My Generation (35 page)

A lot of the time Jackie kept her shapely but rather large bare feet in the presidential lap. At one point J.F.K., in a personal aside to me, asked what I was writing, and when I told him it was a novel about Nat Turner, who had led a nineteenth-century slave insurrection in Virginia, he became immediately alert and probed me brightly and persistently for information, which I was happy to provide. He seemed fascinated by my story of the revolt. The issue of race was plainly beginning to bedevil Kennedy, as it was nearly everyone else. At that time few Americans had heard of Nat Turner. I told Kennedy things about slavery he had obviously never known before.

Then, after the ice cream and coffee, the president passed out to the men Partagas cigars, made in Havana and encased in silver tubes. I rolled mine around between my fingers delightedly, trying not to crack too obvious a smile. I was aware that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods and that the embargo had been promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand. Therefore the Partagas was all the more worth preserving, at least for a while, in its protective tube, as a naughty memento, a conversation piece with a touch of scandal. I watched as the president began to smoke with pleasure, displaying no sense of the clandestine. I palmed the Partagas into my pocket while Kennedy wasn't looking, resolved to smoke it on some special occasion, and lit up one of my Canary Island coronas. Soon afterward, however, I began feeling a certain odd, fugitive sadness at this little gift from Kennedy, a sadness I couldn't quite fathom, though it may have been only the same poignant regret that prompted me to write, later on, when I remembered the boat trip, “of the irreconcilable differences, the ferocious animosity that separated Castro and Kennedy. Of all the world's leaders the Harvard man and the Marxist from Havana were temperamentally and intellectually most alike;
they probably would have taken warmly to each other had not the storm of twentieth-century history and its bizarre determinism made them into unshakable enemies.”

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.]

I
n 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.]

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-misses, 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.

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.