Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790)

by Ritchie, Charles

  25 January 1958.

  I am spending a day and night with the Robertsons at our Embassy in Washington. Norman1 seems stimulated here and is stimulating. This morning I had a ranging run over the possibilities of negotiations with the Russians with him and Ed Ritchie,2 Norman seeing all sides but steering his purpose through his own subtleties. He said he has a few friends here – Dean Acheson, Walter Lippmann, and Frankfurter. He describes them as a sort of mandarin group “not set in their ideas but now become conservative or contemptuous, what proper mandarins should be,” and then he adds, “Perhaps I am becoming ‘set’ myself.” I can see no signs of it. Went to the National Gallery with Sylvia, and there among the Aztec death masks was Sammy Hood3 – lounging, affectionate, welcoming – an El Greco in an old Etonian tie.

  17 February 1958.

  I loathe this official apartment in Sutton Place. There is no privacy, not a single door anywhere in the apartment, every room opens out onto another room, the furniture comes from Grand Rapids, the paintings are bad oil paintings by bad Canadian painters almost all in oranges and yellows of autumn colouring in the woods – a subject which should be put out of bounds for all Canadian artists. We have one maid, and by a curious stroke of fortune she is a German. Her salary is as much as that of the entire staff in Cologne, her name Matilda, her cooking inferior. Popski of course peed on the carpet on the day of his arrival. I can’t say I care what he does to the carpet. It is a repulsive colour and covered with a sort of scurf that scuffs off on your shoes and gets all over your clothes. Every single time the elevator goes up or down Popski barks.

  5 March 1958.

  I started the morning as I have most of the preceding mornings – studying the Constitution and the Rules of Procedure of the United Nations and, in particular, of the Security Council, on which I am now the Canadian Representative. We have before us the crisis over Tunisia, and French actions there.

  Lunched today with Bob Dixon, the British Representative. He seems very nice and intelligent with gentle manners, almost a bedside manner. What do the British make of one – “a sort of foreigner” who wears English clothes and has an English accent, but is he sound?

  The British Delegation are still recovering from the wounds inflicted on them by the Suez crisis, when they were virtually ostracized by friends and allies, not to mention the enemies. Their line about Canada, and Mike Pearson in particular, is one of appreciation and admiration for our role at that time, but I think these sentiments come from the head and not the heart. In their hearts they feel that their true friends were those like the Australians, who backed them up to the hilt. It is from Moore Crosthwaite of their Delegation that I get a less guarded version of their reactions. He is becoming a friend.

  13 March 1958.

  What an extraordinary coincidence it is that not only is Matilda the cook German, but my secretary at the Mission is of German origin, highly efficient and very German in temperament. Went to one of the regular meetings of the Commonwealth Representatives today. Why is the British Representative always in the chair at Commonwealth meetings? Would it not be much better to rotate the chairmanship among the Commonwealth Representatives? Today Bob Dixon said to Arthur Lall, the Indian Representative, “I think, Arthur, that you will find mine is really quite an innocent little suggestion.” “Too little and too innocent,” said Lall, and I felt for him. Aly Khan is the news here. He has come as Representative of Pakistan. From elevator girls to sober-sided U.N. officials – they are all after him. Even when the men pretend to despise him as an amateur in international affairs, they want to get close to him so that they can tell their wives that this glamour boy is really only a balding little sallow-faced man. Bob Dixon’s line is, “We should, I think, all do our very best to make him at home in the U.N. He is trying very hard.” Exactly like a headmaster talking of a rich but erring boy who has come to his school with all registered intentions of “going straight.” Arthur Lall is taking a line of extreme agreeableness, almost amounting to flirtatiousness, with the newcomer. Lall with all his pleasant manners gives off such a shine of malice from his highly polished surface and combines it with intellectual ability and an air of moral irreproachability The fact that he has quite a good opinion of himself is the first, but perhaps not the last, impression left by him. Aly Khan’s modesty and sense of humour are an attractive contrast.

  16 March 1958.

  As I write in the so-called den, Matilda moves maddeningly about in the sitting-room saying “Pfui” to Popski when he barks. Now she has begun Hoovering the carpet. She will end by driving me out into the street in a rage. There goes that infernal little beast barking again. Shall we ever escape from this flat-trap with its scurfy beige carpets, its dentist’s-waiting-room furniture, its unopenable and unshuttable steel-framed windows? I am starting to look for a new apartment but the people in Ottawa are obstructing me at every turn.

  17 March 1958.

  St. Patrick’s Day – a glorious day without a cloud. Went to meet Jules Léger1 last night at the airport. The plane was two hours late and I sat happily alternating my reading between Descartes in a paper-bound edition and Eloise in the Plaza. In the afternoon to the Metropolitan Museum – the look of pride in the portraits of adventurers and dukes of Renaissance Italy, not vulgar assurances but the native vitality and splendour of men clothed in brilliant colours wearing strange hats, like birds of show and birds of prey with foreign markings, natives of another world. Where has that pride and splendour gone?

  How much I like Jules. How wise and witty he is.

  2 April 1958.

  I had lunch with the Soviet Representative. He seems a homely old body, tough but not dehumanized. “We consider,” he said, “that all religious wars have always been based entirely on economic motives. The name of religion merely masks the real motive, for example the Crusades.” I said, “I cannot remember the economic motives for the Thirty Years War or the French religious wars, can you?” Apparently he could not. Brushing the question aside, he reverted to the Crusades.

  In the afternoon we went to Mabel Ingalls’s1 farm in the country. She seemed in a nervous frenzy, jumping up from her chair to half open the window and then immediately shutting it again, smoking incessantly, quoting great names and then dashing them away again. Dorothy Osborne2 sat with her long legs stretched out in dark-green woollen stockings and made her jerky, witty comments in her take-it-or-leave-it voice. Among the other guests was a young couple who touched hands for a moment in physical recollection and could not help smiling at each other. Also a German count who could not – would not – believe that I was a Bad Shot. After lunch we threw things for the dogs to play with in front of the sitting-room fire. Rain streamed down in slanting slats across the flank of the mountain that Mabel has just bought to save it from the common herd and their motels, across her lake, her fields, her woods, her farms. We went home at 4 p.m. precisely. “What’s your hurry?” growled Mabel.

  18 April 1958.

  Lunch with Engen, the Swedish Representative, and walked the sunny streets with him to his office. Banners hung from the tall buildings in the heat haze, vistas stretched, glass gleamed. Oh I love, absolutely love, New York, at any rate on a fine day in spring I do. Engen has a soft charm, a subtle intelligence, and a “progressive” outlook.

  2 May 1958.

  A feeling of respite today after my first day as President of the Security Council. Afterwards a journalist asked me what it was like being “up there in front of all the klieg lights with all the people watching. Can you give us the human angle or are you too hardened a diplomat?” The truth is that I very much enjoy the Security Council.

  It is rather like a court of law. When one is acting as the head of one’s own delegation one is pleading a case, interjecting, cross-examining like a barrister. When one is in the chair one is interpreting the rules, keeping order, presiding like a judge. It is much less tiring than a diplomatic dinner party. The issue before the Security Council was the Soviet veto of t
he Northern Defence Zone. The Americans have prepared an International Arctic Inspection System and we have worked closely with them over this. Dag Hammarskjöld has supported it, much to the rage of the Russians. The “non-committed” countries were at first undecided as to the line they should take. What was decisive was the Soviet attitude, the blank lack of compromise, the Gromyko “nyet.” We were back in the Cold War. Even if our tactics had been subtler, this would have changed nothing. During the disarmament negotiations this summer and even up to the last few weeks it has been possible to see some merit in the Russian case. This had its own consistency, but in this last week a new – or rather a return to an old – attitude has come about. Now they don’t even bother to make a case. What does this change mean? A new access of strength from an unexpected quarter? Or the cover-up for a reappraisal? In the evening I had a television interview with Stan Burke. When the question-and-answer part of the interview was over they took what is called a reaction shot, during which he and I had to sit looking at each other for two interminable minutes before the camera. The more we gazed at each other eyeball to eyeball the more I felt a sensation of embarrassment which he perhaps shared.

  9 May 1958.

  Jetty1 has been staying with us, looking young and pretty. When old Frederic Hudd2 was boring her with the price of shad roe and his desire to acquire a brass-and-bronze platter with the head of Bacchus carved in relief upon it, she curled up on the sofa and went to sleep, looking like a young girl. As for old Frederic, he too looks younger now that the menopause is over. His face is thinner, his aquiline nose juts out like the nose on a death-mask although he is far from dead but pink and perky, and in his relations with his host and hostess, Sir William1 and Lady Stephenson, he makes me think of an undergraduate staying with two old people who “wait up for him” of an evening. After dinner he caused the lights to be turned out and recited the Morte d’Arthur, looking like a noble old Merlin himself. An actor he is – a ham actor. He is a Dickensian figure to me, one of those eccentrics whom the hero David Copperfield, or Pip, meets as a boy on his way upwards in life. I hope I am on Frederic’s “prayer list,” for although he says he is a phoney I should like his prayers. They might be potent all the same.

  19 May 1958.

  Oh this doorless flat, everyone’s perpetual awareness of everyone else. It is like having no eyelids. At this moment Matilda is vacuuming the sitting-room (why at this hour?). If rays of hatred could strike her body through the archway that opens out from this parody of a library into the sitting-room, then dead at this instant would she fall. But who the hell do I think I am – Proust? – needing a cork-lined room to write a masterpiece when I am only scribbling this diary. Are my susceptibilities so exquisite? What would I do if my “dream children” were crying and shouting all around me? A crotchety old bore I am becoming. I have been reading Justine by Durrell. It depends on the mood – if you are irritated it will irritate you and you will say it is all shreds and patches of mysticism, aestheticism, and mandarinism. But wait – let the ingredients settle and the brew is seductive, disturbing, with strong, rancid flavours. Now as Popski barks I hear Matilda say in her plaintive, high voice, “When he and I are alone together he is never like this, never barks. It is funny, very funny,” and she gives a wild pipe of mirthless laughter. She is developing a mania for Popski and a sort of jealousy of us in competition for his love.

  19 May 1958.

  Mike Pearson and Maryon are here. He is taking part in a seminar on the TV – “In Search of an American Foreign Policy.” He is in splendid form, entertaining and so intelligent, quite undismayed by political misfortunes. Maryon looking very handsome and being very funny and very much on the mark in her comments. I thought that the TV show itself was a dispiriting performance, conveying an impression of ineffectual uneasiness on the part of the Americans participating, with a note of sophomoric cynicism struck by the British Representative, Nutting.

  24 May 1958.

  These last days have been spent dabbling in this murky Lebanese crisis in the Security Council, where the Lebanese charge of interference in their internal affairs by Egypt is before the Council. Aksoul, the Lebanese Representative, comes to see me in the apartment at all hours for consultation, sometimes accompanied by his very decorative wife, who is herself no slouch in diplomatic negotiations. Last night when Aksoul was outlining the dangers facing the Lebanon, Popski came barking into the room and Aksoul said to me, “It is very nice to have a pet dog but is it so nice in such a small apartment?” – a question God knows I have often asked myself.

  This Lebanese business is very tricky and one that could be dangerous, and as President of the Council I have to tread warily. Here my ignorance of the Middle East makes it difficult for me to gauge Arab reactions. I hate dealing with an area which I cannot see in my mind’s eye and with people whose motives I cannot assess. Part of the difficulty is my ignorance of the history of that part of the world, which leaves me without terms of reference.

  3 June 1958.

  Our new Minister of External Affairs, Sidney Smith, has been here for a visit. He has been extremely kind and understanding in his dealings with me and I like him. He is shrewd enough too, but all the same I ask myself what can be the secret of his success. It is certainly not force of intelligence or grasp of issues. And he does talk such nonsense. Last night he began comparing Canada to his thirteen-year-old daughter, “both adolescents at the difficult age.” He says, “We must not let ourselves be treated like Tunisians.” What can he mean?

  15 June 1958.

  This Tunisian crisis, caused by the French bombing of a Tunisian border village, has exercised my mind and my feelings too without respite for days. I live in the U.N. like a termite in cheese and my personal life has disappeared. I stay on and on in the evening in the office until I suppose the staff say, “He works because he has nothing else in his life.”

  What is disturbing is the resentment which has grown up between us and the British over the Middle East – echoes of Suez involved. I should like to be in agreement with them, even – if necessary – against the United States. That used to be the state of affairs. For example, over Korea we worked well together. I wish I could talk to some Englishman freely and have it all out – perhaps Harold Beeley or Humphrey Trevelyan,1 not Bob Dixon. He would just pretend to agree with me. What worries me is what worried me at the time of Suez and was not a moral question but a sharp divergence as to the possibilities. They seem to me to be suffering from an aberration and in pursuit of it to be oblivious of their loss of reputation. They proceed by indirection, pretend to scruples, perhaps even feel them, but they do not count the full cost in the Middle East or clearly see the end in view.

  21 June 1958.

  Last night I went, at his invitation, to call on President Heuss (President of the German Federal Republic) whom I had known when I was posted in Bonn. The moment I got into the hotel sitting-room I was transported back to the peculiar atmosphere of all such German gatherings. There was a real wish on their part to make a graceful gesture to a former Canadian Ambassador to their country. There was even genuine friendliness, and the old man himself was as charming and natural as ever, yet still the occasion had a sort of stuffiness and clumsiness like so many German official gatherings. This was mainly produced by the gang of officials surrounding the President. What do I feel when I look back on the Germans and my relations with them? I feel a sort of twisted liking for them and admiration too, but their lack of ease is painful, as is their incessant struggle to impose themselves and an undercurrent of doubt as to whether they are succeeding, the incessant grinding of their will to stamp a rigid form on their self-consciousness, to button up their nature.

  26 June 1958. Ottawa, on a visit for consultation.

  I am off for a walk around the poop-deck of Parliament Hill which overlooks the river where I have so often walked in the past trying to regain balance after some crisis in my Ottawa life. When I see the tired, aging men who are my friend
s and who work in the Department I think it is as well that I don’t have to face that ordeal. There is something wrong here but it is the same thing that it has always been – overwork, the panic desire to escape before they get too old, and the fascination of being in the centre of things, these pulling in opposite directions. I know that dilemma and I have no desire to go through it all over again.

  2 July 1958. New York in a heat wave.

  I am alone in the flat. Sylvia has stayed on in Ottawa. Matilda and Popski are away on a holiday. I sleep in one bed and then in another and I never make up the one I slept in last. I leave my dirty clothes in piles on the floor. If the light doesn’t work, I’m too lazy to change the bulb, so just move to another room. Elizabeth writes that Bowen’s Court is becoming for her a barrack of anxiety and that she has to face the fact that she cannot keep it up any longer and must sell it. She writes, “I am getting bored here and that is a fact. I suppose it is the effect of hardening my heart. When one can no longer afford to support an illusion one rather welcomes seeing it break down, or perhaps, in this case, run down,” but does she really know how much leaving Bowen’s Court will hurt when the time comes?