Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

“If in politics we so severely rejected all compromise, I fear chaos would come to the affairs of men.”

“As it yet may, in spite of much compromise.”

“As it yet may,” the old man agreed, to speed the conversation along, for he had another instance of scandalous muddle to cite. “Less than three months ago, I participated — most unwillingly, mind you — with the Minister to France, Mr. Mason, and the Minister to Spain, Mr. Soulé, in a conference in Ostend and then Aix-la-Chapelle, which had been convened to draft a confidential report to Mr. Marcy and General Pierce upon the matter of purchasing Cuba from a bankrupt Spanish throne.”

“I have read of it in the news,” Hawthorne said quietly. “The British press has been considerably indignant, and those on the continent more so.”

“Oh, and the U. S. Congress, too — we have been mightily flayed,” Buchanan avowed, “and not without justice! The entire business was instigated by two swashbuckling reprobates in our government’s employ, Dan Sickles and Pierre Soulé—both of them hasty in temperament, and quick to take short cuts, whether with diplomatic channels or with other men’s wives. I invited Sickles, at his request, to join the London Mission, thinking as compensation for his willful and pompous moods we would have the company of his charming young wife; but he left her at home in New York and brought along instead a young woman, Miss Fanny White, with whom his only ties appeared to be those of affection! As for Soulé, he has nothing of the temperament of a minister: come to Louisiana from France as a political refugee, having been jailed for agitation against the Bourbon restoration, he has continued his anti-monarchical activities in Spain, lending the diplomatic pouch to revolutionary letters and further distinguishing himself by shooting the French Minister to Madrid in a dispute over the latter’s wife!” The old man rocked forward in the protesting chair, its legs and rungs and curved stick-back loosened by the squirms of untold unhappy petitioners; he coughed with smoke and laughter and took pause to dab at his eyes with a handkerchief produced from his black sleeve. “Well, these two hotheads, Sickles by going to Washington and stirring up the President with talk of an easy conquest and Soulé by demanding a bullying ultimatum to accompany our offer of a hundred thirty million to the Spanish queen, had put our Mr. Marcy in such a bind that he found himself instructing Soulé to ‘detach that island from the Spanish dominion’—I use his very words. Meanwhile, Dan Sickles had returned to Europe spilling into every receptive ear what he had understood to be General Pierce’s order for drastic action. Naturally, protest though I did, it fell to me and Mason — and Mason took the whole conference as a lark, and contributed scarcely his presence at the table — to frame a formal advisement that would draw the teeth from Soulé’s threats while expressing, in some sort, their gist. Though I cannot claim your own pride of artistic authorship, mine was an ingenious composition, which achieved abeyance enough for Marcy to coax from Soulé his resignation this last December. In the case of Cuba as in many another, the best deed is doing nothing. The Young Americans and their hope of a filibustering expedition have been stymied, and Cuba will fall into our hands when the Spanish rot advances a little farther, as under Providence it is bound to. The public press, which understands nothing but crude sensation, accuses me of proposing ‘sale or seizure,’ when in truth it was I who pulled the administration back from such a disastrous option, which might well have given the European powers an opportunity to come forth and rattle our domestic peace with a Caribbean intervention! Britain is in a fighting mood, as you may sense. It has taken all the friendship I enjoy with Lord Clarendon to curb their reaction to our destruction of Greytown and, worse from the diplomatic point of view, our President’s adamant refusal to disavow Captain Hollins’ rash action! Luckily, not a life was lost in the bombardment, though a mass of mud huts were flattened.”

Hawthorne silently wondered at the old fellow’s ability to delight in the intrigue that the expediencies of power impose. The Minister knew his auditor to be the President’s dear and loyal friend from their college days together at Bowdoin, and while seeming to rattle on freely, yet left to incommunicable implication any low view of Pierce’s ability; neither Pierce, who had defeated him for the 1852 Presidential nomination, nor Marcy, whose stubborn retention of his New York votes helped deny the Pennsylvanian that same nomination, could be counted among Buchanan’s friends, yet here he was (Hawthorne reflected), serving them both in this mostly ceremonial post, bereft of real negotiating authority, making the best of their erratic orders, yet serving with a curious relish. He had become, whatever his initial nature and its potential, a slave of public life, at home only among its formalities and nuances, which, like those of feminine society, seek to regulate with a touch and a word the masculine currents of force that seethe across the planet, and to put an acceptable face on the world’s bloody business of birth and murder. Buchanan and Miss Lane cut considerable figures in high British circles, and indeed it was not infrequently rumored that the Minister’s niece might soon make a titled marriage. Like all eager talkers, the man had something to sell or conceal. Yet, withal, something rustic and honest — a sunshot innocence aged in the barrel of long experience, an unspoiled aptitude for pleasure foreign to the shadowed psyche of New England — rendered the old functionary companionable, and indeed imparted a sense of his pleading, beneath the consciousness of high position and importance , for the less public and more reflective man’s approbation.

The Consul, whose consciousness was divided between the deferences owed by his inferior office and his responsibilities as host, thought it wise, after so long an unburdening by his elderly guest, to introduce a topic where he might bear his share of the discourse. He took up the mention of the English mood, and expanded it to a question of the general English personality, as perceived by his fellow American, and discovered impressions not unlike his own, though on a broader plane. Buchanan felt the British willing to fight for their toehold on the Mosquito Coast, if maladroit and domestically distracted American policy provided an excuse for John Bull to exercise his bully tactics, and Hawthorne found the British personally overbearing and cold. There are some English whom I like , we might imagine him saying, in colloquial paraphrase of his words in Our Old Home — one or two for whom, I might almost say, I have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us, as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar, who went to bed with the princess, but placed the cold steel blade of his scimitar between. Perhaps, if I were at home, I might feel differently; but, in this foreign land, I can never forget the distinction between English and American . Buchanan nodded in eager agreement; when he did return from his English mission, he proclaimed to a crowd in New York City, I have been abroad in other lands; I have witnessed arbitrary power; I have contemplated the people of other countries; but there is no country under God’s heavens where a man feels to his fellow-man, except in the United States . Emboldened by the warmth of his important guest’s agreement, and by the second glass of morning brandy, from the consular cabinet, which the visit entailed, Hawthorne moved on to caricature English women, in implicit contrast to willowy American beauties both he and Buchanan had known. As a general rule, they are not very desirable objects in youth, and, in many instances, become perfectly grotesque after middle-age — so massive, not seemingly with pure fat, but with solid beef, making an awful ponderosity of frame. You think of them as composed of sirloins, and with broad and thick steaks on their immense rears. They sit down on a great round space of God’s footstool, and look as if nothing could ever move them; and indeed they must have a vast amount of physical strength to be able to move themselves .