Jean Cocteau: Past Tense: Volume I, Diaries.  John Howard translation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, September 9, 1987.

 

Novelist, playwright, filmmaker, painter Jean Cocteau stayed at or near France’s artistic avante-garde for most of his long career. His diary records the confrontation of a predominantly ‘Greek’ mind and sensibility with a radically non-‘Greek’ world. A certain Aristophanic wit whets itself thereby: When he hears that Monaco’s prince claims to find the casino that underpins his country’s economy embarrassing, “I answered that the prince was wrong, that the casino was the last temple. The acknowledged Temple of Chance: a god much more powerful than is imagined in our age of economic planning.” The ancient Greeks saw this more clearly than moderns do, and Cocteau rather likes the older gods—”Gods with nothing terrible, nothing vague about them. Gods who are concerned with human affairs, who marry the wives of men and give them children.” Americans will find him a bit reminiscent of his contemporary, Ezra Pound, who also preferred Hellenism to Hebraism for its clarity of thought and cleanness of style.

Cocteau is ‘Greek’ both when he looks at art and when he makes it. “To admire is to efface yourself. To put yourself in someone else’s place. Unfortunately so few people (and so few French people) know how to get outside themselves,” escape their own (very modern) individualism or ‘subjectivity.’ From Descartes to Rousseau to Sartre, the French trap themselves inside themselves; when they break out, their politics inclines toward dream-work, the residue of excessive inwardness.

In his own work, which he always calls poetry though it comes in many genres, Cocteau insists not on ‘creativity,’ as moderns do, but craftsmanship, the Greek technē. Today, he complains, “Whatever is botched and perfunctory is called ‘human.’ The profession, the craft, which consists in fabricating the vehicle by which the human is expressed, passes for an intellectual task from which humanism is excluded. The well-written, well-painted work is ‘cold’…. This is the defense of the mediocre. It has the advantage of numbers on its side.” In his own way, he extends Tocqueville’s insights on democracy.

Cocteau therefore applauds Matisse, who buys phonograph records to play while painting, but who “stops at Beethoven,” that Vesuvius of emotion whose eruptions thrill mass audiences. Even the diary form itself, the most personal genre, bends to Cocteau’s non-individualistic purposes. He uses it not to confess but to record. Events do not serve introspection, or self-advertisement; they stimulate (often aphoristic) expression of perceptions registering the world instead of the feelings.

Nor does such poetic expression imply estheticism. “It is likely I would not have devoted myself to poetry in this world, which remains insensitive to it, if poetry were not a morality.” “In a world of disorder, set oneself in order.” Cocteau calls this “acute individualism,” but he means something ‘Greek’: “One’s own equilibrium collaborates with a universal equilibrium whose advantages we shall never know.” Expression of oneself—the disciplined ordering of oneself, not ‘self-expression’—”is what I call an ethic.”

“What is more hateful than Jules Laforgue and free verse? True freedom must be won within the rules. To escape prison under everyone’s nose.” Such freedom calls for “hard virtue,” not “the soft kind.” It requires not only discipline but intelligence to guide that discipline. Cocteau would “restore to God the intelligence transferred to the devil’s account, especially in the sixteenth century, when the devil took the leading role…. The older I get, the more I believe that it is not only goodness which counts—but a goodness which does not extinguish mind.” Cocteau thus admires Nietzsche’s “diamond edge” in the aphoristic writings but deplores Zarathustra.

Cocteau departs from the Greeks in at least one respect. While lauding intelligence as integral to morality, he claims to dislike prudence, rather as Nietzsche does. He nonetheless exercises it, in his own way. When dealing with a journalist, “I say a few words which he makes as much noise out of as he can. Whereupon I am held responsible for the noise. This conspiracy of noise has replaced, in my case, the conspiracy of silence. Moreover, the two get along famously together. For noise conceals real work and establishes the reputation for brio which critics confuse with professional conscience.” When he says, “I am a lie that always tells the truth,” Cocteau means that social life imposes masks no poet removes; the poet uses his mask, speaks the truth through it, as Greek actors did.

Moderns try to dispense altogether with masks. This leads to the comedy of sincere effusion. “Our age is academic and uneducated; everyone is a professor who knows nothing and is eager to teach it to everyone else.” Cocteau sees that “the trouble started with the Encyclopedists,” those devotees of ‘Enlightenment.’ “They told everyone to think. As a result, stupidity thinks—something which had never been seen before.” Unlike any other Frenchman on record, Cocteau rates Gulliver’s Travels over Candide, saying, “Laputa is a very good account of what is happening right now in America and Europe.”

It is the dogmatism as much as the misjudged egalitarianism of ‘Enlightenment’ Cocteau dislikes. “Don’t close the circle. Leave an opening. Descartes and the Encyclopedists closed the circle. Pascal and Rousseau left it open. One must avoid filling in the gaps. Our age has made this mistake.” Politically, one must avoid the temptation—one almost imposed on prominent artists—to have an opinion. “Our modern terminology is very dangerous; if people can no longer use words like ‘message’ and ‘commitment,’ they doubt their own intelligence; they reach a point where they claim that the refusal of political commitment is a negative commitment.” But the refusal to ‘take a stand’ need not betray opportunism; it may be a very sensible thing to do.

Cocteau learned this in the harsh school of experience, and it took more than one lesson. He flirted with fascism in the 1930s, then had his brush with Communism after the Second World War. He failed to heed his own advice, yielding to the temptation of petition-signing and remark-making. He tries to explain one of his acts of idiocy: “I once said there is one great politician of our time: Stalin. This had nothing to do with the system [i.e. the Soviet regime]. Stalin refuses all dialogue because he knows that a conversation with fools always degenerates into a dispute.” Yes, but even such degeneracy might be preferred to mass murder. Cocteau evidently shared the illusions (circa 1952) of French intellectuals generally regarding Stalin’s crimes, reports of which only became believable to the Left after Khruschev reported a few of them in 1956. He does offer one sensible political comment: the Americans, he observes in the early  1960s, are giving the Soviets time to strengthen themselves militarily; this will prove ruinous for the Americans. Twenty-five years later, no prudent person could simply deny this prediction.

He is better on his fellow-poets. “Will the monstrous stupidity of Gide’s Journal ever be discovered?” “It was the child in Gide that I liked. His immoralism seems to me a lot of nonsense. And his Nobel [Prize] is a hoot.” Proust “is very hard in his judgment of snobs and pederasts in order to deflect attention from his own person.” Charlie Chaplin “has [the] childlike fury of humanitarianism,” as he attempts to involve his audiences in his own self-pity.

Five more volumes of Cocteau’s Diaries await translation, and they make a good introduction to his other works, which, except for the films, do not travel easily overseas. Intelligent ‘Greekness’ may have its limitations, and Cocteau’s version, for all its celebration of hardness, has soft edges (the old gods didn’t always marry the wives of men). But his form of intelligence does put overweening modernity in perspective, often in a salutarily jarring way. Many of us get what we deserve in life, but only a remarkable man metes out what he deserves in his very style of writing.

Herbert R. Lottman: The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators After World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 3, 1986.

 

In 1940, Charles de Gaulle set out to make a political revolution in France. For years he had judged a revolution necessary. Parliamentary republicanism was failing to act decisively to defend the country against Nazi ambitions. When Hitler’s troops circumvented the Maginot Line, occupied northern France, and allowed the establishment of a collaborationist French government under the elderly Marshall Pétain in southern France, de Gaulle escaped to London. As the only member of the last administration of the Third Republic to oppose surrender, he established France Libre, a government-in-exile with himself at its head. De Gaulle intended France Libre not only to participate in an Allied victory over the Axis and the liberation of the occupied territories, but to found a new republican regime with a strong executive capable of assuming responsibility for France, and especially for its military and foreign policies. With its petty intrigues and vacillation, parliamentarism had prevented France from achieving the greatness de Gaulle insisted was in her, and at last could not even protect France from conquest.

Simply to participate in the liberation and to restore parliamentary government were ambitions at that moment beyond the average Frenchman, and the average French politician. De Gaulle’s enterprise assured him unusually big obstacles. Man of the French who joined him in London would have opposed de Gaulle’s envisioned new form of republicanism, had he been so foolish as to make his intention explicit. President Roosevelt reacted badly to de Gaulle’s uncompromising independence, and spent much of the war trying to arrange for his replacement with some more pliable soul. At home, both Right and Left had their own revolutions to pursue.

The Right, still anti-republican a century-and-a-half after 1789, generally supported Pétain and at first admired Hitler. The Left, after enthusiastically supporting the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler, just as enthusiastically joined the Resistance after Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the Soviets in 1941. French Communists intended to use the Resistance as a vehicle for their own revolution against ‘fascism,’ which they imagined to be as much a product of capitalism as they claimed parliamentarism was. Finally, and predictably, the majority of the French little understood or cared about political ambitions, noble or base. While not actively collaborating with the Nazis, they passively cooperated, hoping for liberation while not seeing much they could do to effect it, and in the meantime wishing to be left alone by their occupiers.

The French purge of collaborators after the war must be seen in this political context. In his sensible, journalistic history of the purge, Herbert R. Lottman rightly begins by observing that “the liberation of France also liberated anger.” Having returned to Paris from the French colonial city of Algiers, where he established himself after his initial stint in London, de Gaulle gave rein to just enough of that anger to quicken justice, while reining it firmly enough to reestablish the rule of law in the midst of war.

In his radio broadcasts before his return, de Gaulle had rarely called for vengeance. He left that to lesser France Libre spokesmen, thus availing himself of popular anger while carefully distancing himself from it. De Gaulle had his allies among the Resistants criticize the circulation of blacklists within occupied France. In this moderation he received fortuitous help from the Communists, late in the war, whose leadership was told by Moscow in June 1944 “that the liberation would not be accompanied by revolution,” and therefore abstained from widespread terror.

In a risky but necessary and successful move, while still in Algiers de Gaulle gave his “Regional Commissioners of the Republic” near-absolute power—executive, legislative, and judicial—precisely to establish the rule of law by extraordinary means, simultaneously denying power to both the Allied armies and Stalin’s Communists. “Above all,” Lottman writes, the Commissioners “were to represent the ‘new spirit’ of post-Vichy France.” Consistent with that spirit, de Gaulle took a strong but not dictatorial position, establishing a system of laws and courts of law in consultation with representatives of centrist political parties and Resistants, particularly the Christian Democrats.

Ever as pragmatic in life as dogmatic in their theorizing, the French restrained themselves. Lottman does not overlook the “few instances of personal revenge,” illegal shootings, and even torture, but he insists that were indeed few, even in the first, anarchic days of liberation. Summary courts martial scarcely reached the highest standards of legal due process, but they probably averted mob violence, and did in fact acquit many individuals. The French bought time for themselves until, “slowly, step by step, the central authority (which was now Charles de Gaulle and his ministers) transferred their headquarters…to Paris, curbed the anarchy, and dominated.” As Justice Commissioner François de Menthon said at the time, “Tomorrow, when one looks back at the way the purge was carried out in France, we won’t have to blush.” The “Commissioner of the Republic” in Lyon, a Socialist with firm Communist ties, spoke more for the spirit of republicanism than for any leftist ideology when he cautioned, “Wrong opinions are never punishable…. The purge must have its limits, both in time and in its very concept. Otherwise, ‘a pure man always finds a purer man to purify him.'” It is hard not to suspect that the French had learned something from the French Revolution, after all.

Although some of the many surviving collaborationists have claimed that deaths numbered over 100,000, and the historian Robert Aron estimates between thirty and forty thousand, Lottman agrees with the estimate cited by de Gaulle in his War Memoirs and corroborated by subsequent researchers: 10, 842 deaths, most of them after some sort of trial. As in so much else, republican government with the rule of law, even a shaky rule of law, proved far less sanguinary than does state terrorism by ideological fanatics, Right and Left. France actually saw fewer postwar arrests and convictions per capita than did liberated Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway.

If anything, one might call the purge too lenient, and surely too uneven. Newspaper columnists were among the first to be tried, and a few were executed, but wealthy businessmen for the most part escaped personal injury. (It is true that businessmen would contribute rather more to France’s economic recovery than journalists could; this suggest the unfanatical—some would say cynical—wink that accompanies so much Gallic bombast.) No major literary or other artists stood trial for collaboration—not even the despicable Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had complained during the war that the Nazis were not killing enough Jews. Sentimentality about artists is as French as doctrinairism and cynicism, but more appealing than either. The French know that artists can correct one another; Lottman tells the story of the old Fauviste painter Maurice de Vlaminck, who, visiting Germany during the Occupation, saw a painting by a Nazi-approved artist, “stepped back, then commented, ‘Looking at that, you see how people lose a war.'”

Despite many injustices, some nearly inevitable and some not, Lottman concludes that “the French need not be ashamed of their purge.” They nonetheless prefer not to discuss it, and this too marks them as a civilized people. The war set those obedient to republican laws and principles against those obedient to the laws of Vichy; the purge attempted to discriminate between the merely obedient and the enthusiasts of collaboration. This task was necessary, difficult, and in some respects impossible. A police official in the small town of Bayeux “pointed out that in a township of four hundred inhabitants it would be possible to arrest five or six persons for collaborationist activity–or ten times that number, and still remain moderate.” The irremediable imprecision of such judgments, and the painfully unlike consequences of them for citizens of villages all over France, make a certain degree of forgetting more than discreet. After the failure of the Fourth, and still parliamentarian, Republic in 1958, de Gaulle and his successors wisely preferred to celebrate France Libre and the Resistance, leaving the purge to students of history.

Robert Morris: Our Globe Under Siege. Mantoloking: J & W Enterprises, 1986.

Originally published in The New York City Tribune, October 1986.

 

Sir Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947) was a British geographer whose career spanned the zenith of the British Empire and the beginning of its decline. In 1887, he wrote an essay titled “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” deploring the separation of the humanities from the sciences in the modern university curriculum—anticipating C. P. Snow’s lament on “the two cultures” by some seven decades. “It is the duty of geography,” he maintained, “to build one bridge over an abyss which I the opinion of many is upsetting the equilibrium of our culture.” The discipline of political geography or, as he later called it, “geopolitics,” would teach students both natural science and political science, each reinforcing the significance of the other.

Published in 1919, the book Democratic Ideals and Reality (a scornful glance at President Wilson, that) represented Mackinder’s attempt to show how the seafaring republic of Great Britain could defend itself against the great land powers, Germany and Soviet Russia. But Mackinder faced a grave problem in convincing his fellow Britons of the urgency of this enterprise. “Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for reasons of defense.” Unfortunately, tyrants who dream of world dominion love to think strategically.

Mackinder asked his readers to stop thinking of Europe, Asia, and Africa as separate continents. In fact they form “incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe,” holding some 85% of its population. That a single tyranny might someday unite the “Great Continent” or “World Island” posed “the ultimate threat to the world’s liberty so far as strategy is concerned.” Winning the “Heartland” of the Great Continent—north-central Europe and Asia—could enable this tyranny to control the circulation of political and economic power throughout the world. In the twentieth century, Germany and Soviet Russia would vie for this power.

True to Mackinder’s teaching, the democracies ignored him. The Germans did not. Karl Haushofer established the discipline of geopolitics in Germany and, true to the regnant notion of ‘value-free’ social science, willingly advised anyone who listened—including Stalin in the 1920 and Hitler a few years later. Mackinder lived just long enough to see his countrymen interest themselves in his thesis—during the 1940s, too late to avert what Churchill called “the unnecessary war.”

With the invention of nuclear weapons, the democracies suffered another strategic shock. For some two decades, the prospect of thermonuclear war made Western strategists forget or denigrate the importance of geopolitics. But Stalin’s heirs continued to learn Haushofer’s lessons, and methodically acted to acquire military, political, and economic control over strategic pressure points on the World Island. After the Soviets achieved nuclear parity with the United States in the late 1960s, and the communists won Vietnam a few years later, some Western strategists began to remember their geography lessons.

Robert Morris needed no such instruction-by-disaster. Trained as an attorney, he served in U. S. Navy intelligence during World War II, and learned of Soviet intentions at that time in a series of conversations with a top Soviet official. As an aide to several U. S. Senate committees, and also as an educator and journalist, he has advanced Mackinder’s task of overcoming the compartmentalization our universities have imposed, bringing together the insights of several academic disciplines in order to provide a coherent picture of Soviet actions.

Morris sees that the geopolitical war “is the real war, and may be the only war fought” between the United States and the Soviet Union. International politics remains a struggle for sovereignty over territory, despite the increased sophistication of international finance, whose adepts lecture us on ‘global interdependence’ and imagine butter more powerful than guns. By keeping the overall geopolitical realities directly before them, Morris does readers the invaluable service of taking apparently unrelated current events and revealing the pattern they form. Morris helps to make sense of the morning newspaper and the evening news.

He reviews every part of “our globe,” remarking Soviet power on land and sea. On land, Soviet geopolitical designs now center on western Europe and southern Asia. The Soviets often pretend to fear American ‘encirclement’; obviously, the strategy is their own. From the Kola Peninsula (the most heavily militarized region on earth) to eastern Europe, to the economic chokepoints of the Middle East, to the Mediterranean and northern Africa, to several points in and along the Caribbean, the Soviets have constructed a system of bases and alliances capable of interdicting supplies and launching direct attacks on our European allies. In the Pacific, Soviet power bears down upon India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries Radio Moscow called (in 1969) “the nucleus of a security system that would eventually embrace all countries from the Middle East to Japan.” As with Europe, the means to this end coordinate land, sea, and air operations, some covert and some not.

These Atlantic and Pacific theaters are linked. Between  the Kola Peninsula and the massively fortified Soviet Pacific coast lies the Arctic Ocean, where icebreakers and submarines extend power between East and West. In the southern hemisphere the route around southern Africa serves the same purpose; Morris devotes two full chapters to this key strategic region, which he knows firsthand. Indeed, Morris knows much of the world firsthand. Although he makes good use of news reports and journal articles, Our Globe Under Siege is no ‘cut-and-paste’ job; it is firmly based on the author’s more than forty years of extensive travel and observation.

Morris saves his most sobering facts for the final chapter. Since the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, 1.727 billion human beings have come under the domination of communism. That is slightly more than 36 percent of the world’s population, an average of 70,000 per day. Communists rule 18.7 million square miles, 32.5 percent of the earth’s land area. Further, as Morris so vividly shows, mere numbers cannot convey the geostrategic character of these populations and territories. Even a small point can ground an instrument of unremitting pressure, if it is a fulcrum.

Soviet leverage increases yearly. Since the much-heralded heyday of ‘détente’ in the 1970s, sixteen countries have fallen to the communists, most of them close allies of the Soviet Union. And although the Reagan Administration proudly claims no countries lost under its stewardship of our interests, this isn’t quite so. Both Guyana and Suriname have become near-appendages of Soviet and Cuban policy, affording key inroads into South America. During this period the Soviets’ only loss has been the tiny island of Grenada.

The ultimate object of encirclement is of course the United States itself. Sophisticates in the West will dismiss the thought. The Kremlin deceives them by crudeness. Robert Morris is not deceived, and readers who prefer knowledge to sophistication will find this volume a beacon that warns as it illuminates.

 

2017 Afternote: Not long after this was written, the Soviet Union imploded, the victim of internal tensions. Its reach finally exceeded its grasp. But some thirty years later, one notices that China has adapted a similar strategy, now with Russia as a more-or-less junior partner. In particular, the strategy of linking Asia from east to west, from the Pacific to the Middle East, has been pursued with infrastructure projects, especially roads. For its part, Russia continues to work toward the breakup of European alliances, even as it did under the Soviet regime. Far from causing borders to disappear (as some utopians had supposed), computer networks have served to enhance the geopolitical goals of modern states.