MarysLibrary

The Path to Power

Back in about 1974 when Robert Caro had finished writing his monumental biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, he turned his attention to what he expected would be a two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Always interested in political power - how it is gained and how it is used - Caro found Johnson was the ideal candidate for a biography. Nobody was more nakedly ruthless in grasping for power and nobody knew better how to use it, both for ill and for good.

Caro is now working on volume 4 of that two-volume biography, which rumor has it he may need a fifth volume to finish. It could go on forever as far as I'm concerned. It's one of the finest biographies I've ever read. I've been reading Caro just before I go to sleep at night and there are nights when midnight comes and goes and I'm still reading.

Johnson lived as a child in Johnson City, Texas, a small, dusty Hill Country town. His mother was educated and attempted to maintain cultural standards in the Johnson household. But she was unable to cope with the drudgery of keeping house for a large family without much income to work with. As a young man Johnson's father was a member of the Texas legislature and was remembered by many men as "the finest man I ever met." His honesty and hard work on behalf of his constituents was legendary. But he made foolish decisions and the family was dirt poor. People laughed at the Johnson family and his father lived with the shame of not being able to provide for his family for much of his later life.

When he grew up Lyndon Johnson swore that he would never be like his father, laughed at and without resources. He made sure he was nothing like his father and he succeeded. He acquired a significant fortune by using his political connections and he grasped for power no matter what he had to do to get it. He stole elections from the time he ran candidates for class offices in college until the Senate race of 1948 which has gone down as one of the dirtiest in Texas history - and Texas has had some of the dirtiest politics in the US.

This first volume follows Johnson from his impoverished youth and his shame at being laughed at to the eve of World War II which promised to derail his hitherto smooth rise in national politics. As a congressman, Johnson made hydroelectric power generation and rural electrification his issues. The former was to please Brown and Root who wanted to make significant money on the dam they were building on the Pedernales River.

But his passion to bring electric power to the farms of Texas was to benefit the poor people who as late as the 1930s still had no electricity and had to do everything from hauling water to cooking on a wood stove in much the way it had been done in the middle ages. The powerful utilities saw no point in stringing electrical lines great distances to these poor farms assuming the people couldn't afford the rates or the electrical pumps and household wiring and appliances that would increase usage. Johnson proved to them that when the electricity arrived the people would acquire these conveniences and as they used more electricity the rates went down and they were able to take more advantage of this now-essential benefit of civilization.

Obama

David Mendell's new book Obama: From Promise to Power (2007) is the best of the recent biographies that have popped up in the wake of Barack Obama's unexpected success in the ongoing Democratic presidential primary.

Mendell is a reporter for The Chicago Tribune (aka WGN, the world's greatest newspaper) and has been watching Obama more closely and for longer than any other media figure. When Obama was a candidate for the state senate in Illinois in 1997 and had no one with him but a driver as he campaigned at town hall meetings and gave speeches to the Kiwanis Club and to black churches in his district, Mendell would tag along. He also reported on Obama's 2000 race for the US House of Representatives, which he lost, and his successful US Senate campaign. So we have an author who knows Obama very well. He also likes him very much.

In fact, this book is the most comprehensive and most readable of the books about Obama save those Obama wrote himself and it is also the most flattering. No attempt is made to describe Obama's political record in Illinois or in Washington. This is a personal record of the candidate's life. There are a couple of other books about Obama that do delve into his political decisions and the legislation he has sponsored. This one doesn't.

So for a place to start, to lay the groundwork for understanding the man who may be our next president, I recommend Mendell's well-written and informative book. Just don't expect controversy or criticism.

Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Theodore Roosevelt's eldest daughter, the daughter whom he had with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, became one of America's most famous women and in her very long life gained not only fame but political visibility and power. She was called in her later years "Washington's Other Monument."

Princess Alice, as she was known in her youth when she lived in the White House and was a liberated woman well before that term became known, was beautiful and witty and almost entirely uncontrollable. TR famously  told a friend that, "I can either run the country or attend to Alice but I cannot possibly do both." He wasn't exaggerating.

She smoked, she drove a car, she carried a live snake in her purse, she ate asparagus with her gloves on. These were sins she was charged with in her day, the improper eating of asparagus being apparently just as heinous as the smoking.

This recent biography by Stacy A Cordery relates it all, along with Alice's marriage to Nick Longworth, his infidelities, her infidelities, her growing power in the Republican party, and her joi de vivre, something that never left her until the day she died in 1980 at the age of 96. She was famous for a pillow a friend stitched for her that said: "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."

The Prince of Darkness

I've been reading a lot of books about politics lately and the best of them is the columnist and TV commentator Robert D Novak's The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (2007.)

Mr Novak is very (very) conservative, is deeply opinionated, and has always been totally unafraid to tell politicians and everybody else exactly what he thought of them and their policies, in print and to their faces. This, of course, has made for a lively column and lively TV over the years; it makes for a lively memoir. Novak has been the linchpin on Crossfire, Evans and Novak, The McLaughlin Group and other political talk shows during his career in addition to writing his newspaper column, shared with Rowland Evans, Evans and Novak.

He has covered it all, met everybody, had a falling out with almost everybody, been everywhere, and opined about everything. He has been first to report some stunning political developments, and he has been over the years entangled in some other people's nasty agendas. He's still going strong at 75.

You need not agree with the author and you need not believe his take on every controversy to enjoy this tell-all book about political Washington from the days of Eisenhower through today's McCain and Obama.

American Bloomsbury

A couple of weeks ago Fay Sheco at Historical/Present posted some comments on Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury. Now that I've finished reading the book I have to agree that she got it about right and I've asked her to be a guest blogger and let me re-post her remarks. Here they are.

Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Susan Cheever created a mouthful in her title, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Simon & Schuster, 2006). I got lost in punctuating this, but anyway, the book was a disappointment.

The premise appears to be that with all of these writers living and working in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th C., there must be a story in there somewhere. Maybe so, but the organization of American Bloomsbury is anti-story. Cheever tarries with one writer at the center of the narrative for a short few chapters, and then she moves on to the next writer, and later she returns to writers already discussed, and unfortunately the reader begins to feel like she is being led in circles. The minor characters get lost in this mix, and when a member of the supporting cast is mentioned late in the book, it's hard to remember her history or where she fits in, because the character has not made an appearance in recent chapters and she is too peripheral a figure to have stuck in memory in sufficient detail.

With a total of 200 pages, the book cannot and does not pretend to offer much depth about any one writer. Rather, Cheever has read the biographies and letters of the principals, as well as the group's literary corpus, and has identified the points of intersection where the characters meet. She reads with a particular purpose and skims off the content that suits her group biography slant. Unfortunately, a reader like me who has sampled all of the writers, ends up feeling that my time would be better spent reading Alcott's thrillers or a biography of Hawthorne. On the other hand, American Bloomsbury would probably not be a suitable introduction to the writers, because if you have not read their work, then why would you care about their platonic love triangles and financial woes?

Cheever, who was named by Jane Smiley as one of the best American fiction writers of the last 25 years, might have done better to present her material as an historical novel. However, other writers, including Geraldine Brooks, had already mined this field. Brooks's March, about the Civil War experiences of Mr. March (absent father of the girls in Alcott's Little Women) won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Another writer Cheever acknowledges in her notes is Amy Belding Brown, who published the historical novel Mr. Emerson's Wife in 2005.

We hear a fiction writer's voice in some of the description, although I must say that by the end of the book the atmospheric effects of chirping birds and whooshing brooks had appeared a few times too many. My recommendation would be to use the sub-title of American Bloomsbury as a reading list and skip the book. I give Cheever credit for awakening my interest in Margaret Fuller, an important 19th C. American that I want to investigate further, and Hawthorne also deserves more consideration.

The form of the group biography finds a much better expression in Mary S. Lovell's The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (2002), a page-turner about Nancy Mitford and her extraordinary family.

Tomalin's Hardy

Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review features a review on the front page of Clair Tomalin's new biography of Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Mallon, the reviewer, calls the book a "case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology," a term that you might apply to Hardy's novels. He agrees with Tomalin's judgment that Hardy's novels were uneven, that Tess of the d'Urbervilles is both awkward in places and glowing with imagination.

I've read enough of the biography to note, as does Mallon, that Tomalin emphasizes Hardy's decision after Jude the Obscure was slammed by the critics to write nothing but poetry for his remaining 30 years. Tomalin approves. I regret the loss of the fine novels Hardy might have continued to write.

Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary: A Novel, by Janis Cooke Newman, showed up on somebody's list of Best Books of 2006, so I requested it from the library.

I zipped through its 707 pages in four days. Terms like "compulsively readable," "page turner," and "can't put it down" are running through my mind. I was fascinated.

However, I don't feel comfortable recommending it. A novel whose plot hinges on Abraham Lincoln's sex life is going to offend some people right off. And an author who dresses her characters in hoop skirts in 1828 is going to offend the rest of us.

Then there's the issue of fictionalizing historical characters. I know, Shakespeare did it. But that was long ago and in another country and besides, the bard is dead. And Janis Cooke Newman, although a clever writer, doesn't get to rub elbows with the Swan of Avon.

The story is structured as a series of flashbacks within the story of Mary Lincoln's attempt to be freed from a mental institution in which her son had her incarcerated because she was spending money very freely, money he hoped to inherit.

The book graphically illustrates the difficulty in which a woman of the mid-19th century could find herself when she was forced to rely on the good will and honesty of the men in her life. The experiences of the other women in the lunatic asylum where Mary Lincoln spent the summer of 1875 demonstrate the appalling treatment of the mentally ill at that time.

So there it is. A book with serious flaws but one that I found captivating.   

The Wild Man of Lit Crit

Leslie Fiedler will never die. His earthly body died years ago but his ideas, which put the world of American letters in a tizzy, are still alive. He was, after all, the guy who invented the term "postmodern."

I came across a piece about him in "Slate" written in 2003 by Sam Tanenhaus that explains what it was we found so exciting about his work back in the 60s. My copy of Love and Death in the American Novel is crisp and its spine is fractured but I wouldn't part with it for anything.

Leonard Woolf

Victoria Glendinning's new biography of Leonard Woolf arrived yesterday and already I'm on page 110. (Brown's Zola is history. I didn't get to page 110 of that 888-page tome even after three weeks of reading.)

There are those who disparage Glendinning, especially some in the Trollope community who feel her work is not sufficiently serious. I on the other hand, find her treatment of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Anthony Trollope, and now Woolf, to be approachable and the very opposite of tedious. So many biographers struggle to include in their books every detail they have dug up in their research. They may have needed to know the minutia of their subject's life but the reader does not. Anyone in need of that kind of detail should be reading primary sources and not biographies.

So here I am, sharing little Lennie's pleasure at a formal, written dinner invitation from his father, cycling to the Shetlands (I think there was a ferry ride involved), becoming an Apostle at Cambridge, and heading off as a Cadet to administer 10,000 square miles of Ceylon's hinterland.