Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  13 June 1942.

  Worked all afternoon on my dispatch about the future organization of Europe, application of the Atlantic Charter, the treatment of Germany after the war, etc. I have almost decided not to send this dispatch at all. I think it would be too vague to be useful or interesting.

  Dined with Elizabeth. Drank a lot of red wine. Who could help becoming attached to her?

  23 June 1942.

  This morning was interesting because the work was about something that really may matter – the control of trans-Atlantic airways now and after the war and the part that Canada should play. Had lunch with the new Dominions Office appointee to Canada. He must be as sick of meeting me at lunch as I am certainly sick of meeting him. Mentally and socially he is a permanent pre-last-war subaltern in a not too good line regiment. What a man to send to Ottawa to cope with that little group of bristling professional Canadian nationalists who would welcome him as a heaven-sent confirmation of all they have ever said about the Old School Tie! The anti-British members of the Canadian intelligentsia will never be happy until they have pulled down the Old England of Tradition and can dance on its grave. He is the sort of Englishman who makes one understand why.

  28 June 1942.

  Pierre Dupuy came to pay me a visit. What an enjoyable war that little man is having! He exudes high politics and dark diplomacy. He is intelligent – yes – but nine-tenths of it is his capacity to put himself across. From being a dim little diplomat he has become an international figure – the only Canadian except for the Prime Minister whose name is known in Paris and Berlin political circles and in the inner circle in London.

  Dined with the Masseys. Mrs. Greville rang up in the middle of dinner to say, “Winston must go – some of our friends are here with me and we all agree – go he must. I have known him for fifty years and he has never been right yet.” Just the sort of party I should have thought would be sitting there in Claridge’s spinning trivial but not harmless gossip.

  10 August 1942.

  Although there are no indications that we are winning the war, I feel that the Germans are committing suicide, that even if they won they would be incapable of profiting by their victory. They have not got what it takes to organize Europe and rule it as the British ruled India. They are not healthy in themselves. Perhaps they have too much imagination. The rebound from their tensed up national effort must be towards materialism, individualism, and a wish for the cosy and pleasurable. Once beaten they may not prove so hard to handle for the time being. People talk of the Dark Ages, of a reversion to semi-barbarism, but is that really possible? The dream of the masses everywhere is comfort – the American standard of living. It will be the same for the Germans. Once out of the iron circle of fear, hate, slaughter, and revenge they will turn passionately to materialism.

  Dined at the St. James’s Club among the remnants of the Diplomatic Corps. It was pleasant for a change to be back among the chers collègues – not an atmosphere in which ideas are encouraged certainly, but of anecdote, amiability, and polite enquiries about “so and so who was at Teheran or Washington at the same time I was.” A feeling of complicity in belonging to a class or craft which has its own mysteries – although the initiates know these to be trivial. Outside the narrow windows a November-like gale tossed the trees in Green Park. From the walls the blank frames stared eyeless forth. The Club sent its pictures into retirement in the days of the Blitz. They have moved their funniest marble nymph from the foot of the stairs to the lavatory where she shares pride of place with a steel engraving of Paolo and Francesca whirling through space in their endless loves.

  Talking of endless loves makes me think of Saturday night which was a grand catharsis – getting drunk, making love, spending more money than one can afford – things one should never regret. How innocent in comparison with the poisoned pleasures of boasting, showing off, giving false impressions or phoney confidences, or the wicked glooms of sterile introspection.

  10 August 1942.

  The waiter in these flats is trying to get me to give him one of my suits. He talks to me as though the revolution had already come. If it ever does, God defend me from the city hotel servants and all hangers-on of the rich, spoiled and eaten up with envy, full of dirty tricks and cruelty to each other. Gorky in one of his books suggests that the revolution should protect itself by bumping off such people.

  Reading Rebecca West’s book about Yugoslavia.1 What the Croats felt about the Serbs is (I hope in a minor degree) what the French-Canadians feel about us. What the top-dogs cannot imagine or understand is the degree of resentment which the under-dogs feel. Because we know ourselves as Anglo-Canadians to be fairly mild and good-natured we feel injured that we can be so hardly thought of, but it is not only cruelty that people resent, it is unconsciousness, lack of insight, the bland shrug of incomprehension. The British are paying for this attitude now all over the world and we British-Canadians will pay for it with the French-Canadians in Canada before we are through.

  19 August 1942.

  Dined at the Allies’ Club – afterwards a Polish exile played Chopin and jazz in the former Rothschild drawing-room. I sat next to a Polish Countess, a county family type (Polish version) – her country house has been burned down by the Germans, and her brother and his wife have been murdered by the Bolsheviks. As the pianist played a Polish peasant dance she said, “It is funny, but the last time I heard that tune was when I was dancing it over and over again with that Polish officer over there at home in Poland – and now we are both here.”

  Lunched with Anne-Marie by the open window at the Étoile in Charlotte Street. She arrived in a new summer dress, saying, “Imagine a Canadian soldier twenty-four years old but intelligent and a poet – he fell in love with me at first sight. Such a nice present on my fiftieth birthday. It has given me so much confidence.”

  Street fighting in Stalingrad – I heard the news at the St. James’s Club where I dined with Archduke Robert, who seems to have loosened up and become less careful in manner. He has a love of fun underneath the Hapsburg reserve and calcul.

  29 August 1942.

  There is summer lightning tonight. At first I thought it was guns. I dined alone at the St. James’s Club among diplomats and old prints – rather dreary.

  3 September 1942.

  Anne-Marie’s young soldier came to see me today about getting transferred from the army to something in which he could “use his power to create.” He has written a poem about Canada “in six movements.” I do not know what the hell I am supposed to do about it. Although he is an American with a Scottish name he looks like a half-breed Filipino with large and lustrous dark eyes and a pale pink tongue. He came in trailing clouds of Anne-Marie’s extremely cloying perfume after him. He gave me an oration in deep and thrilling tones about his own genius. I could see he had made up his mind to make the biggest possible impression on me. He is such a bounder and so humourless that the poem may be some good. I could see how an older woman might find him touching. When he left he said he would “always be my slave” if I could get him transferred from the army.

  Last night Margery and I started drinking at a pub with a drunk with whom I got into an argument because he said that no woman could be called beautiful if she had “bad legs” and went on to say that he would never sleep with anyone who was not physically perfect – “not if I fault them.” This infuriated me for some reason. Margery and I went back to her house and had rice and pickled walnuts and drank red wine and gin while the cat and Pekinese joined actively in our dinner-table conversation.

  4 September 1942.

  Staying with a Canadian friend, Anson McKim – a cold day like November. I have escaped to my room. The others are playing tennis. Even the park here is ugly – detestable fir trees and a tree with leaves the colour of a bloodstone. The wind is making a loud melancholy sound which suits my state of heavy sensual melancholy. The millionaire who built this dreary expensive barracks of a house came to tea today. A brisk air battle is
going on overhead, rumbling antiaircraft fire far off.

  Four Montrealers, including Anson, staying here – all about thirty-three years old – one stockbroker, one businessman, one lawyer – all now in the army – all with that Montreal voice that echoes from the locker-rooms of good clubs, all coming from the solid homes of the Montreal merchant aristocracy. Good chaps and good company with a pleasant debunking humour, no side, and a canny tendency to under-play their hand. Anything excessive, strange, or alarming can be brushed aside in a tolerant bantering tone. They are far from stupid, though – without mannerisms yet they manage to establish a type.

  A young Belgian named Moreau came to see me who had just escaped from a Nazi concentration camp, arriving with nothing but the suit he wore – having got across to France – then in a Spanish concentration camp and here via Gibraltar. These people who are working in illegal organizations on the continent come from another world. They stare at our food and our normal lives and still have something of the trapped animal about them.

  14 September 1942.

  Spent the day with dearest Elizabeth to whom I owe everything.

  19 September 1942.

  What is going to happen to Canada after the war? Then what is a Canadian? We are a new type among the nations of the world. As the British Empire becomes less able to protect us our future will need more statesmanship and more knowledge of the world. Our greatest enemy is the parish pump. How are we Anglo-Canadians and the French-Canadians to get on together in the future? We have never succeeded and indeed never seriously attempted to become a bilingual nation, and there is the feeling of the French-Canadians that they are being exploited, although that we also feel in the Maritime Provinces.

  This war is digging deeper the gulf between Anglo-Canadians and French-Canadians – the fatal word “conscription” may haunt us after the war. If the casualties are big and still there is no conscription, things will be worse. But supposing a Conservative government came in and introduced conscription, it would undo so much and gain so little. The uneasy but tolerable relationship between French and English Canadians has only been possible because we have used our strength sparingly. We owe much to Mackenzie King for not being panicked into throwing all that overboard. Where we have been the weakest is in making any effort to understand each other, and this is a two-way accusation – the French have been just as bad. But it is a disgrace that these Anglo-Montrealers do not speak French.

  The Canadian war effort may be weak in spots, but if we ever get together to the same extent to achieve anything in peacetime Canada it would be a different country. Our social services are backward, our protection of the really poor from exploitation is nearly non-existent. We have done nothing to encourage the growth of civilized standards of taste, and we are harnessed with an absurdly old-fashioned and cumbrous Dominion–Provincial relationship which just must be overhauled. The Mackenzie King Government has not had the guts to tackle any of these questions. The Tories represent the business community plus some honest imperialists. The Liberals have no programme, they represent everybody and nothing. They stand for equilibrium which has to be preserved to keep the country from splitting seriously on any issue. It is a matter of papering over the cracks. The C.C.F. are old-fashioned socialists, but they do propose certain economic and social adjustments. Canada cannot go in for revolutionary constitutional and social changes in the middle of a war but she can and does tend in the direction of change. For example, the innumerable state controls introduced and efficiently worked during the war by youngish men with no strong party affiliations.

  Canada will not go in for pure socialism but we do not want to develop into an unco-ordinated group of “interests.” The war will make people impatient and ready for a change. The post-war period is our great opportunity.

  I have a new feeling about my fellow Canadians – a feeling that there is good material among the young – idealism, energy, practical ability which somehow never gets a chance to express itself in the public life of the country. I feel that if we can break the crust on top we could make Canada a much better country to live in. What is stifling us is the system – social, economic, and political.

  20 October 1942.

  I went to see Ernest – found him in his dressing-gown with a muffler around his neck in his large dark sitting-room furnished in Curzon Street Baroque. “Bored,” he said. “That is what I am. When I was eighteen years old I swore I would commit suicide on my thirty-first birthday. Now I am thirty-one and I have not committed suicide. I cannot get hold of a girl who attracts me, the old women cling like ivy.” He looked the spoilt fractious not-so-young Frenchman with a sensual mouth and bad teeth. We had a cold dinner, and I left immediately afterwards with the feeling that there was a wounded snake.

  These days with their falling leaves and bland autumn weather make the shabby parks seem like Tuileries of memory. The waiter here has been wearing my suits, which I suppose is flattering of him. The confident voices of American girls at Claridge’s make me feel that the past is still the present and that there is still a comfortable world safe for American humour.

  26 October 1942.

  I have been reading George Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life. The mixture of sensuality, sentiment, and cloying knowing caddishness is more than one’s stomach can take, but the impressions of places in London and of a journey to Paris via Dieppe are nostalgic and remind one of the civilized silver age before the barbarians had broken through. I like the part about my favourite Soho. “The smell of these dry faded streets is peculiar to London. There is something of the odour of the original marsh in the smell of these streets. It rises through the pavements and mingles with the smoke.” That smell is still there, and I have often caught it on my way to the office on autumn mornings.

  I lunched with Mary Bartlett at the Étoile. She showed me the tongue motion that women make when they are cleaning lipstick off their front teeth and I feel that I have gained a valuable piece of information.

  27 October 1942.

  Tonight we had our first fog with a full moon. I walked home with a bunch of violets in one hand and Mademoiselle de Maupin in the other, thanking my stars that any attempt to move me from London has been frustrated and acknowledging to myself that what holds me is not duty or patriotism but London and the spectacle of its decay and the continuance of its fascination.

  I was talking to a man who was telling me of his escape from a concentration camp in France – sawing his way through iron bars with a saw smuggled into the prison in a loaf of bread – “Scarlet Pimpernel stuff” he calls it. He was in a camp composed of Englishmen caught on the continent – these ones were the most sordid type of pseudo-pimps and book-store agents-cum-pimps. When he had first proposed to escape the camp leaders put a guard of fellow prisoners on him to stop him in case his escape should bring reprisals on his fellow prisoners. He says that from the moment he arrived at the camp and witnessed the beating to death of a French prisoner his nervous reactions and sensitivity seemed dead – he was “like an ox being led to the slaughter” and felt only dull fatalism. He has that same peculiar look as others who have escaped from a concentration camp – shifty, nervous, and on the defensive – slightly mad by our standards, or is it just the contrast between the wild and the tame?

  30 October 1942.

  I thought I would have a look again at the New Testament and began reading St. John’s Gospel. I wanted to see how much of a Christian I still might be. I was looking for some sort of copy-book tags to help one along. Instead I met a blazing fire so hot and dazzling that I shield my eyes from it. I read on for ten chapters without ever coming on a moral precept. All is a challenge to believe in the divinity of Christ – not even a challenge – an affirmation. This Christ is a comet miraculously lighting up the skies and He does not want our partial approval or our attempt to find that something can be salvaged from Christian doctrine.

  23 November 1942.

  Went to the 400 Club with Margery and stayed drin
king there until 4 a.m. That place has become part of my life. It is the only place of pleasure left in London with any character that is not infested with middle-aged stout gentlemen and their blondes. At the 400 Club there is always the same background – nostalgic music, half-lighting, eternal youthfulness, guards officers and girls, and myself – not so eternally youthful – always well in the foreground.

  What will happen in Canada after the war? Both the state and our own nationalism are growing stronger. I suppose we shall attempt some kind of an egalitarian planned state, where the power is hidden. There will be a monstrous increase in the hypocrisies of government and a monstrous growth of peddling politicians of the lowest and most dangerous sort. The country will be run behind the scenes by powerful quiet men whether financiers or Treasury officials. It will in that way be different from our old-fashioned Canada but in no circumstances can the people have an effective voice in administering the modern state – it is far too big a machine.