Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

by Ann Beattie

  I brush your hair out of your eyes and glance down

  at your breasts, though I’m too shy to touch them.

  The poem made me smile a big, nervous smile. Someone appropriating Mrs. Nixon, but the poet addressing himself to her, directly! It’s a complicated poem, but the Browningesque direct address increases the intimacy (which is also, in part, the poem’s subject). The poet is right, I think: as we get older, we realize the price people pay for posing for the portrait, in effect. Writers might also feel that sometimes they can rescue the moment, even rescue the past. So many times, that’s the case—that necessary delusion that allows writers to write in the only time period they have, the present, but with the flexibility and with the audacity to look forward as well as backward. Writers see the irony of Gatsby’s famous line about recapturing the past—it is what he believes, or needs to believe (interchangeable), but it is not factually true. Only a pedant would stop at this point in The Great Gatsby and note that the character’s observation is untrue, however. It’s more important that it informs us of his delusion.

  “Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon” is not exactly analogous, as the author certainly knows he addresses a dead person, but he seems more determined in his intent on resurrecting her (her, rather than himself). Whereas Gatsby wants his Daisy, his interpretation of Daisy for his own sake, not to empathetically release her into being the version of herself she wants to be. Also funny, Kirby’s poem is a serious matter about where the laughter starts and ends, as we learn more shocking things from biographies all the time than that a person not likely to run naked into the water went skinny-dipping.

  RN, ousted from office, wanted to recast himself as an “elder statesman.” Mrs. Nixon . . . for all we know, she wanted to go skinny-dipping. For all I know, she would have liked those shoes and nudged my mother in the direction of buying them for me. We can say what’s predictable, based on what we know of a person’s life, but as writers we also have to deal with the unforeseeable. Writers, as well as readers, perk up when some such thing is discovered. Or even when it is invented, if the invention seems possible.

  Flannery O’Connor, writing about science fiction, says that the writer has to write so that “even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic.”

  The Writer’s Feet Beneath the Curtain

  Fiction writers rely on dialogue to carry more meaning than the words themselves convey. We’re used to people saying one thing and meaning another, and we’re used to people blurting out something unexpected: verbal flares of anger; secrets suddenly spilled. Dialogue takes advantage of those moments, but if the writer relies too much on things happening suddenly, the reader is likely to become skeptical. A character’s impulsiveness can seem to be a convenience for the writer rather than a convincing character trait.

  Dialogue can be useful when it gives off enough energy to allow us to read around and through the words, offering us a way to know the characters as we interpret them, not as the writer insists we view them. Dialogue seems to happen in real time: now, the characters are talking. The writer’s narration, however, happens in literary time: the writer has sorted things out and presents them with the coherence of a story being told, instead of with the unfolding immediacy of dialogue. The freshness of dialogue is, of course, an illusion; the writer comes up with whatever is said and can revise. But as characters speak, their dialogue has the effect of making us suspend literary time and pay close attention, as if we’re getting someone’s real thoughts in real time, as they occur.

  Dialogue can be useful to the writer simply because it interrupts exposition that has gone on too long—the way a sneeze can break up the monotony of a long conversation. People create their verbal contexts as they move from one environment to another. A cell phone conversation will use different language, and take a different form, than what is said by the person who walks into a meeting to make a presentation, though in most cases we adopt language much more conventionally than we like to think. Fluent cliché lets us belong, but we prefer not to think of ourselves as formulaic clones. People can come up with their own language and, once they learn it, rely on the words and expressions they feel comfortable with—which means that their speech becomes predictable: the person’s daughter is “The Princess,” his car is “My Beamer.” Mr. Nixon’s wife was “Mrs. Nixon.” The writer has to create enough recognizable speech to be convincing, but also to particularize the character by using words or phrases unique to that person. In the same way we’re startled in real life when someone steps out of character (at least when he or she varies conventional roles: the polite waiter; the brave soldier), we are surprised, in fiction, when a character plays against type. But writers couldn’t write if characters didn’t do this. There are wonderful works of fiction in which the character does not change, but instead goes through the motions of a life. Even then, the writer usually steps out to dazzle at the last possible moment, offering a lyrical passage at story’s end that superimposes the writer’s more expansive sensibility, the writer’s potential to dazzle, previously withheld to better reveal the character’s limitations. (It’s not a value judgment; some people are more guarded, inexpressive, or creatures of habit than others.)

  An example would be Edward Loomis’s “A Kansas Girl,” in which a woman lives an unremarkable life with her father, never marrying, doing her job until she eventually retires, then takes a trip to the Grand Canyon. Hers is the frightening cliché of what life might be—all that life might amount to—that motivates many to live differently. A fear of serving in this way was at the back of Mrs. Nixon’s mind long before she became Mrs. Nixon. Loomis writes about his character, at the Grand Canyon: “She left by train in the last week of July (calm, slow, a little vague), bound for Los Angeles and San Francisco, and her first stop was at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where she found the buildings pleasant and recognizable. She stayed at the old hotel, a high shingled structure that could have had a respectable place in Kansas City; she went to the rim and was astonished, and she noticed many other people her age along the sturdy rail.” Because we believe in the limitations—or at least the repressed nature—of the character, a description such as “she went to the rim and was astonished” does not seem like lazy writing, but is a narrative voice imitating the way the character, herself, might modestly recount her own story, speaking in restrained language.

  The narrator, to this point, has been in collusion with the main character, though the narrator will eventually step away from her at the end of the story. Then, sentences—the writer’s sentences; language the writer has held in check, providing a few hints but giving the illusion of merely reporting, going along with the limitations of his character—appear: “She stayed two days, and felt happy; and her trip was a success—on her return to Kansas City she was ready to die, and seven years later she accomplished this end: her mind was pure, and once, in the hospital, she thought of her father, remembering as a child how she had been able to call him to her, where she lay pale and cool in the narrow bed—a good father, who would be coming toward her out of the glistening throng.” Wow. All the writer’s restraint has been in service of this moment, which expresses his empathy with his character, what was always his ability to see the character in a completely different context, his awareness of her imagination, whether or not she imagines things in the same terms as he. He becomes her spokesperson. Then he eclipses her. He’s watched life creep along in its petty pace until the moment he decides to ignite the engines and achieve liftoff, shooting straight for the stars.

  George Garrett, in “An Evening Performance,” focuses on an event as lavish as Loomis’s story is rooted in the quotidian. The performance (circus acts) described in the story is extraordinary, but instead of ending on an even higher note, Garrett quotes “a wise man” (always suspect, in contemporary fiction). It is, of course, the author orchestrating this final moment, making us uncomfortable
with our assumptions. “A wise man said [the performance] had been a terrible thing. ‘It made us all sophisticated,’ he said. ‘We can’t be pleased by any ordinary marvels anymore—tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, pretty girls being fired out of cannons. It’s going to take a regular apocalypse to make us raise our eyebrows again.” Notice the pairing of regular with apocalypse, which parallels the combination of ordinary with marvels. The author appropriates a folksy tone, pairing words that might be skipped over because they seem to be spoken in the vernacular. They are a big clue to the reader, though, because they are disjunctive. Then, having simultaneously called up and dismissed the “wise man,” Garrett steps in a second time, to give us his—the narrator’s—even wiser opinion (though not advertised as such): “He was almost right, as nearly correct as a man could hope to be. How could he even imagine that more than one aging, loveless woman slept better ever after, smiled as she dreamed herself gloriously descending for all the world to see from a topless tower into a lake of flame?” Almost; nearly; could hope to be . . . the words seem to sympathize with the plight of the average person, while really that person is exactly the one the writer wants to leave behind in the dust. Garrett is the prophet who knows that other people wouldn’t know unless he told them. He focuses on the exception, the extraordinary, the way something has the potential to change one person, profoundly. At story’s end, the author gives a highly valued gift: imagination. That’s the liberating force, both in Loomis and in Garrett: the card game played expressionlessly until the ace is finally revealed. Such stories go to extremes (the blandness of everyday life versus the extravaganza of a circus act) to seem to narrate something familiar, already understood. Each has the resonance of a morality tale, and some of the suspense of fairy tales. But both genres are invoked only to be turned aside. The author prevails, possessing the power of the imagination as the key to escape. There’s a strong authorial presence, even if it’s not obvious—because it’s not obvious—until the last moments of the game.

  The writer has remained hidden in both stories, taking care that his feet aren’t seen beneath the curtain until he chooses to walk out—but in Loomis’s and Garrett’s stories the writer does, finally, choose to appear. In more contemporary stories, the author usually doesn’t display a last-minute, radically different sensibility, but remains offstage, so that we can only infer things about the writer through the trajectory of the story and because of the shifting language chosen to tell it. One reason any story goes on as long as it does is to condition the reader to its milieu, as distinct from what the reader might rush to assume the world of the story is. The writer as spokesman—ironic, or tongue-in-cheek master of ceremonies, or last-minute lyrical poet—has pretty much disappeared from contemporary stories, and dialogue is relied on not so much to show communication between characters as to reveal the lack of it. When dialogue ends a story, it often asks or implies a question—one that becomes cosmic because of its placement, and would make the respondent look foolish however the person answered. The killer last line of Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” speaks to the story’s subtext; any answer offered would be unsatisfying. To ask the question makes it obvious that no answer would make anything any different. The point of the question is that it is unanswerable.

  Within stories, though, dialogue must seem neither contrived by the author to impart information nor chitchat to convince the reader that the characters are real people who, of course, talk. When they speak, it’s the reader’s way of taking their pulse. Consider Mrs. Nixon, and what she is reported to have said from her wheelchair, leaving the hospital after her stroke: “But the stress of Watergate and the illness of her husband took their toll on Pat. On July 7, 1974, she suffered a stroke that crippled her left side. Two weeks later, wearing a yellow pants suit and a bright smile, she left the hospital in a wheelchair pushed by her husband. ‘I feel fine,’ she beamed with a nod toward her husband. ‘But I’m a little frightened about the driver.’” It’s a characteristic attempt at being amusing, and at deflecting attention from herself. If RN makes a response, it isn’t recorded by author Elizabeth Simpson Smith. It’s the sort of remark that requires no response. Also, why not let the person in the wheelchair get the last laugh? As his wife’s straight man, his role is easy to play: just a big smile. Her comment is the verbal equivalent of a wink: You and I know . . . A woman who did not like to talk publicly, she managed yet again to get away with a one-liner. What about fear (his and hers)? The fiction writer would have little interest in her quip, but be fascinated by what was or wasn’t said inside the car.

  In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion describes her writing process:

  When I talk about pictures in my mind, I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

  Taking a tip from Ms. Didion, I looked for a long time at the picture of Mr. Nixon wheeling his smiling wife toward their car. We don’t have—you can be sure we don’t have—the photograph of her as she got into the car. As for the two smiling people, that’s uninteresting. When they could let those expressions go, what did her face look like? His? We don’t have enough to interpret the emotional undercurrents of the moment. This image is the campaign poster, as opposed to the snapshot of the unposed politician. Their public faces, her supercilious talk . . . to have heard the first words spoken in the car would have been a revelation, but his taping system was in the White House, so we have no record of that exchange. Invented dialogue? “Dick, in case this happens a second time, I want you to know . . .” What would she want him to know? What would he say, if he began the conversation? “Pat, it’s been a rotten time for you, but . . .” How much did she listen to him at this point? Both were suddenly in uncharted territory—traumatized, humbled, perhaps trying to appear, to each other, stronger than they felt. People tend to like being in control, or appearing to be in control. Good dialogue can express what a character wants (or, more to the point, what he might think he wants) while at the same time giving us a sense of how much distance there is between that desire and the way things are.

  Here’s an example of dialogue that seems to veer out of control as we listen. It’s from “Duncan in China,” by Gish Jen—a long story about a man with little awareness of how the world operates, who visits China and meets his ill, desperate cousin, who has hoped the visitor might be his (and his son’s) way out of China—though he soon grimly realizes this will not happen. Guotai, the Chinese cousin, has brought along his son, Bing Bing. He gives the boy beer and encourages him to dance on the tabletop. “‘Good dancing, good dancing!’ cried Guotai. ‘Show him what his Chinese cousins are! Embarrass him to death! He’s here to visit China—show him what our country is. In China, you can dance, you can starve. Still people act as if they do not even see you! Show him! You watch.’ Guotai turned to Duncan, his eyes glittering strangely. ‘This is China! Nobody will say anything! You watch!’” The hysteria of exclamation points involves the reader in Guotai’s frenzied excitement. We can see it. The dialogue informs and alarms us. The comma that intends to link things together emphatically is also almost deadly, itself: “In China, you can dance, you can starve.” We’re rushing toward something, and the idea of death is overt: not only has it been ment
ioned in a seemingly throwaway phrase (“Embarrass him to death!”) but it becomes even more explicit when dancing and dying are yoked, as if there is inherent logic to their pairing.

  In the same way we’re all the characters in our dream, we’re Guotai, Duncan, and Bing Bing: we’re the perverse master of ceremonies; we’re the awed and frightened audience; we’re the helpless child who is performing, out of his mind. The moment will go on as long as it does because it and we are out of control. But the dialogue isn’t: it does just what the writer intends it to do, operating explicitly and subtly—“embarrass him to death” may resonate, at first, only as a figure of speech. When the words have done their work, however, the writer concludes the scene with exposition: “But he was wrong. In fact, a hostess was already headed their way with a frown on her face when Bing Bing passed out and fell into the tureen of duck soup.” Conjuring up the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup) is clever and underscores the seriousness of the situation: this isn’t harmless slapstick, this is real desperation.

  As a writer, what do you do either with dialogue that is badly written (unconvincing, for many reasons), or—always a possibility—when you have only the words of people who are not speaking genuinely, but as actors who’ve written their own unconvincing script? Monica Crowley’s Nixon in Winter is a book about a young woman (Ms. Crowley) who works with former President Nixon during the time he is living in New Jersey, written from the point of view of an admirer. Mrs. Nixon—though she lived in the same house the author spent so much time in—figures in the book very little. However, there is a scene in which Mr. Nixon first introduces Ms. Crowley to his wife:

  “I want you to come meet Mrs. Nixon,” he said on July 12, 1990, shortly after I began working for him. “She’s in the office today to do some things, and she knows you have joined the team, and she’d like to meet you too.” He walked with me from my office to the conference room, where the former first lady was seated, signing autographs for a charity event. “Pat?” he said. “This is Monica.” She looked up, smiled warmly, and took my hand with both of hers. “Well, hello. I’ve heard so much about you. Dick tells me that you’re right out of college. What a wonderful opportunity for you to be here.” I thanked her, and she squeezed my hand. “Don’t let Dick give you a hard time, now,” she said, smiling at him. “If he does—well, just report it to me.” He turned to me. “Are you going to squeal on me?” “Only if you give her a reason to,” she said, winking at me, and Nixon leaned forward and gave her arm an affectionate squeeze.