Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (10 page)

Certain writers are energized by getting to do a pas de deux with a ghost. E. L. Doctorow’s
Ragtime,
with its cast of historic figures, was published to wide acclaim and started a trend. Max Apple has a fabulous story called “The Oranging of America” involving the man who started Howard Johnson’s. There are too many writers and too many dances to count, but among others I really love are Don DeLillo, entering the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in
Libra,
and Donald Barthelme’s extraordinary story, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” The list of writers
magnetizing subjects to them (or vice versa) is long; even posthumously, the character might find the writer, the way you sometimes dream things and awake with the spooky feeling that your dream was floating out there and came to reside in you, the dreamer. The writer may even be a most unwilling recipient. (We all know the danger of thinking that Cleopatra or Joan of Arc is talking to us; so rarely does the unexpected internal voice belong to the garage mechanic or the grocery bagger.) But writers can sometimes persuade themselves to join up, to experience unlikely partners. I am very happy to find myself paired with Mrs. Nixon, a person I would have done anything to avoid—to the extent she was even part of my consciousness. As a writer, though, she interests me. My curiosity is based on how little we share in terms of personality, or upbringing, or what fate has dealt us. She was a person of my mother’s generation, who also lived for years in the place where I grew up, Washington, D.C., which was then such a different town (more Southern; less cosmopolitan; at best a shadow city of New York). Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions, letting me see if, in the character I create, my preconceptions are reflected, reversed, or obscured. It’s an area in which I have a little (only a little) power—to animate a character against a stage set believable enough to transcend its artifice; to play out scenarios from outside my experience, limning someone dissimilar from me with whom I nevertheless empathize. Insofar as we know ourselves well, or are convinced that we do, that self-awareness also becomes our self-imposed predictability. What good would come of projecting ourselves onto the page: a character exactly “like” me might emerge, but that character won’t offer me many surprises. Mrs. Nixon isn’t
my
avatar so much as she’s her own.

Years ago there was a book I loved, with photographs of a red sofa that was moved around from location to location (as
opposed to the unmoving outdoor sofa plunked down in the projects in
The Wire
), context and object reinforming the viewer about each. Right now, while I’m writing, the “Sad Keanu” phenomena is being played for laughs all over the place: a picture of Keanu Reeves, sitting eating a sandwich, looking sad, that’s been Photoshopped so that he seems to sit with a panda who also has downcast eyes, or to be sitting on the steps as Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross run out of the church in
The Graduate,
and Keanu . . . well, Keanu is sad. (“That’s so funny,” Keanu says to a journalist at
New York
magazine. “So they take paparazzi pictures and re-contextualize them?”) I’m not the first to appropriate Mrs. Nixon. She is featured in a coloring book; eBay offers old “Pat for President” buttons, with a photograph of her smiling on the front: history as kitsch. And since she is one of only two former First Ladies in recent times not to have written a memoir, it was left to her daughter Julie to write “the untold story,” or we wouldn’t even have that.

Eccentric people, people who play against type, outspoken or outlandish people are pretty easy to write about. But what about Mrs. Nixon, who internalized the expectations of her time and enacted them meticulously (she took care not to smoke when she might be seen), or who also might have been shy, or more psychologically troubled than reported? Her youthful energy and independence were subsumed as she adopted her role as silent partner to a politician who promised her he would leave politics and allow her and their daughters to have a private life, yet who fought to stay in public office until the bitter end. I spontaneously recoil from any image of Richard Nixon, let alone tapes of his voice—and I resist reimmersion in the Watergate years, which provided the ironic backdrop for my graduate study (Wordsworth, Tricky Dick, and the Watergate mess, in the same summer?), but I have
found Mrs. Nixon, the person standing near him (truly or metaphorically), more and more fascinating. Am I saying that Mrs. Nixon found me? I suppose so. Mrs. Nixon is not someone I wish I could have had to dinner. I know perfectly well that she would not have confided in me, and I very much doubt that I would have asked her any direct questions, because—and this deeply dismays my husband—I almost never do that. I listen to what I’m told, which doesn’t mean that I believe it, but I do factor it in.

I have my quick checklist about possible characters, as doctors do when they glance up as you walk into the office, before you’ve begun your litany of complaints, or as people do who are meeting for the first time after finding each other on
Match.com
: check the eyes; take the temperature (to speak metaphorically); do you instinctively feel some attraction? Being alert to what the person or character says is only part of it; you have to register what she can’t, or doesn’t, say. That’s what I find intriguing to try to intuit. This was Mrs. Nixon’s great mystery: not her resolve to avoid being controversial, but her consistent ability to pull it off; not her loyalty, but the sad irony of being trapped by what is in most circumstances a virtue. She was so obviously secondary to her husband—she, of course, enabled this codependence—but what is more interesting than focusing where your attention has not been directed, on someone who isn’t the main character? (Years ago, I met Norman Mailer. He had left the party, as had I, to go into the kitchen and talk to the children and the cook.) So I began speculating about Mrs. Nixon, in part by researching her life and by drawing on my experience of literature. Consider:

In Frank Conroy’s “Midair,” a mentally ill father, who has escaped from the hospital, appears as a stranger at his children’s apartment when their mother is away. He behaves crazily, up to and during the point when the people from the mental hospital
come to the door to take him away. Most anything can be made up about your character, if he or she is crazy. That’s one reason writers tend not to present clinically crazy characters; they’ll always seem half credible, half unbelievable. Conroy writes: “For more than an hour they have been rearranging the books on the living-room shelves, putting them in alphabetical order by author. Sean’s father stops every now and then, with some favorite book, to do a dramatic reading. The readings become more and more dramatic. He leans down to the children to emphasize the dialogue, shouting in different voices, gesticulating with his free arm in the air, making faces. But then, abruptly, his mood changes.” I doubt that the reader would wonder what, exactly, Sean’s father is reading, since his actions are scarily credible and the paragraph has to do with the general situation. Action informs us. Specifics can stop action. (Any specific reference to the books being alphabetized and read from could be made to work here, from
King Lear
to a book about astrology, but a specific reference would also be working against the reader’s visceral reaction to what’s basically going on.)

The father, being “crazy,” cannot (or, at least, does not) express himself except through his actions, and, in the moment, neither do the children—being children—express their thoughts about what’s going on. The story’s brilliance lies in giving us the most dramatic moment first, and then, as the story progresses, we—as we’ll come to realize the main character, Sean, has—forget the whole interaction. A moment of crisis in a stopped elevator much later in the story precipitates Sean’s remembering this traumatic moment (“Midair” is filled with moments of suspension: the young boy, held out the window by his crazy father; airplanes; elevators), but by the time he and a young man who reminds him of his son are trapped together in the elevator, Sean has learned to be an adult, and his version of being an adult is to take charge—to tell
the panicked young man, emphatically, that they can’t fall. He is speaking at a great remove from the dramatic early scene in the story, but clearly its effect on his life is something from which he has never recovered.

The reader understands it all—in fact, the reader has always had more of an ability to analyze Sean than he has—but the errors of Sean’s life cannot be undone, and his triumph of seeming almost unnaturally sane (really:
no
possibility the broken elevator will fall?) is undercut by our sudden awareness of how Sean is coping in the moment, versus the way Sean has coped, or failed to, his entire life. Like the old Polaroid cameras that had to be focused manually, moving the lens so that the double images become one, sliding two rectangular blocks with one superimposed over the other to sharpen the single image, the reader brings Sean into focus by overlaying the early scene with the similar scene that comes later. The Polaroid’s layering is called “justifying the image.” It works metaphorically to explain what we do, as readers, when we see the parallel elements of a story conflate. Had Conroy’s Sean spoken and had an epiphany, however, the story wouldn’t have had the same power. The tension and its potential resolution exist not as words, but as images.
We
have to see, and we do.

I can’t take one moment of Mrs. Nixon’s life and juxtapose it over another without pretending to knowledge of her intimate life none of us can have. She is now a historic figure, but while alive she may well have been unknowable, even by her family. In writing about her, I see her as a child standing on her parents’ farm, which seems to be in the middle of nowhere. (Like Mrs. Nixon, even the town changed its name.) And then, in her teens, she is orphaned. Her determination to survive and to do well through work and perseverance seems to permeate any image of her from then on—supplying one rectangular block against which subsequent events
will have to be justified. When I jump ahead to that future, and to Buddy becoming Mrs. Nixon, and then the wife of the President of the United States, my tendency is to bring her into focus by noticing the child underneath.

This is not the moment when you have to throw the book over your shoulder because I claim Mrs. Nixon spoke to me. She spoke to me as being indelible—as a young person, a figure in a landscape—not by speaking words; in the many ways in which she withheld information (perhaps, like Conroy’s character, unintentionally); as a person on the sidelines—always more interesting than the people on parade. People who are enigmatic, who don’t give you a lot to work with, are more intriguing. There’s no reason, though, to want to turn such characters inside out; in fact, the more potentially revelatory thing is to let them have their integrity, but not to be so intimidated or reverential that you forget to also play with them—to see if you can tease them out of their silence; to reveal them in their off moments. Some writers have a more systematic approach to character, while others are more at ease feeling that a character evolves, and that the Rorschach test is open to vast interpretation. There’s absolutely no way to verify that you got it right, no matter how many positive responses you get, saying
Wow, you really nailed it
. And those times the subject escapes, it doesn’t matter if other people assure you that the subject’s in custody. In my perverse heart of hearts, I applaud the runaway. Though I’m the one supplying the Rorschach, I’m always secretly delighted to know that the blot is not definitive, only taken by some to be so.

Writers I know tend to be superstitious—at least, about one aspect of writing—in that they don’t want to describe what they’re writing about in medias res. They feel that the energy will dissipate, or that they’ll talk about it rather than write it, or that the
book will change on them (it quite often does, and being on guard won’t protect you). When I lived in a small apartment and my desk was in my living room, I threw towels over the papers on my desk before people came over. Others might hide the medicine bottles, but with writers, it’s usually the manuscript. Therefore, I hid the many books I read about Mrs. Nixon from everyone except my husband. (One friend who walked into my writing room made no comment but later brought me a two-ton book by Bob Haldeman.)

When I teach literature, my reactions are very much a reader’s reactions; it never occurs to me that what I’m discussing has the slightest thing to do with what I sometimes do (write). There’s a system or world that requires me to discover
its
inherent logic, to learn to navigate by subtle signs (anything from punctuation marks to descriptions that might eventually suggest a motif). Every reader has to read enough (and to have read enough in general) to understand a particular writer’s tone. The writer must educate the reader, yet writers can do this only if they’re lucky enough that the reader returns repeatedly to that writer’s work.

Katherine Anne Porter, considering Virginia Woolf, describes the writer’s landscape by channeling her subject: “Life, the life of this world, here and now, was a great mystery, no one could fathom it; and death was the end. In short, she was what the true believers always have called a heretic. What she did, then, in the way of breaking up one of the oldest beliefs of mankind, is more important than the changes she made in the form of the novel. She wasn’t even a heretic—she simply lived outside of dogmatic belief. She lived in the naturalness of her vocation. The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly. She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.” This assessment is inspiring,
as well as astute. It raises the question: how many writers do feel there’s a “naturalness” to their vocation?

Today, when writing has been taken up by the academy, writers are nudged toward a new form of self-consciousness (ask any MFA student); there are now numerous forums for delivering one’s words aloud—a different test of the text—as well as putting them on paper.
Naturalness
seems like a loaded word—a lovely word (the
s
’s trail away) that connotes desirability, but at the same time makes me nervous and a little defensive. Any writer can claim certain territory by interacting with it repeatedly: the objective place becomes subjective, because the writer was drawn to it for personal reasons; Faulkner’s South is different from Flannery O’Connor’s, but once inhabited by both of them, the South will never be the same. (The setting of a work of literature has to do with geography, but of course that terrain can also be imagined: in dystopian literature, the dream is the nightmare.)