20 August 1960.
The first morning that I can breathe again after five days of the Minister’s presence in New York, during which he brought off a very neat little ploy on disarmament, sent up his prestige, and got what he wanted by a mixture of toughness and shrewdness that surprised and impressed his fellow professional politician, Cabot Lodge, while at the same time stealing the show from him. I think Cabot may have thought that he was dealing with a nice old boy from the sticks who was a little slow in the uptake and could be patronized with his usual effortless effrontery – but it did not work out like that. This exercise demonstrated the advantage of taking an inflexible and clear-cut position at the start, in our case a middle position towards which the “uncommitted” countries in the U.N. gyrated. During this time I was somewhat irritated by Mark, who came down with the Canadian Delegation. He has all the virtues but occasionally relies too much on possessing them. He “cannot tell a lie,” when no one actually is asking him to do so, so why the protuberant stare of aggressive integrity? Someone said of him, “He is a stallion.” Yes, but a stallion with a conscience.
22 August 1960.
“When will this weather change?” the doorman asked as I stepped out from under the apartment-house awning into the heat of 62nd Street. These hot, sticky days seem to have been with us for so long that we have lost track of dates and can hardly remember when they began or what went before them. The cool sparkle of early autumn seems a distant mirage. Central Park is not really any cooler than the streets but I go there every morning to walk over the burnt grass and under the dusty trees before we have breakfast in the apartment. I get my first cup of coffee in the Zoo cafeteria and take it out onto the terrace. The coffee tastes of dishwater, the terrace tables have not yet been cleaned, and when I put my elbow on the green-painted table surface, grains of sugar stick to the sleeve of my coat. At a nearby table Zoo attendants in open-necked khaki shirts are gossiping about the animals. Sometimes I overhear something that interests me – the cause of the squabble between the gorilla and his mate, the reason why the lioness lies moaning on her back with her paws in the air. The animals are still half asleep at this hour, but they have already come or been pushed out into their outdoor cages. They seem cross or reluctant to begin their day. Only the seals are enjoying themselves, the sole cool creatures in New York, gliding and snorting in the dirty water of their pool.
Inside the apartment, breakfast is waiting on the small table between the windows in Sylvia’s bedroom, the New York Times beside one chair, the Herald Tribune beside the other. Popski is lying on the unmade bed, his head burrowing under the sheets, his rump immobile. Anne, the new maid, brings in more coffee. Her morning face is like her evening one – round, porcelain pink and white. She must have been a pretty girl, plump probably even then.
Outside the windows is the racket of the electric drill as they burrow away at the destruction of the apartment-house next door. You can see down into rooms like our own, minus their ceilings. Sylvia is a thorough newspaper reader. She questions what the Medical Association say in their statement. I read the foreign political news and about animals and architecture. After the egg comes a cigarette. Shaving, thank God, is over, the face in the bathroom mirror packed away till another day.
Static are the morning rooms as I go round them – an unfinished glass of rye, a vase of bronze chrysanthemums, the television doors are open but the drawing-room shows nothing, eternally cool and grave it is like a place in another house. The rooms are linked up by a dark corridor running along the apartment, hung with dubious portraits of unwanted ancestors. At the end is my bedroom, darkest of all and darkened further by the hanging woods of the tapestry facing my bed. I cannot see the colour of my socks in this green gloom.
On the silver tray in the hall (crest of the fighting cock of the Prevosts) are the bills and the invitations. “His Excellency,” “the honour,” “overdue,” and notes of thanks for “a delicious evening.” The car is waiting to take me to the office.
Every day and every night this week has been occupied by the Security Council meetings on the Congo. Ever since the Belgians granted independence to the Congo in June that country has been in turmoil. The Belgian officials and technicians cleared out at once, and there are less than a score of Congolese university graduates in the country and no trained officials. The result is chaos. Then Katanga, the province where the copper belt is, seceded from the central government. The Belgians have sent in troops to ensure the evacuation of their remaining nationals and the Russians are accusing them of “imperialist aggression.” Now the Secretary-General has been authorized by the Security Council to send a United Nations military force to restore peace there and we are contributing a Canadian signals detachment. My head is woozy with sitting up half the night at these Security Council meetings. My mouth’s stale from smoking endless cigarettes, my stomach irritated by nipping out to the bar with my fellow delegates during the translations of speeches. My great friends and allies on these occasions are Freddy Boland, the Irish representative – wise and imperturbable; Nielsen, the Norwegian – a steady friend in all U.N. crises (the Norwegians seem the nearest to the Canadians of any of the Scandinavian delegates, much nearer than the Swedes or the Danes); Jim Plimsoll, the Australian, and I should say my closest friend at the United Nations – so quick, intelligent, and sensitive. It has been gratifying during the last few days to see how other delegations have rallied round to Canada’s defence in the face of persistent attacks on us by the Russians. Yet of course people do inevitably play up to the Russians. That bloody Kuznetsov attacked me personally in the most insolent terms tonight for the support that Canada is giving to Ireland for the presidency of the Assembly. He said this was a Cold War move on our part. I said that he knew perfectly well that our Minister was, as he had so often proved, totally opposed to the Cold War. He replied that in any case Canada had no independence of its own and this was proved by the fact that we were members of NATO. I lost my temper at this, but my temper has got very frail anyway from sitting it out in this vast hot-box of New York, and I also lost my temper with the waiter at the Côte Basque restaurant. Went to a stifling cocktail party at my colleague’s, the Indian Representative. God, how tired we are all going to be by the time the coming General Assembly is over! And what an Assembly it promises to be, with Khrushchev, Lumumba, Krishna Menon, Nkrumah, and Castro!
11 September 1960.
Things are going from bad to worse in the Congo. The Congolese Premier, Lumumba, has declared that he has lost confidence in the Secretary-General and has demanded the withdrawal of white troops from the U.N. forces. Meanwhile, a mob of Congolese soldiers has attacked and severely beat up fourteen Canadian members in the force at Leopoldville. I have been living much more in the Congo than in New York and it now seems quite possible that I shall be asked to go there. I very much want to do this but I doubt whether it will come off as I think the Russians would object because they disapprove of Canada, as a member of NATO, having anything to do with the Congo. They are, of course, attacking Hammarskjöld violently. The Scandinavians intend to stick to him through thick and thin.
It is raining. There go the church bells in the rain-soaked air. I have been reading short stories – O. Henry’s, Chekov’s, and Edgar Allan Poe’s – with pleasure, except for Edgar Allan Poe, a writer I have never been able to endure.
26 September 1960.
I have just come in from my morning walk in Central Park and have paid a visit to the macaws and heard the lion giving its waking roar. The Prime Minister1 is in New York for the United Nations and has made no effort whatever to contact or consult me. So I sit in my room waiting for a telephone call. I am determined not to approach him. Of course, I should have known what Prime Ministers think of resident ambassadors (when they think of them at all). They simply think that they are “officials” and as such a mixture of flunkey and clerk.
3 October 1960.
When will Butterball (as I now call the ma
id, Anne) have my breakfast ready? I have to listen to Khrushchev and Menon today at the General Assembly. The Americans have refused the Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting, and who would have expected them to accept after the wholesale insults fired at them by Khrushchev, whose behaviour is becoming more and more Hitlerian? The spectacle of all these dictators coming here to New York and strutting and orating and bullying reminds one of the Bad Old Days when Hitler and Mussolini were in bloom and busy breaking up the League of Nations. I feel an increasing disgust for what is going on at the United Nations. The incessant work carries me through time with the speed of light.
Elizabeth has written to me again encouraging me to keep my old diaries rather than burn them and to consider later publication. If I ever do publish them I shall call the book Flies Around My Head. I remember as a small boy being horrified by the sight of a horse in a field with its entire face covered with flies and the way it charged up and down the field trying to shake them off.
The United States Delegation are not at all satisfied with the Canadian record at this General Assembly. In fact, I now learn that they have reported that their relations with our Mission here in New York have been so bad for the last two years and that we (I?) have been so unco-operative that they have given up approaching us. In view of my close personal friendship with Cabot Lodge and the many appreciative things he has said about me, I must say this surprises me. The truth of the matter is that the Americans dislike and mistrust the present Canadian government and all its works. Wadsworth, whom I have known for years and who is now heading the American Delegation, has never attempted to make the slightest human contact with me from the first day he arrived here. The United Nations is full of misunderstandings, worse this year than ever, and this poisons personal relationships. People associate their colleagues with the policies of their respective governments and mistrust the man because they dislike the policy. This is inevitable but often mistaken. Half the time the man you think incarnates a hostile attitude is fighting his own government to get that attitude changed.
27 November 1960.
Mike Pearson is here today from Ottawa. He and I had a talk today about the United Nations Secretariat. Last night he said to someone at dinner, “Charles has done all right. He comes of an old Conservative family and has succeeded in ingratiating himself with the Liberals.”
1 January 1961.
Shall we or shall we not go to Haiti for our holiday – that is the question. Matsudiara, the Japanese Ambassador, says, “Don’t go near it, it is frightening and sinister,” but Loelia Westminster1 says, “Yes, go and get me some voodoo charms to braid in my hair the way the Haitian women do.” Loelia is here on a visit. How much I like her, her looks and her friendship! I am just going up to drink vodka with her in the blood-red garçonnière which she has been renting.
Matsudiara came into the French Embassy last night, sat down before the fire with a glass of champagne in his hand, looked round the New Year’s gathering, and said, “There will be a world war within two years. I have just been telling that to the Japanese press correspondents and I foretold to the month the coming of communism in China. Also,” he went on, “there will be communist revolutions in all the Caribbean states.” In the wake of these announcements the company paused for station identification. If Matsudiara happened to be right, how would one get the most out of these two years left to us? Madame Schébéko, a White Russian refugee, told me once that if only she had been sure of the date of the coming Soviet revolution she would at once have bought two fur coats and a Rolls-Royce, to get as much satisfaction out of these as possible before all her money was taken away from her.
It is raining! – the darkest, dismallest New York day imaginable, but I continue to love New York in all seasons, and in spite of anything I may say about the United Nations I enjoy being there and would not exchange it for any post in the foreign service.
22 January 1960.
I have been reading Horace Walpole’s letters all morning instead of working on our next disarmament resolution. He charms me still as he did when I was a boy of fourteen and read his letters for the first time, when I absurdly wrote that his style was “natural.” I think I must have meant “high-spirited.” Horace Walpole was troubled by nerve storms but, lucky man, was untroubled so far as we know by the flesh.
Sylvia says that when she is listening to me talking with the Minister on the telephone I come back and say that I have stood up to him and put my views extremely firmly, whereas she had the impression that I agreed with every word he said. A very wifely observation.
Drinks with Charles and Marie Noetbeart. What good friends they are. Marie, unchanged since Ottawa days, as pretty and amusing as ever.
The General Assembly is meeting and yet it is not functioning. Shall we ever extricate ourselves from the morass of the Congo? I still hope so much to go there and have a look at it. The Congo to me has become a country of the mind. I am obsessed by it and more interested in travellers’ tales from there than in those from the moon.
Last night I dined at Pat Dean’s1 with members of the British Delegation. I urged them to use all their influence to get the Belgians, or as many as possible of them, out of the Congo, but I recognized resistance, tenacious, unargumentative. Then the question of barring arms shipments to the Congo came up. Their new Minister came out with, “When one thinks of all the arms being smuggled all over the world, one wonders why the fuss about arms for the Congo.” I thought, “There go we diplomats! If an issue does not suit you, break it up into parts and make it relative. If it comes to that, when one thinks of all the adulteries being committed in the world, what does one adultery matter?”
12 March 1961.
To put myself to sleep I tell myself stories. How flat, trivial, lacking in imagination, and repetitive they are, so that I go to sleep through boredom. By comparison my dreams are works of surrealistic art, brilliant films in the newest continental mode, rich in endless invention, in scenes of hallucinatory brilliance. Even the small “bit parts” in these dreams are rendered with uncanny intensity. As to emotions – fear, love and desolation, danger and narrow escape, lust and nostalgia – the themes are endless and images crowd to express them. If I could tap the sources of dreams, no writer of this age could touch me. There is no doubt I dream like a genius.
At the close of my speech last night Dean Acheson said, “You were superb.” “So were you,” I replied. “I always am,” said Dean.
Walked through the Park to the Plaza Oak Room bar for morning vodka martinis with Sylvia on my arm. She looked lovely, eyes very blue. She has been so patient and sweet during all the storms of the last few months and the strains of the General Assembly. Then we went to the French seventeenth-century exhibition at the Metropolitan, which was badly chosen and arranged. It left an impression of showy, mediocre pictures. Even the Poussins were the poorest I have ever seen; only two Claude Lorrains saved all.
I have been reading Pope’s Rape of the Lock and now The Essay on Man – “In Folly’s cup still laughs the bubble Joy.”
25 March 1961. Washington, D.C.
No, I do not want to come here as Ambassador. Yet if they offered it to me I should probably not refuse it. Why not? Why not tell Norman Robertson that, as a friend, I ask him to save me from it?
As for the brilliant company of the New Frontiersmen and-women, if last night’s dinner party is an example I’m afraid it is just a group of clever bureaucrats and their clever or artistic wives meeting after a hard day’s work in the office. And must I leave my beloved New York? I feel inclined to make a libation to the Goddess of Liberty at her gates.
Isaiah Berlin, speaking of Adlai Stevenson, told Elizabeth that he hated “a liberal mob.” That phrase keeps echoing in my mind irrespective of party labels.
Pope’s philosophy is thin and he skates over the depths. It is a day-lit jingle but consider how he slides into poetry and out again. Yet he does not seem to me a religious man like Doctor Johnson. He is a monster of
accomplishment rising to genius.
18 September 1961.
A shocking tragedy. Dag Hammarskjöld has been killed in an air accident in the Congo on his way to arrange a cease-fire in the fighting there. Was it an accident? Who will ever know for sure. So many people for so many reasons may have wanted him out of the way. I think his vision of the future of the United Nations will die with him. I also feel his death as a painful personal loss. While he was too detached to be called a friend, I shall so much miss the stimulus of working with him and the pleasure of his companionship.
22 November 1961. New York.
Lunched today with the Libyans. I sat next to a bearded Oman prince and idiotically asked him how he liked New York. He said, “It is just like home,” and sniggered slyly.
Coming through the swinging doors of the U.N. Building I encountered the Romanian Permanent Representative. I have struck up a kind of odd relationship – almost friendship – with him. He has to return to Bucharest and says he longs for it. In fact, I am sure he dreads it. He went on insisting so much about this that it became embarrassing. Then suddenly that great white slug seized my arm and said, “I am a human being, you know.” Of course the poor bastard is a human being – that’s his trouble.
The Finnish Ambassador says if you stay long enough at the United Nations you will find that “all the heels are wounded.” One’s skin gets rubbed thin from the close commerce with one’s colleagues in this claustrophobic place, and as a session of the United Nations goes on, personal relationships become more and more strained. Even with my great friend Jim Plimsoll, the Australian, it was a shock last night, when I voted against the Australian resolution, seeing his amused, pale, ironic face turn crimson with irritation as he came over to my chair and, standing over my shoulder, kept repeating, “It’s not personal. I know it isn’t you, but how could you vote the way you did?”
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 17