An Expatriate Noted for His Capital Tales

Among the mysteries of modern life is why some people recover completely from the disease known as Potomac Fever while others suffer its symptoms eternally.

Novelist Ward Just fled Washington in 1973 to live in rural Vermont. Later there were homes in Boston and on Martha’s Vineyard. For the last 2 1/2 years, Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, have lived in Paris, not far from the cathedral of Montmartre. But the city where the former journalist first made his mark as a reporter nearly 30 years ago refuses to leave him alone.

Washington provides a significant backdrop for all of Just’s eight novels and two collections of short stories. His characters play politics, practice diplomacy. They ponder patriotism and debate moral dilemmas. Certainly moral dilemmas exist equally in Ithaca or Indianapolis, Just would willingly concede, but somehow they seem more at home in Washington, where private quandaries are magnified through massive public lenses.

‘What I Do’

“It seems to be what I do,” Just said at lunch here last week. It seems that what he writes about, over and over, are “people who one way or the other have a public life as well as a private life.”

In a front-page review New Year’s Day in the New York Times Book Review of his newest novel, “Jack Gance” (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95), Just was hailed as “the Washington novelist’s Washington novelist.” The review was written by another Washington journalist-turned-Washington novelist, Judith Martin, who ought to know.

But Just cringes at this assessment. “In the first place, no one likes to be labeled,” he said. “I think it interferes.”

His books, he insists, are not “Washington novels.”

“They are novels that happen to take place in Washington, that often have a political or journalistic context to them. They are not Washington novels any more than they are Chattanooga novels or Philadelphia novels.”

Though its central character does work as a political pollster and does go on to become a U.S. senator, “Jack Gance,” said its author, “is at least as much a Chicago book as it is a Washington book.”

Maybe Just feels so uncomfortable in the role of “Washington novelist” because he feels that someone else has already retired that particular award. The ultimate Washington novel, Just believes, is “Democracy,” written by Henry Adams in the 19th Century.

“I can’t imagine that it is ever going to be superseded. I can’t imagine anyone doing it better,” Just said.

Though Just’s novels are anything but autobiographical, there is a quality about him that makes him seem in some ways like a character from his own literary invention.

Balding, he wears the flesh-toned eyeglasses that identified the intellectual of 30 years ago. His Harris tweed jacket is olive green, a hue seldom seen since the Kennedy Administration, and virtually of museum quality. His white button-down Oxford cloth shirt is as fitting for him today as it was when he was in prep school--Cranbrook, in Bloomfield, Mich., where one of his fellow students was a young math wizard named Ivan Boesky.

Just is 53 and smokes Camels, constantly. He writes a novel every two years, still typing on his manual Smith-Corona. He reads Balzac and Conrad, and quotes from both liberally. Over lunch and a glass of red wine, preferably French, Just will summon forth also the same questions of compromise, social responsibility, power, greed and ambition that obsess the people he creates.

‘Just Plain Wrong’

“It was Balzac, I think he had Napoleon in mind, who said that leaders can’t be held to the same standards of morality as ordinary people,” Just said. “I think he is probably just plain wrong, though it is an interesting point. A President, a prime minister, an emperor has responsibilities that far outweigh those of the rest of us.”

Just speaks often of the ambiguities of politics and public life. His wife teases that he is a “marginal character,” someone who lives on the margins, or in the gray space. But Just’s own roots are anything but ambiguous.

He comes from Illinois, from a family of newspapermen. His father and grandfather alike ran the paper where Ward Just started out, the Waukegan News-Sun, north of Chicago. He jokes now that both men, long dead, “still occasionally shake their fists” at him for eschewing journalism in favor of fiction.

He had no such intentions when he went to Washington to cover the Kennedy Administration for Newsweek in 1961. Just was a star who rose quickly. His temperament and the capital’s at that time seemed molded for one another.

“There is nothing quite so exhilarating as being the youngest person in the news bureau at the opening of a new Administration, particularly with all the panache and charm of the Kennedy Administration,” Just said. “The city itself was so alive. There was a sense of purpose, but also a sense of great ambition. To adapt the ‘80s locution, there was a sense of being ahead of the curve.”

Just paused. “I think that’s a surfing expression,” he said.

New-Found Respect

After all those years of “businessmen from the Eisenhower era,” suddenly, with the arrival of the Kennedy entourage, “the intellectual became a respected figure.” And then there were “those successive disasters,” Just remembered: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and finally the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But even while Washington glittered, “I never took it all that seriously, Hyannis Port, all that,” Just said. “I came from the Midwest.”

In a radio interview that kicked off his publicity tour for “Jack Gance,” Just was reminded that around that same time, he once dug up bodies in a mass grave in the Dominican Republic to help substantiate a story on the excesses of the Trujillo dictatorship.

Just was amazed. “I had forgotten all about that,” he said later. But he quipped that after that incident, “they called me a hard-digging reporter” around Washington.

When he began reporting from Vietnam in 1965, they also called him Ernie. The reference was less to Ernie Pyle, the famous World War II war correspondent, than to Hemingway. It was Benjamin C. Bradlee, journalistic generalissimo of the Washington Post, who first attached that nickname to the reporter he brought over from Newsweek the minute he arrived at the Post.

Just wrote long, highly personal stories from Vietnam, stories where the smell of the jungle and the fear the young soldiers felt came alive on the printed page. Recognizing the power of Just’s unique form of journalism, Bradlee splashed the stories across Page 1 of the paper. Sometimes they even ran above the masthead.

The Second Phase

If Washington was Phase 1 of Just’s professional coming-of-age, Vietnam was an equally significant Phase 2. Recently, he said, “I picked up a book by Joseph Conrad that I had never read before, ‘The Shadow Line.’ ” The title, Just said, symbolizes “the shadowy line between youth and maturity. That was what happened to me in South Vietnam.”

Vietnam, Just said, was his passage. “I fit in in Vietnam. I was able to cover it, I was able to fit into the craziness.” He returned convinced that “you couldn’t live long enough to write all the stories” that came out of Vietnam.

But Vietnam also destroyed Just’s sense in the value or wisdom of fact: “You could really find a fact to support any position that you wanted.”

After Vietnam, “I really became so skeptical,” Just said. “I arrived in Vietnam in December, 1965. All the way through the end of 1966, a rational man could still believe it was conceivable that the United States might win the war, or anyway, not lose it. After Tet, you would not have said that.”

‘Such Silly Work’

When Just returned to cover the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, the process of disillusionment was complete. “I thought that was such silly work for a grown man,” Just said. “Particularly coming out of Vietnam, where you felt that you were writing such consequential stories, and here you were hanging out in these airplanes, playing bridge in hotel rooms.”

Just’s first novel, “Soldier of the Revolution,” came out in 1969. In 1973, he celebrated the publication of his first collection of short stories, “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert,” by leaving Washington for good.

It seemed then that Just had made a commitment to fiction, not fact, as a record of human events.

“It is my belief that that is the only way you can get at anything durable, anything that will last from today to tomorrow,” Just said.

Delving now into the history of his adopted home country, “I can’t imagine a better way to understand the history of France of 1820 to 1860 than to read Balzac, Hugo, Stendahl, Flaubert.

“In our own time, I can’t imagine any history of America between the wars that would benefit you in the way of reading Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Lewis or even James.

“It is not events that you are getting,” Just said. “It’s a sense of life.”

Speaking French

For now Just’s own sense of life will keep him in Paris, a city he adores, despite speaking “about 17 words of French.” He can order from a menu, get about on the Metro or buy a ticket on the French national railroad--”and that is it.”

Mostly he relies on his wife, a reporter for public radio in America, to act as translator, pleading, “I work so hard on my English in my writing.”

But recently the awkwardness of his limited command of French became embarrassingly apparent. In a paean to the life of the American expatriate novelist--television had also apparently decided that Just was obviously the reincarnation of, yes, Ernest Hemingway--the “Today” show had a crew follow Just about in his daily life in Paris.

On a visit to his local vintner’s, Just was seen ordering up a bottle of Calvados, the kind of drink of which Hemingway would certainly have approved. But when he went to sign for his purchase, Just gasped at the price.

By accident, he had bought an $85 beverage, “and all because I didn’t know how to say, ‘No, not that one--the one next to it.’ ”

His next novel, the one in his typewriter now, will concern the American expatriate life in Paris, Just said.

The books wander while he writes them, he said. “Gance,” for example, began as a short story, ballooned to a novella and finally exploded to a full-fledged novel. The critical allegorical tale at the start of “Gance” was almost the last part he wrote of it, Just said.

So for now, he said, the next book will stay put in Paris.

“There is not a Washington component in this book, as I see it,” he said.

Then he smiled. “Yet.”