Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (13 page)

And here’s a man with a lot of spunk. “Sirs: After reading ‘A Doll’s House, 1970’ I feel for the first time that I understand what all those Women’s Lib types have been getting at. Yes indeed. For a woman, Clare is a real fine writer.” Well, she
is
a “real fine writer,” and I know you’re being witty, mister, but you know, maybe it’s time to stop kidding around and listen. The same way the Nixons
wanted to have a dignified photograph for posterity, maybe letter writing is wrong when it’s dashed off instead of thought about carefully. You have to listen to that other voice inside your head that asks you a question, or that makes you feel uneasy, as if what you’re saying might not be true.

I’ll have to read Clare Luce’s piece. I already think I’ll like it. It might make me envious of whatever actress gets to play the wife’s role in that play. Whether you agree or disagree with the character, one thing’s for sure: if you’re chosen, you throw yourself into the part, and you
act
. It’s not about who you are, it’s about who the character is. You have to get inside that character and believe in her, and if you can’t do that, then you’ll never be an actress.

All letters quoted were published in
Life
.

W
hen Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were in the White House, usher (no kidding, usher) Rex Scouten (real name) was informed by RN that new rules must apply to the way things were being done. “If it is a mixed dinner, with a guest of honor, the wife of the guest of honor will be served first simultaneously with Mrs. Nixon, and then the guest of honor and I will be served second.”

Nice that the ladies were served first, but did it give them any advantage as to when they could actually dig in?

I
n
The Time of Illusion,
Jonathan Schell makes a concise and chilling observation that allows us to see how Richard Nixon used fiction for manipulation: “The President had set in motion an elaborate hidden machine for manufacturing the appearance of public enthusiasm for himself. He had begun by making a direct appeal for support in the traditional manner. Then he had sent himself rigged telegrams and letters of support. Then he had put the telegrams and letters on display before the public that had supposedly sent them. Then he had arranged to have the Vice-President praise him effusively. Then he had apparently had telegrams and letters sent to television networks and the press praising the Vice-President for praising him. He had become his own most ardent and prolific supporter.”

Was Mrs. Nixon aware of this? When the young Mickey Rooney exclaimed to Judy Garland that they could put on their own show (which of course the viewer has the ability to
overhear
), we smiled. But this was grown-up, behind-the-scenes nefariousness that had to be conducted secretly in order to work. He was a one-man band, but of course he also got to write the music, the
reviews, then the positive letters to the editor about the reviews, and then go onstage again. Sometimes he thought it best to write a few negative letters, either to gain sympathy or to bring on more angry “supporters.”

Ted Agnew, our Vice President until being forced to resign due to accepting bribes, was a mean sumbitch. He conceived of himself as a showman of alliteration and accusatory epithets and was generally regarded as a hothead whose main mission was to defend the President with whatever verbal ammunition it took. “RN” (as he conceived of himself) created situations and then found people to respond to the situations, then found people to respond to the people who responded, and so on. RN might have written some letters or telegrams himself—certainly he made notes, or voiced his opinions in meetings—but there were people hired to create these pseudodocuments who were bright and who had no doubt about what was expected. They made up a letter, ostensibly written by JFK, ordering the murder of President Diem. It has been suggested that E. Howard Hunt may have had a hand in the diary that was discovered in Arthur Bremer’s apartment—in fact, the rumor was that Hunt might have both written it and planted it in the apartment: the “story” of his shooting Alabama governor George Wallace. All around RN, people were writing fiction whose purpose was to shine a mirror on a radiant President—radiant in his ideas, ideals, and leadership—and dazzle the public with the bits of light thrown off. He would have been too programmatic to be a good fiction writer, because fiction can’t be hermetically sealed, but the genres RN selected worked well: a letter could be heartfelt and brief, a telegram more so. Few people automatically assume a printed letter is bogus—though RN inadvertently led the way to raising our consciousness about that.

In this age of cheap irony, I suspect people still credit honesty,
perhaps even the much derided “sincerity.” Healthy people can envision a sliding scale from total, soul-bearing honesty to sociopathic lying, and act somewhere on this spectrum. Their personal letters—those times they write them at all—can be explicit about the writers’ real feelings, or as ingenuous as they think the situation requires, as insidious as they dare make them: they are works of fiction aimed at accomplishing what the letter writers want. Yet many recipients of letters assume they are reading something genuine; something that—for all the time the writer had to consider the prose—clearly means what it says, like graffiti. A letter can be more eloquent than the person’s ability to speak such sentiments, or more awkward, but letter writing, as a genre, is associated with sincerity. The writer might aim for clarity, formal elegance, private confidence, but he or she asks to be taken seriously, to be read with care.

My friend Harry Mathews tells a hilarious story about how he came to meet Marie Chaix, his French wife. She had written a book that he’d been sent to consider translating. He looked at the gorgeous author’s photograph, read the book, and knew he was in love with the writer. He wrote a letter, agreeing to translate the book into English, but realized, on rereading, that what he’d really done was write a letter that made clear he was in love with her. This wouldn’t do; he wrote another letter, very much toned down, relying on all the advantageous forms of the French language to create more distance. This letter he sent. She received it and understood immediately that Harry was in love with her. So yes, you can reveal what you mean to conceal, even with much time to reconsider, or the letter can say one thing though the recipient will still read between the lines, or perhaps think that, though the letter is emphatic, actually the opposite information is implied. A letter does not necessarily protect its writer. A letter is a fabrication,
a letter is the perfect vehicle for fiction (as RN knew, with some of the letters his staff wrote), yet in most cases, I think the letter’s recipient does not open a letter and suspect a ruse. It’s easy to understand why writers love to play with letters, real and invented: they seem to be private contemplations meant only for the recipients, so we (or the characters) have the impression we are confronted by the senders’ innermost thoughts. As readers, we’re always snooping a little when we read mail not intended for us.

When RN wrote his girlfriend Pat, he wouldn’t have been thinking about the letter later appearing in her biography—but what a wonder it is, with prose so sincere it seems cringingly insincere, full of self-importance and feigned authority and speaking to an embarrassingly idealized future. Some letters do go public, and while their appearance gives us glimpses of the private person, it’s really no guarantee that what we read is entirely genuine. Maybe we romanticize letters, wanting them to express sentiments that come closer to private truths, though experience requires we realize the mixed motivations that can go into writing a letter. Like reporting on dreams, letters dropped into fiction can appear too perfect, too contrived, as explanations or as ways of sneaking in additional information. Yet as documents that reveal more than they say, they can also convey information that reveals things of which the letter writer is unconscious: When F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about Ring Lardner’s being discouraged by book sales and Fitzgerald asks Maxwell Perkins, “
Why
won’t he write about Great Neck, a sort of Oddysee of man . . .” he asserts his best thought, though he reveals more of himself than he realizes. Writers have always loved to invent letters; they seem to be found documents and, as such, give the illusion of being out of the writers’ control. They are so useful, they can seem so plaintive, they are set apart,
they can explain things that would otherwise have to be elaborated in narrative. Surely, in a letter, we hear a person’s “real” voice.

Richardson’s
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,
considered by most critics to be the first novel, is epistolary. The plot—the abduction of young Pamela, who resists being compromised by her abductor, Mr. B—makes logical the format; Pamela, missing her parents, and wanting to let them know what a good girl she still is, is writing home. When her letters are intercepted, she instead keeps a journal. Finally, Mr. B does the right thing and proposes marriage, but what the reader thinks has been heard has been a sort of transcription of the young girl’s life in the present—the ongoing “present” of the story. Though it was written with the intention of showing that virtue is rewarded, it’s interesting that the author, in each subsequent edition of the very popular novel, relied on “readers’ groups” for guidance about how he could improve the text, and ended up toning down the extremes: at first, Pamela’s speech is filled with expressions of the lower class, but in subsequent editions, it becomes less conspicuous, so that the gap between her social class and that of her upper-class abductor, Mr. B, is lessened. The reduced linguistic discrepancy reassured readers that the two characters were meant for each other.

My story (ahem) “Desire” is about a young boy whose parents are divorced. He’s visiting his father, and near the end of the story the father, B.B., intercepts a letter the boy has written:

When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways.
We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno.
We can get married and have a dog.

While understanding that almost everything is wrong with his son, B.B. addresses the immediate problem: the recipient is
his son’s stepsister, so they can never marry. Things deteriorate from the moment he explains. In writing the letter, I felt that I was taking dictation; I
was
the son, in the moment of composition. If he could speak to me, rather than just engage in dialogue with his father, this was what he would confess. I’d known his thoughts in general, but not in particular. Next, I gave thanks for the italics, which set the letter apart and focused attention on it immediately, as italicizing (though in this case I used old-fashioned underlining, to indicate italics on a typewriter). If it’s in italics, it’s important: not a mechanical contrivance suggesting distance, but right there, like something dashed off in real time. When I imagined myself as Bryce, the boy, the misspellings were automatic. (I particularly like “no sno.” It rhymes, and the two words say a lot more than that there won’t be any snow.) I hope the reader freezes just as B.B. does, that I manage to unite the reader with both characters, and to implicate the reader, too. It’s obvious that, as mature readers, we are B.B. rather than the boy—obvious until this moment, when we see both sides of the problem simultaneously, but have no better alternative to offer than B.B. does. The letter seems indelible. It can’t be undone, it will never be unread (we’ve read it), it will never be repeated. The writer (ahem) depends on the wow factor, though the letter is usual in its unusualness. It’s the stopped time that’s such a help, because it comes almost at story’s end. The reader has to feel some small physical jolt. Also, the reader has to feel a little guilty—the value of ambient guilt can’t be underestimated in putting together stories—because the reader has received secret information. You don’t read other people’s mail. And you certainly shouldn’t read other people’s mail while looking over their shoulders. In stories, though, if a letter is presented, you must open it and read. (My husband, before he was my husband, once
mailed me a letter in an envelope that I looked at with dread, so sure of the contents that, instead of opening it, I drove from Virginia to New York to hand it back to him. Things worked out.)

Clearly, Mr. Nixon was not writing lovely, graceful notes to his wife, and later to his daughters, with any idea of producing something that could be used by a fiction writer—but imagine, for a moment, someone familiar with the life and times of RN (from our informed, present-day perspective), trying to reconcile the ardent letter writer with the man on the tapes, who is harsh, profane, racist, anti-Semitic. Were the lovely letters simply from an earlier period, and he changed? He was once the determined, clever suitor, then the proud groom. Were these occasions that brought out the best in him, rather than eliciting his hatred and contempt for his real or imagined enemies? Did he present one face that was benign, when the situation warranted that, and another that was vile, taping himself in the Oval Office uttering the verbal equivalent of strip poker?
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
jumps to mind, but it’s a bit extreme, and too expedient to be really convincing—and also, it’s
literary
. If we knew such a person—certainly most of us know much milder versions—how would we reconcile our information? With some dismissive
Whew, some people are really nuts,
or by inventing some explanation, such as that he was under a spell, or that he was clever enough to put a lid on certain things to accomplish what he wanted, but that his real personality emerged under pressure?

Having read so much about Nixon in researching his wife, I came to internalize his voice, perhaps even his thought patterns—though I can’t say where they originated for him. Where did his way of thinking and speaking come from—experience? The arrogance of power? Was this the same person who had an interest in theater, who enjoyed musical evenings at the White House?
Might he have been—I’m not kidding here—fearful? Intimidated, and therefore intimidating? Those curses and chilling dismissals of entire ethnic groups have the shocking effect of being deeply held beliefs, but what if he was using them as a crude way of expressing and retaining control or power, of keeping some primal fear at bay? If his affection was not involved, might he have existed on a short spectrum that stretched only from affability to paranoia and spitefulness because one extreme was nice but the other effective?