Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (28 page)

She once said her “only goal” was to “go down in history as the wife of a president.”

Her reclusive years after leaving the White House have been described as “Garboesque,” with her resorting to wigs and disguises to go shopping. She suffered a major stroke in 1976 after reading Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” about her husband’s Watergate decline and fall, and another stroke in 1983. She had been in frail health for years.

“She cherishes the privacy of her retirement years,” daughter Julie wrote in her loving 1986 biography, “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” which strove to establish her mother’s accomplishments as the most widely traveled first lady in history with trips to 80 nations, her laudable addition of antiques to the White House, and her promotion of volunteerism.

One of Mrs. Nixon’s last public appearances was in Yorba Linda, Calif., on July 19, 1990, for the dedication of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, and at a dinner that night for 1,600 friends at Los Angeles’ Century Plaza Hotel. The library, where her memorial services will be conducted Saturday, includes a Pat Nixon room and grounds planted with the red-black Pat Nixon Rose developed by a French company in 1972 when she was first lady.

“She is a true, unsung hero of the Nixon administration and our country owes her a debt of gratitude,” former President Reagan said at the dedication. He echoed that appraisal in a statement Tuesday.

“She was a woman of great strength and generous spirit. In time of trial and turmoil, she shared that strength and spirit not just with her family, but with the nation,” said California Gov. Pete Wilson, who will deliver one of her eulogies Saturday.

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http://www-tech.mit.edu/V113/N29/nixon.29w.html
            8/21/2007

T
he writer chooses someone, or a situation, from endless possibilities. The writer may not even know why. Finding out can be the point of writing the story. The brilliant Donald Barthelme wrote an essay called “Not-Knowing,” in which he says, “If the writer is taken to be the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist, this changes not very much the traditional view of the artist. But it does license a very great deal of critical imperialism.” Barthelme understands the process of writing so thoroughly, he might not realize how much such a notion might surprise people unfamiliar with the way writers write. Writers don’t talk to nonwriters about being hit by lightning, being conduits, being vulnerable. Sometimes they do talk that way to each other, though.
The work’s way of getting itself written
. I think that’s an amazing concept that not only gives words (the work) a mind and a body but gives them the power to stalk a person (the writer). Stories do that. They don’t let go. They infiltrate dreams, or sometimes even reach out, nicely, and ask
the writer to dance. Barthelme’s anthropomorphizing of stories brings to mind (this mind) parasites, whose existence depends on finding a host. But—in that analogy—certainly there are worse things than being the host, because it means that at least someone or something is looking for you. You’re not what writers most dread: you’re not alone.

Everybody likes our back porch. The mosquitoes would devour us if we didn’t have the screen porch, but we do, and I hang out there. Every spring when we come back to the house I rehang the pig lights, and every fall we take them down—my husband suffers from pig lights guilt; I put them up, so he usually feels he has to help put them away. Over the winter they are hung from a hook on the back of the downstairs bathroom door, where they dangle in a sort of delicate pig lasso. If they were left outside, they’d be ruined. Hanging them every year passes for tradition and is a rite of spring, in my world. “Pig lights!” people say. Or they don’t say anything: they rock in the rocking chairs and have dinner with us—herbs fresh from the garden—and the birds sing for quite a while and jump on the edge of the little fountain for a drink, and the chipmunks who live in what we call “Chippy Condo”—a mortarless stone wall filled with welcoming holes—dart in and out of the wall, into the ground cover, across the lawn, some zigzagging into our basement, where (alas) they liked to live before Chippy Condo got built. This year, one in particular liked to strut his stuff. He was slower than the others, and fatter. He was always on the run, but waddled and—if I may indulge myself—was a bit insouciant. We were amused by him, though he may well have been a her. I don’t mind not knowing.

Italo Calvino, in one of the many reinventions of one story, in his book
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,
writes: “Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone
is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing. . . . But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.” I suppose that if you think of yourself as inextricable from your writing, it’s disconcerting to see writing that is no longer familiar. Even stranger is the possibility that your identity is mutable and that you can’t get back to your writing, exactly. It’s general advice—Hemingway, among others, has urged this—to quit while you’re on a roll, midsentence, so that you have something to reenter the moment you begin again. Good advice, but I never do it. I rarely get to end the day’s writing with a strong finished line, either—any more than I can come up with a quick retort. I like the passage from Calvino because it’s spooky in the way it suggests that after a short period of time, after sleep, you’re forever different, in some way; if that might be true, it would explain why writers revise so much, each new self required to work hard, while taking the material farther away from the immediacy of its inception.

Along the same lines (no pun intended), this past summer I was on the porch, reading essays on poetry by Louise Glück, all of them astute, remarkable, succinctly written:

A case can be made that publication reinstates vulnerability, collapsing the distance between both poet and materials and poet and reader. This overlooks the artist’s most stubborn dilemma, itself a corollary of distance: specifically, the impossibility of connecting the self one is in the present with the self that wrote. The gap is both absolute and immediate: toward a finished work, only the most tormented sense of relationship remains, not a sense of authorship at all. The work stands as a reprimand or reproach, a
marker permanently fixing an unbearable distance, the distance between the remote artist self, miraculously fluent, accidentally, fleetingly perceptive, and the clumsy, lost self in the world. Critical assault of a finished work is painful in that it affirms present self-contempt. What it cannot do, either for good or ill, is wholly fuse, for the poet, the work and the self; the vulnerability of the poet to critical reception remains complicated by that fact. And the sting the poet may suffer differs from the risks of more immediate exposure: the ostensibly exposed self, the author, is, by the time of publication, out of range, out of existence, in fact.

That’s it. You write by darting out of the spaces in the stone wall to show yourself and to go about your business, or just to have some fun, then return to hide in what have become, to you, the already intricate, private spaces, and whatever catacombs exist within the wall—whatever complex systems you use for protection and survival—nobody really knows. If you’re a chipmunk, nobody much cares.

Finishing any writing project, I always feel myself simultaneously retreating. Though you have to stay alert, be open to possibility, continue until the last period, or whatever punctuation serves as your final, tiny ending, I still feel instinctively when I’m nearing the end of something. There’s a second in which (because all writing is about altering time) things flicker into focus, though their illumination presages their diminishment, their going out of focus. The second you have it is the second it escapes you. So you let it go out into the world at the same time you retreat into the spaces between rocks. Writer as chipmunk.

Barthelme, in catalog notes to an exhibition of work by Sherrie Levine: “A picture on top of a picture. What happens in the space between the two.”

Me, on Mrs. Nixon (I’m not using a question mark, either): We can’t be conflated, but what happens in the space in between.

As with paper dolls, so with writing: pick your favorite and dress it, talk to it,
animate
it. That’s how imagination works: you talk to it, it talks back. You’re playing both parts until the moment the paper doll takes on a life of its own and says it wants to go live with someone more interesting, or that you have a big nose.

Mrs. Nixon didn’t talk back to me—I’m not that far gone—but sometimes I’d write a sentence and feel it was my sentence, not hers, so I’d delete it and wait. All the while, I was reading books about
him
. It was difficult to lift her out of his context, but if I’d let her stay there, she would have hidden forever. She’d put on her scarf and go out only at night,
and not say a word to herself that I could overhear, because she wasn’t crazy.
So I began to look at her in the background. Sometimes she came forward and sometimes she didn’t. I left her where she was if she didn’t give any inclination I might move her. I realize that I was acting on my own cues, but I began to experience the amazement James Merrill felt with his Ouija board, as he suspended disbelief and responded to spirits who gave him information. (If you haven’t read Alison Lurie’s book about David Jackson and James Merrill invoking the spirit world, do:
Familiar Spirits
.)

Mrs. Nixon didn’t make it easy for a writer to write about her—nor was that any obligation. There
isn’t
anything confessional written down (that I know of). We don’t have the advantage of reading the stories of John Cheever and later—to our surprise—learning that we are suddenly able to read his diaries, so different from his fiction: such a different sensibility. Shocked readers held their breath until the next excerpt of his diaries was published in
The
New Yorker
. Of course Mrs. Nixon was interviewed by her daughter when Julie Nixon Eisenhower wrote her mother’s biography, but the two were so simpatico that Julie Nixon Eisenhower was always highly aware of her mother’s boundaries. How did Mrs. Nixon—rarely fierce, by all accounts—maintain them? I don’t have the answer to that. Sometimes people engender enough respect that others back away. Sometimes they’re lucky. There are many possibilities. Occasionally a photograph betrayed her true emotions, but she did not confirm or deny what anyone perceived. She didn’t let us have a lot of information through words. I’m convinced she gave up on them.

I have no trouble understanding that. Writers may love words, but most also mistrust them. It’s why so many writers like action: rafting; hunting; dancing; hiking into forests and countries where language, alone, doesn’t define the experience. Words create an illusory reality. Being adept with language, writers often reel back from their desks wondering: does this just
sound
good, or do I mean what I’ve said? Sometimes the truth is, you don’t know. Once it’s there, the words arranged, alliterating and alluding, it seems shapely and eloquent, and its existence—its tidiness and length and depth—can seduce the writer as well as the reader. If it does, the writer will fail to write the real story.

Mrs. Nixon’s prominence when I was a child and a teenager couldn’t help registering on me, even if what I saw dismayed me and made me want to stay far away from that world. The haunting songs Mrs. Nixon and my parents’ generation understood in terms of the war, I registered only as sad, filled with longing and promise. But those were still the sounds to which I fell asleep. I don’t have love letters exchanged between my parents, but I do have a note to my mother that my father signed “Jimmie.” He was so young, he hadn’t yet changed the spelling to “Jimmy.” I have a photograph
taken in a picture booth of my parents, both nineteen, that proves they were in love, and that every real love is unique. Mrs. Nixon was my nonmother—my mother was youthful and eccentric, often one of the kids. As a voter, she was registered (I like the metaphor) “Independent.”

Though there was a huge gap between my mother and Mrs. Nixon, I sensed that she was something my mother might have become, if not for fate. If you married a man and that man became something else, it could trap a woman. One possibility, when captured, has always been dignity: composure can (at least) land you, with a long pointed horn on your forehead, enclosed with a virgin inside a fence, around which flowers bloom. Not only I, as a young woman, but my mother before me, had escaped being Mrs. Nixon: domestic and modest; picture perfect; always smiling (such a wistful smile, though). A lot of people liked her, but something seemed wrong because she was married to
him
.

It seems obvious to me now that she puzzled herself. Someone who had what is euphemistically called “a hard life” moves on, having integrated life’s difficulties. David Halberstam called her “heartbreaking.” He said: “She ha[d] a childhood so harsh it is Dickensian.” To overcome misfortune, Mrs. Nixon became a person who would try things, and who would persevere—quite possibly, it was a mode on which she overrelied. Nixon’s immediate family vehemently did not want him to resign the presidency, even when there was incontrovertible evidence of his guilt.

There’s all that—the mind keeps going back to that—though the birds seem happier than ever this year. Bright red cardinals (everybody knows those are the males) in among the pink roses, having a drink of water from the fountain, pecking beneath the bird feeder, fledglings learning to fly. It seems they all coexist: the butterfly moving off the flower for the hummingbird; the chipmunk
disappearing as the rabbit hops out of the woods. Sure, you can sometimes hear the shrieks at night, find feathers on the grass. But as you rock, you can also have the feeling that you’re pleased to be watching a life you’re not orchestrating, and couldn’t imagine meddling with. If you happen to be a writer, your thoughts might wander lazily: Did I write before? How exactly was that done? Because even if you stop watching, right that second, and begin writing, even if you write for a very long time and then get something down that pleases you and surprises you and all those other lucky things, you’ll still disappear. You’ll be a different you if your words are ever published, and there will be less and less possibility of ever connecting with them in the same way. You erase yourself every time you write.