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Sunday, June 27, 2004

An Intellectual Dilemma: Who to Believe, A Writer or a Critic?

As a professional wordsmith of some 30 years, this scribbler hesitates not even an eye-blink before announcing: I'll take Larry McMurty's word over Michiko Kakutani's every day of the week and twice on Sunday! What in the blue blazes am I talking about, you ask? It is the diametrically opposite reviews of President William Jefferson Clinton's autobiography, "My Life," in the same newspaper, The New York Times--actually, the literary giant McMurty's rave review is in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, and the critic Kakutani's small-minded rant first appeared last week in the daily edition of the Old Grey Lady.

Kakutani is a pedestrian toiler in the back-forty of the landscape of arts & letters who only dreams of turning a phrase equal to the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Lonesome Dove," and some two dozen other novels, or the author of "My Life" for that matter. What we really have going on here is another example of a Northeastern elite's compulsion to slam anything of intellectual value that might come from any State of the Old South, most particularly if the intellectual property comes from a Southerner of meager pedigree, such as President Clinton. I know this phenomenon well; I am of the same age as President Clinton and grew up in Mississippi, in many ways Arkansas' closest neighbor, and I don't mean only geographically.

Read them both--only excerpts are below. You will wonder if you are reading reviews of two different books:

William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book.

Grant's is about being a general, in what Lincoln called a big war. Clinton's is about being a president at the end of the 20th century. Grant's is an Iliad, with the gracious Robert E. Lee as Hector and Grant himself the murderous Achilles. Clinton's is a galloping, reckless, political picaresque, a sort of pilgrim's progress, lowercase. There are plenty of stout sticks to beat Clinton with, but Grant's memoirs is not one of them. ...

One of the appealing things about Bill Clinton, at least to literary types like me, is that he frequently reminds me of authors or their characters - for instance, there's Thomas Wolfe, the big ghost from the other side of the South. Bill Clinton looks homeward often, to laud his angel mother, Virginia Kelley. But why stop there? You can have Clinton as Gulliver, pricked by the Boss Lilliputian, Kenneth Starr; you can have him as Tom Jones, eternally seeking his Dad; you can have him as L'il Abner, wooing his Daisy Mae in the unlikely purlieu of Yale Law School; though to his gnatlike cloud of enemies he will always mainly be the Artful Dodger, the man they're convinced is getting away with something, even if, as is often the case, they can't figure out what.

The one literary figure Clinton does not suggest is Don Juan. From the massive evidence of this book he's still obsessed with politics, as he always has been. Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for bedroom sports, but not much time. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may be three of the nicest ladies in America, but their "conquest," however we are to understand that term, does not make Clinton the world's No. 1 ladies' man, or even the No. 1 ladies' man of northwest Washington. From my observation, which has been long and searching, the people who are doing most of the messing around in our lovely capital - les hauts journalistes - are still unable to manage a mature tone when dealing with presidential sex, when there is any.

Please read the rest of a masterful wordsmith's review of a book that will surely have more "legs" than any other piece of political literature since the works of Winston Churchill: The New York Times Book Review

Below is Michiko Kakutani's review--excerpts only--read it and you will understand why so few of us authors send Christmas cards to critics who are not also authors:
As his celebrated 1993 speech in Memphis to the Church of God in Christ demonstrated, former President Bill Clinton is capable of soaring eloquence and visionary thinking. But as those who heard his deadening speech nominating Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta well know, he is also capable of numbing, self-conscious garrulity.

Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Clinton's much awaited new autobiography "My Life" more closely resembles the Atlanta speech, which was so long-winded and tedious that the crowd cheered when he finally reached the words "In closing . . ."

The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.

In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton's presidency: lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration. This memoir underscores many strengths of Mr. Clinton's eight years in the White House and his understanding that he was governing during a transitional and highly polarized period. But the very lack of focus and order that mars these pages also prevented him from summoning his energies in a sustained manner to bring his insights about the growing terror threat and an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to fruition.
I suppose to be fair you should read the rest of this exercise in book-contract envy: The New York Times
 


2:21 AM / Editor / permalink    2 comments

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2 Comments:

Obviously you and at least one of these guys is dillusional.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9:10 PM  

Since Ms. Kakutani is a gal not a guy, you are saying that Larry McMurty, one of America's finest novelists, and I, who has also had a rather successful career as an American author, are delusional. No problem, I've certainly been called worse by reactionary far-right-wingers over the years. You are surely not unique or significant.

By Blogger Joseph, at 12:40 PM  

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