Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

And then … A stir jerked, then alarmed me. Wilfrid had left his chair, was already centre stage, fingering the mike with patient forbearance, almost comic helplessness, and touched by the last splendours of sunset piercing the heavy, classical windows. My throat tightened as it had done when, very gently but firmly, Father had contradicted the Herr General. Trembling, I had awaited an anger that did not come. In this fumed density of fatigue, impatience, incipient hostility, a Wilfrid was least needed. His audience was not of dolts, gullible Wolf’s Lair freebooters but a salon of trained minds, and I wanted to step past Trilling and flee.

Wilfrid, still adjusting the machine, looked apologetic, incompetent, too diffident, unconvinced of his right to stand aloft and demand attention. I was certain that his style would be too opaque, his personality too elusive, his text lumbered with the unnecessary – tyche , feng-shui. Could he but ration his regard for Eckhart and Tolstoy.

His tone, never javelin sharp, was conversational, edged with the humour that overcame by not noticing dissent. Malraux, barometer at zero, now recovered, gained height, so that he forwent cigarettes and sugar, and Spender, haloed in a sun-shaft, pocketed his pocket-book.

‘I am not, or not yet, religious and confess, rather shame-facedly, that I do not love my enemies, though managing to respect strangers. I have no difficulty in preferring instant retribution to slow, even-handed justice. Aristophanes…’ he raised a deprecatory finger against any accusation of pedantry, or the glare of Aristophanes, while I remembered the Herr General’s zest for duelling, ‘did tell us that the sun bestows glory on all mindful of the sacred obligation due to strangers and neighbours. Some of you may object that the glory is also bestowed on the wicked and unneighbourly. Well, there are hopes even for them. Some of them!’

Though he did not laugh, he appeared to have done so, and reassurance rippled over the large, tensed gathering. Slight, not appeasing, but as equal amongst equals, he was measured, fluent, clear as the bell of the Palace of Justice.

‘To do the right thing for unorthodox reasons has never much troubled me. To discover the right thing is sufficiently arduous. The rest I leave to the learned and philosophical. The highest of all German voices, already mentioned, long ago told us that in the beginning was the Deed. Better to act, perhaps unwisely, than do nothing. Here in France, the Revolution, of which I admit to some reservations, considered humanity’s chief enemies were the indifferent. Those who existed only on paper. Yet enemies, the wicked, survive very close…’ At this, Golda Meier looked around, eyebrows black, almost in accusation, a nervous titter sounded, though Malraux nodded, Trilling flickered assent, and, behind Wilfrid, Buber nodded encouragement.

‘Herr Flake has generously reminded us of the qualities of Internal Emigration, though this unlocks no prisons, halts no deaths, leaves freedom only to the wicked. What a plain, wholesome word that is!’ He halted briefly, to savour it, connoisseur over a new arte-fact. ‘Still, few of our enemies are visible, they are more insidious. You may remember that a great socialist, his nationality, by definition, is immaterial, wrote that the lie had become a European Great Power. It had, of course, always been so. Who does not remember Odysseus, Virgil and at least three Popes? This afternoon, we have heard no lies but insufficient truth, though I fear you will not hear much more from me. At best, some reminders, against the bland. We are, we like to think, the righteous, proud of ideals, we despise expediency. We desire not news but wisdom, and truth is forgivable. Yet we have seen our betters, majestic writers, marvellously bearded thinkers, declare, “I do not mind if it is a lie, I believe it.”’

The hush wavered between degrees of unease, and I gripped my knees. As if acknowledging a sententious priggishness, Wilfrid quickened his delivery, was lighter, bantering. ‘My own favourite writers were mostly moral hooligans. I read them with gratitude, of course, with awe, but their hospitality would stir up misgivings. To play cards with Dostoevsky, hire a bed from Rimbaud, spend a week deafened by Luther…’ Some chuckles, a long wide curve of pleasure, before he continued. ‘We have been advised to erase the past, start anew, all sins forgotten. Finely intentioned amnesia. An attractive prospect, but attractive only because it is impossible. The dead have powers, too easily overlooked. For myself, I treasure the past, its display of diversities, personalities, encounters, achievements, for which Paris remains so unforgettable.’

Shadows around his eyes and mouth were familiar: conciliatory, temporizing, questioning, they suggesting not a professor but a quiet fellow student. The sunset glow faded, the great room was darkening, as though management was reluctant to jolt us with sudden lights while he continued.

‘We need not dispense with a past still largely travestied by the Lie, nor with a future, doubtless disreputable. There is always today. To collect evidence, then use it. However…’ In the fractured light, encroaching obscurities, he appeared taller, sterner. ‘I am imposing too many abstractions on you, masquerading as a preacher, evading urgency and necessity. We are in Cold War, which may heat up. Our Spanish, Polish and Baltic delegates are exiles. Thousands crouch in sewers. In one country, unrepresented here, men still in power, for their own motives promoted famine, then decreed that eating corpses was uncouth. Such a regime will not collapse from whatever we ourselves decree. Absurdity may one day become the more effective. I have lately been in Spain, and there I read an exhortation from the Generalísimo, no less: “Let us go Straight Forward Together.” And, do you know’ – God, he seemed about to discharge that cracked, over-noisy laugh, but instead was very casual – ‘they’d posted it on a hair-pin bend!’

A rumble of mirth enabled him to calculate our mood and when to reach his curtain lines. ‘We have not allowed much attention to the paradoxes of authority, and its use of the Lie. Only saints, anarchists and the sluggish actually reject authority with, I suspect, all the authority they can muster. I myself, like most of us, respect authority, have occasionally had to use it, without appetite and to small effect. My own exemplar is Cincinnatus, whom the Founding Fathers adopted as an American. Given power, he does a difficult job, then unobtrusively retires. A lesson to Europe.’

The response was muted, at some possible allusion to de Gaulle, but he acknowledged it without dismay or annoyance but with the enjoyment of a conjurer about to produce a favourite trick, without flourish but successfully.

‘I will give you another example, doubtless better known. John Rabe.’ Trapped off-guard, assuming an over-sophisticated joke, a few laughed knowingly, the rest left puzzled or blank: Malraux, failing the test, shrugged, sought his green bag, Trilling glanced at me enquiringly, and I examined the floor.

Modest, Wilfrid was scarcely disclaiming his own authority. ‘It would be easy to offer some reputation honoured and undisputed: Helmuth von Moltke, Pastor Bonhöffer, Regine Karlin, Mlle Weil, Herr Nansen’s father. However…’ – pronounced more heavily, this, like ‘but’, had a speck of grit – ‘though on their achievements, authority at its most selfless, any new Europe must rest. Permit me to broaden the matter. To reach back to 1937. The sack of Nanking. Thousands raped, murdered, tortured with brutal refinements, on a scale not then paralleled within memory. This was halted by one man, by personal courage and authority, by John Rabe. One of our time’s grand gestures. And who was he?’ Yet again he stopped, enjoying the tease. ‘Theologian? Quaker? First Violinist? No, Heaven preserve us, he was a convinced, a pure – if you will forgive the word – National Socialist. He believed in all that we should not believe, yet even in Mao’s China he is revered as a saviour. In him, not in any Führer or Generalissimo, is our difficulty, the self divided by what Charles Dickens called the attractions of repulsion. That we can cherish several contradictions simultaneously. This is fearsome as plague or truncheons and fostered by obedience and the microphone – not, at this very moment, at its most obedient. Did not Faust lament the two rival souls within his breast? We ourselves may resolve – a Resolution. We may even, with one soul, publish no less than a communiqué…’ – the mild sarcasm was another trick of the trade, the performance meticulously prepared, with its chatty flippancy, the dandyesque humour – ‘but with another soul we will disown it. Exquisite hopes, detailed plans, can be unconscious of the creative flaws, riven psyche, scarcely credible energies, of a Rabe. Genius attempts it, and there is much genius amongst us, but genius tends to despise government and hold its nose at committees. I myself am guilty of much that I deplore. A guest in Paris, where Zola once spoke out, I can remind you of Gautier saying that one can journey through one’s own times, yet not see them. European Reconstruction is splendidly visible, but somewhere, overlooked, outside, is the arsonist, the joker, the irreconcilable, the exhibitionist, apt to be romanticized by literature, cinema, by folklore, into the Good Terrorist – as, you may judge, I have romanticized Rabe. And here I am, interminable, keeping better speakers waiting, with no Resolution, no Communiqué, unable to split atoms, write a poem, libel Miss Garbo. Bien entendu .’