16 August 1959. Stonington.
Hotter still today, although a faint breeze is moving in the branches of the tree outside the window. Prideaux, the drama critic of Time magazine, has joined the house party. He is a cozy character but could bite if he chose.
Stonington is a charming little town, eighteenth-century white clapboard houses with fanlights over the doors. In one Mrs. Carlton Sprague-Smith practises chamber music and collects white Wedgwood stone china. In another Miss Bull perfects fine book-binding in a pre-Revolutionary hide-out in her herb garden. We dine on terraces here and there with these acquaintances and they in turn come for drinks in the garden, but tonight it is too thundery for the garden. Perhaps if I went downstairs I might get a drink, although it is really too early for one and it would not do for me to help myself from our hostess’s whisky when she is not about.
22 August 1959. New York.
We are in the final stages of moving from the flat. We camp in the sitting-room with garden furniture. Nothing is left in this place but beds, TV, and toothbrushes, and the incessant wind blowing from the air-conditioner. Sylvia has been working packing things all day for the last two days, while I have been sitting reading. Last night she asked me would I move the window-box from the ledge on the terrace. I went out, picked it up, but it was heavier than I thought and I dropped it on the front of my foot, breaking two small bones. Serves me right for being so lazy. The chauffeur took me to Saint Luke’s Hospital to have a cast put on which will be with me for a month. Sylvia says it is the last time she will ask me to help with moving anything.
22 September 1959.
We are installed in the new flat. It is much larger and rented principally for entertainment during the General Assembly. The Supplies and Properties Division of the Department of External Affairs has spent a good deal on doing it up but for some mysterious reason they refuse to renew the wooden seat on the w.c. of the spare room. I pointed out to them that prongs of wood had come loose from the seat and were sticking out, to the danger of anyone sitting on it. Still they refused. Finally, today, I telephoned them and said that as the Minister was coming to stay it would be their responsibility if any of these wooden prongs stuck into the ministerial bottom. They gave way at once and I have now authority for a new w.c. seat. Truly, the Department of External Affairs works in mysterious ways.
27 September 1959.
Howard Green, the new Minister of External Affairs, has arrived for the General Assembly and we have started, he and I, by having a falling-out. I am upset about this as I feel a rapidly increasing admiration and affection for him, but at the Delegation meeting this morning he publicly rejected my advice. It has to do with the French action in Tunisia, and my pro-French predilection got the upper hand of me. I must say that my support for French positions seems a one-sided effort, as the French never make the slightest attempt to accommodate us. Does he think that as an official of the suspect Department of External Affairs I am working against him in some way? On the policy question he may be quite right and I quite wrong. In fact, he probably is right.
1 October 1959.
All is well again between me and the Minister. He is very impressive in dealing with other delegations but I am sometimes rather alarmed by his technique and the way in which he sweeps aside arguments and opposition. However, he does not seem in the least alarmed. He certainly gave Bob Dixon the surprise of his life yesterday. I couldn’t help laughing in my bath this morning when I thought about it. Bob, as chairman of the Commonwealth meeting, made a statement on policy at the Assembly which he hoped would be acceptable to us. He produced these views with quiet, persuasive confidence and was about to pass on to another item on the agenda when the Minister said, “In our best judgement, that simply doesn’t make sense.” I think there will be quite a lot of broken crockery left about when the Minister returns to Ottawa and I can see that I am going to have to pick up a lot of the pieces. Those who think that they have got a nice tame Canadian in the new Minister are very much mistaken. He is a very shrewd politician. He is also admirable in his pursuit of objectives in which he tenaciously believes, particularly in the field of disarmament.
2 October 1959.
Strauss, the German Defence Minister, came today for talks with the Minister, accompanied by the German Ambassador to Ottawa, Dankwort, and a group of German officials. While Strauss was talking to the Minister, Dankwort kept whispering to me about nothing in a low voice, thus reminding me of that irritating trick of German officials. When their superiors are present they always talk in a low, reverent murmur as if they were in church. Strauss put on a performance of jovial, shrewd frankness which was very nearly convincing. Despite his grossness he can be attractive. The Minister, who has not seen a German since he killed some of them in the First World War, was fascinated by the interestingness of Strauss’s talk, his disregard for platitude, his realism and no-nonsense approach.
15 January 1960.
Outside the door the official Cadillac awaits and I begin to think of what is to be done today. In the office my secretary (except when she suffers from a delaying migraine) waits, gently and satirically. She reminds me of my oversights with a tiny pinprick. The incoming telegrams are piled before me, the news of the world extrapolated for my benefit. These chalk-blue messages and white replies contain a scenario of the World’s Game. They inform and they disguise. A riot or a revolution comes to one without the movement of fear or rage, couched in the cool telegraphese of our Chargés d’Affaires. Policy is indicated in faint loop-like shapes. It is to be flexibly firm and firmly flexible. Aims fade into a Technicolor sunset of world peace, the Declaration on Human Rights excludes the nightmare and sounds like an invitation to a plate lunch at the Waldorf. Disarmament is to be complete, but hate they cannot regulate. This paper world breeds paper conflicts in the mind, starchy debates between the one hand and the other, and peering to descry the barricades on which we ought to die. It is no go, all that; it is none of our business anyway, for we are diplomats, not meant to think or feel but to manipulate and remember and to shift the papers from the “In” box to the “Out.”
Then there is the little matter of personal relations with other governments and, most important, with one’s own. How to put things – in a way – you know – in a certain fashion which does not offend and yet disturbs. How to hide the needle in the bundle of hay.
Of course, Canadians are different. There is no malice in us. We are the family doctor whom no one has called in for consultation. We are the children of the midday who see all in the clear, shallow light.
16 January 1960.
Certainly one does not at any particular time of life from day to day feel the same age. On one day one may feel a premonition of what it will be like to be really old, and on another one awakes again an adolescent. Quivers of restlessness, flushes of vanity, tail-ends of impossible dreams disturb. One even craves the moral anarchy – like a lost innocence – of adolescence. Oh for the breakdown of Values, those weights upon the lids of life!
The Argentine Ambassador says that the access of sensuality in middle-aged men is called in his country “le démon de midi,” after a forgotten novel on this subject by Paul Bourget. He says that the title refers to a phrase in the Psalms, which I must look up.
I telephoned my mother today in Halifax. I don’t know how to deal with her old age. Perhaps when I am with her, by refusing to admit it I seem to make light of an unbearable affliction. My pretence that she is as she always was may be superficially flattering but may seem like silly patronage (who does he think he is taking in?), and am I not forcing her to play up to my pretence? Is that love? In love all barriers are down, and she has always tried to pull them down to show me the truth. She is indeed preoccupied with the business of dying and sends courageous and despairing signals as she is drawn away on an irresistible tide, and yet they say to me, “How amusing your mother was yesterday! Isn’t she wonderful!”
24 January 1960.
I won
der if I can write at all without echoing the truly terrible style in which this book Advise and Consent is written. Norman Robertson says that it is “a good political novel.” For him and for me it comes pat on the occasion. This is what we are up against in Ottawa – the jungle of politics. Of course, we have always been up against it, but for some illusory years we seemed cushioned against its savageries; in the jungle of politics when the powerful beast strikes one can hide or run, melt into protective colouring if any can be found – but don’t wander unarmed in the deceptive sunshine of the glades or you may get badly bruised, finally mauled. I have just been talking to such a victim of power politics. He will live, but will he ever fully recover?
I had lunch today with David Walker.1 He has just finished a new book. He said that as he was getting towards the end of it he developed a fear that he might die before he had time to finish it and hardly liked to go near the tractor on his farm in case he met with a fatal accident. When David told me this I had a flash of the deepest, most hopeless envy. What would I not give to feel myself the carrier of a book in which I believed!
28 January 1960.
I am a little worried by my speech yesterday. Huntingdon Gilchrist said I had given people something to think about. I felt that this was just what I had not done.
With luck – I mean, if nothing goes wrong, illness, scandal, disfavour of the great, or conspicuous failure – I may expect to stay on at the United Nations for two or even three years. Then there is a possibility of the Under-Secretaryship in Ottawa. But it maybe that they would prefer to offer it to someone younger, and perhaps they would do better to do so. Then there is the possibility that Washington may become vacant and they may want a useful, non-controversial successor and I might be the one. Or there is Delhi soon to be vacant – and to be resisted at all costs. Two or three more postings and it is all over. Then retirement and we call it a day.
Harold Beeley of the British Delegation, whom I think of as an educated man, told me that he could never read philosophy and could not understand a word of it. This made me feel better about my struggles with Stuart Hampshire’s book.1 But it does all the same seem idiotic that two grown men like him and me, who are reputedly intelligent at their jobs and who have had expensive educations, are apparently incapable of following a discussion on questions of mind conducted in what looks – deceptively – like plain English.
9 February 1960.
I think and hope that Canada is respected in the United Nations. Or is it just that we are regarded as “respectable”? We seem to have assumed the role in many of the world’s troubles as an objective bystander, willing to help if it does not cost too much, given to tut-tutting over the passionate unreasonableness of other people, and quite given to political moralizing. It seems to me that we Canadians have been lucky enough so far to ourselves be spared any “moment of truth.” I think there is altogether too much glossing over of the real issues in our statements on defence and foreign policy, both by the Government and by the Opposition. There is also a dated “progressive” political vocabulary which is supposed to give a mildly advanced look to our policies but which is often very superficial and could be misleading.
21 February 1960.
I spent the morning with Hammarskjöld, who was in marvellous form, giving me vignettes of the political leaders with whom he has been dealing – Salazar, de Gaulle, and Franco. He is certainly the most charming, witty, intelligent companion and a delight to be with, glinting with malice and playing with political schemes, ideas, devices, and stratagems.
9 March 1960.
March is perhaps the most unpleasant month in the year. Dirty snow in the streets and the cracking and raking of a snow shovel on the pavement, raw sunlight, hard blue sky, and a back-breaking wind.
For some reason I woke up today thinking of Anne. I seemed to see her at the front door of Lapford as her brother Tony and I drove up the avenue in his battered second-hand car, coming from Oxford, where we had begun to be friends. There she stands, her dark head consciously averted, flanked by her mother and her two Chekov aunts. Lapford Grange was enclosed in a green Devon combe. The house was comfortable, rather shabby – not that one noticed – and full of people. I see a young girl, a Romantic Young Girl, with a strongly developed feeling of herself as a Romantic Young Girl, yet with a streak of realism, no silliness, she delights precipitately in her cleverness, she is avid for life, grasping for it. She is sensuous, sentimental, easily in tears or laughter, deliciously eager.
Yes, I remember her, looking like a Russian girl in one of the novels she loved, with her untidy dark hair, her mesmeric dark eyes, her fine-wristed hands. How she talked, with what urgency!
Then I began thinking of Oxford and, inevitably, of Billy Coster, that meteor of my skies till he blunted his wits with drink and became an embarrassing bore. He belonged to the Scott Fitzgerald age and was like Diver in Tender Is the Night; like him in his social fascination and his underlying truculence. He was a sexual nihilist, not to be confused with a neuter. He spoke and seemed like an Englishman and I thought of him as the only American who was not like an American. I think now that his was a very American tragedy. In his last phase during the War he lived almost entirely with dart-playing London pals whom he had picked up at his fire-watching station, and sought solace in a semi-platonic friendship with a good-natured barmaid. He thought the English lower classes better friends than his own class and he romanticized them. He would drink beer, port, and whisky all in one hour. He tried to escape from America, from money, and from sex, and died in his mother’s arms in an alcoholic clinic in California. I loved Billy and laughed with him and drank with him and talked with him for hours on end. Later, we were both at Harvard as post-graduates and hated Cambridge together. If he appeared today as he first was, how life would come to life. How truly awful it would be if he appeared again as he ended. Dear Billy, how he would have hated the United Nations. He loathed cant. He also thought he loathed snobbery, but he was a New York gentleman and in his heart believed it hard to beat the Costers and the Schermerhorns. No one seems to remember him now – not even his relations. Perhaps he was an embarrassment from which they are delivered. His mother is dead, too – fascinating, funny, with her handsome face and wild stylishness. I see her in trailing tea-gowns, in the sitting-room of some hotel suite in London, Paris, or New York, upbraiding, mocking, and moaning over her children and applying her own disastrous touch to their general débâcle. And where has all the money gone? To “little Matilda,” I suppose, the child of the Paris Ritz, married to a duke – must be nearly forty by now. I might sit next to her at dinner without recognizing her. But Billy is Down Among the Dead Men. If he is in Paradise, it is the Oxford of his youth, where he shone briefly in the warmth of friendship and the sparkle of high spirits.
We were all “children of the twenties.” But is that phrase just an escape-hatch to excuse messy, self-indulgent, frivolous lives? Is it like blaming alcoholism on heredity, or crime on “something that happened in one’s childhood”? In fact, is there anything in this twenties business? Not much perhaps, but something. The famous frivolity marked us, as did the fashionable despair. We also were “rebels without a cause.”
13 April 1960.
On this fine spring morning with the sun and the cool breeze and New York traffic sounds coming up from the street I feel hungry and cheerful. Elizabeth is up the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, having taken on a seminar at Vassar. She says the whole place is threaded with stories, a frieze of young creatures drifting across the campus, the girls going to collect their letters like going to collect eggs on the farm, and the girl coming back reading a letter as she walks and smiling to herself. Elizabeth says hang on to the diaries – they could be pruned and published as “The Diaries of Mr. X.”
14 May 1960.
A large, cheerful lunch party today at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley. More and more rich Americans, and how endlessly many there seem to be and how endlessly much money they seem
to have – and when you think of all the other rich Americans who don’t happen to be meeting one at lunch or dinner in the month of May 1960, the thought becomes quite oppressive. Then there is this talk of private planes and swimming-pools and “We have taken a floor at the Plaza for six months,” “Her mother has inherited the most divine villa at Como,” “He has the largest collection of Fabergé in the world,” “They own two miles of private beach on the Sound,” “Our plantation near Charleston” – and what is nice is that they are all rich together. Ambassadors, too, are collected for social occasions – the house-trained ones.
15 August 1960.
Just back from my holiday in Nova Scotia. The Minister has arrived by plane from Ottawa. Went back to the hotel with him from the airport. Of course, in spite of my instructions, no one from the Delegation had inspected their rooms. The heat was appalling and there was no air-conditioner in their sitting-room. Naturally, my flowers for Mrs. Green had not been delivered. Then there was a meeting over his disarmament speech. Tommy Stone, Wally Nesbitt, Ross Campbell, Geoff Murray, and myself- what a lot of high-priced help! The speech was immensely long but I think very well reasoned.
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 16
