The Writer and the World (51 page)

Later Crusoe makes good, in that very New World, but in the settled, beaten-down slave society of Brazil. The horror of the discovery, of being the first totally powerful man in the world: that happened a long time before.

1967

F
ROM A DISTANCE
Jacques Soustelle appears to be two men. There is the exiled politician whose cause,
Algérie française
, Algeria is France, has been destroyed. And there is the ethnologist and scholar, the imaginative interpreter of ancient Aztec life, whose first book, published when he was twenty-three, was
Mexique, Terre Indienne:
Mexico is Indian, you might say. Both careers have been remarkable and both are likely to continue. In the serenity of the last two or three years of exile, Soustelle has become a prolific scholar again.
Arts of Ancient Mexico
, published in England a few months ago, has been recognized as a major work. And he is still only fifty-five: he will not be a political exile forever.

Serenity is Soustelle’s own word. It is one of the unlikely things that has come to him in his exile which, when it began in 1962, was “dreary and dangerous.” He was then on the run, a figure of newspaper melodrama, alleged to be plotting in Italy, Portugal, Vienna.

Early in his exile he was denounced to the Italian police by a newspaper reporter who spotted him in a Brescia hotel. The name Soustelle used then was Jean Albert Sénèque. It “amused” him. (The Stoic philosopher Seneca, when he was very old, was accused of conspiring against the Emperor Nero, and was required to commit suicide.) But exile presently became less amusing. Soustelle was expelled from Italy, banned for a time by Switzerland and West Germany. After someone tried to kill de Gaulle in August 1962, French government agents became active all over Europe. During a carnival dance at a Munich hotel in February 1963, ex-Colonel Argoud, another exile, was kidnapped; he was found in Paris the next morning, badly beaten up, in a van near Notre Dame. After this Soustelle dropped out of the news. When, a year later, he was arrested in a Lausanne hotel and expelled from Switzerland, he was using a more commonplace name: Jacques Lemaire.

“Two attempts were made to kill or kidnap me. The first time I didn’t know. The second time I knew. A clumsy attempt had been made to bribe someone with $100,000. We played hide-and-seek for a few days. Then I shook him off.”

Now the pressure has lessened. France is still closed to him but he can move about freely outside. General de Gaulle is reported to have asked recently after Monsieur and Madame Soustelle and to have sent his good wishes to M. Soustelle through a common acquaintance. Mme. Soustelle still lives and works in Paris. She, too, is an Aztec scholar. She and Jacques Soustelle were married in 1932, when he was nineteen; they have no children. They keep in touch; Soustelle confirms the Paris story that the language of the Aztecs is their secret language, which they use, or used, on the telephone.

Last March, Soustelle was a candidate in the French elections in his old constituency of Lyon. Election would have given him immunity. But he would have been arrested if he had entered France to campaign; in that month a traveller saw his name prominent among the list of proscribed people at Orly airport. Soustelle sent over a tape-recorded speech. He came in second with eight thousand votes. Some people think that Soustelle should have gone to France then, that his arrest would have been a one-night affair. But Soustelle is cautious. Though he is open now to interviews and no longer feels he has to sit facing the main door of hotels, he still requires meetings to be arranged through his lawyer. And the lawyer sits in on all conversations. It is a remnant of the theatre that has surrounded Soustelle since his flight from Paris to Algiers in May 1958, when his aim was to use
Algérie française
to bring de Gaulle back to power. He was reported then to have escaped from Paris—where he was being watched—in the boot of a car.

He says it isn’t true; and all that high adventure now seems so unlikely as, among the flowers and carpets of a grand hotel in the slack season, Soustelle breaks off to consider the wine list or to ask a solicitous waiter for a packet of Players
médium.
The pronunciation is for the waiter’s benefit. Soustelle’s own English is brisk, complex, colloquial. The occasional French words he uses—
éveilleur, acharné
—are those for which there is no ready English equivalent.

Photographs emphasize Soustelle’s heaviness, his double chin, the firm set of the wide mouth, the rimless glasses and the dark pouches under the assessing eyes. But the face is mobile; eyes and lips are easily
touched with humour. He knows about wine and will talk about it, but precisely: “I know the vineyard,” “I know the owner.” He draws your attention to the cigarettes he smokes. They are Players; they hold a story. In Lyon in 1927 Soustelle won an English essay competition. The prize was a fortnight in London. He stayed in a house near Clapham Common. He travelled a lot on the Underground, and it was from a machine in an Underground station that he bought his first packet of cigarettes. They were Players; he has smoked them ever since.

His manner is like that of a university lecturer who knows his own reputation and will not be drawn beyond his own subject. “If you have nothing to say to him,” his lawyer says, “he has nothing to say to you.” Soustelle is not interested in ideas for their own sake. He always appears to speak from a well-prepared position; and this is more than an attribute of exile. He gives the impression that he came to terms with himself a long time ago, perhaps even in his precocious adolescence, and that his areas of interest have been defined by his experience: his scholarship, Mexico, the war, Algeria. He still seems able to survey his experience with wonder; he seems continually to process and refine this experience as it expands within its defined limits. It is the method neither of the scholar nor of the politician, but of both together; and it comes close to the method of the novelist, making art of egotism, creating a private impenetrable whole out of fragments which from a distance might appear unrelated.

Consider the Players cigarettes. Soustelle is conscious of them as a link with his adolescence, his early academic brilliance, his first trip to London—and the Elgin Marbles. In that fortnight he spent much time among them in the British Museum. They made him want to go to Athens; and it was only last spring, in the serenity of exile, that he was able to go. He was overwhelmed; he had expected Greek monuments to be on a smaller scale. And there was another surprise. He had always liked Roman monuments; he found he didn’t like them as much in Athens: they seemed so crude. The visit helped him to clarify his ideas about the United States and the “provincialization” of Europe. And these ideas have come directly from his experience as a scholar and politician.

Europe has been provincialized because she has withdrawn from the “wide spaces” of Africa. Civilizations are limited in space as well as in time; and this withdrawal, like the Roman withdrawal from Dacia and Britain, is “the first sign, the first wrinkles, of old age.” Rome incorporated
Gaul; France ought to have incorporated Africa. Instead, France yielded to the “idol” of decolonization and the pressures of mercantile capitalism and converted the low cultures of black Africa into
a poussière
of petty dictatorships.

“They will use what France left there to the last tractor, to the last bolt, to the last little teaspoon. After that, as in Tripolitania, they will let the goats graze where wheat formerly grew.”

True decolonization would have come from incorporation, with equal rights and an equal advance for all. But this was rejected; it was too difficult.

France has failed and has retreated across the Mediterranean into her own “hexagonal” territory not through defeat—militarily Algeria was a French victory—but through decadence, through bourgeois selfishness,
les week-ends et les vacances d’été et d’hiver
, and through racialism: the unwillingness of the French to accept that Africans, Arabs, Berbers, and the Maltese, Spanish and Greek
colons
of Algeria might also have been made Frenchmen.

All civilizations have perished; even their ruins will go one day; there is no pattern and no goal. But it is Hegelian nonsense to say that the world’s history is the world’s justice; the stoic must always fight. Ideas which do not lead to action are just dreams; action without an “ideological orientation” is only nihilistic opportunism.

So, until the serenity and release of exile, Soustelle the scholar-politician has been trapped in his dual role. The politician is only a part of Soustelle; and his political views, when separated from his experience, can be simplified and used by people to whom they give comfort. Like de Gaulle himself in 1958, Soustelle can be all things to all men.

A
LL
S
OUSTELLES
must originally have come from the area around Soustelle, a hamlet in the Cevennes which today has a population of about one hundred, many of whom are named Soustelle. Jacques Soustelle was born in Montpellier and grew up in a semi-rural suburb of Lyon. He never knew his father; his mother remarried when he was ten; his stepfather, “a very good man,” was a motor mechanic and worked at his trade until recently. The family was Protestant. Jacques Soustelle was an only child in a house which at one time held a grandfather and three aunts, one of whom managed the household. During the first war his
mother worked in a post office; later she worked in an office. “We were not lumpen-proletariat. But we were proletariat.”

It was his class teacher, “a very good man,” who suggested to Mme. Soustelle that her son should look beyond the
certificat d’études
and go to a
lycée.
He was the first of those teachers, those very good men, as Soustelle today remembers them all, who helped and guided and arranged the scholarship examinations which led to Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure when he was seventeen, the
agrégation
and the diploma in ethnology three years later. “By the time I was twenty I had sat twelve competitive examinations. I wasn’t very good in mathematics, but I came first in everything else.” In Paris he had also ghosted a Fourier anthology and some detective stories, to supplement his scholarship money; and he gave lessons.

He had always read a lot, and his interests had set early. He read natural history and history; even as a boy he liked reading about the Roman Empire in its third-century decline, “that majestic and terrible spectacle”; and a taste for Jules Verne had led on to books of travel and books about exotic peoples. In Paris his thoughts turned naturally to ethnology after he met three scholars who were outstanding in the subject. Paul Rivet was one of these. Rivet was director of the Musée de l’Homme, then the Musée d’Ethnographie. Soustelle worked in the Musée de l’Homme for half the day, among the artefacts of the people he studied. To him these artefacts were works of art and not quaint; and through them he felt linked to the makers. He had developed the almost religious feeling that the finest and most comprehensive study was Man. About this time some dancers from New Caledonia came to Paris, and Soustelle was able to spend an evening with them. He remembers it as a privilege, part of his luck.

The peoples of Oceania—visited for the first time in 1945, when he was de Gaulle’s Minister for the Colonies—were then his special interest. But Paul Rivet had visited Mexico in 1930 and had come back enthusiastic about the Otomí tribe, about whom little work had been done. Rivet said he would send Soustelle out to Mexico, where there was a French cultural mission, if Soustelle became
agrégé.
Soustelle shifted his interest to Mexico. And Rivet was as good as his word. The
agrégation
results came out in August 1932; in October Soustelle and his wife—they had not long been married—sailed for Mexico.

The Soustelles worked among the Otomí in Central Mexico. They
also worked among the very small tribe called the Lacandones in the south-east. In the rainy season the Soustelles went to Mexico City. There they fell among Mexican intellectuals; they became friendly with the painter Rivera. “There was still something of the post-revolutionary fervour, a general awareness of the Mexican past. I remember that someone even organized a
velada
, a vigil, in honour of the old Aztec god Quetzal-coatl. On the other side there were people, sometimes of Indian ancestry, who thought that the Indian past was bloody and barbaric and should be forgotten. Of course I took the Indian side. But Mexico can be neither Indian nor Spanish. It is what it is: Indian and Spanish.”

The Aztec universe, as Soustelle has described it, was fragile and unstable. The world had been destroyed more than once before and was going to be destroyed again. Destruction could be stayed only by a continual offering of human blood. “I never thought of human sacrifice as a barrier to my understanding of the Aztecs. I was imbued very early with the idea of the relativity of human morals.” In Soustelle’s writings this sacrifice becomes the tragic, ennobling, wearying act of men determined to keep their world going. But destruction came. Between 1519 and 1521 the Spaniards smashed the head and heart of the developing civilization. If the Aztecs had been left alone, Soustelle thinks, they would have taken Mexico into the equivalent of the Meiji era in Japan. And, strangely, in his writings there is little anger at the destruction, and little regret for what might have developed. “The Spaniards couldn’t have acted otherwise. And we mustn’t forget the efforts some Spaniards made to record and defend; or that they made possible the society in which Indian life was to reawaken.”

It was this Mexican experience—so large, so complete: grandeur, destruction, decadence, incorporation, new life—that Soustelle sought twenty years later to apply to Algeria: the equation of Mexican Indians, who had only Mexico, with Arab guerrillas, who could look to a vast Muslim world, which had once just failed to overrun Europe itself.

S
OUSTELLE
was in Mexico, vice-president of a conference of Americanists, when the war broke out. He took a Dutch ship to Ramsgate and made his way to France to join the regiment in which he had done his military service in 1936. He had nothing to do for some months. Then he
was recruited into the Ministry of Information which the Daladier government was establishing. He was sent back to Mexico and was there when France fell. He was prepared then to be an exile forever. He thought he would go to Canada and serve in a French Canadian regiment. But a friend in the British Consulate told him that there was a French general in London who was setting up an organization. Soustelle sent a cable to London; after three days he got a reply from one of de Gaulle’s aides.