Had dinner last night with an old friend from Nova Scotia, now a very successful New York career woman. It was interesting to see how the acquired layers of New York “graciousness and culture” came peeling off after the third drink. Thank God they did.
16 October 1958
I spent the morning trying to work on the Minister’s (Sidney Smith) speech on disarmament to be delivered to the General Assembly. The truth of the matter is that I am discouraged as I have been working on disarmament now off and on for months and I can see no prospect of achieving anything substantial. The same unreality hangs over so many of the activities of this year’s General Assembly – the abolition of apartheid, the bill on international human rights, peace in the Middle East, peace in the Far East, disarmament. Who thinks we can achieve any of these things? It is likely to be easier to get to the moon. Anyway, diplomats are only small craftsmen and there are no statesmen.
John Holmes came to lunch today. He is here with the Delegation as special adviser. John is probably one of the most liked diplomats in the United Nations, a real asset to Canada. He should be in this job instead of me. He gets on easy terms with all, the more exotic the better. Indo-Chinese princes, Polish communists, Indian intellectuals – all eat out of his hand.
Well, I must get on with that speech. I can’t leave all the work to John just because I am suffering from “cosmic disillusionment.” He has been through all that himself and come out a patient, modest Christian (although not Christian by faith he certainly is by temperament).
For my part, I lost my temper in a most un-Christian way with Krishna Menon, who is heading the Indian Delegation to the General Assembly, yesterday. It does not seem by his attitude today to have done any harm at all to our relations, rather the reverse. The odd part is that I have a grudging, suspicious admiration for the creature. I can’t help seeing that he has political imagination and a kind of wild, malicious high spirits. When he comes into the Commonwealth delegation meetings he flutters the dovecotes just for the fun of it. Poor old Alan Noble, the head of the British Delegation, who is chairman of the committee, is like an ineffectual schoolmaster trying to keep a brilliant bad boy under control. Just how bad is Krishna Menon? Perhaps worse than we think.
20 October 1958.
I spent all last evening with Sidney Smith and John going over the speech until I got quite bleary-eyed and was also suffering from indigestion caused by bad curry. Sid has a dual personality. First there is the over-confident, wordy, artful one – and then, over his shoulder, there is a perceptive, sensitive Sid who appears to judge his companion harshly although he always gives way to him. This is an unkind way to write of him. He has been exceptionally friendly and nice to me. He wasn’t too bad working on the speech, either. When he gets hold of a point of policy he sticks to it, and he changed the tone for the better and some of the individual phrases. The text we were working on for this speech was John’s and I dare say he must have felt a bit bruised as his text was being mauled and battered about, but he is so patient and objective that he gave no sign of irritation, as I certainly would have done.
It is still before breakfast and the red sun has just risen over the river. I have been standing on the balcony looking down to where it broadens towards Brooklyn Bridge and beyond to the sea. I love that widening of the river. I don’t know how I shall live without it when we change apartments.
5 November 1958.
As I was walking along 34th Street near Pennsylvania Station while waiting for my train to the country (it was a brilliantly fine morning), a certain gentleman caught up with me and, walking a few blocks together, we joined in conversation. “New York,” he said, “is a murderous city. You have to know what you can do here and what you can’t or you get yourself a bad ulcer. That is why I walk every morning for an hour before I go to my business.” He was the manager of Coward’s Shoe Store, a wise man sent from God, for as he talked, glancing at me from under his battered hat with sharp, dark eyes, I felt my own tension relax and I walked happily among the skyscrapers, the slum door stoops, the cheap restaurants, and the building sites down by the river under a blue heaven.
7 November 1958.
I wrote off in answer to that nice little German Gräfin’s letter about Aga Fürstenburg’s death. Mine was an empty, careful letter. She must have known that Aga and I were friends. Poor Aga, “warmhearted, courageous, witty” I wrote of her. But that is not the point. Unhappy, near-desperate, turning herself and everything else into a joke, with her “grande dame” manner and her wild gossip. She remained hopelessly attached to her Prussian baron but I think she was not lucky in love or money. She had no reason to live and did not like it much, but she was much more alive than those who have reasons for living and do like it.
16 November 1958.
Weekend with the Angels at their farm in Connecticut. A Sunday-morning walk under the grey sky through a country of small fields enclosed in grey stone walls, and back to drink bourbon out of Victorian moustache cups (Mr. Angel collects them), in company with a group of pleasant late-middle-aged couples. This is a converted farmhouse, full of charm. The Angels and their friends have lots and lots of money, but never too much in evidence. They’re people who have travelled, collected good furniture, shot big game, farmed the land, run businesses or law firms, “kept up” with art, literature, and politics. Most have been married several times. (The interests they have, these Americans! The information they have modestly and unemphatically accumulated while also accumulating so much else.)
15 December 1958.
At last the General Assembly is over and yesterday the Canadian Delegation got off by plane for Ottawa. The weeks of pressure all day and late into the night are over, and the effort of keeping so many balls in the air. I have tried to run a private social life on the margin of the great circus of the General Assembly. I have even succeeded in doing so, at the moderate cost of a ruined digestion.
20 December 1958.
On the Ocean Limited between Moncton and Amherst on my way to Halifax for Christmas leave, during an interminable wait. Why is the train waiting? Frozen up, I suppose, in the midst of this waste of snow and scrubby fir trees. It is darkening quickly outside the train windows and is getting cold inside this compartment. Probably the heating goes off when the train is not in motion. There! she gave a jolt. Does that mean that we are going to move? No, not an inch, and we’ll be four hours late arriving.
Yesterday, sitting alone in the long gallery of the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, I opened my eyes on the dark panelling and the windows inset with armorial glass and the large, obscure paintings in their immense frames. The gallery was half-lit and silent, with snow coming down the well shaft beyond the sightless glazed windows. The housekeeper came along and switched on a table lamp. “A little light might help,” she said, “such a beautiful room, and it’s all to be demolished next year. They will never replace a ceiling like that.”
I determined to take a taxi and go out to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue to see my cousin Gerald. There he was in a corner of the ward among all the other ex-servicemen of the First War. He has been moved now from the mental ward. He looked tiny, shrivelled and shrunk, plucked-looking, with huge blue eyes in his ageless face. He sat up straight in his wheelchair with his destroyed hands in his lap. Round his shoulders was a scarlet shawl. We forced conversation with each other across his bed-table about the Queen, Russia, his pills. “Things,” he said, “are not too bad with me, and not too good.” I talked to his nurse by the door. She praised his courage in standing pain; never a groan or a movement of impatience. Is there something uncanny about him, I thought, as he watched us talking with an ironic expression; a sort of saint has he become? I thought of him writing a card to my mother in the depths of his melancholy madness, “Nil desperandum,” and I thought if he could say that, shall I always be able to?
5 February 1959. New York.
It is the most uncanny thing that whenever I try to write or read, Matilda the German mai
d appears and begins to tidy, to water the plants right under my nose, to turn down the bedspreads, to empty the ashtrays. The moment the woman sees one settling down to work she comes in to fuss like a bluebottle. We are back in our high-up twenty-first-floor apartment, with the wind beating off the East River. High up as it is, it did not prevent our being robbed the night before last. Yes, a burglar came into this very bedroom between three and four in the morning and stole from the drawer by my bed what money there was, which unluckily was too much. It is strange to know that he, or she, was probing about in the dark while we stupidly, blindly, slept, and the burglar coolly got away with the money from the sleeping suckers. Being robbed makes one feel such a damn fool.
21 February 1959.
I am doing an assessment of the personality of Cabot Lodge, who is spoken of as a possible Secretary of State to succeed Foster Dulles. I have struck up a real friendship with Cabot, unlikely as it seems, as no two people could be more different. He is full of courage and energy, extremely impatient, and permanently at odds with Dulles. I think any American Representative at the U.N. will always end up on bad terms with the State Department. Living and operating in the atmosphere of the United Nations inevitably changes one’s point of view. There are tactical advantages to be gained here. There is the temptation of publicity and popularity, not appreciated by Foreign Offices at home, and this is particularly true of the New York–Washington axis. Cabot’s weakness is his emotionalism, which would indeed be a fatal weakness in a Secretary of State who had to negotiate with the Russians. I am never sure whether this emotionalism is genuine or whether it is a stunt for public consumption.
I find him very good company. When Mrs. Roosevelt was here with the American Delegation and I was sitting beside her at dinner, I said to her, “I am very fond of Cabot,” and she drew back her lips over her teeth and said, “How very interesting. You are the first person I have ever met who was fond of Cabot Lodge.”
22 February 1959.
Old John Stevenson, who was for so many years the London Times correspondent in Ottawa, came in for a drink. I like him, but he is full of scurrilous and inaccurate stories. Strangely enough, as he has got older he has almost stopped being a bore and seems to have returned to an earlier self–more considerate, more affectionate, less apt to hog the conversation. I have noticed that onset of mildness and moderation in aging old egotists before now. It is perhaps a sign that their end is not far off.
Talking of bores, I made a speech to the Bullock Forum about the United Nations yesterday which bored me almost as much as it must have bored the audience. In return they gave me a silver replica of Nelson’s dress sword in the form of a paper-opener.
In the afternoon to a cocktail party at Mary McCarthy’s. Elizabeth Bowen says Mary would say anything about a friend, but do anything to help him, or her.
8 March 1959.
I sit here trying to write. Matilda, her hair in curl-papers, comes tidying things under my nose. Then she begins to shake two bathroom mats out of the window on to the terrace. Then she changes the cigarette in my ashtray beside my notebook so that all the smoke goes into my eyes. She has a passion for Popski. She takes him away for weekends with her to stay with her German sister – puts him in a box with an air-hole in it. He seems to accept this with resignation, although he has bitten her three times.
I am reading a book about the American Revolution. As I was brought up in a nest of United Empire Loyalists, I always instinctively sympathize with them, but I am swinging to the side of the Revolution. How insufferable it must have been for the Americans to be patronized by petty British officials and third-rate line officers.
What am I to do about these damn diaries? I know what I should do – destroy them. Perhaps the bank will be bombed with them in it, perhaps I shall lose them. I don’t want to leave them as a mess behind me, which might cause pain or hurt people’s feelings. It is very odd how little mention there is in them of my working life.
Talking about work, I have done about five drafts of a long paper on Germany, German rearmament, the possibilities of reunification, Canadian policy towards Germany, and I was pleased to hear that my piece is to be used by the Prime Minister as the basic paper on the subject for his talks with Harold Macmillan.
23 March 1959.
Dag Hammarskjöld lunched here the other day to meet Elizabeth Bowen, who is here on a visit. They both set out to please each other and succeeded. He does not relax easily in the company of women and most women do not take kindly to him. The sexual element is missing and he cannot be bothered replacing it by cozy persiflage. Women sense a certain chill. Elizabeth, I thought, would not be drawn to him – a neuter Swede could not be attractive to her. As it turned out, she was at first surprised, then charmed and amused. With his customary quickness he caught on at once to the fact that this was no sentimental lady novelist but a mind as capable as his own of dealing in general ideas. From this understanding there was only a jump to pleasure in each other’s company. He left behind him the mountaineer idealist and sparked with witty, clever sketches of people and places, absurd situations, and indiscreet imitations of public personalities – a side of him that he too seldom shows and perhaps deliberately keeps under surveillance. This was for him a day out of school. When Elizabeth exercises her charm it can attract anyone from the charwoman to the Duke of Windsor, with whom she got on so well that evening in Paris. She is desperately worried about money and says she is more and more irritated by what she calls the Fortnum and Mason troubles of the rich, such as the cost of double-silk linings for drawing-room curtains.
1 June 1959.
Alastair Buchan1 is here today and we have been sitting drinking gins and tonics on the terrace. He has just come back from Ottawa and says that the atmosphere there is very claustrophobic. This is partly due to the Diefenbaker régime and the bad relations between the government and the civil service resulting from the suspicion of Ministers, and particularly the Prime Minister, that the higher civil servants may be disloyal to the government, or even plotting with the Liberals against them. In a way this suspicion is comprehensible. In the long years in Opposition the Conservative Members of Parliament, particularly the Western Members of Parliament, have been living a somewhat isolated life in their rented houses and apartments in Ottawa. They have seen the cozy, intimate relationship between Liberal Ministers and civil servants, mostly living cheek-by-jowl in Rockcliffe, their children attending the same schools, their wives in and out of each other’s houses, intimate old friendships between senior civil servants and Ministers, and so they have come to believe in a sort of conspiracy against the government. It is true, I imagine, that most of the influential civil servants in Ottawa have Liberal sympathies, certainly very few are Conservatives, but I think they are much too loyal to the tradition of an impartial civil service to work against the government. Unfortunately, this intense suspicion of their motives and behaviour may create the very animosity that it fears.
8 June to 13 June 1959. Ottawa.
I arrived on a hot, thunderous evening and drove straight to the Country Club for dinner to meet the new Minister of External Affairs, Howard Green. The taxi-driver said that in this weather he had to change his shirt twice a day because it stuck with sweat to the back of the car seat. At the Country Club the senior members of the Department were standing about in a rather stilted, uneasy way waiting to meet the “new boss.” I could hear Norman Robertson’s1 host laugh coming through the windows into the Club, where I was hastily pouring myself a preliminary drink. As it turned out, the dinner went surprisingly well and the Minister made a very good start with us. He was skilful and tactful, with an ironic sense of humour. What kind of impression the members of the Department made on him it is harder to say.
In the afternoon I went to see my brother Roley’s swearing-in as a judge of the Supreme Court. Nothing has ever given me more deep satisfaction than his now being what his nature, ability, and heredity meant him to be.
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June 1959.
Marshal Berland came to lunch with me today. He talked of Elizabeth. He loves and reveres her for her goodness, intelligence, and generosity of heart. So, twenty years later, she is still able to mould, to inspire, and to amuse another young nature. I told him that even when she was gone, and however long he lived, her quickening influence would still work on his imagination. He seemed today to me to be like myself when young – a mixture of romanticism, quick sympathy, and quick cynicism.
We dined with the Japanese Ambassador, my new friend Matsudiara. He is quite unlike any other Japanese I have met. He is worldly and witty, and is extremely indiscreet. He plays the Japanese hand cleverly at the U.N. but is not, I think, quite at ease with the Afro-Asian group of nations, of which Japan is of course a member. Indeed, there does not seem to be much natural sympathy between the Japanese and the Africans. The Afro-Asians as a group are proving increasingly difficult to deal with. Either in bilateral negotiations or with the Commonwealth members in a Commonwealth framework, relations are easier, but as a group the Afro-Asians are showing an increasing tendency to take up extreme positions and to produce resolutions full of sound and fury and quite inoperable. This, of course, is not only true of Afro-Asians.
Another new friend – or one who could become a friend – of a very different kind is the poet Howard Moss, whom I met through Elizabeth. How funny and perceptive he is, charming, and with a fibre of integrity.
We are beginning to make the move from this apartment in Sutton Place to the new one in Park Avenue. Matilda does not go with us. Meanwhile, she has bought a new toupet which makes her look like a housekeeper in a detective play.
15 August 1959. Stonington, Connecticut.
I have the precarious feeling that I shall be interrupted at any moment as I am sitting up here in the cool top room of this pretty little house, or simply that I shall get too sleepy because it is so hot and still outside in the garden and so silent in the house, except for the faint clinking of dishes being washed in the distant kitchen. The noise of insects strumming tunelessly, or according to their own tunes, fills the air. There are three or four other people staying in the house. “What it must be in this heat in New York!” everyone says. This is a woman’s house – wallpapers “enchantingly gay,” the house painted pink outside, a former farmhouse but it has left the manure pile far, far behind. There is a garden, or rather an enclosed lawn, shaded by immense maples (or are they ash? I must look) and walled with a stone wall about the height of a man. I know I bored my hostess, Mary, last night. She looked quite effaced with boredom, her face like one in a murky mirror. She is a delightful creature, with mind, feeling, and wit.
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 15