Collected Essays

  One visitor replying to a polite formal enquiry of the Pope said that there were two Masses he would always remember: one was at 5.30 in the morning at a side altar, in a small Franciscan monastery in Apulia, the Host raised in Padre Pio’s hands marked with the black ugly dried patches of the stigmata: the other was the Pope’s Jubilee Mass in Rome, the enormous crowd pressed into St Peter’s, and men and women cheering and weeping as the Pope passed up the nave, boys flinging their Scout hats into the air: the fine transparent features like those on a coin going by, the hand raised in a resolute blessing, the smile of ‘deep affection’, and later the Pope alone at the altar, when the Cardinals who served him had stepped aside, moving with grace and precision through the motions of the Mass, doing what every priest does every day, the servant of the servants of God, and not impossibly, one feels, a saint.

  But how much more difficult sanctity must be under the Michelangelo frescoes, among the applauding crowds, through the daily audiences with the bicyclists and the tram conductors, the nuns and the ambassadors, than in the stony fields of Apulia where Pio is confined. It is the strength of the Church in Italy that it can produce such extremes, and exactly the same thought came to one kneeling among a dozen women one early morning in the Franciscan monastery, and pressed among the cheering crowds in St Peter’s. lit was not after all the question, can this Thing survive? it was, how can this Thing ever be defeated?

  1951

  3. Eighty years on the Barrack Square

  THIS book is hardly more for general reading than is a Manual of Infantry Training: the comparison is not too loosely made.*12 Here and there, as I hope to show, flashes of illumination occur, phrases typical of the old man we learned to love, but the greater part of the book, begun when Angelo Roncalli was fourteen years old at the minor seminary of Bergamo and concluded in 1962, a year before the Pope’s death, is a record of retreats, spiritual exercises, meditations.

  It begins with a section called ‘Rules of Life to be observed by young men who wish to make progress in the life of piety and study’ and it ends in old age with a section ‘Summary of great graces bestowed on a man who thinks poorly of himself’. Open the book at random anywhere and you may be discouraged: ‘I will observe the greatest caution and reserve in my conversation, especially when speaking of others. Free and open-hearted, yes! but always with prudence’ (age twenty-two, a seminarist in Rome); ‘Know how to preserve silence, how to speak with moderation, how to refrain from judging people and their attitudes, except when this is an obligation imposed by Superiors, or for grave reasons’ (age sixty-four, Papal Nuncio in France).

  How dull it often seems, this long discipline on the barrack-square from boyhood to old age, and then suddenly a phrase occurs, not couched in the terms of the King’s Regulations, and we are in the presence of the saint we knew, with his genius for simplicity – ‘I really need a good box on the ears’, ‘I have always been a bit crazy, a bit of a numskull, and more than ever so in recent days. This is all my virtue amounts to!’ He was still the raw recruit aged eighteen, when he wrote that, but surely there has seldom been so unchanging a character from youth to age. He describes, at a much later period, his imagination as ‘the crazy inmate of the house’, and he seems always to have been aware of a kind of divine folly. He is Patriarch of Venice when he writes: ‘I would not mind being thought a fool if this could help people to understand what I firmly believe.’

  I found it a great aid in reading the Journal to concentrate on certain threads which run throughout: one thread was the sense of time passing. When Roncalli was elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven he had no illusion about the motive of the Conclave (‘everyone was convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional Pope’), but the sense of so much to do and so little time frightened him not at all, for that sense had always been there – ‘the crazy inmate’ had seen to that. ‘Time is running out. Today at twenty-one I must start at the beginning again’, and in his fiftieth year, ‘Everything to be done at once, speedily and well: no waiting about, no putting lesser things before the more important.’

  No wonder that there is an exultant note in his eightieth year – the exercises have borne fruit, the barrack square had been no wasted ordeal, he ‘vas prepared. ‘Here I am, already on the eve of the fourth year of my pontificate, with an immense programme of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is watching and waiting.’

  Another thread I found it fascinating to pursue through the retreats and the formal conventional meditations is the presentation of his own faults. In what he considered his faults we see so often indications of the man we loved. ‘I am really very greedy about fruit. I must beware, I must watch myself.’ ‘I tend to linger too long in the kitchen after supper, talking things over with my family.’ ‘The longing to read newspapers.’ ‘Excessive mirth’ (all these at the age of seventeen); and at nineteen ‘all the words, the witticisms prompted only by a secret desire to show off how much I have studied, all my castles in the air, my castles of straw and castles in Spain’. (How many are praying now that the Vatican Council will not prove to be one of these?)

  A little later, ‘As regards purity . . . I do not feel any strong temptations contrary to this virtue – yet I must confess that I have two eyes in my head which want to look at more than they should.’ (He had a certain fear of women only possible for a man of normal passions, and he noted with relief in 1940, ‘Advancing years, when one is in the sixties like me, wither the evil impulses to some extent, and it is a real pleasure to observe the silence and tranquillity of the flesh.’) As for some of his other young faults, they amuse us and sometimes surprise us: ‘the rather mischievous expression’ (that surely he never lost), ‘the affected gesture, the furtive glance, that strutting about like a professor, that carefully-studied composure of manner, with the well-fitting cassock, the fashionable shoes . . .’

  There are a few pages in this book which, I think, all readess of any creed will find profoundly moving. They describe the day of Roncalli’s ordination as a priest in Rome. The ceremony is over, be has written to his family, and now in his joy he cannot stay indoors.

  I went out. Utterly absorbed in my Lord, as if there were no one else in Rome. I visited the churches to which I was most devoted, the altars of my most familiar saints, the images of Our Lady. They were very short visits. It seemed that evening as if I had something to say to all those holy ones and as if every one of them had something to say to me. And indeed it was so.

  Someone else, too, had spoken to him that day, and history contains few more touching scenes than this encounter between a young priest of twenty-three, who was to become the great Pope John, and Pius X, who was to become Saint Pius.

  The Pope then, still bending down, placed his hand on my head, and speaking almost into my ear said: ‘Well done, well done, my boy . . . this is what I like to hear, and I will ask the good Lord to grant a special blessing on these good intentions of yours, so that you may really be a priest after his own heart. I bless all your other intentions too, and all the people who are rejoicing at this time for your sake.’ He blessed me and gave me his hand to kiss. He passed on and spoke to someone else, a Pole, I believe: but all at once, as if following his own train of thought, he turned back to me and asked when I should be back at my home. I told him: ‘For the feast of Assumption.’ ‘Ah, what a feast that will be,’ he said, ‘up there in your little hamlet (he had earlier asked me where I came from), and how those fine Bergamasque bells will peal out on that day!’ and he continued his round smiling.

  The illustrations are many and satisfying, one in particular. Pope John is caught by the camera talking to a little girl sick with leukemia – he speaks with extreme gravity and she listens with the same deep seriousness. It is impossible to say which of them is the elder, which will be the first dead. He speaks to her as to an equal.

  1965

  THREE REVOLUTIONARIES

  1. The Man as Pure as Luc
ifer

  THROUGHOUT the French war there was a school of thought which believed Ho Chi Minh to be dead, so unwilling were those who had encountered him in 1945 and 1946 to believe that he was a genuine Communist. One of Ho Chi Minh’s strongest opponents in the south had described him to me with unwilling admiration. Un homme pur comme Lucifer.

  When I met him*13 (I had guaranteed that I would not publish the details of our conversation) it was in a small room in Bao Dai’s former palace, over a cup of tea, and I could not believe him to be a figurehead. Another Minister was present, but a Minister known to be effacé. He was there only because I had asked to see him, and he sat silent like a small boy so long as Ho Chi Minh was with us.

  Dressed in khaki drill, with thick dark woollen socks falling over his ankles, Ho Chi Minh gave an impression of simplicity and candour, but overwhelmingly of leadership. There was nothing evasive about him: this was a man who gave orders and expected obedience and also love. The kind, remorseless face had no fanaticism about it. A man is a fanatic about a mystery – tablets of stone, a voice from a burning bush – but this was a man who had patiently solved an equation. So much love had to be given and received, so many sacrifices demanded and suffered. Everything had contributed to the solution: a merchant ship, the kitchens of the Carlton Grill, a photographer’s studio in Paris, a British prison in Hongkong, as well as Moscow in the hopeful spring days of the Revolution, the company of Borodin in China.

  ‘Let us speak as though we are at home,’ he said, and I wondered whether it was in the Carlton Grill that he had learnt his easy colloquial English (only once did he fumble for a word). I am on my guard against hero-worship, but he appealed directly to that buried relic of the schoolboy. When he put on his glasses to read a paper, bending a little down and sideways, shifting his English cigarette in long, bony, graceful fingers, the eyes twinkling at some memory 1 had stirred, I was reminded of a Mr Chips, wise, kind, just (if one could accept the school rules as just), prepared to inflict sharp punishment without undue remorse (and punishment in this adult school has lasting effect), capable of inspiring love. I regretted I was too old to accept the rules or believe what the school taught.

  He was working fourteen hours a day, but there was no sign of fatigue. He got up to return to work (the National Assembly was meeting the next day), and his socks flapped as he waved back at me from the doorway, telling me not to hurry, to stay as long as I liked, to have another cup of tea. I could imagine them flapping all across the school quad, and I could understand the loyalty of his pupils.

  There was sadness and decay, of course, in Hanoi, as there couldn’t help being in a city emptied of all the well-to-do. For such as I there was sadness in the mere lack of relaxation: nothing in the cinemas but propaganda films, the only restaurants prohibitive in price, no café in which to while away the hours watching people pass. But the peasant doesn’t miss the cafe, the restaurant, the French or the American film – he’s never had them. Perhaps even the endless compulsory lectures and political meetings, the hours of physical training, are better entertainment than he has ever known.

  We talk so glibly of the threat to the individual, but the anonymous peasant has never been treated so like an individual before. Unless a priest, no one before the Commissar has approached him, has troubled to ask him questions, or spent time in teaching him. There is something in Communism besides the politics.

  I thought with more sympathy now of the southern President Diem, for in Saigon where there is nothing else but politics he represents at least an idea of patriotism. He has some words in common with Ho Chi Minh, as Catholicism has some words in common with Communism, but he is separated from the people by cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign advisers droning of global strategy, when he should be walking in the rice-fields unprotected, learning the hard way how to be loved and obeyed – the two cannot be separated.

  One pictured him there in the Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank, brown gaze, incorruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I would write under his portrait is the Patriot Ruined by the West.

  1955

  2. The Marxist Heretic

  They seek him here,

  They seek him there . . .

  Those Yanquis seek him everywhere.

  Is he in heaven or is he in hell . . .?

  No one since the Scarlet Pimpernel has been so ‘demned’ elusive as Fidel (whom no Cuban except an enemy calls by the name of Castro). He will see you, if that is his wish, in his own good time and in his chosen place, but there will never – that is certain – be a rendezvous appointed for eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning in an office on such and such a floor in Havana. For one thing he is seldom in Havana. Cuba is a country now and not merely a pleasure-capital as it was in Batista’s day. The new apartment prepared for Fidel in the palace of the revolution holds small attraction for him, with the exception of the big toy installed there, a map of Cuba as big as a billiard table with a great switch-board enabling him to illuminate the grazing areas, the areas of sugar, coffee, tobacco. This agricultural landscape is his home.*14

  Once we nearly stumbled on him on the Isla Turiguano, the state farm in Las Villas surrounded on three sides by marshes – an island of prize cattle, prize horses, and prize pigs. We had arrived at the cowboys’ motel in the evening, but we were a day late by our schedule (cars have a way of shedding parts after seven years’ hard use), and Fidel had left that morning. At Moron we arrived at mid-day to find that he had passed the night there and moved on somewhere else. In Camaguey they knew nothing of his movements at the Party headquarters, but the secretary significantly was absent ‘somewhere’, and Fidel appeared in Camaguey soon after we left. He was always ahead of us or behind us as we drove East to Santiago and Guantenamo.

  On the second night of my arrival in Cuba, I watched him as he made one of his marathon speeches (four hours without a note) to the Congress of the Trade Unions. Knowing little Spanish I observed his physical performance rather than listened to his speech. I could have divided it like a play into acts: in the first act he was a grave formidable figure, almost motionless at the podium, the word conciencia chimed in his sentences. Then suddenly all changed to comedy and farce, as he imitated the ignorant member of a political cadre, ‘No sé. No sé.’ He began to play with his six microphones, touching, shifting, aligning them as though they were flowers; he knew exactly which one of them, if he bent above it, would emphasize best a purr, a laugh, an angry sneer, a humorous imitation. The arms moved all the time now, as he mimicked, play-acted, plucked laughter out of his audience. ‘There is no people more sensitive to ridicule than here.’ He savaged Señor Frei of Chile: you could almost see the poor man’s corpse slung over his shoulder.

  After this speech he vanished into the countryside as effectively as he had vanished ten years ago from Batista’s troops and planes into the forests of the Sierra Maestre. But not till ten days later would reports and photographs of his travels appear in Granma – the daily paper with what seems to be an odd nursery title until you remember that Granma was the boat which brought him and his eighty-three revolutionaries from Mexico to Cuba – seventy-one were dead or captured in the first week – to overthrow Batista’s dictatorship.

  This elusiveness is, of course, partly a matter of security. A gunman would find it difficult to choose the right spot at the right time, and in one of the last plots against his life, betrayed by a double agent in the C.I.A., the would-be assassins made a ruthless plan to ensure his presence at a given place at a given time. They began to shadow the car of Haydée Santamaria on her way home from work in the Casa America where she is in charge of relations with the Communist parties of Latin America. Her death, they believed, would lead them to Fidel.

  There are three principal heroines of the revolution: Celia Sanchez, who in 1956 awaited Fidel in the Sierra Maestre, Vilma Espin, wh
o fought with Raul Castro in Oriente and later married him, and Haydée Santamaria. Haydée (her surname is no more used than Fidel’s) fought in the unsuccessful attack on Moncada Barracks in Santiago in 1953. Her brother was killed there and his eyes torn out, her fiancé was killed and his testicles cut off, and the bodies were shown her in the prison. Four years later, married to Armando Hart, she fought in the Sierra. (I met her first in 1957 when she and her husband were hiding in a safe-house in Santiago on their way to the mountains.) If the assassins had succeeded in killing her, she would inevitably have been buried in the heroes’ pantheon, and her funeral would have been a rendezvous they could be certain Fidel would keep. But she noticed the lights of the following car and took evasive action.

  So there is reason enough for Fidel to make few appointments for fixed hours and to be notoriously unpunctual at his public appearances (on August 29 the curtain rose on the C.T.C. Congress an hour late). But his enemies come only from outside. He has no cause to fear an unpremeditated attack. The nation is a nation in arms, and no tyrant could long survive his constant journeys through the countryside. But the paramount motive for his travels is not personal safety; he is discovering his own country for the first time, with a sense of excitement over the smallest details. In his speech to the Trade Union delegates he said: ‘I have never learnt as much as I have when talking with workers, students, and peasants. I have passed through two universities in my life: one where I learnt nothing, one where I have learnt all that I know.’ He is a Chestertonian man who travels towards home as though it were to a foreign land.