Notebook
A senior diplomat I know was thrown out of the Foreign Office when she had a baby. She Was unmarried. Would the same have happened to a man? A reprimand, a career setback, even demotion perhaps, but the sack? The diplomatic service has traditionally been a male enclave, and its inability to take women seriously when they turn their minds to something other than arranging flowers has shown its ugly side in the outrage that has erupted over the Think Tank's report. Since the team began investigating the organisation of England's interests abroad, its work has been beset by Foreign Office leaks of an exaggerated, alarmist and distorted nature to the press, and by a peculiarly unpleasant campaign to discredit the team, directed in particular against the two women, Tessa Blackstone and Kate Mortimer. Determined not to give an eye for an eye, one member of the team Mildly complained that they had hoped for a Slightly fairer hearing. But just as the popular mind perceives the machinations of Chiang Ch'ing behind every excess of the cultural revolution, and conveniently forgets about Mao and all the other (male) Officials who worked with her, so the radical suggestions of the report have been attributed to the women who, being clever and successful, must it appears also be hard, brutal, revolutionary and purblind. Yet each member of the team devoted equal hours to the study, and all of them agreed on the recomrnendations, while the women Were not invariably the ones to advocate root canal surgery on the sensitive areas before them. Is the report so very revolutionary? when I read its contents as recounted in• The Times, I felt that here were recommendations that would redress weaknesses and extravagances in the British representation abroad that were obvious to Till'one. It is surely common sense that for Instance we do not need embassies in the Xenien, north and south; that the British `-ouncil's work — apart from sheltering a number of fine writers in its time — could be done differently; that second secretaries n travel by Metro, and not always in °filet Ial cars; that — and this is the most imporant aspect of the report — the specialist expertise of civil servants at home should be used. But to think about diplomats in practi cal terms is to debase them in their own eYes. For they see themselves fulfilling a g,rdnd, non-utilitarian office, personifying lite British spirit abroad, flying the Union J:Ick with all its connotations of romance aMi power. On being told it might he effi
!lent to combine them with the home civil
hervice, y
Lne have re aeted with the horror of members of White's told they must amalgamate with the Reform Club.
'Do you talk to your plants?' has always struck me as a nonsense equivalent of 'You've got to be Taurus.' Fun, harmless, but no one could take such theories seriously, So I was taken aback to read in Jon Stallworthy's biography. of Wilfred Owen (an Oxford paperback, and a beautiful piece of book production) that in 1917, when Owen was a patient in the Craiglockhart hospital for the victims of shellshock, he gave a talk to the Field Club, in which he declared: 'Plants have all the elements of perception, and if not consciousness, at least senscience: that they have the glimmerings of sight; that vaguely and sleepily, they feel . . . And further, taken as a whole, the Plant Kingdom exhibits what I can only call Forethought.' So I considered the notion a little more carefully. I don't endorse it — not yet, anyway — because I think that when men find fellowship with plants iii this way, when they ascribe human faculties to them, they are telling us less about the 'Plant Kingdom' than about their idea of themselves. You have man here not merely on the level of the beasts, but of the very earth itself. Owen had seen men reduced so terribly he could no longer entertain illusions about man's pre-eminence in the universe, about his mastery of creation. Owen loved botany — it was one of his earliest interests — and his anthropomorphism about plants reflects his tenderness about the men's lives blotted out in the mud around him. They were indeed at the level of poppies in the field. Our generation's fashionable belief in the sentience of flowers is similar: it mirrors our high opinion of nature and at the same time our low opinion of humanity's place in it. Flowers are as good as ourselves — perhaps better. It is when we become anthropomorphic about stones — 'You must talk to the pavement. Beg its forgiveness for walking on it' — that we shall know our opinion of ourselves has reached an all-time low.
Tuning in to the radio as I drove along Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, 1 heard a voice come over under the whirr of helicopter blades. 'I can see um bad congestion building up urn on the San Diego Freeway, southbound, between exit 22 and exit 35. Best avoid. This is um Francis Gary Powers.' Gary Powers, who died last week, had swopped reconnoitring Russian installations fronv the air to traffic watching for a Los Angeles radio station. It was, I thought, a particularly Californian and economic use of resources. Would the Krogers be acceptable in Moscow as radio fitters, or telegraph engineers? When Gary Powers' U2 plane disappeared over the Soviet Union in 1960, Eisenhower thought that, like a good American boy, Powers had swallowed his poison capsule (CIA regulation issue) and autodestructed plane and self. He therefore informed the American people that Powers was not a spy and had not been trespassing in Russian territory. When Powers then appeared, on film, making a full confession of his crimes, Americans realised — and, according to Richard Reeves, the political commentator, it was a turning point for his entire generation — that the President was lying, that Presidents would tell lies. It was a first step towards that scepticism about authority which has coloured American idealism for the last decade. Powers was one of the first people to funk something without shame. He refused to do the right thing by his bosses, and did his own instead. He became a prototype of the individual standing up against the establishment for his own survival, and when the public understood this, and did not vilify him on his return in 1962, he prepared the way for the climate of opinion that Made draft-dodging an act of conscience, not cowardice. There were no white feathers during the conscription for Vietnam.
A friend of mine who writes short stories sent one to the New Yorker — at their request. It was about a man and an ape. The answer came back: terrific, wonderful, we love it. But it is our house policy not to publish stories with animal narrators. Could he please send mOre work? He did so, sending a story set on the West Coast, in which a sexual incident of a bizarre nature took place. Again the answer came back: terrific, wonderful, we love it. But it is house policy not to publish stories set in California. Could he change the locale, perhaps? At this point my friend decided to try the same story at Esquire. The answer came back: terrific, wonderful, we love it. But we have used up our fiction quota for this year. Do you think we could publish it as your travel diary during your visit over here?
Marina Warner
Previous page
