Portraits and Miniatures (38 page)

Thirty-five years ago last month, on my first visit to the United States, I took a plane from Detroit to Newark. For the first hour it bumped a great deal as was frequent in those pre-jet days. When the bumping ceased my silent neighbours all suddenly became very loquacious. It turned out they were mostly economists, returning from some gathering of the American Economic Association. The chief among them, or at least the one I remember best, was Seymour Harris, I suppose the most devoted of Keynes's United States disciples. He invited me to Cambridge for three days and installed me in the Dana-Palmer House. There he performed a function which for me was much more significant than his introduction of Keynes to the American public. He introduced me to Galbraith - and indeed to Schlesinger. Having performed this function, he then fell away rather like the first stage booster in a rocket launch. I am not sure I ever saw him again. But he had transformed my life, or at least its American dimension. For more than half of it John Kenneth Galbraith (and Arthur Schlesinger, his historical adviser and junior by nine years) has been an unfailing source of wit, friendship, vicarious repute, and
hospitality to me. I count that 1953 Detroit flight the luckiest journey I have ever made.

At this stage of course Ken was only a semi-fledged sage of the Western world. He had published
American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power,
but I think nothing else - between hard backs at least. He was still half thought of as an agricultural economist. Although he might talk of the Office of Price Administration, I think that by far the most important thing that he had done until then was to marry Kitty, thereby demonstrating the concept of countervailing height as well as underpinning his life and enriching ours.

In 1955 came
The Great Crash
and I took Kitty on to the roof of Milan Cathedral where she was overcome with vertigo and I was very glad that it was her end of the theory of countervailing height and not Ken's that I had to manoeuvre back between the minarets and gargoyles.

In 1960, soon after
The Affluent Society,
I took two friends to stay at the Galbraith house in New Fane, Vermont. ‘Well, we have certainly seen the public squalor on the way here,' one of them said as we bounced up the rough and long dirt road. ‘I only hope we see the private affluence when we arrive.' So, I suppose, we did, but only up to a point. For while Ken would never dream of not staying at the Carlyle in this city or the Ritz in London, neither he nor Kitty has ever believed in changing their domestic lifestyle to keep up with the royalties. That of course is a tribute to their supreme, unaffected and therefore wholly splendid self-confidence. Thirty Francis Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is fast qualifying as a house in a time warp. Happily, practically nothing changes. It ought to become a national shrine eventually acquired by Mrs Wrightsman, moved to a new extension of the Metropolitan Museum - and entitled
New England Academic Interior, circa 1950.

From that New Fane visit I retain another memory of Ken's imperturbable self-confidence. He took us to see the beaver dams about half a mile from the house. Suddenly there was a great clanging of wires overhead. ‘That's my private telephone alarm,' he said, adding, ‘It will be the Senator' (and there was no doubt
which Senator that meant in that autumn of the Kennedy election), before loping off through the undergrowth. When we got back we asked him what the Senator wanted. ‘No,' he said, ‘it was the plumber from Brattleboro', but the Senator will be through soon.'

However, my final proof of the indestructibility of Ken's self-assurance came nearly a decade later, when he and I ran into a former British Prime Minister. It became apparent to me after about ten seconds of casual conversation that, unbelievable and discreditable though it was, the former Prime Minister did not really know who John Kenneth Galbraith was. It became apparent to Ken a moment or two later. He was in no way disconcerted. As soon as we separated he turned to me and said: ‘Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home.' The logic was impeccable. If he did not know Galbraith, he could not be an ex-Prime Minister. The dismissal was complete.

I have left myself no time to talk about the eighteen or so books I haven't mentioned, including at least three major pieces of innovative socio-academic analysis, or the volumes of autobiography, or the travel books, or such reassuring titles as
Annals of an Abiding Liberal,
or Ken and Kitty in India, or Ken as an inimitable and iconoclastic lecturer, or Ken stealing the show at a Harvard Commencement Day, or Ken as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the jewel in the crown of that junior university, or Ken the television presenter, or Ken the connoisseur of Indian art, or Ken the
littérateur,
the writer of reviews of Waugh and forewords to Trollope. I stop while my catalogue is still illustrative and not exhaustive: and merely ask you to drink to a man who has put more phrases into the language than the rest of us put together; whose great gifts have always been used in unselfish causes; whose friendship has given us all both pride and pleasure; and whose life if it exceeds the norm as much as do his other qualities, will, I calculate, extend to the age of ninety-seven (after which Kitty can be the Pamela Harriman of the 2008 campaign), so that we all look forward to meeting again for the ninetieth and the ninety-fifth birthdays. In the meantime I give you the toast of Kenneth and Kitty Galbraith.

This miniature is based on a 1991
European
review of Giscard's
Le Pouvoir et la Vie, Vol II: L'Affrontement
(Cie 12).

This Second volume of President Giscard's memoirs covers roughly the second half of the seventies - although chronological order is not its strong point - and, therefore, the bulk of his
septennat
as head of state (and of government) of the French Republic. It is very well written, revealing in a somewhat self-conscious way, like a boy letting off a firework and then standing back to judge the effect before deciding when the next one can be ignited, and wholly compulsive reading.

Giscard's main objective I would judge to be the straightforward one of writing a good book, even a striking piece of literature, which enables him to express a view of life and himself which has been bottled up within him. But there was probably a subsidiary motive of making himself a less remote and condescending figure to the public, which he had been slowly persuaded was a factor in his shattering 1981 defeat, against the odds at the time, by François Mitterrand: perhaps, put bluntly, simply to make himself more likeable.

Happily this second objective produces no falseness of tone. The Giscard that he presents to the public is the Giscard that he believes he is, and not a bogus creation designed to make people like him because he is so like them. What he brings out to an astonishing extent is his vulnerability, which some might regard as closely allied to vanity. The most striking image from his first volume was that of his having to walk ceremonially and alone across the vast
pavé
of the Place de la Bastille on his first 14 July as President, and becoming terrified of losing his balance or fainting.

Even this did not prepare me for the revelation that, from 1979 to 1988, he could not bring himself to read a French newspaper or to watch an RTF news bulletin. It was not merely the fear of an attack. He had become neurotic about even a neutral mention of his name. After a time he found that he could keep up with events through the international and foreign press because, as he rather engagingly says, these journals had ceased to be much interested in him.

Equally he tells us that when walking in a street he is tormented by the risk of catching his image reflected in a shop window, for he dislikes both his shape and his baldness. Both of these reactions I find extreme, but not incomprehensible, having always avoided watching myself on television and even being reluctant to read my own printed words. Even so, I find Giscard's cunicular terror in front of the headlights of
Le Figaro
or even
Antenne II
a bit over the odds.

This neurosis, however, neither kills his sense of wit nor prevents his casting an immensely observant and critical eye over those with whom he has direct dealings. I agree with most of his judgements on the statesmen or would-be statesmen who were his contemporaries in office, not least with those on Mrs Thatcher. He may betray a little prejudice when he writes of looking across the table at her ‘with her mouth open because of the British method of pronunciation', but his analysis of her methods of thought is at once penetrating and devastating. ‘When she comes to the end of her own argument those who have not embraced her conclusions are incompetent, or addicted to half-measures or, last but not least, simply lacking in courage.'

I none the less find it surprising that in what was probably Giscard's last and deadly serious conversation with Jimmy Carter (for it concerned whether the United States would unleash nuclear warfare in order to save France from invasion) he was much struck by the fact that the US president wore long shoes with turned-up toes (winkle-pickers?). Even Giscard's foreign minister (François-Poncet), to whom presumably he was more used, excited favourable notice for his uncreased socks during an important meeting of disagreement with Giscard. I never realized
quite how appropriate a ‘please adjust your dress before arriving' notice would have been in the Elysée lobby.

The acuteness of observation does, however, produce some memorable descriptions. Brezhnev, arriving for Giscard's semi-illicit rendezvous (vis-à-vis his Western allies) with him in Warsaw in May 1980, walked with ‘the swaying gait of a tired bear'. And moments of political decision are successfully mingled with irrelevant but convincing images. Thus, when he was deciding on his first Prime Minister: ‘I wait a moment before letting in my next visitor. I go to the window. In sight are little groups waiting on the steps for the opening of the Musée du Louvre. Young women in bright-coloured skirts. A coach has pulled up, beige and white. It must come from The Netherlands. Tourists get heavily out, clinging to a glistening metal banister … My choice is definite. It will be Jacques Chirac.'

The fault of which some who had to deal with Giscard, and who admire many aspects of his constructive liberal statesmanship, would most accuse him was a certain false condescension. Does he dispel this in these memoirs? The answer must, I fear, be ‘no', although he shows that it was balanced by many more attractive and less complacent characteristics. But it is still there. When he writes of the suicide of Robert Boulin, his minister of labour who was oppressed by a minor financial scandal arising out of his obtaining a free plot of land on the Côte d'Azur, Giscard was genuinely shocked by the tragedy. But it was a photograph of the villa ‘
sans grâce, sans charme',
which Boulin built on it that most stuck in his mind.

When he arrived in Venice for the 1980 summit he metaphorically patted Prime Minister Cossiga on the head: ‘He was swimming in happiness … it was the consummation of his political life' (Cossiga has since been president of the Italian Republic for seven years).

And when Giscard dined with the other heads of government in a great salon overhanging the Grand Canal, and was dazzled by the beauty of the surroundings, he was oppressed that no one else was appreciating the aesthetic feast. He may well have been right, but how did he know what was or was not going on in
their minds? Perhaps that must wait for the sacred and profane memoirs of all of them. But of one thing we can be certain in advance: they will not be nearly as well written or elegantly self-revealing as are those of Giscard.

This miniature is based on a November 1990
European
review of
Guizot
by Gabriel de Broglie (Perrin).

Guizot Was the close contemporary of Palmerston and Lord john Russell and lived somewhat but not much longer than either of these octogenarians. Yet I find him more comparable with those Englishmen who were born half a generation or a little more after him, Gladstone, Newman, Matthew Arnold, even Tennyson. Guizot is almost a Victorian, very ungallic in some ways, with a career and a
mentalité
which at once illustrates the considerable similarities, shot through with profound differences, between the two leading countries of the nineteenth-century world.

François Guizot (although he was a man like Disraeli or Asquith who hardly needed or used a Christian name) was born in 1787, the son of a Protestant advocate living and practising in Nîmes. His Protestantism was important, not because he was primarily a
dévot
but because it deeply affected his cast of mind and character, rather as it had done with that twentieth-century Protestant French politician, Maurice Couve de Murville. (Guizot's mind was, however, both more erudite and wide-ranging than Couve's.)

If this provenance and Guizot's close knowledge of English language and literature (with his future first wife he had translated the thirteen volumes of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
by the time he was twenty-four) linked him with England, another part of his family background divided him sharply from the British experience. His father was guillotined in 1794, and his maternal grandfather, also part of the legal and Protestant establishment of Nîmes at best did nothing to save him and at worst was one of the instigators of the execution. So, mingled with the parchment-
inspired respectability of legal life in a peculiarly urbane
cheflieu,
was an appallingly intimate experience of the unforgiving confrontationalism, with its periodical blood-lettings, which was a feature of French politics at least from the mid-seventeenth century Fronde until 1945, several hundred years after serious violence had disappeared from the English scene.

Guizot was certainly not a man of violence. He was a pacific minister of the regime which, of all those that ruled France in the nineteenth century, was the least concerned with ‘la gloire'. Louis-Philippe, the bourgeois king who preferred an umbrella to a sword, was long and well served by Guizot, who reversed Thiers' policy of tweaking the tail of the British lion and produced the most famous summons to the arms of mammon that has ever been heard in the hemicycle of the Palais Bourbon.
‘Messieurs,'
he told the assembled deputies of 1843,
‘enrichissez-vous.'
Put in its context the remark was not nearly as materialistically self-seeking as it sounds, and Guizot never made much money for himself. Nevertheless, as a political leader he had more than a touch of Neville Chamberlain about him.