By John Freeman
Presidents and novelists are storytellers both, but it is a rare day in America when their narratives collide. It nearly happened in 1963, the year Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy hired (at the recommendation of William Styron) 37-year-old novelist Richard Yates as a speechwriter. The hard-drinking, chain-smoking author of “Revolutionary Road” did well in his first weeks, so well he was given a shot at drafting JFK’s first major civil rights speech.
Yates’ words may not be read verbatim, he was warned, but the President would use some. The night Kennedy was to deliver the speech, Yates tuned in to watch with friends. As Blake Bailey’s biography describes, “It was clear each line struck him with a fresh disappointment. At one point he suddenly came alive—‘There! I wrote that!’—but it was a false alarm, and when it was over Yates seemed embarrassed.”
For the past eight years, with George W. Bush at the podium, America’s novelists and poets and historians have at least been spared such false alarms. These were not their words. But they have experienced Yates’ embarrassment. Bush’s super-narrative of the US as a vengeful, all-powerful nation beyond treaties or conventions recycled the old tropes of a nation founded on frontier “justice,” and unleashed them upon the world. Backed by a multi-billion dollar publicity campaign, the so-called war on terror was like the worst kind of bestseller. It received endless newspaper coverage; its syntax was absorbed into speech; it marched across the globe like a Dan Brown novel in translation.
But will Obama’s election have some impact on literary culture? The bare-bone facts bode well. Obama does not just respect language: he is an accomplished writer. His two memoirs are remarkable for their craft and complexity. More importantly, Obama’s story—the biracial son of an immigrant raised partly in Indonesia, educated at Harvard, proposing social reform—will, briefly, but triumphantly, become the nation’s own. He could radically return the country’s narrative back to possibility and promise, and away from punishment and division.
“I’ve been thinking daily about the significance of an Obama presidency,” says Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award-winning novel, “The Middle Passage.” “He will be the most powerful black person in human history.” He adds: “I think American writers… will want to join so many in the world as they celebrate a Camelot moment for the early twenty-first century, and pray he will succeed at addressing the staggering economic and international dilemmas he will inherit.”
If literary culture can be said to include the stories people tell one another about America, this blurring of private and public narratives—and the hullabaloo over this election—is not a new thing. “It is difficult to describe the place political concerns occupy in the life of an American,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840. “To have a hand in the government of society, and to talk about it, is the most important business, and so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.”
This has been doubly so since the Bush administration, often at the expense of fiction. Since the 2000 election, the fastest-growing areas of book sales have been politics and current affairs, tome after tome dissecting, praising, debunking and chronicling the Bush administration. Our political culture nearly became our literary culture.
Novelists from Paul Auster to Philip Roth and John Updike have hewed ever closer to the zeitgeist to capture a nation adrift. “The Plot Against America” brought Roth back onto bestseller lists, as did “Terrorist” for Updike. For many other novelists, especially those who have climbed into the cockpit of op-ed pieces and blog postings, breaking away from this watchful resistance to life under Bush will be a relief. “Many of us have expended a lot of energy on resisting Bush and his policies,” said Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Ten Days in the Hills,” “and it has been exhausting, at least for me.”
George Saunders, the New Yorker magazine’s resident satirist of the tortured logic and language of right-wing triumphalism, hopes he can go back to dreaming in fiction. “I know it’s always more satisfying for me to write a story about completely invented people, who I kind of love, than to nail something or somebody in an essay. Only sometimes, like with the recent Palin piece… it just feels like it has to be said or my head will pop off.”
Two-time Booker winner and New York resident Peter Carey points out that these activities—dreaming up a better future for the nation and creating new works of art that can stand within and outside it—proceed from similar impulses. In the nearly two decades he has lived in America, he has noticed the country becoming ever more enthralled with statistical determinism. He comments that “you turn on the news and hear, ‘No one has ever won the Presidency who didn’t win Pennsylvania.’ That was then!” The fact is, he adds: “Ideally, what you want to do as an artist is to do something that’s never been done before. And so, if this comes to pass—this thing we shall not name—it’s going to be of enormous importance.”
Dave Eggers adds: “We’re about to elect a guy who pretty much arrived thirty or forty years sooner than most people expected. So maybe we’re being catapulted forward into the future in a way that our imaginations will need to catch up with.”
One can already feel Obama’s shoulders heaving. He has a host of issues to deal with immediately. “We have never seen a time like this,” Amy Tan writes, “an African-American president, republics crossing partisan borders like refugees, rampant racial hatred, contagious religious hatred, economic panic spreading like the bird flu pandemic that never arrived, not to mention so many possibilities vying for first in destroying the Earth.”
Obama is going to need more than a good story. Saunders believes now might be the time to bring novelists back into the fold. “Although a few old lions like Vidal and Vonnegut and Mailer had their [very valiant] say, generally artists were treated by the Bush administration like… Sub-jester treatment, I guess you could say. This was stupid and costly, because any novelist could have imagined the invasion of Iraq and the aftermath better than Bush, et al, did.”
Yet American writers are already worried America’s biggest problems go far deeper than any one candidate can fix. The gap between the rich and the poor, for instance, is greater than it’s ever been in the nation’s history, and it has often fallen to outsiders, like Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai, or emigrants, like Junot Díaz, to point it out in the literary culture. “The horrific violence of our current economic system, which kills more people daily than our wars,” says Díaz, who won a Pulitzer for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” “will not change one jot under an Obama administration. Right now these elections are all about who plays the music at the party. Doesn’t change the fact that there’s a massacre going on. No US election is going to change that. And any writer worth a damn might be in the party but what he’s really listening to, bearing witness to, in small ways, in elliptical ways or flat-out head on, is the violence and terror and inhumanity that reign beyond the party’s walls.”
Obama’s promise then holds out a golden bough to writers and the nation’s literary culture—language may be respected again at the highest level; writers might be brought back into the fold; our president may actually read E.L. Doctorow! It will be safe again, as Geraldine Brooks jokingly put it, to raise one’s head at an overseas literary festival as an American. But by breaking down barriers, Obama may highlight one that remains still standing—and writers, at least some of them, feel the call to return to the center of literary culture a certain questioning of America’s capitalist project, as was done during the stock market crash of the twentieth century, when John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis and Katherine Anne Porter were publishing. “It has been a long idealist dream that someday society life on Earth would evolve in such a way that dissident writers and intellectuals would no longer have to be dissident,” wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and publisher of City Lights, which fifty years ago last year published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” one of the biggest critiques of American capitalism. “There are similarities between Obama and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but they do not point to any real political or social revolution. JFK was not a revolutionary, and he would not have turned into one if he had lived.
“Obama too is no revolutionary, even if Abraham Lincoln is his role model. Unbridled capitalism has recently proved to lead to economic disaster, capitalist triumphs often being achieved at the expense of the poor. This leads to the conclusion that such a predatory system is an enemy of true democracy. We might very well have a Camelot Moment if Obama is elected, and we will certainly heave a huge sigh of relief to have someone in the not-so-White House who is an honest thinker and not a rogue President. But don’t expect global corporate capitalism to be morphed into some kind of benevolent system in which the gulfs between Haves and Have-nots no longer exists. There may be a Camelot Moment, but dissidents can only hope the new President will succeed in humanizing capitalism, if not taming, and thus might a Camelot Moment become a Camelot Epoch.”
Perhaps someone can get this 89-year-old poet a shot at writing speeches come January.
Yunior is back, and he’s brought along his papi chulo brother Rafa and a string of exes stretching from New Jersey to Santo Domingo.