On or about January 1919, the art of diplomacy changed. The old style, favored by nineteenth-century statesmen, was a confidential affair, a conversation in a private parlor over cigars and port. The new style, ushered in by the Paris Peace Conference, was nakedly public, a matter of committees in brightly lit halls, a negotiation carried out among bureaucrats and civil servants on the world stage and reported by the international press. This modernization (and mediation) brought to the forefront what was already inherent in diplomatic practice: its investment in language, performance, and representation. Cosmopolitan and self-aware, the new style shared with modern literature, and the novel in particular, a concern with modes and strategies of both individual and international relations. Such is the overarching theme of Diplomacy and the Modern Novel, which investigates the nexus of literature and diplomacy in Britain and France from 1900 to 1960. The editors, Allan Hepburn and Isabelle Daunais, have brought together eleven insightful essays that collectively examine how novelists and diplomats practice a similar craft.
The book surveys what Hepburn, in his introduction, calls “diplomatic fiction,” an umbrella term that includes “novels by diplomats, novels about diplomacy, and narrative strategies that have common cause with diplomatic discourse” (4). While this commodious concept can make the book feel, at times, a bit unfocused, the unique structure of the volume as a whole, which alternates between British and French topics, imbues it with a kind of dialogic unity, as if performing its own diplomatic exchange. Focusing on Britain and France, Hepburn writes, the contributions explore the intricate, cross-Channel networks that shaped both modern politics and modern literature, reframing the novel as “a European or global phenomenon rather than the product solely of nation states” (4).
The eleven chapters, roughly chronological, are grouped into four subsections. The first of these, “Diplomatic Experience,” concerns diplomats who write about their experiences in fiction or autobiography. In her opening essay on the novelist and playwright William Gerhardi, Claire Davison sets the tone for the book by emphasizing how the best of diplomatic intentions often go comically awry. Gerhardi, who served as military attaché in Petrograd in 1917, turns to farce and pantomime in order to represent the failure of Allied efforts to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution in his novels Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925). Similarly, Maxime Decout discusses how Albert Cohen, a senior civil servant at the League of Nations, employs irony to undermine the deadening, bureaucratic side of diplomatic life in satirical novels such as Nailcruncher (1938) and Her Lover (1968). While Davison and Decout show how diplomacy lends itself to parody, Caroline Z. Krzakowski argues that the new forms of diplomacy emerging after the First World War required a new genre of life-writing. For example, Harold Nicolson's memoir of the Versailles Conference, Peacemaking 1919 (1933), negotiates public experiences and private impressions by drawing on experimental, modernist literary forms, especially the “new biography” developed by Lytton Strachey.
Like Krzakowski, Daunais, whose essay begins the section “Novels and Diplomacy,” highlights an evolving interwar genre, le style de la valise or “diplomatic dispatch style” practiced by French writers such as Valery Larbaud and Paul Claudel. With its emphasis on speed, mobility, and sophistication, Daunais's chapter feels like something of an outlier in a volume that tends to characterize diplomacy in terms of frustrated efforts and bureaucratic quagmires. The ensuing chapters on Joseph Conrad and André Gide are a case in point. In Conrad's fiction, Stephen Ross argues, the ideals of international cooperation founder on the shoals of realpolitik, giving way to “espionage and manipulation of foreign governments” (107). Faced with a similar dilemma, Gide embraces an art of ironic evasion while paradoxically maintaining a commitment to sincerity. As Michel Biron demonstrates, Gide's work, such as his spy spoof, The Vatican Cellars (1914), foregrounds inconsequence—the senselessness of plots and counterplots—as a counterpoint to the more Machiavellian aspects of statecraft.
One of the threads that unites the collection is the centrality of Marcel Proust, whose fictional diplomats cast a long shadow over British and French representations of ambassadorship. As François Proulx demonstrates, Proust's unpublished letters to the playwright René Peter and the Romanian diplomat Antoine Bibesco reveal that the novelist also adopted theatrical devices and diplomatic strategies in his correspondence. In the first of two essays that constitute the next section, “Documents,” Proulx contends that Proust creates his own parody of espionage, complete with codenames and encrypted messages, in order to position himself as an “informant or liaison to the world of queerness” (141). Hepburn likewise draws on unpublished correspondence in his chapter on Nancy Mitford, whom he characterizes as a writer deeply concerned with Franco-British relations. Like her letters, Mitford's novels explore the connection between individuals and states, showing how international relations begin with personal relationships.
The final section, “Foreign Affairs,” brings the conversation into the early years of the Cold War. In his chapter on Graham Greene and André Malraux, Robert L. Caserio considers how both writers use fiction to investigate the potential of action—and violence—in the stultifying world bureaucrats and statesmen. In a similar vein, Maxime Prévost analyzes the overlap between diplomacy and espionage in the lives and works of Ian Fleming and John le Carré. Finally, Maria DiBattista examines the simultaneously tragic and farcical dimension of diplomacy in the fiction of Lawrence Durrell, for whom “comic desperation is the underside of diplomatic calm” (212).
If the essays in this volume seem less than optimistic about the efficacy of diplomacy, they also reveal that diplomatic failure is art's gain. Diplomacy and the Modern Novel is a valuable contribution to an emerging subfield of literary studies: the literature of ambassadorship.
