by Ann Beattie
But we have come far from Mrs. Nixon; such drift seems endemic to writing about the quietly loyal and enigmatic Mrs. Nixon. It is difficult not to leave her behind, when the madness that surrounded her eclipsed her so thoroughly. She knew that Haldeman did not like her, and she did not like Haldeman. He was not even respectful of formalities. He excluded her. Travel schedules were drawn up that simply did not include her. Nothing suggests that she was happy about her husband remaining in politics, but rather that the opposite was true. However, she was used to taking care of things, herself included. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and her father died soon afterward. Mrs. Nixon’s daughter Julie recounts a story in which Mrs. Nixon, leaving her mother’s funeral, “walked directly over to her friends and said quickly, ‘Didn’t she look beautiful?’” Mrs. Nixon was telling her friends a story, not asking a question. She was making a preemptive strike, taking command (or appearing to take command) of the situation and offering a remark that, while uninspired and conventional, also asked a hidden question: Won’t you believe me?—because I am at risk if you don’t. When people believe, Tinker Bell gets to spread her magic.
There’s something awkward or even painful for the recipient of such platitudes: the content is of course unremarkable—that is precisely the person’s intention—but the storyteller is silently asking for collusion, for an acceptance of this story as it’s recited, as opposed to the real story, so that the real story doesn’t have to be told, or emotionally registered. In stories, there are two components: what the story is, and how or why it is told. Those things often create the friction in what we’re reading. It is usually only through time, or with dropped hints, however, that we can tell someone is an unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators, of course, do not necessarily know they’re unreliable. They can be genuinely ill-informed or simply mistaken, as well as being schemers. When we’re reading a work of fiction, the question becomes: does the writer believe this narrator? Lesson one in book club is probably not to assume the voice in the book reflects the outlook of the author. Even quite sophisticated readers can be thrown off by who they think the writer is, though—always a liability for an author, as well as something the writer can capitalize on; paradoxically, once an author is known, there’s a temptation to conflate his or her personality with the character’s. I once thought about Felicia’s Journey: William Trevor must be writing about someone who is a nice old man, and who therefore can’t have the ominous undercurrents I’ve started to sense, so it has to be my paranoia. The gentleman, like Trevor himself, would no doubt be a benign creature. It’s a good trick, to throw off readers because of who they—the writers—seem to be, but it’s not a trick writers can pull too often. I didn’t anticipate what was coming in Felicia’s Journey because of my unconscious stereotyping of the author, and what his fictional world was likely to be. Are we familiar enough with Mrs. Nixon to think that in framing her mother’s death as she did she hoodwinked her audience, or herself? Does any author speculating on Mrs. Nixon need to decide whether she creates her one-sentence story with great craft or naïve simplicity?
The Nixon administration helped create a culture of distrust that flourishes today. Inherent faith in government morphed into automatic distrust of all “they” do. We may have become suspicious of narrators because we’re so attuned to the discrepancy between the presumptive story and what underlies it. If things are moving and taking shape covertly, the words of the story, read too literally, may come to be an impediment to understanding. To some extent, a reading depends on how secure and knowledgeable the reader is. Sometimes when I’m teaching I read a paragraph aloud to make the point that an interesting tone is present if readers allow themselves to hear it. “But how do you know to read it that way? Of course if you read it like that it’s ominous/funny/significant,” a student will usually respond. I can always be wrong, but I’ve come up with my possible reading because the writer has cued me. There has been a subtle alteration before or after the line I’ve read aloud, or sometimes both. It’s bracketed, in effect. A rhythm has been varied, thereby setting something apart while seeming to include it merely as an integer in the story’s larger context. In the context of her mother’s death, what tone can we deduce from Mrs. Nixon’s “Didn’t she look beautiful?”
Raymond Carver is amazingly good at altering tone and pacing, using repetition of what’s obvious in the action almost as an anesthetic swab that precedes the shot. In “Are These Actual Miles?” Carver works with staccato sentences to hypnotize the reader. He narrates a story about a married couple who are complicitous in what they’re doing: the wife is not merely selling their car on the eve of their declaring bankruptcy, she’s also selling herself sexually to the used car salesman. Her husband, Leo, waiting at home for news he hopes to hear and news he does not want to hear (they are synonymous), is described: “His undershirt is wet: he can feel the sweat rolling from his underarms. He sits on the step with the empty glass in his hand and watches the shadows fill up the yard. He stretches, wipes his face. He listens to the traffic on the highway and considers whether he should go to the basement, stand on the utility sink, and hang himself with his belt. He understands he is willing to be dead.”
If the undershirt is wet, then it follows that he is sweating, so we accept the sweat rolling. If he sits on a step with an empty glass instead of a full glass, he’s watching the shadows in a different way than he would if he had a drink, so, okay, they “fill up the yard” (shadows are doing what the liquor is not doing—there’s none in the glass). He makes two conventional gestures: stretching and wiping his face. Then we move a bit outside him—he moves a bit outside himself—and he’s reminded /we are reminded that there is a larger world, a world of “traffic on the highway.” We’ve moved from something small and personal, how he feels in his damp shirt, to not knowing how he feels exactly (he doesn’t tell us here), but we register the other people driving cars (a loaded subject in this story, given what his wife has set out to do) on the big highway, with their inherently metaphorical connotations.
This is already a lot to keep track of, though nothing much is happening overtly: we’ve moved from the personal to the larger world, but a world that is nevertheless eluding the character. We go from close-up to long shot. We are considering him from a lot of angles, so it may even come as a slight relief to know that he’s doing some considering, too. Except that in completing this sentence—as opposed to the ones that have come before—we would not have anticipated this explicit revelation: “He listens to the traffic on the highway and considers whether he should go to the basement”—and then the sentence surges, gains too much speed—“stand on the utility sink”—so far, a possible yet strange inclusion—“and hang himself with his belt.” He is not thinking in the abstract, and we had no way to outguess the thought he was formulating because it does not logically unfold. “He understands he is willing to be dead.” We had no idea this was at stake. Perhaps Leo did not understand, either. Perhaps, following his own thoughts, there was an internal emotional change analogous to a tonal change and—chillingly—his realization makes him able to step outside himself, seeing inside the same way the reader does, now. The last sentence might elicit a nervous laugh from us, since we’re plodding along with Leo, and what does this guy in his undershirt understand that we wouldn’t be able to think circles around? And then we get our answer. Time stops. The paragraph ends. Wherever we go from here, we will go knowing that the stakes are different, and that we were lured into something we thought almost ploddingly banal, only to find ourselves facing mortality.
No one could infer from Mrs. Nixon’s conventional “Didn’t she look beautiful?” that the stakes are as high as they are in the Carver story. But we can’t make the mistake of feeling superior to Leo or Mrs. Nixon, both capable, in the hands of a capable writer, of catching us off guard. The premonition that we are willing to be dead is available to all of us.
Writing a story is different from telling a story, but i
f we omit detail while things brew beneath the surface, the reader usually picks up a sense of what those missing details might be, and what they might mean, by the tone. In person, you can tell if a storyteller is excited and connected, or perplexed and removed. We have the benefit of facial expressions, we often have a history that contextualizes the person speaking (as we come to have with writers whose fictional worlds we become familiar with), we’re more in the world of theater than the world of prose. But a writer like Carver isn’t going to stop to give you the character’s expression (monotonous movement or the lack of it creates its own dynamic; Carver got this, in part, from Beckett), and he isn’t going to jump to the point, either, the way our friend might lead up to a punch line. Carver is more interested in how one gets to that point, and he works like a camera, moving around his character, seeing from different angles. This technique is handled so subtly, though, that you don’t realize you’re moving with the camera’s eye. You’re in motion, and when you stop it’s because you’ve been stopped the way Wile E. Coyote stops, suspended over a canyon’s thin air.
Mrs. Nixon’s remark about her mother’s corpse looking beautiful hardly has the complexity of Carver’s short story. As reported, it’s a one-liner that really consists of only the punch line, complete with implicit instructions from Julie Nixon Eisenhower on how we are to react to her mother. But I don’t hear it the way she has instructed me to, and I doubt many people would. You feel the tension, or even the terror underlying the emotion. She’s playing against emotion. Breezy was a word of the period. You don’t hear it much anymore. Mrs. Nixon was being a bit breezy when she phrased her statement as a question. She wanted to get away as quickly as possible—away from the people she addressed, as well as from the upsetting reality of the situation. Interesting that she married a man who could leave almost nothing untouched, rethinking everything, playing devil’s advocate with himself (or any angels who might be converted), always second-guessing both real and imaginary adversaries.
She married a man who shared her anxiety about expressed emotion: he arrived at ideas and conclusions (those times he ever arrived) by dissembling, hypothesizing, imagining stories that would be told, rather than getting as close to the story as he could and elucidating its substance. He believed everything in the world could shift at any moment. This is not a little boy to whom you would have wanted to give an ant farm. When he had the power, he insisted upon being the camera, making his audience move. He used words to superimpose one story on top of another. By the time he had concluded his half thoughts and ellipses, his curses and his hypothetical scenarios, he’d shaped a ball of twine into a cat’s cradle so dense, even he could not escape. We needn’t make him analogous to Carver’s Leo, with his wife offstage, unable to witness his realization that he is willing to be dead. But in David Frost’s famous TV interview of March 1977, we find out that Nixon, forced by the press’s vigilance about the Watergate break-in and Americans’ increasing desire to lay the blame at someone’s feet to ask for Ehrlichman’s resignation, told his faithful subordinate he’d hoped he wouldn’t wake up that morning. If we trust this particular narrator, Nixon was willing himself to be dead.
The Faux Pas
Mrs. Nixon is quoted in Joe McGinniss’s book: “Our group used to get together often. Of course, none of us had much money at the time, so we would just meet at someone’s house after skating and have food, a spaghetti dinner or something of that type, and then we would sit around and tell stories and laugh. Dick was always the highlight of the party because he has a wonderful sense of humor. He would keep everybody in stitches. Sometimes we would even act out parts. I will never forget one night when we did Beauty and the Beast, Dick was the Beast, and one of the other men dressed up like Beauty. This sounds rather silly to be telling it now, but in those days we were all very young, and we had to do home entertainment rather than go out and spend money. We used to put on funny shows. It was all good, clean fun, and we had loads of laughs.”
We might all, writers included, wonder: Did they know the story of Beauty and the Beast so well that they didn’t consult the text? What fairy tale might people know now that would allow them to put on a performance without referring to a book? Where did the costumes come from or, if they were improvised, out of what? How was it decided that two men would have the starring roles, and was one of them embarrassed to be acting the part of Beauty? Did they just eat dinner, or did they also drink? If so, what? How much?
When someone is recounting an event, as Mrs. Nixon does, what impulse is it that makes a person conclude her story by giving last-minute information, as if we might otherwise misunderstand? Do storytellers assume they can manage the response of the listener or reader by deciding, themselves, on an explanation of the meaning of the story? Are writers ever off duty, or, as listeners or readers, are they always sleuthing for what’s between the lines? When Mrs. Nixon concludes, is she rationalizing? Or just more grown-up, with distance from that scene? Would she like to be back in that room, watching that performance? If she could go back in time, what might have changed for her? Why do so many writers like ending on a note of ambiguity, whereas people telling each other stories like to make the meaning of the ending explicit? Why do writers resist believing that stories can be summed up, and instead take in whatever text they’re presented with from a distance, skeptically, on second reading?
Mrs. Nixon’s statement has enough specificity to be believable. Why do writers want so much more from stories than the literal level? Can this story be understood very differently from the way the storyteller reports and makes sense of it? However that question is answered, how much does it matter that someone who went on to be President of the United States was central to the story? How much does it matter that his wife is also a public figure? Are there stories that could be told about the past that could be described as the opposite of “good, clean fun”? If so, how might we get them? Could this story be the same without the mention of money? Did the usually recalcitrant Mrs. Nixon tell this story in response to something, or because it was a night she’d long remembered? If Mrs. Nixon could tell this story again, would this still be the version she’d want told for posterity? Does this sound like a recited story, or a written story? What would be the difference between the two? Do we assume that Mr. McGinniss quoted Mrs. Nixon exactly, or might he have cleaned up the quote? What happened when the laughter ended?
When campaigning on television was quite new, and the stakes were certainly higher than they were when playing a game in someone’s living room, Mrs. Nixon once made a mistake on camera. Questioned by Bud Wilkinson and Paul Keyes, “She answered a couple of Wilkinson /Paul Keyes questions of less than monumental importance, and then, as the audience—on cue—applauded, she grinned and . . . began to applaud herself.” Joe McGinniss, in The Selling of the President 1968, continues: “It was simply a reflex. There had been so much applause in her life. Going all the way back to the days of Beauty and the Beast. And all through this campaign. She had sat, half listening, then with her mind drifting more and more as the weeks and speeches passed so slowly into one another. Bringing her finally to this television studio on this final night where all that was left of her was reflex: you hear applause—applaud.” She then made a second mistake when she realized what she’d done wrong and put her hands over her eyes.
The scene conjures up “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” It’s probably true that Mrs. Nixon’s mind was wandering, so whatever she heard (even if it had been “evil”) was only half understood. Sitting in front of television cameras, you see nothing of the broadcast, only the cameras and the shapes of the cameramen. You’re made myopic, cut off from really seeing the larger scene. The mistake was in congratulating herself, in responding to a verbal cue, and therefore being robotic. For someone as closemouthed as Mrs. Nixon, who you wouldn’t assume would blurt out anything, the problem was not so much making a sound as it was being caught not thinking, not realizing that she was the center of
attention, and that, therefore, good manners required that she not congratulate herself. Embarrassed, she raised her hands to cover her face, compounding the problem. The cameras moved away from her. Only if you wanted to do in your subject would you have the cameras linger—as they undoubtedly would, now.
Major and Minor Events of Mrs. Nixon’s Life
Working hard on the family farm in California, along with her mother, father, and two brothers
Losing both parents when she was young
Having ambition and trying to accomplish meaningful things
Having the courage to go on adventures, such as driving an elderly couple cross-country to their destination, and changing a flat tire along the way
Gardening
Sewing
Doing domestic chores
Graduating from college
Being robbed at gunpoint in a bank where she worked
Acting
Not marrying Mr. Nixon
Marrying Mr. Nixon
Having two daughters
Appearing on TV without a fur coat while Mr. Nixon explained to the nation where their money came from, and where their money went. (This was known not as the Cloth Coat speech, but as the Checkers speech—their dog being more likely to elicit sympathy than a woman unadorned in fur.)
Traveling the world: to fifty-three nations, and to Peru twice (Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were spit on during the first Peru trip, when an angry mob tried to overturn their car. The second time she went to Peru, Mr. Nixon did not go with her. No one attacked the car.)
Making a decision not to express her views publicly
Advising Mr. Nixon to destroy the tapes
Yearning for vacations but usually staying home
