Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature 9781487537531

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DIPLOMACY AND THE MODERN NOVEL France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature

Diplomacy and the Modern Novel France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature

EDITED BY ISABELLE DAUNAIS AND ALLAN HEPBURN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2020 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0809-8 (cloth)  ISBN 978-1-4875-3754-8 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3753-1 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Diplomacy and the modern novel : France, Britain, and the mission   of literature edited by Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn. Names: Daunais, Isabelle, editor. | Hepburn, Allan, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200230549 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200230778 |   ISBN 9781487508098 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487537548 (EPUB) | ISBN   9781487537531 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: French fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. |   LCSH: English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. | LCSH:   Diplomacy in literature. Classification: LCC PQ671 .D57 2020 | DDC 843/.9109–dc23

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii The Mission of Literature: Modern Novels and Diplomacy  3 allan hepburn Part One: Diplomatic Experience 1 Making a Song and Dance of It: Staging Diplomacy in William Gerhardi’s Early Novels  27 claire davison  2 The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen: A User’s Guide to Social Magic  50 maxime decout 3 Modern Negotiations: Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919 and Public Faces 66 caroline z. krzakowski Part Two: Novels and Diplomacy 4 “Diplomatic Dispatch Style”: Towards a New Aesthetic of the Novel  85 isabelle daunais 5 Conrad’s Politics of Idealism: Diplomacy without Diplomats  100 stephen ross

vi Contents

6  André Gide and the Art of Evasion  116 michel biron Part Three: Documents 7 Proust’s Epistolary Diplomacy: Antoine Bibesco, René Peter, and “Salaïsme” 137 françois proulx 8 The Art of Conversation: Nancy Mitford, France, and Cultural Diplomacy 158 allan hepburn Part Four: Foreign Affairs 9 Action, Diplomacy, Art: André Malraux and Graham Greene  177 robert l. caserio 10 Mythography and Diplomacy in Works by Ian Fleming and John le Carré  195 maxime prévost 11  Lawrence Durrell: Diplomacy as Farce  212 maria dibattista

Works Cited  225 Contributors  237 Index  241

Acknowledgments

Since 2007, a team devoted to research on the novel, an initiative generously funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), has been headquartered at McGill University and led by Isabelle Daunais. Over the years, this bilingual group, called “Travaux sur les Arts du Roman” and known by its evocative acronym TSAR, has hosted presentations in French and English by graduate students, McGill faculty members, and scholars from other universities. Approaches to literary studies by Francophone and Anglophone researchers vary widely, and the fruits of this collaborative enterprise have been as fulfilling as they have been unexpected. In May 2017, under the auspices of TSAR, a group of scholars gathered at McGill University to discuss diplomacy in modern French and British novels. Over two days, participants from France, the United States, and Canada considered the comedy, tempo, quirkiness, and occasional klutziness of diplomats in modern fiction. The colloquium was a full dress rehearsal for the essays in this collection. During the interwar years in France and Britain, diplomats of all ranks – from consuls to ambassadors – wrote memoirs, novels, plays, and essays on diplomatic themes. Certain of these writers, such as Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand, and Saint-John Perse, have a firm standing in the French literary canon; lesser writers, such as Albert Bérard, Henri Hoppenot, Louis de Monicault, and Gilbert de Chambrun, all members of the diplomatic corps, reinforce the claim that the interwar years in France were a golden age of diplomacy, at least culturally. In British literature, claims of the intertwining of writing and diplomacy are not so pronounced, even though certain writers have served as attachés, consuls, or envoys. Lawrence Durrell was a press attaché for the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria during the Second World War; after the war, he worked for the British Council in

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Argentina, then Yugoslavia, in what might be called arm’s-length cultural diplomacy. David Cornwell, prior to adopting the nom-de-plume John le Carré, was unofficially an MI6 agent and officially the second secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. French has been the lingua franca of diplomacy since the Renaissance. A surprising number of British writers discussed in this volume spoke (or speak) French fluently, including Harold Nicolson, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, and John le Carré. In his book called Diplomacy, Nicolson goes so far as to claim that “it is impossible to use French correctly without being obliged to place one’s ideas in the proper order, to develop them in a logical sequence, and to use words of almost geometrical accuracy.” Be that as it may, strictures on what should and should not be said in diplomacy are still in play. Charles de Martens advises that a good diplomatic style should never be overstated: “bien dire dans l’ordre convenable tout ce qui doit être dit, et rien au delà.” Nicola Danby and Gregory Brent translated three essays – Michel Biron’s, Isabelle Daunais’s, and Maxime Decout’s – from French to English. Allan Hepburn further refined those translations with input from the authors. Where primary texts have already been rendered into English, such as Dorothy Bussy’s translations of André Gide’s works, Ezra Pound’s translation of Paul Morand’s Open All Night, Barbara Bray’s translation of Romain Gary’s Europa, or Scott Moncrieff’s legendary translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, those existing translations have been used and English titles adopted, sometimes with minor modifications. Whenever necessary, untranslated passages in French have been rendered into English. In the spirit of give and take, a few French phrases have been let stand, as vestiges of the global dominance of French as the language of diplomacy. Curiously, in French, one speaks of “la Carrière,” with an upper-case C, to signify diplomacy tout court. In English, one speaks of “a diplomat de carrière” to mean a lifelong diplomat. As with any collaborative enterprise, thanks are due to a number of people who moved this project forward with diplomatic tact and skill. Nora Shaalan brought her meticulous proofreading and formatting skills to bear on the entire text. Three anonymous readers provided generous and enthusiastic reports that have helped improve all aspects of this volume. Mark Thompson at the University of Toronto Press has been gracious and sensible in equal measures during the process of moving the book forward to publication. Lastly, financial support from FRQSC and the Insights program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has been, quite literally, invaluable in bringing this book into being.

DIPLOMACY AND THE MODERN NOVEL

The Mission of Literature: Modern Novels and Diplomacy allan hepburn

Like diplomacy, novels are representational: they rely on convention and style to express their point of view. Although there is a long history of diplomats who were also writers – Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Wyatt, and François-René de Chateaubriand among them – writer-diplomats flourished especially in the early twentieth century. Paul Claudel, Albert Cohen, Lawrence Durrell, Ian Fleming, Romain Gary, William Gerhardi, Jean Giraudoux, Graham Greene, Valery Larbaud, John le Carré, André Malraux, Nancy Mitford, Paul Morand, Harold Nicolson, Saint-John Perse, Marcel Proust – all frequented diplomatic circles or thought about diplomacy as an analogue for prose fiction. Outside France and Britain, any number of writers served as consuls, secretaries, or ambassadors for their respective countries.1 Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner, held diplomatic posts in Argentina, Spain, Ceylon, and elsewhere.2 In his youth, the Italian aristocrat Giuseppe di Lampedusa aspired to a diplomatic career but gave himself over to literature instead, and late in life produced one perfect novel, The Leopard (1958), in which Tancredi, a fellow with an “incomparably ironic way” (272), fights alongside Garibaldi in the Risorgimento and, making the most of his political opportunities, is ultimately appointed ambassador in Vienna. The essays in this volume focus on diplomatic strategies in operation between 1900 and 1960, from the transformation brought to bear upon nineteenth-century modes of negotiation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 through the early years of nuclear diplomacy. In diplomatic fiction, writers, characters, or narrators comment on institutionalized forms of diplomacy, usually with irony, sometimes with open disparagement. The modern novel regularly engages with the style, temporality, and comic potential of diplomacy. As in the best diplomatic communications, novels represent human complications with a

4  Allan Hepburn

finely honed feeling for ambiguity and style. Indeed, the novelistic representation of diplomatic protocols challenges assumptions about the revolutionary energies of modernism and modernity. While remaining committed to modernist innovation in representation, diplomatic novels take the long view of history and social transformation. Diplomats know that they have to respond to an imbroglio – a favourite word in the diplomatic lexicon – lest it escalate into an incident, but they suspect that plus ça change, plus c’est pareil. This collection of essays concentrates on British and French diplomacy because the diplomatic networks of those countries were so intertwined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and because political relations between those two imperial powers gave rise to so many and such diverse novelistic representations. Relations between France and Britain being sometimes testy, diplomacy matters all the more in settling disputes and disagreements. Tracing French-British connections, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever note that scholars pay little attention to “the processes of literary and cultural exchange that occurred across the English Channel” (2); such exchanges create an argument for the novel as a European or global phenomenon rather than the product solely of nation states. Cross-Channel exchanges do not mean that some French writers absorbed lessons from specific English writers or vice versa. Exchanges can occur at the level of technique and subject matter rather than influence. That Paul Claudel and Graham Greene both write about consuls does not prove that they read each other’s works, but it does open up an opportunity to think about the representation of diplomacy in their respective oeuvres as a particular kind of cultural formation. The term “diplomatic fiction,” as it is used in this volume, should be understood to refer to novels by diplomats, novels about diplomacy, and narrative strategies that have common cause with diplomatic discourse. This corpus, which includes Jean Giraudoux’s Bella (1926) and Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred (1960), among many other examples, attests to the expansion beyond Europe of multilateral ententes and relations in the modern period. The globe-trotting in Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth (1909), discussed below by Isabelle Daunais, or the multilingualism and cultural hybridization in William Gerhardi’s Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925), analysed by Claire Davison, express some of the international impulses that animate modernism. By its very nature international, diplomacy expands beyond Europe to include Africa, Asia, and North and South America, especially in the interwar years. As Michel Biron observes, André Gide caused something of a diplomatic incident by reporting on colonial abuses in Chad and the Congo

The Mission of Literature  5

in the late 1920s; he repeated this stunt in 1936 by publicly denouncing restrictions on liberty of expression and speech in the USSR after he visited there at the invitation of the Soviet Union of Writers. Diplomacy necessitates tact, circumspection, negotiation, savoir-faire, even irony. Throughout this collection, diplomacy and novel-writing are treated as roughly homologous activities: writing communiqués and promoting national culture through ancillary functions at an embassy, all while preserving an air of detachment, have a corollary in the writing of chapters and promoting a point of view through the decidedly oblique activity of narrating fictional events, all while keeping one’s distance from those imagined situations. To paraphrase Marcel Proust, true diplomacy, diplomacy fully caught up in a language of etiquette and persuasion, in which no subject is ever exhausted either conversationally or intellectually, may, in the end, be literature itself. The lengths to which a novel may go to make its case or to expose the public and private motives that lie behind a decision have a great deal in common with the lengths to which diplomats must go to promote the interests of the country that they represent, even when those interests may not coincide with their personal opinions, which in any event are screened by the protocols of negotiation, decency, and mutual respect. Diplomacy Old and New In general usage, diplomacy refers to the way that relations are conducted by negotiation between political entities, usually states. In Diplomacy: A Basic Guide to the Conduct of Contemporary Foreign Affairs, which ran through several editions after its initial publication in 1939, Harold Nicolson defines diplomacy as “the art of negotiating agreements between sovereign states” (7). In a refinement of this definition, Nicolson treats diplomacy as a process rather than an art: “The function of diplomacy is the management of the relations between independent states by processes of negotiation” (80). In the first definition, the success of diplomatic negotiations is measured by agreements. Under the second definition, the management of state relations requires ongoing negotiation; no matter how earnestly they are undertaken, negotiations may fail at any point. As Nicolson claims, with an eye to the inevitability of friction between competing entities, diplomacy is “an essential element in any relation between man and man or between nation and nation” (14). Diplomacy abides by the basic principle that all states are equal and meet to negotiate on equal terms. Yet this premise can be overturned whenever a state with more resources, weapons, or bravado decides to

6  Allan Hepburn

vaunt its superiority. Charles Hill thinks of this quandary as “the great modern dilemma: how to describe and manage equality when equality does not exist in nature” (294). In historical accounts, modern diplomacy begins with the Peace of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and ushered in the system of sovereign states (Craig and Gilbert 3; Mattingly 178). After the Peace of Westphalia, permanent delegations were established abroad on the grounds that diplomacy was an ongoing necessity rather than an ad hoc remedy to specific crises. The Westphalian system required each country to meet several criteria: “to be a state, to accept international law and organizations and universal human rights ... and to use professional military and diplomatic services. As a procedural system it could encompass widely divergent political and social ideas, but it would have to defend itself against substantive ideologies which would arise to oppose and try to replace it” (Hill 135–6). When a regime of whatever ideological stripe ceases to recognize the sovereign status of another state, diplomacy crashes to an end. In a sense, diplomacy is the antithesis of war; it ushers in peace, and it is meant to keep peace. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, substantial changes were made to the ways that diplomacy was conducted in Europe. As Stephen Ross notes in his chapter concerning Joseph Conrad’s resentful attitude towards diplomats, no longer were state representatives drawn from the aristocratic class after the French Revolution, nor did they represent the will and the pleasure of a single sovereign. They were representatives of the state, not of individual kings or queens. Out of the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, a standard set of rules was established for these post-Revolution forms of diplomacy, and those rules were, by and large, based on French precedents. The consolidation of states and the expansion of empires in the nineteenth century exponentially multiplied the need for diplomatic services. With the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1867 and the unification of Germany in 1871, alongside the imperial expansion that resulted from those national consolidations, European diplomacy increasingly focused on settling disputes in colonies held by one imperial power or another. It is almost axiomatic that the more expansive an imperial power – France, Britain, Russia, Germany, Italy – the more elaborate its diplomatic services. The United States, it should be noted, had quite limited diplomatic missions in the nineteenth century. Although Americans “liked the smell of empire, and felt an urge to range themselves among the colonial powers of the time, to see our [sic] flag flying on distant tropical isles” (Kennan 17), as when the Philippines fell under American administration in 1898 as the spoils of a war with Spain, the US was far from being an imperial nation and

The Mission of Literature  7

did not have a fully organized State Department responsible for foreign affairs until after the Second World War.3 Nineteenth-century diplomacy was a chummy affair. In The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1954), Nicolson summarizes its principles: the conception of Europe as the centre of international gravity; the idea that the Great Powers, constituting the Concert of Europe, were more important and more responsible than the Small Powers; the existence in every country of a trained diplomatic service possessing common standards of professional conduct; and the assumption that negotiation must always be a process rather than an episode, and that at every stage it must remain confidential. (77)

In both Diplomacy and The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, Nicolson glumly notes that negotiations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference marked a shift between old and new diplomatic styles. The old style involved quiet chats between highly placed officials in relative confidence, an approach to averting crises known as “boudoir diplomacy”; the new style involved highly publicized negotiations between teams of civil servants at conferences that were reported immediately in the international press. Nicolson disliked the speed of discussions, as if time, rather than results, were of the essence. Under the old method of negotiation, an ambassador “was not pressed for time” (Evolution 76–7). Nicolson also feared that, under the new diplomacy, international opinion could unduly influence negotiations and cause them to founder. Many people in the interwar years commented on this shift in diplomatic procedures. In a booklet entitled Diplomacy (1926), Sir Rennell Rodd devotes chapters to the “old” and “new” diplomacy. In his view, the old diplomacy assumed British imperialism as a prerogative; old diplomacy, Rodd asserts, vigilantly maintained “the balance of power” (47). With a hint of regret, he observes that diplomacy after the Paris Peace Conference became “more democratic” (48), which he does not think beneficial to proceedings at the negotiating table. Nonetheless, he concedes that the old diplomacy “sought to get the better of a rival or an adversary by taking advantage of any weak points in his armour” and often descended to “unscrupulous manipulations of language” that contained veiled threats or created unjustified insinuations (51, 52). Rodd never relinquishes his belief that on more occasions than one the “trained diplomatist has been proved by events to have been right” (69), whereas the press-mongering politician, anxious to appease or stir up public opinion, looks out for his own interests at the expense of national ones.

8  Allan Hepburn

Laments about the passing of old diplomacy continue throughout the twentieth century. In his 1956 preface to a reissue of Ernest Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Sir Nevile Bland complains that “tendentious press conferences” have utterly supplanted “the discreet exchange of notes” to resolve crises (v). Television worsens the problem, in Bland’s opinion. He lists several other factors that compromise best diplomatic practices, as he understands them: questions in Parliament and criticism in the press; the tendency of elected officials to take into their own hands matters better left to professionals; the habit of parliamentary and other committees to travel abroad to see what is happening and to stage photo opportunities. Bland concludes, “all these tend to undermine the confidence and independence of members of the Foreign Service and in some cases to usurp, in favour of the activities of an amateur hotel and travel agency, time and money formerly, and more usefully, devoted to members of Her Majesty’s Embassies, Legations and Consulates to the cultivation of local contacts” (vi–vii). In this view, new methods are oriented to media and re-election rather than a genuine understanding of frictions and possible solutions. Notwithstanding Nicolson’s, Rodd’s, and Bland’s grumpiness about the obsolescence of diplomatic methods, whatever is new grows old again. After 1945, diplomatic strategy changed radically because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. George F. Kennan, the seasoned American diplomat, warns that any nation that bases its foreign policy upon nuclear bombs and missiles, or encourages other countries to do so, faces a gruesome “chamber of horrors” (vi). To avoid nuclear annihilation if at all possible, Dean Acheson, American secretary of state from 1949 to 1953 during President Truman’s administration, called for “an open world system,” led by the US, over and against “the system organized and led by the Soviet Union” (117). Within the constraints of nuclear diplomacy, “the task is to join with others to get a workable international system of free states” (109). Acheson’s thinking, however, led to brinkmanship rather than de-escalation of tensions. The Soviet Union, he states in Power and Diplomacy – a telling title if ever there was one – is a revolutionary society that repudiates “the most fundamental postulates of the established order” and intends to pursue “destined progression to triumph and dominion” (9). Over the twentieth century, diplomacy fans out from imperial interests to include the international aims of the League of Nations, NATO, human rights organizations, trading blocs, and disarmament. While diplomacy manages international relations through political means, modern novels, in various forms, manage international relations through cultural representations.

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Representation Diplomacy is fundamentally about the treacheries implicit within representation. A diplomat, as a representative of a sovereign state, suppresses his personal opinions for the sake of national interests.4 Through dispatches and briefs, he trades information. Or he parlays, and while he parlays, he temporizes. Paradoxically, his communications must be crystalline no matter what he says or writes, even when he is playing for time. His written reports should accurately represent intention in clear, unambiguous prose free of what Nicolson calls the “Delphic style” (Diplomacy 114). Thus the diplomat, whose profession requires elegance and clarity of verbal expression, is already halfway to becoming a novelist. In his reports, he conveys character, atmosphere, situation, coincidence, conflict, and resolution much as a novelist does.5 Like novelists, diplomats should possess creative intelligence, not just to find solutions to intractable problems but also to understand a situation from multiple points of view and to render that situation coherent despite its complexity and shades of ambiguity. In a famous formulation, Sir Henry Wotton, who served as an English emissary in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, wittily defined an ambassador as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country” (qtd. in Satow 132). His lying abroad, with the range of meanings that the phrase implies, may be for an ultimate good that he himself cannot predict. Wotton sums up the contradictions latent within diplomatic representation: the diplomat must remain loyal to the sovereign or the state that he represents while not offending his foreign host. He stands in for absent authority. As Wotton’s epigram indicates, the diplomat is caught between honesty and lying because he represents something other than himself. Bringing off a foreign mission with style is thus the solution to the diplomat’s slightly false, slightly true representational quandary. Style manuals reinforce the protocols of diplomatic self-representation. August Heinrich Meisel’s Cours de style diplomatique (1826), much like Charles de Martens’s Guide diplomatique ou Traité des droits, des immunités et des devoirs des ministres publics, des agents diplomatiques et consulaires dans toute l’étendue de leurs fonctions (1822, revised 1837), assumes that classical rhetoric is the appropriate foundation for nineteenth-century diplomatic writing, with emphasis on articulation, invention, and eloquence. The diplomat has to be able to identify an issue, then expound upon it with oratorical conviction in order to persuade his interlocutors of the justness of his position. As Michel Murat explains, a common diplomatic style, premised on classical rhetoric and conducted in

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French, prevailed throughout nineteenth-century Europe. In briefs and dispatches, diplomats were expected to write “clearly and succinctly, without useless ornamentation, crisply yet maintaining periodic style” (Murat 140).6 Preciosity and needless sophistication were discouraged, as were badinage, jokes, proverbs, and clichés. The proper model was conversational: pleasant yet serious, purposeful yet never arch. In order to master this style, new arrivals at the Foreign Office in London or the Quai d’Orsay in Paris were advised to consult and imitate examples of proper salutation, tone, and the organization of ideas from any number of guidebooks devoted to the arts of diplomacy, including but not limited to Ernest Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1917), Jules Cambon’s Le Diplomate (1926), Jean Jusserand’s L’École des ambassadeurs (1934), and Léon Noël’s Conseils à un jeune Français entrant dans la diplomatie (1946). In many ways, these books perpetuate a rhetorical tradition that is identifiable as a diplomatic style. Although his subject is Renaissance diplomacy, Timothy Hampton notes that the early modern dramas of political negotiation, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Corneille’s Nicomède, leave vestiges of diplomatic style in later literature: “Diplomacy lives on as a trait of cultural style – in an elegant gesture, a discrete [sic] comment, or a bright turn of phrase” (195). In Hampton’s account, the diplomatic style is aligned with charm and verbal dexterity. Yet diplomatic style as it was codified in nineteenth- and twentieth-century guides easily stiffens into formality, idiosyncrasy, and bureaucratese. In diplomacy, observing formalities punctiliously can be an end in itself. In 1903 the French minister of foreign affairs abolished all formal salutations in ministry correspondence not because they impeded efficiency but because there were so many cases of wounded amour-propre among civil servants who had been inappropriately or wrongly addressed (Murat 140). As Maxime Decout argues in his contribution to this volume, Albert Cohen, who worked as a civil servant at the League of Nations between the wars, found ample material for satire within the precincts of international bureaucracy, much of it based on language: orotund phrases decked out with clichés, memos in which passive phrases hid the agent of any action, committees created to heap empty praise on the good works performed by the League. In a similar vein, the anecdotal chapters of Antrobus Complete – a comic masterpiece about diplomatic eccentricity, as Maria DiBattista points out in her concluding chapter to this volume – Lawrence Durrell cracks jokes about the empty flourishes of diplomatic language. The diplomat, Antrobus, with his penchant for telling stories about the ambassador Polk-Mowbray, remembers that a special “Commission on

The Mission of Literature  11

Official English” produced a book called “Foreign Office Prose – How to Write It” (25). Presumably, this fictitious book provides Foreign Office neophytes advice on style along the lines of Martens’s and Satow’s inventory of diplomatic examples. After falling under the influence of an American majorette, Polk-Mowbray bans the use of Latin phrases and injects surprising, up-to-date American words like “set-up” and “comeback” and “torch-singer” into his memos (24–5). Durrell’s undiplomatic anecdotes embody a modernist tendency to query the representational accuracy of language while mocking the constraints imposed by bureaucratic conventions. At the same time, Durrell refuses to endorse any novelty just because it is new, which would take him into the uncharted waters where anything goes. In another reminiscence about the good old days of diplomacy, Antrobus balances inaccuracy against ambiguity with hilarious results: “In the Old Days (said Antrobus) before Time Was – I think it was the year that Mrs Gaskell won the Nobel for England – diplomacy was a quiet and restful trade carried on in soothing inanity among a hundred shady legations and embassies all over the globe” (158). While insinuating that the Nobel might be some sort of sporting event, Antrobus errs in fact: Elizabeth Gaskell could never have won the Nobel Prize for Literature because she died thirty-six years before the first such prize was awarded. Notwithstanding Antrobus’s tendency to make free with fact, one has to admire his delicate playing on various registers of language. He calls diplomacy a “trade,” not a profession, which may be a show of modesty or an intentional denigration. Who is to say? Likewise the word “shady” has implications over which Antrobus chooses not to linger and which he does not spell out. Irony, by opening cracks between intention and insinuation, distances the diplomat from his own discourse. Dealing with personalities and situations can be discomfiting for diplomats who have to implement foreign policy. For this reason, detachment becomes a signature of the diplomat’s habit of mind, just as it becomes an indispensable resource for the modern novel. Wayne Booth calls this quality impassibilité, meaning “an unmoved or unimpassioned feeling toward the characters and events of one’s story” (81). Although Booth attributes impassiveness to authors, this trait is shared by narrators and characters in diplomatic novels. Impassiveness imposes a distance between author and character or character and world. In Romain Gary’s Europa (1972), Jean Danthès, the French ambassador to Italy, thinks of his profession in terms of enclosure and remoteness: “The immunity conferred by a diplomat’s position makes him live as if under a protective shell from which he can observe reality without

12  Allan Hepburn

being touched by it himself” (1).7 For the diplomat, observation and immunity are mutually reinforcing. Because he is immune to laws in the country where he resides, he freely indulges his penchant for observation without feeling implicated in what he sees; the more he observes, the more detached and immune he becomes. At the same time, the habit of impassiveness creates a pause between action and representation, in which doing anything may be compromised by doing the wrong thing, and not doing anything leads the diplomat to wonder if he is anything more than a representation. In Europa, Danthès rehearses every situation in his imagination before it happens in reality. He even wonders if his valet is slipping LSD into his coffee, the effects of which cause him to experience hallucinations and to doubt his sanity. The impossibility of his own representativeness nearly paralyses him: “I represent France – and that’s no small imposture” (98). He means that living up to so grand an image is doomed and that every attempt to be as grandiose as, say, Charles de Gaulle, who is mentioned frequently by name in Europa, has an element of the ridiculous about it. In response to his representational status, Danthès has mastered a style of evasion or “slithering out of things” (130) that he excuses as the extension of his diplomatic profession. Evasion becomes a signature of diplomatic representation itself. “J’observe!”: The Example of Norpois Observation is thus a form of detachment and evasion at the same time. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s portrait of the Marquis de Norpois, a consummate diplomat – rich, discreet, unfathomable, prone to authoritative pronouncements on culture and careers – is a touchstone for all subsequent fictional ambassadors in the twentieth century. Evasive in his utterances and his actions, Norpois seldom discloses his motives. In general, diplomats’ public utterances diverge from their private feelings, and necessarily so. A diplomat does not speak or act in propria persona. Norpois worsens this trait by speaking in clichés that he has picked up from the popular press. Dignified yet misguided, he spouts political opinions that invariably turn out to be wrong. Among his friends and acquaintances, Proust counted any number of attachés, consuls, or ambassadors. Proust himself studied in the diplomatic section of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, a training that included lectures on foreign policy and the history of diplomacy. According to Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust “never wanted to be a diplomat, yet he wrote the novel about diplomacy that those novelists who were diplomats – Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Gobineau, Giraudoux and

The Mission of Literature  13

Morand – never wrote” (Marcel Proust 109). Diplomatic representation, with its potential to decline into dissimulation and hypocrisy, haunts Remembrance of Things Past. In Within a Budding Grove, the Narrator says that he abandons the idea of a diplomatic career out of love for Gilberte: he does not want to be separated from her and therefore could never countenance a posting abroad. He later regrets this decision because of its whimsy. Although he does not become a diplomat, the Narrator adopts the habit of watching and waiting before acting, as if he were a member of the diplomatic corps. In Remembrance of Things Past, a guest at the Marquise de SainteEuverte’s musical soirée asks a society novelist what he is doing in such company. As he fits a monocle into the angle between cheek and eye, the novelist replies, “with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the ‘r’: ‘I am observing!’” (1:356). The novelist self-consciously looks upon the passing social scene – who said what to whom, which guest snubbed what other guest – with the goal of using such material later. Beyond finding grist for the mill, the observing novelist remorselessly, if not self-importantly, sets himself apart from society in order to sum up its deceits, its snobbery, its complicities, and its comedy. Proust habitually notes how characters speak, as when the society novelist rolls his “r” meaningfully or Françoise the cook says espress instead of express. The novelist observes in much the same way that fictional narrators do – with detachment bordering on indifference. Third-person narrators typically do not align themselves with any particular character or petit clan. This bid for objectivity might be understood as a form of narrative tact. At the same time, the Narrator in Remembrance of Things Past, not wishing to infringe on good manners or decency, does not demean characters or take against them. Remaining impassible, he lets foibles speak for themselves. To assail a character’s mispronunciations too vehemently or to insult someone’s comportment too prejudicially opens a breach in the credibility of the impartial narrator, especially in the diplomatic novel where appearances must be kept up and protocols abided by. The narrator keeps his distance, the better to evaluate the moral implications of what he observes. In this regard, the narrator, and perhaps the novelist as well, carries out his professional obligations like a diplomat. Although truthfulness, precision, and impartiality may be diplomatic traits, novels about diplomacy cast a sanguine eye upon such attributes. In Remembrance of Things Past, the Narrator enjoins Norpois to commend him to Mme Swann, even though he does not know her. A look crosses Norpois’s face. From this fleeting expression of “hesitation and displeasure,” the Narrator conjectures that Norpois will never discharge this request, which “would have given him so little trouble and

14  Allan Hepburn

me so much joy” (1:516). Norpois might act from discretion, or his denial might betoken a streak of meanness or cruelty. The Narrator gives an impressionistic and not, perhaps, entirely accurate summary of why Norpois would refuse so easy a task: M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more easy than to be commended to Mme. Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and were consequently, no doubt, of great difficulty, thought that the desire, apparently normal, which I had expressed must cloak some different thought, some suspect intention, some pre-existent fault, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme. Swann, no one hitherto had been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I understood that this office was one which he would never discharge, that he might see Mme. Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. (1:517)

The Narrator’s marvellously speculative explanation is lopsided. Temporarily thwarted in his ambitions, he does not see the situation with diplomatic subtlety, as does Norpois. Despite probing Norpois’s motives, the Narrator cannot be sure that his surmises are correct. The workings of the diplomat’s mind remain ultimately inscrutable. Nevertheless, the passage reveals a diplomatic technique of extrapolating information from a fleeting look. It is possible that Norpois does not want to be a messenger for the Narrator; not knowing the Narrator sufficiently, Norpois does not feel obliged to represent his wishes, let alone intervene with Mme Swann on his behalf. For all Norpois knows, the Narrator may be a vainglorious crackpot, albeit a youthful one with literary ambitions. The diplomat may exercise restraint in making social connections for fear of sullying his own reputation. Moreover, there is no need for Norpois to exert himself on behalf of the Narrator when there is no possibility of a return favour. Such gratuitous exercises in generosity would yield nothing for a diplomat as seasoned and skilful as Norpois. While remaining truthful, even precise, by not volunteering to convey the Narrator’s compliments to Mme Swann, Norpois nevertheless allows himself to obstruct social connections. In this case, the diplomat is an obstacle to, rather than a conduit for, communication. He effectively slows down the Narrator’s trajectory through society by blocking this entrée. Novels create effects of acceleration, deceleration, deferral, and digression as manipulations of temporality. Such effects are diplomatic as well. The diplomat procrastinates; he appears to disclose information

The Mission of Literature  15

when, in fact, he does not. If he does not always lie, he may commit acts of omission or leave clues that lead to false surmises. By doing so, he retards the unfolding of narrative as transferral of information. In Remembrance of Things Past, the Narrator, despite his keen observations and his inveterate party-going, is the last to know that Norpois has a long-standing amorous liaison with Mme Villeparisis, to name just one example of how belated disclosure requires a reinterpretation of everything that has gone before, and therefore a realignment of time itself. One of the most prominent features of the diplomatic novel is its tendency to distort time – to speed up or slow down, to double back or to omit segments of time – as an effect of modernity. Time and Speed There is a long and revered tradition of diplomats reflecting on their careers in published memoirs. In his posthumous Memoirs d’outre-tombe (1849–50), Chateaubriand recalls being appointed first secretary to the embassy in Rome and his differences of opinion with the statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, among countless other events in a long life. By writing from beyond the grave, as the title of his memoirs advertises, Chateaubriand creates a fold in time. By speaking out of time, he can redress mistakes while deflecting anyone who contradicts what he states. The diplomatic memoir, as a complement to diplomatic fiction, registers time as having been lived through before being lived over again at a later date because the diplomat, champion of the second guess, doubts his own capacity to seize all meanings as an event unfolds. In his detachment or in his desire to avoid an incident, the diplomat often misses the importance of events as they are happening. The manipulation of temporality is inherent in memoir-writing, but it takes on a particular acuteness in diplomatic memoirs, in which secret-keepers break the silence that their profession imposes. Numerous British and French diplomats have reminisced at length about their careers: Sir Rennell Rodd in Social and Diplomatic Memories (1922–3), André François-Poncet in Souvenirs d’une ambassade à Berlin (1946), Charles de Chambrun in Traditions et souvenirs (1952), and Anthony Eden in Full Circle (1960) and Facing the Dictators (1962), to name just a handful of works. Diplomatic memoirs promise privileged, behind-the-scenes access to decisive moments in history. By writing his memoirs, the diplomat, as a witness to history, can aggrandize his own role in the shaping of events, even if that role is less than glorious. As a genre, memoirs allow for elasticity in temporal structures and latitude in content. A common structuring element of the diplomatic

16  Allan Hepburn

memoir is the anecdote – a temporal unit that can be extracted from the ordinary run of events, rehearsed, refined, and trotted out at a moment’s notice to illustrate a point. Charles de Chambrun begins L’Esprit de la diplomatie (1945) with anecdotes about meeting the pope and conversing with notable diplomats; he then provides extracts of historical documents that pertain to diplomacy, from Cardinal Richelieu to Jusserand. In this case, the memoir yields to a textbook of examples illustrating the spirit of diplomacy across time. The diplomat allows his predecessors to speak on his behalf, as an evasion of speaking for himself. Nonetheless, by inserting himself among a roster of notable predecessors, he makes himself timeless. Literary diplomats often adopt a posture of old-fangledness or archaism as a way of clinging to the past and as a way of upholding values that are in danger of being left behind by the modern world. The diplomat adopts old-fashioned attire, perhaps a monocle or a frock-coat, to signal his displeasure with the present and his respect for the past. Norpois is a “trifle ‘out-of-date,’” even though his ideas are said to be “extremely modern” (Remembrance 1:471). A bit wistfully, as if he cannot credit such a motto, Charles de Chambrun, French ambassador to Turkey and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, quotes a maxim that he heard from Jules Cambon: “Il faut vivre avec son temps” (Traditions et souvenirs 5). If one has to be reminded to live with the times, one is probably out of sympathy with the contemporary moment to some significant degree. In novels about diplomacy, as against diplomatic memoirs, the tempo of narrative action fluctuates between adagio and moderato, without ever quickening to presto. Haste, after all, is not a diplomatic virtue. When Harold Nicolson started to tell Marcel Proust about the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, in an anecdote that Caroline Krzakowski recounts in her essay in this volume, Proust begged him to slow down, to recount all the details, not to miss a single aspect of protocol or to neglect any encounter that might illuminate the fullness of narration that is characteristic of diplomacy. Seen in this light, Remembrance of Things Past is the diplomatic novel par excellence insofar as it takes its time to unfold the inner meaning and consequences of every situation. Despite this commitment to slowness, movement is characteristic of modernity. As Enda Duffy claims, speed is closely aligned with modernity: “speed thrills are symptomatic of a revolution in the modernist citizen’s concept of space and place” (264–5). In the modern world, cars and trains facilitate ceaseless travel even as they hold forth the promise of defeating time. Characters whir from Venice to Paris, Istanbul to London, Lisbon to St Petersburg. Paradoxically, this movement happens in two temporalities: the time of the event (so many miles per hour), and

The Mission of Literature  17

the diplomatic time of narrating the event (so many details, detours, divagations, retractions, hesitations, disclosures, and periphrases). In novels, narrators may look upon the events that they recount from some unmarked future, a vantage point from which patterns and meanings, not apparent to those locked into the present, take shape. In novels that presume a diplomatic dimension, the distance between narrator and events does not inevitably produce irony. Instead, it can produce immobility, as if the mission of the diplomatic novel were to bring flux to a standstill and to stave off further complications. The diplomat longs to fix crises in a single moment in order to analyse all the variables that contribute to it. In this regard, diplomacy is anti-modern, or at least it registers doubt about the endorsement of speed that is characteristic of modernity. In Romain Gary’s Europa, chapters go by but time scarcely advances. The plot is almost static. In fact, Danthès has “the impression of living through certain events twice, sometimes in uncanny repetition, sometimes by a sort of anticipation to which the incident itself, when it really happened, conformed with disconcerting accuracy” (7). He thinks about the suspension of time, often written with an upper-case “T,” while watching dusk overtake his garden: “Danthès waited for Time to start the hands of the clock moving again, to set the scattered seconds off once more in their antlike ordered columns. This dusk, multiplied into ceaselessly fading immobility, held the garden as in a net of dream where the captive moments struggled like butterflies. Time had lost its memory” (168–9). Temporal suspension occurs at a formal level, for this passage recalls the opening of the novel, with Danthès waiting for dawn in his garden and thinking about Time as a gent with a pocket-watch counting seconds as if they were a “nibbling army of ants” (1). Other passages in the novel are repeated verbatim (cf. 168, 179–80). Danthès, racked by sleeplessness and personal cares, hopes time will lose both movement and memory. The suspension of time, however, is wishful thinking. Time has an organic life of its own, captured in the metaphors of butterflies and ants, which defies immobility and keeps clocks ticking along without halt. Diplomacy thus unfolds in a double temporality. The diplomat looks to the future with the expectation of crisis while postponing the inevitability of that crisis as long as possible, through procrastination, digressions, and evasions. The crisis in Europa is the future of Europe itself: what has become of its civilization and how will the European Union, from the perspective of the early 1970s, maintain national traditions within a unified economic community? Danthès wants European culture to be continuous with itself, as a tradition, yet he admits, with

18  Allan Hepburn

regret, that the ideal of a “Europe of the mind that knew no frontiers” (197) is regularly defeated by war, revolution, or something as mundane as bourgeois indifference and vulgarity. Gary directs his irony, which is not quite the same as Danthès’s, at the European failure to take inspiration from its own cultural successes. With some bitterness, the narrator reflects that Europe is “where war did infinitely more for literature than literature did against war” (74). As he thinks over the meaning of European civilization, Danthès – whose name echoes Dante’s, Danton’s, and d’Anthès’s, the French aristocrat who fatally wounded Pushkin in a duel (247) – stretches time and ties it into knots. Asynchrony and archaism enact immobility as rhetorical and narrative devices. In Europa, a character called Malwena von Leyden, often abridged to Ma, believes in reincarnation; she is reborn several times in different European locations and keeps encountering the same people, or so she claims. She has a memory so sharp that she “could remember all the previous lives she’d lived under the same physical appearance but under various different names” (23). A con artist who sells her services as a “consultant on the future” (13), she borrows the name Malwena von Leyden from Casanova’s memoirs. By appealing to historical precedents and faking aristocratic antecedents, she makes herself asynchronous with her own epoch. Living moments twice over may seem to offer the chance to correct errors of the past, or to slow down time so that its full meaning might be apprehended as it passes. But the stasis of diplomatic time – the wasted time of committee meetings, the stupefaction induced by endless public ceremonies, the waiting for an opportunity that is almost certainly destined to be missed – is more often than not about emptiness. Nothing changes; nothing improves. Events may occur but they appear to be so much brouhaha or tempests in teapots within the panoramic perspective of diplomatic time, which is to say a zone of near immobility. Time may be of the essence if one wishes to avoid a diplomatic blunder. Timelessness, if it could be achieved, would foreclose the possibility of any blunder ever happening again. The preoccupation with time, as it is construed in diplomatic novels, speaks to the troubling nature of modern speed, in which everything happens so quickly that it seems not to have happened at all. Channel Crossings: Organization of Essays The essays in this collection might have been arranged in any number of ways. Chapters follow a rough chronological order. Each focuses on a single author or a pair of authors, with the exception of Isabelle

The Mission of Literature  19

Daunais’s survey of novels about movement. As far as possible, chapters alternate between British and French topics to restore what has been lost to view in most modernist studies, namely that writers on both sides of the Channel thought along similar lines when it came to representing temporality, the end of imperialism, and the changing role of Europe in the world. There is intentional overlap among sections to sustain continuity across the volume. The first and last essays – Claire Davison’s and Maria DiBattista’s – explicitly address comic patterns inherent in diplomatic representation, though the topic of comedy arises in other chapters as well. The first section of this collection, “Diplomatic Experience,” acknowledges that diplomats have a penchant for writing up their missions in fictional or autobiographical form. This section is integrated by concerns about the benefits of experience and private versus public writing. As Claire Davison points out in the opening essay, Gerhardi, known as the English Chekhov, casts his experiences as a military attaché in Russia during the revolutionary period as a burlesque – a mixture of comic opera, vaudeville, joke, and pantomime – in Futility and The Polyglots. These novels project a European novel of diplomacy that ranges across time and events, although always under the guise of theatricality. This chapter, drawing upon the Gerhardi archives located at the University of Cambridge, anticipates the section on “Documents,” which is devoted to archival research and findings. Not unlike Gerhardi, Albert Cohen, who worked as a senior civil servant at the League of Nations, observes the peculiarities of diplomatic proceedings in his novels Nailcruncher (1938) and Her Lover (1968). Cohen, whose comic novels are still widely read in France, is virtually unknown to anglophone readers, despite translations of his works being available. As Maxime Decout argues, bureaucrats in Cohen’s novels deflect crises, action, or even the most insignificant decision by resorting to moribund language. For his conception of diplomacy, Cohen draws substantially upon Proust’s portrait of Norpois, while modifying and updating it. As Decout observes, civil servants and diplomats accumulate their little stores of cultural capital in order to rise, however minutely, in the echelons of bureaucracy. International diplomacy turns out to be an exercise in futility rather than an experience from which lessons can be learned. Harold Nicolson was born into a distinguished diplomatic family and wrote several significant books about diplomacy and diplomats, including a book about the Congress of Vienna (1936) and a biography of his father entitled Portrait of a Diplomatist: Being the Life of Sir Arthur Nicolson, First Lord Carnock, and a Study of the Origins of the Great War

20  Allan Hepburn

(1930). Although Nicolson’s diplomatic career was interrupted by an incident in Tehran in the late 1920s, this interruption did not prevent him from putting his experience to work in Peacemaking 1919 (1933), a montage of history and personal impressions about the peace conference, and a novel, Public Faces (1932), which satirizes diplomatic tussles between Britain and Iran. Caroline Krzakowski correlates Nicolson’s fictional and non-fictional writing to point up its allegiance with modernist life-writing. Subsequent chapters elaborate on the fictional transformation of personal experience, whether Nancy Mitford’s, Ian Fleming’s, or Lawrence Durrell’s. The second section of this collection, “Novels and Diplomacy,” begins with Isabelle Daunais’s overview of interwar novelistic practice in France. Returning to a relatively unknown essay by Albert Thibaudet, Daunais remarks that various interwar novelists in France constitute a movement, very loosely defined by its commitment to a diplomatic dispatch style – le style de la valise. This movement is worldly, mobile, occasionally breezy in its restless shifting from place to place. Its practitioners are novelists such as Paul Claudel, Valery Larbaud, Paul Morand, and Luc Durtain. Daunais argues that the diplomatic dispatch style, now largely forgotten by literary scholars, constitutes a vital novelistic tradition informed by both speed and style. The representation of diplomacy is taken up in two case studies of novelists: Joseph Conrad and André Gide. In such novels as Heart of Darkness (1899), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1913), as Stephen Ross demonstrates, Conrad sorts through the impasses of diplomacy with recourse to French Revolutionary history. Whereas Conrad favours detachment as a mode of avoiding the more dire aspects of Realpolitik, André Gide throws himself into controversies as a means of surprising himself in the act of personal transformation. For Gide, personal experience is the source of authenticity. In his politically charged books, especially Travels in the Congo (1927) and Back from the USSR (1936), Gide wags his finger at colonial exploitation and Soviet hypocrisy. Revisiting Gide’s The Vatican Cellars (1914), with its speculations on the morality of the acte gratuit, Michel Biron diagnoses the strain of frivolity – or inconsequence – that abides in much diplomatic fiction. “Documents,” the third section, centres on archival sources. By virtue of their profession, diplomats write, send, receive, sift, classify, and sort documents. François Proulx provides a detailed explication of Marcel Proust’s correspondence with Antoine Bibesco, a Romanian prince and career diplomat, as well as his letters to the playwright René Peter. These letters, previously unpublished, are located at the University

The Mission of Literature  21

of Illinois, which owns the largest archive of Proust materials outside France. Through various circumlocutions, Proust avows and disavows queer desire in what one might call a diplomatic tactic of hedging his meaning. In my essay on Nancy Mitford’s novels and non-fiction, I draw upon Mitford’s unpublished letters to Raymond Mortimer, located in the archives at Princeton University, to indicate the degree to which she was invested in Franco-British diplomacy, not only through constant receptions and dinners at the British Embassy, but also through her intimate knowledge of manoeuvring by politicians in the Fourth Republic. Like Conrad and Nicolson, Mitford was fully versed in French history, French diplomacy, and French literature; her postwar novels represent the necessity of cross-Channel collaboration, which begins in personal relations and expands to international proportions. The fourth and final section of this book, “Foreign Affairs,” looks outward from France and Britain to China, Russia, and Yugoslavia. This section loops back in spirit to Claire Davison’s essay about Gerhardi’s sojourn in Russia and Michel Biron’s essay about Gide’s trips to the Congo and the USSR. Taking the Franco-British aspect of diplomacy to heart, Robert L. Caserio compares André Malraux’s The Fate of Man with Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul. Whereas Malraux represents violent action as an alternative to negotiation, Greene returns to Cervantes’ imagining of the novel, generically speaking, as an unveiling of the comic potential in human action. At the heart of this essay, however, is the problem of representation itself, whether diplomatic or novelistic. As Maxime Prévost details in his chapter in this volume, civil service credentials mask espionage activities; while pretending to be nothing more than functionaries, spies operate outside the bounds of legality and participate in unbelievable escapades, often involving physical peril, that convert them into symbolic heroes of the state. “One calls an Ambassador an honorable spy,” writes François de Callières in his 1716 treatise, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (qtd. in Satow 93). The ambassador does graciously what a spy does clandestinely, but their goals remain the same. Working within a methodology that combines biography with sociocritique, the latter being a highly developed branch of literary criticism among francophone scholars, Prévost argues that Ian Fleming creates an idealized mythographic character in James Bond; by contrast, John le Carré, whose diplomatic posting in Bonn in the 1950s masked espionage activities, expresses scepticism about the efficacy of action as a means to resolve diplomatic crises. As Prévost’s essay demonstrates, the thriller, as a literary genre, flips between diplomacy and espionage as two sides of the same coin. In

22  Allan Hepburn

popular literature, diplomacy functions not just as a series of polite conversations at the negotiating table, but also as a behind-the-scenes activity in which pressure is induced by violent or unseemly measures. While casting a glance back to the experiential model put forward in the first section of the volume, Maria DiBattista’s essay on Lawrence Durrell’s fiction posits that diplomacy usually takes place under the lodestar of comedy. In The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell imagines the tragic consequences of diplomacy in the character Pombal, a French diplomat who commits suicide. That seriousness, however, is mocked by the comic stories in Durrell’s Antrobus cycle – three collections of anecdotes about diplomacy called Esprit de Corps (1956), Stiff Upper Lip (1958), and Sauve Qui Peut (1966) that were initially published separately, then gathered together in Antrobus Complete (1985). These anecdotes rely on frantic desperation as the dominant mode of diplomacy. As DiBattista notes, the sauve qui peut motif in Durrell’s narratives suggests that everyone, diplomats included, looks after his own interests before thinking of the larger consequences of any given action. In this regard, the novel about diplomacy, far from upholding the most dignified aspects of “la Carrière,” approaches the generic frontiers of farce. As a métier, diplomacy depends on tact, verbal skill, and timely intervention. Yet diplomacy has a certain degree of haphazardness about it. Decisions about how to act depend on what a diplomat knows when, and what must be done before he is in possession of all the facts. Bad information can lead to bad decisions. By the same token, correct information, however it is gained, need not be disclosed if it causes a strategic weakness on one side or lends a strategic advantage to another side during negotiations. As the eleven essays in this volume demonstrate, the mission of literature, as a cultural foray that runs parallel to diplomacy, is not always straightforward. In diplomacy as in culture, as Polonius might say, sometimes misdirection is the best method to find direction out. NOTES 1 Diplomatic ranks vary from country to country. In bilateral diplomacy, an embassy is headed by an ambassador as the representative of the head of state. There may be only one ambassador at a time in any given country, but there may be several consuls overseeing consulates and consular business. First, second, and third secretaries form a hierarchy beneath the ambassador and belong to the diplomatic corps, whereas attachés are hired for specific purposes – culture, military, press – and do not have an official

The Mission of Literature  23

2

3

4

5

6

7

rank. A special envoy fulfils ad hoc missions mandated by the head of state or governing body such as the United Nations. Throughout this collection, diplomacy encompasses all aspects of political and cultural endeavour without regard for rank. That being said, different authors have occupied widely divergent positions from which they view the work of diplomacy. Gerhardi was a military attaché; Durrell, a press attaché. Sometimes writers held different posts over their career. Paul Claudel, for instance, rose through the ranks from consul to ambassador. In his memoirs, published in Spanish as Confieso que he vivido (1973) and translated into English as Pablo Neruda: Memoirs (1977), Neruda recounts his consular postings as distinctly secondary to his literary friendships. JeanMarc Delaunay offers a comprehensive list of South American writerdiplomats (298–310). Greg Barnhisel discusses the US State Department program to distribute books representing American values and ideas as “weapons in the war of ideas” in the postwar period (95–115). American books were sent abroad as a concerted form of propaganda – or cultural diplomacy – whereas French and British novels published between 1900 and 1960 tend to critique the institutional forms of diplomacy as ineffective, hazy, and jargon-ridden. As a parallel example to the US, Canada, as part of the British Empire, did not have control of its Department of External Affairs until the 1930s, after the Statute of Westminster granted greater autonomy to the Dominions in 1931. I use masculine pronouns because all nineteenth-century and most twentiethcentury diplomats until mid-century were male. In France, the first competitive exam that accepted female candidates for recruitment into the diplomatic corps took place in 1929; after one failed attempt, Suzanne Borel passed the exam in 1930 and faced considerable hurdles to her career thereafter. In other jurisdictions, women slowly entered the diplomatic corps after the Second World War. Trailblazers include Cicely Mayhew and Anne Warburton in Britain, Margaret Meagher in Canada, and Eugenie Anderson in the US. In Barry Unsworth’s novel Pascali’s Island (1980), a spy writes reports about the comings and goings of characters on a Mediterranean island. After sending reports to unnamed and invisible authorities in the Ottoman Empire, he never knows if they are read or not, which leads him to wonder, in a metafictional fashion, how diplomatic dispatches diverge from reality. My translation: “On écrira donc clairement et nettement, sans ornements inutiles, plutôt en style coupé, sans affecter toutefois d’éviter le style périodique.” Barbara Bray’s translation needs modification. Gary refers explicitly to a bell jar, not a “protective shell”: “Le métier de diplomate, par le privilège d’immunité qu’il confère, fait vivre en marge, sous une cloche de verre, et permet d’observer sans être touché” (18).

1  Making a Song and Dance of It: Staging Diplomacy in William Gerhardi’s Early Novels claire davison

A staircase mural by Anglo-Spanish artist Juan Cruz features among the art works commissioned for the new British Embassy in Moscow, which officially opened in 2000 (Dorment). Composed of an intricate montage of stage directions drawn from three plays by Anton Chekhov, the mural is entitled, not surprisingly, “Stage Directions.”1 Beyond paying tribute to Chekhov’s transnational appeal, the work reflects on the literal and metaphorical significance of the border space of an embassy stairwell; it enacts the go-between zone of the diplomat and the deterritorializing passagework of the stage. It encapsulates one of the oldest metaphors of diplomacy: a theatrical, theatricalized “mi-lieu” with a complex set of social, linguistic, stylistic, and formal codes, where the dramas of international alliances and rivalries are acted out and resolved. Coincidentally, the British Embassy in Russia overlaps with Chekhov’s tragicomedies in two early novels by William Gerhardi: Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925).2 Both novels are set against the tumultuous years of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. In both, the main actor-observer – named Andrei Andreiech in Futility and George Hamlet Diabologh in The Polyglots – is a hapless, Chekhovian military envoy and diplomatic attaché. “The ‘I’ of this book is not me,” Gerhardi protests in the epigraph to Futility, but the first-person protagonist in both novels is a barely masked self-portrait.3 Between 1917 and 1921, Gerhardi, later hailed as “the English Chekhov,” worked in Russia as a commissioned officer. He was sent on two separate missions, the first from January 1917 until April 1918, and the second from June 1918 until May 1920. In his memoirs, he claims to have kept company “with the Diplomatists” during these years.4 An Englishman born and educated in St Petersburg, he was ideally suited – linguistically and culturally – for the role of intermediary. As a member of the Allied Military Forces, he was, perhaps, a little less ideal. By his

28  Claire Davison

own admission, he was “the greatest fake of a soldier alive” (Memoirs 134). He was as sceptical of the Allies’ intentions and manoeuvrings as he was irritated by war work that obstructed his literary aspirations. After having experimented with comic libretti and tales of adventure, he tried his hand at composing a comedy for the stage. He then hit on the idea of combining theatrical conventions with prose in the same book: Futility was written during his months in Siberia while he was attached to the Allied Intervention on the side of the Whites. The novel draws on his eyewitness experience of the February and November Revolutions and the beginning of the Allies’ expedition east.5 The Polyglots spans the full two years of the expedition, which he presents as a military and diplomatic debacle, with much to-ing and fro-ing between London, St Petersburg, and Vladivostok. Being a member of the diplomatic corps and a commissioned army officer, Gerhardi qualifies as a writer-diplomat in the longstanding Anglo-French tradition, as well as an offizer-pizatel’ in the Russian tradition, with Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov as his illustrious forebears (De Meaux 324–5). Although he had only a short-lived career as an actual diplomat, Gerhardi remained a cultural diplomat throughout his life. His literary apprenticeship began with juvenile skits on Russian literature and Russian cultural themes in English, and vice versa. In nearly all his professional undertakings, he mixed literary and formal traditions to represent, translate, and mediate between the two cultures. Anton Chekhov (1923), for instance, was the first literary monograph on the author in the English language. He called his experiment in cultural history, The Romanovs (1940), a “biography” or a “diplomatists’ history” of a dynasty.6 An adamant pacifist and internationalist, Gerhardi was especially committed to Anglo-Russian affairs in times of international crisis. In 1940, he offered his services to the BBC, the British Council, the Ministry of Information, and the War Office as a linguistic and cultural diplomat of sorts. Until the 1970s, many of his Cold War radio broadcasts promoted broader Western perspectives on Russian culture and history and a common trans-European cultural heritage. In his own words, he was “a Foreign Secretary manqué.”7 Gerhardi’s experience of diplomacy gains significance within the contexts of international history and literary historiography; it suggests interconnections between the poetics and literary representations of diplomatic affairs, as well as experimental modernist responses to war, internationalism, and technological change. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, statesmen, diplomats, and generals gathered to draw up a new world map with ennobling schemes for international cooperation in mind. Gerhardi’s novels, however, unveil what was going on

Making a Song and Dance of It  29

in the wings of international history and behind the scenes of public diplomacy: national cavalcades travelled back and forth across Asia on ill-defined warmongering and rescue missions while conveniently protecting their own ideological, economic, and imperial interests. These diplomatic-military assignments coincide with a pivotal moment in the historiography of diplomacy. In the words of Harold Nicolson, “The implication is that, somewhere about the year 1918, Diplomacy saw a great white light, was converted, found salvation and thereafter and thence forward became an entirely different woman” (Diplomacy 56–7).8 Salvation entailed forsaking the intimacies of “boudoir diplomacy” for “Diplomacy by conference,” supposedly performed in full view of the public and the press (61–3). How ambassadors, envoys, and embassies functioned at this turning point between 1917 and 1922,9 and how they were represented at this specific crisis of history and historiography, are paramount questions for Gerhardi. If the function of diplomacy is to represent states, and if diplomats allegorically embody the nation, how can they represent anything when states collapse? The question is all the more intriguing when the “diplomatic egg-dances”10 of an international crisis were being observed and scripted by Gerhardi, an aspiring writer and would-be composer keen to explore new musico-literary genres. By experimenting in this convergence of diplomatic and aesthetic crises, I hope to make a case for Gerhardi’s lasting contribution to a specific mode of the novel dating back at least to the nineteenth century: the ­European novel of diplomacy. Such novels combine political, rhetorical, and literary strategies in the crafting of plot. They may include a heightened sense of theatricality, musical accompaniment, or choreography, as well as deft scenic arrangements that shift angles of spectatorship. Historical, military, and political figures sometimes play cameo roles in these novels of diplomacy. Offstage action typically contrasts with onstage strategy-analysis. Alliances and allegiances shuffle and reshuffle constantly. Assessed from these angles, Gerhardi’s novels prove ideally suited to probe three emblematic turning points in the second decade of the twentieth century, when boudoir diplomacy was being upstaged, foreign policy unmasked, and the conventions and metaphors of the nineteenth-century nation state and the n ­ ineteenth-century novel were running amok. Commedia delle Arte Diplomatiche In letters, internal memos, and memoirs, Gerhardi regularly represents statecraft in terms of stagecraft. In his memoirs, becoming a diplomat happens with a theatrical flourish:

30  Claire Davison I remember my unbounded exhilaration when Henry Bruce, First Secretary and Head of Chancery, man of unparalleled silken dalliance, handed me my diplomatic card, which gracious act – O the sweet vanity of one-and-twenty! – filled me with quite unreasonable pride ... Now I was a Member of the Diplomatic Corps. (Memoirs 137)

The protagonist of Futility recalls an equally theatrical but somewhat less exalted début: I still remember very vividly the morning following on my arrival in Petrograd, when I had to meet the Admiral for the first time at the British Embassy. I ascended the broad staircase with its worn red carpet to the Chancery. Very perfect young men, very perfectly dressed, were conversing in very perfect intonations about love among monkeys. It struck me as delightfully human for diplomatists. (63)

In tone and style, Gerhardi’s memoirs and fiction rely on a characteristic balancing act between noble restraint and guffaws. Scribbling down notes taken in situ, Gerhardi as military envoy-cum-diplomatic attaché never loses sight of the histrionic nature of events, whether he is observing revolution from the balcony of the British Embassy, struggling to dress the part of the British attaché when supplies fail, or commenting with deadpan irony, if not out-and-out cynicism, on the constant changes of alliances. He may be recording history in the making, but it is history with a decidedly lower case “h.” It is personal history, not panoramic history. As early as 31 October 1917, Gerhardi compared fast-moving political events to the logic and devices of farce, pantomime, circus, and music hall. The scene, he told his parents in a letter written on that day, could be taken from a Gilbert and Sullivan scenario.11 The analogy of theatrical performance appears throughout his letters, journalism, biography, and fiction. In The Polyglots, Allied intervention provides [o]ne of the really comic sideshows of after-armistice confabulation. It was the poor old sentimental military mind, confronted with the task of saving civilisation, forced to draw upon the intellect, and finding that in truth it had no such reserves to draw upon, plunging gallantly into a Russian sea of incoherence ... There was really nothing to it but to enjoy the spectacle. (42)

Gerhardi’s metaphors may have inflected factual reporting, or they may have already been circulating in military and diplomatic circles.

Making a Song and Dance of It  31

Whichever the case, they recur in the first historical account of the Allied Expedition, aptly nicknamed the “Britmis” campaign, written by one of Gerhardi’s contemporaries and a fellow military officer on the mission east: Volumes can and will be written of the various phases of this gigantic struggle, which, for all its tragedy and suffering, contains much that is comic and futile. So much inefficiency, senseless waste, spineless leadership, bigotry, cowardice, and treachery can seldom have been witnessed anywhere in recent years. Only the rarer cases of heroism, the appalling tragedy of the refugees, and the widespread misery caused by an upheaval on such a scale, can rescue the period of the Allied Intervention in Russia from the realm of comic opera. (Hodges 23)12

The tragicomic grandiloquence and sophistry of Western postwar diplomacy prove ideally suited to Gerhardi’s preferred vein of fiction: near-operatic tragicomedy migrates from the lofty, through the sentimental and poignant, to end up in the grotesque. Gerhardi’s ability to shift registers so readily explains, in part, his being labelled a Chekhovian writer. This characteristic trait of shifting registers also provides a bridge between state-centric diplomacy and cultural diplomacy. Although diplomacy proper in Gerhardi’s works veers from slapstick to state-decreed fecklessness, the mission of the cultural diplomat – namely, fostering mutual understanding across borders through aesthetic means – fares considerably better. So too does a generous sense of empathy, or compassion, or the gently indulgent humour that cultural diplomacy favours. Futility and The Polyglots are masterpieces of the genre, as Edith Wharton observed in 1922 in a preface to Futility: “the most striking quality of Mr Gerhardi’s book ... is to have focused on two so utterly alien races to whom he belongs almost equally, by birth and by bringing-up – the English and the Russian – to sympathize with both, and to depict them for us as they see each other with the play of their mutual reactions illuminating and animating them all.”13 The cultural diplomat’s advantage over the state diplomat, in other words, is precisely the sense of unbelonging or double belonging, which dismantles the self-interested certitudes and principles of national singularity. Gerhardi brings off the feat of bridging cultures by writing English novels in which resonances of Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and P.G. Wodehouse combine with the dynamics, stock-types, and plots of the great classics of Russian literature. He alludes to any number of Russian works and techniques: the

32  Claire Davison

understated stagecraft in Chekhov’s four major plays; the internationalcrisis versus the family-conflict diptychs in Tolstoy’s War and Peace; flashes of sordid eyewitness realism reminiscent of Tolstoy’s Tales of Sebastopol; Dostoevsky’s social theatricality and character-drawing; the sweeping shifts and vast spatial panoramas of Gogol, such as the scene of the Troika traversing the Russian Steppe in Dead Souls; the indolence of Goncharov’s Oblomov; and a host of other novels. Were this merely a case of trans-European intertextuality, the truly diplomatic stamp of Gerhardi’s poetics might appear tenuous – long before the rise of the novel, the circulation of texts across frontiers had been ensuring a constant cross-pollination of literary trends and genres reflecting supposedly nationally inflected poetics. While these demonstrate the novel’s ability to welcome and assimilate foreign cultural imports, or to stage ongoing dialogues between cultures – Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes being perhaps the finest example, in which foreign envoys observe the bizarreries of cultural codes at home and abroad – the poetics of diplomacy are founded on the dialectical interplay of multidimensional relations. Narrative positioning and point of view are essential to ensure the aesthetic success and the dialectical tensions of this transcultural medley. Whereas classic studies of foreign national literary traditions usually approach them from outside, as if they were a set of quaint, exotic artefacts, Gerhardi locates his readers very comfortably inside the Russian tradition. His underlying poetics, in other words, rely on multiple processes of familiarization, rather than the classic de-familiarizing Russian Formalist principle of making strange. This method brings readers as close as possible to watching and culturally understanding Russian literature, however familiar or unfamiliar it may be. A few examples will show how this works in practice. In Futility, the absurd inefficiencies of boudoir diplomacy are played out as a Chekhovian bedroom farce set during the February and October Revolutions and Allied Intervention. The setting never strays from the Bursanov family living room, even when ceremonies of sociability are transferred to the carriages of a train chugging across Siberia. The cast, lifted from a medley of Chekhov plays, includes a superfluous governess, devoted yet incompetent bursars, affable non-entities and hangers-on, would-be reformers, diplomats, philosophers, and three aptly named sisters and their entirely inappropriate plans for marriage and getting to Moscow. Chekhovian methods of compression, juxtaposition, and defamiliarization rescale the dramatic, brutally destructive effects of revolutionary turmoil, the vast geographical scale of military intervention, and the irresponsibility of diplomatic deadlock.

Making a Song and Dance of It  33

The sometimes unlikely combination of themes and perspectives bears out a classic Marxist epigram, itself coined when Marx reviewed the sorry depletion of fervour in the French Revolutionary era: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (Eighteenth Brumaire 15). Likewise in Futility, replaying the brutal contingences of revolutionary tragedy turns them into farce: “I found the household in a state of wild excitement. However, the event had no connexion with the Revolution. In fact, with continual domestic revolutions in their own home, the much ado about the political revolution appeared, particularly to the three sisters, a foolish affectation” (75). In one key scene in Futility, the narrator Andrei Andreiech contrives a “napoleonic” scheme, complete with charts, diagrams, and financial accounts, to settle the family’s growing feuds, economic wrangling, and love triangles. Playing the family diplomat, disinterested bystander, self-appointed envoy, emissary, matchmaker, and deus ex machina, he proposes a peace settlement. It is, he earnestly explains, his “first experience of intervention” (48). Predictably the family unites against him and tears apart his logic and his diagrams. After a melodramatic rant, Andrei Andreiech makes a grand exit, only to find that Professor Metchnikoff – the horse supposed to bear him away in dignified retreat – can only shuffle backwards. Forgetting their earlier wrangling, the family laughs gleefully from a balcony at these antics. Worthy of the finest pantomime tradition or the overture to an opera, every detail of the scene resonates within an allegory of the wider scheme of Allied Intervention, which promotes the Bolshevik cause by opposing it. “Why, it was enough to make a cat laugh!” Gerhardi writes in Memoirs: “Circuses of variegated foreign troops invading at the coast, in the inane belief of bolstering up the Russian national cause, which we succeeded only in consolidating” (177). How far Gerhardi’s reasoning stands up to protracted historical assessment is of course another matter (Smele 107–24). The narrative organization of Futility favours a Tolstoyan juxtaposition of macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds, in this case international politics versus domestic feuds.14 The Polyglots, however, reveals a messier knot of international, domestic, theatrical, and musical interrelations, all of which rework the rituals of court life alongside the deft choreographies and subtle feints of statecraft. In its various configurations, Tristan and Isolde provides the dominant intertextual motif for The Polyglots: as a medieval allegory of betrayed diplomatic missions and family feuds; as a tragic love triangle with torn go-betweens and star-crossed lovers;

34  Claire Davison

and as Wagnerian opera with its emblematic leitmotifs, suspended dissonances, and revolutionary stagecraft.15 The best-known leitmotif in Wagner’s opera is replayed as a tune remorselessly banged out on the piano or reworked as a foxtrot riff. High tragedy becomes slapstick; chivalrous quests turn into pointless, transcontinental shuffling. The Gesamtkunstwerk dwindles to universal muddle and representational pandemonium. The cast and formal organization too are more suited to pantomime than the classical stage. Bewilderment is favoured over clarity and catharsis. Strings of constantly changing, often generically named characters drift past in a blur. Even chapters bear similar titles: “More Polyglots,” “And Still More Polyglots,” “A Nest of Polyglots.” Meanwhile, either with astonishing foresight or by sheer fluke, the farcical imbroglio of domestic and diplomatic feuds feeds quite literally off the term “international relations,” which was only just emerging in the 1920s as the new dynamic alternative to the classical disciplines of political science and foreign policy.16 The self-styled “British Military Ambassador” (131) does not do international relations; he has them. A never-ending flood of Diabologhs, Vanderflints, and Vanderphants, hailing from all corners of the Northern Hemisphere, require his intermediacy. In other words, while diplomats sometimes stand metaphorically for states, states sometimes stand metaphorically for diplomats: even the tenor and vehicle of metaphor (with the domestic sphere doubling for the Civil War and Allied Intervention) are muddled, although the underlying allegory remains firm. The reversal is reminiscent of ­Wilde’s sense of life imitating art in “The Decay of Lying.” Politics imitates the plots of comic opera, and things that happen within the household do not so much echo the world stage as set the scene or anticipate it. Like the intervention scene in Futility, the marriage plot in The Polyglots, which ought to consolidate interstate alliances, goes haplessly awry. As a result of a dowager aunt’s scheming and the diplomat-narrator’s inability to commit to his betrothed until she is desired by a more pragmatic rival, the marriage alliance is renegotiated at the last minute: allegiances are reshuffled, and the wrong partners are united. Tristan transforms into a comedy along the lines of The Bartered Bride or The Gondoliers. Utterly unconcerned by last-minute shifts of alliance, the delegates from the assembled nations applaud the settlement delightedly: As the first course was being removed the General rose and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom, while the band played a flourish. After that, Captain Negodyaev got up and proposed the health of the bride’s parents. Then speeches were made of a national character, and the General

Making a Song and Dance of It  35 drank to the glory of the Belgian Army, the band playing, somewhat inaccurately, the Belgian national anthem. Whereupon Uncle Emmanuel rose and drank to the revival of Russia, the General, as senior Russian officer present, responding and including England and the Allies generally in his toast (having in his festal mood forgotten their betrayal of him). “Turning to our latest ally the Americans,” he said, “I must observe that although they are a godless people they are nevertheless a deuced clever race. Gramophones, galoshes, footwear, vehicles, inventions, and all sorts of rubbish – they can do all that; or construct a railway, let us say, across the ocean – at that they are past masters. The Americans! Hurrah.” (93)

The triviality of the parallels accentuates the irresponsibility of international meddling. This is not straightforward satire; there is an astute, more refined exercise in cultural diplomacy being played out too. As the speeches, along with the onlookers’ total unconcern so long as an alliance of sorts is celebrated, imply, diplomacy is partly about forgetting the past, and partly about making endless adjustments to smooth over inaccuracies. These allegories of what, to misquote René Girard, might be termed global rivalries on a domestic, mimetic scale,17 in which Allied Interventionists and Gerhardi’s protagonists are unable either to stop or to divert the course of history, import key features of Tolstoy’s poetics and pacifist philosophy into the English novel. These imports far transcend the simple juxtaposing of domestic upheavals and trans-European warfare in War and Peace. In the Second Epilogue to that novel, Tolstoy lays down a blueprint for the twentieth-century European novel of diplomacy when he systematically dismantles conventional visions of diplomats, sovereigns, heroes, and great statesmen whose sole will determines the course of History, this time with an upper-case “H.” These would-be protagonists of great events, he insists, are in truth dangling puppets, or self-deluded passengers on board the great steamship of history.18 Gerhardi takes up the metaphor of the marionette in his extended exercise in Tolstoyan historiography, The Romanovs: But if that combat with Napoleon was a farce, it was a tragic farce involving human carnage for the sake of conflicting loyalties and ideals very much in the air when compared with the reality and agony and horror of the battlefield. It is by the futility, the utter hazard and helplessness of all the chief actors involved, a moral story showing plainly that the intelligence of men is of next to no avail in a struggle precipitating to their death millions of suffering beings who have no idea what the conflict is about;

36  Claire Davison and that just when the clever leaders think that they are pulling strings, it is they who obey the movements of an unseen hand dangling them on a thread. (317)

The same characteristics prevail in portraits of the “new diplomat” in the same years. In their influential history, The Diplomats 1919–1939, Craig and Gilbert deny that diplomats are autonomous or even all that important: This is a book without a hero. In it, there appear honest men and evil men, fighters for lost causes and enthusiastic gravediggers, fools and knaves, men with whom we sympathise and men whom it is difficult to regard without contempt, men who lived according to the values and traditions in which they were educated and men who lost or abandoned their principles and their faith – but few men, if any, who are likely to be regarded by future generations as great historical figures. (9)

In a similar vein, Gerhardi’s fictional portrayals of international diplomacy, peeped at through a Tolstoyan eyeglass, provide an essential key to understanding the poetics of the new diplomatic novel, its relation to conventional diplomatic praxis, and its various intersections with the evolving dynamics of early modernism. Diplomatic Spectatorship: “Styles de la Valise,” “Paysages de la Valise” Both diplomacy and novels of diplomacy are founded on a wellpreserved set of internal structures, language forms, private codes, and time-honoured rituals. Just as the public, referential world of embassies and diplomats is popularly perceived as complex, enigmatic, convention-bound, and disconnected from contingency, so the diplomatic novel, in a pact with allegory, gives the impression of being desynchronized with mainstream literary modes. A stock figure, the diplomat dutifully observes linguistic and ceremonial protocols. His allegiance to authorities inures him to intervention (Badel). Gerhardi’s diplomat-protagonists are true to type in the precarious balancing act each is led to play between the roles of authority-by-proxy and onlooker-as-actor, and in terms of the peculiar postwar world he beholds where conventional maps and charts have become obsolete.19 They are tailor-made metonymical figures surveying what Thibaudet pithily terms “le paysage de la valise. De la valise diplomatique s’entend” (1177).

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As befits the fundamental theatricality of conventional diplomacy, respect for diplomatic style includes dressing the part and mastering the rhetoric. Just as William Gerhardi, the officer-diplomat and writer in the making, purchased a second-hand sword to perfect his costume before embarking on his first mission (Memoirs 134), so his two fictional counterparts and their colleagues take up the props of their calling. Foremost amongst these is the eyeglass, whether in the form of a monocle, pince-nez, longue-vue, or lorgnette. Almost a hallmark of the trade within the fictional diplomatic corps, the eyeglass is the single most apt symbol of the diplomat’s mission as observer at a slight remove – temporal, social, and conceptual – a distance accentuated anew by his being caught in various postures of looking. He observes from the outside in, from the inside out. In châteaux, embassies, and trains, he peers through arches, doorways, and windows. In Gerhardi’s case, the coinciding contexts of the 1918–21 crisis of diplomacy (Nicolson, Diplomacy 63–70), the Paris Peace Conference (1919), and emerging modernist poetics also shape diplomatic attributes. Andreiech and Diabologh supposedly observe international and domestic crises with detachment. In truth, they cling to lost causes. Knowing their causes are lost, they procrastinate. Bewildered, misunderstood, and befuddled, they look on at events without knowing what to do. As Andreiech laments, “But do you silly people realize how utterly laughable you all are? Oh my God! Can’t you see yourselves?” (I could not see myself.) “But can’t you see that you have been lifted out of Chekhov? ... Oh, what would he not have given to see you and use you!” (Futility 54)

Diabologh, meanwhile, is often to be glimpsed at his improvised “buffer-state” desk (Polyglots 75), from which he aimlessly peers into others’ lives as part of his mission as mail censor. At the same time as performing this “farce” (75) of state-imposed voyeurism, he writes up his thesis. This learned synthesis of Diabologh’s domestic, international, and philosophical observations is called “A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude.” His train of thought, diverted by his flicking listlessly through “the glazed pages of Anglo-Saxon magazines,” rarely matures beyond the reflection that he is “out of it all” (147). Comparable instances of the diplomat’s inflated rhetoric of passivity and exemption resonate throughout the modern novel of diplomacy, from Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) to Jean-Christophe Rufin’s Rouge Brésil (2001), via Marcel Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919) and Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps (1957). In Europa (1972), Romain Gary, who held diplomatic postings in Sofia, La Paz, New York, and

38  Claire Davison

Los Angeles, offers a memorable portrait of the diplomat-protagonist; Danthès, like his monocle-adorned counterparts, is caught between the roles of actor-spectator who can either see without acting or act without seeing. Immunity condemns him to observe life from the margins, as if he lived permanently within a bell-jar: The immunity conferred by a diplomat’s position makes him live as if under a protective shell from which he can observe reality without being touched by it himself. Accustomed to be coolly analytical about matters of life and death, one tends to view human situations theoretically, as so many “problems” instead of as so much suffering. One was expected to be distant: The Quai d’Orsay had no time for ambassadors who identified themselves too closely with the country they were accredited to. (1)20

The intellectual disposition of treating all situations as problems, each with its implicit solution, is reinforced by an office of foreign affairs, which intervenes whenever ambassadors identify too closely with the good fortune or misfortune of the countries to which they are posted. In the anarchic, post-revolutionary, postwar period between 1917 and 1922, diplomatic haplessness fits easily into pan-European literary history. The tergiversations of the reluctant lover, the would-be pianist who flunks his performance, or the garrulous bystander whose eloquence makes him miss his cue – all provide variations on a long Anglo-Russian tradition of ditherers: the “superfluous Man” in Russian literature of the 1860s; Turgenev’s Hamlets and Don Quixotes; Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya or Treplov in The Seagull. In the words of Kartoschinsky, reviewing Russian stagings of Shakespeare in 1916: “It was Hamlet that won the deepest sympathy of the Russians. His passivity, his constant reflection, his everlasting pensiveness, – are these not typically Russian traits? We can almost say that in Russia alone, Hamlet is sincerely loved and deeply understood” (143). In many ways a masterly remake of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Gerhardi’s The Polyglots does what Chekhov toyed with but never wrote: a skit on Hamlet, provisionally entitled Hamlet, Prince of Russia, A Vaudeville Sketch (Magarshack 55). Following an improbable itinerary, Hamlet travels via Russia before bouncing back into anglophone modernism, then ricocheting anew to Russia. Both the Russian and the anglophone twentieth-century variants do not quite hit the mark of being tragedy. They are waffling Hamlets with no inner nobility; they have no affairs of state or phantoms to grapple with. Whether reporting on the international situation as a conference diplomat or courting Sylvia, Diabologh procrastinates, just like his near contemporary, Prufrock. He is,

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moreover, more a Guildenstern and Rosencrantz double act than a noble prince: No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous – Almost, at times, the Fool. (Eliot 27)

Despite numerous modernist resonances, Gerhardi’s comedies of manners with their pontificating diplomats, adrift in northern Asia, are never cited as landmarks in any history of the twentieth-century British novel, or in panoramas of British modernism. One simple explanation for this is doubtless that there is nowhere where they would be entirely at home in a purely British, or even anglophone, literary genealogy. There is, however, a clear trans-European line of descent to be traced for these novels by looking across the Channel. There is, for example, a longstanding tradition of adopting French models of language, formality, literary form, and style as the prerequisites of diplomacy proper. As a natural extension of this principle, the evolution of diplomats’ literary undertakings likewise passes via France. The literary diplomat speaks a universal, cosmopolitan language, or to use Thibaudet’s formulation, “a universal language of sleeper cars and cinema, auxiliary to the universal language of music, a cosmopolitan literature of trips, capital cities, beings that join in solidarity with the diplomatic vocation, just as, in a previous generation, the literature of stopovers and the sea joined in solidarity with the call to seafaring in Loti’s works” (1178).21 In keeping with the diplomat’s quintessential dislocation, “le style de la valise” is defined by constant displacement. According to Thibaudet, this style is characterized by movement: The symbol, correlative, even the direct image of this movement would be railroad, sea, and air routes woven around the planet on the world maps that you see in travel agencies. These routes harmonize with each other. Diplomatic dispatch style is born at the point where these two phenomena – style and movement – intersect: in Paris, at the Quai d’Orsay, lifted to this optimum by the inherent intelligence of the place ... (1179)22

40  Claire Davison

Such worldviews are exactly those of Gerhardi’s early writings. Reconfigured world maps, new transport systems, globe-trotting diplomats, and purposeless military missions inform the spatial geographies of Futility and The Polyglots alike. If “literary histories carry with them a theory and practice of diplomatic space” (Watkins 114), and conversely if diplomatic space carries within it a theory and practice of literary history, it is surely fitting that the globe in Futility and The Polyglots is an amorphous blur criss-crossed by futile, deterritorialized movements.23 Distended by skirmishes between Reds and Whites, local anarchy, and Western Intervention, the familiar sphere is at best an unruly, randomly shaped expanse for diplomats, armies, and revolutionaries to traverse. This situation again recalls the diplomatic crisis in Russia between 1918 and 1920, when there was no state to represent or represent to, and there were no up-to-date maps to reflect the constantly changing cartographies of states and interstate borders. The relentless sending of missives, instructions, and orders for strategic about-turns all proved counter-productive or unfeasible in practical terms. Amorphousness is allegorized on the microhistorical scale by Gerhardi’s narrators in terms of their international relations. As families move around Asia in quest of lost fortunes, as alliances dissolve and re-form, so the reader of Futility and The Polyglots loses track of the global circumnavigations. Destinations and ports of call, travellers and bystanders all dissolve into a whir of unfamiliar names and all too familiar tales half-overheard in adjacent carriages: And so we covered verst after verst, as our luxurious train, freshly painted, beautifully furnished, admirably kept, rushed through a stricken land of misery. On our choice engines we moved like lightning, or perchance stood long hours at lonely wayside stations, the glamour of innumerable electric lights within our carriage presenting to a community of half-starving refugees the gloating picture of the Admiral and his staff at dinner. (Futility 114–15)

Ultimately, all communication grinds to a standstill, including conversations, telegrams, and telephone calls. All geographical space becomes impromptu, to the extent that, in Futility, “We lived in our train” (123). Diplomatic Discord at the Concert of Nations The poetics of the ship and train, from the nineteenth-century figures of imperial, military, and scientific ambition to early twentieth-century symbols of dislocation and exile, are not only played out in parallel or

Making a Song and Dance of It  41

counterpoint. Gerhardi stages the overlap of the two – imperial expansion and civilian destitution – in the mode of tragicomic farce. However desperate the plight of the refugees, however random and devastating the civil-war street violence, the diplomat-writer looking on from his “stationary vehicles”24 sees missions of salvation as unscrupulous, self-defeating, and painfully comic. In The Polyglots, in true Chekhovian spirit, the narrator’s outward journey is aboard the Aquitania, but the return is made on the Rhinoceros. Like the puppets of statecraft, Gerhardi’s key allegorizations of transport are not solely Chekhovian; they bear the imprint of his aesthetic and philosophical debt to Tolstoy. The liners carrying ambassadors, generals, and envoys across the Atlantic and Pacific are directly inspired – as his Memoirs, Biography of the Age, and The Romanovs make explicit – by the essential trope of the steamship in the epilogues to War and Peace. One of the allegorical vessel’s many functions is to embody “moving power,” namely the underlying forces that direct or divert the apparently stable course of world history: Wherever a moving ship may be heading, at its bow will always be seen the swirl of the wave it cuts through. For people on the ship, the movement of that swirl will be the only noticeable movement. Only by following closely, moment by moment, the movement of that swirl and comparing that movement with the movement of the ship, will we realize that ... we were misled by the fact that we ourselves were imperceptibly moving. We will see the same if we follow moment by moment the movement of historical figures (that is, having restored the necessary condition of all that happens – the condition of the continuity of movement in time) and do not lose sight of the essential connection of historical persons with the masses. (1199)

These are likewise the conclusions reached by Gerhardi’s bemused narrators when, having failed to perceive the underlying currents that determine their own stories, they realize, too late, that their great chance in life has sailed away. The theme of belatedness provides the structuring logic of both novels. From their opening paragraphs (on board ship) to their closing words (at sea or at quayside), both Futility and The Polyglots create a perfect symbiosis between territorial vagueness and the metaphoric appropriation of journeys by train or ship. Quintessentially modernist juxtapositions of action and inertia, plot and plotlessness, movement and stasis, vastness and containment, destinations and drifting prove particularly apt to stage the timeless plight

42  Claire Davison

of refugees. Structural devices and formal experimentation thus become acutely political. They reflect the specific tragedy of Russia’s contemporary refugees – among them the Gerhardi family – adrift between a home and a land that was only theirs by adoption. Their ambassadors and consuls, appointed to a Russia that has already been deposed, are as helpless as they to intervene. Homeward and return journeys are therefore outdated labels that refer to no particular space or direction. This intersection of key modernist tropes that tally perfectly with the eyewitness portrayal of an acute international crisis being haphazardly mismanaged by diplomatists and exacerbated by inappropriate military intervention thus leads to the crucial question of the diplomatic novel’s relation to literary modernity. Do modernist aesthetics draw on the blunders and violence of postwar diplomacy to renew fictional form? Or do they provide writers with new social realities – disorientation, globalization, dislocation, estrangement, disempowerment, space-time compression – that prove ideally suited to represent chaos on an international scale? Yet few novels of diplomacy are acknowledged as typically modernist, on account of their abiding engagement with international political history and professional testimony. In many ways, the classic diplomat figures from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century – Norpois, Bilibin, Antrobus, Deume, Danthès, Andreiech, and Diabologh – have more in common with each other as members of a novelistic diplomatic corps than they do with their fictional contemporaries who are not diplomats. The same is true of novels and novelists of diplomacy. Gerhardi and his novels prolong a central tradition of the Russian classics. Their ironic detachment recalls nineteenthcentury comedies of manners; their cabaret tones and wry, selfconscious theatricality bear comparison with later strains of modernist experimentalism – Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) or Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), for example. Nevertheless, by combining international crises with farcical flippancy, they are out of sync with the general tone of high modernism, or what Harold Nicolson, writing in 1928, termed the “new spirit in modern literature.”25 As a Russian-educated Englishman, Gerhardi evolved outside the sphere of Anglo-American avant-garde fiction. Approaching his fiction from the angle of diplomacy therefore matters. He is not just staging the diplomatic crises of the immediate postwar world; he is staging the crises of diplomacy itself. Gerhardi’s hapless, ineffectual protagonists may be enjoined by history to serve the army and the chancery, but they never really have the affairs of state at heart because they have no single state to refer back to. At best they are utopian diplomats. Or perhaps

Making a Song and Dance of It  43

they are blueprints for the para-diplomats of an era yet to come – committed to a babel of languages and the withering of the state. As Watkins points out, twentieth-century writer-diplomats represented nation states, but “as citizens of an international republic of letters, they frequently imagined alternative international spaces: recollections of past multi-ethnic empires, present-day regional systems, modern nation-states superimposed on [a] palimpsest of lost heritage geographies, the world as an open field inhabited by cosmopolitan figures at home nowhere and everywhere” (119). Such an internationalist framework for understanding Gerhardi’s diplomatic characters is not, of course, to be understood within a rigorously theorized Marxist model; instead, it offers a sensible solution that reflects an instinctive notion of double belonging and interlocking cultures that was always already theirs. As constitutionally defined multilingual, transcultural citizens of more than one country, these diplomatic characters are not so much awakened by war to conscientious objection as they are moved to irresolution, half-heartedness, or wry perplexity. They may be slightly desynchronized with any national history of literary trends, but they are perfectly at ease in the history of the European novel. In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera defines the European novel as a form that has been meandering across the continent, deliberately and very literally outlandish, for centuries (26–32). European to the core, such novels are inherently picaresque. Clearly, the same holds for diplomats in the real world. Although they are key players in a multi-secular parade, or concert of nations, they are also liable to be interrupted in their ventures at the whim of a Foreign Office or monarchy. In the epilogue to War and Peace, Tolstoy hints at just the same thing when he describes his meandering, stochastic, and overwhelmingly theatrical conception of history and power: The man who had devastated France returns ... This man is still needed to justify the last joint act. That act is performed. The last role has been played. The actor is told to undress and wash off his greasepaint and rouge: there is no more need for him. (1136)

Epilogue Each era of diplomacy has had its musico-literary counterpart. The pageantry of Renaissance diplomacy brought in “trumpets ... clanging bells and booming cannon” for its pageants, fantasias, and masques (Mattingly 38). Boudoir diplomacy favoured lyric poetry, and it found

44  Claire Davison

its acoustic equivalent in intimate chamber music and serenades. The diplomacy of the Westphalian nation state is frequently correlated with the rise of the novel, and symphonic form. But which is the most appropriate literary mode or the ideal musico-literary form to herald peace in the post–Treaty of Versailles years, when states crumbled into pandemonium and sauve qui peut diplomatic wranglings went on backstage? In Gerhardi’s wry depiction of domestic and international relations, there is only one implacable answer: farce. In Futility, farce, even “hilarious farce” (110), is always waiting in the wings, as when the aged grandfather is suddenly galvanized into a frenzy of activism by the thought of Bolsheviks: The antiquated veteran suddenly relapsed into a fit of anger. I’ll show these Bolsheviks! he threatened. I’ll make them dance! I’ll stand no nonsense! I’ll stand no nonsense! Not I! They’ll soon see the man they’ve got to deal with! They’ll get short shrift from me, I can tell you! I’ll show these Bolsheviks! I’ll make them sing. The feeble old man was seized by a violent fit of coughing. His body shook and reeled, and his vain threats only emphasized the wretched impotence, the piteous weakness of his senility. (185)

The farcical intrigues all come with suitably absurd, even grotesque soundtracks – thereby making sonic modernity and vibrant contemporaneous soundscapes part of the modernist poetics of diplomacy. The soundtracks combine snatches of songs, a medley of dances from the waltz to a stationary one-step, live bands and gramophones, staged performances, and amateur riffs on Wagner. Familiar music is defamiliarized: “Tristan became a thing alien and remote, and I felt that I was singing in an altogether different opera” (Futility 183). The author, asserting anew his prowess as a cultural diplomat, mediates not only between lands, cultures, and languages, but also between the arts. He creates an intermedial montage that owes as much to modernist praxis as it does to the impromptu turnabouts of international intervention: And just that moment the gramophone, which Vera was fiddling with, broke loose into an intoxicating one-step. Nina, standing by it, echoed at the end of each refrain – “My-y-y-y-cell-ll-ar!” as the music galloped into syncopation ... “There they are!” cried Sonia. Three US naval uniforms appeared in the window ... “I’m forever blow–ing bub-bles,” hissed the gramophone ... “Fu – fu fu fu fu – fu fu – ” whistled Nikolai Vasilievich. (147)

Making a Song and Dance of It  45

However desynchronized from the national novel’s evolution, the soundscapes of Gerhardi’s novels are entirely in tune with musical and diplomatic desynchronizing forms. By making a song and dance of revolutionary chaos and the sordid part played by Western nations, he acknowledges the tragedy of events as he witnesses them, but re-presents, or restages, lyric tragedy as good music-hall sing-songs. Jazzily discordant comic opera proves the cultural diplomat’s ideal genre for observing history, statesmen, and diplomatists who repeat the monumental errors of the past. Adapting theatrical conventions to the novel, he bridges the gap not only between nations and statecraft but also between the grand lyric tradition, bourgeois comedies of manners, Renaissance commedia dell’arte, and pantomime. Gerhardi’s novels of diplomacy began as, and had tentative afterlives as, experiments in intermedial negotiations and montage.26 Early drafts of The Polyglots show that George Hamlet Diabologh was initially intended to be a composer attempting to write a fitting oratorio for his times; and in the early 1930s, Gerhardi embarked on a number of adaptations in the hope of inspiring the cinema or theatre to take up his Anglo-Russian tragicomedies. Nothing came of these endeavours, which, like his novelistic strategies, proved singularly desynchronized with the dominant aesthetic preoccupations of his day. However misunderstood by literary history Gerhardi may be, he tried to bring to both contemporary diplomatic schemes and the contemporary novel a sense of the unbearable lightness of the times. His fictional blend of Chekhovian stage directions, Tolstoyan philosophy, and comic opera provides an allegory of the diplomat’s comic spirit – God’s Fifth Columnist. The artist-philosopher’s consolatory jest, he believed, consisted in providing entertainment and solace to the helpless victims of tyranny, since the tyrant could no more heed the artist-philosopher’s tales than the artist-philosopher could govern. But perhaps consolation is not of this world. After spending more than thirty years drafting a biography of the age, in which he would lay down the blueprint for a fairer, borderless world state, the “foreign secretary manqué” died. He left boxes of notes in which he records thoughts, fragments, and false starts. His magnum opus remains the work he never wrote, which may be the finest example of Gerhardi as his own Chekhovian hero, a cultural diplomat to the bitter end. NOTES 1 Much of Cruz’s early work uses texts in transition or in translation to problematize and re-enact the border-crossing zones of cultural diplomacy.

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

See the exhibition catalogue for “Portrait of a Sculptor,” July–September 2001. An online summary is available at https://www.mattsgallery.org/ artists/cruz/exhibition-1.php. Although usually referred to as “Gerhardie,” Gerhardi did not add the final “e” to his name until 1967. For this reason, this essay adopts the earlier spelling. Although the convention problematizes historical verisimilitude, Memoirs of a Polyglot later presents the two novels as theatricalized encodings of his own diplomatic experience: “I have dealt in ‘Futility’ and again in ‘The Polyglots,’ with the business of interfering, on an international scale, in other people’s affairs, the sample I dealt with being known to history as the Allied Intervention in Russia of 1919–1920” (Memoirs 164). Chapter 6 of his memoirs bears the title “With the Diplomatists.” Bayley provides a brief overview of Gerhardi’s career and works. In Arnold Bennett’s terms, Gerhardi was “The Pet of the Intelligentsia” and “The Lion of Mayfair” in the 1920s, before being just as expeditiously forgotten (Davies 196). For a more thorough study of Gerhardi as an Anglo-Russian gobetween writer, see my article, “Near Misses: From Gerhardi to Mansfield (and Back), via Chekhov.” The interaction of diplomatic work and novel-writing is attested by the first typescript of Futility, partly written on embassy paper (Add 8292/161). Scenes in The Polyglots were first sketched on headed notepaper from “Headquarters. British Military Mission to Siberia” (Add 8292/162). Drafts are located in the Gerhardi Papers at the University Library, Cambridge. I would like to express my thanks here to archive staff for their attentive assistance during my period of research there. A blend of historical and dynastic panorama, anecdote, retrospection, and speculative philosophy, The Romanovs foregrounds the offstage tribulations and whimsies of diplomacy. It is also an exercise in Tolstoyan historiography, inspired by the epilogues in War and Peace. The Sunday Graphic, which printed serialized extracts in 1940, hailed it as “The Greatest Biography of Modern Times” (Davies 329). For letters and some replies, see Add 8292/90. Gerhardi describes himself as a “Foreign Secretary manqué” in an interview with Olivia Manning (Add 8292/172/3, p. 42). However sober the overall approach that he takes in Diplomacy, Nicolson’s metaphor is no doubt intended to resonate with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), especially Orlando’s momentous awakening as a woman during his appointment as British ambassador in Constantinople. As critical variance to this day reflects, there is no unproblematic marker of the end of the revolutionary and civil war era in Russia and the Soviet Union; 1922 has been taken here as a marker of the shift in Western

Making a Song and Dance of It  47 diplomatic relations with the newly established Soviet government, the demise of the Mensheviks, and the withdrawal of the last Allied Intervention forces. See Moffat 242–4 and Smele 231–66. 10 In Queen Victoria, a biography focused on diplomatic manoeuvring, Lytton Strachey uses this term to describe Benjamin Disraeli’s feats of domestic and foreign diplomacy during the Anglo-Russian crises of the 1870s (177). Beyond the scope of this chapter, there are striking resonances to be explored between the modernist novel of diplomacy and Strachey’s New Biography as theorized and practised in Eminent Victorians. 11 See Add 8292/1/2. The date of the letter is a small but significant example of Gerhardi’s bridging role between cultures. It bears the date of both calendars, the Julian (dropped by the Soviet government in February 1918) and the Gregorian. In his Memoirs, Gerhardi acts and then recounts the part of the classic diplomat when he stood in for the British ambassador at a staged meeting with Kerensky and other political delegates at the Alexandrinski Theatre, Petrograd (152–3). 12 For Gerhardi’s review of the book, see Add 8292/139/9. 13 The opening clauses of Wharton’s preface to Futility are steeped in the popular clichés of Russian Fever in the 1910s and 1920s: the first impressions of many readers of the Western world, she claims, are “a recurring sense of bewilderment in trying to trace the motives of a strange, seductive and incoherent people” (i). 14 See Gerhardi’s God’s Fifth Column, 61. Both God’s Fifth Column (subtitled A Biography of the Age) and The Romanovs were defined along the lines of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Davies 340). Gerhardi’s explicitly Tolstoy-inspired poetics include shifting narrative perspectives from the panoramic and international to the microscopic and domestic, and juxtaposing cameo scenes with potted essays or philosophical commentaries. 15 Gerhardi wrote a short story with the title “Tristan and Isolde,” published in the collection Pretty Creatures. 16 The first Chair of International Relations was founded at the University of Aberystwyth in 1919; the academic discipline developed throughout the 1920s. 17 See “What Is Happening Today Is Mimetic Rivalry on a Global Scale,” a 2002 interview with Girard (Girard, Tincq, and Hilde). Although allegories of diplomacy represented via courtly marriage and libidinal desire have long been the staple of the literary imagination, Girard’s literary models for desire and conquest have only recently caught the attention of international relations specialists. See Troy, “Mimesis and the Problem of Rationality” and “Desire for Power or the Power of Desire?” 18 In War and Peace, Tolstoy also uses nautical metaphors: “But the calm sea suddenly becomes disturbed. To the diplomats it seems that they,

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19

20

21

22

23

24

their disagreements, are the cause of this new upsurge of forces; they expect war among sovereigns; the situation seems insoluble to them. But the wave which they can feel rising does not break from where they expect. The same wave rises from the same point of departure – Paris. The last backwash of the movement from the west occurs, the backwash that is to resolve the seemingly unresolvable diplomatic difficulties and put an end to the military movement of that period” (1136). The pronoun is of course gendered, not “gender-neutral.” Neither conventional diplomacy nor literary representations of the diplomat offer any insightful models of female diplomats. My translation: “Le métier de diplomate, par le privilège d’immunité qu’il confère, fait vivre en marge, sous une cloche de verre, et permet d’observer sans être touché. Le devoir d’analyser froidement pousse à voir les situations humaines sous un aspect théorique de ‘problème’ et guère sous celui de la souffrance. La règle du jeu était la distanciation: le Quai d’Orsay était sans tendresse envers les ambassadeurs qui s’identifiaient par trop avec les heurs et malheurs du pays où ils étaient accrédités” (8). My translation: “une langue universelle du wagon-lit et du cinéma, auxiliaire de la langue universelle de la musique, une littérature cosmopolite des séjours, des capitales, des êtres, solidaire à la profession diplomatique.” My translation: “aurait pour symbole ou correspondant, ou pour image naturelle, le mouvement des routes de fer, de mer et d’air tissés autour de la planète sur les mappemondes des agences de voyage ... On conçoit qu’un style de la valise se forme à leur croisement. Et qu’il se forme à Paris, dans ce Quai d’Orsay qui fut amené à cet optimum par l’intelligence naturelle du lieu.” The globe as arbitrary plaything is an image Gerhardi also uses in The Romanovs, in which Peter the Great’s globe – a diplomatic gift from Gotthorp – literally encapsulates the whims and irresponsibility of rulers and diplomats settling world affairs: “This globe was as large as a room. Several people could dine inside it, and it revolved in such a way as to enable you to walk across seas and continents within it” (The Romanovs 314). In the same year (1940), Chaplin’s Great Dictator indulged his own fantasies with a puffed-up globe, memorably choreographed in time with Wagner’s prelude to Lohengrin. The oxymoron of the stationary vehicle figures as a leitmotif throughout both novels – even, paradoxically, when the vehicle is on the move. In Futility, the train, quite literally the theatre of operations, is incessantly hampered by breakdowns that leave it standing stationary, or galvanized by sudden accelerations, during which the diplomat figure stands motionless

Making a Song and Dance of It  49 at the window observing the moving yet unchanging landscape (see Futility 110–28). 25 See Harold Nicolson’s nine-part series of radio talks, “The New Spirit in Modern Literature,” published in weekly instalments in The Listener between 30 September and 23 December 1931. 26 For early drafts, see Add 8292/109, 111, and 132. For later adaptations, see “‘The Polyglots’: Synopsis of Proposed Talking Picture” (Add 8292/155/9) and “‘Love in Four Languages’ or Polyglot Love” (Add 8292/155/4).

2 The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen: A User’s Guide to Social Magic maxime decout

Contrary to popular belief, Albert Cohen was not an ambassador but an international civil servant.1 His wide-ranging experience as a lawyer and negotiator had a pronounced effect on his literary works, particularly in the representation of diplomacy as a form of bureaucracy. The League of Nations plays a prominent role in his satires on diplomacy, especially in Mangeclous (translated as Nailcruncher) and Belle du Seigneur (translated as Her Lover), published in 1938 and 1968 respectively. Solal, a career diplomat, loses his position as under-secretary at the League of Nations in Her Lover; he also appears as the protagonist in Solal (1930) and in a minor role in Nailcruncher.2 Throughout his novels, Cohen depicts the diplomatic world as a complex mechanism that registers correspondences among the civil service class, members of the Deume family in Her Lover, members of Solal’s eccentric family nicknamed the Valiants, and, as a literary precedent in the representation of the diplomat in a modernist setting, Marcel Proust’s depiction of Norpois, the career diplomat in Remembrance of Things Past. Cohen focuses his study of the values and customs of international civil servants on language as it is used at the League, as well as the language used by individuals at home and in social situations outside the workplace. Generally speaking, the crisis of language among civil servants at the League of Nations is symptomatic of a modern crisis in values. Moreover, in Cohen’s novels, bureaucratic language mutes broader concerns about the position of international bodies on the global political scene. In contrast with many other writers, diplomacy for Cohen is not an enriching experience. Nor does diplomacy in fiction prove that literature has a pragmatic dimension. It is an ineffectual construct, essentially linguistic, based on non-pragmatic language. At the League of Nations, civil servants use an idiosyncratic language governed by its own set of codes. Mastering these codes indicates that one belongs to the world

The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen  51

of bureaucracy, not to the world beyond. In fact, those who speak this idiolect do not aim to connect with the outside world; instead, they distance themselves from it. Linguistic competence does not, in this case, abide by the norms of communication. As an institution – in the sense that Pierre Bourdieu uses the term to signify the reproduction of authority through education, apprenticeship, adherence to rules, delegation of responsibility, and so forth (175–86) – the League of Nations bestows authority upon some speakers over others. The authority of speakers also depends on the authority vested in certain auditors. To be heard by someone in a position of authority within this hierarchical milieu means one is being taken seriously. In addition to these acts of “social magic” (Bourdieu 207), which confer hegemonic power on some members of the tribe rather than others, another system of triage, more primitive perhaps, and certainly cruder, separates the chosen few from the reprobates. Differences are formalized, albeit mysteriously. A certain violence, all the more powerful because it remains symbolic and unspoken, is permitted within institutional strictures. Irony undermines, or contradicts, verbal and verbose diplomacy in Cohen’s novels. First, by describing civil servants as animalistic, even bestial, in their striving and cravenness, Cohen erases any so-called social magic that diplomacy might be thought to possess. Animal metaphors expose bureaucrats’ true nature, hidden beneath the veneer of culture afforded by language. Secondly, and as an antidote to the self-referential world of diplomacy and bureaucracy, the Valiants inventively and ironically ape diplomacy, and thus free it from its institutional constraints. Civil Servants, Dilettantes, and Baboons With the League of Nations as his source material, Cohen sharpens his critique of diplomatic bureaucracy by looking at a typical day in the life of an idle civil servant, Adrien Deume. Adrien’s activities are set against a vast tableau of characters, whose behaviour is shown in situ, including their social pursuits. In these frescoes of the inner workings of diplomacy, meetings are portrayed as social opportunities rather than professional events. For Proust – not only a primary model for Cohen in this regard, but also an identifiable source for his readers, and thus a model to be at once assumed, studied, and extended – diplomacy and society are already part and parcel of each other. As social animals, a subspecies of the socialite or snob, diplomats in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past adapt quickly to any milieu in which they find themselves. They mingle. More so than in the diplomatic world,

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the worldly settings of parties and salons offer a privileged view of this exotic species. Norpois, former ambassador and friend of the Narrator’s father in Proust’s novel, frequents the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, the outcast aunt of the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes. Although he is more usually glimpsed at receptions than at embassies, he continues to use the codes and customs of the Chancery even outside of his work (Henry 7–22). For Cohen, as against Proust, the diplomat or the international civil servant is more often than not depicted in his official capacity, surrounded by his peers. His profession is so ingrained in him that receptions and social functions become mere extensions of the workplace. Hence Cohen registers a change in modern civilization and the mechanisms of diplomacy: a process of professionalization in which the means of production and the control of policy are concentrated in the hands of increasingly powerful professional politicians and bureaucratic structures. From that starting point, two main spheres appear in the novels: the macrocosm of the League of Nations and the microcosm of the ­Deume family. Shuttling back and forth between these two worlds, Adrien demonstrates, in a manner quite different from Proust’s, how the social world interacts with diplomacy. Between these two spheres, the difference is more of scale than of type: structure and habitus ­remain the same. For example, Adrien, preparing for a meal with Solal, general under-secretary of the League, tells Antoinette that “at a formal dinner you eat just a little bit of everything” (Her Lover 136). In response, Antoinette modifies this phrase ever so slightly: “at formal and official dinners one eats just a little of each course” (153; emphasis added). The adjective, slipped in by Antoinette, lays bare the fantasy that a private meal, as soon as it is transferred into the world of public affairs, can be a political game with uncertain stakes. This interaction (or reciprocity) between the social world and diplomacy is at the origin of Proust’s and Cohen’s different narrative techniques, and it demonstrates the differing values in their worldviews. In Remembrance of Things Past, Norpois’s shortcomings represent those of an entire social class, insofar as he typifies the snobbish, aristocratic, and cultured diplomat. Yet this mocking criticism is made available only through the observations and commentary of the Narrator – always presented as highly perceptive – and, to a lesser degree, of his mother, Bergotte, and Charlus. In Cohen’s novels, the narrator’s use of irony broadens the mockery, and a greater diversity of views on the milieu is offered by Solal, Ariane, and the Valiants, who come from Cephalonia. These diverse critical approaches meld into a chorus whose main characteristic is irony.

The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen  53

As Cohen portrays them, the diplomats-cum-bureaucrats are all dilettantes or amateurs. The most iconic of these is Adrien. He continually leafs through files, then closes them without doing a lick of work (Mangeclous 431–7). He punctuates his days with washroom breaks, “a legitimate little pastime that offers the additional advantage of stretching his legs,” or by taking the elevator up and down to count the floors of the building (492, 439). His “plan of action for the day” is an exercise in absurdity: “First, have a hook installed to hang scissors so I won’t have to look for them anymore. Must be systematic about these things! Second, examine the new filing system for articles from the French press. Third, a little laxative tonight because this morning things didn’t quite work out. And off to work we go!” (430). Adrien surrounds himself with objects that convey a whole aesthetic of inaction and a system of ironic meanings. At the office, he tries to beat his personal record for melting a praline in his mouth; he toys with his stapler, his pen, his pencil sharpener, his watch. Adrien’s time-wasting activities are profoundly bourgeois. They shed light on a desire to possess and handle things, even ridiculous things such as nail scissors; at the same time, they show up Adrien’s vacuity, his utter lack of interiority. He gives himself over to empty, slack, unproductive stretches of time as a form of escapism. In his inactivity, he embodies the image of an international organization at its most torpid and ineffectual. The international civil servant is no longer a worldly man informed by tradition, culture, and breeding, like Norpois, an exemplar of prewar society in Remembrance of Things Past. The modern functionary cannot even lay claim to an ideological conviction, the way, for instance, Norpois adheres to patriotism as a cause in and of itself. In Cohen’s novels, the civil servant faces a hurtling void where meanings blur and dissipate. If he can, on the one hand, be accurately slotted into a social or professional category, he cannot, on the other hand, be identified according to political, ethical, or ideological criteria. He inhabits a neutral zone that defies distinction and definition. In Cohen’s universe, the international civil servant has no real opinion on politics or any ethical commitment, aside from a certain racism for which the Jewish character, Mossinsohn, pays the price (Mangeclous 468–70). Like Finkelstein, he is a “social nothing who was not only no use to man or beast but, more damningly, could not harm a fly” (Her Lover 264). The international civil servant is bound only by a double standard, namely personal interest and a passion for domination: The worship of power is universal. Note how underlings bask in the sun of their leader, observe the doting way they look upon their chief, see them

54  Maxime Decout ever ready with a smile. And when he utters some inane pleasantry, just listen to the chorus of their sincere laughter. Yes, sincere. That’s the most awful part of it. For underneath the self-interested love your husband has for me exists another, perfectly genuine and selfless love: the abject love of power, a reverence for the power to destroy. Oh that fixed and captivated grin of his, the obsequious civilities, the deferential curve of his backside as I talked to him. The moment the dominant adult male baboon steps into the cage, the younger, smaller, adolescent males get down on all fours, assuming the welcoming, receptive position of females, adopting the position of voluptuous vassalage, paying sexual homage to the power of destruction and death, the moment the dominant fearsome adult male baboon steps into the cage. Read up on apes and you will see that what I say is true. (Her Lover 342–3)

Where calculation meets cravenness, the international civil servant materializes. In Cohen’s judgment, he is not only a professional socialite – a dilettante of diplomacy – but also a baboon. The group scenes at the League of Nations follow this general rule: they form a portrait gallery, which, despite apparent diversity, reveals a limited range of attitudes. Within the group, the dominator displays his omnipotence to the dominated, who accepts being subjugated with pleasure because of his admiration for the stronger person. Modelled on animal behaviour of domination and submission, the international civil servant’s behaviour tips over into an unrelenting habitus. In short, the civil servant is subject to the most basic and the most comprehensive stereotyping. When diplomats come together, they blur into a mob; because they mimic each other ferociously, they are hard to distinguish one from the other. The League of Nations, supposedly the place of civilization and “politeness,” in the seventeenth-century sense of formality and protocol, turns out to have a wild, hidden, suppressed nature. It is true that Proust, too, uses the trope of animality in Remembrance of Things Past, as when images of fish proliferate during the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s soirée in Swann in Love. (Many gentlemen at Saint-Euverte’s party wear monocles, which Swann takes to be a sign of their conformity to fashion and habit and which make them look goggle-eyed, like fish.) But Cohen plays up with unprecedented energy the animalistic aspect of individual characters during group scenes (Nailcruncher 174–8; Her Lover 109–13, 256–66).3 This “babooning” of characters, to coin a term, is superimposed on the official divisions between class A and class B civil servants. In these divisions, “symbolic power” is enshrined in objects (Bourdieu 201–12). In Her Lover, power is flaunted: “The habit of the great and the good,

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kings, generals, diplomats and even members of the French Academy, of wearing a sword which is the badge of the killer” (345). Consecrating already established class differences, this caste system assigns power to élites on the grounds that “wealth, marriages, friendships and connections give the members of this class the power to harm others” (342). A further dynamic is at play in the official ordering of civil servants: an “Important Person” competes with a “More Important Person,” if not the “Most Important Person,” and “inferiors” try to come into contact with superiors, who in turn avoid them to target people more important than themselves (257–8). This pecking order may be informal, but it is widely accepted as the natural order of things. The point of this game is to escape weaker figures, to court stronger ones, or to be seen in a position of domination over someone slightly weaker or, better still, equal in status. The official distinctions between A and B, set by the international organization, ought to be based on skills and competence. Instead, they enact and legitimate hierarchies on the symbolic and official stage, which is to say in the realm of the herd or the pack. The portrayal of League of Nations civil servants as apes or baboons overturns the traditional image of diplomacy as being connected with culture and literature. Cohen satirizes the way that civil servants instrumentalize culture and literature for the sake of advancing their social and professional standing. On the flyleaf of a book by Winston Churchill, Adrien writes “Ex Libris Adrien Deume,” about which the narrator wryly comments, “One was an intellectual, after all!” (Nailcruncher 274). Deume writes a paper on Paul Claudel, the author and diplomat, but he sends copies only to people who could prove useful to him. He could not care less about his pamphlet; the point is “to craft the perfect inscription” (Mangeclous 424). His study is only intended to “butter up” the poet, to “make his acquaintance” (425). Buoyed by his success with this venture, Adrien wants to ride the momentum: “Also need to write a little brochure about Gide. No, because he’s a communist. A brochure on Valery since he’s a member of the intellectual cooperation committee. And on Giraudoux because of Quai d’Orsay” (425). In his literary dilettantism, Adrien resembles Proust’s Norpois, who has a foot in the door at the French Academy but has no real respect for literature. Afflicted with poor literary taste, Norpois despises Bergotte. Nevertheless, he believes that a career in literature would suit the Narrator very well and offers to put him in touch with a striving young writer of his acquaintance. The offer is, nonetheless, a wicked joke. The young writer of Norpois’s acquaintance has penned “a book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza,” in addition to a study “on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army”

56  Maxime Decout

(Remembrance 1:489). Norpois, like Adrien after him, sees literature only through the lens of diplomatic and social advantage, in other words in terms of careers and power relationships. In spite of the cultural instrumentalization that appears in both Proust’s and Cohen’s works, Adrien is not Norpois. He fancies himself talented in the literary arts. He cultivates a chin-strap beard in order to make him “look like a romantic poet, or, rather, even more like a modern painter” (Nailcruncher 270). He sits down at the piano, which he cannot play, and produces a “shrill medley” of notes and “fancy work by the left hand” in imitation of Chopin (272–3). Ensconced at his work-table, he embarks on writing a novel while wearing a silk shawl around his shoulders, which he imagines to be the uniform of a true artist (Mangeclous 342). He even tells his wife, when career advancement appears to be stagnating, that he has had enough of the League of Nations, that he wants to be like Marcel Pagnol “with lots of money, because that’s the only thing that matters,” or like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, “a man of his time,” or maybe like Jules Romains, “a prolific writer, who can churn out a novel every six months” (482). In Her Lover, Adrien is racked by the same desire to become an artist: “Of course, she [his wife] was absolutely right, for God’s sake! The Secretariat was just a job, it paid the bills. But his life, his real life, was Literature, just you wait and see! When he got to the office, he’d sit down and definitely come up with a sure-fire subject for a novel. Now let’s see, what would be original?” (222). The deliberate echo of Proust – “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated ... is literature” (Remembrance 3:931) – exposes just how second-rate Adrien’s ambitions truly are. Adrien confides to Solal that he has written a few poems that are meant “to express rather than to communicate” (Her Lover 322). Furthermore, he plans to write something that will be, as he says, “unique of its kind, I think, it won’t have a plot and, in a way, it won’t have any characters either” (322). Upon a suggestion from Solal, Adrien decides that his novel will be about Don Juan. Guided by modernist precepts of unrestrained – and unoriginal – formal innovation, he intends to call the novel “Juan,” because he thinks that title will startle people with its originality (659). In contrast, Norpois denounces “Art for Art’s sake,” on the grounds that “at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner” (Remembrance 1:489). This criticism might be perfectly justified, but, in light of the diplomat’s social and often formal concerns – what might also be described as the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner – Proust ironically discredits it. Whereas Proust identifies the chasm separating diplomatic art, consisting of allusions and fixed forms, from true literary creation, Cohen

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for his part provides no artistic escape hatch for the instrumentalization of literature. He offers no genuine creator in his work. No matter how hard one looks, a figure like Bergotte in Remembrance of Things Past never appears in either Nailcruncher or Her Lover. A Frozen Language of Stereotypes Above all, Cohen perfectly understands that one of the essential forms of symbolic power in a bureaucracy is language. Like Proust, he brings together the language of society and the language of diplomacy. Both languages use indirect speech and allusion. This attention to language, especially the inherent capacity for insinuation and assumption that words allow, forms the basis of Cohen’s sociology of verbal interaction. The League of Nations has the distinction of being, more than anywhere else, a place where language has the last word. In this milieu, language takes precedence over reality itself. Proust, too, observes diplomatic meticulousness, not to say round-aboutness, with regard to language. While reading one of Norpois’s articles, the Narrator notices an insistent attachment to certain verbs and formulas: “The reader may perhaps have observed in these last pages that the conditional was one of the Ambassador’s favourite grammatical forms, in the literature of diplomacy. (‘Particular importance would appear to be attached’ for ‘Particular importance is attached.’) But the present indicative employed not in its regular sense but in that of the old ‘optative’ was no less dear to M. de Norpois” (Remembrance 3:653). In Cohen’s novels, form becomes the only real concern of League of Nations employees who join in the unbridled pursuit of the signifier as an end in itself. Divorced from the things it signifies, language acquires an importance all its own, a reality detached from the world. Adrien, like Norpois, frets over proper language usage. In the end, his real “work” amounts to quibbling about words: – Van Vries will disapprove. He doesn’t much like “relative to” either. It would be better to say “that related to.” He crossed it all out. No, it wasn’t any good. After “our services,” it should be “learned about with the greatest interest.” ... What if, instead of starting with “I have the honour,” he put “In response to your letter of et cetera in which you were kind enough to et cetera”? (Mangeclous 437)

Similarly, Le Gandec consults Adrien about whether the phrase “agree with our opinion” is correct, or if “agree with our point of view” might not be more appropriate (478).

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Symbolic power depends not only on forms of speech and the compatibility of any utterance with intelligible codes formulated within a group, but also on the power that emanates from the speaker. The hierarchy among Adrien, Le Gandec, and Van Vries takes shape in and through language; at the same time, language sustains that hierarchy. Indeed, Adrien uses little insights that give him a slight advantage in this linguistic universe. He takes great pride in having had the idea to “use the word development in the plural, which would give it more gravity”: And the greatest feather in his cap, this ingenious expression by which, when it was impossible not to use “with regard to,” one could at least avoid repeating it. Historically, his colleagues would write “with regard to Syria and regarding Palestine.” That’s where he could use “regarding both Syria and Palestine.” And the “pieces of documentation” and “pieces of information” and the “received with thanks,” to whom did one owe all that? To him! Before, we simply said “documentation,” “information.” A debt of thanks was due him! (Mangeclous 484)

It is necessary not only to manipulate the traditional, legitimate language of the League but also to be able to invent new expressions mimicking the same model. By adding to the limited repertory of acceptable bureaucratic language, one builds and magnifies an image of self and an image of the League at the same time. Statements, irrespective of their meaning, have a dual value: first, as a sign of belonging to the group; second, as a distinction within the group if the civil servant demonstrates appropriate innovation. One has to exhibit this faculty for conformity to higher echelons of the bureaucracy, even while one takes minor risks, in order to receive validation: Anxious to shine in the presence of their silent chief, this fine body of men went at it with a will and improvised enthusiastically, conjuring up in the strange language of the Secretariat “avenues to be explored,” “the consensual accord to be sought on the repartition of responsibilities both in the organizational and the operational contexts,” “perceived models of approach to this problem,” “the published track record of the specialized agencies,” “the provision of back-up equipments which governments, if approached in a spirit of cooperation, might be incited to take on board.” (Her Lover 280)

The League is therefore the locus of a paradox in communication: verbal interaction succeeds even when it functions beyond meaning

The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen  59

and comprehension. Nailcruncher puts the problem as clearly as possible, within the limits of bureaucratic mystification: “Everyone understood they did not understand, with the exception of Chester and Solal, who understood and pretended not to understand. The others, who did not understand, pretended to understand” (Nailcruncher 178). This basic principle for discussion at the League of Nations in Nailcruncher resonates with an agenda for a meeting proposed in Her Lover: “Action to be taken to promote the goals and ideals of the League of Nations” (Her Lover 278). This nebulous statement virtually predicts the vacuous debates that follow. No one knows what the action item means, but everyone makes proposals in the same vein: confusing and convoluted formulations mask fundamental meaninglessness. Sir John, who proposes the agenda, “expected his subordinates to tell him what he wanted” (278). Everyone speaks with great conviction: “the rule of rules being never lose face, always appear to be on top of things, and at all cost never admit to not understanding or not knowing what to do” (278). A series of proposals follows, each as incoherent as the next. Van Vries declares that the plan of action must be “systematic” and “concrete”; Benedetti retorts that a “program” of action would be far more valuable than a “plan” of action, and that this program must be a “specific project” (279). In truth, no one understands anything. Nonetheless, every statement is “conscientiously noted by the stenographer, who could not make head nor tail of any of them, for she was an intelligent girl” (281). Maxwell, responsible for drafting a guidance note, delegates the work to Mossinsohn, who, hardworking and serious, “would simply make up what the six heads of section had decided” (282). This speech, devoid of all content, serves only to consolidate relationships of power, even as it forbids any decision-making or concrete action by the institution. Jargon-filled and pointlessly sterile discussions all lead to the same tried-and-true solution: the setting up of a working party to explore avenues and to present, to an ad hoc committee to be constituted at a later date and composed of members delegated by national governments, the draft of a specific project setting out concrete proposals which shall form the broad framework of a long-term programme of systematic and coordinated action designed to promote the goals and ideals of the League of Nations. (281)

Incapable of resolving any issue, the intermediaries tasked with considering the matter multiply. Meanwhile, resolutions are postponed until a later date. Therein lies the tragic consequence of this professionalization and bureaucratization of diplomacy. Unable to unite around common

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ideals, the League will never be able to make its voice heard on the international scene. International authorities sink inevitably into inaction, “the waters [having] been so muddied” by political waffling (281). Not taking a position on anything is more than just a symptom of this uniquely formal communication: not taking a stand is also the goal. Expressing a meaning could pose a risk or cause an inconvenience; at the very least, meaning might hinder linguistic proliferation. Thus, it is more polite to forego any meaning at all. Only when someone strives to deny meaning is it indirectly taken into consideration at all. Some characters excel in the art of speaking without saying anything. The mastery of prattle earns them a position of advantage: Van Vries’s notes were greatly admired by his fellow heads of section but made his staff tear their hair. He was a past master of the art of saying nothing. He was pathologically circumspect, and quite capable of stringing together a dozen sentences which seemed pregnant with meaning but, on close examination, meant nothing at all and therefore did not commit him to any point of view. It was this buffoon’s very special talent that he could take pages and pages to say nothing. (288–9)

Deliberately uncontroversial, language at the League of Nations is a discursive practice that aims to manage delicate matters without ever implicating the speaker – or, for that matter, the audience.4 As artful and savvy as it may be, this practice of skirting responsibility is diplomacy at its most perilous, since it can only avoid showing conflicts, not avoid the conflicts themselves. As such, by exposing the limitations of the diplomatic pirouettes within bureaucratic language, Cohen’s novel is also at its most prescient. Even before the League drastically reduced its operations in 1938 – its headquarters in Paris remained completely shuttered during the Second World War and it officially ceased operations in 1946 – Cohen foresaw its ineffectuality. In Nailcruncher, Scipion, a friend of the Valiants who hails from Marseille, is welcomed at the League by passing himself off as an Argentine representative. He asks the Comte de Surville what happens at the League of Nations in the event of a war: “We start a file ... We meet, and issue to the Press a cautious communiqué in which we express our sorrowful regrets.” “And if the war goes on?” ... “Then,” he said in a forceful voice, “we adopt strong measures. We appoint a committee and sometimes even sub-committees and we go so far, if necessary, as to beg the belligerents to cease their carnage ...”

The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen  61 “And if the war goes on?” “Then we no longer send a polite request, but we recommend them to cease hostilities ...” “And if the war goes on?” “Then we pass resolutions in which, while admitting that the weaker party is right, we do not say that the strong party is wrong ...” (Nailcruncher 191)

Scipion presses on with his questions until Surville finally relents: Each country may do as it pleases. We wash our hands of it. After all, our task is to issue prudent recommendations and to pass clever resolutions which inconvenience no one. Our job can be summed up in the one word: “appeasement!” (292)

As the very pinnacle of inefficiency, the Comte de Surville is assigned to a file called, preposterously, “Propaganda in Toy-shops in Favour of Disarmament” (Nailcruncher 182).5 The Valiants: Breathing New Life into the Language of Diplomacy The only real counterbalance to the sclerotic universe of diplomacy is the paradoxical imitation of diplomatic conventions offered by the Valiants.6 By aping the professional diplomat’s codes of behaviour, the Valiants demonstrate that he is always already a caricature of his own career. Each civil servant may be a caricature in his own way, but Adrien serves as the epitome of the genre. In a parody of an espionage plot in the highest echelons of international bureaucracy, he discusses his colleagues with his wife, Ariane, over the telephone: because Adrien believes himself to be under surveillance, or wishes he were, he uses ridiculous codenames. Solal becomes Suzanne; Kanakis becomes K. During this phone conversation, he explains his ingenious system of basing codenames on initials, which rather gives the game away (Her Lover 292–4). Parody achieves its full expression with the Valiants – a nickname for five cousins in the Solal family, including Nailcruncher. Whereas civil servants in Cohen’s novels are usually animalized, the Valiants parade about in elaborate costumes that create some distance between them and their bestial state. At the same time, their ingenious outfits mock the symbols of power loved by diplomats. Their vestimentary excess is such that the Valiant cousins, abiding scrupulously by custom, indicate their inability to submit to protocol. Vital and inventive, they remain

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outside the strictures of diplomatic fanfare. For example, the narrative dwells at length on Nailcruncher’s attire as he prepares to leave for the League of Nations: New frockcoat with silky lapels. Starched shirt. A spotted lavallière adding a touch of dash. Panama hat, given the heat. Sand-shoes, for he had tender toes. Tennis-racket and golf club in the manner of English diplomats. Gardenia in his buttonhole. Intellectual pince-nez solemnized by a black ribbon on which his long teeth chewed with gay abandon. (Her Lover 233)

Taken one by one, these items could be signs of belonging to a group. Taken together as a motley sartorial ensemble, they surrender all value. According to Nailcruncher, the cousins attend the “Foolery of Nations or Salad of Noodles or Circle of Simpletons” (Nailcruncher 171). These nicknames play on the initials of the League of Nation in French – SDN or the Société des Nations: “Satisfaction of the Nourished and the Satiation of the Navel and the Saturation of Noodles!” along with “Sopha of Nephews” (285, 293). They invoke diplomatic protocol while indulging in the carnivalesque.7 The cousins also play dress-up with the gregarious, bureaucratized language of diplomacy. With unusual verve and creativity, they breathe new life into its standardized and empty phrases. Incapable of following the codes of this idiolect, Nailcruncher saturates his speech with supposedly diplomatic formulations, often unsuitably and incongruously. When taken for a foreign president and asked how he should be announced, he replies: “I am here incognito ... Negotiations. Political secrets. It will be enough, O liveried underling, to give him the password, which is Cephalonia. Now go, make haste! ... But hear this, my good man. I shall wait no longer than five minutes ... It is a rule which I have always observed in my official life. Convey this intelligence to whomsoever it may concern” (Her Lover 235). When he arrives at the Deumes’ and finds Hippolyte alone, he introduces himself as a diplomat and asks, using quaint, archaic terms, that his “topper ... be deposited in the cloakroom, in accordance with what the English call the diplomatic drill via the usual channels” (248). A chapter entitled “Concerning the Envoy Plenipotentiary: On Sipping and Supping” (251) humorously evokes diplomatic manuals governing protocol. Hippolyte cannot help but be impressed by Nailcruncher, because Hippolyte draws everything he knows about protocol from a society guide. But Nailcruncher, not one to be ruled by a book, uses fancy as his guide. Protocol for him is not a constraint, but a veritable smorgasbord of delights. He habitually metaphorizes diplomacy as food. In one instance, he creates a menu based

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on whatever he can find in the kitchen. He invents a sort of histrionic feast of phrases, where culinary and linguistic symbols combine and multiply, as if by parthenogenesis. In his inventiveness, Nailcruncher knows no limits: “What would suit me best would be to have a swirled nationality, like a strawberry and vanilla ice. I should like to have a Franco-British-American-Czecho-Scandinavian-Swiss passport” (Nailcruncher 290). He does not hesitate to offer culinary advice to the Queen of England in a thinly diplomatic letter (305), and he goes so far as to dream of a “universal sandwich” (Valeureux 289). He overreaches categories and limits, to the point of celebrating peace among peoples and religions with an unlikely toast: “let’s drink with stout hearts and make the most of the time we have on this earth! A murrain on racial discrimination!” (Her Lover 255). Nailcruncher’s diplomacy is frankly culinary: more than restraint, asceticism, and separation, he blends categories and finds pleasure in new gustatory combinations. His aesthetic could not be further from Norpois’s. In Remembrance of Things Past, Norpois, over a meal, entertains fellow diners “with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his colleagues in ‘the career,’” but, when faced with a pineapple salad, dons the mantle of discretion once again: “after fastening for a moment on the confection the penetrating gaze of a trained observer, [he] ate it with the inscrutable discretion of a diplomat, and without disclosing to us what he thought of it” (Remembrance 1:495). For the Valiants, by contrast, food and language are the symbol of an exteriorized interiority, the basis for sharing. They reinvent diplomatic customs by suffusing them with new meaning based on clothes, conversations, and meals. In a manner of speaking, they revitalize cultural capital by flouting cultural conventions. Cohen intensifies his satire of League of Nations civil servants through the repeated depiction of the Valiants’ ethical and political stance, of which diplomats are bereft. Saltiel explains the different governments as follows: “They make wars. When they have finished one they get ready for another. And that gets them into debt. And they are furious at having no more money. And then they beat us to console themselves, and say it is all our fault if things go wrong” (Nailcruncher 112). Seen against the backdrop of the League of Nations civil servants, the Valiants have strong convictions, which distinguishes them from the diplomatic caricatures with whom they mingle. Their conversations, covering all manner of subjects, provide a counterpoint to the empty conversations of diplomats. Their conversations often culminate in fierce declarations of love for nations, particularly France, England, and Switzerland (Nailcruncher 6, 53–4, 73, 77, 85; Valeureux 19, 25, 64, 75–7). Whereas diplomats dawdle, the Valiants act. They send missives

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far and wide, to the most influential and important individuals they can fathom having a relationship with, such as English ministers (Nailcruncher 47), the prime minister (Valeureux 84), the president of the Republic (Valeureux 187, 206–13), or the queen of England (Valeureux 294–337). Their mode of communication could not be more different from that of civil servants and diplomats. Their speech assumes polemical dimensions. Implicating the subjective investment of the speaker and the listener, speech itself becomes a performance. For this reason, the cousins contemplate, in their typical heroic-comedic vein, solutions which, tragically, are condemned never to be realized. They propose attacking Hitler (Valeureux 252), cursing the Germans in a letter campaign (Nailcruncher 210), or praying that God transform Hitler into a Polish Jew without papers – or, better yet, to argue the Law with Hitler until he becomes a rabbi (Nailcruncher 101). Whether their solutions are realizable or not, by proposing them, the Valiants condemn the attitude of the Comte de Surville and the other civil servants. Cohen’s writing brings to life a splendid dream performance in an active, joyful, honest, generous language, which portrays in depth a social and human ideal, and a model of literary speech. Cohen achieves this feat by subverting the mechanisms of diplomatic language, which is in itself one of the most specific, secret, and powerful languages created by modern society and institutions. NOTES 1 From 1926 to 1931, with some interruptions, Cohen was a civil servant attached to the diplomatic division of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. Prior to that, he worked for the World Zionist Association. While maintaining his legal and administrative functions, he founded and edited La Revue Juive in 1925. Liaison work with the members of the League of Nations provided him with key elements for the description of bureaucracy in his novels. In 1939–40, Chaim Weizmann asked Cohen to create a “Jewish Legion” to help Jewish refugees bound for different destinations and to support Zionism through a committee made up of intellectuals. In September 1944, he took up work for the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees as an attorney. On 15 October 1946, at the Committee for Refugees conference, an agreement was passed to provide refugees with an international passport that granted them official status. On 14 June 1949, Cohen left that position to return to the International Labour Organization, where he worked until 31 December 1951. From that date, at the age of fifty-six,

The League of Nations As Seen by Albert Cohen  65 he pursued his literary career exclusively (Goitein-Galpérin 17–31; Nicault 99–118). 2 Because characters migrate from one novel to another in Cohen’s oeuvre, and because translators have their ways with words, the name Mangeclous is translated as “Nailcruncher” in the novel of that name but as “Nailbiter” in Her Lover. With its association of infantile fixation and anxiety, “nailbiter” does not capture the meaning of “clous” in French. Similarly, “les Valeureux” is translated in Her Lover as “the Valiants,” but as “the Gallants” in Nailcruncher. The former, being more accurate, has been used throughout this essay. In a further complication, Mangeclous was translated into English by Vyvyan Holland in 1940, but for reasons that are not explained, he did not translate chapters 39–47 of the French text; it merely stops at the end of chapter 38. For this reason, citations from the novel appear either as Nailcruncher, the English version, or as Mangeclous, the French version. All translations from Mangeclous beyond chapter 38 are ours. 3 Schaffner provides further analysis of this animalization (59–67). 4 In Nailcruncher, Adrien takes great pains not to give even the slightest offence in a memo: “Put down that the mandate committee would surely use this piece of paper for its report to the Council. Careful, though, not to compromise oneself. He thought for a long time and crafted this careful phrase, ‘This report seems to’ (‘would seem’ might be less compromising but it did not work in terms of style)” (437). 5 A scene in Her Lover recalls this theme of war and diplomacy (81–3). The Comte’s equivocation in Nailcruncher could also be a nod to a passage in Proust: “To give an anticipatory idea of the Italian incident, let us show how M. de Norpois made use of this paper in 1870, to no purpose, it may be thought, since war broke out nevertheless – but most efficaciously, according to M. de Norpois, whose axiom was that we ought first and foremost to prepare public opinion” (Remembrance 3:652). 6 For another perspective on this issue, see Daunais’s study, “Albert Cohen, du côté de Guermantes.” 7 For a full treatment of the carnivalesque in Cohen’s novels, see Kauffmann.

3 Modern Negotiations: Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919 and Public Faces caroline z. krzakowski

In the 1930s, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson left the British Foreign Office and turned to writing books that looked back on the transformation of British diplomacy from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. The resulting trilogy – Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy (1930), Peacemaking 1919 (1933), and Curzon, the Last Phase (1934) – traces the shift from what Woodrow Wilson termed the “old” to the “new” diplomacy (Otte 157). In the midst of working on this historical trilogy, Nicolson also published a novel, Public Faces, in 1932. Like his non-fiction, Nicolson’s fiction is haunted by the brutality of the Great War and the talks that settled the conflict and created a fragile peace. Throughout the 1930s, as he witnessed mounting international tensions, Nicolson reflected anew on the effects of the Paris Peace Conference and the shortcomings of diplomacy. Taken together, Public Faces and Peacemaking 1919 articulate his support for an incremental and transparent diplomacy while also revealing his scepticism about the viability of diplomatic solutions to violence. A decade earlier, in the spring of 1919, Nicolson was attached to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. In his junior role, he drafted agreements, wrote memos summarizing the conflicts that led to the crisis of 1914, and sat on committees charged with drawing new, national boundaries. During this time, he also kept a personal diary, subsequently published as part of Peacemaking 1919. In an entry for 2 March 1919, Nicolson records his reminiscences of a group dinner at the Ritz in Paris, where he met the novelist Marcel Proust: He puts his fur coat on afterwards and sits hunched there in white kid gloves. Two cups of coffee he has, with chunks of sugar. Yet in his talk there is no affectation. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the Committees work? I say, “Well, we generally meet at 10.0, there are

Modern Negotiations  67 secretaries behind ...” “Mais non, mais non, vous allez trop vite. Recommencez. Vous prenez la voiture de la Délégation. Vous descendez au Quai d’Orsay. Vous montez l’escalier ... Précisez, mon cher, précisez.” So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time – “Mais précisez, mon cher monsieur, n’allez pas trop vite ...” (Peacemaking 1919 275–6)

In their exchange, Proust presses Nicolson for more precision about the lived everyday experience of the diplomat – details of rooms, cars, teas – rather than the official details of memoranda and agreements. Proust is not interested in hearing a summary of European politics, the kind of document that Nicolson had become so adept at writing. Rather, as a novelist, Proust is interested in a narrative of the unfolding of the Paris Peace Conference as a sequence of small, seemingly everyday actions in which the functionaries are engaged. He wants to hear the situation reveal all its manifold possibilities – speed, sham friendliness, dissimulation, even refreshments. Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919 and Public Faces, written a decade after that memorable conversation at the Ritz, represent the slow and gradual disclosure of the process of diplomacy itself, in historical and fictional forms. Whereas the “old” diplomacy was conducted beyond public knowledge and relied on alliances between nations, the new diplomacy promised what Woodrow Wilson called “open covenants ... openly arrived at,” as opposed to “secret covenants secretly arrived at” (Otte 157). The new diplomacy, or congress diplomacy, was carried out through negotiation by committee. Its procedures were known to the voting public. In his pamphlet called Diplomacy, Sir Rennell Rodd defines the new way of negotiating as “diplomacy by conference” (64), in which media and public opinion weigh in the balance of international decisions. As the expression of these new diplomatic procedures, the Paris Peace Conference became a media event unlike any previous diplomatic congress. Indeed, Nicolson’s book includes several images of the diplomats in negotiation – images that, circulating globally in newspapers, emphasized the modern character of the proceedings. The practice of new diplomacy in the early part of the twentieth century arose in the same cultural framework as Ezra Pound’s modernist injunction to “make it new.” The representation of the new diplomacy had aesthetic repercussions; it required a modern genre that could capture the incremental fluctuations and changes in the process of negotiation. Building on the success of his semi-autobiographical novel, Some People (1927), which was praised by his contemporaries as an example

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of the new biography, Nicolson experiments with generic hybridity in Peacemaking 1919 and Public Faces. As Max Saunders explains, in the “new biography” of the 1910s and 1920s, as pioneered by Lytton Strachey, “[t]he point of the biographer’s detachment – like the impersonality of the modernist artist – is to ironize the subject, while expressing ... the author’s personality” (453). The new biography moves away from the conventions of Victorian life-writing in its “mixing of imaginary and real portraits and self-portraits” (Saunders 459). Discussions of biography and personality, argues Claire Battershill in Modernist Lives, were central to the intellectual climate of modernism, and Nicolson, together with his spouse, Vita Sackville-West, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, developed a critical and practical literature about lifewriting. Virginia Woolf particularly admired Nicolson’s Some People. She praised his combination of autobiographical and fictional material: “I can’t make out how you combine the advantages of fact and fiction as you do” (Woolf 3:392). According to Battershill, Nicolson’s technique in Some People allowed him to “achieve external perspectives on the self” (81), in a variation on the ironic presentation of the subject that expresses the author’s personality. Mixing the autobiographical and the political, Nicolson’s books from this period also attempt to capture the process of the new diplomacy, as well as the atmosphere of the rooms in which the talks were conducted. Modern life-writing, as Maria DiBattista and Emily Wittman explain, redrafts history by “abandoning the very idea of eventfulness in favour of recounting memories or anecdotes that evoke the emotional and moral texture of everyday experience” (xiii). Peacemaking 1919, rather than strictly narrating historical events, takes as a cue Proust’s thirst for detail about the narrator: as a result, Nicolson discusses the events of the conference alongside responses and experiences that he recorded in his diary. He mixes private musings with historical insight, in order to write diplomatic history in a new fashion, namely with the diplomats’ personalities as part of the historical process. Peacemaking 1919 Peacemaking 1919 was written retrospectively in 1933, when Nicolson was already an illustrious figure in British foreign affairs. The historical distance matters to his presentation of the subject of diplomacy. His early enthusiasm for the League of Nations was tempered by his knowledge of the rising tensions of the 1930s and his apprehensiveness about the old diplomacy that was still in use. In this political climate, Nicolson looks back to the failures of Versailles and experiments with

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literary form to represent an event that did not bring progress to international relations. He seeks an appropriate form for the interplay between public roles and private feelings in international affairs. In pursuit of this goal, he mixes biography, history, autobiography, and diaries. An example of a modernist text, Peacemaking 1919 uses generic hybridity to produce an account of an unsuccessful diplomatic congress. The book is divided into two sections. The first offers a detailed, day-by-day account of the proceedings. Drawing on his first-hand experience of the conference, Nicolson conveys an account of each of the talks, committee by committee. He details the process of negotiating new territorial boundaries and redrawing the map of Europe. From this first section of his book, it is clear that the fighting did not resolve many of the disagreements between warring nations. The atmosphere of the negotiations is palpably tense. The second section of the book consists of excerpts from the diary that Nicolson kept during the Paris Peace Conference. In the diaries, Nicolson carries out his own process of negotiation with the reader by giving an account of his unofficial, personal responses as a witness to the official, public congress. He considers how his role in reconfiguring territorial boundaries at the conference will have an effect on the daily lives of millions. The diaries thus supplement the historical documentation of the proceedings, as narrated in the first part of the book, with a personal perspective. By conjoining the public and private sides of the event, Nicolson seeks to define the characteristics of a successful diplomat even as he narrates the failure of the congress to achieve lasting agreements. Along the way, he questions values such as nationalism, imperialism, and even internationalism. Nicolson’s narrative function in Peacemaking 1919 is by turns that of a participant-observer, a historian, and a close observer of character. In a section entitled “As It Seems Today,” he chronicles the months of negotiations that took place at the conference and scrutinizes the motives and behaviour of other delegates and political leaders. Chronology being unsatisfactory for representing negotiations, Nicolson underlines the uncertainty experienced by the delegates as proceedings unfold by breaking generic and temporal continuity. He often interrupts the narrative to question the form that he has chosen for recounting these events. He wonders if film might not be a more suitable medium for the observation and representation of the congress: It is not easy, when using the silent machinery of printed words, to reproduce the double stress of turmoil and time-pressure which in Paris constituted the main obstruction to calm thinking or planned procedure ... Only

70  Caroline Z. Krzakowski through the medium of sound film could any accurate impression ... be conveyed. Were I to sketch such a scenario of my own impressions, the result would be something as follows ... sound-motifs would be accompanied by a rapid projection of disjointed pictures. The tired and contemptuous eyelids of Clemenceau, the black button-boots of Woodrow Wilson, the rotund and jovial gestures of Mr. Lloyd George’s hands ... such portraits would be interspersed with files, agenda papers, resolutions, procès verbaux and communiqués. These would succeed each other with extreme rapidity and from time to time would have to be synchronized and superimposed. (153)

To communicate diplomatic processes with precision, Nicolson imagines that a cinematic montage rather than a photographic still, with its fixing of specific details, would serve his purpose best, in that film allows for multiple sources of information, overheard discussions among them, to cross the screen simultaneously. In the plethora of detail, whether Clemenceau’s eyelids or shots of communiqués, meaning is latent but not explicit. The ultimate failure of the conference might lie within those details, much as Proust hopes to plumb minutiae for hidden, and possibly sinister, meaning. Nicolson’s account of the Paris Peace Conference documents his disillusionment with diplomacy by congress. Guided by hindsight, he opts to narrate the conference as a series of impasses and difficulties. Instead of imposing a narrative of progress – a movement from war to peace – Nicolson emphasizes obstacles to be overcome at the conference. Sections of the book are entitled “Delay,” “Misfortune,” “Mistakes,” “Disorganization,” “Quarrel,” and finally, “Failure.” Rather than looking back on the conference to bring clarity to the events, he designates confusion as the abiding motif of the proceedings: Here again I was faced with difficulty. I realized the impossibility at this stage of furnishing any connected narrative of the conference in terms either of subject or of time-sequence. On the one hand many vital documents are still unavailable, and on the other hand the consecutive method would create no accurate impression. The important point to realize about the Paris Peace Conference is its amazing inconsequence, the complete absence of any consecutive method of negotiation or even imposition. The actual history of the conference will one day be written in authoritative and readable form. What may remain unrecorded is the atmosphere of those unhappy months, the mists by which we were enshrouded. My study, therefore, is a study in fog. (6)

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The studies published in the fifteen years after the Peace Conference, he observes, fail to record the difficulties faced by the negotiators: “from all these books I have derived the impression that something essential was absent, and I am convinced that this vital omission was the omission of the element of confusion” (6). The conference fails to create global geopolitical stability through debate alone. He concludes that the “conference, in its essence, was the imposition by a group of victorious Powers of certain articles of surrender upon a group of defeated Powers” (32). Nicolson fears that the negotiations are in fact impositions and that the treatment of aggressors at the conference will lead to another war. He is careful not to adopt a triumphant tone in these pages, since triumph and winning belong to warfare, whereas consensus and conciliation are more appropriate to peace and diplomacy. In negotiation, there is not so much a winning party as a gradual realization of common interests and common conclusions. The gerund in Nicolson’s title, Peacemaking 1919, indicates an ongoing process rather than a final and lasting state of peace. When Nicolson refers to his participation at the conference, he represents himself both as a private observer and as an envoy of the British Foreign Office. Nicolson links private character to public events throughout this account to demonstrate their interdependence. In diplomatic matters, he explains, an envoy’s character has international consequences. He therefore advises potential diplomats to cultivate their character in view of their global role. In his account of the Peace Conference, Nicolson reads the comportment of fellow delegates as representative of the ways that their political strategies are shaped and affected by character. Observing the representatives of the Five Powers ratifying a treaty with Austria, Nicolson writes: Down with Balfour to the Quai D’Orsay. There ... the fate of the AustroHungarian Empire is finally settled. Hungary is partitioned by these five distinguished gentlemen – indolently, irresponsibly partitioned – while the experts watch anxiously – while Balfour, in the intervals of dialectics on secondary points, relapses into somnolence – while Lansing draws hobgoblins upon his writing pad, Clemenceau says nothing during all this. He sits at the edge of his chair and leans his two blue-gloved hands down upon the map. (139)

The repetition of “while” in the same sentence registers the simultaneity of responses that may or may not have a bearing on the fate of Europe. Nicolson sees Arthur James Balfour’s lack of attention to the grave stakes of the proceedings as a warning about future misunderstandings. Nicolson becomes more attentive to the precise details of the

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wording, in proportion to Balfour’s inattentiveness, to avoid mistakes and omissions. Commenting on Woodrow Wilson’s character, he notes that “his sensitiveness to press criticisms” shapes the way he uses his aides and experts (139). He consults them for information. To Nicolson, this consciousness about the press is a weak point in Wilson’s character, and he uses this knowledge to anticipate the political results of future negotiations at the congress. Nicolson’s account shows that during conferences, delegates are engaged in multiple kinds of observation: they witness and gauge the direction of the proceedings while monitoring one another, not only in their official state positions, but as characters in an international drama. It is impossible to know whether they are genuinely unconcerned or just feigning a lack of interest. The continuities between national character and national policy were of particular concern to Nicolson in the 1930s. In 1935, in a comic article in The Listener entitled “As Others See Us: How the English Appear to the Foreign Mind,” he sketched English character types as they were understood by different European nations. While this may seem to be an imprecise practice in diplomacy, Nicolson wants to understand how different nations perceive one another. Peter Mandler, in his study of the English national character, finds that there was an increased preoccupation with character in the 1930s; discussions of national character abounded in the press. David Low, the satirical cartoonist for the Evening Standard, regularly represented the British as conservative, bellicose, blustery “Colonel Blimps,” an image that Nicolson found worrisome. As Mandler explains, in the interwar period, many Britons wanted to find an alternative to the “outdated image of ‘John Bull’ or the ‘English gentleman,’ neither of whom represented the true national character any longer. A new image had to be propagated, something closer to the ‘Little Man,’ who was not cold, aloof, imposing, and arrogant at all, but kindly, a bit shy, very human, possibly more like his Continental equivalents” (181). Nicolson favoured the new image of the “Little Man,” not far removed from either the Common Man or the Little Englander, and perhaps an amalgam of the two. In Nicolson’s view, the promulgation of the Little Man, as an image, might even be helpful to the goals of British foreign policy. Although the revelation of character is part of Nicolson’s project, he considers the concealment of character and private opinion to be an integral part of the presentation of British identity. Further connecting national character and foreign policy, he finds that concealment is also a feature of British diplomacy. He explains that “there is nothing more damaging to precision in international relations than friendliness between Contracting Parties ... Diplomacy is the art of negotiating

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documents in a ratifiable and therefore dependable form. It is by no means the art of conversation” (Peacemaking 208). In matters of international relations, Nicolson concludes, the individual character and private intention of the envoy should remain illegible even as diplomats must cultivate the skill of decoding the character of others through the observation of their behaviour and their words. As a diplomat, Nicolson fashions a public persona that enacts the sincerity of state representation rather than his private misgivings. In his later studies of diplomacy and in his essay on biography, Nicolson privileges self-effacement as a trait of both diplomats and biographers. In The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1953), Nicolson finds that even as meticulous observers and recorders, state envoys occupy a liminal subject-position vis-à-vis political events. In their liminality, both ambassadors and diplomats exercise a number of different functions: they act as emissaries and informants, but they are also negotiators and interpreters who influence the course of events. As “the chief channel of communication between his own government and that to which he is accredited ... [the ambassador] remains the intermediary who alone can explain the purposes and motives of one government to another. The ambassador’s opinion, judgment and authority to suggest a course of action are central to his work” (Evolution of Diplomatic Method 82). Diplomats observe and record events as they happen; they use language for peacemaking rather than for warfare. From a position of dispassionate objectivity, they advocate the continuation of discussion and negotiations with an eye to mutual benefits. In his 1939 manual on diplomatic practice, Diplomacy, a book that ran through multiple editions, Nicolson warns against vanity as a dangerous trait in the professional envoy, since it interferes with detachment: A diplomatist may be truthful, accurate, calm, patient, good-tempered, but he is not an ideal diplomatist unless he be also modest. The dangers of vanity in a negotiator can scarcely be exaggerated. It tempts him to disregard the advice or opinions of those who may have had longer experience of a country, or of a problem that he possesses himself. It renders him vulnerable to the flattery or the attacks of those with whom he is negotiating. It encourages him to take too personal a view of the nature and purposes of his functions. (63)

Vanity, according to Nicolson, can threaten the envoy’s professional detachment. In an essay on biography, he likewise counsels biographers to practise self-concealment and detachment such as diplomats

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ought to possess: “Biography is always a collaboration between the author and his subject; always there must be the reflection of one temperament in the mirror of another. The biographer should thus be careful not to permit his own personality to intrude too markedly upon the personality that he is describing” (“The Practice of Biography” 153). In this conceptualization of biography, close observation of a subject is as revealing of the observer as it is of the subject. This practice is also helpful to the diplomat. In these strictures, Nicolson echoes Ernst Satow, who advises in his Guide to Diplomatic Practice that “a good diplomatist will always endeavour to put himself in the position of the person with whom he is treating, and try to imagine what he would wish, do and say, under these circumstances” (Satow 145). According to the seventeenth-century French diplomat François de Callières, whom Satow cites approvingly, an ambassador should remain firm in his convictions while being supple enough to see matters from the foreign sovereign’s point of view: “Il faut qu’il se dépouille en quelque sorte de ses propres sentiments pour se mettre en la place du Prince avec qui il traite, qu’il se transforme pour ainsi dire en lui” (Satow 145).1 Nicolson echoes Callières’s insistence on cultivating the skill to understand the position of the other negotiating party because it offers a diplomatic advantage. Nicolson, however, considers that the behaviour of envoys at diplomatic congresses and conferences does not necessarily reveal the key to their character and their motives. Character may only appear in private life. He writes in his essay The Development of English Biography, published in 1928 as part of Leonard Woolf’s Lectures on Literature series, that “it is also important to be able to visualize a person, not in the set pictures of official busts and portraits, but in the more illuminating attitudes of ordinary life” (158). This comment sheds light on Nicolson’s unusual pairing of historical account and diary in Peacemaking 1919. Whereas the historical text and the representations of diplomacy in the press offer official information, the diary, as well as the novel, illuminates those attitudes of ordinary life that shape an envoy’s approach to negotiations. His representation of the Paris Peace Conference can be read as an example of modernist multi-generic life-writing, combining third-person autobiography and diary entries as a way of capturing the multiple angles that contribute to successful diplomatic missions. Rather than adopting the tone of victory, Nicolson concludes that the conference failed to create conditions for peace in the long term. He thinks of the conference as an unfinished event: while some issues are resolved, further negotiation will be necessary to stave off future violence.

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Public Faces Just as he had observed and recorded the personalities and discussions of the representatives of the Five Powers ratifying treaties in 1919, Nicolson turns to fiction to scrutinize British civil servants in Public Faces. Set in the future – June 1939 – the narrative takes place over the course of a few days and follows high-ranking Foreign Office envoys as they grapple with the consequences of a series of diplomatic misunderstandings. The title of Nicolson’s novel is borrowed from W.H. Auden’s poem “Public Faces,” which provides an epigraph to the novel: “private faces in public places are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.” Nicolson admired Auden’s political ideas and felt challenged by them. In a diary entry for 4 August 1933, Nicolson admits, “I follow Auden in his derision of patriotism, class distinctions, comfort, and all the ineptitudes of the middle classes. But when he also derides the other soft little harmless things which make my life comfortable, I feel a chill in the autumn wind ... I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian” (Diaries 121). Nicolson writes about the inception of Public Faces in his diaries. He hesitated about his subject. Initially, he considered writing a sequel to Some People. Thereafter he entertained the idea of a memoir in the style of Proust, but soon gave that up. Defeated by these efforts that led nowhere, he decided to write a novel, and planned it out in the pages of his diary as if fiction and life were twinned in his mind: “I think that it should be a dramatic, even a romantic novel. Dealing with diplomacy and character. A central figure, intense as Charles Siepmann ... who might be a Private Secretary. A dispute, say in Persia. A Secretary of State such as Joynson Hicks ... unctuous, evangelical, and insincere. A woman Under-Secretary of the type of Hilda Matheson” (Diaries 104). Many of the figures Nicolson looked to as models for his fiction worked for BBC radio. In the interwar years, Charles Siepmann developed educational programming at the BBC. Hilda Matheson, the first director of talks at the BBC, invited Nicolson to give on-air commentary and oversaw his first forays in the medium; Matheson subsequently published a pioneering study called Broadcasting (1933). William Joynson-Hicks, who died in 1932, had served as home secretary in the Conservative government, and had earned a reputation for moral puritanism after cracking down on nightclubs, literature that he deemed immoral, even proposed revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. Nicolson’s diplomatic novel features appearances by such historical figures, much as Some People featured imaginative portraits of people whom Nicolson had encountered in his public career.

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According to his son Nigel, Nicolson wrote Public Faces in three months in the summer of 1932, and immediately afterwards began working on Peacemaking 1919. The two books are connected by their interest in exploring the details of diplomatic negotiation and in their retrospective vision of diplomacy in the early part of the twentieth century. The premise of the novel is futuristic and only mildly far-fetched: exercising their mining rights in the Abu Saad concession, a region of Iran (still known as Persia in 1935), the British have discovered a rare mineral with powerful properties. The British aeronautical division, under the auspices of the air minister, Charles Pantry, develop an alloy from this rare mineral to create new materials: “the Livingstone Alloy had been described as introducing a revolution in aeronautical construction” (Public Faces 29). The uses of this alloy are not only benign. Another champion of the new technology, Lord Lympne, “insisted that with this explosion chamber the problem of the rocket aeroplane was finally solved” (16) and that the new material would create a “weapon of adventure such as no British Government had ever possessed before” (17). The British Air Ministry then secretly builds a rocket-propelled aircraft, which closely resembles an atomic weapon. Politically, they believe, such a weapon would ensure British power on the international stage, in what looks suspiciously like the logic of weapons that was ubiquitous during the Cold War. Despite its humour and detachment, Public Faces dwells on the serious implications of diplomacy. In the novel, the failure of the Foreign Office to cooperate with Cabinet and with the League of Nations results in the detonation of an atomic weapon. Sir Charles Pantry and the Air Ministry decide to test their new weapon, which they launch from a ship. The bomb accidentally hits the east coast of the United States: The exact range of the explosion remains to this day a matter of some controversy. The records at the Air Ministry are ... precise enough. It is clear that it had at first been decided to release the atomic bomb at a point in the western Atlantic which is known to oceanographers as Nares Deep ... these calculations, in several important particulars, were at fault. The tidal wave which overwhelmed the cities of Charleston, Myrtle Beach and Mount Pleasant, involve[d] a loss of eighty thousand lives ... (216)

Although one of the fictional diplomats, Jane Campbell, eventually manipulates the press and a series of events to avert a global war, Nicolson’s narrative nonetheless imagines the horrific consequences of a thirst for power that pushes Britain to build and test arms of massive destruction.

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Nicolson’s novel looks back to a period of which he had first-hand knowledge. In the mid-1920s, he was counsellor at the Tehran legation in Iran and grew increasingly critical of British foreign policy while in that post. As a result of a letter he wrote in 1926, he was demoted and shortly thereafter resigned from the Foreign Office. Moreover, Public Faces deals fictionally with the historical failure of the Anglo-Iranian agreement of 1919, which aimed to create better relations between the two countries. The dispute, eventually brought to the permanent court of international justice at The Hague, was one of the first to be arbitrated by the newly formed international tribunal. The novel dramatizes the postwar quest for sovereignty of many so-called minor nations, some of which also sought to throw off the yoke of British control and protectionism. The novel also tests the ability of the League of Nations to arbitrate a global crisis of this proportion. In this regard, Nicolson’s work derives from first-hand experience. As the diplomatic historian T.G. Otte points out, after the Paris Peace Conference, “Nicolson was appointed Private Secretary to Sir Eric Drummond, the first Secretary-General of the newly formed League of Nations, and his idealist preference for the League was coupled with a firm belief in the necessity of strong links with the United States” (152). In the 1930s, as Nicolson was writing this novel, he once again grappled with the viability of the League of Nations as an effective and consequential negotiating body. Public Faces re-creates, fictionally, a scenario in which the League of Nations would be called upon to intervene in an international dispute. The narrative tests the effectiveness of diplomacy against the most destructive of modern forces: nuclear weapons. The case is complicated, however, by a duplicitous British government. Instead of cooperating with the League, the fictional prime minister, Spencer Furnivall, uses the crisis to renew global British dominance. Furnivall and his Cabinet would like it to be widely known that the British possess atomic weapons and that those weapons give the British an advantage in bids for global power. Members of the British Foreign Office are unable to contain the ambitions of the prime minister and the Air Ministry. In fact, the novel satirizes Walter Bullinger, the fictional secretary of state for the Foreign Office, and his principal private secretary, Arthur Peabody. Like his government, Bullinger is at first enchanted by the prospect of Britain possessing atomic weapons with devastating capacities: “The Cabinet, fourteen months ago, had been informed by the greatest British physicist that the Livingstone alloy rendered probable, or at least possible, the construction of an atomic bomb. The possession of the Abu Saad concession gave Britain a monopoly of this alloy: it thereby, as Bullinger had pointed out, placed Britain in the sole possession of

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the greatest engine of destruction ever known” (21). Despite knowing “the true proportions of the Abu Saad question” (12) and despite his role as a diplomat, Bullinger does nothing to stop the unfolding events. As the narrator explains, Bullinger’s hesitation stems from a disharmony between his public and private selves: “There was his outside self – confident, convivial, voluble: there was his inside self – dispirited, critical, tongue-tied. He was painfully aware of this divergence” (14). Narratively, Nicolson treats the idiosyncrasies of character as variables that affect political events. Bullinger “was wrestling not only merely with the intricacies of a velvet dinner-jacket, not only with the impending intricacies of world-disaster, but with the jarring inner intricacies of his own temperament” (15). Trivialities – what jacket to wear for dinner – clash with problems of global proportions. Everything hinges on the personality of ambassadors and negotiators. For different reasons, Bullinger’s ineffectual colleague, Arthur Peabody, prefers to interfere as little as possible in the crisis: For seven years now he had been the Principal Private Secretary to his Majesty’s Private Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs. He would, on occasions, repeat this formula to himself, deriving pleasure from its rich alliterations ... He had always (and perhaps rightly) visualized foreign policy as a slow but majestic river, flowing sedately in a uniform direction, requiring merely, at moments of crisis, a glib but scrupulous rectification of the banks. Yet, even then, only in places; and even then, not for very long. (5)

Peabody’s approach rules out direct action; therefore, he does not refer the crisis to the League of Nations. Deferring to his superiors, he generally believes that the Abu Saad issue will disappear if ignored. For Nicolson, a central difficulty of diplomacy is that events are affected by the abilities and private dispositions of individual diplomats. The narrator of Public Faces reflects that “the course of events is determined not so much by the conscious processes of human volition as by the unavowed weaknesses of human character. Had [Peabody] been less preoccupied with the more pleasant, the more flattering, aspects of man’s endeavour, he would have observed those eddies of chance, those swirls of foolishness, those whirlpools of inadvertence, into which his current of events had, in those first days of June, been twisted and twirled” (124). Both characters refuse to adapt their methods to meet a situation which requires quick manoeuvring. In this regard, Nicolson mocks the diplomats’ styles and adherence to outdated schools of diplomacy.

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Bullinger’s and Peabody’s approaches are contrasted with that of Jane Campbell, a “new woman” in the Foreign Office and a skilled diplomat. Although her interest in procedure is satirized, Campbell is the only methodical – and successful – diplomat in the novel. Campbell thinks of Peabody as a “pneumatic brake”; both he and Bullinger have “nineteenth-century minds” (28). While the other characters turn away from the complexity of the crisis, Campbell investigates the history of British dealings in Persia. Foreign Office documents provide her with a history of the roots of the dispute. She becomes familiar with the details of the “Muscat Treaty of 1857,” which granted the concession of Abu Saad to the British (31). Her analysis of the case, drafted and presented to Cabinet, turns out to be correct. Campbell eventually averts war by leaking information about the British atomic weapon to the press and issuing an anonymous public apology for the testing of missiles. Unlike her colleagues, who favour evasion over action, Campbell skilfully stages a diplomatic coup that results in disarmament negotiations, which the Foreign Office had sought all along. Nicolson’s editor, praising the novel, claims that “Public Faces reveals as no previous novelist had ever done what went on behind the scenes of diplomatic life” (Lammers 233). Despite this praise at the time of its publication, there has been very little critical discussion of Nicolson’s novel in theorizations of modernism. In Public Faces, as in Peacemaking 1919, Nicolson eschews the historical chronicle in favour of a more modern form that captures the seemingly fleeting and unimportant details and incidents that shape events. As Otte claims, Nicolson’s style in his non-fiction and fiction depends on experimental mixing of techniques: “treatment of his subject is both descriptive and analytical, combining biography, often in an impressionistic Stracheyesque manner, with historical narrative and analytical efforts” (155). By using a cinematic approach in Public Faces as in Peacemaking 1919, Nicolson represents the multiple, simultaneous discussions that constitute diplomatic work, and the speed at which negotiations happen. While tracking different characters, the setting shifts abruptly from England to France and Russia. This quick cross-cutting conveys narrative simultaneity, suspense, and the pace of international relations that unfold in different places at the same time. Walter Bullinger reflects that “diplomacy ... was almost wholly a matter of correct timing” (113). Just as Nicolson had wondered if film might convey the time-pressure of events in Peacemaking 1919, in Public Faces, the action turns on a series of timed responses, careful footwork, and calculated messages. Officials wonder how much the other envoys know. Unlike Nicolson’s historical approach to the Paris Peace Conference, Public Faces compresses time – the events occur in

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only a few days – and focuses on a specific “crisis,” a term that diplomats dread. Even though it compresses time, Public Faces can be read as continuous with Nicolson’s historical studies of diplomacy insofar as all these fictional and non-fictional works examine the motivations of key players in as much detail as they scrutinize events. Nicolson’s experience as a diplomat shapes his representational choices. In Public Faces, individual personalities threaten longstanding traditions and protocols, chronology is upended as time is compressed into key days and moments, and ephemeral details are given as much importance as matters of global significance. The League of Nations In Public Faces, Harold Nicolson creates a fictional case-study to test out the new diplomatic methods outlined at the Paris Peace Conference. Critical of the British response to the League of Nations, the novel begins with the acknowledgment of error committed by Cabinet: “Obviously, on that April day in 1938, they should have taken one of two courses. Either they should at once have resigned and allowed a new National Government to cope with this devastating invention. Or else, as a pacifist Cabinet, they should have summoned the Assembly of the League of Nations, and laid before it the potentialities and the details of the whole discovery” (21). The British fear the involvement of the League of Nations, since the League would advocate for the sovereignty of all Persian territory, and Britain would lose its concession. As France, Russia, Germany, and the United States seek to curtail British claims on the Abu Saad region, the air minister weighs “the vital interests of the nation” against the opinions of “the cranks and internationalists of Geneva” (72). In this sense, Public Faces highlights Nicolson’s critique of British imperial power and continued British resistance to the authority of the League of Nations. Even as Nicolson championed the League of Nations, his fiction narrates the difficult transition of Britain from an imperial nation to a cooperative player in the emerging, postwar, global order. Looking back to the conference, Nicolson thought that in 1919 Wilson “‘had sought to apply to international relations the principles of American democracy, [yet] the diplomatists continued undismayed to weave the old tapestry of alliances and combinations, of big or little ententes, of pacts and conventions’” (qtd. in Otte 153). In Public Faces, the British government considers the development of its new weapon as an advantage, since it could help Britain to regain its position as a global leader. Sir Charles Pantry, the air minister, insists that “if we were provoked, if we were

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attacked, this deposit would give us an advantage, an almost overwhelming advantage, against any aggressor” (19). The British government makes a decision not to bring the information about the discovery of a new alloy to the League of Nations, which ultimately provokes an international crisis. Not sharing information escalates, rather than allays, global security risks. Nicolson’s two books about diplomacy coincide with momentous changes in modern international relations. Jeremy Black contends that, in the years following the creation of the League of Nations, tension between internationalist and nationalist sentiments ran high: “Diplomats were expected to encourage international arbitration and become practitioners of what was seen as the science of public international law ... Yet internationalism appeared to clash with the defence of national interests, a theme that was to be repeated to the present day, albeit to a different tune and with different players” (179). Nicolson’s novel not only underlines the centrality of imperial ambitions to British foreign policy, even after the Great War, but also highlights the concerns with disarmament which were a matter of international public debate in the 1930s. As Andrew Webster states, “The issue never faded from prominence, even as the war receded; for most of two decades, international debate on disarmament was pursued in the forums provided by and surrounding the League of Nations” (141). In Public Faces, Nicolson foresees the inability of the open, new diplomacy to maintain peaceful relations among European nations. He criticizes British foreign policy for being resistant to international cooperation. Far from defending the British, the novel takes aim at the inertia of the Foreign Office and the self-serving national policies that sustained Britain throughout the 1930s. As the modern discipline of international relations was shaped in the first decades of the twentieth century, it was tested by conflicts and negotiations. Nicolson adapts literary form to the movements of international negotiation. His account of the Paris Peace Conference sheds light on the uses of detached observation while also being preoccupied with questions of international responsibility and imperialist domination. Peacemaking 1919 is both a historical document and an act of self-presentation; in Public Faces, Nicolson links private character to public events. In both these texts, Nicolson traces the geopolitical consequences of the diplomat’s character. He worries that an approach to international relations that seeks triumph may impress the public, but it does not lead to lasting agreements. Prone to doubting the efficacy of the new diplomacy, he chastises international congresses for not effectively arbitrating national interests against international benefits of

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agreements. In Public Faces, Nicolson’s prophetic vision articulates the details of world crisis, while criticizing the instability of diplomacy to see beyond national boundaries. In both these texts, despite his scepticism about international cooperation, Nicolson suggests that diplomacy is not exceptional, that it should not only be a last resort. He insists on the fallibility of envoys and on the need for a gradual, constant, and everyday diplomacy. NOTE 1 My translation: “The diplomat must rid himself of his thoughts and feelings in order to put himself in the place of the sovereign with whom he negotiates, even transform himself into this other person.” The slightly old-fashioned French is Callières’.

4 “Diplomatic Dispatch Style”: Towards a New Aesthetic of the Novel isabelle daunais

In an article entitled “Paysages,” published in the 1 July 1927 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française, critic Albert Thibaudet draws his readers’ attention to a literary movement that he has seen taking shape over some years. The movement has no name, and it is in no way organized. It is not, Thibaudet explains, a school or a doctrine, as were pre-war symbolism or unanimism in literature, or cubism in painting. Nor does he think this movement can be called an “uproar” – t­he word he uses to describe surrealism, which he sees as already defunct: “There are uproars and there are movements. Surrealism was an uproar. Let us look at movements: real movements, which battle stability and rest to the death” (1176).1 By choosing the word “uproars,” he alludes, surely, to Baudelaire’s poem “The Owls”: “They teach the sage a lesson here / That in the world he ought to fear / All movement, uproar, turbulence.” Thibaudet turns his attention to one movement in particular, which he describes as having begun in Paris during the war at the Maison de la Presse. Founded in 1916, the Maison de la Presse was created by Philippe Berthelot, who was widely regarded as the leading French diplomat throughout the Great War and the postwar period. Secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1920 and 1922 and again between 1925 and 1932, he was one of the architects of the L ­ ocarno Treaties (1925), which set the borders of Germany, and of the BriandKellogg Pact (1928), according to which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve their conflicts. During the war, he brought together all of the communication and propaganda services of the Quai d’Orsay and the Ministry of War in a single location, the Maison de la Presse, at 3 rue François 1er, a stone’s throw from the Grand Palais. This section of the Quai d’Orsay communications branch prepared press materials, tracts, and brochures to facilitate the work of emissaries, personally recruited by Berthelot, who were sent abroad to counter German

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propaganda. In addition to being Quai d’Orsay informers, these envoys were supposed to establish contact with intellectual circles and to spread French thought in foreign countries. Berthelot also enlisted for the cause, albeit more informally, writers, directors, actors, and others involved in cultural production. For example, Jacques Copeau and the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier troupe were sent to the United States to compete with the Deutsche Theater, which was already busy mounting German productions on the far side of the Atlantic. When actor Lucien Guitry was invited to Montevideo, he was provided with films about the Battle of the Somme and Battle of Verdun (Barré 293). Berthelot’s efforts on behalf of cultural diplomacy did not stop there. In 1920 – ­once again under the authority of the Quai d’Orsay and once again with the aim of spreading French culture abroad – h ­ e established the Service des Œuvres Françaises à l’Étranger (Jeannesson). During and after the Great War, the Maison de la Presse was therefore home to a literary network which was just as aware of current affairs in a rapidly changing world as it was active on the sidelines of traditional artistic combat and debate. Thibaudet described it as “An odd and likable place, whimsical and useful, a comfortable writers’ clubhouse” (1177).2 Various literary publications orbited around the Maison de la Presse, including La Revue européenne (1923–31), edited by novelist Edmond Jaloux, and Les Nouvelles littéraires (1922–85), founded by literary critic Maurice Martin du Gard. Some writers held official titles; Jean ­Giraudoux headed the Service des Œuvres Françaises à l’Étranger from 1921 to 1924. Paul Claudel, Paul Morand, André Gide, Jean ­Cocteau, and Raymond Radiguet were all friends of Berthelot. Two other “clubhouses” complemented the Maison de la Presse. During the Peace Conference in 1919, the private mansion of successful retailer Georges Dufayel housed the Cercle Français de la Presse Étrangère (French Foreign Press Club). At the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme, Proust regularly extended invitations to dine; numerous writers therefore congregated at his or others’ tables. At these three meeting places, novelists, journalists, diplomats, and cultural attachés crossed paths; out of these meetings and intersections developed the movement that interested Thibaudet. Not animated by ideological conviction or aesthetic manifestos of any kind, this movement is characterized by a style of writing that Thibaudet calls diplomatic dispatch literature or “la littérature de la valise”: I mean of course the diplomatic pouch. This is a cosmopolitan literature alongside which Turgenev and Bourget in Cosmopolis meld timelessly with Delphine and Corinne – ­a cosmopolitan literature that, beyond specific

“Diplomatic Dispatch Style”  87 languages to which one is prisoner, awaited the formation of a universal language of sleeper cars and cinema, auxiliary to the universal language of music, a cosmopolitan literature of trips, capital cities, beings that join in solidarity with the diplomatic vocation, just as, in a previous generation, the literature of stopovers and the sea joined in solidarity with the call to seafaring in Loti’s works. (1177–8)3

As an example of this literature, which he defines as “urban, super-­ urban” (1177–8), Thibaudet cites a passage from Partage de Midi (Break of Noon), by Paul Claudel. According to Thibaudet, this 1906 play is “the first work with a whiff of this contemporary diplomatic dispatch, as recognizable as a Mediterranean port” (1178).4 In the first act of Claudel’s play, the four principal characters – a­ diplomat, a travelling couple, and an adventurer  – t­alk on the bridge of an ocean liner en route to China. Suddenly smelling familiar fragrances floating over the Indian Ocean, one character exclaims: “I recognize the old East. For me it is what the department store of the Louvre is for the lady from a distant province, a place crammed with cloth and soap. India is just ahead of us. Don’t you hear it? It’s so crowded that you hear the flickering of millions of eyelids” (Claudel 64–5). For Thibaudet, these few sentences illustrate the new literature that he seeks to describe. Its essential characteristics are fluidity and rhythm: It’s a movement that jumps from one idea to another with images as the connecting thread. The symbol, correlative, even the direct image of this movement would be railroad, sea, and air routes woven around the planet on the world maps that you see in travel agencies. These routes harmonize with each other. Diplomatic dispatch style is born at the point where these two phenomena  – ­style and movement  – i­ntersect: in Paris, at the Quai d’Orsay, lifted to this optimum by the inherent intelligence of the place ... ­This disinterested global literature was born in Paris and of Paris, as naturally and as necessarily as Kipling’s imperial and imperialist global literature was born in London. (1179)5

Even if he thinks that Break of Noon predicts and paves the way for this movement, Thibaudet does not view Claudel as the best representative of diplomatic dispatch literature. Claudel, despite being a career diplomat, is too attached to his rural origins and his Christian faith to enter fully into capital cities and sleeping cars, to be an urbane writer flitting across time zones with grace and ease. If diplomatic dispatch literature presents a particular way of inhabiting and moving through space, a significant part of this style derives

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from agility and dexterity. Much of this style relies on modes of ­transportation – ­never anything less than express journeys, whether by rail or by car  – a­ s well as the deftness and refinement of those who deploy it. Diplomatic dispatch characters must be flexible and detached in order to be at home wherever they go. They arrive and depart as if circulation were a way of life. Nevertheless, they must know how to shine during their brief stops; wherever they go, they project their presence intensely. In Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Robert de Saint-Loup’s fluidity of movement strikes the Narrator the first time he sees him in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel in Balbec: “One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining-room of the hotel, plunged in semi-darkness ... ­when along the central gangway ... ­I saw, approaching, tall, slim, bare-necked, his head held proudly erect, a young man go past with searching eyes ... ­he was walking fast” (1:783). Saint-Loup is still in motion the last time he appears in the novel. Passing through Paris during the war, he briefly visits his friend: “Saint-Loup, arrived from the front and very shortly to return to it, had come to see me for a few moments only, and the mere announcement of his visit violently moved me” (3:779). Off once more, he dies at the front a few days later. For Thibaudet, the diplomatic dispatch style, characterized by duration and speed, requires a nearly aristocratic casualness. He recalls, in fact, that “the former tradition of the Quai [d’Orsay] required, insofar as possible, that its diplomats be well born” (1179),6 and that their genteel credentials go hand in hand with a sense of being part of a grand scheme of time, above the ordinary, unforeseen events and necessities of life. Although the aristocracy, at the end of the war, no longer served as the chief source of diplomats as it had in the nineteenth century, there remained a sort of aristocratic way of being and existing that defined a career diplomat. Diplomats perpetuate the tradition of living in a time apart: slow-moving, suspended, free of constraints. In dispatch style, aristocratic nonchalance fuses with the speed of the Orient Express and the cosmopolitanism of ocean liners and hotels. Instead of tempering or balancing the modern world of speed, this approach to time transforms diplomacy into a world of its own. For this reason, Proust’s work appears to Thibaudet not only to be assimilable to diplomatic dispatch style, without belonging entirely to it, but also to be a better representation of that style than the work of Claudel: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, his probing into time, much as the gothic architects, according to Rodin, probed the sky, finds a forceful complement in the probings of diplomatic dispatch literature into planetary oneness and the exploration of space. The nave crosses these transepts.

“Diplomatic Dispatch Style”  89 The sense of space and the sense of time cannot coexist to their fullest extent within the same author, but they do coexist in the genius of an era and in the landscape of a literature in the same way as water and stone. (1180)7

Defined in this way, dispatch literature unfolds in two planes: time and space. Spatially, it occupies a planetary scale, where all paths, all exchanges, and all destinations are imaginable. Temporally, it belongs to an era old rather than new, a time when those who belonged to the leisure class – ­rich, worldly, and well travelled – ­knew each other by secret signs and who, regardless of where they were, always had somewhere else to be. In an extravagant but pertinent analogy, Thibaudet compares diplomatic dispatch writers to vacationers in a palatial hotel, where cosmopolitan space overlaps with aristocratic time: In this palace there are arrivals and departures ... ­Latest arrival: Princess Bibesco, for whom the ground floor suite is reserved. Mr. Valery Larbaud who has been staying at the hotel since its inauguration, of which he was part (he was one of the first with Barnabooth), took one of the 200 rooms and 200 bathrooms. Mr. Paul Morand is leaving soon: there is his luggage. He declares that once his method has caught on, his cravats imitated, as it were, he will give up his work, his group of subjects, and move on to something new. That’s just fine. Giraudoux did the same when Bella replaced Juliette, and he was rewarded with success. Moreover, one does not actually see Giraudoux in the palace until teatime ... ­Luggage freshly set down by the bus – ­I look upon it with curiosity – ­is plastered with American stickers, Quarantième Étage by Luc Durtain, arriving from America! a traveller to remember. (1182)8

If diplomatic dispatch literature is a “movement,” as Thibaudet claims, where is it headed? What direction are the bearers of this diplomatic bag moving in? Which future novel – ­the movement, it should be noted, is fundamentally novelistic – ­might be pulled out of this mysterious satchel? Or, to draw out the meaning of Thibaudet’s metaphor further, what instructions does the dispatch style contain for a diplomatic mission that promotes the movement without prescribing a program? To answer these questions, the features of diplomatic dispatch novels have to be distinguished from what they are not. If speed and movement are key to these novels, racing around Europe or globetrotting is not, in the end, their essential feature. Thibaudet counts among the earliest examples of diplomatic dispatch literature Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth. Presented as a travel journal, Larbaud’s novel tells the story of a young dandy at the wheel of his car, nicknamed Voracious, eating

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up the miles between Florence and San Marino, Venice and Trieste, Moscow and St Petersburg, London and Copenhagen. Thibaudet, however, does not mention Octave Mirbeau’s La 628-E8, another car novel written in the form of a journal, published in 1907. Personal preference may be at play, or Thibaudet may have limited himself to just one example. Yet the opening sentences of Mirbeau’s and Larbaud’s novels clearly indicate what distinguishes an older, perhaps outmoded, novelistic style from the dispatch style. La 628-E8 opens with the following “Notice to the Reader”: Here, then, is the journal of a motor tour through parts of France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany; and, especially, through a small part of myself. Yet is it really a journal? Is it even a tour? Perhaps it is simply a tissue of daydreams, memories, impressions and stories that have nothing to do with the countries visited, but [are] simply brought to mind by the recollection of a face, a passing landscape, a half-heard voice singing or weeping on the wind? (Sketches of a Journey 12)

By contrast, Larbaud begins his account without the burden of doubt that afflicts Mirbeau: Florence, Hotel Carlton. Lung’Arno Amerigo Vespucci, 11 April 190... I have been nearly four hours in this curious American town built in the style of the Italian Renaissance, where there are too many Germans. Yesterday morning I was in Berlin; and Stéphane stood on the platform of the Anhalt station and waved his big handkerchief. I crossed, in the Harmonika-Zug, a Germany still hesitating between winter and spring, – ­with her dear little nose chilled and cold under her veil. I bowed to her tenderly: au revoir, my beloved Germania ... ­When I return the chestnut trees by the restaurants will be casting a strong shadow over the tables. (9)9

The novels differ in more than just tone and style. Unlike Mirbeau’s introspective and lyrical opening, Larbaud uses images to jump from one idea to another (to return to Thibaudet’s formulation). They are also distinguished by the narrators’ relation to the images around them. In La 628-E8, this relation is characterized by vertigo and wonder, similar to the Proustian narrator’s experience of the magic of the telephone and the quasi-demiurgic power of the first telephone operators, “the All-Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them” (Remembrance

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2:134). For Mirbeau, technology also presents something marvellous and captivating: From the car, there’s barely time to see the difference in the leaves. And you don’t see the flowers in the hedgerows ... ­These trees flying by, they’re just trees, nothing more ... ­and they rush by, flash past ... ­Who cares if they’re called oak, acacia, elm, or plane trees? They rush by, that’s all ... ­They stream towards us, speed towards us, in a spin. It’s as if ... ­they’re going to hit the car and go right through it. ... ­they’ve become reflections, shadows, that flit by. The plain too dematerializes, swept up in an eerie rush. (200)10

A diplomatic dispatch character is not so easily impressed. He does not travel for the sake of thrills; he knows the world too well for that. Even though he is sometimes exhilarated by the velocity and diversity of travel, as is Barnabooth at the wheel of Voracious, he is the master of the situation and of himself wherever he goes. Always on top of things, he feels at home everywhere. If he travels from one country to the next with ease, the world having no borders for him, it is not because space “dematerializes,” as in a hallucination or a dream, where everything becomes as substanceless as a shadow. Rather, it is because he dematerializes and flows like a shadow. For Mirbeau, the world blurs; for Larbaud, who understands dispatch as a subjective effect, the character himself turns into a blur. Leaving Italy and wondering about his next destination  – L ­ ichtenstein, Montenegro  – B ­ arnabooth chooses Vienna on a whim because of a fleeting memory: But immediately the abundant life of Vienna invaded my memory and I thought that after buying a lot of useless things in the shops of the Kohlmarkt, I could go and see more of Serbia and Bulgaria, which I once passed through in the Orient Express and can only remember by vast melancholy fields of roses ... ­and mountains harsh and bitter to look at though they conceal a very delicate life: on the little stations I saw young boys and girls dressed in charming costumes, going along with great painted carts, with solid wheels, as I imagine the chariots in the Homeric poems. (212–13)

Whereas Mirbeau’s hero, always on the verge of vertigo, would make a poor member of the diplomatic corps, Barnabooth moves seamlessly between missions and embassies as if he were the very flower of diplomacy. Diplomatic dispatch characters remain aloof; they are not motivated by psychology. Unlike the authors named by Thibaudet in the palace

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of arrivals and departures, adventurers, such as those who appear in Blaise Cendrars’s novels, do not exactly fit the criteria for diplomatic dispatch travellers. At first glance, Cendrars might seem a likely guest in the palatial hotel imagined by Thibaudet. Cendrars’s Moravagine (1926) contains some of the keys to open the doors to this palace: characters with diverse European origins, a story about a chase around the world that leads the two heroes – t­ he criminal Moravagine and Doctor Raymond – f­ rom Russia to America, in a syncopated style evoking the relentless rhythm of train travel. But Cendrars highlights crime and madness, which place him more on the line linking Dostoyevsky to Céline and Malraux than on the one linking Berthelot’s writer friends to one another. Highly mobile and always ready to leave at the drop of a hat, Cendrars’s characters are nonetheless too limited by their psychological constraints, their desires, and their impulses to belong to diplomatic dispatch literature. Dispatch characters make themselves perpetually available for new escapades; they demonstrate a very slight, if not utter, lack of responsibility to anyone, even themselves. The action in diplomatic dispatch literature does not involve the characters personally. Between characters and actions falls a separation that is in itself one of the most striking characteristics of the movement perceived by Thibaudet. For these characters, the ever-present possibility of picking up and leaving – ­returning to home port or going elsewhere, dropping a losing game for a better offer – d ­ efines their actions and their thinking. As Harold Nicolson spells out in Diplomacy, the seven qualities of a good diplomat are honesty, precision, calmness, good temper, patience, modesty, and loyalty (104–26). Characters in diplomatic dispatch literature reflect these cardinal virtues in many ways, especially with regard to evenness of temper. “The impassivity which characterizes the ideal diplomatist ... ­[and] the manner of suspended judgement, of sceptical tolerance, of passionless detachment which denotes the trained diplomatist” (117) are shared by the characters in novels by Valery Larbaud, Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand, and Luc Durtain. They are always above things, beyond others, not so much in terms of what to think of the world but how to behave in it. Upon leaving Venice for Trieste, which then belonged to Austria, Barnabooth remarks to his travelling companion, the Marquis de Putouarey, that they will, as a consequence, be leaving Italy: Putouarey began: “There is a good deal to be said for and against ...” “No, there is nothing to be said for or against Italy: there is simply a good deal to be said. I can easily imagine the kind of fool who would

“Diplomatic Dispatch Style”  93 cavil at everything in a country and the other kind of fool who would admire everything. We are beyond that. At heart I think Italy the pleasantest country in the world. But what reason can I give for my preference? ... T ­ he people? I was going to say that the Italian people are the best civilization has to show. Idiotic. I like them and that is all. (199–200)

Similarly, in Jean Giraudoux’s novel Bella, the young hero Philippe Dubardeau, a character largely inspired by Philippe Berthelot, is thrilled to see his lover at the exit to the Metro every morning. He embraces her while Paris awakens to the work of labourers and to news of catastrophes around the world, as reported over the newswire: She got out at the Champs-Élysées station of the Metro, which at that hour of the morning was also the most exclusive, being almost entirely reserved for masons and plasterers, whose plaster she sometimes wore on her dress – ­her only cosmetic. I forgave her for allowing work to brush her in its passage. We embraced not in the atmosphere of the stock-markets, or in the musty odour of the foreign exchange and the racecourse, or the news published by the Temps and the Intransigent of a day already spoiled for men, but in the great uprush of information which every morning brings, earthquakes in Japan, a revolution in Brazil, or the sinking of a battle-ship. (27–8)

Of all the diplomatic dispatch authors, Paul Morand is undoubtedly the most shaped by the diplomatic world. In his works, independence is connected to the speed of travel and fleeting spaces. Named attaché to the London Embassy upon completing his studies, then assigned to the office of the minister of foreign affairs during the war, he was recruited by Berthelot in 1921 to become head of the literary and artistic section of the Service des Œuvres Françaises à l’Étranger. That same year, he published his first work, a collection of three short stories entitled Tendres stocks. The book is usually remembered today for its preface by Proust – a­ reprint of an article published several months earlier in La Revue de Paris that dwells on Flaubert’s style rather than Morand’s stories. Proust had met Morand in 1915 through a friend working at the London embassy. If the action of the three stories that make up Tendres stocks still possesses the leisurely pace of the nineteenth century, in which Proust finds echoes of Flaubert’s “moving walkway” style (Essais et articles 283), this is clearly not the case in Open All Night, a collection of stories published the following year. Open All Night is suffused with the

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atmosphere of sleeping cars, which Thibaudet evokes as a signature of the diplomatic dispatch style. The first story, “Catalan Night,” begins on a train: I was going to travel with a lady. Half of her already adorned the compartment; the other half, thrust through the compartment door, still belonged to Lausanne station and to a delegation of men of diverse nationalities ... ­Bells jangled. Travelers glided over the asphalt ... ­The noise of the whistle pierced the compartment. The lady shook hands over the lowered window: a freckled Britannic hand, a fat German one, the parchment hand of a Russian, some slender Japanese fingers ... O ­ ne by one the train broke the handclasps, its hawsers, and slid onward, thus lightened. (Morand, Fancy Goods, Open All Night 65)

The story moves to Paris, where the narrator meets again the female traveller, Doña Remedios, then on to Barcelona, where she disappears. After waiting in vain for her all night in a hotel, in the early morning hours he hears of her arrest for attempted murder. The story ends with this unexplained detail; no further information about the cause or the nature of the event is disclosed. The other “nights” in the story – ­Turkish nights, Roman nights, six-day nights, Hungarian, Nordic – ­pass much the same way. On each occasion, the narrator meets a mysterious lady on a train or on a boat, in a hotel or in a bar. They wander the streets of a capital – C ­ onstantinople, Rome, or Budapest – b ­ efore the woman in question dies or disappears. It is impossible to know whether the narrator feels any sadness at this loss, because each story ends with the simple fact of her disappearance. In a slight variation on this motif, “The Nordic Night” ends just prior to the woman’s disappearance: “Aïno threw her arms around my neck. ‘You are an international pig,’ said Aïno. I took her in my arms. She remained there for the rest of the night; that is to say for something under ten minutes, for the sun, after a rapid ablution, was already upon us” (151). Coincidentally, A.O. Barnabooth also ends with a disappearance. After experiencing all sorts of intrigues on his travels through the cities of Europe and noting them in his journal, Larbaud’s hero decides to leave the Continent and give up writing. He marries a childhood friend, Conception Yarza, whom he comes upon during a trip to London. At the same time as he abandons writing, he announces his departure for South America: “I am going to land there as a private individual. I shall give my cabin ticket to a clerk of the Norddeutscher Lloyd on the landing-stage; for the first few days I shall put up like any ordinary European tourist, at the best hotel in the capital ... ­Then I shall take

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the road to my estates in the interior ... ­I shall not keep this diary any longer” (313–14). These interruptions – a­ rbitrary breaks in movement that could continue indefinitely – ­are one of the most prominent characteristics of diplomatic dispatch stories, where nothing, neither logic nor construction, steers towards a conclusion. In a world that offers itself up as a vast playground and a timeframe that puts them above everyday, ordinary, real life, diplomatic dispatch characters never have to fight or vanquish, win or lose. Instead, they come and go, enter and exit. As with Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, they know the “melancholy associated with ships” and the “bitterness of broken sympathies” (breakfasts at the Ritz, however, are replaced with “the chill one feels on waking up under tents”).11 New trips and encounters make them forget these moments of melancholy and unhappiness. Diplomatic dispatch narratives are based on endless movement, whose only possible form is therefore a brief interlude or the resumption of movement. In this regard, we might say, these narratives are largely related to performance. Slipping skilfully from one place to the next, the dispatch characters engage in a performance, as does the narration. The narratives strike a balance between the serious and the frivolous, as well as between drama and the absence of drama. They are sustained by a rhythm just quick enough to create the effect of speed, but moderate enough not to sacrifice the richness of description, whether of décor, costumes, or secondary characters. But in what way can a performance be a movement, as in Thibaudet’s description of diplomatic dispatch novels and stories? To come back to the original question, if it is indeed a movement, what is its destination? The idea that these works constitute a movement at all is certainly not shared by literary historians, who continue to give surrealism and its “uproar” a superior role in the literary history of the twentieth century. Within that same history, these diplomatic dispatch authors are marginal or forgotten. In Le roman, modes d’emploi, Henri Godard devotes the chapter on the novel of the 1920s to surrealist writers Philippe Soupault, Joseph Delteil, and Louis Aragon, and mentions only in passing the authors cited by Thibaudet. Some of these authors, mainly Morand but also Giraudoux to a lesser extent, found themselves on the wrong side of history during the Second World War; political contamination no doubt has lowered their canonical status. At the same time, diplomatic dispatch literature positions itself thematically and aesthetically in a zone beyond adventure. In that zone, there are changes of scene but no transformation of character. In many ways, dispatch novels skirt history, just as their characters depart for other destinations without any hint about what is left behind, unless it be a scent

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or a lingering memory. Like the spirit of diplomacy that they obliquely express, these novels are intended neither to take centre stage nor to leave a trace. Their success, from this point of view, is precisely in the way they remain unnoticed in the great scheme of history. By and large, they sneak past unobserved, even within their own era. Thibaudet’s essay is one of the few records of their passing. Could Thibaudet have been wrong, or did he grasp something that literary historians do not? There is a clue to this conundrum in Paul Morand’s 1957 preface to the reprinted edition of Open All Night. Morand uses his defence of the short story to take on other writers and their convictions. Although he names no names, he surely means to attack the existentialists and the Nouveaux Romanciers: The short story is doing well: it is escaping the perils to which the novel is exposed (territorial occupation by philosophical writers, dissociation of the I, collapse of the subject, which follows on the heels of the collapse of the object). The short story is doing well, thanks to its density. ... ­No room for meditation, for a system of thought. You can fit everything into a short story, even the deepest despair ... ­everything except the philosophy of ­despair. (“Preface” 73)12

Without detracting from any of the qualities that Morand sees in the short story genre, it seems to me that he is missing the point. It is not so much the short story that is removed from meditation and systems of thought, but the short story as Morand practises it. He states that a 150page “short story” – a­ n excessive length for the genre – i­s the format “he enjoys [writing] more every day” (“Preface” 73). In Morand’s view, the cosmopolitan literature of speed, diversion, and dash is resolutely opposed to the philosophical novel that features the collapse of the subject. In other words, Morand inveighs against a certain type of novel and not against the novel, broadly speaking. In this respect, Morand’s criticism anticipates Julien Gracq’s in “Pourquoi la littérature respire mal” (“Why literature is suffocating”), an essay that reflects on philosophical and ideological novels. Contradicting Sartre and Robbe-Grillet, Gracq calls for works more open to the imagination, to life, to “the natural powers” of human beings (875). I do not mean to draw a parallel between the diplomatic dispatch novel and Julien Gracq’s novels; in truth, they have nothing in common. Rather, Gracq’s comments contextualize the movement identified by Thibaudet within what might be called a third branch of the twentieth-century French novel. If engaged literature (Sartre) and formalist literature (Robbe-Grillet) constitute two main branches of writing, the third branch

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is composed of the writers known as the Hussards or novelists such as Romain Gary and Albert Cohen  – d ­ iplomats both  – w ­ hose works, on the whole, feature many characteristics of the diplomatic dispatch style: cosmopolitanism, speed, nonchalance, a taste for chance. If these works create scarcely a brouhaha in relation to the “uproar” of their respective eras (surrealism after the First World War; existentialism and the Nouveau Roman after the Second), it is in large part because they cultivate a position of distance and irony, a certain defiance of schools and concepts, a modernism more European (or Anglo-Saxon) than French. They are more mindful of the concrete experience of the world – ­its comedy, its foreignness. They are also mindful of history. The diplomatic dispatch novel that Thibaudet identifies can also be seen as part of a longer tradition than is generally recognized in French literary history. Non-partisan, this branch of the novel does not promote a philosophical or ideological agenda. Nor does it promulgate formal revolution or call into question the function of the novel per se. In a word – ­a diplomatic word if ever there was one – t­ his branch of the novel is non-aligned. The dispatch case of Larbaud, Morand, Giraudoux, and Berthelot’s friends might also contain instructions for another incarnation of the novel – a­ n incarnation which appears paradoxical, since it is, in spite of what I have just proposed, the Nouveau Roman. The Nouveau Roman that I have in mind does not bear the historical gravity of Claude Simon or the theoretical performance of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute. Instead, it is manifest in the worldly, mobile novels of Marguerite Duras or Michel Butor. The connection that can be drawn between these two groups does not depend on the hotels, seasides, autoroutes, and railways that lend them a holiday feeling, but on the “dissociation of the I” that Morand deplores without noticing its operation in his own writings. The characters of diplomatic dispatch literature are light as gossamer; they float from the past into random encounters in the present. Incidents for them are not constitutive of identity. They tend to a more evanescent form, which is not just their furtive and detached way of being in the world, but also the role they play within the novel itself. They belong to what Nathalie Sarraute calls the “age of suspicion,” or more precisely, they foretell it. Thus, they constitute a historical bridge between the interwar years and the postwar. In their dispatch pouch, they carry orders for a mission that a later time receives and executes, namely creating a novel that fits any plot and makes its characters into beings that capture the spirit of their time and place. Which of these interpretations is the truer? Are diplomatic dispatch novels a movement unto themselves  – ­a third branch of t­wentiethcentury French novels  – o ­ r are they forerunners of a certain kind of

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Nouveau Roman? It is all the harder to say, given that they exist hand in hand, and, moreover, that the art of diplomacy consists of balancing divergent perspectives while keeping the playing field open to the widest range of possibilities. NOTES   1 My translation: “Il y a des tumultes et des mouvements. Le surréalisme fut un tumulte. Voyons les mouvements. Mouvements qui sont des vrais mouvements, en ce qu’il se défendent de la stabilisation et du repos comme de la mort.”   2 My translation: “Lieu bizarre et aimable, absurde et utile, qui servait de caserne confortable à des écrivains.”   3 My translation: “De la valise diplomatique s’entend. C’est une littérature cosmopolite à côté de laquelle Tourguéniev et le Bourget de Cosmopolis se fondent dans la même ancienneté que Delphine et Corinne, – ­une littérature cosmopolite qui attendait que, par-delà les langues particulières où l’on est prisonnier, se formât une langue universelle du wagon-lit et du cinéma, auxiliaire de la langue universelle de la musique, – ­une littérature cosmopolite des séjours, des capitales, des êtres, solidaire de la profession diplomatique comme la littérature des escales et de la mer s’était trouvée, dans la génération antérieure, solidaire, chez Loti, de la profession maritime.” Cosmopolis was published in 1893, Delphine in 1802, and Corinne in 1807. In his gusty prose, Thibaudet means that this literature is both timeless and also therefore always slightly archaic.   4 My translation: “la première œuvre où se respire cette odeur de valise contemporaine, aussi reconnaissable que celle d’un port méditerranéen.”   5 My translation: “[Il s’agit d’] un mouvement qui consiste à sauter les idées avec des images pour point d’appui. Ce mouvement aurait pour symbole ou correspondant, ou pour image naturelle, le mouvement des routes de fer, de mer et d’air tissées autour de la planète sur les mappemondes des agences de voyage. En tout cas l’un et l’autre s’accordent. On conçoit qu’un style de la valise se forme à leur croisement. Et qu’il se forme à Paris, dans ce Quai d’Orsay qui fut amené à cet optimum par l’intelligence naturelle du lieu ... ­Cette littérature planétaire désintéressée est née à Paris et de Paris, aussi naturellement et nécessairement que la littérature planétaire impériale et impérialiste de Kipling est née à Londres.”   6 My translation: “l’ancienne tradition du Quai [d’Orsay] demandait que ses diplomates fussent, autant que possible, nés.”   7 My translation: “La Recherche du temps perdu de Proust, ses fouilles dans la durée comme les architectes gothiques, dit Rodin, faisaient des fouilles

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  8

  9 10

11

12

dans le ciel, forment avec le sentiment planétaire et l’exploration dans l’espace de ceux de la valise un puissant complémentaire. Cette nef croise ces transepts. Le sens de l’espace et le sens du temps ne peuvent coexister dans toute leur force chez le même auteur, mais ils coexistent dans le génie d’une époque et dans le paysage d’une littérature comme l’eau et le rocher.” My translation: “Dans ce palace il y a les arrivées et les départs. ... ­Dernière arrivée: la princesse Bibesco, à qui est réservé l’appartement du premier. M. Valery Larbaud qui descend là depuis l’inauguration, dont il était (il a essuyé les plâtres avec Barnabooth), a retenu l’une des 200 chambres et des 200 salles de bain. M. Paul Morand doit partir prochainement et voilà ses malles. Il déclare qu’une fois son procédé repéré, ses cravates imitées, il abandonne sa matière, sa famille de sujets, et se dirige vers une autre. C’est très bien. Giraudoux en a fait autant quand Bella a remplacé Juliette, et le succès l’a récompensé. On ne voit d’ailleurs Giraudoux dans le palace qu’au moment du thé. [...] Des bagages que l’autobus vient d’apporter et sur lesquels je pose un œil curieux, c’est, tout zébré d’étiquettes américaines, Quarantième Étage de Luc Durtain, qui arrive d’Amérique! un voyageur à retenir.” Thibaudet refers to A.O. Barnabooth. Son journal intime (1913); Bella (1926); Juliette au pays des hommes (1924); Quarantième étage (1927). Princess Bibesco’s Catherine-Paris (1927) portrays cosmopolitan life during the war. The Harmonika-Zug is the name of a train invented by Larbaud. Dominique de Roux used it as the title of a novel in 1963. My translation: “De l’auto, c’est à peine si on a le loisir de comparer entre eux les feuillages différents. Et l’on ne voit pas les fleurs des haies ... ­Ces arbres qui fuient, ce sont des arbres, sans plus ... ­et ils galopent, galopent ... ­Qu’importe qu’ils s’appellent chêne, acacia, orme ou platane? Ils galopent, voilà tout ... ­Ils accourent vers nous, se précipitent vers nous, dans un vertige. On dirait ... ­qu’ils vont entrer dans la voiture et la traverser. ... ­ils sont devenus des reflets, des ombres, et qui galopent. La plaine aussi ­s’immatérialise, emportée dans un galop surnaturel.” My translation: “Il voyagea. // Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous la tente, l’étourdissement des paysages et des ruines, l’amertume des sympathies interrompues” (Flaubert 450). My translation: “La nouvelle se porte bien; elle est en train d’échapper aux périls où le roman est exposé (occupation du terrain par les écrivains philosophes, dissociation du moi, effondrement du sujet, après celui de l’objet). La nouvelle tient bon, grâce à sa densité. ... ­Pas de place pour la méditation, pour un système de pensée. On peut tout mettre dans une nouvelle, même le désespoir le plus profond ... ­mais pas la philosophie du désespoir.”

5 Conrad’s Politics of Idealism: Diplomacy without Diplomats stephen ross

Joseph Conrad’s works are riven by a dissonance between idealism and idealists. He was profoundly pessimistic about the possibilities for democracy and human society in modernity at the same time as he staked his life on the possibility of creating moments of communion, epiphanic instances in which the artist “make[s] you see” something essentially true (“Preface” xiv). Underwriting much of what makes his work challenging is a fundamental tension: while acknowledging that ideals themselves are essential to human conduct, he insists that idealists are invariably dangerous. “It is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal form and power, to lose its ‘virtue’ the moment it descends from its solitary throne to work its will among the people,” Conrad states in “Autocracy and War” (86). He held to the view that, even as ideals structure human lives, those ideals are invariably tarnished when individuals try to realize them. This perspective thoroughly determines Conrad’s approach to the problematics of diplomacy. Throughout his major works, Conrad increasingly refines the difference between diplomacy and diplomats until he arrives at an ideal formula: diplomacy without diplomats. This view simultaneously preserves diplomacy as an ideal and scorns anything even approaching an official (unofficial, quasi-official) diplomat. At one and the same time, Conrad preserves diplomacy – as expressing the paramount Conradian values of fidelity, truth, loyalty, communication, and community – while denigrating diplomats per se. He develops a vision of diplomacy without diplomats that is at once romantic in its idealism, cynical in its scepticism, and thoroughly modernist in its detachment of the work from its creator. Understanding this perspective helps elucidate some key elements of Conrad’s larger politics, including his complex relationship to revolution in general, the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleonic aftermath in particular, and his

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parents’ associations with both. More broadly, it illuminates the history of diplomacy itself as a product of the 1789 Revolution, and exposes the process by which international relations was professionalized and democratized – a process about whose results Conrad remained at best ambivalent, and which has left an enduring legacy in the forms of diplomatic conduct to this day. Revolutionary Etymologies Across his oeuvre, Conrad’s understanding of diplomacy finds its ­coordinates in the 1789 French Revolution and its aftermath (Marcus; Hampson 28; Najder 48, 51–2). This orientation to French history is not accidental or idiosyncratic; rather, it points to a historical aspect of diplomacy whose importance is at best unevenly recognized. Whereas Vladimir Potemkin discusses the French Revolution extensively in Histoire de la diplomatie, M.S. Anderson barely mentions it at all in The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919. Yet the terms diplomacy and diplomat were introduced into French and English during the Revolutionary period in France. The French Revolution was both the moment at which diplomacy as such entered modernity and the key historical reference point from which Conrad took his bearings. The term diplomatie enters French in the midst of the 1789 Revolution as a cognate to aristocratie, countering pedigree with certification. The first recorded use of the term diplomacy in English is 1796 (“diplomacy” n.). The first uses of diplomat and diplomatic in English date to the Treaties of Reichenbach in 1813. Both are preceded by their introduction into French by the revolutionary government, which established them as part of an egalitarian lexicon opposed to that of the ancien régime. For aristocratie they devised diplomatie; for aristocrate, diplomate; and for aristocratique, diplomatique. These neologisms register the magnitude of the effects of the historical crisis on social relations; at the same time, they imbue the terms themselves with a politics. For Conrad, they are of a piece with the drift towards democratic governance – in which leaders’ only claim to authority is “the sudden shout of the multitude” (“Autocracy and War” 105) – versus the personally concerned system of international politics obtaining amongst related families in the ancien régime. That democratic politics, as Conrad understands it, hinges upon the displacement of pedigree with civil accreditation, of bloodlines with diplomas. With a few notable exceptions, until 1789, virtually all ambassadors were, if not aristocrats, at least members of the upper class (Anderson 119). They represented sovereigns, not civil

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governments. Even such mighty entities as the Dutch Republic and Interregnum England faced serious difficulties on this score (Anderson 60). Ambassadors spoke for kings, queens, popes, princes, and dukes rather than for elected bodies. Very often envoys personally knew the sovereigns to whom they made representation, when they were not actually related. Letters of introduction sufficed to establish the right to represent, and hinged as much on the person of the ambassador as on his licence to represent: the representative’s pedigree was essential to his legitimacy as a representative. The 1789 Revolution fundamentally altered this set of assumptions by rejecting the efficacy of pedigree in such cases, and instead opting for election or appointment on the basis of ability and aptitude (Duranti 10). The key to enabling such a shift was the provision of a guarantee, a document that would identify the bearer as licensed to conduct diplomacy on behalf of his home regime (Duranti 17). In the political context, the document that guarantees such authenticity – and gives diplomatics, diplomacy, diplomats, and diplomatists their names – is an actual diploma. The word diploma derives from the Greek δίπλωμα, which literally means “a doubling.” It denotes “a folded paper, a letter of recommendation, later a letter of licence or privilege, from the verb διπλοῦν, to double, to bend or fold double.” More specifically, it is “a state paper, an official document; a charter” (“diploma” n.). The term diploma entered English usage in 1645, the year Charles I surrendered to Parliamentarian forces. It did not appear in France until 1728, only reaching its full potential in diplomatic terms when it was used to derive diplomatie, diplomate, and diplomatique after Louis XVI was deposed. A diplomat is therefore someone who bears a diploma and is thereby licensed to conduct diplomacy: relationships among the diplomated (itself a term dating back to 1660, the year of the Restoration of the English king Charles II); diplomat is a name for those who have been invested “with a degree, privilege, or title” (“diplomate” v.). Crucially, the Revolutionary period in France also marked the advent of diplomacy as a profession, a factor that weighs heavily in Conrad’s distaste for its practitioners. As both Duranti and Anderson note, the 1790s saw a decisive shift in how diplomacy was used and conceived (Anderson 113; cf. Anderson 144). Professional schools for training diplomats began to appear in France after 1800 (Anderson 126–7). As the democratic and republican ethos of the revolutionary era signalled the beginning of the end of the ancien régime’s politics of breeding, a whole new profession emerged. Conrad’s own familial background of nobility, supplemented by his professional experience of documentary certification in the merchant

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marine, animates this fertile etymological field. His second career as a novelist brings his familial background and his professional experience together in a quasi-paradoxical situation where what he thinks of as the natural aristocracy of the artist goes out into the world in documentary form, his novels themselves folded papers that retroactively guarantee the quality of their writer. But such guarantee is not the point of Conrad’s writing: he is no would-be diplomat. Instead, they issue forth as diplomas whose objective is to elevate their receivers and to provoke insight, community, even an experience of truth. I return to this point in my conclusion, where, having traversed briefly four of Conrad’s major novels, I claim that the disinterestedness of method that marks Conrad’s modernism is likewise the key to his ability to square the circle of novelistic production itself as a form of diplomacy without diplomats. Fictions of Diplomacy From his first fictional foray onto diplomatic terrain in Heart of Darkness, through his more direct confrontations in Nostromo and The Secret Agent, and at last in the fully realized subtlety of Under Western Eyes, Conrad comes at the tension between diplomacy and diplomats – between idealism and idealists – from a variety of angles. Notwithstanding this variety, Conrad consistently returns to an ideal of diplomacy that can only ever be realized in contingent, vanishing moments by figures whose diplomatic functions are equally contingent and vanishing. Heart of Darkness (1899) charts the earliest stages of Conrad’s engagement with diplomacy, roughly equating it with cynical manipulation and not yet quite able to entertain its positive potential. Flashes of that potential appear in Marlow’s good-faith attempt to explain his experience to the professionals on the deck of the Nellie, but they remain transient and fade all too quickly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the earliness of Heart of Darkness in Conrad’s oeuvre, there is not much actual language of diplomacy; he does not use the words diplomat, diplomacy, diplomated, diplomatic at all. Instead, Conrad consistently applies the term emissary to Marlow and Kurtz and eschews those legitimate terms already in circulation, such as ambassador, agent, or chargé d’affaires (Anderson 83–4). The word “emissary” first appears when Marlow discusses his new job with his aunt. He suggests that the Company may be driven by the profit motive rather than humanitarian principles. Her response puts him firmly, if ironically, in his place: for her, he is “an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” (59). “Emissary” commonly

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signifies “A person sent on a mission to gain information, or to gain adherents to, or promote the interests of a cause. (Until recently used almost exclusively in bad sense, implying something odious in the object of the mission, or something underhand in its manner)” (“emissary” n.). In the context of Heart of Darkness, “emissary” clearly establishes a dark view of Marlow’s diplomatic potential. It identifies him as an interested agent seeking to cultivate the political and commercial advantages of his employer rather than to foster congenial relations between sovereign nation states. The second instance consolidates this pattern, when Kurtz, too, is identified as an emissary. One of Marlow’s earliest sources of information when he arrives at the Outer Station, the Brickmaker, informs him that in practical terms both he and Kurtz belong to “the new gang – the gang of virtue” (79). As part of the “gang of virtue,” Marlow is further tied to the lexicon by which Conrad denigrates idealism. It links him to the cynical fetish – Virtue, with a capital “V” – at the heart of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, perhaps the first instance in the West of official state-sponsored terrorism. The Brickmaker tells Marlow that Kurtz “is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else” (79). In a few words, the Brickmaker establishes Kurtz as being cut from the same cloth as Marlow, at least with regard to his superficially humanitarian motivations. He likewise employs the ironic term “emissary” to undermine any straightforward reading of Kurtz’s activities as innocent. He fleshes out Marlow’s aunt’s phrase, “emissary of light,” by adding “pity,” “science,” and “progress” to its meanings. Pity, science, and progress: these goals constitute the infernal trifecta of imperialist sanctimony. The amplified rhetoric of sanctimony surrounding Kurtz starkens the depths to which he sinks – and the real bleakness of Conrad’s vision of diplomats, however unofficial they may be. Nostromo (1904) continues to develop Conrad’s dual vision of diplomatic activity. In this case, Conrad splits diplomatic roles between Martin Decoud, the “idle boulevardier” (152), and Don José Avellanos, the aristocratic diplomat. He also introduces a third element in the figure of Pedro Montero, who spies on expatriate Costaguanans in Paris and returns to the country only to try for an elevated office for himself. For Conrad, Decoud performs the role of diplomacy in the positive vein. He arrives in Costaguana as an outsider who gradually takes on more and more responsibility for reporting on his experiences. When he writes to his sister back in Paris, Decoud effectively produces a diplomatic communiqué by narrating the tumultuous events of the Monterist revolution so that those remaining in the diplomatic imperial

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metropole can understand them. Although the parallels are not precise – Decoud is not an official representative of any government, he inhabits no embassy, he has no official mission, and Costaguana is in fact his own country and not a foreign land – his functions and the ideals he comes to represent in his diplomatic activities exemplify Conrad’s growing sense of diplomacy as an ideal that can only ever be realized accidentally and outside official channels. Decoud agrees to run the Porvenir, an anti-Monterist newspaper that exerts diplomatic pressure through the public press. It advances republican ideals against the dictatorial ambitions of the Montero brothers, and it provides a public record of the country’s travails. Chief among the Porvenir’s revelations is that Pedro Montero, while presenting himself as a member of the Costaguana Legation in Paris, is in fact little more than a hanger-on; he spies on the activities of others living in Paris, and of the Legation itself, for his fellow would-be revolutionaries back in Costaguana. When the Porvenir finishes its brief run and the Monteristas move in on Sulaco to take control of the silver mine and the harbour, Decoud abandons his job as editor and changes tack. Instead of news for the public, he writes a long letter to his sister that sums up the history of this period in the country’s fortunes. His letter thus provides an unofficial communiqué upon which the Costaguanans in Paris may develop their future plans. The likely futility of the letter – it will almost certainly not be sent if the Monteristas take the city – further anchors it in the realm of the Conradian ideal, since it cannot have been undertaken for personal gain and has no incitement to deception or venality. It is simply as accurate an account of the events as Decoud can provide: a diplomatic transcription giving the fullest possible outline of the political scene. As against Decoud’s idealistic unofficial diplomacy, Don José Avellanos functions as the only officially designated diplomat in Nostromo. Don José forms part of the political machinery of the ancien régime in Costaguana. He belongs to the old way of doing things, to the bureaucratic and governmental apparatus which Charles Gould navigates in order to set the silver mine back on stable footing, to facilitate the building of the railway, and to secure exemptions from those few regulations that might hinder maximum productivity in the mine. Called the “frail diplomatist” (200), Don José is repeatedly characterized as ­running on the fumes of his effectiveness; he sustains the appearance of recognizable governmental and diplomatic norms even as they decline. His residuality manifests most clearly in a meeting with Sir John, who has undertaken to finance and build the railway essential to Gould’s ambitions. Faced with the uncouth General Montero, and

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unsure of how to integrate him into the proceedings, Don José can do little more than approach “diplomatically this weird and inscrutable portent” (122). Of course, Montero is the last person to respond to a diplomatic approach, his inscrutability signalling his inaccessibility to conventional diplomacy, and his eventual ascendancy indicating the arrival of a post-diplomatic age for Costaguana. The disparity between Decoud and Don José manifests starkly in two further differences. The first lies in Decoud’s daring formulation of a plan for Sulaco to become an independent republic, no longer beholden to the Blanco aristocracy and its remnants. Such a move violates longstanding diplomatic agreements, and definitively inaugurates a new age for the coastal region. In this new age, Sulaco becomes a full participant in global capitalism, an economic independency whose political structures, though ostensibly republican, are subordinated to the supremacy of the economy based on the Gould Concession. As Paul B. Armstrong has noted, Decoud’s declaration is highly effective. It hastens stability and prosperity in Costaguana through revolution, whereas a gradualist approach would have taken much longer. Notably, Decoud undertakes this declaration only after hearing of Don José’s death; in effect, he recognizes that his death signals the end of politics on the European colonial diplomatic model. His own political consciousness forged on the boulevards and in the cafés of Paris, Decoud envisions his declaration as something akin to the statements of independence and liberty that drove the French Revolution. For this reason, he explicitly frames his intervention as the advent of a new republic. By contrast, Don José figures the sort of mincing caution that sustains the status quo. He does not publish his history of the region for fear that it will make waves. Decoud openly advocates a new political reality in the columns he pens for the Porvenir, one to be achieved not through the stagnant channels of corrupt political institutions, but through popular rebellion. His vision is driven by a form of the republican idealism that coined the neologism diplomatie as a counterpart to aristocratie in 1796. It partakes of the contingent nature of idealized diplomacy, a desubjectified agency that instrumentalizes Decoud to effect an epochal shift. History uses Decoud to achieve a diplomatic outcome without making him into a diplomat in the precise sense of the term, except perhaps retroactively. Conrad makes the connection to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France explicit in the figure of Pedro Montero. Pedro’s shared time with Decoud in Paris was at least partly taken up in “devouring the lighter sort of historical works in the French language, such, for instance as the books of Imbert de Saint Amand upon the Second Empire” (387).

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Expressly a second-rate figure, Pedro finds his level in admiration for the Duc de Morny (387). A professional diplomat and opportunist, Charles de Morny was related to Napoleon I and half-brother of Napoleon III. An adept manipulator, he survived several regime shifts in France, while using his position to enrich himself through his sugar beet plantations in Santo Domingo. In Nostromo, Pedro’s identification with the Duc de Morny expresses his ambition to become a slippery diplomat with fluid connections to ersatz as well as legitimate royalty, and to enrich himself through imperialist depredation upon Latin American resources. Furthermore, Pedro’s identification with the Duc de Morny anchors Conrad’s vision of diplomacy and diplomats in the politics of France circa 1789–1848, a period book-ended for Conrad by two revolutions that managed to drag key ideals – liberté, egalité, ­fraternité – into the muck of venal ambition and selfish interests. By making Pedro take the Duc de Morny as his ideal, Conrad places him in the muckiest section of the diplomatic swamp, a fitting counterpart to his brother’s posturing as yet another Napoleonic pretender. The Secret Agent presents yet a further turn of the screw in Conrad’s developing notions of diplomacy. In this novel, an actual diplomat, M. Vladimir, behaves undiplomatically by instigating a terrorist act on British soil. His actions contrast with the unassuming, highly effective, and profoundly unofficial diplomacy of Winnie Verloc. The Secret Agent is the only one of Conrad’s novels to feature an actual embassy and professional diplomats who achieve results, however deplorable they might be. Rooted in the dynamite outrage novels of the 1890s and an actual attack on the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent registers Conrad’s perception of a shift in international relations in the early years of the twentieth century. His vision of diplomacy in this context enters a new phase, one in which the ideals of mutual cooperation have been superseded by espionage and manipulation of foreign governments. Conrad captures this transition in the discrepancies between the character of Baron Stott-Wartenheim, erstwhile ambassador of the foreign government for which Verloc works, and his replacement, M. Vladimir. The politics of this dichotomy for Conrad are transparent in the names he chooses: the old-style idealistic diplomat bears a name at once German and aristocratic, while the cynically manipulative replacement is a Russian commoner. The Baron’s noblesse oblige bumps monsieur’s calculating machinations. Going one better than Don José, who has the delicacy to die by the end of Nostromo, the Baron is already dead at the beginning of The Secret Agent. Whereas Don José is “the frail diplomat,” the Baron is “the deceased diplomat” (51). For Verloc, the Baron represents an earlier age of understanding and mutual respect,

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an idealized period of efficient and noble interventions, while Vladimir represents the cynical future. Confirming the Baron’s association with this idealized version of diplomacy, Conrad makes him something of a seer who intuits that the golden age of diplomacy is over: “He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of ­diplomacy, and pretty nearly the end of the world in a horrid democratic upheaval. His prophetic and doleful dispatches had been for years the joke of Foreign Offices” (56). Again Conrad demonstrates his characteristic disdain for the popular, this time reinforced with a more or less open declaration of the difference between diplomacy and diplomats. If the ideal I have been limning so far is that of a diplomacy without diplomats, the Baron articulates a foreboding that the opposite is on the cusp of realization: diplomats without diplomacy. Certainly, this is an accurate description of M. Vladimir, who reduces Verloc’s elevated conception of his activities to a strictly commercial relationship (“no work, no pay” [56]) and furnishes the novel’s plot in his plan for un acte provocateur to force the English government’s hand in cracking down on foreign agitators taking refuge in London. Though linguistic facility would seem a strength in a diplomat, Conrad depicts Vladimir’s progression through languages and accents as demonstrating an “unprincipled versatility” (63). It is not possible to be sure which political entity he represents in his diplomatic functions, or whose interests he serves in his covert activities. Though his name identifies him as Russian, the embassy he works for is never identified and his predecessor bears a German name. A representative of Realpolitik, Vladimir embodies the end of diplomacy that the Baron dolefully anticipated; where the Baron figures nineteenth-century, aristocratic diplomacy, Vladimir figures the modern, professional diplomat. To revive the terms used in Heart of Darkness, Vladimir is an emissary, underhandedly manipulating the political situation to “promote the interests of a cause,” but this time lacking even the gilding ideals of pity, light, science, and progress. Verloc sums up Conrad’s view of the diplomatic scene in The Secret Agent when he notes, “Anarchists or diplomats were all one to him” (208). Just as the anarchists in the novel turn out to be rather poor specimens, so the diplomats are decidedly weak tea: they promote shadowy interests that undermine the host nation’s sovereignty rather than promoting international understanding. As Harold Nicolson points out, diplomacy should not be confused with foreign policy on the one hand, or with international law on the other hand. Strictly speaking, diplomacy refers to “the management of international relations by negotiation” (Diplomacy 15). Yet this definition

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ignores the strategic uses of diplomacy in domestic policy and everyday life. This brings us to Winnie Verloc, perhaps the least ambitious diplomat in Conrad’s fiction. She seeks only to secure a stable life and future for herself, her mother, and her brother Stevie by tactful, mostly unspoken accommodations of her husband. Though Conrad does not idealize the specifics of Winnie’s diplomacy – she effectively prostitutes herself, though with the sanction of matrimony, to secure her objectives – but some key aspects of her actions figure a mode of diplomacy best understood as domestic policy. Intensely circumspect, quietly persuasive, and always working towards outcomes of stability, peace, and consistency, Winnie performs numerous diplomatic tasks in her day-to-day management of the Verloc household and business. Adhering to her mantra that “things don’t bear looking into very much” (163), Winnie advances her own objectives in a way that simultaneously satisfies Verloc’s. She keeps him sexually gratified, maintains a studious ignorance of his business dealings, and discreetly serves clients in the family shop, which sells pornography, propaganda, and stationery. In all this, she continues the long tradition of women’s diplomatic management of the household, but with some key variations. She is the wife of a spy: Verloc, a sub-rosa diplomat, works for “at least two Embassies” (70). He anchors a group of putative anarchists and he acts as a police informant too. Winnie’s work is not just continuous with the world of politics, revolution, and espionage; it is the secret domestic face of that world. Conrad punctuates the fleeting nature of Winnie’s diplomacy in her ending: robbed of Stevie, and thus her impetus to maintain civil relations with Verloc, Winnie proceeds straight to violence. She kills Verloc, flees the country, and takes her own life. We could hardly ask for a starker illustration of the transience of true diplomacy in Conrad’s view, or of the catastrophic alternatives attending its foreclosure. As the figure of diplomacy, Winnie presents a distinct shift in Conrad’s politics, a gendering of diplomacy that takes further unexpected turns in Under Western Eyes. In Under Western Eyes, the most obvious exemplar of the diplomatic vein is the Teacher of Languages, though he is a greatly reduced figure in that line, more like the editor of a diplomatic edition than an influencer of international relations. Nonetheless, the task he sets himself fits within the remit of diplomacy broadly conceived: his presentation of Razumov’s diary for the consumption of “western eyes” is an effort to make Russia comprehensible to Europeans. Rising to this challenge, the Teacher of Languages insists that he has not invented his material, but copied it out and translated it faithfully to facilitate its comprehensibility (49). He seeks to efface himself as a subject from his material,

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to be just a diplomatic channel through which the document passes, only transforming it sufficiently to make it legible. In his aspiration to a desubjectified agency, the Teacher voices one of the conditions of possibility for preserving idealism in Conrad: the ideal itself must not be tainted by the particularity of any individual or set of interests. And yet, as Conrad well knew, neutral presentation of the facts is impossible. Editing, if not editorializing, is inevitable. Therein enter the diplomat’s biases, the blindspots, and the self-interested decisions that irretrievably tarnish the work of anyone who sets out to practise diplomacy as a profession. The Teacher proves himself almost immediately incapable of staying out of things. Leaving aside his admission that the earliest part of his report imaginatively reconstructs events not found in Razumov’s diary, we are still confronted with his specific perplexities, his sense that “the Russian character” is characterized by “illogicality ... arbitrariness [and] ... frequency of the exceptional” (49–50). Even on the limited terms of his self-identification and unofficial status as a kind of diplomat, the Teacher falls short of Conrad’s ideal of diplomacy. Moreover, as Jennifer Malia has shown, “because of the way the double narration is handled, it is impossible to know how much of the novel is a translation of Razumov’s diary, the narrator’s interpretation and/or embellishment of the diary, and the narrator’s own account that has nothing to do with Razumov” (178). Though a long critical tradition gives him something of a pass on this question, numerous critics have nonetheless cautioned against accepting his claims at face value.1 Indeed, the entire novel may be read as an act of espionage. A private document is intercepted, translated, and presented to readers who might want to understand the foreign entity that the document supposedly represents. In this, the Teacher is directly aligned with Razumov in his role as a spy on the expatriate community in Geneva: upon completing his first report for Councillor Mikulin, “Razumov knew that this, his first communication for Councillor Mikulin, would find its way to the embassy there [Vienna], be copied in cypher by somebody trustworthy, and sent on to its destination, all safe, along with the diplomatic correspondence” (279). With such moves, Conrad aligns the Teacher and Razumov in parallel roles of espionage and subversion – ­counter-revolutionary violations of trust – that link both characters’ roles as ersatz diplomats with Russian autocracy. By drawing this conclusion, he confirms his suspicion that official diplomacy is profoundly debased and raises further questions about whether it is ever possible to sustain an idealized version of diplomacy against contingency, accidents, and shifting circumstances.

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Enter the enigmatic Mme de S—. A lynchpin of the novel’s engagement with diplomacy, she directs its entire conceptual apparatus right back to the 1789 French Revolution. She is the proprietor of the Château Borel, where Peter Ivanovitch plies his brand of misogynistic feminism and foments revolutionary politics in an atmosphere of intrigue and occultism. Bearing an aristocratic-sounding name, she clearly has sufficient money to bankroll Ivanovitch’s elaborate and unpredictable activities as well as those of certain revolutionaries. Picking up the threads of gendered diplomacy he introduced in The Secret Agent, Conrad represents Mme de S— as the widow of a diplomat and herself an unofficial diplomat who belongs to the murky underside of the profession: “the life of Madame de S—, with its unofficial diplomacy, its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgraces, expulsions, its atmosphere of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth century than for the conditions of our own time” (166). A historical avatar, Mme de S— revives the pre-professional diplomacy of the ancien régime even as she instigates elements of the gothic. Conrad insistently frames Mme de S— in the language of spiritualism to animate the ghosts of the Revolution and their spectral after-­ effects. He directly links the haunted-house atmosphere of the Château Borel with occultism, diplomacy, and a failed bourgeois hegemony: “It might very well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning, futile ghost of a middle-class order. The shades evoked, as worldly rumour had it, by Madame de S— to meet statesmen, diplomatists, deputies of various European Parliaments, must have been of another sort” (200). The ghosts that Mme de S— conjures are different from the “futile ghost[s] of a middle-class order” that populate uncounted ghost stories. Mme de S—’s ghosts rise up to meet diplomats and politicians, people of a higher order, or at least of greater responsibility than the bourgeois habitués of the Victorian ghost story. Are they, perhaps, the ghosts of the Revolution’s stated ideals? Or are they relics of the optimism and hope that saw diplomatie enter the French language to counterbalance the longstanding power of aristocratie? The answers lie with Mme de S—’s historical counterpart, Mme Germaine de Staël. Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Jacques Necker, finance minister to Louis XVI before the collapse of his reign. After Necker was sacked by the king for his infamous Compte-rendu, in which he detailed the bankruptcy of the nation, the family moved to their château, Coppet, on the banks of Lake Geneva. Educated along Rousseauian principles, Germaine published a book on Rousseau in 1788. Upon marrying Eric Magnus, Baron of Staël-Holstein, she became Mme de Staël. The Baron was a career diplomat who was guaranteed

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the ambassadorship in Paris for twelve years before a generous retirement, a tenure that was interrupted by the 1789 Revolution. The de Staëls returned to France when the dust had settled, the Baron having been accredited to the French republic. Falling afoul of Napoleon I, Mme de Staël was twice exiled, before finally retreating to the family’s estate in Geneva where she was watched closely by the imperial police. She obtained a Russian passport to escape France, and rounded out her dramatic life with theatrical flair, dying on Bastille Day, 1817. Conrad’s Mme de S—, clearly aligned with the historical Mme de Staël, invokes the pre-Revolutionary monarchy, the Revolutionary government, Napoleon I, the Bourbon Restoration, and even Napoleon’s return to France. Razumov finds Mme de S— in Geneva, where almost all the action of Under Western Eyes takes place. She even owns a château outside the city, as did the historical Mme de Staël. Mme de S— is the widow of a diplomat, as Mme de Staël would eventually become when her husband died. The figure of Rousseau towers over Under Western Eyes, his statue casting a stony glance upon the fortunes of the characters. Razumov writes his confession beneath Rousseau’s statue. Mme de Staël’s connection to Napoleon revives the connections to diplomatie and Revolutionary-era France that Conrad activated in Nostromo. Not only is “the life of Madame de S— ... more fit for the eighteenth century” than the twentieth, but it positively finds the key to its ­significance – certainly for Conrad’s purposes – in that earlier epoch. Placing this historical figure in the context of the ghost story and the haunted house (edifice, family line, pedigree) in the character of Mme de S—, Conrad triggers manifold hauntings: of Mme de S— by Mme de Staël, of history itself via the spectral rhetoric of such predecessors as Karl Marx (in The Eighteenth Brumaire, for example), and of diplomacy itself – reduced to a vestigial (because failed) presence in this historical process. All three levels are anchored on the banks of Lake Geneva, where idealized diplomacy finally submits to the vulgar Realpolitik of modernity. Mme de S— thus emerges as the real figure of diplomacy in Under Western Eyes, a far more complex and convincing figure than the Teacher, with a far longer pedigree in the world of politics. By lining her up with the occult, Conrad suggests that she is a ghostly after-image of an earlier time of diplomatic potential, even as she harbours its living spirit. She provides liaison between the faux-feminist-radical-utopian Peter Ivanovitch and various political figures. She facilitates connections, promotes understanding, and provides a place of sanctuary for the fugitive revolutionaries in Geneva. Her château functions like an embassy, insofar as it occupies an apparently sovereign space free from

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the machinations of the imperial police. Its link to idealized diplomacy rather than the professional realm of diplomats manifests when she meets Razumov for the first time and mutters to herself “later on in the diplomatic service” (208). It is one of the novel’s more direct moments of irony, since Razumov is, at this point, an agent of the imperial police, reporting back to Councillor Mikulin on the revolutionaries’ activities. He is a spy working behind the scenes to advance the interests of a particular faction back home. In short, he is a diplomat in Conrad’s most pejorative sense. Leading a life of “unofficial diplomacy,” Mme de S— both identifies Razumov as an untrustworthy infiltrator and projects a future for him that is incompatible with the idealized form of diplomacy Conrad cautiously sustains. In the end, Under Western Eyes offers perhaps the strangest vision of diplomacy and diplomats in Conrad’s works. It preserves the conviction that professional diplomats, and even unofficial diplomats who consciously undertake diplomatic work, can only accidentally achieve anything like real diplomacy. Instead, he presents a view of diplomacy that is pessimistic yet hopeful, likely to happen contingently and transiently, if at all. In Conrad’s understanding, diplomacy possesses a secret agency of its own, insofar as it makes use of individuals without attaching lastingly to any one person. Fiction as Diplomacy For Conrad, the task of the writer, like that of Mme de S— in Under Western Eyes, was to conjure with the ghosts of idealisms past and present: to conjure with them, to promise or swear together, at once to “struggle against a superior power” and yet to call into existence, to “make come ... what is not there at the present moment of the appeal” (Derrida 40–1). Doing so binds diplomacy to the spectral, constituting a diplomatic commitment to the future, to the possibility of a true diplomatie precisely where diplomats have failed. An author cannot guarantee the diplomatic effects of the work. A true modernist, Conrad insisted that his books had little to do with him as a person, and that they must go out into the world on their own. If they were to be diplomatic, they must be so in a desubjectified way. Conrad’s pages – folded, cut, and printed in volumes – lack the credentialling power that the original diploma signified, but they nonetheless function as guarantees of his bona fides. His good faith, his fidelity: a fidelity to the event of diplomatie we can only detect as a halting and at times contradictory progression in thinking about diplomacy and diplomats across his oeuvre.

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Pascale Casanova, in laying out her case for a world republic of letters, quotes Valery Larbaud’s characterization of writers as worldly aristocrats: There exists an aristocracy open to all, but which has never been very numerous, an invisible, dispersed aristocracy, devoid of external signs, without officially recognized existence, without diplomas and without letters patent, and yet more brilliant than any other; without temporal power and yet possessing considerable authority, such that it has often led the world and determined the future. From it have come the most truly sovereign princes that the world has known, the only ones who for years – in some cases, centuries – after their death direct the actions of many men. (qtd. in Casanova 21)

Explicitly invoking an aristocracy that has no need for “diplomas,” Larbaud rejects the very notion of the author as a diplomat, and thus of a writer’s works as any form of “letters patent.” He reactivates the ancien régime rhetoric of the artist as inherently superior to the common run of person, ironically at just the same moment that writers such as T.S. Eliot and Conrad himself were beginning to think of the writer’s role as a professional one rather than a quasi-religious calling.2 And though Larbaud appears to lean towards the democratic in his claim that his is “an aristocracy open to all,” there can be no question of a truly catholic approach: the meritocracy indicated hinges upon innate talent rather than hard work and craftsmanship. The nod to openness notwithstanding, Larbaud’s aristocratic writers are clearly not diplomats on the post-1789 model, but aristocratic envoys. Though Conrad would no doubt have been tempted by such a vision, given his deep ambivalence about the democratic thrust of post-Napoleonic European politics, he ultimately affirms a rather different vision. The key difference resides in Conrad’s determined affirmation of the writer’s importance in distinctly diplomatic terms: “His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring – and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition – and, therefore, more permanently enduring” (“Preface” 145). Where Larbaud nods to the democratic before reasserting the aristocratic, Conrad nods towards innate ability before asserting the writer’s core diplomatic role. Thus, allowing that the writer appeals to something innate in “our being”  – “that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition” – he generalizes that

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innate value to all who would read. In lieu of Larbaud’s insistence upon aristocracy for the writer, then, Conrad more subtly reconciles ancien régime claims to nobility and legitimacy with an emerging modernist insistence upon disinterestedness. The newly professionalized role of the artist is to produce letters patent, diplomas that circulate in the world republic, forging community and sustaining idealism even as  they relentlessly portray the existential dangers posed by idealists. On this view, writers’ diplomatic function can only be detected after the fact, retroactively conferred by those readers sensitive enough to heed their communiqués. It presents a canny resolution in which the fact of the diplomat is permanently replaced by what we might call, on the model of Foucault’s author-function, the diplomat-function of modern literary geopolitics. NOTES 1 See Hollander (9–16) for a synthesis of this line of criticism (including Henricksen, Hay, Szittya, Thomas, and Wheatley), and for her own contribution. 2 See, for example, John Marx, especially his chapter “Conrad’s Gout.”

6  André Gide and the Art of Evasion michel biron

André Gide would certainly have had major reservations about drawing any parallels between “diplomacy” and the “novel.” In general, he was wary of well-meaning literature that brimmed with good feeling and virtue. Nor would he have looked kindly upon a novelist taking up the esprit de corps and carefully modulated style favoured by diplomats. To use coded language for strategic purposes, to write on behalf of the state (if only dispatches), to cast characters in ambassadorial roles – all these literary tactics belie Gide’s commitment to sincerity. Unlike his celebrated contemporaries – Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand, and Alexis Léger, thanks to whom it is possible to speak of a golden age of the writer-diplomat in France between the wars (Meltz 72) – Gide has nothing of the career diplomat about him. In general, Gide’s critics emphasize “the irony of form” as the basis of his aesthetics (MaisaniLéonard 273). In an apt turn of phrase, Vladimir Jankélévitch links diplomacy with the ironist’s light touch: “One becomes an ironist not only through ‘economy’ but also through ‘diplomacy’” (32).1 Speaking of Paludes (1895), Jean-Pierre Bertrand demonstrates that irony is not “a simple rhetorical figure that overturns the meaning of a statement: it is an entire vision of the world, of the self and the other, that engages the imagination and moral outlook of Gide’s work, at the same time as it is a literary form” (16).2 Through irony, the protagonist of Paludes, like Gide’s own persona, evades labels and passes from one social group to another without fully identifying with any in particular. All that being said, Gide bore a diplomatic aura that consistently elevated him above or beyond the fray.3 He played off his successes and, better than anyone, reconciled diplomatic ethos, what might be called a taste for pretence, with “the power to say ‘I’” (Marty 60–77). With his modern classicism, his numerous and sometimes improbable friendships, his Goethean vision of world literature, his refusal to

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raise his voice or take a hard line, his passion for control that led him to sidestep conflicts, Gide embodies several meanings of the adjective “diplomatic”: regardless of circumstances, he is invariably capable and clever. His diplomatic dexterity, in fact, exasperated Paul Claudel, perhaps the best known among French diplomat-writers. In his diaries, Claudel calls Gide a “faux-fuyant” or “hedger,” because of his evasiveness (2:582). In his writing, Gide subordinates skill to the ruling quality of sincerity, which for him is the opposite of official language and political manoeuvring. For Gide, sincerity is infinitely more important than modern literary autonomy; it ranks higher than any political, religious, or moral attribute. Gide may be deceptive and evasive, but he remains remarkably consistent insofar as he never strays from loyalty to himself. There are not two Gides, in the sense that there is an Alexis Léger (the person) and a Saint-John Perse (Léger’s pseudonym), or in the sense that there is Paul Claudel the diplomat and Paul Claudel the poet. “How can you be a French ambassador and a poet?” the surrealists asked Claudel (Badel et al., “Introduction” 21). No one ever posed such a question to Gide. In his case, the claim to the poet’s independence remains secondary to his sincerity, perhaps because he feels free of material, familial, and political constraints. Gide never wonders how Claudel can exist on more than one plane. For him, the only question that counts is whether Claudel is completely himself, irrespective of which hat he is wearing. In their correspondence, Gide never warns his friend about the inevitable subjugation of a career at the embassy, nor does he pass judgment. In fact, the opposite is true: Claudel attacks, Gide defends. On more than one occasion, Claudel enjoins Gide to be careful of his demons, then redoubles his efforts to convert him. Gide responds by avoiding the issue at hand, as if the game of cat and mouse were played out purely for the sake of amusement. Of the two writers, Gide is certainly more crafty; even under provocation, he remains more subtle, polite, and measured than Claudel. In short, Gide is more diplomatic than the career diplomat. Gide’s correspondence with Claudel reveals a great deal about the challenge of being an actual writer-diplomat. Gide is well placed to observe the constraints his friend has to contend with for the sake of preserving the demands of the Chancery. On 18 February 1909, for example, Claudel flatly rejected Gide’s invitation to present his play, Violaine, at the Théâtre d’Art: “I am by no means sure that the performance would be welcome at the Ministry, where I am already out of favour for my religious views, and where Berthelot is my only supporter. I could not compromise my position for the sake of momentary

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fame. Understand my disjointed existence – to be a consul, a poet, and a man of God all at the same time is too much, and then I am a father into the bargain” (Claudel and Gide 87). The same prudence appears a week later, this time on the topic of a contribution to the Nouvelle Revue Française, edited by Gide: “If my Hymne du Saint-Sacrement has not yet appeared in your Review, would you please either stop it from appearing or let it appear unsigned or with the initials P.C.? It seems that I have often been denounced at the Ministry for my religious opinions; and with a dossier like mine it’s better for the moment that I’m not too much talked about” (Claudel and Gide 88–9). When this letter was sent, Gide and Claudel were still friends. Their positions subsequently grew apart; Claudel’s views became more rigid and Gide’s more sinuous and flexible. His letters to Claudel, ironic and distant, exemplify Gide’s art of evasion. Open disagreement between Claudel and Gide first erupted over The Vatican Cellars. Claudel did not appreciate its humour. In the original version of the novel, published as a serial in the Nouvelle Revue Française between January and March 1914, Gide cited an excerpt from Claudel’s play, The Tidings Brought to Mary, as an epigraph: “But of which King and of which Pope do you speak? For there are two, and one does not know which is the right one” (Lestringant 1:695). The quotation, meant to be humorous, perfectly sums up Gide’s novel, which recounts how swindlers make off with money from some devout Catholics by inventing a story about the pope being kidnapped and replaced with an impostor. In 1912, prior to seeing the novel, Claudel agreed to play along with Gide. When he finally read it, however, he found it sinister and changed his mind about one of his works being used in such a context: “I know that I’ve no way of preventing such a quotation. Still, I must tell you how grieved I should be if my name appeared at the head of a book in which the most venerable person of the Sovereign Pontiff was not treated with the respect and tenderness which a Catholic owes to the Pope” (Claudel and Gide 199). He also demanded that Gide remove a passage that he believed – not wrongly – praised pederasty. Gide agreed to withdraw the epigraph when the book version was published, but he refused to modify his text to align with Claudel’s wishes. A Literary Ambassador According to Stanislas Jeannesson, Claudel may be the best, if not the only, example of the writer-diplomat, insofar as he has full, parallel careers as a writer and as a diplomat. Yet Claudel’s influence on future generations and the weight that he carries on the international scene

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barely compare to Gide’s. No other French writer during the interwar period had an influence as strong as Gide’s, to the point that historian Michel Winock calls these the “Gide years.” However irredeemable he may be in the eyes of Claudel, Gide triumphantly epitomizes French literary verve between the wars.4 Even when he publicly asserted his homosexuality and pederasty, against his friends’ warnings, he paid no price in terms of prestige; perhaps the only tangible consequence of his candour was never being elected to the French Academy. Anything Gide said was worth its weight in gold. His intellectual reputation, both in France and abroad, increased throughout these years, which led him to behave more and more like a literary ambassador. Gide’s exposés are the most obvious proofs of his intellectual clout and ambassadorial function. Upon his return from the Congo, he denounced French colonial interests in Africa in Travels in the Congo (1927) and Return from Chad (1928). After a trip to the USSR paid for by the Soviet Union of Writers, he excoriated the Stalinist regime in Back from the USSR (1936).5 These inquiries created the image of an “engaged” Gide, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines the term. Beyond Gide’s ideological positions with regard to colonialism or communism, these texts demonstrate the evolution of Gide’s ideas. Indeed, they make a virtue of transformation. As his investigation progresses, readers become spectators of his intellectual metamorphosis. Although he declares himself to be neutral, he documents the process of perceiving the truth of the situation in Africa and Russia, such as he understands it. Despite his stance of impartiality, he takes offence, albeit mildly, at what he sees; he discovers scandals that he had not anticipated when he started out. He dramatizes his experience as a process of revelation. His year-long trip to Africa, made in the company of the young filmmaker Marc Allégret, begins, like most of his travels, with sex tourism. According to his most recent biographer, Frank Lestringant, Gide chased butterflies – of the literal and metaphorical sort – like an excited child. He played the role of “the anti-missionary, an exultant inverse missionary, who, instead of reproving or censuring local sexuality, celebrated it” (Lestringant 2:298).6 Through chance encounters, he learned about the inhuman treatment and massacres perpetrated by the white owners of large forestry companies in the name of productivity. All of a sudden, he felt that he had a mission and started to keep careful records of the most flagrant abuses. In his notes, he took precautions to prove that he was not biased. Despite claims that he has no personal interest in exposing abuses and that he is the most open-minded of Westerners, he inadvertently reveals his colonial and racial prejudices: “When the white man gets angry with the blacks’ stupidity, he is usually showing

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up his own foolishness! Not that I think them capable of any but the slightest mental development; their brains as a rule are dull and stagnant –  but how often the white man seems to make it his business to thrust them back into their darkness!” (Travels in the Congo 95–6). Filled with a sense of mission, Gide moves from being a novelist to being a neophyte reporter. Recommending Return from Chad to his friend Jules Iehl, a justice of the peace and amateur novelist, Gide warns, “You’ll certainly be disappointed if you’re looking for a literary piece. But I believe it is a matter of the greatest importance” (qtd. in Lestringant 2:387).7 Gide put great energy into publicizing colonial abuses. His campaign went all the way to the League of Nations in Geneva in 1929. The General Assembly at the League debated the issue of forced labour in the French colonies. In spite of Gide’s efforts, reasons of state prevailed. In the end, the impact of his campaign on the treatment of the concessionary companies – the monopolies in Africa – was virtually nil. This excursion outside the domain of literature did not embitter Gide. On the contrary, he set about educating himself in political issues. He records his strides into political understanding in resolutely utilitarian prose, very much like the diaristic prose that increasingly became his speciality and that ultimately became central to his oeuvre. Never an investigative journalist per se, he was nonetheless an eminent practitioner of the personal journal as a literary genre. In 1928, excerpts of his journals tracking abuses in Chad appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française. As of August 1932, Gide regularly published instalments of his diaries in the same journal. In the first half of the 1930s, his growing notoriety in France and elsewhere showed no sign of slowing. In 1933, approached by the Left, he published The Vatican Cellars (which had originally appeared in 1914) in instalments in the communist newspaper L’Humanité. He befriended Léon Blum, despite having reproached Blum in 1914 for his views on the Jewish people’s desire for power and domination (Journals 2:3). French intellectuals, stunned by what they saw, looked on at the spectacle of Gide’s conversion to Communism: “But he was a born acrobat, a verbal gymnast, and he successfully navigated his perilous recovery without denying his true beliefs in the least” (Lestringant 2:730).8 He also became friends again with Aragon, who had disowned him ten years earlier for his political tepidness. Revealingly, Aragon had dismissed The Vatican Cellars as “nothing more than a diplomatic event” (qtd. in Lestringant 2:198).9 In 1933, Aragon interceded with Spanish director Luis Buñuel to adapt The Vatican Cellars, certainly an honour during this period when Buñuel’s career was at its peak; nonetheless, the angle that Buñuel took was so violently anticlerical that Gide abandoned the project altogether. Other

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adaptations of the same novel were produced for the theatre, in particular in Lausanne by a troupe connected with the communist association known as Art et travail. Throughout these various endeavours, Gide savoured his success. He took no issue with the instrumentalization of his work for the purposes of communist propaganda. He believed more and more strongly in the cause and intensified his public involvement on its behalf, even as he maintained reserve, moderation, and commitment. In 1935, Roger Martin du Gard criticized Gide after being asked to read a draft version of a “far too respectful” (Lestringant 2:691) letter that he planned to send to the Soviet ambassador in Paris regarding Belgian militant Victor Serge, interned in the USSR. Gide admitted to being too timid, but instead of remedying the situation, he simply acknowledged his weakness of character: “This submissive tone is – alas – natural for me (it’s military ranks that bring it out in me; specifically, I lose any sense of self-worth around them)” (Lestringant 2:691).10 Visiting Moscow in the summer of 1936, he was received with great pomp, as if he were a head of state; three hundred thousand postcards featuring his picture were printed and distributed (Lestringant 2:736). Upon his return to France in early September, he found himself in “a tremendous, a dreadful confusion” (Journals 2:344). He wrote his report about the USSR in three weeks, then read it to his travelling companions. Aragon and Malraux, along with other communist intellectuals, tried in vain to dissuade him from publishing it. They believed that the Spanish Civil War made the moment inauspicious for a critique of Soviet Communism. For Gide, such contextual reasons had little bearing on his thinking. In any event, he was convinced that criticism would help the USSR. He thought that the Russian communists would “end up triumphing over the serious errors” that he had pointed out for their benefit (Back from the USSR 16). For him, the crucial issue, once again, was telling his own story. He did not intend to carry a banner into the fray or liberate the workers of the world. Instead, by looking at his own convictions and by admitting the errors of his previous thinking, he executed a complete ideological about-face. His disappointment in communism is rivalled only by his earlier admiration: “It is precisely because of my admiration for the Soviet Union and for the wonders it has already performed, that I am going to criticize” (15). The book, reprinted nine times in under a year, sold 150,000 copies – an unprecedented success for Gide, whose novels had never sold particularly well. As on his return from the Congo, Gide shows in Back from the USSR how experience transforms him. Each instalment in this experiential record, with its implicit narrative of transformation, concludes with the

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attainment of Gide’s freedom as a writer despite threats made against it. Communist friends’ and officials’ suggestions about what words he can or cannot use are taken as constraints on his freedom. When preparing a salutation to Stalin, he is told that he simply cannot say “You” – he must write “You, leader of the workers,” or “You, master of the peoples” (67). By the same logic, it is out of the question to place the adjective “great” before the word “monarch”: a monarch, he is advised, cannot be great. More than the statistics and stories he hears, these “diplomatic” interventions convince him that there is no way to speak seriously about culture under such a regime. These constraints therefore compel him to write a sentence that his communist friends never forgive: “And I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, the spirit is less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized” (62–3).11 Gide goes no further than that. The rest of his report remains cautious and nuanced. Even today, it seems more lenient than critical. Gide organizes the information in his report so that changes in his awareness hold centre stage. Always open to the lessons offered by the random encounters, limited and official though they may be, Gide adapts to circumstances. Because candid, his observations have the gloss of truth about them. Like a reader who enters a novel voluntarily suspending his disbelief, Gide seeks nothing more than to be seduced when he is travelling abroad or encountering new situations. Yet he sees holes everywhere in the stories that he is told; the fiction is not plausible; the storytelling is crude. Gide acts like the reader of a novel who is disappointed in the story that he is being asked to believe. In this respect, he continues in the distrustful mode of Paludes (1895), a novel that rejects determinism – the past can reliably predict the future, whether it pertains to plot or to character – and programmed reading. For Gide, the novel is the perfect place to examine the freedom of character, that movement of being that shows, over the course of the action, how the individual least motivated to fight the world turns in upon himself, not out of a desire for adventure or compulsion to rebel, but out of the very power of his growing awareness. The Inconsequence of Lafcadio Evasion and inconsequence triumph in The Vatican Cellars, the spoof spy novel that pleased Gide’s surrealist and communist friends. In this novel, Gide builds up a plot out of hoaxes. Lafcadio, the principal character, wears any number of disguises. Like Gide, he despises group affiliations; he shifts restlessly from one group to the next, from one

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family to another. Gide ceaselessly mixed with influential networks, either political or literary, such as the group clustered around the Nouvelle Revue Française. Despite his coziness with the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, he never became a member. Likewise, in literary circles, he cultivated networks, then left them behind. He distanced himself from his former symbolist friends; he grew wary of his burdensome Catholic friends; he proudly publicized his dissident views in order to join forces with dissidents who were less peaceful and less diplomatic than he. On 20 April 1923, he wrote to Louis Aragon: “My fate is to have my back to each and every group” (qtd. in Lestringant 2:190). In Frank Lestringant’s words, Gide is a “born traitor” (2:735). Treason is the very base of the moral code that he shares with his reader: “And now, Nathaniel, throw away my book. Shake yourself free of it. Leave me,” he writes in the envoi to The Fruits of the Earth (163). Directly connected to the art of the Gidean novel, this moral code explains the refusal of any relationship that is too direct. It also explains Gide’s suspicion of masters and disciples; he distrusts the notion of received wisdom. Thus he resists any imitable art of the novel: “Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you” (163). Gide the novelist constantly comes back to this maxim, applying it first and foremost to himself, as an incitement to go beyond what he has achieved. It is also a provocation to write something other than novels, because he knows that authors with more talent or genius than he possesses already master the novelistic genre. For this reason, he writes mock novels or non-novels, which he calls “soties” or farces. He agrees to be categorized as a novelist only when he perpetrates a whole bag of tricks, as in The Counterfeiters (1926), which includes notebooks and mise-en-abîme effects. Indeed, he claims that The Counterfeiters was his first novelistic novel, despite its parodies of novelistic conventions. In some ways, Gide is at his most modern when he experiments with form, even as he is at his most diplomatic when he distrusts, then renounces, any rigidly defined relationship. Perhaps the only really memorable character in all of Gide’s work, Lafcadio in The Vatican Cellars embodies the art of evasion. This strange hero is the bastard son of a diplomat, which is not, as it turns out, just an incidental detail. In The Vatican Cellars, the fiction of diplomacy is global, even if it does not actually relate to the diplomatic world. The narrator does not offer a study of diplomats’ characters, as Stendahl does with Comte de Mosca or as Proust does with Norpois. Rather, in the diplomatic world, Gide pursues something like a cosmopolitan atmosphere where secret societies and state intrigue merge. Mixing

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together, they create a novelistic backdrop connected to high society full of spies and counterspies, what Blaise Cendrars in Moravagine calls “upper-class racketeers of the diplomatic world” (14). This realm of imagined diplomacy offers Gide the opportunity to create a disconnected character with a bizarre name: Lafcadio Wluiki. According to instructions in the text, Wluiki is pronounced Louki – the w and the first i are hardly sounded (Vatican Cellars 36). Lafcadio is neither a writer nor a diplomat. Nonetheless, he belongs to an unplaceable elite. He is produced by universal culture: he reads the Aladdin story from The Arabian Nights and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. He embodies the freedom of children who grow up in the deracinated world of diplomats – those who customarily change places, cultures, and languages with scarcely a second thought. Born in Romania, student of the “the most brilliant [society]” but also “the most mixed” (76), Lafcadio is taught Italian, Polish, Russian, and French by his diplomat uncles. He plays chess without looking at the board, learns to cheat at whist, wanders from the Carpathian Mountains to Algeria, then disappears, alone, to other cities, sleeping anywhere, as nomadic as a gypsy. He chooses desire over hunger, which makes him tell his halfbrother Julius, who is a writer, “As for me, I should let myself die of hunger if I had nothing before me but such a hash of bare bones as the logic you feed your characters on” (83). For Lafcadio, inconsequence is a way of life, an art of living and of writing; he celebrates inconsequence as a moral virtue and as a protest against the programmed life of families, religions, and institutions. This inconsequence is less a sharp break than an oblique escape from bourgeois order. Lafcadio defies the cause and effect world, just as Gide refuses to write a realistic novel, except as a parody. Lafcadio’s old friend Protos – a character so improbable that he could have come out of a novel by Alexandre Dumas or Eugène Sue – introduces him to set-ups and scams. Protos leads a gang of crooks, known as “the Millipede” (137). They create a vast conspiracy to extort money from pious Catholics by convincing them that the pope has been kidnapped and that the kidnappers are demanding a hefty ransom in exchange for his safe return. The story is directly inspired by a newspaper report Gide saw in the early 1890s. If Gide does not actually invent the premise of the plot, he does apply creative licence to build up a mock novel or to deconstruct the story using the very ingredients that go into its making. In Paludes, he strips the novel of any plot; in The Vatican Cellars he creates an incredible adventure driven by plot. Abiding by the rules of the novel, so-called, he spins a complicated yet coherent yarn, full of twists and turns, knitted together by a range

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of diverse perspectives and characters. As he claims in a draft preface to Isabelle in 1910, this diversity is the express condition of the novel: “The novel as I know it or imagine it contains a range of points of view, attached to a range of characters; in essence, it is a bewildering work” (992).12 In The Vatican Cellars, his touch is so light and his tone so facetious that the book comes across as a satire of the novel. Gide himself categorized the book as one of his “soties.” In his Anthology of Black Humour, André Breton sums up the confusion of Gide’s friends and the enthusiasm of the next generation, who see themselves reflected in Lafcadio’s inconsequence: From the moment of its appearance in La Nouvelle Revue Française, the novel provoked two violently opposed currents of opinion. Whereas most of the author’s old friends and admirers hastened in their dismay to claim he had taken a wrong turn (they accused him of indulging in “serial novels,” of sacrificing to parody nobody really knew what, but at all events to parody; they resented him for being, for the first time, less than serious), young people were ecstatic – not so much over the plot, if truth be told, though its frivolity was actually quite tolerable; or over the style, which had its share of preciousness; but over the creation of the main character, Lafcadio. This character, who was totally unintelligible to the first group, seemed full of meaning to the second, the forebear of a remarkable lineage. For the latter, he represented a temptation and a justification of the highest order. In the years of intellectual and moral debacle that saw the War of 1914, this character did not stop growing in significance; he incarnated nonconformism in all its guises, with a smile that even the “dromedaries” found rather seductive, though it was imperceptibly sidelong and cruel. From Lafcadio came a sort of “unconscientious objection,” much more dangerous than the other kind, that had by no means had its final say. The ideas of family, fatherland, religion, and even society emerged somewhat the worse for wear from the assault that this latest form of resigned adolescent boredom, of wandering adolescent idleness, had waged on them. (Breton 197–8)

The Vatican Cellars opens not with Lafcadio but with Julius de Baraglioul – pronounced “Barailloul,” as Gide helpfully explains (12). Julius, an established novelist and, as it turns out, Lafcadio’s halfbrother, aspires to be elected to the French Academy. His most recent book, L’Air des Cimes, meets with sarcastic critiques even among his entourage. His father, a diplomat named Juste-Agénor de Baraglioul, lambastes the book. According to Julius, his father has “no feeling for literature” (37). Despite his alleged lack of feeling, Juste-Agénor reacts

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to L’Air des Cimes with a witticism fit to be quoted in a newspaper or repeated in social settings: “If after that you don’t get into the Academy, such rubbish is unpardonable” (36). Although Julius does not reply to this insult, his feelings are hurt, all the more so because he hoped to honour his father with the book: “Had not Julius, indeed, retraced in this book the old diplomat’s truly representative career? As a companion picture to the turbulent follies of romanticism, had he not glorified the dignified, the ordered, the classic calm of Juste-Agénor’s existence in its twofold aspect, political and domestic?” (38). The reaction of Julius’s wife is just as discouraging. She cites the ambiguous praise of a critic, M. de Voguë – incidentally, a former diplomat known for having introduced the Russian novel to France, and Gide’s whipping boy – who pompously celebrates the nationalistic virtues of the novel: “A pen like yours defends France like a sword” (38). Julius believes this praise to be nothing more than critical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, he quotes de Voguë’s phrase in full to his wife, as if he has learnt by heart all of the reviews, even the hypocritical ones, to which his novel has been subjected: “Threatened as France is with barbarism, a pen like yours defends her better than a sword!” (38). Still searching for compliments, Julius receives equivocal support from his wife: “What’s the matter, dear? Do you really think your last book isn’t as good as the others?” (41). Gide’s signature irony, evident throughout this scene, is directed at the mediocre novelist who wants to please his father, his wife, his social class, even his nation. In this regard, Gide parodies those novelists, such as Maurice Barrès, who vaunt their patriotism. More generally, he mocks the deceit of artists who serve some other purpose than their art. By seeking prizes, Julius risks betraying what Gide calls “the genuineness of his life” (39). Julius resembles the writers and pseudo-philosophers in Paludes, who all look to the past instead of looking ahead or looking at themselves. Always mindful of what has come before or what will come after, they cannot write with sincerity. Julius, prisoner of his own desire, begins a letter of reproach to his father: “It is a matter of grief to me that you, of all people in the world, should be the one to suspect my disinterestedness” (40). After starting this letter, he changes his mind and throws the draft in the waste basket. In the end, he remains the obedient, servile son. Without any complaint, he complies with his father’s wish to find Lafcadio, who is living incognito in Paris. “A novelist like you will easily be able to invent some excuse for introducing yourself” (36), Juste-Agénor tells Julius. Gide makes fun of Julius’s vanity and naïvety. Julius flatters others in hopes that he will be flattered in turn. He throws himself into

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adventure without the faintest clue of the dimensions of the plot that enfolds him. He feels excited and a little scared of being in the position of a novelistic hero: “it seemed to the novelist that he was plunging into an unknown sea of adventure” (42). When Julius shows up at the address that his father gives him for Lafcadio, the filth of the place disgusts him. It is utterly different from the embassy gardens that he admires from his office; in those green spaces, “eyes and mind could cleanse themselves from the squalor of the streets and from the meannesses of the world” (37). Once inside Lafcadio’s lodgings, he finds a Russian leather notebook and begins to read it. The book contains some accounts, a list of activities, place names with dates, a few philosophical ideas, nothing that makes any sense. These jottings do not add up to a story in Julius’s eyes. He craves something self-evidently literary. When Lafcadio appears, he is intrigued and somewhat amused by the presence of a well-dressed man in his untidy lodgings. He does not yet know who Julius is, and Julius does not yet know he has just met his half-brother. Julius knows only what he has read in the notebook; Lafcadio, for his part, knows only that the intruder has taken the liberty of reading his incoherent musings. There is no hostility between the two men, although Lafcadio, furious that his pocket-book has been discovered by an intruder, stabs himself in the thigh with his penknife. The act has no particular motive. Beyond this angry outburst, nothing suggests even the slightest conflict between the two men. Lafcadio, after a moment of hesitation, seizes Julius’s offer to become his secretary. A range of novelistic possibilities opens up as soon as the bastard Lafcadio, in the manner of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, claims his family name as his own. Then and there, he decides to have calling cards embossed with his full name: Lafcadio de Baraglioul. Lafcadio easily slips into the habits of the novelistic hero – in the most melodramatic sense. The novel is crowded with incident. On the way to collect the calling cards that bear his newly claimed name, Lafcadio happens to save two children from a fire while bystanders and a ­panic-stricken mother watch helplessly: One push of his shoulder shivers the window-pane; he has disappeared into the room. Agonising moment of unspeakable suspense! Here he comes again, holding a crying infant in his arms. Out of a sheet torn in two and knotted together end to end, he hastily contrives a rope – ties the child to it – lowers it gently to the arms of the distracted mother. The second child is saved in the same way. When Lafcadio came down in his turn, the crowd cheered him as a hero. (58)

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Lafcadio refuses the promised reward, even though he has barely enough to pay for the visiting-cards and the clothes he needs as the son of a diplomat. The panicky mother turns out to be Julius’s daughter, Geneviève de Baraglioul. Subsequently – why not? – Geneviève and Lafcadio become lovers. So numerous and so unbelievable are Lafcadio’s adventures that he begins to seem more an idea than a character: “‘They take me for a clown,’ thought he, as he roughly and ungraciously repulsed their greetings, exasperated at feeling himself blush” (58). Critics have pointed out the parodic nature of this scene, which adopts the crudest contrivances of melodrama. The mock adventure novel seems unfamiliar and mechanical in Gide’s hands, as if, unlike the controlled irony in Paludes, the ulterior meaning of such a passage is no more sophisticated than its surface meaning. Lafcadio behaves like a puppet, without any inner life or identity. He saunters along, completely open to surprise and adventure; subject to whim and circumstance, he is an abstraction rather than a character. Should his inconsequentiality be taken seriously? The Vatican Cellars gravitates around the fifth and final part, eponymously called “Lafcadio.” In this section, the well-known “acte gratuit” occurs. (Gide hated this expression; like Julius, he believed that every act had a motive.) This sequence is narrated in a slightly less elaborate and only slightly less parodic way than Lafcadio’s initial adventures. The change in tone raises a further question: as the logical outcome of Lafcadio’s inconsequentiality, need the motiveless murder be taken seriously? The scene is relatively short and understated, as if nothing of any importance were happening. Quite by chance, Lafcadio finds himself in a train compartment with a stranger somewhere between Rome and Naples. Pretending to be asleep, Lafcadio sees the stranger leaning nonchalantly against the door of the compartment. He imagines a crime, perfect in its simplicity: he will push the stranger out of the moving train. He hesitates, then decides to leave the matter to chance: if he can count to twelve without seeing any lights in the countryside, then the “dromedary” (192), as he calls him, will be saved. When he gets to nine, a light appears. So he pushes the man from the train. The act has no motive. There is no animosity between the two men, as there is none between Julius and Lafcadio at the moment that Lafcadio stabs himself with a penknife. Although Lafcadio has no clue about the identity of the stranger in the train, he is, as it so happens, Amédée Fleurissoire, Julius’s brother-in-law. Earlier in The Vatican Cellars, the narrator warns readers not to expect the story to be believable:

André Gide and the Art of Evasion  129 Fiction there is – and history. Certain critics of no little discernment have considered that fiction is history which might have taken place, and history fiction which has taken place. We are, indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist’s art often compels belief, just as reality sometimes defies it. Alas! there exists an order of minds so sceptical that they deny the possibility of any fact as soon as it diverges from the commonplace. It is not for them that I write. (88)

Bad readers do not accept the incredible divergences from the commonplace that occur in both fiction and in life. Yet characters, like people, can have many faces that change according to changes in circumstance. Protos, disguised as a law professor, believes that an honest man can become a felon at any time: “Do you know what is needful to turn an honest man into a rogue? A change of scene – a moment’s forgetfulness suffices. Yes, sir, a gap in the memory and sincerity comes out into the open!” (255). At this juncture, Gide introduces an opposition between two kinds of being: “crustacés” and “subtils,” or “the crusted” and “the slim” in Dorothy Bussy’s translation. “The crusted” – slow, blinkered people – “strutted and swaggered through every walk of life” (227). The slim, by contrast, including Protos and Lafcadio, “did not present to all persons and in all places the same appearance” (227). They recognize each other but go unrecognized by the crusted. The crusted, it goes without saying, will never grasp Protos’s theory of forgetfulness that provides a portal to sincerity. But Gide’s categories exist to be transgressed. Just as a hardened freemason like Anthime Armand-Dubois can become a zealous Catholic after the Holy Virgin appears to him, Julius succumbs to Lafcadio’s charm and, as a result, transforms into a subtle writer. He begins to create characters as free and inconsequential as Lafcadio, to whom Julius proudly explains his about-face: “So nothing is further from my old novels than the one I am planning now. I used to demand logic and consistency from my characters, and in order to make quite sure of getting them, I began by demanding them from myself. It wasn’t natural. We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us” (201–2). Jubilant about his transformation, Julius declares, “I’m at a turning-point of my career” (200). His candour is disarming, especially when he claims, in a state of near giddiness, that it is “as if I were going to evaporate” (200). Julius sounds like Nathaniel in The Fruits of the Earth: he is overcome with joy at the idea of finally having “a free field” (202) before him, to write only as he wishes. He bets everything on “the man who

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is sincere” (202). Having dreamed of being voted into the Academy and having been humiliated by that august body, Julius reinvents himself. As a novelist, he imagines a different species of “inconsequential” heroes, who, quite by accident, might commit a random crime. As in Hamlet, with its play within a play, Gide perpetrates a mise-en-abîme: a novelist within a novel imagines a perfect crime that has, as it turns out, already been committed. Although Julius does not accuse Lafcadio directly of murder, the story that he tells echoes Lafcadio’s crime at every turn. As much as Gide speeds through events in The Vatican Cellars, he also takes great pleasure in stretching out the scene between Lafacadio and Julius, full as it is with novelistic self-derision and mirror games. At the beginning, Lafcadio listens to Julius’s story without showing any particular emotion; he protests, diplomatically, when Julius gives his character the ability to reason. Julius is “too subtle” (205), Lafcadio says, as if he were becoming one of the crustaceans and Julius is becoming a chameleon novelist. At this point, the reader does not know whether the target of Gide’s irony is Julius or Lafcadio. Barely converted to the joys of inconsequence, Julius changes his mind as soon as he reads in the newspaper that his idea for a novel, which he thought too far-fetched, has almost happened, and that his own brother-in-law, Amédée Fleurissoire, was the victim. “Almost,” because Julius does not believe that the crime is random, even when Lafcadio shows Julius, with the newspaper story to prove his point, that money was not the motive. It was merely a senseless act. Julius does not believe Lafcadio because he knows about the plot against the pope. In the end, the gratuitous murder committed by Lafcadio is credited to the papal kidnappers, who henceforth acquire a reputation for being dangerous, homicidal criminals. Julius solemnly concludes that “there’s no such thing as a crime without a motive” (209). In the end, the entire novel takes place under the sign of inconsequence, although that guiding principle may not be evident at first. The novel begins with the sudden conversion of Anthime Armand-Dubois, which is actually informed by Lafcadio’s lesson on inconsequence. From there, Julius discovers a new kind of novel, one that emulates Lafcadio’s insouciance. In a further reversal, Julius resumes his original approach to writing novels: nature returns with a vengeance. Julius cannot deny his true disposition as a novelist; he is consistent with his past and his penchants. Only Lafcadio has no real identity, which, ultimately, is his strength as a character. Lafcadio’s lack of identity also makes him unique among Gide’s characters. Like a Dostoyevskian hero – reviewers did not fail to draw a parallel between his senseless crime and Raskolnikov’s in Crime and Punishment – he confesses to a

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baffled Julius. His confession is as “motiveless” as the crime, for no one suspects a thing. In fact, Protos is found guilty of the murder. The confession has no more consequence than the crime. Behaving as naturally as can be, Lafcadio confesses without the least regret. He even asks himself if his act had some moral, empathic basis. As he explains, Amédée “didn’t look happy” (242) prior to being shoved out of the train, as if this justification might matter. But Julius, distracted by a broken nail on his baby finger, barely listens to what Lafcadio is saying. In the final scene, Lafcadio, on the verge of suicide, weeps in front of Geneviève de Baraglioul. He is crying because Julius told him, “I was beginning to care for you” (245). This frivolous, unsentimental, seemingly shallow novel ends with the distressed words of Lafcadio and the compassionate rejoinder of Geneviève, who has come to his bedside out of fear that he has taken his own life. Now lovers, the two spend the night together. The scene could be a romantic parody, but in the end, it leaves every stone unturned. New possibilities continue to arise. “Here begins a new book” (250), Gide concludes. In fact, Gide had not quite finished with Lafcadio. The Counterfeiters begins with his return as protagonist. Gide takes this technique of miseen-abîme even further by having Édouard’s notebook form a reflection on the plot of the novel. Yet Édouard’s notebook in The Counterfeiters is quite different from Lafcadio’s in The Vatican Cellars. Édouard is a perceptive, self-aware novelist, entirely unlike Lafcadio. In keeping with his motto, “Never take advantage of momentum – such is the rule of my game” (Counterfeiters 406), Édouard continues the Gidean quest for indeterminacy. He sees novelistic characters as severed from all biological or social connection. They have no family, no fraternity, no antecedents, and no descendants. For Édouard, “the difficulty lies in not constructing the rest of my novel as a prolongation of the lines already traced” (409). Each character develops according to his inconsequence, which is a form of awareness heightened by the traces that he leaves – a journal fastidiously kept, for instance, or an unfinished novel documenting his transformations. And that is no simple game, notwithstanding all of the novelist’s arabesques. The art of evasion, for Édouard, Lafcadio, and Gide alike, is a way of being. In the end, it is the only way of being that is not trapped in a novelistic or diplomatic lie. Coda In a journal entry for 14 May 1921, Gide reports an exchange with Proust, to whom he had sent Corydon while making him promise not to discuss the book with anyone. Proust summarized, “You can tell anything, but

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on the condition of never saying ‘I.’” In response, Gide commented, “That doesn’t suit me at all” (Journals 2:265).13 One can imagine that diplomacy, in which the pronoun “I” is firmly repressed under most circumstances, would not suit Gide either. But diplomacy, in the sense that it is used in this essay, is paradoxically what allows Gide to say “I,” by virtue of what Vladimir Jankélévitch calls the “pact of the mutually incompatible” (38).14 Of the 157 French diplomats who were active in 1938, nearly half – 77 in total – had published books, 15 of which were novels. With these statistics in mind, Renaud Meltz argues that literary values and diplomatic values are, generally speaking, mutually exclusive. Under such a formulation, Giraudoux, Léger, and Morand must have made poor diplomats, and, by contrast, good diplomats must have made fairly mediocre writers. As it happens, certain writer-diplomats between the wars, such as Xavier de Laforcade, Armand Barois, Albert Bérard, Jacques de Maricourt, and Louis de Monicault, have been forgotten. They belong to the Gidean category of the crusted, like Julius de Baraglioul and all the pseudo writer-diplomats whom Lafcadio mocks. The only counter-example is Paul Claudel, the writer-diplomat par excellence and an anti-Gide if ever there was one. Maurice Blanchot observes, however, that Claudel is full of contradictions: “a fundamental discordance, a mighty clash, contained and unrestrained, of uncoordinated movements, a tremendous mixture of contrary needs, opposing demands, ill-assorted qualities, and irreconcilable aptitudes” (93–4).15 Only under the condition of “fundamental discordance” do the parallels between diplomacy and literature assume meaning. NOTES   1 My translation: “On devient un ironiste, non seulement par ‘l’économie’ mais par la ‘diplomatie.’”   2 My translation: “une simple figure de rhétorique qui inverse la teneur d’un propos: c’est toute une vision du monde, de soi et de l’autre, qu’elle engage, en même temps qu’une forme littéraire, un imaginaire et une morale de l’œuvre.”   3 Signalling Gide’s diplomatic aura, Pierre Lepape subtitles his biography “the messenger,” an evocation of the diplomat’s tendency to carry messages between parties. In keeping with his ambassadorial image, Gide published Essai sur Montaigne (1929), in which he identified with his subject; Montaigne of course had served as an envoy for Henri III and weighed the exigencies of diplomacy in such essays as “A Trait of Certain Ambassadors.”

André Gide and the Art of Evasion  133   4 Henri Béraud, one of his most illustrious detractors, coined the epigram “la nature a peur du Gide,” a play on the phrase “la nature a horreur du vide” (nature abhors a vacuum) (qtd. in Lestringant 2:130).  5 Travels in the Congo and Return from Chad, usually published together in French and in English, form one more or less continuous narrative. Gide also published Afterthoughts on the USSR (1937) as a sequel to Back from the USSR; these works, too, are usually published as one book. In both cases, Gide abides by his usual practice of retouching or finessing his thoughts through revision.   6 My translation: “à l’anti-missionnaire, au missionnaire inverse exaltant, au lieu de la réprimer, la sexualité indigène, célébrant la sexualité au lieu de la censurer.”   7 My translation: “Tu seras certes déçu si tu y cherches un intérêt littéraire. Mais je le crois de la plus haute importance.”   8 My translation: “Mais il était un acrobate-né, un gymnaste du verbe, et il opéra avec succès le périlleux rétablissement. Sans le moins du monde renier le fond de sa pensée.”   9 My translation: “Les Caves du Vatican tout compte fait ne sont qu’un événement d’ordre diplomatique.” 10 My translation: “Ce ton soumis m’est hélas! assez naturel (les galons m’en imposent toujours; ou plus exactement, je perds, en face d’eux, conscience de ma propre valeur).” 11 The original reads, “Et je doute qu’en aucun autre pays aujourd’hui, fût-ce dans l’Allemagne de Hitler, l’esprit soit moins libre, plus courbé, plus craintif (terrorisé), plus vassalisé.” We have modified Dorothy Bussy’s translation slightly. She renders “esprit” as “thought,” though surely more than thought is vassalized in the USSR. And she renders the subjunctive “soit” as “be,” which is of course correct, but slightly out of date. 12 My translation: “Le roman tel que je le reconnais ou l’imagine, comporte une diversité de points de vue soumise à la diversité des personnages; c’est par essence une oeuvre déconcertée.” 13 My translation: “Vous pouvez tout raconter; mais à condition de ne jamais dire: Je. Ce qui ne fait pas mon affaire.” 14 My translation: “le pacte des incompossibles.” 15 My translation: “une discordance essentielle, le heurt puissant, contenu, mal contenu, de mouvements sans harmonie, un mélange formidable de besoins contraires, d’exigences opposées, de qualités dépareillées et d’aptitudes inconciliables.”

7 Proust’s Epistolary Diplomacy: Antoine Bibesco, René Peter, and “Salaïsme” françois proulx

In 2016, the University of Illinois acquired nine previously unpublished letters to and from Marcel Proust at a much-publicized auction (Collection Patricia Mante-Proust). This purchase built upon a collection that now totals over twelve hundred letters. Two of these letters, written to René Peter (1872–1947) at the turn of the year 1907, centre on a queer scenario of conjecture and insinuation followed by clamorous and somewhat unconvincing denial (Proulx).1 Proust’s tortuous exchange with Peter, a playwright, echoes aspects of his correspondence, a few years earlier, with Antoine Bibesco (1878–1951), a Romanian prince and career diplomat who also enjoyed moderate success writing and translating plays. I propose to examine three common patterns that can be discerned in Proust’s epistolary relations with Peter and Bibesco, all sharing certain theatrical qualities, redolent of farcical intrigue and compromising divulgations: first, diplomatic manoeuvres, including the exchange of secrets, pacts of alliance, and the use of coded or ambiguous names and terms; second, disguise and the interchange of places, often through a practice, or a fantasy, of shared writing; and third, the falsification of documents, after Proust’s death, in memoirs and editions of letters published by his correspondents. Studies of Proust and diplomacy usually focus on the character of the Marquis de Norpois in the Recherche, and consider either Norpois’s role in an early scene about the young hero’s potential choice of career (Henry 7–22), or the novel’s subsequent critique of the ambassador’s hollow diplomatic journalism during the war years (Chaudier). By investigating various diplomatic aspects of Proust’s correspondence in the years 1901–7, I will instead show how, in writing (often awkward and convoluted) letters to purportedly heterosexual men like Peter and Bibesco, Proust drafted and developed – one could say negotiated – the complex position of informant or liaison to the world of queerness that would later become a hallmark of his novel.

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The parallel between Peter and Bibesco is most clearly suggested by the almost verbatim repetition by Proust of an ambiguous written statement, at five years’ distance. This repetition is not in itself particularly unusual, since Proust often reused certain formulations or literary citations in his correspondence. Proust in fact restaged certain scenarios with epistolary relations in various periods of his life: biographers suggest that Antoine Bibesco and René Peter belong to a category of male friends with whom he played out a script of poorly sublimated attraction (Tadié, Marcel Proust 389, 448–9). Proust writes to René Peter in late December 1906, in a letter that was omitted from Peter’s own memoir about his friendship with Proust, Une saison avec Marcel Proust (2005), and censored in Philip Kolb’s edition of Proust’s correspondence (Proust, Correspondance VI:344):2 [...] comme je garde le lit après q.q. jours avec la grippe je n’ai plus la force que de vs dire que je vous admire et que je vous aime. (Letter to René Peter, [Versailles])3 [...] since I am bedridden following a few days with the flu, I have barely enough strength to tell you my admiration and my love for you.

Five years earlier, he wrote this dedication on a copy of his first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours from 1896: À Antoine Bibesco, que j’aime et que j’admire – Le 30 octobre 1901, dix heure[s] du soir «Bonne nuit, aimable prince et que des essaims d’anges bercent en chantant votre sommeil» (Hamlet !) Marcel Proust «Franchement il est bon à mettre aux cabinets.» (l’exemplaire) (Correspondance II:461) To Antoine Bibesco, with my love and admiration – 30 October 1901, 10 p.m. “Good night, sweet prince: And flights of angels sing you to your rest! [sic]” (Hamlet!) Marcel Proust “Honestly it should be thrown in the closet.” (this copy of the book)

The double theatrical citation, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (5.2.312– 13) and Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1.2.376), is remarkable for its two grammatical modifications. Proust substitutes a more distant “votre” for the “ton” of the 1886 translation of Hamlet (by Émile Montégut),

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which he quotes in an epigraph in that same volume, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (26). He also makes the “cabinets” plural in his citation of Molière, pushing the citation towards the scatological, whereas the nature of the “cabinet” in question (singular, in the text of the play), cupboard or lavatory, has been left unresolved by centuries of literary criticism.4 The dedication is shot through with equivocality and suggestion, all hinging on the ambiguous usage, repeated in the letter to Peter, of the verb “aimer” – and we find yet another hint of queerness if we remember that Sarah Bernhardt performed crossdressed as Hamlet in London and Paris just two years prior, in 1899 (Roberts 174–9). Antoine Bibesco, the younger son of a Romanian prince, was born in Paris in 1878. He became an attaché at the Romanian legation in Paris in 1899 and was promoted to secretary in 1903 (Sturdza; V. Greene 1182–4). Having received his early schooling in Canterbury, he spoke perfect English, somewhat uncommon for a Romanian aristocrat of the era. He was named secretary of the Romanian legation in London in 1913 and married Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, in 1919. From 1920 to 1926 he was minister of Romania in Washington, and from 1927 to 1935, in Madrid, in the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War. While in Washington he earned the enmity of the powerful Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu, who sought a rapprochement with the USSR. Bibesco was named to the League of Nations in 1937 by the Romanian king, Caroll II, as a counter-influence to Titulescu; after the Second World War, he attempted, without success, to use his Anglo-American connections to mitigate Soviet control over Romania. Before his death in London in 1951, he published a selection of Proust’s letters to him, to his brother Emmanuel, and to his cousin Marthe, Lettres de Marcel Proust à Bibesco (1949). He wrote many plays, some of which were performed in Paris, including Le Jaloux in 1904, Jacques Abran in 1910, and Laquelle ?... in 1927 (also performed in Berlin and New York); he adapted (with Andrée Méry) Noël Coward’s Hay Fever into French in 1928, under the title Week-end. René Peter was born in 1872, a year after Proust. The two had known each other as children: Peter’s father, like Adrien Proust, was a professor at the Faculté de médecine in Paris (Brachet). Peter was great friends with Reynaldo Hahn,5 the composer who had been Proust’s lover from 1894 to 1896 and who remained his closest friend. It is through Hahn that Proust rekindled his friendship with Peter in 1904. That year, Peter had his greatest success as a playwright with Chiffon, co-written with a certain Robert Danceny (a pseudonym, taken from the name of a young and naïve male character in Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses of 1782). After the First World War, he published a biography of Claude Debussy in 1931, and a five-volume “Secret History” of the Académie française

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between 1934 and 1940. Peter died in 1947, but it was not until 2005 that the manuscript of his short memoir, Une saison avec Marcel Proust, was discovered and published. The season in question is the fall of 1906, when Proust, having moved out of his parents’ large apartment on the rue de Courcelles following the death of his mother in 1905, temporarily settled at the Hôtel des Réservoirs in Versailles, at Hahn’s recommendation. There, he nursed his health, worried about finding a suitable new lodging in Paris, and possibly – at least according to Peter – began to mull over an ambitious writing project. The title of René Peter’s 1914 collaboration with Georges Feydeau, Je ne trompe pas mon mari [I am not cheating on my husband], provides a tonal key for understanding certain boulevardian elements of Proust’s epistolary exchanges with playwrights like Peter and Bibesco, including extramarital couplings and seemingly implausible denials. Diplomatic Manoeuvres Proust’s first known missive to Antoine Bibesco dates from September 1899, when they both vacationed in Évian-les-Bains. Letters are sparse and the relationship undefined (Proust writes, “Mon cher ami (?)” [“My dear friend (?)”] in late summer 1901) until October 1901 (Correspondance II:440), when Proust mounts a sustained campaign of epistolary rapprochement: invitations, a poem, an acrostic, the dedicated copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a gift of a photograph. One letter from [11 November 1901] features a particularly rich commingling of theatrical intrigue and diplomatic negotiation around the question of friendship. Cher ami En vous quittant j’ai appris que le concierge de Reynaldo était venu me prévenir qu’il revenait demain (c’est à dire aujourd’hui “quand vous ­aurez ce mot” (style théâtre)[.] HaraS jouant une pièce d’elle après ­demain j’aurais du [sic] le deviner. J’ai aussi tot [sic] pensé que la visite de Reynaldo serait pour Haras, sa seconde pour moi et qu’en conséquence je me trouverais peut’être demain soir possesseur de q.q. impressions ­d’Haras sur la Lutte (peut’être non) [...] (II:469–70)6 Dear friend After I left you I learned that Reynaldo’s concierge had come by to tell me that he would return tomorrow (which is to say today “when you receive this note” (theatre style)[.] Since HaraS is starring in a play of her own7 the day after tomorrow I should have known. I immediately thought that Reynaldo’s visit would be to Haras, the second to me,

Proust’s Epistolary Diplomacy  141 and that therefore I might perhaps as of tomorrow evening have in my possession some of Haras’s impressions regarding La Lutte (perhaps not) [...]

The missive is both self-consciously theatrical (“style théâtre”) and concerned with theatre as a topic. “HaraS” is Sarah Bernhardt, of whom Reynaldo Hahn was a devoted fan and friend. La Lutte is a play written by Bibesco, which he was pitching to Bernhardt and other actresses at the time; those efforts failed, and the play was never performed. Such reversed or coded names circulate among Bibesco’s correspondents in this period, as in a parody of espionage. The Bibesco brothers are called “Oscebib”; Marcel becomes “Lecram” or “Stroup” (Carter 308); Antoine is nicknamed “Telephas” (Correspondance II:464–5), he who talks from far away, since he preferred using the telephone to writing long letters. The letter continues: [...] Il faudra que nous ayons ¼ d’heure de franche explication qui simplifiera je ne dis pas l’avenir de notre existence mais l’avenir de la portion d’existence sur laquelle sera répartie (quelque espace qu’elle y occupe, je ne dis pas en durée mais en étendue, quel charabias [sic]) ce que je suis peut’être très outrecuidant d’appeler notre amitié. Et puis il faudra quelques < [...] (Voilà que je prends votre habitude d’appeler les femmes par leur petit nom. [...] >8 brèves indications concernant les relations avec Reynaldo, lequel dès son arrivée sera instruit de l’importance prise dans la vie du moschant par certain personnage sis au 69 de la même rue et qui avant son départ y figurait (style de théâtre) très accessoirement bien qu’avec pittoresque. [...] (II:464–5)9 [...] We will need 15 minutes of straightforward discussion which will simplify, I won’t say the future of our existence but merely the future of the portion of existence which is to be occupied (whatever space it may take up, not in length but in spread, what gibberish) by what I might be quite presumptuous in calling our friendship. Also we will need a few < [...] (Here I am adopting your habit of calling women by their first name. [...] > brief indications concerning relations with Reynaldo, who as soon as he returns will be briefed about the newfound importance in the life of the moschant by a certain character living at number 69 on the same street10 and who before his departure was featured (theatre style) very much in the background though in a picturesque manner.

Before a renewed self-conscious admission of writing and acting in “style de théâtre,” Proust asks for a face-to-face conversation with

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Bibesco regarding delicate questions (including how to deal with Hahn), a request which subsequent letters show was not granted. Proust’s spelling gets mangled (he writes “charabias” instead of “charabia”), his sentence becomes inflated with precautions and rhetorical circumlocutions that are anything but “brief” or “straightforward.” He manoeuvres, in an addition at the bottom of the page (the most loaded statements in Proust’s letters are often found in postscripts or additions, sometimes literally scribbled between the lines), to assert an intimate proximity to his correspondent – I am becoming like you, I am taking on your habits – while simultaneously reassuring Bibesco of his status as a ladies’ man. The use of another code word, “moschant” (a deformation of méchant), which in this context designates Proust himself but with other correspondents (usually Reynaldo Hahn) is also used to label men with queer leanings or incriminating marks of queerness (Delesalle-Rowlson), also serves as a mark of complicity. The question of queerness is addressed at the end of the letter, in the form of a denial: Quant au Salaïsme[,] n’êtes[-]vous pas assez psychologue me voyant autant pour avoir l’impression qu’il m’intéresse comme le gothique bien que beaucoup moins et que dans la réalité de ma vie, en moi, dans mes amitiés etc[.] (vous en avez une sous les yeux) il est aussi absent que. Je ne (Correspondance II:464–5)11 As for Salaïsm[,] are you not well-versed enough in psychology, seeing me so often, to perceive that it interests me like the Gothic, although much less and that in the reality of my life, in me, in my friendships etc[.] (you are looking at one right now) it is as absent as. I can think of

Proust’s avowal and immediate disavowal of a supposedly theoretical interest in the topic of “Salaïsme” (“il m’intéresse [...] bien que beaucoup moins”) leads to a denial of its presence in the practical

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reality of his existence, in a suspended comparison (“il est aussi absent que. [...]”), which is then followed by an affirmation of disinterest in Bibesco’s opinion, itself of course disproved by the rhetorical pirouettes that precede. Philip Kolb, and every Proust biographer after him, explains that “Salaïste,” a code word for male homosexuality in Proust’s letters from this period, is derived from the name of Count Antoine Sala, a contemporary who appears to have been, given what his name is made to signify in these letters, somewhat notoriously queer (Correspondance II:463, 465; Carter 307; Tadié, Marcel Proust 383). One biographer points out that the word is also a play on “salace” [salacious] (Davenport-Hines 148). Another critic proposes a complementary explanation: Salaï is the French spelling of Andrea Salai (1480–1524), Leonardo da Vinci’s protégé who was possibly the model for his St John the Baptist, displayed at the Louvre, and even the Mona Lisa (the latter a speculative claim that remains the object of much debate) (Fraisse 899–900). The connotation would likely not have been lost on Proust’s interlocutors. A more idiomatic link to Leonardo and Salai is also hinted at by this letter’s allusion to “the Gothic.” Proust had read about Leonardo in an 1892 book by Gabriel Séailles (Yoshikawa 57–8), his philosophy professor at the Sorbonne from 1893 to 1895 (Fraisse 148–50). In 1897, Hahn notes in his journal, “I just found the following sentence in Séailles’s book on Leonardo: ‘He did not like the Gothic.’ [...] this surprise is endearing: He did not like the Gothic style” (qtd. in Correspondance III:210–11).12 Séailles’s book is fairly suggestive on the topic of Leonardo’s relationship to Salai: “He has around him a few students who live under his roof. Salai, ‘a youth of remarkable grace and beauty’ (according to Vasari), set off by a mane of abundant curls, is at once his disciple and his servant” (Séailles 479–80). The close proximity, in this November 1901 letter to Bibesco, of mentions of Reynaldo Hahn, of the “Gothic,” and of affirmations of being interested or uninterested in a certain style, suggests that the term “Salaïste” may have had as much to do with Proust’s personal associations concerning Leonardo as it did with Antoine Sala. The letter is unsigned; it ends on an offer to initiate Bibesco in the peculiar epistolary language shared by Proust and Hahn. This last tactic is perhaps the most surprising: in order to arouse the amicable interest of a purportedly heterosexual man, Proust offers to provide him with information about the secret codes of queer ex-lovers. Such a manoeuvre is akin to the strange position of the Narrator in Proust’s novel, also purportedly straight, who nevertheless entices Proust’s readers with ever-increasing access to the hidden world of inverts, beginning with

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the revelation that opens Sodome et Gomorrhe. Soon after he spies on the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, the Narrator, now suddenly equipped with an unfailing instinct for discerning male homosexuality in all its forms, acts as a guide and decipherer for the reader at a gathering hosted by the Princesse de Guermantes: From that instant M. de Vaugoubert (greatly to the annoyance of M. de Charlus) could not tear his eyes away from these young secretaries whom the X – Ambassador to France, an old stager, had not chosen blindfold. M. de Vaugoubert remained silent; I could only see his eyes. But, being accustomed from my childhood to apply, even to what is voiceless, the language of the classics, I read into M. de Vaugoubert’s eyes the lines in which Esther explains to Elise that Mordecai, in his zeal for his religion, has made it a rule that only those maidens who profess it shall be employed about the Queen’s person. (Remembrance 2:689–90; À la recherche du temps perdu 3:65)

Diplomacy and theatre again meet in this passage, with its citation of Racine, as the Narrator proposes to serve as an interpreter. He decodes, for the benefit of the reader, the lustful gazes that M. de Vaugoubert, a career diplomat who had long renounced queer pleasures,13 directs at the striking young secretaries of the unnamed ambassador – ­translating from the unsuccessfully repressed body language of inverts to the more culturally acceptable language of classical plays. The role of informant, of liaison to the world of queerness, that Proust offered to play with correspondents such as Bibesco was somewhat analogous; hence his frequent denunciations of men like Antoine Sala, and later his tortuous admissions of amorous interest in a mutual friend, Bertrand de Fénelon (“Nonelef,” in their coded language), quickly followed by the requisite disavowals (Carter 306–10). Between Proust and Antoine Bibesco in 1901–2, secrets were exchanged and labelled “tombeau” [tomb], to be taken to the grave; a mutual pact was established, whereby each was to inform the other of any slander made behind his back (Carter 310; Tadié, Marcel Proust 380–1). In his 1949 edition of Proust’s letters, Bibesco explains that this idea was based on a literary fantasy, rather than on his actual experience as a diplomat: “At twenty when I was a devoted reader of detective stories I believed that friendship could be secret and absolute. Marcel Proust seemed so readily confiding that one day I proposed that we make a pact” (Bibesco 120). Each party – Proust in letters as early as the fall of 1902, Bibesco in his commentary in

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1949 (Correspondance III:134–5; Bibesco 120) – eventually complained that the other did not honour the pact. And while Proust shared his secrets, to a perhaps unwelcome degree, and usually only to attempt to retract them soon after, Bibesco did not seem to reciprocate. After 1904, their friendship grew more distant. A similar pattern of oversharing of information related to queerness, quickly followed by disavowal, can be found in the pair of letters to René Peter from 1906–7. We read, in the second letter: Mon cher René vous n’avez compris quoique [sic] ce soit à ma lettre. D’abord je vous disais que ma supposition n’en était pas une et je suis trop fatigué pour vous réexpliquer ce que je croyais vous avoir si bien expliqué. Mais, même si vous n’avez pas compris à quel phénomène mental je faisais allusion, si vous avez pensé que c’était une “supposition” (!!!!!!), en tous cas où avez-vous pris qu’elle eut [sic] un caractère ... douteux ? C’était à mille lieues de ce que je pensais. Lui a trop fait ses preuves de laideur et vous de pureté pour qu’il put [sic] entrer dans mon imagination un arrangement de ce genre. Ou plutôt que dis-je, lui aussi a fait ses preuves de pureté, et même éclatantes et un peu ridicules. (“Letter to René Peter, [Paris]”) My dear René you have completely misunderstood my letter. First of all I was telling you that my supposition was not one and I am too tired to again explain what I thought I had explained quite clearly. But, even if you have misunderstood the mental phenomenon to which I was alluding, if you thought it was a “supposition” (!!!!!!), in any case where did you get the idea that it had a ... dubious character? That kind of thing was furthest from my mind. He has given too much proof of his baseness and you of your purity for such an arrangement to ever enter in my imagination. Or rather what am I saying, he as well has given much proof of purity, conspicuous and rather ridiculous at that.14

The letter shows many signs of having been dashed off in haste. Proust uses scrap paper, not the mourning paper he usually uses in this period (a year after the death of his mother); accents are missing; some words are not properly spaced. His logic is circuitous: the fact of having made an assumption is first avowed (“ma supposition”), then immediately denied (“n’en était pas une”), only to have the word “supposition” itself indignantly attributed to Peter a few lines later. Peter’s moral purity is affirmed, contrasted with a third man’s moral turpitude, which is then quickly denied (“que dis-je”), in an attempt to absolve everyone involved. What prompted this hurried response?

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Disguise, Collaboration, and the Interchange of Places The first of the two letters to Peter, which can be dated to late December 1906, describes a hypothetical scenario, fastidiously wrapped in a preterition and two disavowals: [...] Et si j’étais moins accablé je vous dirais une idée qui m’avait traversé l’esprit. Mais René comprenez bien qu’il ne s’agit pas de q.q. chose que j’ai cru, mais d’une de ces idées qu’on imagine, comme quand on se dit : on vient de me nommer président de la république, qui est-ce que je prends pour ministres etc etc etc. Hé bien il y a une quinzaine Ulrich qui n’était pas venu depuis que vous l’aviez vu chez moi, vient. Un instant après on entre et on me dit : “Monsieur Peter !”. Désespoir etc. Puis plus de Peter et ... plus d’Ulrich. Puis l’autre jour Ulrich revient (le pauvre en ce moment est sans place et je le recommande comme je peux et je crois que je vais réussir) et cinq minutes après : “Monsieur Peter !” – Puis, depuis, plus d’Ulrich, plus de Peter. Alors cette idée c’est que vous aimiez beaucoup Ulrich et me le cachiez, que vous veniez ensemble à Versailles et n’arriviez pas exprès en même temps, et feigniez de ne pas partir ensemble..–. René cette idée d’ailleurs si sympathique ne m’a qu’effleuré ! – . [...] (“Letter to René Peter, [Versailles]”) [...] And if I were less ill I would tell you about an idea that crossed my mind. But René you must understand it is not something I believed, but rather one of those ideas we imagine, like when we tell ourselves: I’ve just been named President of the Republic, who do I invite to join my cabinet etc etc etc. Well about two weeks ago Ulrich who had not turned up since you had last seen him here, turns up. A moment later someone comes and announces: “Monsieur Peter!”. Despair etc. Then no more Peter and ... no more Ulrich. Then the other day Ulrich comes back (the poor dear at the moment is without a position and I recommend him as best as I can and I think I will succeed) and five minutes later: “Monsieur Peter!” – Since then, no more Ulrich, no more Peter. So this idea is that you love Ulrich quite a lot and hide it from me, that you travel together to Versailles and do not arrive at the same time on purpose, and pretend not to leave together..–.15 René this quite charming idea only barely occurred to me! – . [...]

Proust, having noticed a strange coincidence in the comings and goings of René Peter and another man at the Hôtel des Réservoirs where he is staying, imagines – while going to pains to specify that this is a fanciful conjecture – “that you love Ulrich quite a lot and hide it from me.” The ambiguous use of the verb “aimer,” as in the 1901 dedication of a copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours to Bibesco; the decipherment of queer clues for the benefit of an ostensibly straight reader, as when Proust offers Bibesco a

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lesson in “moschant” language in the [11 November 1901] letter; the symptomatically insistent denial that these questions are of any importance, as in the same 1901 letter to Bibesco: a pattern is visible in these exchanges, five years apart. Peter likely responded with an indignant letter, to which Proust hurriedly replied with the [2 January 1907] letter, previously cited (“Letter to René Peter, [Paris]”). In that letter, Proust distances himself from even having made a “‘supposition,’” through a surcharge of punctuation: ellipses, quotation marks, parentheses, exclamation marks. Instead he claims to have simply transcribed to paper a “phénomène mental.” In that regard, he is right: he merges character traits, imagines coincidences, structures a narrative. Through these mental processes, displaying overactive powers of interpretation and imagination, the novelist is already at work. The mystery man at the centre of this hypothetical scenario of discovery is Robert Ulrich, who episodically served as personal secretary or “pseudo-secretary” to Proust (as he calls him in a letter to Mme Straus) between 1906 and 1910 (Correspondance VII:188–90). Little is known about Ulrich apart from his age (he was allegedly twenty-five in November 1906) and a flattering description made by Proust to Robert de Billy: “very distinguished and highly presentable [...] very good manners” (VI:268). Philip Kolb mistakenly identified Ulrich as the nephew of Félicie Fitau, a domestic long in the service of the Proust family (VI:270). Multiple scholars have since corrected this error; how Proust came to be acquainted with Ulrich remains unknown. What does this imagined scenario suggest, through the interchange of roles, about Proust’s positioning vis-à-vis Peter? His feelings are ambiguous, as we see in the closing salutation to a letter from [14 January 1907], shortly after the exchange about Ulrich: “et croyez cher René à (à quoi ? à mes sentiments distingués ?)” [“I remain, dear René, very (very what? very faithfully yours?)” (VII:35). That fall in 1906, Proust had formed the project of co-writing a play with Peter; the title, according to Peter’s posthumously published memoirs, was to have been Le Sadique [The Sadist] (Peter 135). Proust gives a plot summary in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn from mid-September: “un ménage s’adore, affection immense, sainte, pure (bien entendu pas chaste)” [“a couple love each other, immense affection, saintly, pure, (of course not chaste)],” but the wife discovers the husband’s perverse inclinations (he hires prostitutes and has them say horrible things about his wife); she leaves him, he kills himself (VI:215–17). This scenario develops a long-running theme that can be traced to Proust’s earliest publications in literary magazines in the early to mid-1890s: an unspeakable desire, once avowed or discovered, causes the death of the person who harbours this desire, or of someone they love. From one version to the next, the gender of the various characters shifts. In the Recherche, the character with a vicious desire will be

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Mademoiselle Vinteuil, and her adored victim, her father, who dies of the sorrow caused by her lesbian affair. The Proustian definition of sadism is based on a paradox: the sadist stages a defilement of the object of his or her love, precisely because of the intensity of this love. “Her adoration of her father was the very condition of the daughter’s sacrilege,” we read in La Prisonnière (Remembrance 2:263; À la recherche du temps perdu 3:765). Le Sadique was to have represented a happy couple, threatened by the discovery of an unspeakable penchant. Might this fictional couple not be a stand-in for Proust and Peter, who see each other with domestic regularity during Proust’s stay at Versailles in the fall of 1906? Upon learning of Peter’s upcoming wedding in October 1911, Proust writes to him, in a characteristic interlacing of confession and denial: René, ce doit être si agréable de passer toute sa vie avec vous ! On ne doit pas s’embêter d’aucune façon à être votre femme (malgré les malheurs répétés de cette rédaction, à demi voulus d’ailleurs, ne croyez pas qu’il se glisse ici quelque aveu rétrospectif et cynique d’une coupable convoitise). (Peter 167–8)16 René, it must be so pleasant to spend one’s life with you! Being your wife must mean not never [sic] being bored in any way (despite the many blunders of this statement, half-deliberate by the way, do not presume that there transpires some retrospective and cynical confession of guilty coveting).

Proust’s imagination had earlier been struck by the fact that Peter’s cowriter for a number of plays, “Robert Danceny,” was the pseudonym of a woman, a certain Mme Dansaërt, who seems to have been his longtime mistress. Cela me rend heureux de penser que la charmante femme dont on m’assure que c’est elle qui se cache sous le nom masculin de votre collaborateur, sera de moitié dans votre œuvre. ([25 October 1904] Correspondance IV:322–3) It makes me happy to think that the charming woman who I am told is the one hiding behind the male name of your collaborator, will be present as a half of your work.

His stated desire to write a play with Peter is likely not unrelated to this act of literary cross-dressing and disguise (we know Proust’s fascination with women in male drag, for instance from Elstir’s portrait of Odette as “Miss Sacripant” in the Recherche). In another letter to Reynaldo Hahn, after the engagement is announced, Proust imagines a new scenario of discovery followed by death:

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Figure 1.  Marcel Proust, Letter and “Sala Draft” to Antoine Bibesco, [June or July 1902], recto. Proust 1-195, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. j’ai peur qu’une fois marié, sa femme ne prenne ombrage de Me Dansa[ë]rt, que lui-même ne s’éloigne d’elle et que celle-ci ne se tue. ([26 October 1911] Correspondance X:361–4) I fear that once he is married, his wife will take offence at Madame Dansa[ë]rt, that he will distance himself from her, and that she will kill herself.

Proust’s proposed collaboration with Peter never materialized. No draft materials for Le Sadique appear to have survived; perhaps none were produced, save for the summary made to Reynaldo Hahn. An earlier writerly collaboration of sorts between Proust and Bibesco did survive, though it is unknown whether that particular project ever went beyond the draft stage. In [June or July 1902], Proust writes a

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Figure 2.  Marcel Proust, Letter and “Sala Draft” to Antoine Bibesco, [June or July 1902], verso. Proust 1-195, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

remarkable letter to Bibesco, two-thirds of which consist in what he calls “le brouillon Sala,” that is, a draft apology to Antoine Sala, to be copied and sent by Bibesco, but in fact composed by Proust, for having spread slanderous rumours about Sala’s queer leanings. This clumsy attempt at interpersonal diplomacy uses a highly theatrical device that would not be out of place in a farce, or an eighteenth-century epistolary novel.17 [...] Mon petit Sala [...]

J’ai été bien bête de t’écrire cela car ma gaffe involontaire et insignifiante est aujourd’hui réparée. Ce serait compliqué

Proust’s Epistolary Diplomacy  151 à t’écrire par lettre. J’avais dit des choses que personne ne pouvait deviner s’appliquer à toi, et à un trait que des gens connaissaient et que je ne pouvais pas me douter qu’ils connussent, ils t’avaient reconnu. Mais j’ai dit que c’était une blague et cela a parfaitement pris. [...] (Correspondance III:74–5)18 My little Sala, I was quite silly to write you that, since my involuntary and insignificant blunder has now been repaired. It would be complicated to write to you in a letter. I had said some things that no one could have known applied to you, and because of a trait that people knew and that I could not have guessed that they knew, they had recognized you. But I said it was a joke and that stuck perfectly. [...]

The proposed apology, like the letter to René Peter, begins with a preterition that the story is too “complicated to write to you in a letter,” immediately followed by a tortuously detailed explanation of the said story. It unfolds in a succession of contradictory affirmations. “Bibesco” (Proust) admits having repeated things that no one could have guessed were about Sala, except that people did, but he couldn’t have known that they would, so he denied those things were true, and people allegedly believed him. The elision of the topic at hand is continuous: “des choses,” undefined things, serve as the antecedent to a series of demonstratives that constantly call back to it but never clarify it, “ces choses” [those things], “cela” [that], “c’est” [it is], “ce sont” [they are]. We should note the suggestive near-homophony between Sala and the repeatedly used cela – “that,” the thing discussed but never named. Later in the same letter, the “lesson” ostensibly learned by Bibesco/ Proust about the need to silence secrets is expressed in strikingly oral and tactile terms: En tous cas ce m’est une leçon d’être plus prudent et jamais plus je n’ouvrirai la bouche sur rien qui de près ou de loin touche à ces choses. [...] (III:74)19 In any case this is a lesson to me, to be more careful and never again will I open my

152  François Proulx mouth about anything that in any way touches these things. [...]

Maladroitly repeating the expression “en tous cas,” the falsely authored letter goes on to attempt to exculpate its real author, identified only through a code as “P”. [...] En tous cas je crois qu’on parle de moins en moins de toi à// à [sic] ce point de vue. Tu m’as dit qu’une des personnes qui avaient dit cela [de] toi était P. Or si cela [a] été vrai, ce que j’ignore, c’est bien changé, car quand il l’entend dire, il a dit que c’est absolument faux, que ce sont de pures inventions etc. [...] (III:74)20 [...] In any case I think people speak less and less of you in// in [sic] that regard. You told me that one of the people who had said this [about] you was P. But while perhaps that [had] been true, which I don’t know, it has certainly changed, since when he hears it said, he said it was absolutely false, that those were pure inventions etc. [...]

The proposed draft makes an amusingly false first-person claim not to know for sure whether “P.” (i.e., Proust) had repeated the rumours that circulate about Sala – which we assuredly know he did, specifically to Bibesco, going as far as using Sala’s name as a code for queerness, as he does in the postscript to this very letter. P.S. pour Bibesco jusqu’à la barre [...] Voici le brouillon Sala. [...] Il faut absolument cesser ce métier horrible d’être ainsi les dénonciateurs publics du salaïsme. (III:75)21 P.S. for Bibesco until the line [...] Here is the Sala draft. [...] We absolutely must stop this horrid business of being the public denunciators of Salaïsm.

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It is not known whether Bibesco ever transcribed and sent the letter to Sala. As in the project of a play co-written with René Peter, one can wonder what places Proust occupies, through disguise and the interchange of roles, in the scenario outlined here. In exculpating himself from having spread rumours about Antoine Sala, is he attempting to distance himself from suspicions that likely circulated regarding his own tastes, or from half-confessions he has made to Bibesco only to deny them later? In wanting to apologize to Sala, and arguing that he and Bibesco should stop denouncing “Salaïsme” in their social circle, Proust may simply be trying to be prudent; but the very existence of the letter belies this prudence, since the only truly prudent course of action would be to keep silent and not put anything in writing that might circulate and survive, as Bibesco appears to have done, and as Proust seems to have been unable to do. The apology, in a circuitous manner, may also be directed at Proust himself, as if Proust wished to be absolved, both of spreading rumours and of possibly being an object of suspicion, under Bibesco’s pen. The concomitant pull of solidarity and distancing between Proust and Sala, from one rumoured “salaïste” to another, the contradictory impulse to excuse and even defend queerness while at the same time laying it bare of its dissimulations, to be leered at by an ostensibly straight reader – these same forces will inflect the variously sympathetic and foreignizing descriptions of inverts and the convoluted positioning of the Narrator in the Recherche. What is known about Antoine Sala? His family tomb at Père-Lachaise and his military records provide some information (“Sala-Sanford Isabel”; “Recrutement militaire de la Seine”): he was born in 1876, and his mother was Emily Sanford (1852–1931), the daughter of American frontiersman John F.A. Sanford (1806–1857). John F.A. Sanford had worked in St Louis under William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame (Clark and Barry); by the 1850s his mining and railroad ventures had earned him substantial wealth. After his death, his widow, Isabel (née Davis, 1832–1898), settled in Paris with her two children, possibly fleeing the American Civil War. In 1875 Emily married Count Maurice Sala (1851–1905),22 who was soon given diplomatic assignments in Washington (Keim 56). Their son Antoine, a diplomat like his father (Tout-Paris 512), turns up again in Proust’s correspondence during the First World War, in a letter to Lucien Daudet from [14 August 1918], and another to Ramon Fernandez from [shortly after 8 October 1918], as Proust describes how the male waiters at the Ritz appear to flee the “bande Sala” or the “table Sala” (Correspondance XVII:343, 387).23

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Antoine eventually married, in 1933, another wealthy American, Laura Bayer (née Laura Bache Kayser, 1874–1961). It was her second marriage, and they were both in their late fifties. She was an art collector; he had become an art dealer. Antoine Sala died in 1946, Laura Bayer Sala in 1961, after which their extensive art and furniture collection was sold in New York (The Countess Sala Collection). Falsified Documents, Discrepant Genres In 1950, a year after Antoine Bibesco published his selection of letters, Philip Kolb secured the purchase of 220 original documents from him, the first major acquisition of Proust letters at the University of Illinois. The transaction turned out to involve deceit on many levels: Kolb soon discovered that Bibesco had taken substantial liberties in his 1949 volume, making his deceased brother Emmanuel the recipient of certain letters addressed to him, Antoine, suppressing passages, fudging dates, or combining the text of separate missives (Correspondance II:xv–xvii). Kolb later admitted to Paul Morand that the agreed price24 was “almost nothing,” far less than what he estimated the letters were worth (Morand, Journal inutile 2:30). The American scholar Mina Curtiss, who taught at Smith College and translated a selection of Proust’s letters into English, Letters of Marcel Proust (1949), left an entertaining account of her role as go-between in this operation, which allegedly involved negotiating with the aging Bibesco at the Ritz hotel “in a horizontal position,” as she puts it (Other People’s Letters 83). Intriguingly, Curtiss comments on this seduction against the background of the failed Paris production of a play by Bibesco, in the spring of 1949: “If I’d realized sooner that the Prince has always been an unsuccessful playwright I might have better been prepared for this theatrical approach to life [and for] the rather Feydeauesque conclusion of this unusual variation of scholarly research” (Other People’s Letters 81). In this instance, as in Bibesco’s account of his epistolary pact with Proust, we are told that his tactics when it came to letters (writing them, responding to them, and later selling them) were modelled after literary genres (the detective novel, the boulevard comedy) rather than his experience of diplomacy. His rearranging of Proust’s letters in the 1949 volume, especially the apocryphal presentation of certain letters as being addressed to his brother Emmanuel (who committed suicide in 1917) rather than to him, could be understood as a playwright’s impulse to redistribute lines more equally among a cast of characters (as suggested by Kolb in Correspondance II:xvi), to tighten the plot, to cut certain scenes that might not go over well with parts of his audience.

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Proust’s two letters to René Peter transcribed above reveal that Peter made similar rearrangements when he included letters from Proust in his memoir, completed in 1947 but published only in 2005.25 Peter states in his memoir that Proust had not been very forthcoming with him on the topic of queerness: according to him, a single confession from Proust regarding the “solicitations [...] of forbidden love [...] in the spring of adolescence,” along with the testimony of a fellow student of Proust’s at school, “were the only, absolutely the only information that I ever gathered regarding this delicate question” (Peter 108–9). The letters where Proust hypothesizes about Peter and Ulrich show that this was not the case. Another statement from Peter’s memoirs, about the way Proust would playfully exaggerate their age difference (Proust was only a year older, but called himself an old man compared to Peter’s vibrant youth), sheds an indirect light on the kind of enjoyment that Peter may have derived from Proust’s epistolary manoeuvres, fantasy scenarios, and ambiguous turns of phrase: “in friendly conversations with Marcel, little by little, one lost the sense of truth [...] I ended up playing along in spite of myself, and I even found a certain pleasure in it” (32). The statement might perhaps also apply to some readers’ experience of the Recherche, as the Narrator assumes, somewhat more comfortably though no less complicatedly, the role of informant on the world of inversion that Proust tortuously played with these two correspondents. These parallel statements, from Mina Curtiss about Antoine Bibesco, and from René Peter about Proust, both speak to an issue of genre, and the need to adjust generic expectations. It is a mistake, or at least a misreading, to approach Proust’s letters, as recipients like Peter, or as acquirers and scholars like Curtiss, and assume them to be a kind of diplomatic document, one where information is provided, or through which agreements are reached and honoured. Curtiss expected Bibesco to write and behave like a diplomat, and was puzzled when he did anything but; she found that she could only come to terms with their encounter once she understood he was a frustrated playwright. Likewise, Peter failed to understand Proust’s letter from [late December 1906], presumably writing an incensed response, because he read it as a compromising “supposition,” rather than a work of imagination. The latter is not really Peter’s fault; if anything, it is Proust’s. Proust concocts a fiction, he writes a sketch for a short story or a Feydeauesque play (with an all-male cast), instead of writing a letter. Perhaps he should not be writing correspondence, any more than Bibesco should be writing diplomatic briefs: he should be writing a novel – which, soon, he would.

156  François Proulx NOTES   1 The present chapter integrates and develops material previously published in that article.   2 Although Kolb indicates that he had access to the original document, his transcription of the letter is partial, as is the case for many other letters from Proust to Peter in his edition (see for instance Correspondance VI:209, 228, 240). Kolb was likely denied permission to publish the letters in full. I have followed the established convention among Proust scholars of citing the volumes of correspondence with Roman numerals followed by page numbers. Also, in this chapter only, square brackets have been placed around ellipses representing omissions from the texts.   3 Marcel Proust to René Peter, [Versailles, late December 1906, before the 27th], Proust 97-3, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.   4 See, for instance, Henfrey 178.   5 About two hundred letters from Reynaldo Hahn to René Peter (spanning the years 1899 to 1947) are held at the Beneicke Library, Yale University.   6 The first page of the letter is reproduced in Kolb’s edition (Correspondance II:471). Transcription verified on the original document. The signs < > enclose interlinear or marginal additions by Proust. The signs [ ] enclose my editorial interventions, usually adding missing punctuation or signalling a cut in the citation. See Proust, “Letter to Antoine Bibesco.” Proust 1-216, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  7 L’Aveu, a one-act play by Sarah Bernhardt, according to a note by Philip Kolb. See Correspondance II:470.   8 Addition at the bottom of the page.   9 Transcription verified on the original document. See Proust, “Letter to Antoine Bibesco.” Proust 1-216, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 10 Kolb notes that Antoine Bibesco, yet unmarried, lived with his parents at 69, rue de Courcelles, while the Prousts lived at number 45 (Correspondance II:470). 11 Transcription verified on the original document. See Proust, “Letter to Antoine Bibesco.” Proust 1-216, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 12 Yoshikawa notes that the sentence indeed appears on page 88 of Séailles’s book. 13 “The career of diplomacy had had the same effect upon his life as taking orders” (Remembrance 2:689; À la recherche du temps perdu 3:64).

Proust’s Epistolary Diplomacy  157 14 This is likely a reference to Robert Ulrich’s correspondence with his mistress, which Proust mocks in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn from [1907?] (Correspondance VII:284–5). 15 In his letters, Proust uses a dash between two periods (“. – .”) to indicate a paragraph break at the end of a sentence without moving to a new line, in order to save space. Here the punctuation suggests a hesitation, perhaps humorously meant, between an ellipsis and a paragraph break. 16 This letter was also censored in Correspondance X:361. 17 In Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, Danceny, the character whose name serves as a pseudonym for René Peter’s collaborator, occasionally writes his letters under the guidance or dictation of Valmont. See Part II, Letters LXIV–LXVI. 18 Transcription revised on the original document. See Proust, “Letter and ‘Sala Draft’ to Antoine Bibesco” (figure 1). For this letter my transcription preserves Proust’s original lineation to facilitate reading the reproduced figures. 19 Transcription revised on the original document. See Proust, “Letter and ‘Sala Draft’ to Antoine Bibesco” (figure 2). 20 See Proust, “Letter and ‘Sala Draft’ to Antoine Bibesco” (figures 1 and 2). The sign // indicates a change of page. 21 See Proust, “Letter and ‘Sala Draft’ to Antoine Bibesco” (figure 1). 22 An overview of Maurice Sala’s diplomatic career can be found in Annuaire diplomatique et consulaire de la république française 270. 23 The name associated with the “bande” was censored in the 1929 publication of letters to Lucien Daudet to which Kolb had access; a 1996 auction catalogue confirms that Sala was in fact the name mentioned (Valuable Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, Music and Printed Books 123). 24 Three thousand dollars, according to the correspondence between Kolb and Bibesco. Kolb-Proust-Archive, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 25 I detail these omissions and rearrangements in “Deux lettres à René Peter.”

8 The Art of Conversation: Nancy Mitford, France, and Cultural Diplomacy allan hepburn

Nancy Mitford understood diplomacy as a network of personal relationships in which policy is entirely a matter of who knows whom. For Mitford, conversation forms the chief part of diplomacy: quandaries in foreign policy and misunderstandings between countries can be resolved by the right word spoken at the right time. She views diplomats, not courts or governments, as the final arbiters in difficult international situations. In the four novels that she published after the Second World War – The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951), and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) – diplomats figure everywhere. In Love in a Cold Climate, Alfred Wincham travels to the Middle East on unspecified business, almost certainly to negotiate a point of foreign policy; in Don’t Tell Alfred, Alfred is appointed British ambassador to France, no doubt because of his astuteness in representing national interests abroad. In The Blessing, there is speculation that Charles-Édouard de Valhubert might end up an ambassador, “negotiating, treating, making terms and driving bargains, for France” (445), possibly in Indochina. In all these novels, diplomacy consolidates Franco-British relations more often than relations with other nations. In her letters, articles, and novels, Mitford provides running commentary on the founding, the flailing, and the collapse of the Fourth Republic in France. As intensely as she loves the French, Mitford just as intensely despises Americans. She teases Americans for being banal when not duplicitous; she especially satirizes American interference in Europe, through NATO, the Marshall Plan, and cultural policy. In this regard, Mitford defends the nascent idea of a united Europe against the ascendency of American international power in the postwar years. Precedents Born into an aristocratic family, Mitford moved in élite circles. Her grandfather, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, the first Baron

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Redesdale, entered the Foreign Office in 1858; over the next fifteen years, he was posted to St Petersburg, Shanghai, and Tokyo. During the latter posting, he served alongside Ernest Satow, whose Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1917) lays down rules and regulations for appropriate behaviour in the diplomatic corps. Exuding chumminess and charm, Lord Redesdale recounts his diplomatic adventures in The Garter Mission to Japan (1906), two volumes of Memories (1915), and a sequel called Further Memories (1917). Always erudite and often funny, he was a model for his granddaughter in terms of wit and subject matter. While drafting Love in a Cold Climate, she reread his Memories to capture the geniality and formality of a lost diplomatic style (Love from Nancy 203). She recommended that Raymond Mortimer read Garter Mission to Japan, without saying why (352). As his memoirs indicate, Lord Redesdale balances urgency with sedateness when conducting diplomatic business. When he arrived at a posting in St Petersburg, he hastened to present dispatches to Lord Napier, the British ambassador, as a sign of deference. Despite being unkempt after days of travel in a slow-moving train, he was shown up immediately to see the ambassador upon arrival: “The diplomatist abroad is always hungry for the latest news, the latest piece of gossip, social or political, and my chief kept me talking in the friendliest way” (Memories 1:206). Like his granddaughter, Lord Redesdale treats politics as a matter of friendly chats between like-minded, cultivated people; these chats, although personal, invariably have public implications. They are the foundation of friendships and, consequently, the foundation of international alliances. As Mitford writes about Sir Conrad in The Blessing, “politics should be transacted, lightly, by clever men, and not ponderously by stupid ones” (465). When she married in 1933, Mitford chose recklessly. Her husband, Peter Rodd, despite signs of early brilliance and cleverness with languages, turned out to be a ne’er-do-well, a mooch, a monumental bore, and – it goes without saying – a grave disappointment as a husband. “Nearly everything he touched turned out badly,” Selina Hastings summarizes (83). By contrast, Peter’s father, Sir Rennell Rodd, was a man of many accomplishments: a scholar, a writer of verse, a linguist, and a distinguished diplomat who held posts in Cairo, Stockholm, Berlin, and Abyssinia. In 1908, he was appointed British ambassador to Rome where his “noble bearing and unfailing politeness” endeared him to the Italians, who saw him as “the epitome of the English gentleman, the very flower of diplomacy” (Hastings 80). In addition to his two-volume Social and Diplomatic Memories 1884–1893 (1922), Sir Rennell published a short book called Diplomacy (1929), in which he tempers all approaches to diplomacy with prudence. “Tact, judgment, and discretion will be more than ever necessary” (76), he writes about future diplomatic

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endeavours, including the British mission to the League of Nations. In a brief reckoning of a diplomat’s qualities, Rodd ranks highly a gift for language appropriately applied: “A diplomatist should not only be careful to abstain from any action or utterance which might invite criticisms, but he should endeavour to anticipate by tactful settlement the possibility of an incident which would lead to public discussion” (59). A word in time prevents untold damage to the diplomat’s reputation as surely as it prevents blots on the integrity of the country that the diplomat serves. For Mitford, who had a weakness for pompous men, her father-in-law proved both intimidating and alluring. He served as the model for Lord Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate: suave, politic, glad to be of use, and unflappable in any circumstance. With so many ambassadors and statesmen in her family, it is unsurprising that the love of Mitford’s life was a charming, well-informed Frenchman: Gaston Palewski. In the early years of the Second World War, Palewski served as chef de cabinet for the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle in London. Palewski exuded charm and spoke excellent English; he used these skills to keep the peace between de Gaulle and the Allies, relations between those entities being touchy when not downright hostile during the war. When de Gaulle walked down the Champs Élysées with Sir Winston Churchill on 11 November 1944, Palewski figured among the entourage, just a few steps behind the general. An ardent supporter of de Gaulle through thick and thin, Palewski became a central figure in the Fourth Republic. Elected as a deputy in 1951, he served as vice-­president of the Assemblée Nationale from 1952 to 1955. He took on the role of chargé des affaires atomiques in 1955, among other cabinet assignments. Palewski was appointed ambassador to Rome in 1957, shortly before the Fourth Republic came to an end in 1958. Among the Italians, Palewski, a compulsive womanizer, was known as “L’Embrassadeur” (Hastings 214). When they met in 1942, Palewski captivated Mitford. Their love affair had unintentional consequences: with guidance from Palewski, Mitford began to pay close attention to British and French politics. As her letters to family and friends indicate, she kept up to date on political wrangling between the two countries. In 1945, Mitford moved to Paris, ostensibly to scout out books for the Heywood Hill bookshop where she worked during the war and where she was a business partner, but actually to be near Palewski. “Oh my passion for the French,” she wrote: “I see all through rose coloured spectacles” (Love from Nancy 143). In 1947, Mitford found an apartment on the ground floor of 7 rue Monsieur. She lived there until 1966, at which time she bought a small house with a large garden in Versailles. The apartment in Paris was a hive of activity – both cultural and political. Palewski, who worked nearby, popped in at all hours. At

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other times, Mitford hosted illustrious British visitors: Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, Raymond Mortimer, Evelyn Waugh. So inevitable was 7 rue Monsieur on the itinerary of English visitors that Harold Acton described it as “a cultural annexe to the British embassy” (72). Indeed, Mitford promoted diplomacy through cultural means, principally her postwar novels, three of which feature alliances between gallant, witty Frenchman and beautiful, aristocratic Englishwomen. For Mitford, cultural understanding precedes and enables concerted action between nations. After hearing a lecture by Kenneth Clark at the Sorbonne, Mitford wrote to Mortimer: “I’ve never known one of these Anglo-French occasions to succeed & long to write to our Minister of Propaganda to say do do spend the money on an adequate English library – it’s all that is wanted here” (25 January 1959).1 Books, she implies, mediate cultural differences and shore up political alliances between the two countries. Because of the scandalous political allegiances of her sisters – Unity Mitford was an intimate of Adolph Hitler, Diana was married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists before the war – Mitford rarely discussed her relationship with Palewski, and then only with intimate friends. In magazine articles, however, she reroutes her passion for Palewski into admiration for French literature, designer clothes, and Paris gossip. In the columns that she wrote for the Sunday Times between 1949 and 1953, she could never resist pointing out the superiority of France to England. The weather in England is always rainy and gloomy, she jokes; the weather in France, by contrast, is invariably glorious. Women’s clothes in England run to bad-fitting tweeds; women’s clothes in France include exquisitely tailored confections from Dior. In an essay on elegance, Mitford concludes that “in England the women are elegant until they are ten years old and perfect on grand occasions; in France a few women are entirely elegant always” (Talent 84). The preference for all things French animates Mitford’s novels as well. In The Blessing, Sir Conrad shares with his mistress, Mrs O’Donovan, a keen admiration of the French: “They both belonged to the category of English person, not rare among the cultivated classes, and not the least respectable of their race, who can find almost literally nothing to criticize where the French are concerned” (328). Neither could Mitford: in her eyes, France and its people had no faults whatsoever. The Fourth Republic According to Selina Hastings, “Nancy remained all her life politically immature, her opinions too frivolous and too subjective to be taken ­seriously – a limitation which restrained her not at all in the airing of

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those opinions” (95). Mitford herself compounds this perception of political naïvety. Somewhat disingenuously, she told Evelyn Waugh, whom she feared and teased in equal measures, “I shall never formulate another political opinion, I am not clever enough” (Love from Nancy 206). In fact, she is much more savvy about politics than she gives herself credit for. The tradition of diplomatic appointments being exclusively male, in Britain as in France, Mitford positions herself outside diplomatic imbroglios. Excluded from direct negotiations, she understands herself not as a writer-diplomat along the lines of Jean Giraudoux, Paul Claudel, or Sir Rennell Rodd, but as an onlooker of international relations, like a latter-day Samuel Pepys or Duc de Saint-Simon. Like those notable antecedents, Mitford keeps track of the faux pas, witticisms, and gatherings at the British embassy through her letters to friends. In her correspondence, she cracks jokes about diplomatic blunders and politicians’ personalities. She tallies up the number of ambassadors who attend the same parties as she does, and she is not above expressing her boredom at having to attend yet another dinner with her compatriots at the British embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Nonetheless, such official functions gave her the opportunity to hear the latest political news, as when she converses about NATO and the atomic bomb with Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office from 1953 to 1957 (Love from Nancy 359), or gossips merrily with Field Marshal Montgomery – “Monty,” as she calls him – about world leaders. As Mitford reported to Mortimer, Monty “says de Gaulle is quite right & L.B.J. has gone mad” (4 September 1966). Politics, for her, is a matter of personality resonating with events. She eventually bought a television in order to watch politicians. François Mitterand, she reported, made her flesh creep (Love from Nancy 462). Under Palewski’s tutelage, Mitford became a Gaullist or at least a fellow traveller on the fringes of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français during the Fourth Republic. She eagerly read the three volumes of de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre as they appeared throughout the 1950s. While doing research for Voltaire in Love (1957), she proposed to Mortimer that they visit the Château de Cirey, where Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet lived from 1734 to 1749, then afterwards make a “pilgrimage,” as Mitford thought of the trip, to nearby Colombey-les-DeuxÉglises, the village where de Gaulle had a country house: “we might do both those great & dissimilar men in one day & then go on to [the city of] Nancy which I’ve never seen” (26 March 1955). Whatever her Gaullist credentials, enemies occasionally stigmatized Mitford as a communist, a label that she laughed off, and rightly so (Love from Nancy 238). In Love in a Cold Climate, Fanny remarks in an

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aside that she and Alfred do not vote Tory – a rebellion against Fanny’s aristocratic origins – and they might, daringly, be regarded as socialists (216). In a moment of giddy irony, Mitford described herself as a “pink” and guffawed about “the hysterical funniness of my fellow pinks” (Love from Nancy 277). For someone who spent as much time as Mitford did at embassy dinners and swank garden parties, her pinkishness is notional rather than actual. Whenever possible, she disavowed political affiliations. In 1953, she told Palewski, apropos of his reputation in London, that she restricted herself to statements about his charm: “I kept off politics as you know I always do” (Love from Nancy 316). In the same letter, she reveals that some people in Paris think that she is a go-between for Palewski and the British government; she is alleged to have accepted an invitation to a party thrown by Winston Churchill merely to convey Palewski’s opinions directly to the British prime minister. Leery of declaring allegiances, Mitford nonetheless understands that political vectors crisscross international alliances. In The Pursuit of Love, Linda Radlett is said to take “no interest in politics, but she was instinctively and unreasonably English. She knew that one Englishman was worth a hundred foreigners” (73). Linda cringes to learn that her ex-husband, the banker Tony Kroesig, intends to emigrate to the United States should a world war break out; his lack of national pride is, in Linda’s opinion, nothing short of cowardice. In this regard, Mitford understands political convictions as national, even aristocratic, before they manifest themselves in party politics. In Grand Strategies, Charles Hill defines diplomacy as “what must be done before one knows all the facts” (172). Similarly, Mitford understands diplomacy as spontaneous yet premeditated responses to constantly changing circumstances. Mitford monitored the political situation in France with an ear to policy decisions, elections, and diplomatic crises. In December 1955, she commented to Mortimer on the elections to the National Assembly that had been moved forward to 2 January 1956: “The election is being lovely – one mass of jokes. You can’t turn on the wireless without a shriek or two” (23 December 1955). While in Paris, Mitford corresponded energetically with many people in England. Her letters often convey the latest political news or insights that she may have picked up from Palewski or on the radio. In their mixture of social gossip and rumours, these letters represent history as confusion and process – an ever-shifting terrain of possibilities in which diplomacy alone can bring about desired ends. Sometimes cultural diplomacy is meant as a deterrent. On 28 March 1954, Raymond Mortimer reviewed Ronald Matthews’s The Death of the Fourth Republic for his regular column in the Sunday Times. Beforehand,

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Mitford, who knew Matthews personally, worried that Mortimer might go wrong in his interpretation of French politics. In a pre-­emptive sally, she wrote to set him on the right track, as she understood it: “The Ambassador saw that you were going to review Matthew’s [sic] book & asked if I knew anything about it. The title sounded rather misleading – is it ‘The end of the 4th republic’? We think here that the 4th republic is at last beginning to find its feet, with a respectable president & other healthy signs” (23 March 1954). The ambassador in question is Oliver Harvey, who ceded his post at the British embassy to Sir Gladwyn Jebb in mid-April 1954. One suspects that Harvey did not ask Mitford directly to relay a message to Mortimer, but that he was anxious not to create diplomatic ripples where no ripples need be made. Mitford’s embracing pronoun, “we,” suggests a complicity, or perhaps a compliance, with the official, ambassadorial point of view on the Fourth Republic, even if that point of view contradicted the facts, namely that the French government was floundering. In this regard, she understands cultural diplomacy not as a separate endeavour that runs parallel to political diplomacy, but as an inevitable extension of ambassadorial hints and wishes and therefore as a direct extension of foreign policy. Despite Mitford’s reassurances that the Fourth Republic was solid, it struggled through one crisis after another. In a letter to Mortimer dated 5 June 1957, Mitford demonstrated her mastery of current affairs and the changing parade of politicians. She comments lightheartedly on the fates of Louis Joxe (French ambassador to the USSR, then the Federal Republic of Germany), Roger Seydoux (French ambassador to Tunisia, and later to Morocco), and Pierre Pflimlin (who held various ministerial posts in the Fourth Republic, then became prime minister for about a month during the constitutional crisis of 1958): I didn’t know Joxe had left the Quai how extraordinary, he’s hardly been there any time. I do wonder why. I’ve always heard much good of Seydoux – Joxe is clever & awfully agreeable, but a professor through & through & without much authority at the Quai or so I believe (not de carrière you see). I do wish Pflimlin could succeed. But what can anybody do with this constitution as it is? As the General says all the politicians are good & patriotic men but what can they do? Ay di me. (5 June 1957)

In 1954, Mitford met Joxe while she was on a jaunt to Russia. Despite being French ambassador to that country, he confided to her, with reference to Théodore Géricault’s famous painting, “Nous sommes t­ ous ici,

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comme sur le radeau de la Méduse” (Mitford, Water Beetle 58),2 a dire image of Cold War survivalism if ever there was one. Mitford assembles her opinions from odds and ends. She has “always heard much good” about Seydoux; General de Gaulle “says all the politicians are good,” a bit of hearsay no doubt relayed by Palewski. “Ay di me,” Mitford’s preferred lamentation to mean something like “woe betide me,” she lifted from Thomas Carlyle. Politics by hearsay is a politics nevertheless. Like rumours in the court of Versailles, Mitford’s scraps of information suggest tendencies in the wider political arena: who is in, who is on the way out, who is beyond reproach, who may be sacrificed to political expediency. In this regard, Mitford’s correspondence reads like a series of undiplomatic dispatches: she tattles and prattles, though never unmeaningly. Although her letters have no direct influence over Franco-British relations, they nonetheless register minute gradations in political opinion. She abides by the principle, articulated by Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate, that news “can always be gleaned, and far more entertainingly too, from those who make it,” rather than from newspapers (190). In February 1955, Mitford wrote a gossipy letter to Mortimer about the current conversations taking place in Paris: Frog stocks may be low in London (though I don’t know why exactly now? they seem to have been rather sage [well-behaved] of late) but I can tell you our stocks are zero here, over Libya. I sat next to Corbin at dinner & he said some English MP had been here lecturing on foreign policy. I said did he explain about Libya whereupon Corbin who, like all ambassadors, is far more pro English than – well – me, jumped as if I had poured boiling water over him. But when he had got over the bad taste of my remark he said sadly “there are things about the English which one will never understand.” But I think the English truly, & not hypocritically, think now that colonization is wrong, & genuinely believe that all white people ought to leave all black territory, & it annoys them to have left so much themselves & to see the French still in possession of a large Empire. Also I think the prosperity of France annoys the Anglo Saxons – they, specially the Americans – have been prophesying woe for so long & the Bourse goes steadily up – it must be maddening. Beaton week was lovely. Everybody made an effort & I haven’t dined out so much for years, or eaten so many truffles. I sat next Cocteau at the Embassy dinner – very funny about the book about him in which he says all is just wrong. Imagine a book about o ­ neself – every word would be wrong wouldn’t it. Gaston said the next day “the more I see the Jebbs the more I realize that Diana was mad & the Harveys

166  Allan Hepburn were dull.” Certainly the Embassy is very brilliant again, & more French than in Diana’s reign, ce qui ne gâte rien [which is even better]. (18 February 1955)

Charles Corbin, French ambassador to Britain during most of the 1930s, knew his subject well. Mitford deliberately issues a provocation over Libya, which had gained independence in 1951 yet had accepted British military bases within its territories. Whatever her stance on colonialism, Mitford means to antagonize Corbin by zeroing in on the differences between British and French tactics of continuing colonialism through other means than direct governance, namely military installations and humanitarian aid. That Mitford can pass from Libya to Cecil Beaton to the succession of British ambassadors in France – Duff and Diana Cooper (1944–8), Oliver and Maud Harvey (1948–54), Gladwyn and Cynthia Jebb (1954–60) – equalizes the differing magnitudes between foreign policy and idle chatter at an embassy dinner. While observing the challenges that afflicted the Fourth Republic, such as the inept process of decolonization in Indochina, the FrancoAlgerian war, the Suez Crisis, and the failure of the parliamentary system, Mitford cast herself as a latter-day Duc de Saint-Simon. In her private and public commentary, she treats the politics of the Fourth Republic as a reflection of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the court at Versailles. In her longing for a return of governance by aristocratic and monarchical prerogatives – governance thought to be in the best interests of the country as understood by those classes that were connected to the land by centuries of noblesse oblige – she repeatedly turned to Louis XIV and Louis XV as models. She understood these rulers through court memoirs and letters, which she read with great pleasure, among them the correspondence of Mme du Deffand, the memoirs of Mme de la Tour du Pin, and Theodore Besterman’s edition of Voltaire’s letters in 107 volumes, which she dutifully bought as they appeared in print. Diplomacy à la française Mitford’s affection for Saint-Simon was longstanding. While working at Heywood Hill during the war, she sold a copy of Saint-Simon’s memoirs to Palewski as a gift for Charles de Gaulle (Hastings 145). In Love in a Cold Climate, Boy Dougdale brushes up on court life and genealogies by reading “all the court memoirs that had ever been written”; he tells Lord Montdore, “It’s all in Saint-Simon ... I’ve been reading him again and so must you, Montdore, simply fascinating” (174). For

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Mitford, Saint-Simon’s observations about the court of Louis XIV are political in the best sense of the term: unrestrained, behind-the-scenes news from the court, combined with sharp character sketches, amusing anecdotes, and a well-tuned ear for conversational gaffes. Mitford was never so much interested in the ends of politics – foreign affairs, atomic weapons, domestic regulation, social amelioration – as she was in the personalities and the conversations that swirl about in the inner circles of government. As her letters indicate, she prefers gossip to policy. Her novels, in their anecdotal structure, resemble Saint-Simon’s memoirs insofar as personalities shape events and outcomes remain unpredictable because they are subject to the caprices of personalities. Like SaintSimon, Mitford never hesitated to draw her lessons and examples from real life. “I imagine I can really use the duller members of the Embassy here as copy,” she notes (Love from Nancy 202). Saint-Simon provided a touchstone for Mitford’s thinking about the Fourth Republic. “Saint-Simon failed as a politician,” she writes in The Water Beetle, “But oh, how he succeeded as a writer!” (135). She was approached to translate a selection of his memoirs into English, a task that she felt exceeded both her endurance and her talents. Yet the suggestion that she do so was not ill founded; Mitford had already translated André Roussain’s play La petite hutte (1947) and Mme de Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678) with considerable success. While writing The Sun King (1966), a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, Mitford groaned to Mortimer, “I’m carrying on without any reference to St Simon. Otherwise you can’t help seeing the thing through his eyes. He is a great writer of fiction, that’s what it is” (13 August 1964). While trying to preserve the veneer of factuality in her biographical outings, she is tempted to strike off into anecdote and Theophrastan characters, as Saint-Simon might do. Relying on Saint-Simon presents other hazards too. As Mitford notes, “he’s such a dread liar yes but so génial” (14 September 1964). On balance, geniality outweighs truthfulness, at least in Mitford’s books. Saint-Simon tempts her into defying the truth for the sake of an effect. All, or nearly all, of the Duc de Saint-Simon’s obsessions were Mitford’s: genealogy, precedence, personality, intrigue, conversation. In “The Grand Little Duke” (1955), she laments that the British have never cared for, let alone understood, the sprawling memoirs that Saint-Simon produced. She attributes this antipathy to a British disparagement of the court at Versailles, which Harold Nicolson sums up, erroneously, as “lounging courtiers, chattering rubbish” (Mitford, Water Beetle 132). Mitford intended her essay about Saint-Simon as a prolonged jab at Nicolson (Love from Nancy 345). Against Nicolson’s

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assessment, Mitford finds much to praise in the lounging and chattering at Versailles, specifically a commitment to pleasure and conversation for its own sake. Whereas Nicolson denies that diplomacy is the art of conversation, Mitford treats diplomacy as witty verbal engagement. When history is written, Mitford implies, it will be by diarists not politicians. She recommends that all of Saint-Simon be read, not just the highlights: “The day-to-day chronicle is at least as important as the set pieces, which, of course, gain by being read in their proper context. The whole work, to be sure, is immensely long, but it has something for everyone” (Water Beetle 136). According to Mitford, protocol at Versailles kept nobles on the hop: they dashed from one palace function to another. Meanwhile, in the privacy of his cabinet, the Duc de Saint-Simon captured the mores and language of the court for posterity. “Like a journalist, he had a passion for hot news,” writes Mitford; “unlike a journalist, he reported it and then put it away” (Water Beetle 133). History need not be published as it happens. Although prone to teases and provocations in print, Mitford makes her snidest remarks to friends in confidence. If anything, her correspondence provides a chronicle of mid-century France that rivals in piquancy anything that Saint-Simon might have said about courtiers at Versailles. Whereas he had Louis XIV, she has Charles de Gaulle, whom she elevated to something like the status of a god. Whereas he had the French aristocracy, she has les gens du monde, a civilized and glittering group of people, many of them attached to the British embassy or the expatriate community. Mitford’s histories all centre on strong personalities. A devotee of Thomas Carlyle, whose biography of Frederick the Great she thought unrivalled, she invariably conceived of history as a series of public figures – heroes and hero-worship she never shied away from. After finishing Madame de Pompadour (1954), Mitford cast around for other subjects. She considered the French nobility her particular domain of expertise, as long as they lived before the French Revolution. She despised the nineteenth century, especially Napoleon, for curtailing the Bourbon monarchy. In March 1954, she wrote to Mortimer about possible book projects: “Mr Cass Caufield is here. He says he has come over on purpose to see me & try & get my next book – I expect he tells everybody that. He wants me to do Joséphine – I don’t think so, I hate the Empire, its taste & its côté parvenu. I must say I’ve no ideas about what to do next, & Colonel keeps saying Joséphine & has for a long time. But Napoleon would hog the picture I fear” (27 March 1954). On the one hand, Mitford pauses to consider Joséphine as a biographical subject because Palewski – nicknamed “Colonel” because of his war

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record – suggests that she do so. On the other hand, Mitford fears that Napoleon will eclipse Joséphine, no matter how brilliant her personality. Truth be told, the nineteenth century never inspired Mitford the way that the court of Versailles did. “The heavy atmosphere of the nineteenth century,” she writes in The Water Beetle, “with its messages and meanings, its reforms, its scientific discoveries and German philosophy, fell like a wet blanket on the world, extinguishing the flame of pure pleasure which had hitherto burned so brightly and which has never been lit again” (92). Seeing herself in a direct line with the ancien régime, Mitford kept the flame of pleasure alive as best she could. Despite her better instincts, Mitford occasionally sought evidence of wit in the nineteenth century. In Love in a Cold Climate, Fanny fills in Polly Hampton’s ancestry by mentioning a “rather clever and very worldly” son of an English lord and a French aristocrat who became close friends with the Prince Regent and built houses filled with a connoisseur’s collections of art and furniture: “He was really much the most interesting and original character the family ever produced, but no member of it [since] deviated from a tradition of authority” (156). This sport of nature, the rare flowering of a French-English alliance, expires amidst his descendants, all of them stolid, British worthies. Mitford was much taken with the idea of French-English hybrids as fictional tropes. As a chronicler of the passing social scene, however, she had reservations about speaking for either the French or the English. On one occasion, a French publisher – she does not say which one – asked her to write a history of England, an idea that she rejected out of hand on the grounds that the scope exceeded her knowledge. Stephen Spender subsequently asked her to write about the French aristocracy for Encounter, an idea that she also rejected on the grounds that she did not have the proper credentials, namely rank and birth in France, for so important and onerous a task. Flouting her own predilection for the eighteenth century, Mitford did give some thought to writing a biography of Charles de Flahaut, the military figure and statesman alleged to be the illegitimate son of the statesman and diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. She mooted this possibility with Mortimer, with a characteristic misspelling of Flahaut’s name: “I must consult you about my literary future. Am thinking of a life of Flahault – ? I gather the Lansdownes would let me see the papers” (17 September 1954). In the event, Mortimer appears to have advised her that a biography of Flahaut already existed. A few days later, she wrote again, with an air of regret: You are so kind & helpful. Well I know nothing about Flahault himself (didn’t even know there was a book) it was all his various relationships

170  Allan Hepburn that seemed amusing & the fact of his having a foot in each country. I always think the dotty old upper classes went on being 18th century well into the 19th – it was those awful intellectuals who ruined all! (Oh [Victor] Hugo. I had to go on reading pour alimenter ma haine [to nourish my hatred]. (22 September 1954)

The choice of Flahaut is somewhat surprising: he served with distinction during the Napoleonic campaigns, and afterwards supported LouisPhilippe. Married to an English woman with whom he had five children, Flahaut did indeed have “a foot in each country.” In later years, he served as French envoy to Berlin, Vienna, and London. His European outlook and savoir-faire endeared him to Mitford. Nonetheless, she took Mortimer’s hint. She subsequently reported that she was reading the book that he had recommended: “I’m reading Flahault, rather sadly as it seems made for me as a subject. But honestly it’s so well done, no point in beginning again” (18 February 1955). As for the biography that she had in hand, she does not specify whether it was Frédéric Masson’s Le Général Comte de Flahaut. Une rectification (1881) or, more probable because more up to date, Françoise de Bernardy’s Charles de Flahaut, 1785–1870, que deux reines aimèrent (1954). In any event, Mitford, her interest in the eighteenth century fully revived, had already found her next subject: the love affair between Mme du Châtelet and Voltaire. Mitford complained often about her lack of a formal education. Her spelling and punctuation, as Evelyn Waugh never ceased to remind her, were approximate. An autodidact, Mitford jealously guarded her subjects against the incursion of experts. Although she conceded that mistakes crept into her biographies and histories, she denigrated her competitors for their own factual errors. She dismissed Margaret Trouncer, whose bestselling biography of Mme de Pompadour, first issued in 1937, reappeared in the wake of Mitford’s treatment of the same subject: “I’m amused to see that Margaret Trouncer is reissuing her rubbishy Pompadour. I expect she’ll get rave notices – after Steegmuller’s [biography of the duchesse de Montpensier] I’ll never be surprised again. She calls the Marquise Toinette throughout, very odd, her family called her Reinette, everybody else Madame, what does Toinette mean? However, like you, Trouncer hates dear good” (1 February 1956). Always fond of nicknames, Mitford invariably referred to Louis XIV as “dear good” – a tremendous tease that defies anyone to name the king’s faults. Other books were too scholarly for Mitford’s taste. They did not show enough passion or human interest to make good biographies. In August 1956, she took a swipe at G.P. Gooch’s Louis XIV: “Silly old Dr Gooch has written a book against Dear

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Good & I have riposted in an intensely brilliant review which you will read in our mag on Sunday. I think you’ll shriek, I hope so. Honestly his book is too bad, from every point of view badly written & not nearly enough stuff in it” (30 August 1956). Mitford’s review appeared under the title “A Good-Time King” in the Sunday Times on 9 September 1956. “Dr.  Gooch is one of our most revered historians,” begins Mitford’s review, “but he is not interested in human beings.” Mitford was not above turf wars with recognized authorities. In private, she mocked Theodore Besterman’s knowledge of eighteenth-century France, even while she struck up a lively, if sycophantic, correspondence with him. She relied on Besterman to correct her factual errors and stylistic infelicities, much as she relied on Raymond Mortimer to proofread her manuscripts and advise her on English grammar. Leisurely Hours of Talk In her fiction as in her non-fiction, Mitford dwells on conversation as the crowning achievement of political discourse. Mme de Rambouillet’s salon, Mitford claims in an essay on French salonnières, “inspired confidences and long leisurely hours of talk” (Water Beetle 83). The art of conversation reached its zenith in the eighteenth century, and Mitford emulates that art as best she can in the twentieth century. Throughout her novels, she stages scenes as conversations. In The Pursuit of Love, Fanny has long hours of chitchat with Linda in an abandoned linen closet at the top of Alconleigh (178). As a matter of etiquette, one is expected to participate in conversation, as Davey advises Fanny in Love in a Cold Climate: “‘So long as you chatter, Fanny, it’s of no consequence what you say, better recite out the ABC than sit like a deaf mute. Think of your poor hostess, it simply isn’t fair on her’” (173). Talking for the sake of talking keeps up the appearance of sociability. It also provides cohesion within a love affair. “Racontez,” Fabrice says to Linda more than once: “‘I must tell you that I like very long conversations in the morning, and I shall expect you to raconter des histoires’” (Pursuit 106). They have long, silly chats on the phone that prove the pleasures to be had in conversation. Similarly in The Blessing, Grace has frivolous, pleasurable conversations with Charles-Édouard de Valhubert, with whom she shares no political terrain. Every conversation has its proper audience, as the novel takes pains to point out. Valhubert saves his political insights for Sir Conrad: “It would have surprised and gratified Grace to know that they had long, interesting discussions on political subjects when they were alone together” (Blessing 402). Sharing a sensibility, Valhubert and Sir Conrad are compatible conversationalists

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whose insights into European affairs need not be disclosed to all and sundry, and certainly not to their respective mistresses. Although Mitford privileges boudoir diplomacy, she does not promote idle political chatter when the stakes are too high, which is to say she brooks no commentary that might compromise the solidarity between France and Britain. For Mitford, humour has its place in political discussions. A well-timed joke lightens the tone and smooths negotiations. Yet not all of Mitford’s jokes wear well. Her witticisms about the dropping of atom or cobalt bombs are more macabre than funny. She idly wonders if radioactive fallout might cure rheumatism (8 October 1961). In a letter to Raymond Mortimer in 1964, she tells an anecdote about her maid: “Marie has just come in & asked if I think the Americans are going to start bombing us now or will they give us a few more years?” (7 August 1964). Beneath the whimsy – all nuclear power is concentrated in the hands of the Americans and they toy with the fate of nations as foolishly as they toy with foreign policy – is a plea for common sense. As Harold Nicolson states in Diplomacy, the diplomat should be “truthful, accurate, calm, patient and good-tempered, but he is not an ideal diplomatist unless he be also modest” (119). According to Nicolson, fatal diplomatic indulgences include “irony, epigrams, insinuations, and the barbed reply” (119). Mitford disagrees: genial conversation opens the way to negotiation between independent states that have common interests. Disarming one’s interlocutor with humour may lead in the long run to nuclear disarmament. In The Blessing, Mitford satirizes American political ascendancy in Europe after the war. Among the many sins that Americans commit, none, at least for Mitford, damns them so much as their offences against language. Heck Dexter, a rich businessman turned do-gooder, expects guests at his dinner parties to brief him on current events and policies. Like a volcano in eruption, Dexter’s speeches spill viscously in all directions: “My government expects, and gets, reports from me on the political equilibrium, stability and soundness of the various countries I visit. At first sight this stability, equilibrium, and soundness seem very great in Britain. At first sight. But there is a worm, a canker in this seemingly sound and perfect fruit which I for one find profoundly disquieting. I refer to the frivolous attitude you Britishers have adopted, just as it has been adopted here (the difference being that nobody expects the French to be serious whereas we do most certainly expect it of you Britishers), the frivolous attitude towards – we are all grown-up and I guess I can speak without embarrassing anybody – sexual perversion.” (405)

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Dexter lets no irony pass without underlining it. His pronouns align into antagonisms: “we” and “you.” All things considered, Dexter’s favourite pronoun remains “I,” which he drops with irritating regularity, usually as the subject of sentences. He claims that the “moral and ethical aspect” of Western Europe preoccupies him (406). Yet he reduces complexities to homilies, in which he takes the moral high ground, even when it makes him appear prurient or just plain foolish. Instead of conversing, he sermonizes. If his verbosity were not enough to convict him of cultural imperialism, Mitford delivers a coup de grâce: Heck Dexter, it turns out, is a communist mole in the pay of Mother Russia. He ends up defecting behind the Iron Curtain. So much for American disinterestedness in Western Europe. The title, Don’t Tell Alfred, draws attention to oral communication and the presumed need to keep Alfred, as the British ambassador to France, in the dark about trivialities. Yet Fanny, the ambassadress, is really the last to know what her children and relatives are up to. They tell her nothing about their lives; in fact, they actively mislead her with partial or faulty information. Alfred remains aloof from family squabbles to concentrate on affairs of state. In this novel, Mitford clings to forms of diplomacy that are disintegrating, the forms known to her grandfather when stationed in Russia and Japan: cosy têtes-à-têtes and personal relations, usually consolidated by aristocratic marriages, that ensure solid international cooperation. The United Nations and NATO, regularly invoked in Don’t Tell Alfred as new forms of diplomacy, prove ineffectual because they are bureaucratic and impersonal. As a central dispute in the novel, territorial claims over the Îles Minquiers – three uninhabited rocks that disappear at high tide somewhere between the two countries – set France and Britain at odds. The press fans the flames of this minor dispute. For their part, French deputies never commit themselves to any major policy for fear of overstepping bounds: “C’est plus prudent” (546). When the dispute over the Îles Minquiers goes to The Hague for arbitration, the judges assign the barren rocks to Britain, which promptly grants them their independence. The end of diplomacy is not territorial expansion, but the amicable and disinterested resolution of squabbles. As Fanny observes about Franco-British relations, “The two old neighbours are not always displeased by each other’s misfortunes, nor do they trust each other not to take advantage of them” (544). Diplomacy presumes the existence of states, as well as inequalities between states. In its finest form, diplomacy moderates inequalities; when diplomacy fails, states exacerbate inequalities. Like diplomacy, the novel assumes the existence of states and comments on the strategic

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relation of states to individuals. In effect, a novel is an explanatory structure of how characters live within states. In Nancy Mitford’s novels, that structure encompasses the strategic alliances and strategic enmities between states, notably France and Britain. In Mitford’s hands, the novel can exaggerate differences between nations – either through teases or through satire – in order to minimize their ultimate importance. In line with William Gerhardi, Marcel Proust, and Lawrence Durrell, Mitford understands the novel as a comic solution to international quarrels. By taking a diplomatic distance from skirmishes, the novel sheds a benign light of plus ça change over differences of opinion. Mitford subscribes to the principle that France and Britain are not, in the final analysis, unequal. Whatever minor differences may arise between the two states, diplomacy will regulate and eliminate them. For Mitford, the mission of literature might therefore be described as the ongoing modification of the state through the pursuit of circumspection, frivolity, and, above all, fine, fulfilling conversation. NOTES 1 Mitford’s unpublished letters to Mortimer are located in the archives of the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. I cite them by date, rather than by box and folder number, because they are more easily located that way. Mitford’s punctuation and syntax are never accurate; I have rendered her letters as she wrote them, their spontaneity forming the greater part of their charm. 2 My translation: “We are all of us here as on the Raft of the Medusa.”

9 Action, Diplomacy, Art: André Malraux and Graham Greene robert l. caserio

In Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (1973), a novelist surnamed Saavedra offers himself to a band of Paraguayan terrorists as a substitute for a hostage they hold captive. The captive, as it happens, is a British consul. The terrorists’ response to the novelist’s offer is indignant: “‘Why should ... we want a novelist in place of a Consul? What good is a novelist?’” (224). The terrorists have already made an unwanted exchange; their hostage was supposed to be an American ambassador, not a minor British diplomat. Having kidnapped the consul by mistake, they want to barter him for the release of imprisoned political insurgents. One might answer the terrorists’ complaint by saying that a novelist is good for something: for artfully negotiating exchanges between the realms of reality and representation. Representing others by writing, a novelist is arguably their honorary consul, acting on their behalf in the manner of an ambassador or a diplomat. Likenesses between novelists and diplomatic figures depend on metaphorical identities that might be as erroneous as the mistake made by the terrorists in The Honorary Consul. Nevertheless, for the two protagonists of this chapter, Graham Greene and André Malraux, those identities seem justifiably interchangeable, not only in their writing but in their lives. In Ways of Escape (1980), Greene admits that it is “a habit with me to visit troubled places,” then to write about them (146). Among the results of Greene’s global wanderings is his admiring involvement with Panamanian president Omar Torrijos, the subject of Greene’s Getting to Know the General (1984). Torrijos issued Greene a Panamanian diplomatic passport, so that Greene could attend, as the general’s confederate, the 1977 Organization of American States’ signing of the treaty that handed over the US Canal Zone to Panama. Malraux’s appointment (1958–69) as minister of culture in Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic complemented the political actions and activisms of Malraux’s earlier

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career by designating him, alongside official French diplomats, as de Gaulle’s “roving ambassador” (Lyotard, Signed 277), in journeys to Martinique, India, the US, and China, to name the most salient of Malraux’s missions. Despite their honorary consulships – whether self-appointed, officially credentialled, or metaphorically assumed – both Greene and Malraux struggled against their roles as diplomats; they wanted to recede from those roles after enacting them or while enacting them. A desire for untrammelled freedom of action and initiative, rather than subjection to the restraining tact necessary for diplomatic negotiation, characterizes one aspect of their recession. Representation in a worldly, practical sense – as distinct from writing – appears in these writers’ works as a burden to be broken free from. The art of fiction is a possible escape route from the burden of representation. For Malraux, visual art is another viable escape route. In Greene’s Ways of Escape, despite its author’s commitment to matters of global concern, the political and diplomatic representational impulse seems insufficiently open to other-worldly dimensions. Not that other-worldly means anything recognizably religious for Greene: “I had no apostolic mission,” he protests to readers who want him to be a celebrity diplomat for Catholicism (Ways 261). For Greene, what is other-worldly is menacing rather than inspiring, and it invites self-destruction: he visits “troubled places” not to calm their agitation, as one might expect of a diplomatic endeavour, but “to regain the sense of insecurity,” he states, “which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on London” (Ways 146). For his part, Malraux traverses the globe in the execution of a self-divided project: he is less than whole-hearted in his attachment to de Gaulle. “In the management of Gaullist business” – ministerial-ambassadorial business, that is to say – Malraux is “rather more like its [Gaullist] hostage,” notes Jean-François Lyotard (Signed 277).1 Hence Malraux’s meditations on life and art in his Anti-Memoirs (1967) and his multiple volumes about art (1947–76) outline possibilities of transcending the ineluctable reality and history in which diplomacy is embedded. At one and the same time, he wants such power and embedding, and he does not. Placed side by side, Greene and Malraux might figure as an updating of Hans Holbein’s famous picture, from 1533, of The Ambassadors, who are cosmopolites assured of themselves and their arts, but at whose feet lies, rendered in a stain-like anamorphosis, a skull that portends their undoing. Like their painted predecessors, Greene and Malraux proudly assert their ministerial identities, even as a dimension of ultimate threat rises to meet them. Whereas Holbein’s pair of ambassadors does not see

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an impending demise – only the painting’s viewer can, and only, as it were, through a glass darkly – Greene and Malraux directly face, even pursue, the subversion of their mastery as diplomats and as artists. Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973) argues that Holbein’s painting exemplifies the essence of visual art, whereby representational and anti-representational aims contest each other. The struggle cannot be resolved; it must inevitably submit to what Lacan formulates as an objet petit a, an indecipherable, virtually blinding resistance to our capacity for imaging the world. The essence of novels – perhaps especially of novels in their modernist phase – might constitute a variant of the contest, and of surrender to a dimension beyond the reach of diplomacy or of political representation or of representation altogether. As evidence of a generalized modern literary matrix to which Greene’s and Malraux’s ambassadorial and artistic agons belong, one might enlist Henry James as an example and as an antecedent. James is no roving ambassador, but narrative fiction in his practice predicts the self-division I will trace in his successors. In The Ambassadors (1903) James exploits a similitude between narrative agents and unofficial diplomacy, but in The Tragic Muse (1890) he explores diplomatic doings more literally. Among James’s characters is a journeyman diplomat who has a close relation to the arts. James further dramatizes the representational aspect of the diplomat’s calling by creating a complementary character who is a “representative” – a member of the House of Commons – and who also happens to be an aspiring painter. The diplomat is Peter Sherringham, who loves drama and actors and a rising star of the theatre, Miriam Rooth. He is “fond of representation – the representation of life,” Peter says. “I like it better, I think, than the real thing,” including his ministerial work (58). But Peter’s preference also frightens him. The actress’s talent for representations, her ability to assume multiple identities, might have no responsible attachment to real things. She invariably puts on an act. Should Peter marry an actress, the hollow authenticity of her kind of action might scandalize his prospective ambassadorial dignity and duty. Accordingly, he sacrifices his desire for Miriam to his job. In contrast to Peter, the MP becomes increasingly willing to sacrifice his job to his art. His choice of painting over Parliament – his choice to divorce himself from standing for others politically, and to honour his contemplative alternative to public activism – seems to his fiancée and to his foremost parliamentary patron the perpetration of a crime. Nevertheless, even at the cost of his fiancée (another sacrifice), the MP prefers representing life in art’s terms, rather than in governmental ones.

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But what exactly are art’s terms? They are Miriam’s incalculable ones. In the triangulated drama of The Tragic Muse, James paints a self-divided self-portrait of the artist: one who wants to be a diplomat or a political delegate, but who cannot be either because art’s claims on him are more peremptory. Those paradoxical claims resist the very act of delineating them, or the very act of representing them. A representational mission holds James hostage, even as he evokes art as a way of escape. The way of escape, however, cannot be pursued without authorial dependence on the contrast between art and diplomacy, nor can it be pursued outside the context of the political and global reach of diplomacy. This is true of James and his tragic muse, and it is all the more true of Malraux and Greene. In their works, the contest between diplomacy and diplomatic recession – not to speak of the undermining of diplomatic procedures – is a shaping force. André Malraux: The Anti-Diplomatic Diplomat Olivier Todd, in Malraux: A Life (2001), refers to a 1948 interview in which Malraux tries to reconcile antithetical claims. He “sees no incompatibility between a life in Art and a life in Action” (the upper-case letters are Todd’s). But, then, almost instantly, he does see incompatibility. Malraux concedes that it is difficult to live as an artist and a man of action. “All art,” Malraux tells the interviewer, “implies ‘a sort of obsession’ in order to ‘distill’ the world into the work of art,” whereas action, instead of distilling the world, “‘dissolves’” it (330). In light of one half of his comment, if action is what diplomacy and representative politics usually stand for, and if political and global order matters more than anything, the stage actor, or the painter, or the novelist might not easily justify their “distillations.” Diplomatic negotiations of a problem or a crisis also would not be easily justified. The characteristics of diplomacy – tact, constraint, strategic indirectness, mediation – appear to lead inevitably to compromise. What, then, of urgencies that allow no compromise? Foregrounding such urgencies, action commands Malraux’s most famous novel, Man’s Fate (1931). The novel surely prefers dissolving the world to distilling it. Action is Malraux’s chosen medium. The world requires corrective deeds, not representational play, whether in diplomatic or artistic form. Political murder is the name of action in Man’s Fate. Malraux’s favoured agents of dissolution are incendiary Shanghai terrorists –  communist revolutionaries who will not brook Chiang Kai-shek’s claim to represent progressive China, or tolerate Moscow’s strategicdiplomatic ban on taking resistance to Chiang into their own hands.

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Indeed, diplomats on all sides of the political struggle are in bad odour. The French businessman Ferral has no time or patience for the diplomacy of the French minister of finance and for representatives of the banks that fund Ferral’s Franco-Asian Consortium. “You never have carried out a single great enterprise by yourselves,” Ferral thinks as he sits among the emissaries of power in Paris. “When you’re through prostituting yourselves to the State, you take your cowardice for wisdom” (342). They also mistake their cowardice for action. Whereas Ferral, like the revolutionaries, insists on the real thing: “action, action alone justifies life and satisfies the white man. ... A man is the sum of ... what he has done, of what he can do” (241–2). Ferral’s racism is mistaken: the terrorists, in service to propaganda of the deed, are a multi-ethnic coalition. They will not prostitute themselves to Moscow’s strategic directives. The narrative describes the terrorist Ch’en as “incapable of living by an ideology which did not immediately become transformed into action” (69). The transformation is realized on the very first page of the novel, where Ch’en kills a sleeping enemy. If the consequence of political action without diplomats is violence, so be it. What action satisfies for the terrorists, at the very moment of murder or suicide, is an exertion of will that no mere minister or ambassador can exercise. Holbein’s hierarchy is reversed: now the skull, emblem of mortality, is embraced by the terrorists in order to master death – and simultaneously to master the political order. Ch’en’s fellow insurgent Kyo “had chosen action ... as others choose a military career” (69). “To die is passivity,” Kyo thinks near the time when he will swallow cyanide in order to avoid being executed; “but to kill oneself is action” (321). Katov, a colleague imprisoned with Kyo, donates his own cyanide dose to inmates whose execution will take the form of being thrown alive into a locomotive boiler. Katov will face that death, without the poison, in a starker instance of Kyo’s declaration that “to kill oneself is action.” Such action includes a will to dominate more than mortality. Ch’en feels exalted on the brink of his second assassination attempt. He begins by stabbing his own arm, so as “to possess his exaltation rather than be possessed by it” (196). According to the novel, killing others as well as oneself can also enact love, by instrumentalizing and ruling it. Kyo thinks, “The willingness to lead the being one loves to death ... is perhaps the supreme expression of love” (216). Another insurgent, Hemmelrich, loses his wife and son to a bombing of his home by the police. His response is relief: now he is “freed” to act – in other words, to throw grenades into the nearest police station. Liberated into a broader range of agency, he discovers that “life was not the only mode of contact between human beings ... it

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was not even the best; he could know them, love them, possess them more completely in vengeance than in life. ... One can kill with love, by God!” (271). Readers might well be shocked by Malraux’s equation of action – indeed, his idealization of it – with terrorist combat. What good is a novelist who makes heroic such an equivalence and such protagonists? One good is that Man’s Fate confronts readers with a refusal of customary political negotiations – a refusal that some might oppose because they spurn any coming to terms with perpetrators of political violence. Whether or not Malraux’s novel enlarges our understanding, it affords readers some apprehension of the unthinkable. Moreover, political action, in its extremist form, is a willed determination, hence an exercise or a hope of radical liberty. It aims to dominate mortal circumstance, rather than suffer it. In its own fashion, diplomacy too aims to take charge. But the diplomat understands that there are constraints on taking charge. And, notwithstanding diplomacy, death is a determination less pliable than the actions of Malraux’s terrorists demand that it be. As Malraux states, action dissolves the very world it aims to reshape. Is that because there is in action, and in the events that it effects, something self-dissolving: at once intentional and unintended, calculated and incalculable? Malraux as a narrative artist means to double the terrorists by doing violence to a novelist’s equivalent of ambassadorial function: negotiation of the world, for the reader’s betterment, by figuring the world under the constraints of representation. Action would seem to explode those constraints. But if action is not dominated by an agent’s shaping intention, the terrorist-novelist, along with his terrorist characters, might be hoist with his own petard. Action might contribute to the “distilling” aim of art, after all; it might not evade representation, and it might support values that are not action-centred. There is a crucial moment in Man’s Fate in which action is less sovereign than the novel declares. The moment (it perhaps seeds Malraux’s ideas that germinate in his books on visual art) occurs after Kyo’s suicide, when his father, Gisors, gazing at his son’s body, undergoes a metamorphosis. Surprisingly, “all that was destroying him found in him an avid welcome. ... He felt the ... basic suffering ... which gushes forth from [humanity] and from which life [tries] to tear us away; ... he plunged into ... this terrified contemplation, ... as if this suffering of being [human] ... were the only prayer ... the body of his dead son could hear” (332–3). At the threshold of this moment, Gisors has rejected opium, to which he is addicted, so that he faces without any buffer the truth of a condition that humanity cannot dominate or master: the truth

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of mortal suffering, rather than of action. Contemplation, harbouring a different kind of terror, is the path of this truth’s revelation. For Malraux in person, however, action outwardly remained the goal during the Second World War, especially in its latter months, and, thereafter, during his long-term postwar Gaullist ministry. At the start of the war he underwent a brief imprisonment by German occupying forces; he escaped without difficulty, more or less by walking out of the prison gate. Perhaps to make up for such marginal action, he began writing a study of his hero, T.E. Lawrence, who “brought to life [Malraux’s] demon for action” (Lacouture 207), and who was a diplomat too. Then, in 1944, Malraux energetically, if belatedly, associated himself with the Maquis – for him an emanation of the demon. He reports in his AntiMemoirs (1967) that, having been arrested again and imprisoned by the Germans, he faced a firing squad from which he was delivered by a commando raid. Thereafter he exploited the possibility of being “the most famous fighting French writer” (Todd 298), first by positioning and promoting himself as “Chief Inspector of the FFI [the Resistance of the interior] for the Dordogne, the Lot, and Corrèze,” and then by forming an Alsace-Lorraine Brigade, whose mission was to dog the German retreat, and to recapture Strasbourg. The mission succeeded, and Malraux won a British DSO for his part in it. Fourteen years later, Malraux the minister of information (later the minister for cultural affairs) began the globe-trotting to which de Gaulle delegated him. In his Anti-Memoirs, Malraux claims that “General de Gaulle could not leave France at the time and gave me the task of representing him” (109). While he was visiting the Antilles and French Guiana “to win votes for the referendum by which the Gaullist constitution drawn up during the summer would be institutionalized or rejected” (Lacouture 398), the poet Aimé Césaire, mayor of Fort-de-France, called Malraux “the ambassador of rediscovered hope” (Anti-Memoirs 112). The honorary ambassador’s stirring oration on behalf of the constitution exalted a mass meeting – and the orator. In response to his words, he heard “the roar of black freedom, the roar of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s soldiers and of the eternal Jacquerie”; he adds, in a significant index of his latest assumptions about “representation,” “this frenzy ... [was] addressed to a supernatural personage who was ... what the Republic is to its President: the intermediary between human life and the world of the unknown” (114). At a repetition of the oration in Cayenne, however, the immediate outcome of the roar of black freedom was different. The mass meeting included physical attacks on the orator: poles garnished with obtruding nails were thrown at Malraux on the podium. He caught one of them, and, brandishing it aloft, continued his speech.

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The gesture projects and recapitulates an image of the undaunted man of action. During his ministerial years, Malraux receded from that image of action for two reasons: his loyalty to de Gaulle, which he accepted as a dutiful constraint, of the kind to be associated with diplomacy; and his developing ideas about art that hark back to Gisors’s terrified contemplation of suffering. The latter might well have influenced the former. Malraux’s biographers, Jean Lacouture and Olivier Todd, would not argue so, in part because they dismiss Malraux’s account of visual art: “his writings on art are like some strange poem or curious novel,” Todd derisively claims (447). Not that these historians have more patience with the man of action. Both puncture Malraux’s glamorizing, indeed mendacious, self-portrayal of his wartime deeds. And, not quite coherently, as if wanting Malraux to be the action figure he pretends to be, Todd cuts his subject down to size by using terms that feature his “diplomacy”: he refers to Malraux’s self-appointment to the FFI as “a diplomatic diversion from the main line into an honorable (but entirely honorary) siding. ... To be, if one cannot do, is to seem” (224). As a back-handed compliment to Malraux’s formation of the AlsaceLorraine Brigade, Todd pays tribute “to Malraux the diplomat, who nevertheless did not manage to federate the various organizations” (304). Likewise back-handed, Lacouture exclaims: “Action never gave him what he expected of it. ... There lies his failure. ... Yet we have to admit that the Malraux plunging into divisive and devouring actions is more creative than the author of La Métamorphose des Dieux [a 1957 volume about art], who has entered ‘into art as into religion’ and is surrounded by the gentle peace of the monastery that for him is represented in the museum” (470–1). In the name of action, then, to the prejudice of contemplation and art (figured by the monastery and the museum), Malraux’s judges assert their “critiques.” As for those more sympathetic to Malraux, perhaps because they implicitly are allied with Lacouture’s or Todd’s perspectives, they scratch their heads at the self-contradictory impulses that thread Malraux’s ministerial-diplomatic years. Gaston Palewski (the lover of Nancy Mitford) initiated the de Gaulle-Malraux liaison; but Palewski was lastingly surprised that Malraux (“no longer the apparition in beret and khaki”) “soon acquired the manner of a minister,” indissociable from “the image” of de Gaulle (76, 78), whom in earlier years Malraux identified with reactionary politics. Moreover, in the 1950s, the former adventurer, Palewski recalls, was “dreaming of art” (76), rather than of action or diplomacy, and continued to dream so, when – or is it because of? – “He entered into the epic of de Gaulle, as

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we all did,” Palewski says, “like a man entering a religious order” (69). Lyotard confirms the idea of a self-lacerating asceticism, appropriate for a contemplative monastic: “it would be an unbearable dependence that [Malraux] would bear, striving to favor the other [de Gaulle] over himself to the point of ruining his own image. ... Everything that revolts him, he now endorses” (Signed 264). The varied commentators converge on the topoi of inevitable constraint and will-less surrender. Malraux and de Gaulle came together, according to Malraux, as an inertial fruit of fatality: “Nobody ever wishes for their union,” Lyotard comments about Malraux’s way of regarding it; “it was just destined to occur. Malraux will see to it that this pathos, that of tragedies, will be safeguarded to the very end” (Signed 273). Malraux might have been thinking still of another action figure, one who receded from action and diplomacy both, and who thereby suggested a model for Malraux’s final career phase, even its focus on art rather than deeds: T.E. Lawrence. Intending to write a study of him, Malraux during the war years had commented that “The instinct that leads the politician to the ministry, the minister to the role of leader, did not lead [Lawrence] to wish to direct ... colonial policy.” Indeed, Lawrence, in his own words, avowed his “contemplative nature,” and asserted that he desired no ministerial or diplomatic success in colonial policy or anywhere else. “My scale of values was clearly opposed,” Lawrence wrote, “to that of men of action ... For [me] ... clear-sighted failure was the sole aim” (qtd. in Lacouture 212–13). Hanging back increasingly from initiative as his years as a minister wore on, and retreating, at the cost of enormous cultural capital, from directing government policy in response to Algeria’s revolt, Malraux in effect went on writing his unfinished study of Lawrence by living out his idol’s aim: to be himself a failure of the “apparition” that he once was. Early in the postwar years he might be said to have ceded that former apparition for apparitions that belong to art, in his view of it. A different kind of embassy underran or ran parallel to Malraux’s heroic episodes, such as the de Gaulle-directed visit to Mao in 1965. (According to “legend,” this historic visit “consolidate[d], ennoble[d] and place[d] on a personal footing the links forged the year before between France and China, at the political level” [Lacouture 427]). That other embassy is an aesthetic one. In such studies as The Twilight of the Absolute (1947–50), The Museum without Walls (1951), and The Metamorphosis of the Gods (1957), Malraux virtually displaced action from the historical world, where he had previously exemplified its demon in one or another form (including the subdued form of diplomacy), and he elected art to be action’s transcendent exemplar. According to Malraux’s evocation,

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the action that is art originates as an engagement with another world, unfathomably mysterious, unqualifiedly inhuman. To borrow from Malraux’s words about the Martinician crowd, art is for Malraux “the intermediary between human life and the world of the unknown.” Art sends ambassadors of its encounter with another world towards us in the form of what we have come to call masterpieces. As such, “Every masterpiece sponsors the progress of man’s dominance” (Twilight of the Absolute 115). That progress no doubt results from the “distilling” power in art. If Malraux is right, however, art-as-action does something antithetical to the unreliable, world-dissolving, and self-dissolving character of action. Just by its transaction with what is inhuman and unknown, “the world of art,” Malraux writes, “implies the presence in our midst of what would, normally, belong to death” (“Synopsis” 386). Hence art’s embassies, for all that they sponsor domination, also emphasize mortal attunements to suffering and loss, and contemplative submission to them. In effect, the metamorphosis that Kyo’s death imposes on Gisors is taken up in Malraux’s art theory. Gisors’s “avid welcome” of the “basic suffering ... which gushes forth from [humanity] and from which life [tries] to tear us away” is the keynote of a generalized aesthetics. Todd’s derision of Malraux’s art theory (“strange poem,” “curious novel”) suggests, albeit negatively, the involvement of literature with visual art in Malraux’s intentions. His novels, as well as their struggles with action and diplomacy, are a bridge to his studies of the visual, inasmuch as they are part of Malraux’s commitment to the cause of generic and inter-generic metamorphoses. Anti-Memoirs is autobiography and novel.2 The subdivisions of Anti-Memoirs bear the titles of Malraux’s fictions. “La Condition Humaine” – “Man’s Fate” – is its last chapter. Malraux interweaves evocations of the cave paintings of Lascaux with a narrative of the sufferings of concentration camp survivors. All the arts are “strange poems.” Ambassadorial though they be, their representational referent is distant from what is humanly identifiable. By chance, and yet by a canny logic, Lyotard echoes Gisors, along with Malraux’s art books and anti-memoir, when he sums up one of Malraux’s gists: “Through art the human bends its will to strive toward this inhuman [the unknown world, including death, in which art is rooted] that sometimes forces [the human] wide open” (Soundproof 50). As Lyotard explains, art becomes for Malraux a “grace” that may be accorded “if only man agrees to subject himself to the law of his own loss,” including his loss of agency (Signed 302). In other words, humanity must surrender a fixed identity that can be adequately represented (including the identity of the man of action),

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and humanity must also lose the security it derives from its historical embedding. “A work emerges in its time and from its time, but it becomes a work of art in virtue of being outside time” (Metamorphosis 32; original emphasis). The force of this exteriority, throwing the tale of man’s domination – history – into a state of suspense, might be said to take historical actors hostage. As Lyotard’s commentary puts it, “Great works are brush strokes of the absolute, abrupt epiphanies of being that grab us by the throat” (Signed 303). What is (being), rather than what acts (doing), comes to the fore; so that even art’s own action is delivered to passivity. According to another of Lyotard’s apt glosses, “It [art, whether as painting or as writing] is always itself that it stages: the convulsion of nothing willed coupled with submission to the order of things” (Soundproof 64). Accordingly, every masterpiece, like ordinary life, suffers a version of death: artworks undergo a demise of their original meaning and function. Alienation is essential to these strange poems. “Hitherto,” Malraux writes, “all civilizations that built up a past to sponsor them, peopled it with congenial exemplars; whereas our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents supporting its solutions, but it transforms the entire past into a series of tentative and transient answers to a problem that remains intact” (Twilight 151). The problem is how to come to terms with “the inhuman” that is eternity, death, or the absolute, as art proposes those phenomena, rather than as historical action, in whatever form, articulates them. And while “art culture” transforms the past, its metamorphic will is constrained by what it only tentatively comprehends: art’s “voice, calling across ages ... attuned in some elusive manner to [the] aura with which genius is ever widening our awareness” (148). One is reminded – indeed Malraux explicitly reminds his reader at this juncture in Twilight of the Gods – of Kyo’s listening in Man’s Fate to a recording of his own voice, yet being unable to recognize it, even though it is his. Like the claim that suffering makes on Gisors, art for Malraux makes a claim on us, which we must contemplate and respond to, even if it means facing our inability to possess it as “ours,” even if it means “entering into art as into a religion.” Graham Greene: Honorary Consul, Honorary Quixote “By the late 1950s,” Michael G. Brennan writes, “[Graham] Greene’s commentaries on global politics had become an integral element of his public identity as a writer, often beginning with pithy letters to the press” (113). One such beginning, in June 1960, was Greene’s challenge

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to Minister Malraux in an open letter to Le Monde, in which Greene accused the author of Man’s Fate of covering up the torture of political prisoners in Algeria. The challenge ironically makes Greene appear to be Malraux’s antagonist when, in fact, their thought and art are not dissimilar. Greene’s relation to “global politics” – his self-appointment as an honorary consul representing numerous trouble spots; his journalism in the early 1980s on behalf of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua; his book J’Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982) denouncing the French Mafia – constitutes his Malraux-like demon of action. Yet I have already noted Greene’s reference to the self-destructive element in his version of the demon. And, judging by the novel about “consulship” and by Monsignor Quixote (1982), I propose that Greene no less than Malraux desired a contemplative recession (“like a man entering a religious order”) – if only for his art’s sake – from ambassadorial callings. Greene’s decision to “split the Spanish royalties [for Monsignor Quixote] between the Sandinistas and the monks at Osera monastery” (Sherry 3:589), where the Quixote novel ends, is a symptomatic division of loyalties. Greene’s attraction to heroic action can be gauged by his early taste in reading and by his second novel, The Name of Action (1931). In 1918, when Greene was fourteen, his favourite fiction was Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan. In 1960, he wrote an Introduction to a reprint of Bowen’s novel, which features two condottiere antagonists, and a scene in which a father-son pair allied with one of the two blow up themselves and their city: a last victory over their enemy, whom they leave with nothing but already scorched earth. Kyo and Katov are not less heroically bloody, and barely more sensationally evoked, than Bowen’s self-immolating action figures. In The Name of Action, Greene invents a modern condottiere: an independently wealthy Englishman who decides to finance, and personally to conduct, the overthrow of a dictator of an unnamed German state. The Englishman’s leadership includes his delegation of consular powers to a native poet and a native visual artist, who collaborate with him in bringing the dictatorship to an end. But just as Gisors undergoes a transformational suffering, Greene’s favoured protagonists – in Bowen’s as in his own novel – experience a “convulsion of nothing willed” (Lyotard, Soundproof 64). In The Viper of Milan, the better condottiere, at the moment of near-victory, suddenly surrenders and thus betrays his allies. Treacherous capitulation is scarcely the hallmark of a man of action. Greene in 1960 says that he learned from Bowen’s picture of betrayal to see any worldly success as the brink of an inevitable catastrophe, and therefore he decided to “pray that failure would not be held off for long” (“Introduction” 10).

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Failure does not hold off for long in Greene’s 1931 novel. Its hero loses control of the revolution he financed, and he flees the country in the dictator’s company. The political change casts off both the new “actor” and the old. When Malraux accepted his ministries, Lyotard says, he became a Gaullist hostage: at the very least, he distanced himself from the vita activa in order to honour the constraints of being an ambassador or a representative of an inhibitory force. Greene followed a like course. Even as he was pursuing global activism, in his novels he portrayed figures withdrawing from action, or losing the name of it entirely. Illustrating that recession best, The Honorary Consul – the novel that Greene preferred to all his others (Ways 308) – foregrounds diplomacy as an epitome of compromised action and of constraining representational phenomena. Mixed feelings about ambassadorial representation already affected his youthful response to The Viper of Milan, wherein embassies are vehicles of treachery. The same mixed feelings seem operative in The Name of Action. It is the Englishmen’s consuls, the poet and the visual artist, who bring about the revolution, virtually without bloodshed, because they control the public media. Representations, rather than direct action, win the struggle. The English financer looks down on such a comparatively deedless triumph by such low-profile agents. So, it seems, does Greene, who presents both poet and artist sourly. But Greene soon did not like anything about The Name of Action, and he suppressed it. By 1973, in his fiction at least, Greene had accepted, and thoroughly explored, sufferings that are divorced from action, and gaps that drive a wedge between representations and their referents. The Honorary Consul unfolds a story of representational standins – whereby one person or thing figures another – as a tragicomedy of compromised action. Mistaken identifications intensify the compromise. The eponymous consul Fortnum, an alcoholic minor functionary in a provincial Argentine city near Paraguay, thinks he has found happiness by marrying a young woman whom he met in a local brothel. Dr Edward Plarr, however, has been sleeping with Fortnum’s wife, and has impregnated her. Thus entangled with Fortnum, Plarr becomes a second hostage when Paraguayan terrorists wound the mistakenly abducted consul, then summon Plarr to doctor him. Once Plarr arrives, they refuse to let either man go. Hence the consul, who substitutes for the American ambassador and therefore represents the latter, gets represented in turn by Plarr – an alternative honorary consul, as it were. Plarr is not only a hostage to the terrorists’ immediate demands, but also a captive representative of his own history. The terrorists, a spoiled

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priest among them, are his former schoolmates. As a boy, Plarr was sent to Argentina by his father, an insurgent in Paraguay who did not want to sacrifice his wife and son to his activism. The terrorists have wanted to take an internationally prominent ambassador hostage to bargain for the release of political prisoners at home, including Plarr’s long-lost father. Desperate to prevent Fortnum’s assassination, in an effort to intercede with the police who are out to capture the terrorists, Plarr makes a sudden break from his confinement. He is killed in the attempt. He had just learned that his father was not alive after all: the senior Plarr was shot in the escape from prison that liberated Plarr’s terrorist acquaintances and set them on their hostage-taking venture. What Plarr decades earlier was sent away to avoid catches up with him. His death represents, doubles, and displaces his father’s. Greene’s picture of men of action, representatives, ambassadors, and consuls reminds one of Holbein’s anamorphosis: the lurking death’s head that inevitably undoes actions aiming to dominate mortal vulnerabilities. The very title of Greene’s novel suggests that his book too is an honorary consul (his delegated ambassador), and that it is a hostage to history, which his authorial invention cannot surmount. His desire to surmount it is indicated in what he says was the inspiration for this novel: “I had a dream about an American ambassador ... but in my dream there was ... nothing to identify it with the [novel] except the fact that the dream lodged inexplicably in my head ... and the figures [in the novel] stole up around the unimportant Ambassador and liquidated him” (Ways 301). “Liquidation” suggests that the author, in command of the elements of his narrative, is the terrorist exploding ambassadorial function. Nevertheless, Greene also reports that the world of fact was uncannily directing and constraining his fiction – abducting his plot, rather than the other way around. On a research trip to Corrientes, the city on which the novel’s location is based, Greene read in the local paper “very nearly the story I had come there to write – a Paraguayan consul from a town near[by] ... had been kidnapped in mistake for the Paraguayan Ambassador and a demand for the release of political prisoners had been delivered to [the Paraguayan dictator], who was on a ... holiday” in Argentina (Ways 303). When Greene was writing the novel, the Tupamaro Natives of Uruguay “succeeded ... in kidnapping the British Ambassador in Montevideo. His story ... contained some interesting parallels to my own. There was even, he believed, a priest among the kidnappers” (Ways 301). To be the honorary consul of a real history, to be embedded in contemporary actuality, no doubt confirmed for Greene his sense that his writing had relevance to worldly interventions. Nevertheless, to judge

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by the strangling – and “dissolving” – effects of action to which ambassadorial and representational imbroglios lead in the novel, it is not surprising that Greene also exhibits a desire to escape the world. The ways of escape are provided by two characters: a novelist named Saavedra, and the spoiled priest, Father Rivas. Saavedra writes proletariat novels to which Plarr and a literary critic vehemently object: the novels are not realistic, not historically grounded; their characters do not exist. But Saavedra does not want “to write merely for the seventies” (Honorary Consul 71–2); and he is not the stupid person Plarr and the critic think him. He makes an acute analysis of the melancholy afflicting Plarr and Fortnum; and he suggests that, despite the suffering it entails, melancholy provides a detachment from immediacy and hence a hope of escape from action’s tragic indeterminacies, rather than into them. Saavedra brings into Greene’s text something of an equivalent of Gisors’s metamorphic vision and of Malraux’s contention that artworks, for all their historical origin, leap beyond time. Greene is not without respect for Saavedra: he gives him the surname of the father of modern fiction, Cervantes, from whom Greene will borrow timeless Don Quixote. Indeed, Greene makes Plarr, in Cervantes’ name, rebuke the terrorists for their machismo, which Plarr says they inherit from the conquistadors. “Can’t any of you for a moment escape your bloody history? You haven’t learned a thing, have you, from Cervantes? He had his fill of machismo at Lepanto” (264). Not to escape history is the tragedy. At the same time, to escape history in favour of a supra-worldly dimension is not to identify the latter with bliss. Greene makes the terrorist priest, Father Rivas, who will die along with Plarr, a formidable voice in the text. The priest is a negative theologian, whose God is dark and unknowable. Performing a mass during the police siege and planning to execute Fortnum after mass, Rivas argues that God is “responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night side as well as a day side” (269). Fortnum survives into the day; but the fates of Plarr’s father, of Plarr, and of Rivas are consonant with the night. Again one is reminded of Malraux, whose appeal to art’s evocations of the gods suggests, in Lyotard’s gloss, that “the artwork owes its transitivity in history to the intransitive ‘presence’ of the night within it” (Soundproof 90). As an artwork, The Honorary Consul mostly witnesses that intransitive darkness. Whether one is an untrammelled actor or a diplomat under constraining orders, a contemplation of both conditions is necessary from the perspective of the night side. That would seem to be Greene’s vision, borne out by his innovative treatment of Quixote, the character whom one might regard as the novelistic genre’s plenipotentiary. Whereas

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Cervantes’ hero is the self-appointed ambassador of the men of action of romance, Greene’s hero resents the activist character that is thrust upon him because of his name. His quest surrenders action to a higher goal: contemplative detachment. Greene ends his protagonist’s life in the Osera monastery, and thereby seems to end the life of novelistic art in that location – an unintended echo of the transit of art’s fortunes in Malraux if one accepts, shorn of its malice, Lacouture’s claim that Malraux entered into art as into religion. Doubtful qualities that pervade action are more prominent in Monsignor Quixote than action’s clear-cut political inspirations; and the doubting of action also undermines the status of representations as the narrative dramatizes them. Quixote’s sidekick Sancho, who is a communist ex-mayor of Toboso, fears doubt. According to Sancho, doubt makes one lose “freedom of action. Doubting, one begins to waver between one action and another” (255). Contrastively, Monsignor Quixote respects “man’s doubt” (59). He thinks a doubter is unlikely to be a terrorist – terrorism will be his nemesis – because the man of doubt “fights only with himself” (59). He does so when he thinks he is not at one with his representational burden. Admitting the oddness of his descent from a fictional character and his apparent identity with him, the Monsignor insists he does not represent his namesake: “My adventures are my own adventures, not his ... I have free will ... I am not tethered to an ancestor” (160). It is as if Greene too wants not to be tethered: forced by novelistic tradition to be another of the original Quixote’s honorary consuls, at the same time he wants to break free of the representational dimension. He therefore invents as his ambassador a new Quixote who resists action and representation equally. Greene is like his invention: he is representational, but suffers being so. For him the inhibition of action as well as representation is more essential and valuable than otherwise. His eye is on another world. Critics have treated Monsignor Quixote as merely a minor rehash of its namesake. That treatment ignores Greene’s reversal of the quixotic ideal that doing good is better than meditating it from a distance. Greene’s hero, unlike his literary ancestor, is competently practical – which is the thing that, to his grief, changes his life. For Father Quixote’s “practical abilities” (23), demonstrated by his repairs of a bishop’s car, earn him his promotion to monsignor. It is his superiors who then “would like [him] to go forth like your ancestor Don Quixote on the high roads of the world” (23); to find “a wider scope for your activities, perhaps ... even in the mission field” (28). But contemplation is his romance. “My books mean more to me than myself. They are all the faith I have and all I hope in,” he claims (85). They are not tales of chivalric action, but books of religious reflection. He wants to stay at home and read them.

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The only mission he can think of is to go touring in his Volkswagen named Rocinante, in Sancho’s company. The goal is not to rescue persons in distress, but to visit Teresa of Avila’s shrine and Cervantes’ house in Valladolid. If Sancho is more interested in action it is because, although he began adult life as a novitiate, he came to prefer Marx to mystery. But the Marxist is out of his mayoral job because communist praxis is dying out, despite the liberation provided by Franco’s demise. The fellow travellers most of all want to talk, and their conversations seek an entente between Marxism and religious speculation. That is not easy because, although the Monsignor is religious, he prefers doubt and disenchantment to faith. He has a frightening dream: in it Christ descends from the cross at once. Hence Christ’s triumph over death is without doubt. But if there is no doubt, Quixote fears, there is no room for faith. The prospect that “the whole world [knows] that Christ was the Son of God” fills Quixote with despair (76–7). Without including a mortal threat to belief, life would have no interest. Nor would death. Contemplative exchange keeps the travellers together until the world of action intrudes. An armed robber gets into Rocinante’s trunk, and then the police mistake Quixote and Sancho for Basque terrorists. In both cases action and representational thinking exemplify serious blunders: the thief is not the needy innocent he seems; the travelling friends are not envoys of terrorism. Because of the police mistake about what Quixote stands for, Greene’s barely active hero is mortally injured and brought into the Osera monastery to die. Quixote tilts at windmills in Cervantes’ novel; Quixote and Sancho are the windmills at which the world of actors tilts in Greene’s. The quixotic prospect of wilful, significant, all-dominating action enchants the world; but Monsignor Quixote redirects attention to what is removed from action; unworldly, doubtful, and dark in meaning. What Greene’s character does is also what his novel does. As a character, Monsignor Quixote can be read as Greene’s way of figuring the novel that is its vehicle and the novelistic genre too. Cervantes’ Quixote is identified with an art form – romance – undergoing extinction. Yet the form also is undergoing metamorphosis. This figure who represents, and belongs to, the death of romance traverses the history of the novel, and will not die! Nevertheless, he endures as a memento mori: a reminder, as in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, of the hollowness of representations, and of the illusiveness of human action and faith. In whatever guises the Quixote appears in fiction – he may be an ambassador, he may be a terrorist – he makes forays into history, but does not sustain any way of being in it or mastering it. His only way of surviving is by being at a loss. And art’s way of speaking, it seems, emphasizes

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doubt and mortality, even should it acknowledge hope. On his deathbed, inspired by his patron saint Francis de Sales, Quixote imagines a miracle. The saint has contemplated the magnetic sympathy between iron and adamant, such that the iron hops towards the adamant. St Francis calls the iron a stone, and asks: “Do you not see all the parts of a lively love represented in this lifeless stone?” (141). Quixote, expiring, thinks he sees lifeless stones begin to hop. Perhaps Greene means the stones to stand for words, or for fiction, or for all plastic arts, things which appear to have life even though they are lifeless. Perhaps the animated stones mean that art is death-defying after all. But certainties remain in suspense. No one knows if art’s fate is man’s hope. Such, I submit, is Greene’s meta-fictive gist in Monsignor Quixote. Upon this dubiety about art’s fate Malraux and Greene converge. Diplomacy-related practices appear in Malraux and Greene as phenomena without which their ideas of art would not be what they are; just as their ideas of art would not be what they are without “action” and without contemplation’s contrast with action. One asks again, what good are these novelists? It might be a good that readers who value untrammelled action or diplomatic strategy (despite its constraints) might be shy of: the benefit of that recession from action and diplomacy without which any account of Malraux or Greene is incomplete. Contemplative, intellectually and emotionally speculative, the benefit as Malraux and Greene evoke it is hard to face, given that such a benefit depends on an experience such as Gisors’s or its acceptance of an inhuman factor that, as Lyotard says, sometimes forces the human wide open. NOTES 1 Lyotard’s books about Malraux are the most authoritatively appreciative available. Derek Allan’s is the best English-language treatment of Malraux’s art theory. 2 Malraux runs all the arts together in his “Anti-Critique” (1976).

10 Mythography and Diplomacy in Works by Ian Fleming and John le Carré maxime prévost

In a 1958 letter to a reader who criticized the increasing lack of realism in each new James Bond adventure, Ian Fleming politely stressed that, over objective representations of secret services and international affairs (with which he was familiar), he vastly favoured the romancer’s poetic licence: “I entirely agree with you. Doctor No was very cardboardy and need not have been. ... The trouble is that it is much more fun to think up fantastic situations and mix Bond up in them. The ordinary spy world is, in fact, a very drab one and, while a great book waits to be written about it, I am not the one to write it” (F. Fleming 189). As it turns out, the great novelist of the drab, ordinary, spy world is John le Carré, whose first novels were published in the early 1960s. For both Fleming and le Carré, the world of secret service is the obverse of diplomacy: in international relations, what cannot be accomplished by diplomatic means finds an outlet in non-diplomatic intrigues and secret agents’ missions. In both writers’ works, the thriller extends the arcane business of diplomacy into the domain of popular representation. Licence to Thrill In a manner that might seem paradoxical, Bond’s creator had an ambition to write the spy story to end all spy stories, according to his biographers and his nephew (Pearson 291; Lycett 154; F. Fleming 6). He partly fulfilled this mission: Ian Fleming is to spies what Alexandre Dumas is to musketeers. More diametrically, John le Carré and Ian Fleming are to the imaginary of spying and international relations what Marcel Proust and Alexandre Dumas are to the novelistic exploration of the passage of time: the realist completes the mythographer’s work in a wholly different register. It has long been a critical commonplace to salute le Carré’s realism, his “healthy recognition of universal ambiguities” (Eco

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190), his mastery of all nuances of grey “akin to that of great writers” (Tadié, Le Roman 15). Such praise is well deserved, as long as one does not lose sight of the fact that his project, immanently realistic, is in no way comparable to Fleming’s. Whereas Fleming remains first and foremost a romancer, the author of “fairy tales for grown-ups” (Lycett vii), le Carré is a novelist who makes virtue of facts, realism, and mimesis. As le Carré writes in The Pigeon Tunnel, “Spying and novel writing are made for each other” (23). All in all, Fleming has undoubtedly left a greater imprint on the imaginary of espionage than has le Carré. He created a character that not only activated the social imaginary of the 1950s and 1960s, but also survived the passage of time. A universal embodiment of the spy, despite the fact that he is quintessentially British, James Bond has become more famous with every generation. He has made the leap from the social imaginary of a particular period to the collective imaginary of at least three successive generations.1 Fleming nourishes what Cornelius Castoriadis what would call “social imaginary significations” and the “anonymous collective” (369–73), while le Carré strives to inform them in a reactive manner. In his first novels, as I will argue in this essay, John le Carré offered a reasoned response to the fantastical diplomacy that Ian Fleming was in the process of instituting. Spying and diplomacy have a long, intertwined history. A Cold War Clausewitz could well have written that espionage is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Like diplomacy, espionage is the opposite of war; it is a means of keeping the peace. If an ambassador is “an honourable spy,” as François de Callières wrote in 1716 (qtd. in Satow 93), the spy novelist is an honourable fashioner of partial truths, honest in his very invention. In the end, both Fleming and le Carré understand diplomacy as less effective than espionage, insofar as information gleaned from spying is thought to be more authentic, less encrypted, closer to the machinations of state power than information transmitted through the official channels of diplomacy. The spy acts; the diplomat weighs options, tergiversates, negotiates, delays. Whereas Fleming represents espionage as a necessary arm of foreign policy, le Carré, responding to Fleming’s example, remains sceptical of the violent means and ideological ends of undercover activity conducted among states. Le Carré’s first novels were published during Fleming’s heyday. ­Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, appeared in 1953; You Only Live Twice, the last novel that Fleming published in his lifetime, came out in 1964, just prior to Fleming’s sudden death in August of that year, at the age of fifty-six. Bond’s popularity in Britain took off in 1957, with the serial publication of From Russia with Love in the Daily Express. In

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North America, Fleming and his indefatigable protagonist were both propelled to the forefront of public attention when President John F. Kennedy revealed, in the 17 March 1961 edition of Life magazine, that From Russia with Love was one of his “Ten Favorite Books,” alongside The Red and the Black and Winston Churchill’s Marlborough: His Life and Times.2 In 1962, with the release of Dr No, James Bond became a movie character. Adaptations of From Russia with Love followed in 1963 and Goldfinger in 1964. Two Bond titles appeared posthumously: The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) and Octopussy (1966). During this same period, David Cornwell worked as a second secretary for the British Embassy at Bonn, then as a consul in Hamburg; he was also an agent for MI5. Under the pen-name John le Carré, he published his first four novels during the golden age of James Bond: Call for the Dead (1961), A Murder of Quality (1962), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), and The Looking Glass War (1965). Throughout these novels, George Smiley shows up in various roles, some smaller and some larger. Smiley is an anti-Bond figure: dumpy, bespectacled, intellectual, mundane, and nearly invisible. In the Karla Trilogy – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1973), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979) – le Carré perfects the novelistic form of the realist spy thriller with Smiley as protagonist. Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming, RNVR Ian Fleming’s diplomatic activity took place in its entirety during the Second World War. Handpicked in 1939 by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, director of naval intelligence (DNI), Fleming was appointed his personal assistant. “Throughout his life Ian had a knack of impressing older men,” states Andrew Lycett (50). Fleming, who “quickly fell into his allotted role as DNI’s liaison with the outside world” (Lycett 103), was given the rank of lieutenant (special branch) in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), and rapidly promoted to commander, a rank that he shares with James Bond.3 His duties reached further than the term “personal assistant” usually suggests: “in fulfilling [those ­duties] Fleming finally discovered the one job for which he was ideally suited, the one career in which he was to be completely at home and in which every side of his complex and contradictory nature could be made the most of; by the time the war was declared, he had already created an indispensable place for himself” (Pearson 124). Edward P. Comentale describes Fleming as a relatively obscure civil servant: “Ian himself appears less like the dashing composer of salacious thrillers and more like a passionate civil servant with little aristocratic clout to

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his name” (5). Such a description underplays the true pleasure that Ian Fleming must have felt putting his literary imagination, which had so far found no outlet, to His Majesty’s Secret Service. “Fleming must have recognized the boyhood tang of Buchan and Jules Verne which wafted around the corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall,” writes John Pearson (131); Fergus Fleming adds that his uncle’s “wartime career was one of ingenuity and daring. Although he never engaged in active combat he engineered numerous covert operations, some of which had a major impact and others – such as recruiting the assistance of black magician Aleister Crowley – did not” (6). Amongst his more inventive initiatives, Fleming contrived “Operation Mincemeat,” an elaborate gambit involving “the man who never was.” For this operation, a dead body was left floating near the coast of Portugal, an attaché case tied to his wrist containing false information; this ploy succeeded in convincing the Germans that an Allied invasion would take place in the eastern Mediterranean, and not in Sicily where it was actually planned (Macintyre 11–12). Fleming acted as liaison officer with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an army of commandos trained for sabotage behind enemy lines. Military historian Brian Lett uncovered several documents concerning Fleming while searching archives to write the history of Operation Postmaster, that is the planned hijacking of two ships thought to be supplying German U-boats in the officially neutral waters of Spanish Guinea. The historical significance of this successful operation is less than that of Mincemeat, but it provided Fleming with inspiration at a later date. The codename of the man who ran the SOE, Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins, was “M.”4 His licensed-to-kill agents were identified as W.01 (W for West Africa – Captain Gustavus March-Phillipps), W.02 (Lieutenant Geoffrey Appleyard), W.03 (Lieutenant Graham Hayes), and so forth. According to Lett, “The situation then was that Commander Ian Fleming, as he became in May 1941, was working with the real M, and formed a trusted link between M’s Secret Service, with its team of ‘James Bonds,’ and the Admiralty” (25). Fleming treats postwar espionage as a continuation of wartime operations: “It was Ian Fleming’s fantasy to keep SOE going into the 1950s and 60s, as the perfect vehicle for the perfect agent, James Bond” (Lett 25). To avoid being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, Fleming had to refrain from publicizing his Second World War experience, except in a coded and symbolic manner, often in the form of inside jokes between him and former collaborators.5 For instance, Anthony Eden, as foreign secretary during the war, had been “prominently involved in the international cover-up after Operation Postmaster, and had advanced

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the ‘official lies’ contained in the cover story to the Spanish” (Lett 239). He succeeded Winston Churchill as prime minister while remaining in contact with Ian Fleming. In 1956, Eden recovered from the effects of “severe overstrain” at Goldeneye, Fleming’s Jamaican property, named after another operation on which the two men had collaborated (Pearson 412–27; Parker 212–18). In fact, James Bond’s name is a discreet tribute to the main agents responsible for Operation Postmaster. Fleming always pretended to have chosen a name for his protagonist at random. As legend has it, he glanced at an ornithological guide that he frequently used in ­Jamaica – James Bond’s Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies – and the down-to-earth, monosyllabic quality of the name won him over. On 5 April 1958, Fleming published an open letter in the Manchester Guardian about the origins of Bond’s name: “One of the reasons why I chose the pseudonym of James Bond for my hero rather than, say, Peregrine Maltravers was that I wished him to be unobtrusive. Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department” (F. Fleming 185). As Lett points out, agents W.01, W.02, and W.03 were passionate amateur ornithologists, “as were a surprising number of SOE agents” (42). They devoted much of their leisure time to bird-watching, even while they were on official missions. To name his double-0 agent after a famous ornithologist was therefore a sly tribute to his wartime colleagues. Fleming generally refrains from revelations that are not coded and symbolically transfigured. Nevertheless, his fiction reproduces the structure and even the codenames of the paramilitary organization for which he worked during the war. Fleming’s fantastic representation of diplomacy – diplomacy as a form of espionage – can be interpreted as a prolongation of the British war effort into the Cold War context. James Bond’s enemies are often linked to the Axis: presumed former Nazis in Moonraker and Goldfinger; a Sino-German villain in Dr No; Italians in Thunderball. The Soviet Union is remarkably absent from the Bond novels, with the exception of From Russia with Love. Bond never travels to Russia. The counter-espionage organization that Fleming calls SMERSH reflects a Second World War entity. SMERSH was “a body which worked very largely with the Red Army during the war, rounding up German spies and saboteurs and Russian traitors”; supposedly never operating outside the borders of the USSR, the group “was never a counter-intelligence unit in the sense that it worked against enemy secret services, and that in any case it had changed its name at the end of the war” (Pearson 381–2). In spite of his makeshift search for realism,

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Fleming remains unconcerned by such details. In From Russia with Love, he invents an Irish assassin who works for this phantasmagorical organization; more werewolf than spy, Red Grant feels “strange and violent compulsions around the time of the full moon” (13). Eventually SMERSH is replaced by SPECTRE – “The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion” (Thunderball 51) – an organization of highly efficient, stateless gangsters. For the first generation of Fleming’s readers, James Bond possessed a vintage quality: he was a relic of British wartime diplomacy. Simon Raven, reviewing Casino Royale in The Listener on 25 April 1953, insists on this aspect of the fiction: “All honour, then, to Mr Fleming for taking the best elements of the Cheyney method (speed, controlled savagery, a pungent and sceptical idiom) and yet combining them with the more spacious and gracious atmosphere of old-style international intrigue – monocles, medals and milordos. Mr Fleming is a Cheyney with a Sandhurst accent” (qtd. in Chapman 131). Peter Cheyney, the crime writer, was famous for fast-paced novels featuring Lemmy Caution or Slim Callaghan as recurring detectives. Judith Roof also connects Bond’s politics with out-of-date style: “Bond’s style is always retro, mummified. Bond’s style itself returns the past to the present, even, and especially, in its most futuristic moments, and it is in this constant temporal inter-referentiality that Bond can make style work as law” (78). In Goldfinger, Fleming makes light of this outdated aspect of his fiction and worldview. In that novel, M confides, “Matter of fact, 007, I had the Treasury on to me the other day. Their liaison man thinks the double-0 section is redundant. Says that kind of thing is out of date” (41). James Bond, Public Servant In 1961, Fleming sighed over the end of British imperialism: “I think England is in the process of slowly sinking beneath the waves. She had a very good run and I only hope she does her sinking gracefully” (F. Fleming 290). Lars Ole Sauerberg agrees that British diplomacy is vestigial and insignificant in postwar negotiations: “To England the new distribution of international power meant that whenever English leaders were invited to express an opinion on world issues, it was to conceal that this was merely a courtesy gesture” (150). After the war, Fleming made no effort to be transferred to MI5 or MI6; he saw, in these two institutions during a time of peace, nothing more than a promise of clerical drudgery. Pearson puts the matter dramatically: “Certainly the day-to-day contact with those professionally humdrum characters who are the backbone of the real Secret Service would have seemed a

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tedious anticlimax after his Red Indians and the wartime variety-show of Room 39” (189). Instead of a secret service career, Fleming worked as a journalist before trying his hand at novels. There is something ridiculous in the contempt shown to his work by critics who specialize in spy thrillers. Fleming is completely absent from Luc Boltanski’s seminal work on the imaginary of espionage. LeRoy L. Panek writes in all seriousness: “The perspective given by eighty-odd years of spy novels shows Ian Fleming to be a minor writer who, himself, did little to advance the form” (201). While Panek understands Fleming to belong to a tradition of spy writing, he finds the works too flawed to hold their own: “Occasionally he worked on structuring a novel, like From Russia with Love, Dr No, or Thunderball, and these are his best efforts. Nevertheless, his best are poor stuff when compared to his predecessors or successors in the spy novel” (219). Yet an alternative way to read Fleming’s novels as mythic structures illuminates some of their virtues. About what he calls “mythical thought,” Ernst Cassirer states: “Myth is an objectivation of man’s social experience” (Myth 47). In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he elaborates on this concept using metaphors of distance and detachment: “the objectivity of myth consists primarily in that wherein it seems farthest removed from the reality of things – from the reality of naïve realism and dogmatism – this objectivity is not the reproduction of a material datum but is a specific and typical mode of formation, in which consciousness disengages itself from and confronts the mere receptivity of the sensory impression” (15). Lars Ole Sauerberg makes a distinction between the mimetic and mythographic as a political effect in the James Bond novels: “At the time when his success was certain, Fleming suddenly changed his mimetic technique from one in which international politics formed a credible background to his hero’s ordeals to one in which the realistic approach was largely abandoned in favour of a background modelled on pure fantasy instead. The change took place in the Goldfinger-Thunderball phase” (205–6). His romances were becoming less and less realistic, more and more true, if one accepts Jean Molino’s definition of myth: “The myth is a true story, truer than trite reality” (57).6 The State infiltrates the anonymous collective through individualization and humanization – through the figure of James Bond. As Simon Winder observes, it seems reasonable within the parameters of postwar mythology that, in a world confronted with a nuclear menace caused by an almighty terrorist organization, salvation should come from a solitary Englishman sent to the Bahamas, or Japan, to drink dry martinis under fallacious and fantastical pretences: “When a secret organization with stolen atomic weapons planned to destroy

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Miami Beach it was not the Americans who would save the world, but a solitary Englishman, mucking around for wholly implausible reasons in the Bahamas” (103). But why should this be the case? Frédéric Julien, interpreting Bond’s success as a reactivation of ancient mythologies, sees the character as a “modern day knight errant,” the incarnation of Odysseus or Hercules (15–16).7 Umberto Eco understands Bond as a character out of “primitive epic translated into contemporary terms” (222).8 Such considerations, if fundamentally sound, fail to explain Bond’s vitality in the collective imaginary. The actualization of ancient mythological characters presupposes an important element of novelty, without which the actualization would have served no purpose and proved unnecessary. In other words, it seems insufficient to claim that James Bond is a modern Theseus or Odysseus, because any actualization or updating is pointless without the addition of novelty. Ancient heroes have to be contemporized. Ian Fleming creates far-fetched almighty terrorists – Emilio Largo, Doctor No, Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld – who are defeated by a remarkably efficient and resourceful civil servant. In many ways, Bond resembles his enemies. He has “something a bit cruel in the mouth,” according to Gala Brand in Moonraker (169). He is trained to be violent; he is a state-sanctioned killer. Yet he is the moral and indeed ontological superior of his enemy for the very reason that he is an emissary of the State. “I work for the Government,” says Bond to Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever. “Sort of a secret agent?” she asks. “Just a civil servant,” answers Bond modestly (161–2). For Kingsley Amis, James Bond is, in essence, a “Medium-Grade Civil Servant” (11). “Just take it easy, Mr Bond. You’re a civil servant, I understand,” a dietician tells him at the beginning of Thunderball (15). As a civil servant, he is often obliged to do clerical work, as in Thunderball: “Since leaving Shrublands ten days before, he had never felt so well in his life. His energy had doubled. Even the paper-work he had always found an intolerable drudgery was now almost a pleasure” (64). Despite such a modest job description, Bond might very well be the most heroic civil servant ever produced for and within the social imaginary. James Bond is morally superior to his terrorist foes not only because he works for the State, but also because of his humanity: he appreciates simple pleasures as well as luxuries. At the heart of the Bond myth reside phantasms of luxurious consumption, but in this instance consumption made by a spy who gives his life to the State, that is, an ostentatious consumption validated by the State (opposed symbolically to Soviet austerity as well as to the selfish needs of the villains he defeats). James Bond appreciates luxury without trying to enrich

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himself. As Panek notes, “He lives in comfort, sure enough, but it is modest comfort, for Fleming repeatedly mentions Bond’s austere salary” (209). Nor is he a snob, at least not in the novels. The lavishness of his existence, granted for reason of State security, is paradoxically Spartan. He can have anything, and he indulges occasionally when on a mission, but he dreams of scrambled eggs and double doses of gin, or of a “large dish of Spaghetti Bolognese containing plenty of chopped garlic and accompanied by a whole bottle of the cheapest, rawest chianti” (Thunderball 34). Bond serves an efficient State.9 During missions, Bond is granted total liberty. Orderly and responsible, his is given carte blanche. “He’s a patriotic sort of chap,” declares M in You Only Live Twice (21). What Alain Dewerpe calls the “fideistic spy thriller,” featuring a “noble and national hero” (292), thus gives birth to a spy acting with the approval of the State but completely apart from it. This fideistic thriller is contrasted to the sceptical spy novels written by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, or John le Carré. Simon Winder observes that the mythology instituted by Fleming (encompassing M, Bond, and the Secret Service for which he works) instils a form of soothing fascination (162–3). In this mythology, faith, be it purely mythical or symbolic, balances doubt. It should be added that, on the front of British-American relations, Ian Fleming’s agent has a fine working relationship with the CIA, personified by Felix Leiter, perhaps echoing Fleming’s own experience with General William J. “Big Bill” Donovan in the creation of the American Office of Co-ordinator of Information (COI), soon to be renamed Office of Strategic Service (OSS) (Lycett 128–32).10 As the incarnation of American traits, Leiter is invariably portrayed in a favourable, if somewhat paternalistic and often humorous, light. First a CIA agent, he becomes a Pinkerton security agent after an unfortunate encounter with starving sharks in Diamonds Are Forever: “The right arm had gone, and the left leg, and there were imperceptible scars below the hairline above the right eye that suggested a good deal of grafting, but otherwise Leiter looked in good shape” (55). In every phase of his career, he embodies the special – which is to say cordial and fruitful – relation that officially obtained between Britain and the USA in the postwar years. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond laconically tells Tiffany Case, “Felix is all right” (155), a supreme compliment in Bond’s lexicon. In Goldfinger, Bond looks affectionately at Leiter, “with whom he had shared so many adventures. He said seriously: ‘Bless you, Felix. You’ve always been too good at saving my life’” (204). Bond’s chumminess with Leiter could not be further from le Carré’s scepticism about American interference in foreign states. By and large, the CIA is absent from le Carré’s early

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titles, although an American goads Leamas with his mere presence in the first chapter of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. In le Carré’s later novels, such as A Most Wanted Man (2008), the CIA is represented as a force of imperialistic injustice. “I hate them more than I hate myself, more than I hate a hangover,” he writes in his notebook. “They’re the one bunch I hate morally: I only have to see their Mormon haircuts and listen to their open-plan charm. I have only to hear them call Europe ‘Yurrp’ and I start sweating at the joints” (qtd. in Sisman 382). Le Carré’s Way: George Smiley as Anti-Bond In a career not quite as distinguished as Ian Fleming’s, David Cornwell led a double life as diplomat and secret agent before being catapulted to success as a spy novelist: “You would not, I imagine, if you were on the lookout for the inside story of Grand Prix racing, choose for your source a junior mechanic with a hyperactive imagination and zero experience of the race track. Yet that is a fair analogy of what it felt like to be appointed, overnight and solely on the strength of my fictions, to the status of guru on all matters of secret intelligence” (Pigeon Tunnel 164). In 1963, Cornwell was working as “Second Secretary (Political) at the British Embassy in Bonn” (Pigeon Tunnel 22) when The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, an international bestseller that was made into a movie in 1965, persuaded him to embrace a literary career. In The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré claims that his imagination had been formed by romances when he started writing: “I hadn’t read Maugham’s Ashenden by then, but I had certainly read Kipling’s Kim, and any number of chauvinistic adventure stories by G.A. Henty and his ilk. Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Rider Haggard could do no wrong” (3). Ultimately his fiction strives to overthrow romance as a mode and genre. In this regard, his novels form a dialogue with Fleming’s, or at least set up a diffracted echo with them. Giant squids, sharks, and sea monsters are remarkably absent from le Carré’s novels. From his first appearance, George Smiley asserts himself as the anti-James Bond. Whereas Bond advises that “one shouldn’t get fat” in The Spy Who Loved Me (142), Smiley is overweight. Whereas Bond seduces women serially, Smiley has been married, but his wife has left him. Whereas Bond is active, Smiley is cerebral; he has a particular fondness for German literature, especially the seventeenth-century novelist Grimmelshausen. Bond keeps his emotions under control, but Smiley loses control of himself. In Call for the Dead, he experiences a gamut of feelings, none of them edifying: “Panic and fury welled up in a sudden tide, flooding his breast, suffusing his whole body. His

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face felt hot and red, his spectacles blurred, and tears sprang to his eyes, adding to his humiliation” (46). In short, he is an ordinary fellow: “When Lady Ann Sercombe married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary” (Call 9). Yet the self-effacing civil servant, hiding behind his mediocre appearance, slyly observes the activities of more dashing yet less efficient agents. In Call for the Dead, Smiley spies upon an East German assassin: “tall, fair, handsome, thirty-five odd. A light grey suit, white shirt and silver tie – habillé en diplomate. German or Swede” (50). At the conclusion of the novel, in an airplane flying over France, “Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers – a little fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the corner of his eye. He knew the type well – the tired executive out for a bit of fun. He found it rather disgusting” (157). Either the young man misjudges Smiley’s unassuming appearance entirely, or Smiley performs brilliantly a role that he has crafted for himself. He is not exactly what he seems to be. In A Murder of Quality, le Carré takes even greater pleasure in deriding his agent’s apparent anti-heroism. Although she admires Smiley, Miss Brimsley “used to think of him as the most forgettable man she had ever met; short and plump, with heavy spectacles and thinning hair, he was at first sight the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a sedentary occupation” (17). The narrator, whoever he may be, confirms this description while projecting scorn: “Well, he looked like a frog, right enough. Short and tubby, round spectacles with thick lenses that made his eyes big. And his clothes were odd. Expensive, mind you, you could see that. But his jacket seemed to drape where there wasn’t any room for drape” (28). A further passage seems written precisely for the romance reader who fails to grasp the imaginary regime of rationality and scepticism: “Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction” (81). Le Carré’s plots become more complex over time, especially as he moves away from the domestic settings of his first two novels to international settings in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Looking Glass War. The latter novel is constructed as a relay race, the three parts of the novel each relating, in an overarching plot, to the actions of three distinct agents: “Taylor’s Run” in Part 1; “Avery’s Run” in Part 2; “Leiser’s Run” in Part 3. Each running, these agents are somewhat interchangeable. Moreover, international relations, whether overt or occult, result from teamwork, which leaves little room for overbearing personalities

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or independent renegades. Unlike Fleming, le Carré is interested in the conjugal life of his agents. James Bond cannot be said to have a private life. By contrast, le Carré’s protagonists are married, often badly, and face tremendous difficulty in reconciling their private and professional lives. In The Looking Glass War, an agent reveals the nature of his mission to his wife: “He’d told her, of course: he wasn’t supposed to, but Leclerc [his superior] didn’t know Joannie. ... How the hell was he supposed to push off to Scandinavia without telling his wife?” (462–3). Le Carré’s agents often face financial difficulties and status anxiety; young Avery belongs to “that intermediate class of contemporary Englishmen which must reconcile an Arts degree with an uncertain provenance” (Looking Glass 473). Even if the usual designations for intelligence and security agencies are not used in le Carré’s novels, the reader understands that Avery works for MI5. He answers to a civil servant named Leclerc, whose long-gone glory days occurred during the war. Leclerc, biding his time at MI5, hopes to run an important operation under the auspices of the more prestigious MI6 (“the Circus”). Although Smiley acts as a liaison officer between the two offices, Leclerc describes him in condescending terms: “He used to be one of their best men. Typical of the Circus in some ways, of the better kind. He resigns, you know, and comes back. His conscience. One never knows whether he’s there or not. He’s a bit past it now. They say he drinks a good deal” (Looking Glass 479). The spy’s duplicitous nature, his dishonesty, his eventual bad conscience will become the vital thread of John le Carré’s work. The Circus, as Leclerc sees it, is “a curious crowd. Some good, of course. Smiley was good. But they’re cheats. ... Lying’s second nature to them. Half of them don’t know any longer when they’re telling the truth” (480). In A Legacy of Spies (2017), Smiley tries to recruit Peter Guillam with an underwhelming speech: “We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means” (8). In The Looking Glass War, a team animated by a “loyalty without faith” (504) sends a war hero named Leiser to East Germany. The operation, already poorly planned, lacks key intelligence to succeed. Leiser, consequently, meets an absurd and unglorified demise. The Looking Glass War can thus be read as the symbolic entombment of the heroism of open warfare, especially of the patriotic resistance of men who fought in the Second World War, including Ian Fleming and James Bond. Henceforth, war will be occult, less valiant – in a word, “cold.” Such a war requires anonymous soldiers, professional civil servants who dispose of their individuality and ideals, as happens in the first chapter of Call for the Dead: “The NATO alliance, and the desperate measures contemplated

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by the Americans, altered the whole nature of Smiley’s service. Gone forever were the days of Steed-Asprey, when as like as not you took your orders over a glass of port in his rooms at Magdalen; the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, under-paid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy, and intrigue of a large Government department” (14). In Alain Dewerpe’s terms, the shift from the fideistic thriller (Fleming’s model) to the sceptical spy novel (le Carré’s) represents a paradigm shift: “our agent, no longer a true hero, bears within himself and reveals to the public all tensions and ambiguities of secret policies” (290). Like many le Carré spies, Smiley has a hard time reconciling ends and means: “A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust” (Murder 77). For le Carré, the spy is not and can never be entirely authentic, even with himself. In Call for the Dead, Smiley is saddened to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure. Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction. By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life. (12)

The reception of John le Carré’s novels, largely recognized as “literary spy thrillers,” has proved more and more positive over the years (Sisman 342). Fleming’s Bond novels are often invoked as the antithesis of le Carré’s approach. Reviewing The Little Drummer Girl, William F. Buckley wrote in the New York Times Book Review that such a spy novel “transcends the genre”: “The Little Drummer Girl is about spies as Madame Bovary is about adultery or Crime and Punishment about crime” (qtd. in Sisman 432). In the New York Review of Books, David Remnick described The Night Manager as a novel that Ian Fleming could have written, if he had possessed more talent and maturity: “a Goldfinger for grownups” (qtd. in Sisman 496). Even Salman Rushdie, with whom le Carré had had a rousing public feud, tried to make amends for a negative review of The Russia House twenty years earlier by claiming the idea that “le Carré’s novels transcended the spy genre and should be considered literary” (qtd. in Sisman 594). In making such judgments, commentators affirm their presuppositions about the superiority of

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one imaginary regime over the other – the sceptical surmounts the ­mythological – without being aware that their predilections are being put forward as a categorical aesthetic imperative. Le Carré’s popularity reached a pinnacle with the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People in 1979 and 1982, both of which feature George Smiley. In opposition to Ian Fleming’s way, le Carré shows no inclination to be a mythographer: after Smiley’s People, he ceased to write novels with Smiley as a character, except for The Secret Pilgrim (1990) and A Legacy of Spies (2017). In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Smiley’s People (2000), he links his loss of interest in Smiley to a sense of dispossession; le Carré was inclined to think that Smiley was becoming owned by actor Alec Guinness and, in a more abstract way, by the general public. In this regard, Smiley escapes his creator’s control: When Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first shown on the BBC ... we were pulling in audiences of up to eleven million for each episode, and the series became a kind of public institution, with endless chat on the radio about who understood how much or how little of the plot, and George Smiley briefly became a kind of myopic national hero ... George Smiley, whether I liked it or not, was from then on Alec ­Guinness  – voice, mannerisms, the whole package. And I did like it. ... On the other hand, I didn’t at all enjoy the fact that Smiley had somehow been taken over by my public. It was a thoroughly odd sensation, and not at all a pleasant one, when I went to get my character back after Alec had finished with him, to discover that I had been given used goods. I think I even felt a little bit betrayed. (“Introduction” xii)

Le Carré suffers from what Pierre Bayard calls the “Holmes Complex”: the feeling of dispossession felt by authors who have had the troubled fortune of creating mythical characters (Lycett 393). In a manner of speaking, le Carré wants to avoid seeing Smiley converted into a modern myth. By contrast, Ian Fleming treated the first Bond film adaptations as a source of inspiration for his last novels. Indeed, while Fleming favoured Englishmen, either David Niven or Roger Moore, to play James Bond (Lycett 393), he was won over by Scotsman Sean Connery’s portrayal. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice, he indulges in some British cultural diplomacy with Bond’s lineage: “James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the canton de Vaud” (You Only Live Twice 256). This information is used in greater detail in The Man with the Golden Gun and The Living Daylights. Sean

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Connery’s Scottish accent, which the American public had difficulty in identifying – he was often thought to be Irish – thus became endorsed by the canon itself.11 This authorial loss of control, that is to say this patriotic claim made by the British social imaginary over not only the character of George Smiley but also the spy novel as a genre, happened while John le Carré was becoming more politically radicalized. He was less and less convinced of the accuracy of all representations of international relations, including his own. One can imagine le Carré being surprised, perhaps even antagonized, by the praise he received from the secret service. “We want to thank you for what you did to our image,” David Spedding, head of MI6, told le Carré in 1998. Spedding’s predecessor, Sir Colin McColl, once told a friend that “the Firm likes the le Carré stuff, because he makes us look so good” (Sisman 521). If John le Carré had continued to use George Smiley as a character, he might have played a leading part in the institution of a new brand of fideistic spy imaginary. As things stand, his reasoned representations will likely remain the yang to Fleming’s yin of fantastical diplomacy. NOTES 1 In The Life of Ian Fleming, Pearson tries to estimate the magnitude of Bond’s popularity: “Somebody calculated recently that a quarter of the population of the world has at some time or other seen a James Bond movie. I can’t entirely believe this, but even if it is remotely true it makes me think that in its way Ian’s creation of James Bond has to be one of the most staggering achievements of any twentieth-century writer. Who else has created a character so many people recognize and whose adventures they still continue to enjoy fifty years later?” (xvi–xvii). 2 According to Lycett, “On the night before his assassination in November 1963, the President was reported to have been reading a Bond novel, and so, it was said, was his murderer Lee Harvey Oswald” (383). 3 Fleming makes light of his own career in the mock-obituary that M writes for James Bond at the end of You Only Live Twice: “To serve the confidential nature of his duties, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of Commander” (257–8). 4 Brian Lett elaborates: “The real M, whose codename Ian Fleming was later to borrow for the controller of his own secret agent, was a short wiry Scottish Highlander, Brigadier (later major General Sir) Colin McVean Gubbins

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5

6 7

8

9

10

MC” (18). Of course, there is no unanimity concerning M’s real-life inspiration, fictitious characters tending to be a compound of influences and imagination. John Pearson thinks that M was based on John Godfrey (202), while Adam Sisman claims that he was inspired by Maxwell Knight (129). Fleming makes a humorous disclaimer in M’s obituary of Bond: “The inevitable publicity, particularly in the foreign Press, accorded some of these adventures, made him, much against his will, something of a public figure, with the inevitable result that a series of popular books came to be written around him by a personal friend and former colleague of James Bond. If the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would certainly have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. It is a measure of the disdain in which these fictions are held at the Ministry, that action has not yet – I emphasize the qualification – been taken against the author of these high-flown and romanticized caricatures of episodes in the career of an outstanding public servant” (You Only Live Twice 258–9). My translation: “Le mythe est une histoire vraie, plus vraie que la réalité d’ici-bas.” My translation: “si l’agent secret créé il y a plus de soixante ans s’est imposé si facilement dans notre imaginaire, c’est peut-être parce qu’il s’inscrit comme un chevalier des temps modernes et un digne héritier d’Ulysse, de Thésée, d’Hercule et de bien d’autres figures très anciennes.” My translation: “E piace al lettore sofisticato che vi individua, con un punta di compiacimento estetisco, la purezza dell’ epica primitiva spudoratamente e maliziosamente tradotta in termini attuali.” Edward P. Comentale comments: “It is my contention that the novels, insofar as they work to counter painfully obvious signs of England’s postwar decline, also work to justify the increasingly corporate structure of the nation” (3). In a slightly different vein, James Chapman notes resonances between Bond, his antecedents, and historical contingencies: “In fact, Bond is something of a paradox for the cultural historian in that he represents, on the one hand, a throwback to the ‘clubland heroes’ exemplified by characters such as John Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, but is also, on the other hand, an embodiment of the values of meritocracy and professionalism that helped to shape British society after the Second World War” (130). “In the middle of much socializing, Ian wrote at least two memoranda for Donovan. They were clear and practical – the very qualities which made him so valuable for Godfrey. One concentrated on how a new US intelligence service might cooperate with the British. Ian recommended the appointment of intelligence officers to US embassies in sensitive foreign capitals, where they should come under the command of the local SIS (i.e.

Mythography and Diplomacy in Ian Fleming and John le Carré  211 British intelligence) representative until they were fully trained. He suggested that an American intelligence service ‘should be under the protection of a strong government department and it should be insured by every means possible against political interference or control.’ A typical Fleming touch was his no-nonsense prescription for the ideal intelligence officer who, he said, ‘must have trained powers of observation, analysis and evaluation; absolute discretion, sobriety, devotion to duty; language and wide experience, and be aged about 40 to 50’” (Lycett 130). 11 Parker reports another inventive gesture based on the film adaptations of the Bond novels: “In an interview in Playboy magazine conducted after two Connery films had been released, Fleming even reinvented Bond to the extent of suggesting that his politics were ‘a little bit left of centre’” (274–5).

11  Lawrence Durrell: Diplomacy as Farce maria dibattista

“In Diplomacy,” maintains Antrobus, Lawrence Durrell’s amiably ­indiscreet chronicler of a life spent “lying abroad” for one’s country, “quite small things can be One’s Undoing; things which in themselves may be Purely Inadvertent. The Seasoned Diplomat keeps a sharp eye out for these moments of Doom and does what he can to avert them. Sometimes he succeeds, but sometimes he fails utterly – and then Irreparable Harm ensues” (Antrobus 27). What immediately but not exclusively marks this axiom as humorous is the portentous use of capitals to emphasize the outsized capacity of quite small things to metastasize into Unmitigated Disaster. The diplomat is preternaturally alert to and alarmed by such inadvertencies, in which all manner of calamities lurk. Success for the Seasoned Diplomat means keeping moments of Doom on the far side of the calamitous divide. By contrast, modern fiction, in the hands of the Seasoned Novelist, steps nimbly back and forth across the divide that separates the amusing from the appalling, the hilarious from the horrific. Indeed Antrobus’s tales of diplomatic mishaps and imbroglios would not be out of place in William Gerhardi’s Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925), Evelyn Waugh’s macabre Black Mischief (1932), or Graham Greene’s mordant The Honorary Consul (1973). As Durrell repeatedly demonstrates in the Antrobus anecdotes, as well as the four volumes of The Alexandria Quartet, comic desperation is the underside of diplomatic calm. Indeed, Durrell returns tragedy to its ­origins in farce by showing the power that inadvertency – the untimely, the unforeseen – has to upset the most deftly laid diplomatic plans. Durrell’s fictions revel in tracking the inadvertent happenstances and the venal motives that can unravel and even pervert the diplomatic arts of negotiation, compromise, peace-making, and peace-keeping. In their pages, the routine work of diplomacy is often conducted and typically concludes in the frantic scrambles and stupendous catastrophes

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in which comedy in general, and farce in particular, specialize. All are steeped in an abiding scepticism of the diplomatic métier – its workaday protocol and language of euphemism – although no work devotes itself more sedulously to staging the farce of diplomacy than Durrell’s three collections of Antrobus stories. These stories satirically recall, with less distortion than one might expect, Durrell’s years as press attaché in Yugoslavia (renamed Vulgaria, in open disdain for the assignment): Esprit De Corps (1956), Stiff Upper Lip (1958), and Sauve Qui Peut (1966). The sequence of titles delineates a darkening arc of disintegrating morale amid escalating fiascos: facing the Unmitigated Disaster they had hoped to avert, even the most seasoned diplomats, spirits flagging and upper lips aquiver, scramble ignominiously to save, if not the day, at least themselves. Less recognized is the comic gravity that grounds and often deflates the baroque emotionalism of The Alexandria Quartet, on which Durrell’s reputation now rests. Read with and against each other, these highly idiosyncratic works, written contemporaneously, give a fuller and funnier but also more sombre account of the diplomatic life that Durrell knew firsthand and mercilessly lampooned. Diplomatic Humours The Antrobus stories at times seem to elude the tenacious clutches of burlesque to find more complicated sport in tragicomedy, while at the same time the reader is offered temporary relief from the florid romanticism that suffuses The Alexandria Quartet like a miasma. The most immediate aesthetic benefits accrue to the Antrobus stories, which abound in opéra bouffe clichés and patronizing stereotypes of Balkan life, culture, and names, such as Icic, Cicic, and Pepic. It is hardly any wonder that discerning critics, most notably Vesna Goldsworthy in her invaluable study Inventing Ruritania, find them irredeemably crude in “employing the comic effects of knockabout farce” (157). While there is little question that the Antrobus tales represent diplomacy as a subject uniquely suited for knockabout farce, their predilection for caricature may reflect imaginative impulses that are not quite as benighted and degraded as Goldsworthy believes. Although the Antrobus stories are infused with the blithe obliviousness of Wodehousian comedy, it is also true that, in burlesquing the “tireless treadmill of protocol and entertainments” (Justine 21) of ambassadorial missions, they align themselves with the more romanticized colonialist perspectives of The Alexandria Quartet, like those adopted by George Pombal. A minor consul, Pombal views the diplomatic life “through the eyes of Douanier Rousseau” – a life

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that, for all its tedium, staid formalities, and dysfunctionalism, is nonetheless “full of exotic charm” (Justine 21). Much of the charm for the reader of both works is in observing how Durrell the Seasoned Novelist imaginatively counterpoints the Antrobus stories with the entwined narratives and voices that comprise The Alexandria Quartet. Their juxtaposition reveals the dramatic character of their inverted relationship: the Antrobus stories, whose caricatures of diplomatic life and protocols are recounted by a “portentious” (sic) diplomat who “takes everything so frightfully seriously” (Antrobus 13), present a comic antidote to the anguished, doom-laden narration of The Alexandria Quartet. Their tone and not a few of the incidents that Antrobus recalls generically transpose the tragic lives and events recounted in the tetralogy into the raucously distempered, unruly, politically incorrect precincts of farce. Durrell hints at just such a possibility in the irresistibly titled story “Seraglios and Imbroglios” – ­ indispensable elements in mounting a full-scale farce – when, in a modernist self-­referencing gesture, Antrobus relates the baleful influence of The Alexandria Quartet on a young American diplomat. Like all Americans, Antrobus superciliously remarks, “little Carter” was notoriously “Romance Prone,” the proof of which was his going “off to Egypt on leave with the ALEXANDRIA QUARTET under his arm. The next thing we knew, he had become a Moslem – bang! Just like that. Gone over to them bodily. ... ‘Durrell’s right,’ he is alleged to have announced to his chief with an airy wave. ‘Down there almost everything goes’” (Antrobus 172). In response, Antrobus soberly relates, “Well, of course, he went too; but he had brought us a headache” (172). That everything and anything goes is the enabling premise of farce, but Antrobus’s play on words also serves as a comic vehicle for Durrell to translate himself from the realm of high romantic literature into the realm of bodily mayhem and headaches galore. Put another way, this is one of those moments of authorial self-display in which Durrell the Seasoned Novelist reverts to his doppelganger, Durrell the Humorist, a reversion that alerts us to their co-dependence. He even signals their co-existence in the initials – L.G.D. – that he shares with the main narrator of The Alexandria Quartet, L.G. Darley. Pursewarden, the tetralogy’s resident ironist, wittily, if somewhat tactlessly, suggests that these initials serve as an apposite acronym for Darley’s overripe romanticism: Lineaments of Gratified Desire (Balthazar 110). Durrell often manifests his innately humorous disposition in Pursewarden, the diplomat-­ novelist through whom he chooses to ventriloquize this dimension of his own artistic consciousness. Darley, despite being the narrator-­designate of The Alexandria Quartet, gives over great patches of his narrative in

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Clea to extracts taken from Pursewarden’s notebooks. Entitled “My Conversations with Brother Ass” (Clea 125), this rambling, Shandean interlude deflates the overwrought rhetoric and “emotional gongorism” of the artist, like Darley, who is always trying “to saturate the world with his own anguish” (151). In a particularly weird moment of self-address, Pursewarden interrupts himself during a long and increasingly fervid disquisition on the artist’s great fecundating role that culminates in an ecstatic paean to D.H. Lawrence. In his “death-struggle,” Pursewarden rhapsodizes, Lawrence came “to realise his sexual nature fully, to break free from the manacles of the Old Testament; flashing down through the firmament like a great white struggling man-fish, the last Christian martyr” (141). Pursewarden abruptly pauses to announce his own artistic genesis in a newly revived pagan dispensation: “I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode!” (142). This exultant realization, a moment of comic theophany, subsides into dreamy visions of his own poems. So beguiled is Pursewarden by these visions – “like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night” – that he loses sight of where he is in his own discourse. “What was I saying,” he wonders in an effort to recollect himself. “Yes,” he resumes, now seeing his way clear, “the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect” (Clea 142). Only a humorist with pronounced satiric inclinations would contemplate burying a great truth under a mountain of follies that comfortably – comfortably! – await the picks and shovels of those elected by Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode, to sort through the rubble in search of the great verities. The temptation for both the elect and reprobate is, of course, to dismiss this unlikely conjunction of the pagan satyr-god, all lightning power and erotic hijinks, and the high romantic emotionalist voicing soft, anguished tributes to human desire as a megalomaniacal exercise in self-doubling. I would advise resisting this temptation, since Pursewarden’s praise of follies, including his own, belongs to a long and venerable tradition of comic exuberance, one that seeks to expose and expound the fundamental relation between vulgarity and sublimity. The cultural roots of this tradition date to antiquity, most notably in Greek drama. The relation is most egregiously played out in the coarse buffoonery of the satyr play, which relaxes the taut, anguished strains of tragedy without necessarily abandoning tragedy’s preoccupation with the gnarled motives that impel, and the uncanny vicissitudes that upend, human action. As Northrop Frye notes in his essay on the provenance of literary genres, the relation between farce and tragedy is an enduring,

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but deeply mysterious one. “Classical critics from Aristotle to Horace,” he writes, “were puzzled to understand why a disorganized ribald farce like the satyr play should be the source of tragedy” (292). Durrell seems to appreciate if not solve the mystery when Pursewarden, beginning to sound and speak more and more like Zarathustra, proclaims, “we Celts mate with despair out of which alone grows laughter and the desperate romance of the eternally hopeless” (Clea 143). This Nietzschean fantasia on the genealogy of tragic laughter, demented as it may seem, accords with Freud’s clinical respect for Humour as one of the psyche’s primary defence mechanisms against distressing affects. “[F]ending off of the possibility of suffering places it,” Freud writes, “among the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer – a series which begins with neurosis and culminates in madness and which includes intoxication, self-absorption and ecstasy” (165). Freud’s account of the power of Humour to deflect suffering puts at our disposal a psychoanalytic as well as generic key for understanding why The Alexandria Quartet, a desperate romance chronicling every sort of neurotic mania, erotic madness, sensual intoxication, morbid self-absorption, and spiritual ecstasy, cannot help, at such self-aware moments, laughing at itself. I am not proposing that Durrell had a substantial theory of how tragedy could and did ramify and metamorphose into farce. I am merely pointing out that, throughout The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell underscores the essential comedy of human relations, effectively providing a measured counter-voice to the novels’ turgid prose rhapsodies on sexual desire, their aggrieved and distressed laments against betrayal, their baroque and wildly miscarried political plots, and the folly, if that is what it is, of Pursewarden’s ultimately self-injuring irony. The latitude Durrell allows comedy in the novels’ darkest moments suggests that he may have been writing out of some intimation of this mysterious but vital affinity between farce and tragedy. Certainly Antrobus, picking through the Rabelaisian mountain of follies that has been built up over his long and inglorious career, feels no compunction in presenting the droll fates of fellow diplomats as tragedies of floundering ambitions and careers cut short after a single “Major Experience” (Antrobus 124), as he euphemistically calls the catastrophic event that can undo the most disciplined diplomat. He is particularly moved and impressed by the “tragedy of Mungo Piers-Foley,” which “should give every Thoughtful Person Pause” (121). The details of Mungo’s tragic undoing are particularly harrowing – and silly. In an absent-minded moment and “by the purest inadvertency” (121), Mungo, a military attaché, Colonel in the Blues, and founder-member of

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the Society for the Prevention of Everything to Nags, eats a horse – with a touch of mustard. Overcome by remorse, he feels compelled to resign his commission. Although Antrobus immediately recognizes that he is “in the presence of tragedy” (122), he shows a fine appreciation for the nuances that separate professional disgrace from a full-blown moral collapse. For years, he relates, he saluted Mungo’s gallantry in taking responsibility for his gastronomic depravities and dropping considerately out of sight, thus sparing the feelings of the household cavalry he had so devotedly served. But then he becomes apprised of the “grisly sequence” of Mungo’s violation of the food taboos of his tribe and clime. Having discovered how edible everything is, Mungo’s appetite becomes more adventurous and increasingly decadent. He ends up spending his days inventing the most exotic à la carte confections, like “Leeches à la rémoulade ... Giraffe Truffée aux Oignons ... Boaconstrictor Chasseur ... Ragoût de Flamingo with Water-Rat Flambé” (126). This is not the grisly cannibalistic feast that concludes Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, because Waugh, the superior artist, is not content just to approach, but is determined to cross the threshold where farce and satire meet and transform into horrific tragedy without any possibility of comic amelioration. Inadvertency Mungo’s gastronomic tragicomedy typifies Durrell’s modernist interest in relativity, relativity in values and tastes foremost, as befits a diplomat delegated to smooth over and negotiate cultural differences, but also relativity in the different orders of events that both the diplomat and novelist struggle to control and, ideally, manipulate for their own purposes. Hence the diplomat’s and novelist’s heightened sensitivity to Chance, that moment of purest inadvertency that can cause any one of us, however innocently or reluctantly, to act as an ironic instrument of Nemesis. In confessing his own transgression, Mungo insists that his fatal dinner of horsemeat was “[q]uite inadvertent, the whole dashed thing. It could have happened to anyone” (Antrobus 122). For Durrell the mission of the novel, insofar as it accords with diplomatic means and diplomatic consciousness, is to instil a humbling appreciation of the inadvertencies – a word that conveys better than contingency the limits of purposeful human action – that can upset the most careful negotiations with a seemingly unstoppable train of events. In Durrell’s fiction, unlike Waugh’s, the Humorist prevails over the satirist as well as the desperate romantic. His representations of diplomatic life, including his sympathetic account of the career of Mountolive,

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may be indelibly marked by an unrelenting and often unforgiving irony, but they are tinged with a tenderness – the most valued of all the sentiments and passions in The Alexandria Quartet – that ensures that the inanities he traffics in are meant to amuse and not just discomfit. His fiction attributes the spiritual and emotional stultification of life in the diplomatic service to “fatuities endured – deliberately endured in the name of what was most holy in the profession, namely the desire to please, the determination to captivate in order to influence” (Mountolive 159). Pursewarden, himself condemned to endure such fatuities, offers this diagnosis not in moral disdain, but “with compassion and affection” (159), two attitudes vital to a humorous rather than stridently satiric understanding of the diplomat’s limited power to control events, to subdue, as Antrobus might say, the Purely Inadvertent with Cool Deliberation. Pursewarden’s masterwork, which carries the telltale title God Is a Humorist, acknowledges the worrisome aspect of regarding human beings as humours available for manipulation by higher powers, divine or otherwise. “Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use,” Pursewarden wonders, “and does this cut one off from them a bit?” (160). Pursewarden answers his own question in the affirmative and then pointedly remarks: “For observation throws down a field about the observed person or object. Yes. Makes the unconditional response more difficult – the response to the common ties, affections, love and so on” (160). His consolation is the humorist’s resignation: “Well! It takes all sorts to unmake a world” (159). The world is unmade partially because people persist in unmaking themselves. (Pursewarden, notably, commits suicide.) It is for this reason that Pursewarden can regard the bureaucratic formalist, Maskelyne, as “[n]arrow, acid, desiccated,” and then admit that “the writer somewhere treasured him while the man condemned him” (Mountolive 160). Not just Maskelyne, but all those involved in diplomacy in The Alexandria Quartet, including Pursewarden himself, struggle against becoming humours caught up in the compulsive logic of their profession. Most tellingly, mordant humour introduces and comically resigns Mountolive to the world of the foreign service, which he believes will be his “making” as a man. Despite his “initial dismay,” Mountolive accepted his fate with good grace and joined in the elaborate game of musical chairs which the Foreign Office plays with such eloquent impersonality. The only consolation, a meager one, was to find that everyone in his first mission knew as little as he did about the language and politics of the country. His Chancery consisted of two Japanese experts and three

Lawrence Durrell: Diplomacy as Farce  219 specialists in Latin American affairs. They all twisted their faces in melancholy unison over the vagaries of the Czech language and gazed out from their office windows on snow-lit landscapes full of Slav foreboding. He was in the Service now. (Mountolive 50)

Mountolive here enters the world of Antrobus, a world of absurdist happenings in which the only consolation is that he is not alone; comedy, we should remember, is the most sociable of genres. Such sociable humour aerates the emotionalism of The Alexandria Quartet and the uninhibited caricatures of diplomatic lives in the Antrobus stories, exposing how much these singular and seemingly opposed works offer ultimately complementary accounts of how the diplomatic attempt to remake the world results in its undoing and, more often than not, in self-undoing as well. Durrell finds the vulgarity as well as the frivolity of farce gratifyingly serviceable in activating this comedy of undoing. In an interview with the Paris Review, he states that he wanted to avoid writing The Alexandria Quartet in an inhibited frame of mind, which he feared might make it “pawky” – “do you have that word?” he asks his interviewers. “It means a kind of schoolmasterish, donnish intent to be funny.” He then elaborates on his comic vision. “The difficulty,” he explains, “is that it is hardly permissible for me to be as vulgar as I would like. You see, I don’t really think a comic novel is any good unless it’s as vulgar as it is satiric. It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness” (“Lawrence Durrell, The Art of Fiction” 60). Durrell might thus have revisited Vulgaria as a literary territory not just to lampoon the misery of his service in the Balkans, but to be as vulgar and bawdy as he needed to achieve a refined mode of comic storytelling that would be both satiric and tender. Sauve Qui Peut! For Durrell, to characterize diplomacy as farce conveys, then, no puerile dismissal or defamation of the diplomatic arts and character. Rather, it recovers a profound connection between the ordered disorder of diplomacy that farcically miscarries and the disordered order of diplomacy that tragically fails to avert Irreparable Harm. The Antrobus stories, as insouciant about consequences as they are obsessive about protocols, rework the melodramatic, often tragically foiled destinies recounted in The Alexandria Quartet in a confidently Wodehousian manner, as if seeking to return the very idea of tragic machinery to its source in farce.

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Certainly both Antrobus Complete, as the compilation of all three sets of stories is called (they hardly amount to a cycle), and the four interweaving volumes of the space-time complex known as The Alexandria Quartet are impelled – and undone by – characters acting out of sauve qui peut desperation. Run for your life is the last resort of those frantic ones caught in the undertow of the Purely Inadvertent, which is proverbially indifferent to the arrangements and rituals that men and women, not to mention entire societies and their institutions, devise to advance their individual and common interests. In the Antrobus stories, this theme of farcical desperation – let us call it the sauve qui peut motif – is elaborated in the cheeky scepticism that shadows serious investigation into the limits of diplomatic power to influence events in The Alexandria Quartet. The caricature of the diplomatic mentality and the more sympathetic delineation of Mountolive’s sentimental education express the pronounced, and, in each case, exaggerated facets of the “effects” (Mountolive 183) of diplomatic training on character. The diplomat is professionally conditioned to withstand, if not minimize, the threat posed or outright damage done by pure accident or by a chain of events that defy human management. This emphasis on the diplomat as a manager of contingencies and vicissitudes that can disrupt the best-laid plans is well within the tradition of diplomatic self-understanding. In The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1954), Harold Nicolson traces the origin of diplomacy to the “dawn of history” when, he surmises, anthropoid apes realized “it might be profitable to reach some understanding with neighboring groups regarding the limits of their respective territories” (2). Diplomacy is born among such mutually beneficial agreements, Nicolson argues, but its authority and impact remain insecure. Stability in diplomacy is predicated on continuous, not irregularly pursued, negotiations and as such requires, both on pragmatic and moral grounds, its own method. Time, or rather timeliness, is of the essence to the diplomatic method, indeed to the achievement of diplomatic objectives. Nicolson appeals to the authority of De Falsa Legatione, Demosthenes’ indictment of the dilatory, hence dangerous methods of his former colleague Aechinus, in urging the most methodical and patient conduct in diplomatic negotiations. Nicolson quotes Demosthenes to the effect that “Ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal or heavy infantry; their weapons are words and opportunities” (Evolution 13). The strategic deployment of such weapons – language and the opportune moment – puts the diplomat “in control of occasions and therefore, to a large extent, of events” (13). The illusion of such control activates, but also undoes the diplomat, who as the informed, third-person narrator of Mountolive tells us,

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“was expected to be entrained in great events” (Mountolive 182). Not above multi-lingual jokes, he means “entrained” in the English sense of “being educated,” as well as in the secondary French sense of “being dragged along.” The expectation, amounting to a presumption of entrainment, is no figure of speech. It is the literal vehicle that launches Esprit de Corps, the first instalment in the Antrobus stories. The volume opens with “The Ghost Train,” Durrell’s initial foray into and across the absurdist terrain traversed by a diplomatic corps that apparently never staged a ceremony or attended an affair of state that it did not bungle. The reversion of a figurative expression to its literal meaning is echoed in Antrobus’s claim that nothing illustrated “the peculiar hazards of Diplomatic Life so well” (Antrobus 13) as the obligatory entrainment of the international diplomatic corps on the Liberation-Celebration Machine, a “special train which would prove once and for all that the much-vaunted Yugoslav heavy industry was capable of producing machinery every bit as good as the degenerate capitalist West” (14). The diplomatic corps rechristen it the Ghost Train in recognition of its old-fashioned, baroque design: “three long coaches ... made of painted and carved timber” decorated with “flowers, birds, liberation heroes, cache-sexes, emblematic devices, post-horns – everything you can imagine, all painted and carved according to the peasant fancy” (15). The Ghost Train, manned by engineers who are dubbed the Karamazov brothers because of their unkempt dress and frantic efforts to stoke the engine, careens out of control across the Balkan countryside until it overshoots the Zagreb railway station and misses the red carpet by a quarter-mile. Like the characters and props of farce, the ceremonial stand erected for the occasion collapses, a dismantling in which no one suffers injury, unless to their dignity. Nor do any casualties result from the Incident – a word that, along with Gaffe, occupies a special place in the diplomatic lexicon of ­misadventure –  that occurs a week after the Liberation Day festivities when the Ghost Train, returning home, again goes off the rails, carrying away most of the station buildings. Antrobus is neither surprised nor concerned by the mishap. “No one was hurt,” he reports, then adds: “No one ever is in Serbia. Just badly shaken and frightened out of one’s wits. It is all, when you come to think of it, part of the Serbian way of life” (Antrobus 21). Thinking is hardly part of the diplomat’s portfolio, such as Durrell represents it. It might be wise therefore to take this reflection for what it is: not so much a comment on the “Serbian way of life” as an illustration of the sang-froid of the diplomat, who must ceaselessly confront and mitigate “the peculiar hazards of Diplomatic Life” (13).

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In this particular instance, the hazards encountered in the derailment of the Ghost Train do not represent Durrell’s farcical detour away from his actual experiences in Yugoslavia, but only a slightly exaggerated version of them. Indeed this railroad slapstick was apparently based on an event that Durrell witnessed in Zagreb and whose reality quotient made him immediately associate it with something in a Waugh novel: “The Netherlands chargé d’affaires slightly tipsy on the platform. The ministers shaking hands and cooing like doves; the Argentine ambassador in a frock-coat got locked out of his pullman and ran shrieking beside the train for a hundred yards ... The wife of the Brazilian ambassador got locked in a lavatory and had to be set free with axes and dosed with peppermint” (The Spirit of Place 101–2). Whatever this episode says about the physical indignities and embarrassments to which diplomatic corps and their entourages are prone, it confirms that comic situations can have their source in events that may be literally true without being the least bit probable. For this reason, Pursewarden, the instinctive humorist and aspiring novelist, regards the newspaper, especially the faits divers, as a mountain, a veritable Everest of follies, diplomatic and civilian alike. It is not in picking through the official communiqués that give an official version of human life and affairs abroad but in sorting through the faits divers that he discovers those little oddities of human conduct which mirrored the true estate of man, which lived on behind the wordy abstractions, pleading for the comic and miraculous in lives made insensitive by drabness, by the authority of bald reason. Behind a banner headline which he would have to interpret in a draft dispatch for Mountolive the next day – ARAB UNION APPEALS AGAIN – he could find the enduring human frailties in GREAT RELIGIOUS LEADER TRAPPED IN LIFT or LUNATIC BREAKS MONTE CARLO BANK which reflected the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance. (Mountolive 165)

The faits divers are valued as the record of those occasions when the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance infiltrates the realm of everyday life under the guise of the comic and miraculous. This is precisely the range of experience that is determinedly normalized in the language of diplomatic communication, the language of euphemism steeped in consideration for outraged feelings. Durrell, who estimates that he read “millions of words of Foreign Office dispatches” while he was a press attaché, insists that his was “a much harder job than any foreign correspondent’s because I was the buffer state between, say, four and four

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hundred correspondents in a situation where a statement of policy was expected on a split-second basis and so water-tight that it wouldn’t fall apart under analysis. Of course, to make that kind of statement you have to have a policy, and in most of the places where I worked we didn’t” (“Lawrence Durrell, The Art of Fiction” 44). Insofar as he is a diplomat, Pursewarden must concern himself with policy, sometimes improvised on the spot. But insofar as he is a novelist, he must be concerned with human experiences and the values that inform them or accrue to them. In this respect, a religious leader trapped in a lift may tell us more about the enduring human frailties than the Sermon on the Mount. Or rather, his farcical entrapment in a lift is precisely the event that confirms the wisdom and gist of the Sermon on the Mount. “Why don’t they recognize in Jesus the great Ironist that he is, the comedian?” Pursewarden pleads: “I am sure that two-thirds of the Beatitudes are jokes or squibs in the manner of Chuang Tzu. Generations of mystagogues and pedants have lost the sense” (Clea 144). By interpreting the Beatitudes as sublime jokes, Pursewarden affirms his faith in a distinctive mode of comedy – diplomatically cross-­cultural yet cheekily dismissive of mystagogues and pedants who fail to recognize the Truth to be found in Humour. Reading the Antrobus stories and The Alexandria Quartet as distorting but not inaccurate mirrors of each other may be the first step in regaining, or, perhaps more rightly, possessing for the first time, the sense of the Beatitudes as the work of a great ironist. If we manage to do so we might come to credit, if not share, Pursewarden’s belief that God is a Humorist and Jesus a comedian. Is this the last divine joke of The Alexandria Quartet, a joke that never would have been made or told if it had not been for the foolishness of Antrobus and all those who live and hope to be saved by the farcical doctrine of sauve qui peut?

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Contributors

Michel Biron is a professor in the Department of French Language and Literature at McGill University. He is the author of La Modernité belge. Littérature et société (1994), L’Absence du maître. Saint-Denys Garneau, Ferron, Ducharme (2000), and Saint-Denys Garneau. Biographie (2015). He is also co-author of Roman célibataire d’“À rebours” à “Paludes” (1996) and Histoire de la littérature québécoise (2007). Robert L. Caserio, emeritus Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, is co-editor of The Cambridge History of the English Novel and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth Century English Novel. His most recent book, The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950, appeared in 2019. Isabelle Daunais is Canada Research Chair in the aesthetics and art of the novel in the Department of French Language and Literature at McGill University. A specialist in the works of Flaubert, she has published several studies on the modern novel, notably Les Grandes Disparitions. Essai sur la mémoire du roman (2008) and Frontière du roman. Le personnage réaliste et ses fictions (2002). She is also the author of a work on the Québécois novel, entitled Le roman sans aventure (2015). Claire Davison is Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky (2014). She is co-­ editor with Gerri Kimber of volume 4 of The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16), The Collected Poetry of Katherine Mansfield (2016), and Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives (2016);

238 Contributors

the first in their co-edited four-volume series The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield was published in March 2020. Maxime Decout is professor at Aix-Marseille University and member of the IUF (University Institute of France). He is the author of two books dedicated to the relationship between Jewishness and literature: Albert Cohen: les fictions de la judéité (2011) and Écrire la judéité. Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française (2015). He is also the author of En toute mauvaise foi. Sur un paradoxe littéraire (2015), Qui a peur de l’imitation? (2017), and Pouvoirs de l’imposture (2018). He edited La Disparition, Revenentes, and Voyage d’hiver (2017) for “La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” edition of Georges Perec’s works (2017) and wrote the Album Romain Gary (“Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 2019). Maria DiBattista, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, has written extensively on modern literature and film. Her books include Fast Talking Dames (2003), Imagining Virginia Woolf (2008), and Novel Characters: A Genealogy (2010). She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (2014) and Modernism and Autobiography (2014). Her latest book, At Home in the World: Women Writers, Public Lives (2017), co-authored with Deborah Nord, is a study of women’s political writings from Jane Austen to the present day. Allan Hepburn is James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University. He is the author of Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (2005), Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Literature (2010), and A Grain of Faith: Religion in Mid-Century British Literature (2018). He has edited four volumes of works by Elizabeth Bowen and two previous volumes of critical essays. He co-edits the Mid-Century Studies series at Oxford University Press. Caroline Z. Krzakowski is Associate Professor of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century British Literature at Northern Michigan University. Her forthcoming book, Diplomacy in Mid-Century British Literature and Culture, examines representations of international relations in fiction and non-fiction by Rebecca West, Lawrence Durrell, Olivia Manning, and John le Carré, as well as in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. The project shows how international relations – refugee crises, tribunals, espionage, and diplomatic practice – have influenced the thematic and formal concerns of twentieth-century cultural production.

Contributors 239

Maxime Prévost is professor in the French Department at the University of Ottawa. Author of Rictus romantiques. Politiques du rire chez Victor Hugo (2002) and Alexandre Dumas mythographe et mythologue. L’Aventure extérieure (2018), he is interested in romantic literature and modern mythologies. He co-edits, with François-Emmanuël Boucher, the series “Littérature et imaginaire contemporain” at les Presses de l’Université Laval. François Proulx is Associate Professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is co-editor, with Christie McDonald, of Proust and the Arts (2015). His book, Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France, awarded a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, appeared with University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is a member of Proust21, a research partnership between the University of Illinois, the Université Grenoble Alpes, and the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes in Paris that is working towards a revised and fully digital edition of Proust’s correspondence. Stephen Ross is Professor of English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Conrad and Empire (2004) and Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel (2018), as well as multiple articles on aspects of modernism and literary theory. He is general editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, coeditor of The Modernist World, and lead investigator on several projects that use Digital Humanities methods to explore modernism.

Index

acte gratuit, 20, 128 action, 12, 21, 29, 41, 53, 59, 73, 79, 92–3, 112, 160–1, 178–94 ambiguity, 4, 9, 11, 126, 138–9, 147, 207 anecdote, 10–11, 16, 22, 46n6, 68, 167, 172, 212 Aragon, Louis, 95, 120–1, 123, 133n9 archaism, 16, 18, 62, 99n3 aristocracy, 3, 6, 18, 52, 88–9, 101, 103–41, 158, 161, 163, 166, 173, 197 attaché, 12, 19, 22n1, 27–8, 30, 86, 93, 139, 213, 216–17, 222 authenticity, 20, 102, 179, 196, 207 authority, 36, 51, 70, 73, 80, 86, 101, 164, 169, 220, 222 Berthelot, Philippe, 85–6, 92–3, 97, 117–18 Bibesco, Antoine, 20, 137–55, 156nn6, 9–11, 18–21, 24 biography, 19, 21, 28, 30, 41, 45, 47n10, 68–9, 73–4, 79, 132n3, 139– 40, 168–70, 186 Bland, Nevile, 8 boudoir diplomacy, 7, 29, 32, 43, 172 bureaucracy, 10–11, 19, 50–64, 105, 173, 207, 218

Cambon, Jules, 10, 16 charm, 10, 129, 142, 146, 148, 159, 160, 163, 204, 214 Chekhov, Anton, 19, 27–8, 32, 37–8, 41, 45, 46n4 circumspection, 5, 60, 109, 174 civil servants, 7, 10, 19, 50–64, 75, 197–8, 202–6 Claudel, Paul, vii, 3–4, 20, 23n1, 55, 86–9, 116–19, 132, 133n15, 162–3 Cohen, Albert, 3, 10, 19, 50–64, 64–5n1, 65nn2–7, 97 colonialism, 4–5, 6, 20, 106, 119–20, 166, 185, 213 comedy, 3–4, 5, 10, 13, 19, 21–2, 28, 30–1, 34, 41, 45, 72, 97, 154, 174, 189, 212–16, 223 comic opera, 19, 31, 34, 45, 213 committees, 8, 10, 18, 55, 59, 60–1, 64–5n1, 65n4, 66–7, 69, 104, 198 communists, 55, 120–3, 162, 173, 180, 192–3 conduct, 5, 7, 67, 100–2, 159, 188, 212 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 20–1, 100–15 cosmopolitanism, 39, 43, 86–9, 97, 99n8, 123–4, 178 crisis, 17, 28–9, 32, 37, 40, 42, 50, 66, 77–82, 101, 164, 166, 180

242 Index cultural diplomacy, 23n3, 28, 31, 35, 44–5, 45–6n1, 161–6, 208 cultural imperialism, 32, 173 de Callières, François, 21, 74, 82n1, 196 de Chateaubriand, François-René, 3, 12–13, 15 de Gaulle, Charles, 12, 160, 162, 165–6, 168, 177–8, 183–5, 189 delegation, 6, 51, 66–7, 94, 188 democracy, 7, 80, 100–3, 108, 114 detachment, 5, 11–13, 15, 20, 37, 42, 57, 68, 73, 76, 81, 88, 92, 97, 100, 191, 192, 201 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 3 diploma, 102, 113 disarmament, 8, 61, 79, 81, 172 discretion, 8, 12, 14, 63, 109, 159, 199, 212, 211n10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 32, 92, 130 Durrell, Lawrence, 3, 10–11, 20, 22, 23n1, 37, 42, 46n8, 174, 213–23 Durtain, Luc, 20, 89, 92, 99n8 Eliot, T.S., 38–9, 114 embassies, 5, 8, 11, 15, 21, 22n1, 27–30, 36–7, 52, 91, 93, 105, 107–11, 117, 127, 161–8, 185–6, 188, 197, 204 empire, 6, 23n3, 26n5, 43, 71, 106–7, 165, 168 equality, 6, 173–4 espionage, 21, 61, 107, 109, 141, 196–205 evasion, 12, 16, 17, 79, 116–33 farce, 22, 30, 32–3, 35, 37, 41, 44, 123, 150, 212–22 Flaubert, Gustave, 93, 95, 99n11

Fleming, Ian, 3, 20–1, 195–204, 206–9, 209nn1–3, 209–10n4, 210nn5, 9, 210–11n10, 211n11 foreign affairs, 6–7, 68, 85, 93, 167 frivolity, 20, 95, 125, 131, 161–2, 171, 173, 174 future, 17–18, 36, 72, 74–5, 105, 108–9, 112–14, 141, 159–60, 169 gaffes, 150, 167, 221 Gary, Romain, 3, 11–12, 17–18, 23n7, 37–8, 42, 97 Gerhardi, William, 3–4, 19, 21, 23n1, 27–45, 46nn2–7, 47nn11–15, 48nn20–2, 49n26, 174, 212 Gide, André, 4–5, 20–1, 55, 86, 116– 32, 132n3, 133nn4–8, 10–13 Giraudoux, Jean, 3–4, 12, 55, 86, 89, 92–3, 95, 97, 99n8, 116–17, 132, 162 Greene, Graham, 3–4, 21, 177–80, 187–94, 203 Hahn, Reynaldo, 139–43, 147–9, 156n5, 157n14 Hitler, Adolf, 64, 122, 133n11, 161 honesty, 36, 92, 129, 196 human rights, 6, 8 hybridization, 4, 68–9, 169 imbroglio, 4, 34, 162, 191, 213–14 immobility, 17–18, 41–2 imperialism, 4, 6–7, 8, 19, 29, 40–1, 69, 80–1, 87, 104–5, 107, 112–13, 173, 200, 204 inertia, 31, 53, 81, 185 internationalism, 4, 6–8, 19, 21, 27–9, 32–45, 47n14, 50, 53–61, 64n1, 66– 9, 71–3, 76–82, 101, 107–9, 118–22, 159, 162–3, 174, 190, 195, 198, 200, 201, 205, 209, 221

Index 243 irony, 3–4, 5, 11, 17–18, 30, 42, 51–3, 56, 68, 97, 103–4, 113, 116, 118, 125, 128, 130, 163, 172–3, 188, 214–18, 223 James, Henry, 179–80 jokes, 10, 19, 55, 108, 151, 161–3, 172, 198, 221, 223 language, 4, 5, 7, 10–11, 19, 28, 36, 39, 43, 44, 49n26, 50–1, 57–64, 73, 87, 103, 108–10, 111, 117, 124, 143–4, 160, 168, 172–3, 213, 219, 220, 222 Larbaud, Valery, 4, 20, 55, 89–95, 97, 99n9, 114–15 le Carré, John (David Cornwell), 3, 21, 195–7, 203–9 Lermontov, Mikhail, 28, 37 loyalty, 92, 100, 117, 184, 206–7 lying, 9, 34, 167, 199, 206 Malraux, André, 3, 21, 92, 121, 177– 89, 191–4, 194nn1–2 melodrama, 33, 127–8, 219 memoirs, 6, 15–16, 18, 23n2, 27–8, 29–30, 33, 37, 41, 46n3, 47n11, 75, 137, 138, 140, 147, 155, 159, 162, 166–7, 178, 183, 186 Mirbeau, Octave, 90–1, 99n10 Mitford, Nancy, 3–4, 20–1, 158–74, 184 modernism, 4, 36, 38–9, 68, 79, 97, 103 modernity, 4, 15, 16–17, 42, 44, 100, 101, 112 montage, 20, 28, 44–5, 70 Morand, Paul, 3, 13, 67, 86, 89, 92–7, 99nn8, 12, 116, 132, 154 movement, 16–17, 19–20, 39–41, 85–98, 122, 132

music, 13, 29–30, 39, 43–5, 56, 87, 215 narrative, 4, 15, 16, 18, 32, 33, 47n14, 52, 62, 67, 69–70, 75, 77–80, 95, 121, 147, 179, 186, 214–15 nation state, 4, 29, 43–4, 104 negotiation, 3–7, 10, 21–2, 34, 45, 62, 67, 69–82, 108, 137, 140, 154, 158, 162, 172, 178–80, 182, 196, 200, 212, 217, 220 Neruda, Pablo, 3, 23n2 Nicolson, Harold, 3, 5, 7–9, 16, 19–21, 29, 37, 42, 46n8, 49n25, 66–82, 89, 92, 108–9, 167–8, 172, 220 nuclear diplomacy, 3, 8, 77, 172, 201 observation, 12–15, 37, 69–74, 81, 211n10 peace, 6, 20, 33, 44, 53, 66–82, 109, 120, 123, 160, 184, 196, 200, 212 Perse, Saint-John (Alexis Léger), 3, 116–17, 132 Peter, René, 137–40, 145–9, 151, 153, 155, 156nn2–3, 5, 157n17 press, 8, 22n1, 29, 60, 72, 74, 76, 79, 85–6, 173, 213, 222 propaganda, 23n3, 61, 85–6, 109, 121, 161, 181 protocol, 4, 5, 9–10, 13, 16, 36, 54, 61–3, 80, 168, 213–14, 219 Proust, Marcel, 3, 5, 12–16, 19–21, 37, 42, 50–7, 63, 65n5, 66–8, 70, 75, 86, 88–91, 93, 98n7, 123, 131–2, 137–55, 156nn2–3, 6, 9–11, 13, 157nn14–15, 19–21, 174, 195 queerness, 21, 137–57 refugees, 31, 40–2, 64n1

244 Index representation, 3–5, 8–13, 19, 20, 21, 28, 34, 48n19, 50, 67, 69, 71, 73–5, 80, 88, 102, 105, 178–83, 186, 190–3, 195, 199, 209, 217 revolution, 4, 6, 8, 16, 18–20, 28, 30, 32–4, 38, 40, 45, 46n9, 76, 93, 97, 100–13, 168, 180, 189 Rodd, Rennell, 7, 15, 67, 159–60, 162 Sala, Antoine, 143–4, 149–54, 157nn18–23 satire, 10, 20, 35, 50–65, 72, 77, 79, 125, 158, 172–4, 213–23 Satow, Ernest, 8–11, 21, 74, 159, 196 sauve qui peut, 22, 44, 213–23 snobbery, 13, 51–2, 203 sovereign, 5–6, 9, 353, 48n18, 74, 77, 82n1, 101–2, 104, 108, 112, 114, 118 speed, 7, 15–18, 20, 67, 79, 88–97, 130, 200 state, 5–9, 21, 22n1, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 42–4, 45, 73, 85, 104, 116, 120–1, 123, 173–4, 181, 188, 196, 201–3, 222 style, 3–4, 5, 7, 9–12, 20, 30, 37, 39, 65n4, 75, 79, 85–99, 111, 116, 125, 141, 143, 159, 200 surrealism, 85, 95, 97 tact, 5, 13, 22, 109, 159–60, 178, 180, 214 technique, 4, 14, 31, 52, 68, 79, 131, 201

television, 8, 162 temporality, 3, 14–18, 19, 37, 69, 89. See also time terrorism, 104, 107, 177, 180–2, 188–93, 207, 201–2 theatre, 27–33, 37, 42–3, 45, 46n3, 47n11, 86, 112, 117, 121, 137–8, 143, 140–1, 144, 150, 154, 179 Thibaudet, Albert, 20, 36, 39, 85–92, 94–7, 98nn1–6, 98–9n7, 99n8 time, 6–9, 11, 15–18, 19, 41–2, 53, 63, 66–7, 70, 79–80, 87–91, 106, 111, 160, 172, 187, 191, 196 Tolstoy, Leo, 28, 32–3, 35–6, 41, 43, 45, 46nn5–6, 47nn14, 18 tragedy, 31–4, 38, 42, 45, 48, 191, 212, 215–17 trains, 16, 32, 37, 40–1, 48n24, 92–4, 99n9, 128, 131, 159, 221–2 violence, 21–2, 41–4, 66, 74, 109, 182, 196, 200 Wagner, Richard, 33–4, 44, 48n23 war, 6, 7, 18, 23n3, 28, 41, 43, 46n9, 60–1, 65n5, 66, 70, 79, 81, 85, 137, 158, 160–1, 163, 168–9, 183, 185, 197–9, 205, 206–7, 209n3 Waugh, Evelyn, 161–2, 170, 212, 217, 222 weapons, 5–6, 8, 23n3, 76–7, 79, 80–1, 167, 201–2, 220 Wilson, Woodrow, 66–7, 70, 72, 80 Woolf, Virginia, 42, 46n8, 68