PB's Notebook From The Republic of Letters, No. 16, Winter 2005

Big mistakes get made in wartime. The nature of conflict, blind as it is to nuance, makes this inevitable. If you read the brief extract from Christabel Bielenberg’s memoir in this issue’s Archives, you will perhaps understand why. When we can be human beings—and war seldom enough allows for this—it is possible for us to understand the position of our adversaries, and see that, but for the grace of God, they could be us, and we them.

Into the village of Rohrbach in the autumn of 1944, desperate times for Germany, rides a band of Cossacks retreating from France: as Bielenberg says, ‘typical of those Russians who in 1942 had thrown in their lot with the Germans, hoping for better things under Hitler than under Stalin.’ A misjudgment. As they ride off again, headed for the Eastern front, you know, and they know, that it was probably a fatal misjudgment.

They are, those Russians, ordinary, unexceptional men. They drink, they fight, they can be sentimental about women and horses. But they are also losers. History hasn’t pardoned them for fighting alongside Hitler; it has merely forgotten them. They are like Vlasov’s army or the Czechs who lost their lives fighting for the White cause in the Russian Civil War. Alas! History is full of little people who make wrong choices—that is, choices that did not succeed. Was Hitler a worse choice than Stalin? The Whites a worse choice than the Reds? What actually happened, who won out, is what makes history, which the winners write.

It is not just little people who make these mistaken choices. Yet it is not often obvious that, given their positions and the choFices offered them at the time, they could have chosen otherwise. Extensive reading on the Vichy régime (on a small fraction of which I am writing a brief novel called Collaboration) has only reinforced a lifelong sympathy for losers, often stuck in situations from which there are no easy escapes.

Unfortunately, our times, which can hardly be called ‘moral,’ are also times of undue moralizing. Just try re-writing official history. The choices of those Cossacks, long used to leading their lives in their own free way, close to their horses and each other, are not that different from those facing the defeat and occupation of their own country. Not everyone would step into a British plane and create, as the Poles had done before them, a government-in-exile. The condition of each person, at any time, in any country, differs from the positions of all others; the choices are seldom attractive; their outcome unknown; and not everyone is born to be a hero, or to exercise that heroic virtue, which requires that one give up one’s life for what is right. If all were capable of doing so, the virtue would no longer be heroic. We weren’t there and we weren’t Serbs, so we do not know what we would have done at Srebnica. Nor were we the young lieutenant Kurt Waldheim, ordered to shoot a prisoner. Had we refused to do so, we would not be alive and having to consider what we ‘should’ have done.

These thoughts returned to me as I read the memoir of his years in Bucharest during the war by the head of the French Institute in that country. Addicted to France and things French, related deeply to Latin culture but squeezed between Germany and Russia, knowing what to do, which way to go must have been—when France fell—horrifyingly difficult. Spend a moment considering the fate of Mgr. Vladimir Gikha, son of a princely family and a convert. In Paris he had devoted himself to the poor in the very suburbs of Parish that burn as I write. He returned to Romania at the beginning of the war to look after lepers in Dobruzhda. He was arrested by the Soviet-installed government in 1953 and died a martyr in a Romanian prison in 1954. Another loser. Whose skin does one save?

I admit that my ambition as a boy was to be a justice of the Supreme Court. The first book I ever bought with my own money, during a layover in Providence, Rhode Island, then a city of book-stalls, was a history of constitutional law. It was a big fat book and I got it for a quarter. I read it with awe. What an instrument was this Constitution, that took general principles, clearly enunciated, and expanded them into a means by which a civil society could resolve those conflicts which inevitably arise between the various ‘interests’ of a new state! I took up the law, of course; but late, and in another country. Anyway, I now realize, no president of sound mind would ever have nominated me; and in my maturity I decided I would not have made a good one.

And here we are embroiled in a dogfight over a president’s right to name Supreme Court justices as he sees fit. This right, like that to declare war, is limited by the Constitution, which states he may only do so ‘with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.’ Our state is one where ‘checks and balances’ limit the power of any branch of the government to do the nation grievous harm. The senate must therefore do its job. But the right to nominate is an absolute and nominations to the Supreme Court involve choosing someone whose power is going to be very nearly equal to his own, and to last much longer.

Every president’s choice generally, but not always, has fallen on persons well-versed in the law, of sound reasoning power and a willingness, within the confines of the court, to accept majority rule; or, to live to fight for what they felt they had to fight for. How that nominee decides individual cases, however, is unpredictable. The task of the senate, then, is to ensure that these standards are met. It is not to seek to ensure that the nominee act as the senate, or any of its members, would act were they the nominee. The nominee’s decisions are his to take and there are nine justices on the court to make sure that wild men cannot act in a manner contrary to the national interest.

The current debate centers on the issue of abortion and results from a cataclysmic shift in the nation on marriage and related women’s concerns. There is no consensus in the country on this issue, and reasonable men or women can be found defending either side of the debate. What is the legal status of a foetus? Is it a person, and if so at what point? Is a woman’s body her ‘private’ property, hers to do with as she wants? Is this so in all circumstances? Within marriage as well as outside of it? What is the status of the father, or the state, in regard to a foetus? And is this ‘right’ of mothers to abort absolute? Or is it subject to mediation?

I have no personal doubts on the score of a foetus. At whatever point, it is not anything but human. Human? Is it a viable person subject to the protection of the law? Only potentially. It clearly has a telos, a direction and an intention to grow, develop and be born, and that fulfilling of its potential is quite independent of the wish of its mother. Once born, it is a full human being equal to, and likely to outlive, its mother. As we, children and adults alike, remain potential to the very moment of our deaths, it is clear that this potentiality is a part of us from the moment of our conception, and only two classes of acts can put an end to that potentiality: one is spontaneous (natural) abortion, a ‘miscarriage,’ the other requires a deliberate act of termination by its mother.

Roe v. Wade does not offer much help in understanding the nature of the decision a mother must take, a decision which is often painful for her and, within marriage, for the father. Blackmun’s decision was based upon ‘the concept of personal “liberty” in the fourteenth amendment…or in…sexual privacy said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbra…” This penumbra and its expansion to a generalized right of privacy is one that I would contest, though not in all cases, and certainly not in cases involving force.

It is certainly an issue the Supreme Court has every right to review, especially given the divisive nature of Roe v. Wade; it is equally certainly an issue that the court cannot be denied the right to consider, nor forced not to do so for ideological reasons. Each case on this issue coming before it will have to be decided on an individual basis, and in an area, the human and sexual relations of two individuals, where it is preferable that the state intervene as rarely as possible.

As one who grew up in a culture in which the sexual act always included the potential for the woman’s pregnancy, such a pregnancy involved doing the ‘honorable’ thing and marrying the mother. If I did not, other messy decisions arose: an illegal abortion, the orphanage, a bastard child; or, just as possible, an unhappy or unsuccessful marriage.

This difficult set of choices was largely sidelined by contraception, and contraception undoubtedly made sexual relations outside of marriage both more available and less consequential, with social results that I would not care to comment on. One result, however, is clear. Contraception altered the dynamics of marriage, that ultimate social contract between two adult humans, on which successful civil societies (in terms of property and inheritance) had long been based. It did not reduce the importance of marriage, as is often argued, but rather intensified it, as an option for those who took their commitment to one another seriously. For it then became a viable alternative to maintain serious commitments between men and women, including common children, outside of marriage.

This was only partly mitigated by the fairly rapid disappearance of the stigma of bastardy, so vitally important to previous generations. At that point it seems to me the choices are fairly clear: if you do not want children, though this is damaging to society, there are ways around it, by negotiation, by contraception, or by refusal of sexual relations.

Marriage, however, is different, and I do not see how sexual relations within marriage, and any issue thereof, can be seen as matters of privacy. In matters of children as in all others, the individuality of the partners is, by common consent, largely merged. The resulting stability is that on which civil society rests. A couple in which both yield a part of themselves (in old fashioned parlance that was called love) forfeits a part of their privacy.

Here I have to declare an interest. I have faced such a question. I was asked by my wife to allow her to abort a child. I said that I opposed abortion, but that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, force her to have a child she did not want to bear. But that if she chose to abort, that had certain consequences for our marriage that she should consider carefully before she reached her decision. The decision—eventually she decided in favor of the child—was one taken, as it should have been, privately and between two adults with due regard to the ‘rights’ of all three: hers, mine, and the child’s.

In marriage, that is where I believe the matter should rest. Yet it is that very issue on which Mr. Bush’s recent nomination is being challenged. The nominee—the sole dissenter—argued that a child the woman wished to abort was also the husband’s, so that at the very least he was entitled to know that his wife sought an abortion of his child and could argue or plead with his wife to bring it to term. As we do not know if the judge in question would, on another set of facts, argue the same, nor whether the entire court would agree with him, I do not see his opinion, in that case, as being a matter disqualifying him from the court. Privacy here is important and not just part of a vague penumbra. These are private matters—indeed, matters of conscience—which are best left to husband and wife, but not to the unilateral decision of either.

I have been asked to join an association dedicated to maintaining ‘la francophonie littéraire.’ The request is really a plea for the survival of literature: in French as in all languages. I do not think it is part of any outbreak of Gaullism, or any statement of any innate superiority in French, which is the language of my family and my childhood—as is the Italian of my mother. I do know that when I translate myself into French I become a very different person as well as a very different writer, and certainly a greatly diminished one. Monsieur Bellow in French is not Saul Bellow, I am not me, though there are writers whose transition to French is relatively easy.

This has to do, I think, with the fact that ordinary prose, the language of the argument, of this diary for instance, is easily translatable, but that the language of fiction, when one’s own language is essential to the fiction, to the characters one has created, is not. France has no Chicago. And we ‘ave no Paree.

As I pointed out in my last diary, the world is full of writers who write in no language at all, quite deliberately. They write in prose that, lacking all sinew and particularity, no doubt fits the Albanian reader as it does the French. It is such writers who are in vogue and who thereby gain international recognition. It is the refractory writers, those whom we love because they contribute to the ever-renewed creation of our language, who are the outcasts. Increasingly so, too, in our own culture, where we are saddled with the epithet of being ‘literary.’

Though I could have become a French writer rather than an American, I early on declined to do so. My most recent wife, who is French, would chide me when I spoke French to her. She said she mistrusted me because in her language I became polite. She may have had other reasons, but that’s what she said. In French.