Leopardville, UNESCO
I should say something here about that curiously diaphanous and nebulously disembodied body called Unesco where mother worked then, not so much because of the political importance it may or may not have had, but because of the unpaternalistically benevolent role it definitely played in all our lives. It served mother well enough in 1963 and James and I made ends meet by working for Unesco on-and-off when we were older, even though at the time of which I am speaking we only set foot there to have lunch with mother, at the cafeteria or the restaurant.
Happily oblivious as we were then of the serious things going on in the world and the endless difficulties that prevented it from progressing, the name Unesco represented little more to us than a series of letters having something to do with culture and of which the first two stood for United Nations. It was a big world with lots of exciting things in it to be discovered, so naturally we tended to ignore the boring ones, which by default included anything which was known by a set of initials. By that time Western society had slipped into the deplorable habit of referring to things by acronyms such as Nazi for National Socialist, USSR for you-know-what, and Unesco for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which was admittedly a lot to say en passant.
We didn’t like official institutions s whatever they were called, and thought, like Brassens, that the only things worth doing were the ones you did on your own or with at very most two friends. We thought that politics was a rip-off that did no good for anyone except the politicians themselves, and what could have been more political than the United Nations, from which Unesco sprang? We did vaguely know that the yoo-en, as it was pronounced in abbreviation, was founded after the Second World War in the general élan to do what could be done to avoid a Third one, which sounded good enough and gave Manhattan a rather sleek office building by the East River.
But no group – and here is why I hate politics - is worth more than its worst member. The people who spoke at the UN were mostly autocrats and career diplomats vying for advantage, and many of them didn’t come from real nations at all, but geographical accidents fabricated from the remnants of empires. Their long-winded leaders were a parody of the old school of European politics, rather than egalitarians with the “transparency” which the UN was always desperately calling for. Neither were these pseudo-nations united, since from the very start they used the struggle between America and Russia to sell their votes to Russia, ruining every referendum and casting a pall over that elusive thing called cooperation on which the UN was based.
Still, the cultural offshoot of the United Nations seemed different, if only because people found it easier to agree about abstract things like art, architecture and scientific knowledge than sordid politics, which gave so few the chance to gain so much. Thus it was that just after the war an enlightened French premier asked for the fledgling organization, which sprung from the rib of an earlier body, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, to be located not in New York like the UN but in Paris, which was itself a symbol of culture and civilization, as well as of fun and pleasure.
Unesco’s French beginnings were appropriately romantic, comme il s’en faut. First it functioned in a hotel which had just been vacated by the German army and then in a chateau near Paris donated by a Swedish millionaire. The noble idea of “industrialized” countries (the word “civilized” to distinguish one nation from another was a thing of the colonial past) joining together to bring culture in all its forms to poor or “underdeveloped” was embraced so enthusiastically that contributions poured in from associations and individuals. By the end of the fifties Unesco could afford to construct its own “house”, the sprawling, wishbone-shaped office building south of the Hôtel des Invalides and the École Militaire. The land had been the site of the barracks of the cavalry school and was donated by the French government.
This not really very beautiful building was designed in the cast-concrete Brasilia style which was popular after the war, “functional modern”. But it was still awesomely referred to by Parisians as the maison de verre for the endless rows of windows in its curving walls, when mother worked there in 1963, during its fifth year of existence.
Beautiful or not, for us it was like having a gleaming piece of the future, not to say of America, in the heart of musty old Paris. We had not yet learned to fear newness then, nor America, and these first stirrings of things to come were uncritically and elatedly welcomed. The magical word UNESCO conjured up all sorts of hopeful, radiant things about the world that we felt was being born. It stood for the liberation of exotic lands with their colourful costumes and customs, full of fine people proud of their traditions but also grateful for the help we could give them in learning how to survive on their own.
One day in the future the word Unesco will sound to everyone, as it does already to many, like an antiquated brand of refrigerators or margarine. But the effect it had on us then was uplifting and encouraging. The huge building itself was triumphantly international, so we felt at home there, and the lobby and the walls, as well as the magazines it published, the exhibits it held, were one great advertisement for modernity, for modern art as the art of the future, of freedom.
The maison mère was designed and decorated from top to bottom by the most original architects from places not then associated with modern anything like Brazil and Italy. There was marble in the garden by the English sculptor Henry Moore, and a huge mobile of painted sheet metal by Alexander Calder hung in the lobby. The walls were covered with the paintings of Picasso and Joan Miró from Spain and painted with the murals of Tamayo, which I was admiringly familiar with from Mexico. There was an avant-garde version of a Japanese garden made with rocks brought from Japan, in a half-enclosed courtyard.
Today, I would trade all of it for a single Sienese ikon, but then it meant something very personal to us. A Simone Martini or a Duccio di Buoninsegna, I already knew from my visit to Italy, were deeper and more intense, more lovingly and artfully made. As objects of beauty they were far superior to what we were making in the 20th century. But the kindergarten cut-outs in primary colours, the blobby shapes like melting ice-cream cones, the whimsical squiggles and doodles and the women with lop-sided faces of the new ikons spoke in a language we saw as our own. They made us feel that we were part of something adventurous and intelligent, just like crusading knights felt strong and good when they cried Deus volt! They were our sacred trappings, and when our faith lost force they went back to being what they were, like coaches and pumpkins, even if we went on swearing by them, some for longer than others.
Things had already moved so fast in 1963 that Unesco’s euphoric beginnings in the years after the war were already being looked back on nostalgically by the tiny clutch of “old-timers” mother met there. Among the free spirits who got things going then was the first Director-General, Oxford biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley who wrote Brave New World, one of my favourite novels. Its assemblies were electrified by such 20th century prophets as Jean Piaget, who founded the modern school of child psychology, and Teilhard de Chardin, the humanistic priest who urged fellow Christians to give credence to evolutionary Darwinism. They were the pioneers of an auspicious beginning.
But Unesco was easier to launch than to keep flying, like so many endeavours which count for their success on men’s unstinting unselfishness. Even the austere morals of the monks of Cluny, who for the first half century after the Order was founded lived in poverty, working each day in the fields before they prayed for their patrons, turned into full-time supplicants with uncalloused hands and hired farmers, when the monastery’s burgeoning wealth made them lose sight of the Higher Purpose.
Things happened faster in the 20th than in the 11th century, though, and in scarcely a decade the ground-breaking visionaries had gone their different ways, not being office denizens by nature. Unesco was taken over by professional bureaucrats who wanted a “cushy” job, by jaded gentlemen, not to say parasites, who were often Oxford and Cambridge men but whose faith in the future of mankind was less than firm. A post at Unesco meant a large, tax-free salary and an expense account that included travel, rent and private schools for the children. A translator recruited in Argentina told mother that the organization paid for his piano to be shipped all the way from Buenos Aires!
That was why Unesco soon became a gravy train for over-educated, under-motivated characters who couldn’t make it anywhere else – “ineffectual intellectuals”, as mother called them. In an ironically unintentional way Unesco seemed to have been created to suit their needs, since thanks to Prime Minister Léon Blum during his short tenure in office after the war, the organization set up shop in Paris where “everyone who was anyone” wanted to live. Mother was the secretary to the Press Officer and brought home juicy bits of gossip almost every day, about intrigues and affairs and abuses of personal influence, as well as rumors of sexual intercourse being had behind locked office doors, followed by unwarranted salary increases and promotions. She made working there sound like a cocktail party without drinks, although they made up for that after hours, like social get-togethers where people stopped now and then to do some paperwork.
What killed the “real” Unesco, and what was already killing it then, was that no one really knew what it was supposed to produce, and that what it did produce was not measurable. All those vaguely defined lofty principles got swamped in a hothouse of steering committees to fight against illiteracy, far-ranging projects for stimulating arts and crafts and on-going campaigns to protect ancient monuments. The profusion of possibilities with limitless funds available to “implement” them, as the house jargon put it, created a jungle in which it was all too easy to do what you wanted, or do nothing at all.
But while the Romans lay about eating grapes, the barbarians – in this case from the south rather than the north – were restlessly gathering on the borders. With more and more African colonies gaining independence and joining the United Nations as member states, and each one getting a vote in the Assembly, they used their new power to rise from the passive role of recipients of aid to active dispensers of it, from offices essentially taken away from white men in Geneva or Paris.
So it was that, by the time mother worked there, the dissolute scions of the dissolving empires found their altruistic functions being usurped by the very people whom they were meant to benefit. But while the white men were generally apologetic about their lack of serious commitment, their new ebony-skinned colleagues saw their European assignments as nothing more nor less than momentous promotions of their own selves. Hand-picked in their festering lands from the tribe of the local despot to stamp documents in his makeshift ministeries, trained by their colonialist masters present or previous in English, French and Belgian universities, they came to Unesco in their immaculate European clothes intent on trumpeting their own personal importance, rather than any humanitarian principles.
Mother often told us, over her lamb curry dinners, how fights broke out over the slightest departure from protocol between the European and African camps. We seldom learned what the blacks said about the whites, but the whites talked – among themselves – about little else than this their post-colonial burden. One of them was mother’s boss Richard, very much the hard-bitten, hard-drinking foreign correspondent pithily described in pre-war novels written by Eton and Oxford men. He had seen most of the African colonies first go independent and then to pot, one after the other, so he didn’t have many illusions about the caliber their envoys whose utterances he now had to report on as Press Officer for Unesco.
He would stagger out of meetings that got held up for hours simply because the man from Ghana and the man from Senegal couldn’t agree with one another on the wording of some statement or resolution. When the man from Ghana objected to the wording proposed by the Belgian delegate (the Africans only ever objected to points of form, not content), it was easier because the objection was invariably accepted, just to save time. At meeting’s end, Richard came moaning into the safe harbour of his office, “Joan, we taught’em how to speak English and French and now they never shut up!”.
He then sat down to dictate to her his coverage of the solemn event, amid a lot of raucous jokes which the Africans would not have found amusing. As it was they never, to anyone’s knowledge, ever had any direct evidence of the mirth they aroused, except on one occasion and, I have the dubious honour of saying, due to a disastrous typing mistake made by mother.
Richard was dictating his notes from an interview with the delegate from Leopoldville, then the name of the Congolese capital Kinshasa, and to relieve the bureaucratic boredom hammed it up by saying that the man was from “Leopardville”. Mother laughed so much that she failed to make the necessary change and write it down correctly. The proofreader didn’t catch the errata and it went to press as is.
The next day people gathered in the corridors tittering with laughter – white rather than black laughter I imagine – at the press release presenting the distinguished delegate from Leopardville. When the concerned party read it, he stormed into Richard’s office with his eyeballs popping, indignantly demanding an explanation. “You should have seen him”, mother told me, “so proud of his natty suit and shiny shoes, and then we made him sound like some sort of jungle chieftain in animal skins!”.
Richard abjectly explained that it was all the fault of his stupid secretary, but since mother was still very fresh and pretty for a woman of forty-two (women aged faster then) and he was very fond of her, she was neither sacked not sanctioned. Unesco was a sort of planet where once you were accepted by the tribe you could do no wrong, just like in Africa. Even the misused man from Léopoldville, after fiercely rolling his eyes at mother when she was pointed out as the culprit, tried to date her the next day when they met in the elevator.
xxx