by Ann Wroe
Mr Dong, prime minister from 1955 to 1986, saw his own reputation decline once peace came to Vietnam in 1975. It is not only in the West that political careers tend to end in failure. Mr Dong told visiting westerners that running Vietnam in peacetime was far more difficult than waging a war. Of course it was. The old unity had gone, and had been replaced by people’s expectations. Mr Dong longed to return to the simplicities of wartime when a Vietnamese was grateful for a pair of sandals, and a straw mat to sleep on; and a bicycle was a luxury. Now the same Vietnamese wanted a television and a car, and had developed a taste for Coke. Vietnam made a nod, if not a bow, to market forces. “Produce and make a profit” was an approved slogan. But the country’s flirtation with capitalism was blamed for corruption, never a problem during the war.
Worse, Vietnam had become unimportant. Mr Dong wrote many essays about Vietnam’s 2,000 years of struggle against invaders from the north, principally China. He was an authority on two sisters named Trung who had led a rebellion against the Chinese invaders. In modern times the Vietnamese had fought the Japanese when many Asians had collaborated. Since beating the French and the Americans, the Vietnamese had chased Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh in 1979, and had repulsed China when it had come to Pol Pot’s aid. These days Vietnam was merely a statistic in charts that compared its dismal performance with the likes of Algeria and Cuba. It occasionally turned up in stories about claims for the Spratly islands, a group of extremely boring rocks in the South China Sea. You could not get more unimportant than that.
If Pham Van Dong had to pick a moment in his life when he felt he had stepped on to the world stage it would probably be in the Geneva peace talks of 1954. These took place in the aftermath of the French defeat. Back in 1945, after the end of the second world war, the French had returned to their former colony and refused it independence. Now their chief concern was to save what face they could. Mr Dong, representing the victors, was far removed from the Vietnamese peasant the French expected. His father had been secretary to one of Vietnam’s last emperors, and Mr Dong had received a good education in Hue, the old imperial capital, and at Hanoi University. As a young man he was also rather good at football.
Although America sent only an observer to the talks, Mr Dong was aware that President Eisenhower loathed French colonialism. He thus felt he was in the strongest of positions. But at Geneva he let the French off lightly, allowing them to run the south of the country under a puppet Vietnamese government.
The communists believed that their chief weapon was patience. They would first establish their northern state, then tackle the problem of the south. Mr Dong told an American reporter in 1966, “How long do you Americans want to fight? One year? Five years? Twenty years? We will be glad to accommodate you.” That sort of talk caused a chill in Washington as American casualties mounted. Even Henry Kissinger, Mr Dong’s adversary after the Americans replaced the French as the enemy, lost his customary urbanity when discussing the North Vietnamese. “Just a bunch of shits; tawdry, filthy shits,” he said in one of his high-level briefings for Richard Nixon. They were incapable of negotiating in a decent and responsible way. Pham Van Dong, he said on another occasion, was “wily and insolent”. The angrier the Americans got, the cooler was Mr Dong’s response. When the Americans leave, he said, “we will strew the path of your departure with flowers”.
This past week the Vietnamese have been celebrating the 25th anniversary of their capture of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. As the Americans are reminded of the only war they lost, the debate has been rekindled about whether Pham Van Dong and his comrades were more nationalist than communist; and if they were, was too much made at the time of their supposed threat to the rest of South-East Asia?
For all his sophistication, Mr Dong did play the part of the party heavy. He never budged from his belief that Vietnam should remain a one-party state, although quite likely the communists could have won, or at least done well, in multi-party elections, as other communists have done in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. He insisted, though, that he was a patriot. “The Communist is the most genuine patriot,” he said, leaving others to puzzle out quite what that meant.
Abbé Pierre
Henry Grouès (“Abbé Pierre”), champion of the homeless, died on January 22nd 2007, aged 94
TRADITIONALLY most saints are gentle creatures. Those enshrined in French homes, or on prayer-cards stuffed into the missals of elderly churchgoers, are usually St Anthony carrying the child Jesus, or smiling St Thérèse of Lisieux with a bouquet of flesh-tinted roses. Odd, then, that the nearest modern France has come to a saint was a man fuelled and driven by unceasing anger: anger that the poor should suffer and that the rich did not care.
For any man in authority, clerical or lay, a visit from Abbé Pierre was an unsettling experience. First there was the look of him: the coupe zéro haircut under a black beret, the straggling beard, the black cape thrown dramatically across the shoulders, the belted soutane and muddy boots from tramping through slums. Then came the disquieting blue stare, and the surprisingly loud, ringing voice. He was not a large man or a strong one: lung trouble had disrupted his studies as a boy, and he had been advised at 26 to give up the monastic life for his health’s sake. His anger surprised even himself; it did not seem in character. But it made him a giant.
Charles de Gaulle summoned him in 1945, after giving him the Croix de Guerre for a brave, clandestine war, to have an appreciative word; Abbé Pierre lectured him on the lack of milk for babies. Almost 50 years later, the elderly priest refused to wear his Légion d’honneur until a crowd of 300 poor African families, sleeping rough on the esplanade de Vincennes in Paris, was given lodging. When Jacques Chirac, hoping to score electoral points, offered to open up empty buildings for the homeless, Abbé Pierre berated him for hypocrisy. With “measured insolence”, he scolded John Paul II for not allowing married priests and for refusing to retire. He would bite people’s ears like a flea, he said, and yell, “Wake up!”
France first heard that voice at lunchtime on February 1st 1954. The napkins were tucked in, the spoons poised over the soup, when Abbé Pierre, having seized the microphone at Radio Luxembourg, told his listeners that a woman had frozen to death that night on the boulevard Sebastopol. She had been clutching an eviction notice, served to her the day before. The weather was grim; all over France, thousands more were dying. Abbé Pierre appealed for blankets, food, stoves and money to be brought to his temporary headquarters at the Hotel Rochester. The response was so enormous that not only the hotel lobby, but the disused Gare d’Orsay nearby, were filled to the roof with donations. Army lorries helped distribute them, and the National Assembly voted 10 billion francs for housing for the poor.
The organisation to which the rich brought their jewellery, and ordinary people packets of rice and jars of jam, was still a strangely fluid affair. It was run from a large ramshackle house in Neuilly-Plaisance, a Paris suburb, where Abbé Pierre in 1949 had started taking in the homeless, first in rooms and then, as numbers grew, in shacks in the garden. He had no idea what this project would become. Perhaps it would be no more than a kindly bourgeois gesture, the sort his own wealthy father had made when he went, each Sunday, to wash and shave the poor in the shelters of Lyon.
His colleagues were a strange,
quarrelsome band, ex-cons and ex-legionnaires, some of whom had been homeless themselves. To raise funds they picked rags and salvaged furniture, or begged with laundry baskets in the Paris streets. Abbé Pierre called his project “Emmaus”, after the place where two disciples had given shelter to the risen but unrecognised Christ.
Emmaus communities caught on and thrived; by 2006 there were 350 of them in nearly 40 countries, 110 in France itself. Abbé Pierre became a thorn in the side of successive French governments, and a year before he died was still lobbying for a law establishing the right to lodging. Yet he did not relish publicity on his own account. After regularly topping the annual poll of best-loved figures in France
, in 2004 he asked to be removed from it. Celebrity helped the cause, but it appalled him.
He had little enough to hide: a clutch of Utopian left-wing views, and one dismaying brush with Holocaust denial which seemed the mere misjudgment of old age. In 2005 he also admitted, in a memoir, that chastity was too hard forhim. He had decided to become a monk at 15, and had joined the Capuchins at 19; from then on, the pain of living without sexual love was constant. Indeed, he did not always live without it. He occasionally slept with women and would sometimes, wistfully and innocently, fall into discussions of sex with women who scarcely knew him.
Yet those who imagined him deprived of love were wrong. Abbé Pierre was possessed by it. Priest though he was, he rarely preached or mentioned God by name, a fact that only added to his popularity in proudly secular France. The force he invoked was different. “Despite all the evil that men and women suffer”, he said once, “I believe that the Eternal is Love all the same, and we are loved all the same, and we are free all the same.” Love would absorb him in the end, when his “Sister Death” came, as tenderly as any woman, to embrace him. And it was Love, he said, that made him so angry.
Gene Pitney
Gene Pitney, singer and songwriter, died on April 5th 2006, aged 65
AGEING pop-singers are not meant to die. The waist thickens and the lush dark hair turns white; the tan grows more improbable, the trouser legs more short; yet the voice, given a bit of a run at them, can still reach those high notes, and the warbling now comes smoky with experience. There may be no hopes left of chart appearances, but an audience can still be found, climbing slowly out of the tour buses into one or another sherbet-coloured theatre in Branson, Missouri.
Gene Pitney never inhabited one of Branson’s living mausoleums. Well past middle age he trod the boards in Europe, mostly in Britain, taking his ancient hits to the likes of Peterborough, Birmingham and Glasgow. He died unexpectedly in Cardiff, of heart disease, after another sell-out show.
Why Mr Pitney, an all-American boy, was so much more popular in Britain than in America is difficult to say. Sheer contrast had something to do with it. Mr Pitney hit the pop-music scene at the same glorious moment as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; but where the Beatles were all Mersey jauntiness and the Stones strutting London rudeness, Mr Pitney offered the wailing of disappointed teenage love from a strange, distant land.
“Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa” (1963), his greatest hit in Britain, fell on ears that had no very clear idea where Tulsa was. As in “Wichita Lineman” and “Do you Know the Way to San José?”, half the song’s drama came from its evocation of America as a land of highways, plains and (broken) dreams. The lyrics, too, painted a picture worthy of a James Dean movie, and sung like one.
I saw a welcoming light
And stopped to rest for the night
And that is when I
saw her
As I pulled in outside of a small motel,
She was there
and so I walked up
to her
Asked where I could get something to eat
and she showed me
Where
Mr Pitney’s appearance gave credibility to the poor traveller’s tale. He was improbably clean-cut and besuited even for the time, with brooding brows and a pained, naive expression. You could well believe that he had been born in Hartford, Connecticut, the home of insurance, had studied electrical engineering and, in his spare time, had painstakingly trapped and stuffed racoons. He had also sung in the church choir. Clearly he was shy and good, and the world was hell to him.
But he was not as shy as all that. He was writing songs and singing them from an early age, and hawking them where he could. Some say he was spotted by an agent at a seminal concert by Gene and the Genials in Rockville, Connecticut, in 1959 or so. Others remember him going, with a greased-up pompadour and a bag of demo tapes, to knock on doors on Broadway, where Burt Bacharach and Hal David eventually adopted him. “Tulsa” was one of their songs, as was “Only Love can Break a Heart”, Mr Pitney’s biggest hit in the United States. The combination of Mr David’s dramatic words, Mr Bacharach’s wistful melodies and Mr Pitney’s tear-filled tremolos was powerful stuff.
Asked to sum up Mr Pitney, critics found it difficult. His music ranged all over rock, pop and country, and merged them together. His voice, though pretty good, was also “heart-stopping”, “panic-stricken” or “like a kid pulling a wagon across a gravel road”. He was as famous for writing songs for others (“Rubber Ball” for Bobby Vee, “He’s a Rebel” for the Crystals) as for recording them himself. His admirers credited him with large influence, from bringing Indian music to the notice of the Beatles, to encouraging Phil Spector towards his “Wall of Sound” period, to providing the model for David Bowie’s odd sounds and manners as Ziggy Stardust.
He had some claim to have done all this. Most remarkably, he moved at the highest levels of the pop charts in the 1960s without melting down, by the end of the decade, in a blur of LSD and flowers.Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull were his friends, and his recording of the Jagger/Richards song “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday” helped to get the Stones known in the States; but in that maelstrom Mr Pitney remained his small-town self. He provided some frenzied maracas for the Stones’ cover of “Not Fade Away” and some company for Ms Faithfull, but (it was said) of a gentlemanly kind.
This was rather typical. Away from the stage he liked to fish, or just look at water. As a teenager he would drive out of Rockville five miles to Walkers Reservoir, sit there for hours in his candy-apple red Ford coupé, and write songs. In later years he disappeared so frequently from the American scene that he was often assumed to be dead, or living as a recluse in the woods somewhere. In Glasgow, Peterborough and Cardiff they knew different: Mr Pitney’s voice, one of the stranger instruments ever heard in pop music, swooping and aching through three octaves, was still ringing round them.
Oh I was only 24 hours from Tulsa
Ah, only one day away from your arms
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton, writer and madcap, died on September 25th 2003, aged 76
Perhaps Ernest Hemingway started it. In the 1920s he was a hungry young writer in Paris, inventing a new way of putting words together that was to make him the world’s best-known novelist. “Happiness”, Hemingway wrote much later, “is a moveable feast”, and “A Moveable Feast” was the title he gave to a nostalgic memoir of his life in Paris at that time. In the 1950s a new generation of young Americans felt the allure of Paris. Like Hemingway, they had been in a war. They were not especially hungry. Some were rich. All had dollars in their pockets. America had treated them generously for their wartime services. Still, “they seemed endlessly delighted in posing as paupers and dodging the bill collectors”, wrote Gay Talese in an essay called “Looking for Hemingway”. They lived “in happy squalor on the Left Bank for two or three years amid the whores, jazz musicians and pederast poets”. In the summer they drove down to Pamplona to run from the bulls, as Hemingway had done. In the winter, like him, they skied in the Alps.
George Plimpton was probably the most interesting of the young Americans. He was working on his first novel and one of the walks that he liked to take in Paris was in Montparnasse, along the streets that Jake Barnes takes after leaving Lady Brett in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”. Then he would go into a bar and have a drink, as Hemingway would have done. Some friends of Mr Plimpton persuaded him to take over as publisher and editor of a little magazine called the Paris Review. The Review was one of many literary magazines of the time that would be started, with great hopes, and die after a few issues when the printer could not be paid. The Review survived. It was also extraordinarily good. It published much early work by gifted writers, among them Philip Roth and Italo Calvino. Its interviews with established writers, among them, naturally, Hemingway, remain important pieces of biography. Mr Plimpton was to go on to do many amazing things, but keeping th
e Review going and maintaining its quality was his best achievement. He put the 50th anniversary edition to bed the night before he died.
George Plimpton was born into what is regarded as aristocracy in the United States. His father was a wealthy lawyer who later became a diplomat. At Harvard he became chums with many of the people who were part of America’s privileged circle of influence. He was close to the Kennedys and was one of the team that helped to get John Kennedy elected president. After Kennedy was murdered he joined Kennedy’s brother Bobby in his bid in 1968 to become president and was with him when he too was shot dead.
Mr Plimpton was not by nature a name dropper. Being with the Kennedys, playing tennis with the elder George Bush, travelling with Bill Clinton, knowing movie stars: what was exceptional about that? Doesn’t everybody? He wanted to be known as a writer, and wrote a couple of dozen books, more than his hero Hemingway did. But although in 2002 the American Academy of Arts and Letters graciously named Mr Plimpton as a “central figure in American letters”, it is difficult to think of a title of his that will endure. Possibly “Paper Lion”. It is a funny account of his disastrous experience playing football with the Detroit Lions. He was applauded as he hobbled from the field “in appreciation of the lunacy of my participation”.
There were other lunatic moments in Mr Plimpton’s experiences in what he called participation. In tennis, Pancho Gonzalez beat him easily. In golf, he lost badly to Arnold Palmer. He climbed from the boxing ring with his face bloodedby Archie Moore; never mind, hadn’t Hemingway once been floored by Morley Callaghan, a Canadian writer then in Paris?