takers.
Whether or not it has proved to be a wise decision to locate the United Nations in New York, for me personally it was a happy choice. Sometimes New York tired me, but I never tired of New York. Many of our friends there neither knew nor cared anything about the United Nations; they lived in other worlds of interest and amusement. Elizabeth Bowen came on frequent visits to the United States, lecturing or as writer-in-residence at American universities, and was often in New York where she had so many friends and which she so much enjoyed, although during this time she was in the throes of a financial crisis which resulted in the sale of Bowen’s Court, her beloved family home in Ireland.
Looking back upon the New York chapter of my life I still feel, as I wrote at the time, that I should make a libation of gratitude to the Goddess of Liberty at her gates. These diaries terminate with my appointment in 1962 as Ambassador to Washington, a new challenge for the diplomat and a change of scene for the diarist.
20 January 1958. New York.
Today I presented my Letters of Credence to Dag Hammarskjöld. He twinkled at me and turned on the charm. What is he like? Modest conceit, subtlety, vanity, intimacy switched on and off, an intriguing little creature. Is he to be the “Saviour of the World”? He would probably make as good a shot at it as anyone else. He talked of Mike Pearson, of their working so closely together at the time of the Suez crisis and the setting up of the U.N. peace-keeping force. He seems to look on Canada as a member of an inner circle – the “Scandi-Canadians” is his word – who, together with Ireland, are particularity dedicated to the United Nations and share his objectives and his point of view. He wants to get Geoff Murray, the number two in our Mission, on his own staff. I do not welcome this, as Geoff is one of the ablest operators on the U.N. scene and his experience and ability will be invaluable to me, but I suspect that Hammarskjöld will prove persistent about this. He has the reputation of taking up new people who attract his attention – and sometimes dropping them again.
In the long bar at the U.N. I met John Hood, the Australian Representative. We had three or four jumbo-sized Manhattans each. I don’t know if this is the order of the day at the U.N. In the afternoon walked in Central Park – icy wind, cloudless blue sky, the wild animals shrunken in their cages, bored jaguars, comatose pumas, a wild-animal smell that hung about one for an hour afterwards. To a cocktail party in the evening. I had forgotten how much the Americans love talking on social occasions about international affairs and how earnestly distressed they are about the conduct of everyone everywhere – the French in North Africa, the Germans in Germany, the Russians, and of course the Americans themselves. “Aren’t you depressed about the international situation?” as an opening gambit in conversation at a cocktail party always makes me feel like persiflage.
23 January 1958.
Entering the U.N. building is like going aboard a vast, gleaming ship moored off 42nd Street. You might have turned at the entrance to wave goodbye to the passing New Yorkers left behind in the street, before joining the motley crowd of your fellow passengers on the voyage outward-bound – the compass pointing to far horizons – the weather uncertain, with gale warnings out – and the final destination unknowable. One after another the gleaming black Cadillacs, pennants fluttering, sweep onto the curving driveway before the great glass doors, and out step the diplomats, dapper in their dark business suits, heading for the entrance with the air of preoccupation of men who have grave
matters on their minds. Following come their juniors, swinging briefcases purposefully. The uniformed guards at the front door have the business of knowing them all by sight and nation, and giving each a respectful yet friendly greeting. They do it well. The U.N. guards do everything well, from managing the mass exodus at the end of a public session to controlling the unruly in the public gallery. They are picked for strength as well as intelligence. The bartenders at the long bar know the drinking preferences of half the world. The telephone operators and the lounge receptionists can track down an Ambassador for an urgent long-distance call from his capital at any hour of the day or night. The interpreters are sophisticated, tactful, tireless artists of language. These are the indispensable crew without whom the ship would founder. They could teach a lesson in good temper and good manners to some of the delegates. An escalator leads up from the entrance to the upper level of the Assembly Hall and the Council Chambers. As one ascends one mingles with the incoming colleagues – “There is a point I should like to raise with you before the vote this afternoon. Could we meet in the usual corner in the Delegates’ Lounge in half an hour?” or “Have you had a reply yet from your government about sponsoring our resolution?” You step off the moving staircase together, and separate. The day has begun.
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 13
