Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron

Author:William Styron [Styron, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

—Traces (Indiana Historical Society), SPRING 1995

(originally delivered as an address at the Indianapolis–Marion County Public Library, 14 APRIL 1994)

LES AMIS DU PRÉSIDENT

IN 1948, WHEN I HAD JUST BECOME OLD ENOUGH TO participate in an election, I cast my first vote for that durable old socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. This, of course, was a protest against both Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey—a throwaway vote—and I have always cast a Democratic ballot since then, although many times despairingly. And so, this past May, when I received a personal invitation to attend the inaugural of François Mitterrand as the president of France, my greats urprise was accompanied by a fleeting wonder whether the honor was not perhaps acknowledgment of that lonely vote cast thirty-three years ago. But of course not: François Mitterrand, perhaps alone among chiefs of state of our time, cares for writers more than the members of any other profession—more than lawyers, more than scientists, more even than politicians—and his invitation to me and to six other writers was a simple confirmation of that concern. This nonpolemical account is that of a partisan.

It is interesting, I think, that among les amis du président—the small group of 125 or so of us who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe for the inaugural ceremony—there were no representatives whatever of the diplomatic corps, no members of international officialdom, and a very minimum of pomp and circumstance. Interesting, too, that there were no French writers—obviously to avoid factionalism and jealousy. Two American writers stood with me, all of us dressed informally in ties and jackets: the playwright Arthur Miller and Elie Wiesel, novelist and essayist, chronicler of the Holocaust. The others, dressed similarly, were the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar from Argentina, and Yachar Kemal of Turkey. Having gathered early, a little after noon under a gray sky threatening rain, we were able to observe the other guests as they arrived beneath the great arch with its engraved roll call of battles.

What these personages represented was unequivocal: the heart and marrow of world socialism. They came almost at random, without ceremony. Willy Brandt arrived, followed by Felipe González, head of Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party. There was Olof Palme of Sweden. After him came socialist leaders Mário Soares of Portugal and Bettino Craxi of Italy. Léopold Senghor, the president of Senegal and also a poet and writer, arrived, and shortly after came Andreas Papandreou, leader of the Socialist Party of Greece. But this was not an all-male gathering. Papandreou walked side by side with a radiant Melina Mercouri, whose post as member of the Greek Parliament now competes with her career as actress. Finally, in rather somber reminder of the tragic events of Chile and the eclipse of democracy there, Hortensia Allende appeared. The widow of the slain president was accompanied by another widow, the wife of Pablo Neruda, Chile’s great poet. All in all, it was an extraordinary sight, this gathering of illuminaries and votaries of

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