Centrepiece

The reluctant prodigal

Colin Welch

As I tried to convey in my Daily Mail sketch, M. Mitterrand is now about as insubstantial a figure as a French President Could be. The flowing abstract rhetoric is still there, the name-dropping references Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, `Shursheer — which prove him a widely if not deeply read man. But behind the façade yawns now a void, empty save disconnected remnants of the socialism he once embraced, dead lumber deposited by the socialist he once was — vague allusions, for instance, to 'North and South', to the third world, to the 'mobilisation' of technology. `Mobilisation' — one of the many military terms so dear to socialists, under cover of which they seek to order about societies they cannot understand, to remedy by discipline and barked commands the ill effects of governing against the grain.

No longer a socialist, M. Mitterrand is not anything else. He is suspended be- tween two worlds, one dead, the other Powerless to be born. He has undergone no Damascus conversion. Deprived of old lights, he sees no new ones. His reluctant `Thatcherism' is not an enlargement but a reduction of his former self, a shadow.

Whatever he has done in France has been either the opposite of what he prom- ised to do or has produced results opposite to those promised. His misfortunes have in effect performed on him a sort of political, economic and philosophical lobotomy. They have removed the parts of his brain which gave him whatever substance and Coherence he had. He remains self- Confident, polite, serious, eloquent in his mirthless way, but hollow now, a zombie. His speech revealed as little of this as of anything else. Voids do not declare them- selves: they must be inferred. More reveal- ing in their way were some of his remarks to Diana Geddes in the Times. Take this, for instance: 'The great difficulty is that I have to lead France at a time when the effects of the economic crisis are still very severe, which means that I cannot imple- ment the policies which I intend to pursue to the extent that I would wish'. What an astonishing thing for a socialist, if he were one, to say!

Socialism for socialists is not just an engine for appropriating the fruits of capi- talism and distributing them to the needy. If it were, a severe crisis would naturally and inevitably bring it to an abrupt halt: no fruits, no socialism.

But no: socialism for socialists is, among other things, an engine for dealing with severe crises, for avoiding, surmounting, Curing and abolishing them. It is meant to be more efficient and productive than capitalism, resolving contradictions, re- leasing new energies, diverting to useful purposes what is now squandered by rich and useless parasites, creating new wealth. If M. Mitterrand were a socialist, he would think socialism just what the doctor ordered for a severe crisis, urgently neces- sary rather than inappropriate or possibly damaging. If his programme were a social- ist one, and if he believed in it, he would think a severe crisis exactly the right time, rather than the wrong one, to implement it.

As it is, he boasts of having carried out two thirds of it, and of producing changes in France's economic, social and institu- tional structures, 'the like of which we have not seen since the First Empire'. A socialist might expect from such momentous changes, if well judged, vast and beneficial results. But no: 'we have been hampered by the economic crisis', which imposes `limitations', and 'a lot remains still to be done'.

Thus might the reluctant prodigal son boast of the silly and naughty things he once did, while gloomily deploring the constraints which prevent him from doing more. Of true repentance there is little sign: only regrets that mounting infirmities preclude the repetition of past excesses. Whatever sense there may be in M. Mitter- rand's mournful musings must lie in a belated realisation that socialism is in fact a rottenly designed ship, top-heavy, unsea- worthy, fit only for flat calm. Without this realisation, the musings are nonsensical: 'It was raining, so I took off my macintosh'; or 'no aspirin for me, thanks — I've got a severe headache.'

With senescent croaks and palsied tre- mors, though not without a certain interest, I studied the youthful transves- tites pictured for our delectation in a recent YOU, the Mail on Sunday's magazine. Entitled 'The Third Sex comes of age', Peter Martin's accompanying text related how 'fashionable androgyny has caught on — months ago in London, and now it's buzzing round the more exclusive kids' niteries nationwide like a trendy hormone' (or perhaps like a trendy whore moaning?).

What held my attention? Was it some obscure sexual attraction, some long- suppressed elective affinity, some unacknow- ledged desire to deliver my grim copy to the Spectator arrayed, like the retired major in an early Anthony Powell novel, in a tea gown and picture hat? It is hard to deny such speculations. In our psyche, as in Bluebird's castle, there are many cham- bers, some dark and cobwebbed, some kept securely locked. Who knows what goes on in them?

Nor can I wholly accept Peter Martin's disarming view: 'No coincidence that cross- dressing is so blatantly asexual. For, however it exercises the mind and pre- judices, it excites the amorous instincts not at all.' Certainly my own prejudices were exercised like mad. But I fancy that what sent them shinning up the wall bars and swinging on the trapezes was precisely a `blatant' attempt to excite amorous in- stincts by means novel, outrageous and arresting, if also tragically or ludicrously unsuccessful. What attracts, attracts; what strives obscenely to attract may powerfully disturb without attracting.

`Novel' is certainly a debatable word to use in a culture graced by Cherubino (a distinguished admiral once confided to John Mortimer how stirred he had been as a boy by those little breeches and that sword), Leonora and Oktavian, not to mention Rosalind, originally boy playing girl dressed as boy. But traditional cross- dressing seems to work in only one or two ways. Familiar, piquant and attractive to us is only girl in boy's clothes or adolescent boy playing girl. Sung by a fat Heldentenor, the Marschallin might fail to charm; and the spectacle of hideous oafs in a kids' nitery heavily made up and dressed as prostitutes is still novel, seems unnatural and is bound to raise doubts about the future of our civilisation.

And hideous oafs on the whole they were! One on the cover, reappearing, I think, inside, with short 1930s hair on one side, long tresses, pink, gold and mauve hanging down the other, was not without an ambiguous allure, rendered controver- sial by heavy five-o'clock shadow: on Spanish ladies, however, a slight mous- tache has been admired. As for the rest, what freaks and frights, not at all asexual but repellent in a deeply sexual way!

In his marvellously amusing Music Ho! (`Jung at the prow, Freud at the helm'), Constant Lambert declared exhibitionism in music tolerable or even irresistibly charming when the exhibitor was, like Rimsky-Korsakov, naturally well-formed and graceful. Horrible by contrast the exhibitionism of one as ugly and deformed as Hindemith (Lambert's view, not wholly mine), who proudly displayed, exposed and exhibited what, like the multi-coloured pudenda of an ape, were better veiled!

On the other hand, old Treitschke said in favour of the German princes — I think he had those of Wurttemberg specially in mind — that they served the cause of virtue despite themselves, by practising their vices in such a coarse, blatant and odious manner as to render them repulsive to all good citizens. Perhaps the 'fashionable androgyny' of our day will have like salutary results, warning rather than seduc- ing. How I doubt it, in an age when bad taste, ugliness and falsehood travel by jet and satellite, good taste, truth and beauty in a creaking wheelbarrow!