French lesson •
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Washington—It is surely quite absurd to print menus in French when de Gaulle is an open - enemy of the United States. The Australians don't print menus in Japanese.' The speaker was my host at the Metropolitan Club, long a resident of Washington, an Englishman but highly susceptible to the local ambience. I ex- plained, patiently, that menus were printed in French for historical reasons, as musical scores of non-Italian composers yet bear the marks of Italian priority in instructions like 'andante cantabile.' He was still enamoured of his sanc- tion against the General so I dropped the sub- ject. But this attitude is general. In the Washington Post, there was an indignant letter from a doctor in nearby Maryland proposing the most ferocious sanctions against anybody who buys French goods or visits Paris. In a way it reminded me of the early days of the National government, when the Royal Family was cut off from the Riviera and King George V had to convalesce in Bognor (now Bognor Regis). It will probably be all in vain, for it is as true as it was when Tom Appleton made the best American joke over a century ago, that 'good Americans when they die go to Paris.' And not-so-good Americans want to go there while they are still alive.
It is a tribute of a kind that all the ills of the dollar are attributed to the President of the French Republic. Of course, highly intelli- gent commentators, like the leader-writers of the Wall Street Journal, don't write this non- sense. If they want a devil theory of what is wrong with the dollar, the devil is more LaT than General de Gaulle. Well-informed com- mentators, observing the demands for a boy- cott on Chanel Number Five and and Modt et Chandon, point out that France buys three times as much from the United States as the United States buys from France. Others point out that the refusal to go 'all the way with taf in financial matters is not confined to Paris; the gnomes of Zlirich, Frankfurt, even of Rome (or Milan) have taken an unsenti- mental view of the dollar and have imposed conditions for aid. These conditions are not as severe as those imposed on Mr Callaghan, but they are conditions. And some Americans, off the record, agree with the gnomes. The unkindest thing I have heard said about the programme from the ranch on New Year's Day was: 'this is pure -Wilsonism.' And. this comment by an important federal official was a knock, not a boost.
I don't propose to give an opinion on the justice of this verdict or on criticism of the policy of the 'Fed' (the Federal Reserve Board) and the Treasury. My opinion would be worth- less anyway. But I am struck by the degree that economic disaster in Britain and economic difficulties in America, have revealed how much ?es Anglo-Saxons' behave as the General has asserted they always do. For it is assumed as a right that all good men must come to the aid of Britain and the United States. Perhaps they will, but I doubt it, and the missions hurriedly dispatched to solvent countries like Germany and Japan will get, I fear, a dusty answer. Bankers are gnomes everywhere. (An American banker friend of mine, with special European interests, asked me recently, 'Why thegnomes of airich? The gnomes of Geneva are worse but they keep a Calvinistic silence and get away with murder.') The General's manners are so bad, de- liberately bad, that they often conceal what he is .saying. (I say deliberately bad, for the General lives up to the famous definition of a gentleman by Cardinal Newman: 'A man who never gives pain by accident') But few, people seem to note that by banning American investment in Europe um is carrying out the General's wishes. I think, with M Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, that the General is wrong and that the European reply to le deli amen& cain must be much more sophisticated and revolutionary. But the General and the Presi- dent are in agreement if not in cahoots.
But why is all the wrath concentrated on General de Gaulle? In part, in America, it is a deception d'amour—Lafayette etc. In part, it is the indignation of a very rich and ! pompous man who is caught in an embarrass-ti ing situation. It was illustrated, ten or so yearsil ago, in an admirable New Yorker drawing byri Peter Arno. It showed two cops bringing in af: very strayed reveller, white tie awry, dress coat 1, disordered. One cop says to the desk sergeant, 'He says we can't do this to him.' An example of this was provided a few days ago by a prominent and enlightened Senator, Henry Jackson of Washington (a state that depends more than most on military orders, by the way). Mr Jackson announced that de Gaulle was a senile old man and that the United • States would not allow him to assume the leadership of Europe. That was that. 'Scoop' Jackson moved up from the House to the . Senate a month before I published, in Harper's Magazine, in December 1952, an article under the title of 'The Illusion of American Omnipo- tence.' If it was an illusion then, it is more of an illusion now when- the United States, mutatis mutandis, is in Vietnam in the ludicrous position of Britain in South Africa, 1899-1902. It is an annoying position for a great power to be made ridiculous by a small power, but as Housman wrote: 'Tis true there's better booze than brine, But he that drowns must drink it.'
So it all comes back to the maddening frus- tration of the Vietnam war; and if General de Gaulle didn't exist, he'd have to be invented. Meantime, Senator Jackson might do worse than read my essay, which has been reprinted and which he can buy. Here ends the com- mercial.
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