This column first ran in the News & Observer of Raleigh on November 8, 1998.
The coarsening and dumbing down of America has long seemed to me a result of the absence of a literary sensibility in our national discourse. In this sound-bite era of moving images, the marginalization of the written word in our politics and culture has seemed a primary cause of – and, through its rejuvenation, perhaps an antidote to – our moral and intellectual decrepitude.
If only we would listen to the soaring voices of writers, hearken to their deep insights about tangled life and its ruddy paradoxes, we might, as a community, begin to see our national life as something more than filler for an ever-expanding cable television system.
Boy, was I wrong.
The scales fell from my eyes when I read the Oct. 5 and Oct. 12 issues of The New Yorker. It should have been a dream come true: several of our most acclaimed writers – including Toni Morrison, William Styron, Jane Smiley, E.L. Doctorow and Louis Begley – holding forth on the President’s troubles. But instead of providing imaginative criticism and surprising perspective into the loathsome mess, these writers proved as screechy, parochial and partisan as all the other gasbags who’ve been bending our ears while trying our patience.
Most startling was the degree to which these brilliant authors were in accord with the mindless and manipulative forces that are degrading our culture: talk show hosts, conspiracy theorists and political spinmeisters. Rather than illuminating the scandal’s deeper meanings, they simply carried water for the president. Mixing equal doses of James Carville’s partisanship with Oprah Winfrey’s boundless empathy, they chose to ignore rather than surmount the inconvenient facts of the case – that Clinton lied about the affair, attacked those investigating the allegations, tried to hide evidence and influence witnesses – to paint a one-dimensional portrait of the president as a victim.
Raising the specter of McCarthyism – during which “people who had committed no crimes were brought before congressional committees to testify about their political beliefs” – E.L. Doctorow wrote that Zippergate “is the unseating of a democratically elected president with all the legitimacy of a coup d’Etat.” Louis Begley blamed Monica, a “little slut” who couldn’t keep a secret; Janet Malcolm fingered Kenneth Starr, who, she asserted, is motivated by “some strain of deep-seated misogyny.”
Toni Morrison offered the most bizarre conspiracy theory. According to the Nobel laureate, Clinton is being brought down by the white establishment because he is “our first black president.” Her evidence? Clinton “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working class, saxophone playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”
Astounding!
Admittedly, the writers do lay some of the blame on Clinton, but only in the most heroic sense. To Jane Smiley, the 50-ish president engaged in a year and a half long affair with the 20-something intern because of the all-too-human “desire to make a connection with another person.”
Clinton dissembled and covered up, according to James Salter, simply “to save his reputation and to prevent considerable injury to Mrs. Clinton and his daughter.”
It is not these opinions that I find so troubling – thoughtful people can and should differ on the matter – but their utter commonness. Morrison aside, we’ve heard it all before in CNN interviews with “ordinary Americans” waiting on line at the Krispy Kreme.
And yet, the New Yorker pieces do constitute a larger argument about culture that shows how staggeringly out of touch with the reality of modern America our leading writers are. We may live in a Viagra nation, in which titillation forms the nexus of news, entertainment and politics, but according to these writers, we are still a gaggle of boorish Puritans. Thus, the novelist Ethan Canin writes that Clinton is “a mensch – roughly translated a man, in the best sense of the word … comfortable with the extremes of human possibility, with the grandness and loathsomeness of mankind … [unafraid] to stray from what in some circles is thought of as morality.”
And pity poor William Styron, who for years has been trying “to convince my friends in France that Americans are collectively quite as broadminded as the French.” But whereas his French confreres “revel[ed]” in the fact that Francois Mitterand had a second family with his mistress, Americans lack the “decency” to look the other way from their president’s dalliances.
The great paradox of these failed essays is that they reconfirm our need for a literary sensibility. Great fiction, which refracts reality, resonates with ineffable truths, makes the world anew. But when writers stray from their higher calling – when they practice politics instead of art, when they paint in black and white instead of provocative shades of gray – they are as pedestrian as everyone else.
This column first ran in the News & Observer of Raleigh on November 8, 1998.
