by Ann Beattie
I’ve heard that short stories are written to shake us up, so that when the dust settles, things will be a little different. Why would an author want to do that, though? Think about Cole Porter. His songs tell us something in a nice way, and he’s clever, too. He doesn’t write songs to tell us about some horrible betrayal. He finds a way to get across an upbeat message, so we feel better. When we’re sweeping or cooking, how often do we recite a sentence of a story? And how many times do we sing some Cole Porter lyrics? That’s exactly my point.
Certain writers, though, can make it seem like you’re somewhere else and even somebody else—like Cinderella, on the night of the ball. I often hear people say they’ve been “lost in a story.” We know we’re supposed to get lost in a fairy tale, because so often one of the characters does. Some little child wanders off the path, ends up in the dark woods or something like that. If someone leaves the path, it’s not quite as obvious in a short story, though sometimes you’ll look up from the page and be startled to find you’re where you are. Maybe you’re startled by who you are, too. Stories are meant to transport us, but we should never let ourselves be overwhelmed with a writer’s sad view of life and think we can’t do anything to change our own lives. If that’s the message, tuck the bookmark inside, shelve that book, and move on!
Caracas, Venezuela, 1958
So many angry people. They hate us. Hate Americans. That’s the Venezuelan national anthem playing, and they are Venezuelans, and they want us to do the right thing and stand respectfully while it plays, and all the while they hate us. Spit falls on us, from above. Spit! Let them spit: it can be washed away, but their shame can’t. Music, music. We stand, honoring their patriotic song, and they can think of nothing better than to spit on us, when we’re here to represent the best country in all the world.
The girls . . . if anything happened to us, how would the girls get along?
They would manage, because they are smart and self-reliant and because people do get along. You do what you have to do. You do it hoping it’s the right thing, but sometimes that isn’t clear in the moment.
They’ll get these terrible people in order.
(Later, all twelve Secret Service agents would be commended for heroism by President Eisenhower.)
Life involves danger. Every day, there is danger. You can’t think about it, can’t let that hold you back. If you have a job to do, you do it. If you need to express your anger, you write a letter, or you punch a pillow. That’s what I’ve read about, in some of the same magazines that write about me. They advise that you punch a pillow, not your enemy! Imagine women on the bed, punching pillows! Anger only begets more anger.
(Julie Nixon Eisenhower would later write: “At first the spit looked like giant snowflakes.”)
Moving toward the car. Their flag being ripped up. Ours. An angry mob, growing larger. They could have set upon us as we stood listening to their national anthem. They might still cause harm, but they are so wrong, so wicked, in the way they are going about this.
Flowers from a child. One must always accept a bouquet. One must always be kind to children. Little Venezuelan child, holding out her flowers. A lifetime of flowers for me, after all those years on the farm, where we didn’t even have a vase. Or any time to plant and pick flowers. Thank you, little girl, with my smile, which is the universal language. It’s not your fault, you’ve been told to spit, to be angry. Your parents are angry. It is necessary to forgive. If you spit, and if you then hold out flowers, I acknowledge not your bad acts, but your kind ones.
(Julie Nixon Eisenhower: “The girl turned away in shame.”)
The wife of the foreign minister is sitting next to me in the car. I am so sorry for her, because even she is endangered.
Blockades. Dick’s black limousine moving in front of us. Don Hughes is so worried: he has so much responsibility. We Americans accept responsibility and carry it on our shoulders like Atlas always progressing, however slowly. Those who seek to win by intimidation will not prevail.
Someone wielding a baseball bat. Dick’s car stopped, being rocked. They want to turn it over, they want Dick dead, and all Americans to perish because of their beliefs.
(Don Hughes: Mrs. Nixon “had more guts than any man I’ve ever seen.”)
Dick ahead of me in his limousine, me following. If something terrible happened to one of us but not the other, how would that affect the girls? Would the other parent always be the survivor that reminded them of the one who didn’t survive?
Blockades. Like bumper cars crashed into one another. No way around them.
Heading for the American Embassy. We’re told we’re going to the embassy. Vernon Walters running back to make sure I’m okay. I’m okay, and proud to be an American.
(Home from school, Tricia Nixon turns on the radio and hears what is happening. She calls her father’s office. It is the first they’ve heard about it.)
Imagine the embarrassment of the wife of the foreign minister. A pat for her hand. Pat pats the hand gripping the seat next to her. If I saw this from above, that’s what I’d see: myself, offering a touch. What do they think anger will accomplish?
(The night before, in the hotel: “Muerte a Nixon.”)
(Andrew Marvell: “The Grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none I think do there embrace.”)
Horrible, to sit and watch Dick’s car set upon. Such a helpless feeling—though you can’t give in to feelings like that, because we are so rarely truly helpless.
Windows smashed. Thugs. Terrible actions, if not terrible people.
Forgiveness frees us, when we’d otherwise stay clenched in anger. Sister Thomas Anna would understand. She would certainly understand.
These people are acting like a disease. I suppose they even want to kill.
Day after day, Aunt Kate tending all those people, suffering with tuberculosis. It killed Dick’s brother. His wonderful, beloved brother. Hannah Nixon’s favorite, maybe. I’ve heard mothers have favorites—though I can’t imagine it.
The car is racing toward the American Embassy. Will they storm the embassy? How will it end, all this violence? They must have gotten hurt, too. Some of their police were tackling their people.
My red suit, a mess.
My own father dead of tuberculosis, too. So soon after my mother. In those days, you never said “Cancer.” But it was listed on her death certificate: cancer of the liver. She couldn’t come back to the farm but lay dying at the house of the doctor. And I sat by her side, and sat by her side, and sat by her side, trying to make it easier.
(Cancer. A scary word, almost a cliché, when used descriptively. John Dean would later speak of “a cancer on the presidency,” but on their trip to Venezuela, Watergate was an as-yet-unbuilt building. Even an unthought building.)
They are thugs. Criminals. It degrades them, it does not degrade those set upon.
Julie, Tricia, Tricia, Julie, JulieTricia, TriciaJulie, both in my arms.
What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette.
The Writer’s Sky
What ways of treating a recognizable person are fair game when you’re writing fiction? Both the writer’s and the reader’s expectations become complicated when the writer is creating a character based on someone familiar or—probably more common—if the reader can see in the character a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar traits, so that a whole new Literary Lego Person seems to have been created. Even people the writer knows are instantly altered when they are tuned to a major or minor key. Also, in the act of writing, the character can escape the writer’s intentions, and come to dominate the story in a way that is unwanted (or at least unexpected). Freed from the restraints of real life, the person-become-a-character can grow huge. As you write, you watch your character inflate as if you’ll be taking her to the Macy’s parade, where her huge face will bounce as high as the treetops. Containing a character is often the problem.
Let’s say the writer has a character who is based on a well-known figure—a situation
increasingly common, as fiction writers struggle to remain standing in the Age of Memoir.
This development hasn’t happened overnight. Our American forebears congratulated themselves from the very beginning for their nuts-and-bolts factualism, their rejection of fantasy, illusion, and fiction as unmanly and “just made up.” Long before reality TV we prided ourselves for revealing the man, or author, behind the curtain as a scam, a sham. Such misleading trifles belonged to the old world of artifice, while we created a New Jerusalem of truth in a new world. Memoir or, as a friend calls it, me-moir, fits easily into our entire history, while fiction has always been highly suspect.
But what a change: memoirs now are usually about people no one would have heard of until they read the book, while novels increasingly invoke historic figures: Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s final days, The Last Station; Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Marilyn, about Marilyn Monroe. Legally, a work of fiction can simply ascribe words or actions to a person considered a public figure. But there are few cases of writers bothering to write fiction merely to express a vendetta (graffiti is more effective), so the writer’s fascination with his or her subject usually indicates something about the writer, as well. We also read excellent writers on any subject (William Shawn’s belief, when he was editor of The New Yorker), and we are pleased when we think a writer is sure to have something fascinating to say about a subject we would not have assumed she’d be writing about (Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville). When Edmund White writes a short biography of Rimbaud, we understand that there are two individuals whose stories will be heard: Arthur Rimbaud and Edmund White. Whether writers like it or not—they hardly ever do like it—readers have serious expectations of the writers whose fictional, or nonfictional, worlds they have come to know.
A certain class of writers—perhaps an ever vanishing number—remains reluctant to play to the crowd. In part, that’s because the crowd is never right in front of them (when writing, at least) and is therefore unknowable. The writer can think only of his loyal dog, who never walks out of the room when he is reading aloud (he might hear the words “dog park” or “treat”!), or of his wife, who wouldn’t dare, or he may have internalized the opinions of his fellow MFA students, who never think he’s funny, or he might think he knows just the windup for the pitch to his agent, but in my experience, all people—even all dogs—drift away, in the moment of writing. The writer is left with herself as creator and merciless judge, struggling to keep left brain and right brain distinct.
Writers live an odd life, in which they face forward while spending much time looking back (How much of this story do I know?), appearing at enough events of daily life to stave off being served with divorce papers, while on a roller coaster of enthusiasm and despair, depending on how their writing is going. When you meet them, they often seem remote. That’s because they’re half in their fictional world, which they believe might blow away like a thistle in the next burst of wind (a wind, perhaps, from people recounting their stories, which the writer should know about in order to write something really interesting), and half fixated on passing for normal, which is the most difficult state to try to approximate. None of your clothes look quite right when your goal is to look normal.
Certain writers are energized by getting to do a pas de deux with a ghost. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, with its cast of historic figures, was published to wide acclaim and started a trend. Max Apple has a fabulous story called “The Oranging of America” involving the man who started Howard Johnson’s. There are too many writers and too many dances to count, but among others I really love are Don DeLillo, entering the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in Libra, and Donald Barthelme’s extraordinary story, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” The list of writers magnetizing subjects to them (or vice versa) is long; even posthumously, the character might find the writer, the way you sometimes dream things and awake with the spooky feeling that your dream was floating out there and came to reside in you, the dreamer. The writer may even be a most unwilling recipient. (We all know the danger of thinking that Cleopatra or Joan of Arc is talking to us; so rarely does the unexpected internal voice belong to the garage mechanic or the grocery bagger.) But writers can sometimes persuade themselves to join up, to experience unlikely partners. I am very happy to find myself paired with Mrs. Nixon, a person I would have done anything to avoid—to the extent she was even part of my consciousness. As a writer, though, she interests me. My curiosity is based on how little we share in terms of personality, or upbringing, or what fate has dealt us. She was a person of my mother’s generation, who also lived for years in the place where I grew up, Washington, D.C., which was then such a different town (more Southern; less cosmopolitan; at best a shadow city of New York). Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions, letting me see if, in the character I create, my preconceptions are reflected, reversed, or obscured. It’s an area in which I have a little (only a little) power—to animate a character against a stage set believable enough to transcend its artifice; to play out scenarios from outside my experience, limning someone dissimilar from me with whom I nevertheless empathize. Insofar as we know ourselves well, or are convinced that we do, that self-awareness also becomes our self-imposed predictability. What good would come of projecting ourselves onto the page: a character exactly “like” me might emerge, but that character won’t offer me many surprises. Mrs. Nixon isn’t my avatar so much as she’s her own.
Years ago there was a book I loved, with photographs of a red sofa that was moved around from location to location (as opposed to the unmoving outdoor sofa plunked down in the projects in The Wire), context and object reinforming the viewer about each. Right now, while I’m writing, the “Sad Keanu” phenomena is being played for laughs all over the place: a picture of Keanu Reeves, sitting eating a sandwich, looking sad, that’s been Photoshopped so that he seems to sit with a panda who also has downcast eyes, or to be sitting on the steps as Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross run out of the church in The Graduate, and Keanu . . . well, Keanu is sad. (“That’s so funny,” Keanu says to a journalist at New York magazine. “So they take paparazzi pictures and re-contextualize them?”) I’m not the first to appropriate Mrs. Nixon. She is featured in a coloring book; eBay offers old “Pat for President” buttons, with a photograph of her smiling on the front: history as kitsch. And since she is one of only two former First Ladies in recent times not to have written a memoir, it was left to her daughter Julie to write “the untold story,” or we wouldn’t even have that.
Eccentric people, people who play against type, outspoken or outlandish people are pretty easy to write about. But what about Mrs. Nixon, who internalized the expectations of her time and enacted them meticulously (she took care not to smoke when she might be seen), or who also might have been shy, or more psychologically troubled than reported? Her youthful energy and independence were subsumed as she adopted her role as silent partner to a politician who promised her he would leave politics and allow her and their daughters to have a private life, yet who fought to stay in public office until the bitter end. I spontaneously recoil from any image of Richard Nixon, let alone tapes of his voice—and I resist reimmersion in the Watergate years, which provided the ironic backdrop for my graduate study (Wordsworth, Tricky Dick, and the Watergate mess, in the same summer?), but I have found Mrs. Nixon, the person standing near him (truly or metaphorically), more and more fascinating. Am I saying that Mrs. Nixon found me? I suppose so. Mrs. Nixon is not someone I wish I could have had to dinner. I know perfectly well that she would not have confided in me, and I very much doubt that I would have asked her any direct questions, because—and this deeply dismays my husband—I almost never do that. I listen to what I’m told, which doesn’t mean that I believe it, but I do factor it in.
I have my quick checklist about possible characters, as doctors do when they glance up as you walk into the office, before you’ve begun your litany of complaints, or as people do who are meeting f
or the first time after finding each other on Match.com: check the eyes; take the temperature (to speak metaphorically); do you instinctively feel some attraction? Being alert to what the person or character says is only part of it; you have to register what she can’t, or doesn’t, say. That’s what I find intriguing to try to intuit. This was Mrs. Nixon’s great mystery: not her resolve to avoid being controversial, but her consistent ability to pull it off; not her loyalty, but the sad irony of being trapped by what is in most circumstances a virtue. She was so obviously secondary to her husband—she, of course, enabled this codependence—but what is more interesting than focusing where your attention has not been directed, on someone who isn’t the main character? (Years ago, I met Norman Mailer. He had left the party, as had I, to go into the kitchen and talk to the children and the cook.) So I began speculating about Mrs. Nixon, in part by researching her life and by drawing on my experience of literature. Consider:
In Frank Conroy’s “Midair,” a mentally ill father, who has escaped from the hospital, appears as a stranger at his children’s apartment when their mother is away. He behaves crazily, up to and during the point when the people from the mental hospital come to the door to take him away. Most anything can be made up about your character, if he or she is crazy. That’s one reason writers tend not to present clinically crazy characters; they’ll always seem half credible, half unbelievable. Conroy writes: “For more than an hour they have been rearranging the books on the living-room shelves, putting them in alphabetical order by author. Sean’s father stops every now and then, with some favorite book, to do a dramatic reading. The readings become more and more dramatic. He leans down to the children to emphasize the dialogue, shouting in different voices, gesticulating with his free arm in the air, making faces. But then, abruptly, his mood changes.” I doubt that the reader would wonder what, exactly, Sean’s father is reading, since his actions are scarily credible and the paragraph has to do with the general situation. Action informs us. Specifics can stop action. (Any specific reference to the books being alphabetized and read from could be made to work here, from King Lear to a book about astrology, but a specific reference would also be working against the reader’s visceral reaction to what’s basically going on.)