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First lady's life never comes alive
By David Greenberg |
November 18, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IT was the vice presidency that John Nance Garner invidiously compared to a bucket of warm spit, but the role of first lady of the United States has got to be just as bad. Only Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton notched autonomous accomplishments of historical weight, though Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison also hover in the national pantheon. Sad to say, most presidential spouses - not necessarily through any fault of their own - achieve little of lasting note. Constrained by high-stakes politics and society's sexism, they can at best champion a safe, domestic cause like literacy or fitness before dissolving into the history books as yet another presidential helpmate.
If first ladies present a challenge to biographers, Pat Nixon is an especially unpromising subject. As Ann Beattie notes in "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life," Richard Nixon's wife of 53 years wrote no memoir, rare among recent first ladies. Not only did Pat Nixon abjure any aspiration to realize independent public attainments, but her values and upbringing trained her always to be courteous, proper, self-effacing and traditional in her demeanor. The opacity of "Plastic Pat" signaled both a rejection of the feminist ideas then sweeping America and, perhaps, the lack of any tantalizing spark within. Beattie calls her "a person I would have done anything to avoid - to the extent she was even part of my consciousness."Yet, Beattie insists, Pat Nixon interests her as a writer. The woman's very inscrutability, her otherness, makes her an inviting subject for the novelist to imagine. (Beattie also implies that Pat Nixon reminds her of her own mother.) And given the psychological acuity Beattie has long brought to her fiction, she might seem just the person to pull this off.
For all her psychological prowling, she never quite makes Pat Nixon come alive the way she so deftly does with her fictional creations.
In this rumination - not quite a biography, not quite a novel - Mrs. Nixon emerges, much like the standard popular image, as lonely, inward-looking and long-suffering. Experimenting with form, Beattie renders different chapters of the book in starkly different styles and voices - some in her subject's, some in Richard Nixon's, some in a more omniscient tone. In storytelling, Beattie writes, "we are not supposed to digress," but digress she does, constantly and knowingly. "Such drift seems endemic to writing about the quietly loyal and enigmatic Mrs. Nixon," she acknowledges.
Pat Nixon is ultimately too weak a character to consistently divert our focus from her endlessly fascinating husband. The gravitational pull of his sun is too strong; she floats in the outer reaches of Nixon administration lore like a minor satellite.
Writing great fiction is hard. But we should remember, particularly in our age of easy opinion, of pundit TV and content farms and Webwide blogorrhea, that writing about history and politics - and writing about it well - is hard too.
If first ladies present a challenge to biographers, Pat Nixon is an especially unpromising subject. As Ann Beattie notes in "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life," Richard Nixon's wife of 53 years wrote no memoir, rare among recent first ladies. Not only did Pat Nixon abjure any aspiration to realize independent public attainments, but her values and upbringing trained her always to be courteous, proper, self-effacing and traditional in her demeanor. The opacity of "Plastic Pat" signaled both a rejection of the feminist ideas then sweeping America and, perhaps, the lack of any tantalizing spark within. Beattie calls her "a person I would have done anything to avoid - to the extent she was even part of my consciousness."Yet, Beattie insists, Pat Nixon interests her as a writer. The woman's very inscrutability, her otherness, makes her an inviting subject for the novelist to imagine. (Beattie also implies that Pat Nixon reminds her of her own mother.) And given the psychological acuity Beattie has long brought to her fiction, she might seem just the person to pull this off.
For all her psychological prowling, she never quite makes Pat Nixon come alive the way she so deftly does with her fictional creations.
In this rumination - not quite a biography, not quite a novel - Mrs. Nixon emerges, much like the standard popular image, as lonely, inward-looking and long-suffering. Experimenting with form, Beattie renders different chapters of the book in starkly different styles and voices - some in her subject's, some in Richard Nixon's, some in a more omniscient tone. In storytelling, Beattie writes, "we are not supposed to digress," but digress she does, constantly and knowingly. "Such drift seems endemic to writing about the quietly loyal and enigmatic Mrs. Nixon," she acknowledges.
Pat Nixon is ultimately too weak a character to consistently divert our focus from her endlessly fascinating husband. The gravitational pull of his sun is too strong; she floats in the outer reaches of Nixon administration lore like a minor satellite.
Writing great fiction is hard. But we should remember, particularly in our age of easy opinion, of pundit TV and content farms and Webwide blogorrhea, that writing about history and politics - and writing about it well - is hard too.
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