corrente

This startling phenomenon comes to us courtesy of Brad DeLong. As the good professor points out, the author of this lonely good review of "My Life," Larry McMurtry,(who is also, let me point out, the author of such novels as "Lonesome Dove" and "Terms of Endearment" and "Cadillac Jack" and "Leaving Cheyenne" and "The Desert Rose" and "Texasville" and "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" and "The Last Picture Show" and "Moving On" and "Horseman, Pass By," as well as such non-fiction as "In A Narrow Grave, Essays on Texas" and "Film Flam, Essays on Hollywood" and "Sacagewea's Nickname, Essays On The American West" and "Crazy Horse," a biography, and "Walter Benjamin At the Dairy Queen," and those are only the books that I've personally read), not only likes the book, McMurtry doesn't find it necessary to include even a single sneer, at Clinton, or his wife, or at Monica, or l'affaire, or his Presidency, or indeed, at his life.

Here's how McMurtry places Clinton's in the context of American Presidential Memoirs:

William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book.

Grant's is about being a general, in what Lincoln called a big war. Clinton's is about being a president at the end of the 20th century. Grant's is an Iliad, with the gracious Robert E. Lee as Hector and Grant himself the murderous Achilles. Clinton's is a galloping, reckless, political picaresque, a sort of pilgrim's progress, lowercase. There are plenty of stout sticks to beat Clinton with, but Grant's memoirs is not one of them.

McMurtry approaches Clinton with the rich interest one expects from a first-rate novelist and essayist who has delved for years into the complexities of the American character and how it's influenced by American places, landscape and history. McMurtry makes short work of the tired and ridiculous forumulation of Bill Clinton's "character" as being reflective only of his personal failings, while remaining reflective of none of the admirable aspects of both his public and his personal life.

Bill Clinton spent most of his childhood in the small town of Hope, Ark., which, culturally, is on the western edge of the South or the eastern edge of the Midwest, depending on which way one happened to be looking. His garrulity, which in the book manifests itself as too unremitting a focus on the minutiae of governance, maybe comes from the South, while his loneliness, his slight out-of-placeness, his seeming inability to get himself to really solid ground, comes from the Midwest, where he would have grown up had his father not rolled a car off the road and drowned in a drainage ditch. He died three months before Bill was born.

Some will object to any suggestion that Bill Clinton might be lonely. Look at what he's done, they might say: Rhodes scholar, Yale Law, five times governor of Arkansas, twice president of the United States, wed and kept a smart wife, sired and raised a decent daughter, gregarious, adaptable to any American occasion, from fish fry to cow-chip throw (a sport that flourishes chiefly in Nebraska). Why, he even plays the saxophone!

All true, but he's lonely, and in the quality of his loneliness lies much of his appeal. And he does have serious appeal. Nothing in this book becomes Clinton so much as his gentle, sympathetic treatment of his alcoholic, sometimes abusive stepfather, Roger Clinton, whose name he took and whom he calls Daddy:

edit (quote from the book)

Dreiser is the novelist who would best have known what to do with Clinton, although it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote that "of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one."

Clinton has the vitality, but with it the inwardly angled gaze of a man who sees too clearly the crack in reality, the difference between what is and what might be, a sense born of all those normal things - the Cardinals, fishing, the Christmas tree and the out-of-state vacation - that somehow were never to occur again.

Try and imagine any of the Washington media tribe being able to imagine that the complications of Bill Clinton's personality, specific to him to be sure, but not all that different from most human beings, are the stuff of the great American novels. I've often wondered if any of them have actually read any of the great novels of Western civilization, or in college did they content themselves with reading the cliff notes? Of course, as super busybody top-drawer celebrity journalists, who among them has time for much dabbling in literature, or put another way, much reading of actual, genuine writers.

Yesterday, Richard Cohen, writing in the WaPo, provided some heavy-duty evidence for this theory. From the title of his column, "Good Oprah, Bad History," you should be able to summarize what Cohen has to say about Clinton and his book, else you haven't been paying attention these last twelve years.

The good news for Bill Clinton is that his book, "My Life," sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores the first day it was on sale, a record for the chain. The bad news for Bill Clinton is that the book sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores, a record for the chain. The book may make Clinton rich. It will not rehabilitate him.

On the basis of no evidence, Cohen asserts the ten million price tag of "My Life" obligated its author "to write the sort of book that could be promoted on "Oprah," by which Cohen seems to mean, one with the kind of seamy personal details that would "entice" his readers, rather than the kind of book worthy of Richard Cohen's devoted attention. He does admit the Clintons left the White House oweing millions in legal fees (that were not of their own making, please remember), but he's just as sure Mr. Clinton could have found other avenues to solvency, so the taking of the ten million becomes a moral failing. At least I think that's Richard Cohen's point. (Imagine: personal details in a memoir)

Typical of the Washington elite, Cohen is as out of touch with popular culture as he is with the haute version; never mind that Oprah has undoubtedly read more of the better books produced in the last decade than has Richard Cohen, and never mind, for just one instance, that she introduced to her book club audience one of Toni Morrison's most difficult novels, "Paradise," and never mind that Oprah made a much underappreciated film of Morrison's great "Beloved," producing the film as well as acting in it, and best of all, having the taste to select as her director, the wonderful Jonathan Demme.

And how exactly does Richard Cohen know that Bill Clinton wrote "that kind" of book? Do you really need to ask? Michiko Kakutani told him all about it; about how the book was sloppy, self-indulgent, and self-obsessed, just like Clinton's presidency. Cohen calls her review and the rest of the early ones, "eviscerating," and he includes a quote about the book being "dull," but fails to note that the source of that dullness for Kakutani is its heavy emphasis on policy and politics, and boring stuff like that. Nor does Cohen seem to notice the contradiction in decrying the book's tabloid tendencies while quoting with approval complaints about its excessive wonkery. Oh well, not to worry. All the other reviews have said the thing stinks, so Cohen doesn't have to sweat it.

A bit strange, though, the way Cohen emphasizes what other people think about the book, when surely if he is writing about it, he must have read it? Remember, we're dealing with a member in good standing of the elite commentariate, who just as surely must be the laziest occupational grouping in the history of the world.

My own hurried perusal of the tome leads me to support Kakutani.

Cohen's only personally perused example of de trop in the text is a single sentence that describes the Grand Canyon, presented without any sense of its context. Reliably and right on cue Cohen brings up the example of Grant's memoirs and Nixon's post-presidency.

To a large extent, Ulysses S. Grant's presidency was rehabilitated by his memoirs, written as the Civil War general was dying of cancer. Richard Nixon, virtually banished from Washington, wrote book after book from his exurban Elba in New Jersey. Watergate haunted him, as it should have, but slowly we came to realize that he possessed a first-class mind, keenly analytical, occasionally wise. No one could say that Nixon did not have gravitas.

That's a neat trick on the part of Grant, considering that he was writing about the Civil War and not his presidency. As for Nixon's "gravitas," I can't better Professor Delong's take on the matter.

About Bill Clinton's rehabillitation, Cohen expresses doubts that Clinton can ever move beyond "Monica," and taking that ten mil only made it less likely. Obligated by that to include the kind of personal details, like Clinton's sleeping on the couch after his confession to the Grand Jury, or the Clinton's use of family therapy, (swear to God those are the ones Cohen mentions) that would entice Oprah's audience to buy the book, and thus forced journalists to focus on the salicious and the personal in dealing with the book.

As a result, the news that initially came out of the book was mostly about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. If there is something dramatically new about the Middle East, I haven't heard about it. If there is something revealing about why health care reform went down in flames, that has not been reported either. Partly that's because the Clinton administration -- and Clinton himself -- was so bad at keeping secrets, but mostly it's because the public's attention is focused on the salacious and personal. A president who makes history is of interest mostly to historians. A president who makes personal mistakes is of interest to us all.

Larry McMurtry must have read a different book than the one Cohen perused.

It takes Bill Clinton only 69 pages to work through such disorder and early sorrow as he experienced and get himself to Washington and Georgetown University. In my opinion the crucial decision that ultimately got him where he is was his choice of Georgetown over the University of Arkansas. At the latter he would have been assured of booze, girls and football. At Georgetown he was reading Hegel, Kant, Joseph Schumpeter and others of that ilk; he also quickly found his way to Senator J. W. Fulbright's office, where he was put to work.

Dispatching his youth so quickly leaves very nearly 900 pages for Clinton as Political Man. Not only is politics - local, state, national, international and galactic - the heart of this book, it's also its brain, torso, liver and sweetbreads. Hillary and Chelsea visit often, but this narrative is not about family life or sex, in which area Clinton's failings are acknowledged but not extensively dwelt on.

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I happen to like long, smart, dense narratives and read "My Life" straight through, happily. I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely can't hurt.

What seems to most offend Mr. Cohen is what he claims is Bill Clinton's status as a super-star celebrity. It never occurs to him that had JFK lived to enjoy a second term and managed to live another two decades, he'd have been exactly the same kind of celebrity. McMurtry deals with the issue of celebrity as well, and the difference between his take and Richard Cohen's is the difference between the life of the mind and the life of a celebrity journalist.

Most telling in Mr. Cohen's review is his contemptuous attitude toward ordinary Americans.

The people who lined up long before dawn to buy a copy were not drooling to find out about health care or the budget. Instead they were seeking a piece of Clinton -- like a souvenir or an autograph. He has emerged as the uber-celebrity of our times, beloved for his good looks, his charm and, paradoxically, the sex scandal that almost doomed his presidency.

And how does Richard Cohen know this? Well, obviously because that's what everyone else in the commentariate are all saying, at the club, at lunch, in the locker room, on the telly, and in print, so, jeepers, it must be true. (Silly Marxist-Leninists to think they needed gulags to enforce party-line thinking; our pravada-tellers manage to do it all by themselves, for the right price. Damn if it turns out Capitalism does rules)

What's wrong with wanting a piece of contemporary history that you lived through? Isn't it part of paying attention? Isn't that what we want citizens to do in a democracy? The Americans who admire Bill Cinton and/or are interested in what he has to say don't do so because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Good Lord, in how many polls did the vast majority of the American public try and get through to the media elite that they didn't want to know more about Monica and the President, and had already decided it was none of their business because it was strictly a private affair and had no implications for the public governance of this nation.

I'd actually decided I wasn't going to do any writing about Clinton's book, but the SCLM is still too much the same as it was in 1998 for me not to.

Next post: How Dan Rather Lied About Clinton's Lies on Sixty Minutes.

In the meantime, Michael Tomasky has a fine but depressing analysis of why the baby boomer press hates Clinton and always will.