Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Tell me about Duff Cooper.
I don’t know how many biographies of Talleyrand there are in English and in French. I’ve read several in both languages over the years, but Duff Cooper achieved an extraordinary feat with this short book. It’s only about a hundred and fifty pages long. It brings Talleyrand completely to life and covers his own life, bringing out the person he was and the achievements he had to his credit(or, as some people would say, to his discredit). In a funny kind of way, Talleyrand has the same sort of problems with his personality and so on as Kissinger. There are some people who think he was a real scoundrel, and there are others who admire him greatly.
Tell me what kind of person he was, and what his achievements were.
He was devious, crafty, a fundamental survivor. He was a priest, which people tend to forget – I think he himself forgot it fairly often. He had a fairly interesting personal life. He managed to survive and steer French foreign policy through a very difficult period during the Revolution, the Napoleonic period and post-Napoleon. He was the French representative at the Congress of Vienna, which sorted out Europe after the defeat of Napoleon, but he also served Napoleon very faithfully for a while. He had a great capacity for compromise, for staying on the right side of things, for spotting which was the right side of things and making for it. He rendered very considerable service to France, quite apart from managing to keep going himself and to survive through all sorts of difficult periods and jobs at a time in history when survival was jolly difficult.
Do you think that being devious is a key attribute for a diplomat?
No. I think it depends a little bit how you define ‘devious’. A diplomat has to understand why people are doing things, and one of the essentials in any diplomatic negotiation is to start by asking yourself what you want, what you hope to achieve, and then to ask yourself what the other guy wants and how he will try and get it, and then to be willing to sway with the punch of that and to recognise that if you are going to have an agreement you are going to have to compromise with what the other person wants. Is that devious? I don’t know, but it’s part of diplomatic skill.
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Sir Arthur Michael Palliser is the vice chairman of the Salzburg Seminar's Board of Directors and a former senior British Diplomat who worked with Ted Heath, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher.
Tell us about your third selection, a biography of the 18th and 19th century French diplomat Talleyrand. First will you remind our readers who Talleyrand was?
Well, who wasn’t Talleyrand? He was a statesman in France before, during and after the French revolution. He was able to be foreign minister under a number of different regimes when people who were deviating from the orthodoxy of the moment were getting their heads chopped off left and right. He is the poster child for landing on your feet no matter what. Because he was so thoughtful, careful and obeisant, and always took care of himself, he was deeply distrusted by everyone. And yet he was also trusted by everyone, because he was given top posts and top assignments which he always handled well and made a bundle to boot.
This was a time of cruelty and chaos when many people died for having principles. Napoleon had principles, and he brought tremendous destruction. All of the people of the Terror – Robespierre and others – were people of tremendous principle. Having principle is no guarantee against evil and destruction. When times are turbulent, sometimes survival is the best principle. One woman who knew Talleyrand at the time said of him: “One of the first things that struck me when I first talked with him was his complete lack of any illusion or of any enthusiasm.” I think what she meant was that he saw things as they were, not as he wanted them to be and not as other people saw them. That is another hallmark of prudence. But it’s always lonely.
Another word to think about prudence with in the context of Talleyrand is adaptability. Surely in everyday life, even if you’re not a French revolution-era politician, adaptability is essential.
I’m grateful that you brought that word up. I did a study many years ago of various modalities of therapy, from Freudianism all the way through to cognitive behavioural therapy. My question was about their models of mental health rather than mental illness. In other words, what is the cure designed to bring about? The interesting thing was that despite the divergence and conflict among these modalities of understanding illness, they all had the exact same model of mental health. It was exactly what you just said: Adaptability. Mental illness was seen as a rigidity of response.
Flexibility is another word for it. Flexibility means that when you have no illusions about reality then you can see what’s real. And when you can see what’s real, you can respond to it not in a stereotyped way but in a way that best serves your goals in the context of your circumstances. This is talked about all the time in the psychology of investing – poor investors have emotional relationships with their investments. They feel a tender connection to something because they own it, rather than seeing the reality that it’s just a pile of money with a label on it. Research shows that people get caught up in financial bubbles – even when they are knowledgeable about the danger of them – precisely because, unlike Talleyrand, they have a rigid and supine response to their own illusions.
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Dr Charles Foster is a therapist for individuals, couples and families. He is co-founder and research director of The Chestnut Hill Institute. He has lectured at Harvard Medical School, and with Mira Kirshenbaum he is co-author and lead researcher of over 13 books, most recently I Love You But I Don’t Trust You
