The Aztec universe, as Soustelle has described it, was fragile and unstable. The world had been destroyed more than once before and was going to be destroyed again. Destruction could be stayed only by a continual offering of human blood. “I never thought of human sacrifice as a barrier to my understanding of the Aztecs. I was imbued very early with the idea of the relativity of human morals.” In Soustelle’s writings this sacrifice becomes the tragic, ennobling, wearying act of men determined to keep their world going. But destruction came. Between 1519 and 1521 the Spaniards smashed the head and heart of the developing civilization. If the Aztecs had been left alone, Soustelle thinks, they would have taken Mexico into the equivalent of the Meiji era in Japan. And, strangely, in his writings there is little anger at the destruction, and little regret for what might have developed. “The Spaniards couldn’t have acted otherwise. And we mustn’t forget the efforts some Spaniards made to record and defend; or that they made possible the society in which Indian life was to reawaken.”
It was this Mexican experience—so large, so complete: grandeur, destruction, decadence, incorporation, new life—that Soustelle sought twenty years later to apply to Algeria: the equation of Mexican Indians, who had only Mexico, with Arab guerrillas, who could look to a vast Muslim world, which had once just failed to overrun Europe itself.
SOUSTELLE was in Mexico, vice-president of a conference of Americanists, when the war broke out. He took a Dutch ship to Ramsgate and made his way to France to join the regiment in which he had done his military service in 1936. He had nothing to do for some months. Then he was recruited into the Ministry of Information which the Daladier government was establishing. He was sent back to Mexico and was there when France fell. He was prepared then to be an exile forever. He thought he would go to Canada and serve in a French Canadian regiment. But a friend in the British Consulate told him that there was a French general in London who was setting up an organization. Soustelle sent a cable to London; after three days he got a reply from one of de Gaulle’s aides.
He was asked to stay on in Mexico for a little to organize support for the Free French from the local French community. Then, in a ship full of New Zealanders and Australians, future pilots, he went to England. “At Liverpool, where we docked, I had a lot of trouble to prove that I wasn’t a dubious character. But it was all right at Carlton Gardens. By some chance de Gaulle’s ADC was an old schoolfellow of mine from Lyon. I met de Gaulle that very day. Two or three days later I was invited to dinner.” Then, as always later, de Gaulle’s manner was one of icy formality. De Gaulle was fifty, Soustelle twenty-eight; it was the beginning of an association that lasted eighteen years. “The great qualities in him which attracted me can still be seen today, but only in caricature.”
Soustelle was put in the “foreign service” section and sent back to Latin America once again. Later, in London, he was National Commissioner for Information with the Liberation Committee. When the Allies landed in North Africa he became Secretary-General for Action in France. His job was to pool the resources of the Free French Intelligence with those of the Vichy Deuxième Bureau, which had fled to North Africa after the German occupation of Southern France; and to supply the French underground. “We ran short of French banknotes, and in the end we were dropping little pieces of paper signed by Mendès-France promising to pay after the liberation. The winter of 1943–4 was horrible. So many people one knew disappeared, were killed or committed suicide. Such a waste of life. I don’t think the underground in France would have lasted another year.”
The liberation came, and disillusionment. “Everything just went back to what it was before. We overestimated the importance of the Resistance. You know, it was just point something per cent of the population that took part. I suppose the First World War was the beginning of the end for France. Fewer people were killed in the Second War. But France was occupied and we became hopelessly divided. We fought against one another in Syria and Dakar. And we didn’t show sufficient restraint after the liberation. It would have been difficult, I know.”
General de Gaulle presently withdrew from politics. But Soustelle stayed on. His academic career continued. In 1955, the year he published his master-work, The Daily Life of the Aztecs, he became—with de Gaulle’s blessing—Governor-General of Algeria, where on the first of November 1954, the insurrection had broken out, with seventy separate incidents.
In time the insurrection tied down 500,000 French troops. When it was over in 1962, the French had lost 14,000 men, the insurgents 140,000; 3,000 European civilians had been killed, 30,000 Arabs.
In the legend, which has lasted, Soustelle underwent a conversion in Algeria. The sight of a massacre, it was said, unhinged him; overnight the reforming pro-Arab liberal became a supporter of Algérie française; and his head was finally turned, so the legend goes, by the adulation of the colons among the crowd of a hundred thousand who gathered to cheer him off at the end of his two-year term. The massacre story is in Soustelle’s favour, but it is the part of the legend he most vehemently rejects. His aim in Algeria had always been integration, on the Mexican pattern. To hand the country over to a terrorist faction would have been irresponsible, illiberal and stupid. Integration would not have been easy. It would have taken time and money, but he was prepared to use the newly discovered resources of the Sahara to create this new Algeria. In 1958 integration was more than a possibility. But de Gaulle wasn’t impressed. And to Soustelle all that has followed has been betrayal and destruction. “Destruction is not a style: it is the negation of all styles.” The million colons have left; one Algerian dictatorship has been replaced by another. Arab Algeria sinks; an idea of France has been destroyed.
SOUSTELLE’S political career so far has been contained within two periods of exile. The scholar whose nationalism was aroused before the war by the German threat has known only political defeat. The defeats grew bigger even as his political authority grew. The fall of France has been followed by the fall of the French Empire. The vision of the Paris-Algiers-Brazzaville axis shrank to the vision of France stretching from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset, the Touareg town in the Sahara. Now there is only France. But if Algeria went yesterday, Corsica and Brittany might go tomorrow: it is the logic of bourgeois indifference and decline. The Third World that France now seeks to lead is a chimera; de Gaulle’s personal rule has taken France away from her friends. France, Soustelle feels, has been politically neutered. A fresh disaster is being prepared.
Dealing with defeat, the scholar, so exact in his own discipline, turns to the generalizations of emotion. He sees technical progress coinciding with moral and aesthetic decay. “Our civilization has had no style for a century.” “A civilization which is exhausted no longer attracts.” And his imprecise fears have now gone beyond the ruined idea of France to Western civilization itself. No capable enemy, no overwhelming external proletariat is yet visible. But that proves nothing.
These propositions are all debatable. Perhaps what is missing is a definition of the civilization that is threatened: perhaps such a definition will show that at the heart of the despair lies a patriotism that has been both nourished and wounded by defeat, as by a drug. Soustelle’s main concern now is to return to his country. Inaction need not be ignoble. “I might abstain from political life. But I can’t admit being ostracized after twenty-seven years in the service of my country.” This is part of the serenity of exile and it may go when exile ends. The certainty of total defeat, the defeat that leaves no more battles to be fought, is its own dangerous solace. It can commit a man to hopeless duty and quixotic action and release him from the fear of failure.
This playing with the idea of defeat appears also to come from the Soustelle who makes art out of his experience and who now, in exile, has discovered all the consonances of this experience. The politician has known defeat; the ethnologist has studied a defeated people (a recent letter has told him that the Lacandones are in danger of extinction); the study of ethnology itself derives from a civilizatio
n that is on the defensive. The pattern, too neat, belongs to art. It is art, though, that comes close to self-indulgence. Even the stoicism is like romance: one of Soustelle’s favourite historical tableaux is the second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius holding the Germans on the Danube.
This romance, which holds the fear of the sudden unknown destroyer, can be taken beyond the scholar’s discovery of the nervous
Aztec world, awaiting Cortés. When he was a boy in Villeurbanne in Lyon, Soustelle liked to read the Roman histories of Ammianus Marcellinus. In a footnote in his last book, Les Quatre Soleils, Soustelle re-tells a story from this historian. On a day in AD 241, Soustelle says, the citizens of Antioch were at the theatre. Suddenly one of the actors broke off and said: “Am I dreaming? Or are those Persians?” The audience turned. The archers of King Sapor stood on the topmost terrace; their bows were drawn.
New York with Norman Mailer
NORMAN MAILER always campaigned in a correct dark-blue suit. Towards the end he cut his hair short. A week or so before election day the Mailer campaign staff lost some hair as well. The hefty thirty-year-old campaign manager shaved off his little beard, and the sideburns of others were abbreviated. Angry young necks showed fresh and clean; plain dark ties closed up open shirts. The first order, the one that had got rid of the manager’s beard, had come from Mailer himself; it had worked its way down; and for three or four days in this last week the candidate and his staff were partially estranged.
“There’s been some degree of role-confusion,” one shorn young man said.
They were still loyal at headquarters, but they said they were loyal to the campaign, the cause, the ideas. They spoke less of “Norman”; they spoke of “the candidate” and they made the election sound like a day of sacrifice. Where someone had pinned up Get Ready for the Norman Conquest someone now chalked an anti-Mailer obscenity in red, but shyly, not using the name, only the initials.
Campaign headquarters (Senator Eugene McCarthy’s last year) was a large grimy room on the second floor of a decaying building on Columbus Circle, above a couple of cafés and a sauna establishment. The lift didn’t always work; it was safer to go around the corner to the staircase, where rubbish was sometimes left out on the landings in plastic sacks; New York in places is like Calcutta, with money. The headquarters room was divided into offices by low flimsy partitions, which for various reasons were knocked down one by one as the campaign progressed. The furniture was sparse, trestle tables, old folding chairs, duplicating machines; there was printed paper everywhere, on walls, floor, tables.
The helpers moved in little cliques within the larger club. Sometimes, when girls brought their babies strapped to their backs in aluminum frames, it was like a hippy encampment with its familial privacies and self-satisfied dedication. During the days of the estrangement privacies vanished; and, like amateurs miming dejection in a low-budget film, the helpers huddled round a table behind the last partition and tried with the help of some beer-cans to give the impression to correspondents—at first ignored, but then welcomed—that they were drinking heavily.
It had been an ambiguous campaign—professional-amateur, political and anti-political. The other guys are the joke, a Mailer campaign button said. But now it was possible to feel that the estrangement was also a cover-up for doubt, perhaps panic. A fortnight before, a New York writer, no friend of Mailer, had told me that Mailer’s campaign would be as self-defeating as Goldwater’s had been in 1964. Mailer, like Goldwater, was a licenced figure. The media would cheer him on, but only in this role. After a time Mailer would begin to suffer from a lack of serious attention; it would get worse as the campaign went on; and at the end Mailer’s ideas, however good, would be discredited and Mailer himself would be running for cover.
It didn’t work out like that. But this was the gamble Mailer was taking, at the peak of his reputation. Mailer never stopped complaining about poor press coverage; but he got a lot, and it became more and more serious. On election day forty-one thousand registered Democrats voted for him. A good sale for any writer; and for Mailer the seven-week politician, a triumph. The blue suit, the walking tours, the handshaking: Mailer’s instincts had been right. The display of energy and campaigning orthodoxy—the politician’s simple self-satire—had helped to establish Mailer’s seriousness.
At the same time the campaign had never ceased to be an intellectual entertainment. Through all the repetitions and simplifications Mailer always rang true. He never lost his gift of the phrase, that made so many of his comments sound like epigrams. “Anonymity creates boredom.” “Crime will be on the increase as long as it’s the most interesting activity.” “You will need more and more police to keep more and more bad government in power.” To the end he was good in the direct interview. His replies then—after what looked like a flick of the tongue against the top teeth, as though a piece of chewing gum was being hidden away—were abrupt, swift and pithy. The writer’s imagination, ceaselessly processing and ordering experience (“You are always writing that novel about yourself,” he told me later), could at any moment pass inspection.
“If you win the Democratic nomination, which Republican would you like to run against?”
“Marchi. He says he’s a conservative. I call myself a left conservative. We could have an extraordinary discussion about the meaning of conservative principles. Many people who call themselves conservatives are right-wing reactionaries. Which is a different thing altogether.” Next question. And this was at the last press conference, when Mailer was tired with words.
He was least effective in the later, non-controversial TV tournaments, where each candidate did a one-minute joust in turn. The politicians won then. Though using words, they appeared to be dismissing words, even their own; they made it plain that they genuinely wanted power and knew what that power was. Mailer’s words were part of Mailer. As a writer and politician he carried a double burden; and the ridiculous part of his gamble—so private, so public—was that irresponsibility in either role would have led to the disaster that many had seen coming.
The ideas were big—New York a dying city, alienation its major problem, a complete political reorganization the only hope, with New York as the fifty-first state, more directly controlling its own funds, and the more or less autonomous city districts developing their own lifestyles. There were attractive elements of fantasy: no cars in Manhattan (the city-state ringed by a monorail), free public bicycles, and a monthly sabbath, a Sweet Sunday, trafficless, when “nothing would fly but the birds.”
The platform was like an anguished intellectual statement, and the publicity in the beginning had been a writer’s publicity: rallying approval from the New York Times in a ponderous, punning editorial; the prizes for Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night; a reported million-dollar contract for the new book about the Apollo moon shot.
The first meeting of the campaign, in Greenwich Village, was an intellectual-social occasion. It was rowdy. From press reports it appeared that Mailer was attempting a re-make of Armies. A false start—this was admitted later—but a writer’s false start: the new book often begins like a repeat of the one just finished. Then the campaign changed. It found—what it had lacked—a political issue. It became political; it acquired substance.
The City College of New York, CCNY, which had been having its racial troubles, formulated a dual-admission policy: half of its places would be reserved for students from disadvantaged communities. There was an uproar. The disadvantaged would be black and Puerto Rican; Jewish students would suffer; standards would be lowered. Every mayoral candidate, Democratic and Republican, spoke out against the plan. Only Mailer and his “running mate” were for it. The campaign that had begun as an entertainment now seemed dangerous to some. “The Jews here regard Mailer as a sinner”: this was the message from a Mailer worker in the Bronx. A poll showed opinion eight to one against dual-admission; and for the next few days, for five or six or more times a day, Mailer worked h
ard to show that what looked irresponsible had logic and was socially necessary. After a week there was a compromise; CCNY said they would take only 400 disadvantaged students, not 1,500; the issue faded. But the campaign had proved itself.
In the early days Mailer could say of a rival: “If I didn’t make a vow to use no obscene language, I would say that Wagner was full of an unmarketable commodity.” This was the Village Mailer. At the end he said of Wagner: “He’s the lead hobby horse in a wooden field.” This was funnier; it also made more political sense. On election night, the fight lost and won, the cheering crowd followed Mailer from headquarters across Eighth Avenue to his car. They were also cheering Mailer’s wife and Mailer’s mother, both of whom had taken part in the campaign. The politician as family man: to this extent the campaign had become orthodox.
Three weeks before, Mailer had told a television reporter that running a campaign was like writing a novel. The same confidence was required; there were analogous problems of creation. “Your brains are working all the time. The writer works on a world, brings it to a resolution; and that world changes him. When a writer finishes a novel he is a changed man.”
IF MAILER had a political base, it was his glamour as a writer. But glamour also stood in his way.
The Writer and the World Page 40