Latest Readings (7 page)

The story is intoxicating but raises the question of whether we ought to be intoxicated. Perhaps not, but abstention would not be easy. Gossip of such quality (at these altitudes, as the Spanish say) feels like the food of life, as if hors d’oeuvres could be the whole meal. And if the caviar and the blinis are good enough, why eat anything else? Well, knowing how many new young women the glowing American prince could get through in a week won’t tell you how he got Khrushchev to take the missiles out
of Cuba. There is a bigger picture. But to do her credit, our author knows about that too, and is able to set JFK’s priapic energies within a truly historical context. So finally this is an essential book about American politics. The story about François Hollande’s entanglement with the enchantress Julie Gayet—it was still going on while I was reading about JFK’s heroic efforts to marshal the supply of secretaries who joined him in the White House swimming pool—would be an essential book about French politics, but less sensational in its effect, because in France these things are well understood. In America, what is well understood is that they are not allowed. Among his many deleterious medical conditions, JFK had at least one that threatened his life, but nobody in the Kennedy family, and not one staff member, ever told the press. In
The West Wing
, President Bartlet has a similarly serious chronic ailment, and the whole plot of almost the entire multiseason serial turns on the fact that the ailment has been concealed. But what Bartlet was not allowed to have, even in supposedly more enlightened times, was a secret habit involving women. Nobody would have watched. In that respect, the American TV culture, impressive though it has become, is still outstripped by books.

Gripped by a specific hunger for huge American books that deal with the new imperialism—which is a cultural imperialism, beyond the power of armies—I moved directly to
Personal History
, the autobiography of Katharine Graham, which I should have read in 1997, when it first came out. At the time, Kay Graham was still well in charge of the whole
Washington Post
conglomerate, including
Newsweek
and the TV stations: the proprietress had become the hands-on administrator, and therefore one of the most powerful women in America. She wrote the book in the full confidence conferred by her position. But what makes the book so good is that she remembers a time when she was not confident at all. It lasted for all of her childhood and much of her adulthood. She had an overwhelming mother, and later she was plunged into an overwhelming world.

Briefly, it can be said that she was born and raised in a context where women were supposed to be dainty and attractive, and she always felt like a lump. Even her mother, who did all kinds of extracurricular things including translating Thomas Mann, was basically a glamour puss: i.e., not a lump. That Kay Graham–née–Meyer’s lack of routine glamour worked her way in the end is easy
to say now. Had she been the standard-issue high-society debutante, she might have gone on to consume her mature years as a wife, mother, and hostess of many accomplishments. She might have had the life that seemed set down for Jacqueline Lee Bouvier before she, too, went looking for a real personality of her own, instead of just a standard screenplay. But Kay Meyer, as inside the system of rich connections as a woman could be, felt like an outsider. She was a wallflower, and her nervousness made her ill. In the book she is disturbingly frank about how unsettling it felt. Another strength of her account is that she is fully aware that her anguish of uncertainty is bound to seem like self-indulgence in a context where so many American women were too poor to choose their lives. Such a realization added embarrassment to uncertainty. She wasn’t Cinderella: she belonged at the ball. That was just the trouble. She belonged; but she was not, by her own estimation, qualified. She could feel the eyes of a whole social stratum on her, finding her inadequate.

The book is the long and sometimes sad story of how she attained a sense of qualification. It was a social milieu in which men ruled. It was taken for granted that her brilliant husband, Phil Graham, would run things, although
he did not own them. As well as running the Empire, Phil was the one who had the entrée into the Kennedy administration’s Camelot on the Potomac. Kay was just the wife. To do her credit, she was not content with this; and to do some of the men credit, they were in her corner. Ben Bradlee, as editor of the
Washington Post
, behaved especially well. With Bradlee’s help she gradually asserted herself until, after Phil’s suicide, she was ready to adopt the burden of command. I wonder why the book is not more often cited by feminists: perhaps too many of them are too far on the left, and don’t believe that a poor little rich girl can have real problems. In chapter 21, she gives an especially touching account of how women of her class were pressured to belittle themselves in order to fit into a man’s world. She fought back well, and eventually she was ready to resist even the tawdry might of the Nixon administration, which pulled every conceivable dirty trick in order to persuade her to call off the
Post
’s investigations of the Watergate caper. Woodward and Bernstein could not have done without the support of Bradlee, but Bradlee could not have done without the support of Kay Graham. The Nixon people—with the aid of the Justice Department, which was in their pocket—were ready to
burn down the whole of the
Washington Post
empire. The constitution would not have been enough to stop them. It took the guts of the proprietress. In her brainy integrity, the great lady reminds you of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was no glamour girl either, but was still the center of attention. Kay Graham and Adlai Stevenson used to see a lot of each other. Their conversation must have been fascinating. Unfortunately, there are no tape recordings of it. We only have tapes of Nixon.

Kipling and the Widow-maker

BACK IN
2010, during my first year of illness, I added to my woes by stupidly contriving to remain immobile in my cabin throughout an Atlantic crossing to New York, instead of walking around the deck a few times each day as I should have done. It rained all the way, but that was no excuse, because on a ship as big as the
Queen Mary 2
you can do a satisfactory deck walk just by using the internal corridors. Instead, I did a long lie-down, and paid the penalty by finding out, when I arrived in New York, that I had contracted a thrombosis. After ten days in Mount Sinai hospital there was the long trip back to England, and even then I was not free of the effects. The price of safety from a further occurrence, I was told, lay in Ambulation. The doctors managed to pronounce the word with a capital “A,” and I still do so myself. Every day I Ambulate for at least half an hour, to make sure that my legs get some
work to do. In the summer months the walk to town and back counts as Ambulation. I Ambulate to the bookshops, load up with a few books, and Ambulate back again. But in cold or wet weather, Ambulation must be done inside the house. It felt like a perfect waste of time until I hit upon the device of reading while I Ambulated. All I needed was a fair mental map of where the furniture was and I could Ambulate while reading Kipling’s poetry. It seemed a fitting activity because so many of his poems are written in a kind of march rhythm. They are soldierly stuff.

And yet, how brilliant. Technically, he could do anything. Here is the whole of his little four-line epic “The Sleepy Sentinel.”

Faithless the watch I kept: now I have none to keep.

I was slain because I slept; now I am slain I sleep.

Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept—

I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.

The trouble with the owner of the technique that can do anything is that he is continually tempted to do everything at once. Left to their own impulses, his poems make so
much noise that they seldom settle into the condition of a statement: they are always giving you a whole symphony. Yet one must confess to a certain relief that so many of Kipling’s poems rule themselves out: whether because they are burdened by too much dialect, or too much flashy wordplay, they usefully tell us that we need not go back to them. If he had reined himself in, he would have been a poet the way he was a writer of short stories: one of the supreme exponents in the language. Even as things are, with your capacity for attention automatically whittling down the number of his poems that you would wish to revisit—and perhaps your capacity for attention is declining anyway—there is more than enough of him to keep you murmuring with admiration. He has the knack, peculiar to the poetic genius, of speaking in your own throat. It would be the wish of any poet to attain the phonetic force of the first stanza of “Harp Song of the Dane Women.”

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Unforgettable for the power of its movement, the whole poem is like that. If that one poem had ten companions, he
would have changed the history of English poetry. But of course it has, scattered about in his works; and he almost did. It’s just that his influence proved impossible to absorb. Kipling deserves all the praise he gets from Craig Raine’s introductory essay to
Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poems
, a Penguin of the perfect weight and dimensions for the Ambulatory student. T. S. Eliot once did a good selection too, with an essay presaging Raine’s in its analytical approval. Both Eliot and Raine, inventors of their own manner, can be seen struggling, however elegantly, with the self-imposed task of coaxing a raging bull into the back of a small truck. The urge, for any poet who reads Kipling, is to get his energy under control before it infects everybody with the ruinous urge to emulate him.

Speer in Spandau

WHEN HE WAS IN
Spandau prison, Albert Speer walked long distances to stay in shape. He calculated the number of paces to Istanbul, checked off the number of paces he walked each day in the prison yard, and eventually, without having left Berlin, he reached his destination. Later on he got as far as Beijing. It’s one of the more believable stories in his book
Spandau: The Secret Diaries
, which I have just read again. This time I read it in English, although there was a day when I could read it fairly easily in German. All his books are good for your German, but I am not at all sure they are good for your soul. As a writer, he never let up on his act as the civilized man, the true artist, who got caught up in the dream world of the fake artist Hitler because it offered such irresistible aesthetic opportunities.

The message being, you might have been him. To deny this, you have to be unembarrassed about speaking with a
confidence that feels like bluster. But surely he was pulling a fast one, which he made all the more persuasive by pulling it slowly. Over the years, after the war, both in prison and out, he told the world that he should have known what the Nazis were up to, and could not forgive himself for his ignorance. But he did know, and he was never ignorant. He was especially vulnerable on that last point because he liked to be seen as the man who knew everything. He resolved the paradox by a quietly histrionic trick of looking puzzled at all times, as if those big questions were too much even for a man with such a fine taste in tailoring. In the movie
Downfall
he is chiefly present as a model for black leather overcoats, but we are asked yet again to believe that when Hitler ordered him to destroy the remains of Germany’s infrastructure, Speer disobeyed the order, in the interest of future generations. His account of how he defied Hitler’s order was probably at least partly true, but confidence is not increased by the fact that his account of how little he knew about the Final Solution was at least partly a lie. Still, his guilt remains a personal question for all of us who were alive in those years, even if we were not born until near the very end of them. What would we have done? Something to ponder while we, too, go walking to Beijing.

Shakespeare and Johnson

WHEN I STILL DID
a lot of traveling to make TV shows or appear on stage, I always took my complete Shakespeare with me on a long flight. It was the old Selfridge’s one-volume edition, with no notes but with an excellent introduction by Sir Henry Irving himself. Thus, because I was always traveling, I was always reading Shakespeare, even when the book fell to pieces so seriously that it had to be held together with a rubber band. In particular I read the history plays and the tragedies. The comedies I have always been able to read less often, although
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is a special case. I like to read it every couple of years. Recently, on a midsummer night, I went with the family to see an open-air production in King’s College gardens. For my granddaughter, aged eight, it was the second time she had seen the play, and during the interval she politely made it clear that she had seen it done better: a knowledgeable
theatergoer. She was right, alas. The production was uninspired. Though they were hired-in professionals and not the usual bunch of mistakenly confident undergraduates, only a few of the actors knew how to speak. But the lines survived the beating they took. The text is a crowd pleaser, however transmitted. Hence the obvious answer to Johnson’s momentary puzzlement in his note on the play, when he quotes the bit about “the fiery glowworm’s eyes” and says “I know not how Shakespeare, who commonly derived his knowledge of nature from his own observation, happened to place the glow-worm’s light in his eyes, which is only in his tail.” But Shakespeare wasn’t just interested in what he himself knew to be true: he was interested in what the audience thought to be true, as they sat there and watched. As always, however, I would rather have been reading than watching.