Paler Than Truth: The Problem of the Washington Novel
Bethel, Tom
Paler Than Truth: The Problem of the Washington Novel by Tom Bethel Because so many Washington novels are written by journalists, iii.un el llio ll.iws of llu- profession are mirrored in the...
...It is quite possible, of course, that this is an accurate reflection of life at the White House-life at the center of the innermost circle of power...
...What do you do...
...McCarth y ’s book is really dismal...
...It was, he said, comparable to “the introduction of electricity into machine technology” -something that you couldn’t go back on, in other words...
...The book comes across as a comparatively painless piece of instruction in economics...
...Three such “message” novels have come out lately: Abigail McCarthy’s Circles, Herbert and Benjamin Stein’s On the Brink, and Barbara Raskin’s 7he National Anthem...
...Another “guessing game” novel is Orchids for Mother by Aaron Latham...
...I found that the book had a horrible kind of fascination...
...Almost all Washington novels today give us realism on every page-all the detail about how the White House and Congress work, and so on...
...Willie Morris had a shot at this story, incidentally, in The Last of the Southern Girls, but why was this book so unsuccessful...
...Most people, especially old-time journalists in Washington, think that “new journalism ’ means blending fact and fiction and writing about oneself all the time...
...The “electricity” of novelistic realism has now been supplemented by a powerful new magnetism...
...Journalists in Washington...
...And this is surely the crucial point: more and more nowadays, this kind of detail is being given to us in non-fiction books about Washington...
...Kissinger undoubtedly did too good a job of convincing them that they were a part of history in the making...
...I think this may be because the book includes among its dramatis personae a character who comes to life, which is rare in Washington novels...
...ulm woiU foi CMS-IV and presumably wants to go on working there...
...Barbara Raskin’s book is better written, but it turns out to be too conspicuously an attempt to get the reader to feel sorry for her heroine, whose old man, an Abbie Hoffman figure, has prudently gone underground one step ahead of the FBI...
...This is “Mother,” the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence and in charge of the Israeli desk...
...When lie s. i \ s i h , i l >ou *.:m s a \ lliiti'is in fiction lorm Ilia I you i,n:'i c\press in non-tktion...
...When one turns to the great novels of the past, one finds that their most enduring features are, first, characterizationgetting to know the people and how they interact with one another-and perhaps equally important, the social organization, or lie of the land, in which these characters move...
...Another was All The President’s Men, this being a more unusual (although easier to write) example of the genre, because Woodward and Bernstein included themselves as central characters in the book and wrote about each other in the third person...
...cJu^r of The WdshingLun Mont lily.esied ill slitittk- diploma^ and tlio n.it uro o| kissiivjci as ;i diplomat and iiiampnl.iltir nl c \ e n i s . the novel 'jives more insidil into Ins technique ill,in reporting...
...an inlmi.ilc coinuvtion wilh knowing v u e K and nut disclosing ihi-in If J louinaliM breaks the code, of course, then he is autonulicalk l">.ini^hoil to the ciicumference, where the power is weak, the V C K - I N not unitli knowing...
...Who can top that...
...Thackeray shows us how she “got ahead” in London, at a time when London was the most important capital in the world...
...A journalist worth his salt, after he has been here a few years, will be at the eye of a hurricane ol' secrets...
...he is content to let “Secretary of State” tell you what that person is like...
...they also have been indoctrinated, in many instances, into believing that “the issues” are the only matters weighty enough to warrant their attention...
...Raskin could write something interesting about Washington yet if she would stop thinking of life in terms of males vs...
...And that is the most fundamental problem with almost all of contemporary Washington fiction...
...Paler Than Truth: The Problem of the Washington Novel by Tom Bethel Because so many Washington novels are written by journalists, iii.un el llio ll.iws of llu- profession are mirrored in the novels...
...Kissinger felt he had no alternative but to kneel down, too...
...One reason for this is that Washingtonians in general very often see one another according to their labels, rather than as human beings: title is everything...
...Kalb s n i c k n^aris r/urtii i. Similarh...
...In ilus instance...
...They accumulate them as a magpie collects scraps of bright glass...
...techniques of socia climbing,” and it remains so because most of the writers are engaged in it themselves...
...Bereft Nona finds herself in a world of smarty-pants liberal journalists and other power trippers, who only came alive to the threat of Watergate because one or two of their own were finally harassed by wiretaps...
...is “th...
...It may banish you from the tables of the mighty, but those tables have a way of being very impermanent anyway...
...The groans of displeasure when one mentions “new journalism” these days are almost universal, but that is what I am referring to...
...I don’t care who it is, the problem is always the same, and it is very simple: we have had-we have “tasted”-the real-life President Nixon on his knees...
...After a chapter or two one abandons all pretense of observing any minutiae of character that are presented and confines oneself entirely to the fiduciary developments...
...h\ Man in Kalb and led Koppel •"Siiii-iv'tinies \mi ian really sa> lliings in ticiion lorm that vou can't express in uon-liclion...
...And then, still sobbing, Nixon leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, ‘What have I done...
...but what is certain is that a major weakness of current Washington novels is that their characters generally fail to come to life...
...There is a paragraph of names, beginning: “Chairman, Mrs...
...One such \waLiu->s D I W.ishinjMnii journalists, especially the older generation of journalists, is their tendency to become the custodians of secrets...
...The same is true with John Ehrl i c h m an’s President Richard Monckton...
...Would they talk under these circumstances...
...For this reason it may well be that all Washington novels involving such stereotyped characters are doomed, as far as bringing those characters to life in any distinctive or idiosyncratic way is concerned...
...There’s some energy to the story, even if it usually takes the form of anger...
...One reads today’s Washington novels in vain for any serious attempt to outline the social topography of Washington-how people get ahead or fall behind socially...
...The Final Days is impressive because Woodward and Bernstein did such detailed and thorough reporting of what had gone on at the White House that they were able to permit the “scaffolding” of conventional journalism to drop away and tell the story as though they had been present, but invisible, in the White House, during the final days...
...a lot ol journalist here know .1 lot, but as a rule I hey aie constitutionally unable lo v.rile down .1 good deal of what llu-\ know...
...then I will M I up and pa> attention...
...M I \ S Marvin Kalb...
...Latham interviewed Angleton several times shortly after Angleton resigned from the CIA...
...otherwise they wouldn’t have cared...
...Lawton Chiles...
...Because it is in the no-man’s land between fact and fiction, the reader is inclined not to care whether it is true or not...
...As Frank Flaherty walked into the dim room,” we read, “he heard the telephone receiver smash into its cradle and he could not resist a smile...
...The trouble with this is that most people never get anywhere near these positions, and so one reads them not for illumination of class or character (as one does Thackeray or Dickens), but for the “factual” details and gadgetry-how telexes are sent, or how the “black box” works, or where the President’s bedroom is in relation to the Lincoln Sitting Room...
...This e\plains Hie origin o| a good 111:111 Washington novels, e.g., In The Naliniiul Iniiiisi...
...It should have been given another name...
...Il Kalb...
...Probably not...
...It is only with the very greatest reluctance that we are prepared to do it...
...The great attraction of journalism, old ar new, is that the reader knows that these things really happened, that this is really true...
...What next...
...the chief of staff...
...He has an elaborate cast of characters, chess pieces all...
...who "'possessed the lingering trace of a British accent, which had been acquired .it I Ion ami < ) \ l n u l . w h cK Yjndcnlvi-J had -ludied diirin;1 his father's years as an international banker in I mope...
...What has happened?’ ” This is extraordinary stuff...
...Some don't mind at all...
...the bureau chief...
...Immediately after that is acknowledged, however, we stumble into an even more serious difficulty-of-thenovel...
...It is as though the author is reduced to playing a game of literary chess with “the President” (queen), “the Secretary of State” (bishop), and so on...
...The Senator’s assistant is described as “his A.A.,” as though this would be meaningful to those outside Wash-ington...
...I'll pav attention to all the extraneous detail, loo all the lele\ message (.hitter that so laseiuates Kalb and Koppel...
...Intelligent, but too didactic...
...It was only the men’s camaraderie and commonly shared assumptions that gave authority to their opinions...
...That is the task of her chess pieces...
...Ford, April 22, 1975...
...Mother is based on James Angleton, who was also head of the CIA’s counterintelligence and in charge of the Israeli desk...
...They become circumscribed, and in the end hamstrung, by the requirement that they honor the code, respect the agreement, preserve the ^iU'iKi...
...J. Glenn Beall . . . . ” Then comes the punch line, in case you were wondering what this was all about: “They don’t go for the chairperson bit, I see-not very liberated of them, is it...
...But it someone wants to write a book about the real-life Kissinger, saving this is the way it was aboard .he plane, and this was how he manipulated leporlers...
...O i l i e r rcgaid it as a pity, and come lo the conclusion thai iheie iniisi he \nuii wa> of gelling it all down on paper without being banished to [he 111tellecl11.il bellw.i...
...But the book‘s main success is in the character of Mother, who is as interesting as Angleton himself...
...Even while pondering the question, we soon notice that Woodward and Bernstein, and John Dean, give us the real-life Nixon to read about, immediately rendering the question, as it were, moot...
...In an introductory essay to a collection of “new journalism,” Tom Wolfe noted that as the novel developed in the 19th century, the crucial new device that gave the novel such power was realism...
...Another possibility is that anothei journalist who wasn't on boaid *.pukl "leeonsluiLt" the scene by internetting the louinahsls who weie theie and promising them the same confidentiality that they promised Kissinger...
...We are like carnivores who have been given a taste of raw meat, and are now expected to go back to the watery greens of fiction...
...A Washington kaffeeklatsch would, of course, know what it meant, and I suspect that this is McCarthy’s true audience...
...The males are uniformly caddish: “The males spiced their certitudes with intimate allusions to powerful people and inside information until eventually Nona realized, despite her drunkenness, that she was letting outrageous statements pass unchallenged because they were camouflaged in old-boy-club dialect...
...To a limited extent, admittedly, this all-important social climbing and jockeying is described in some Washington novels, but only in such circumscribed settings as the White House (Full Disclosure) or the immediate entourage of Powerful People (In the National Interest...
...He was weeping...
...How could a President and a country be torn apart by such small things...
...That’s about thk level of it...
...The Steins’ On the Brink is the most outrageously message-ridden of all these books, but at least their message-deliberately inflating the currency does not solve the problems 22 of poor people but instead is a prescription for anarchy and demagogic takeover-is unusual...
...I don’t care whether it’s William Safire’s President Sven Ericson or Kalb and Koppel’s Secretary Vandenberg or Ervin Duggan and Ben J. Wattenberg’s President Carl Rattigan (“He radiated energy, vitality, zest for his high office . . . . ”), or, heaven help us, Abigail McCarthy’s Senator Sam Nordahl (from the State of Onahaska) or Benjamin Stein’s wicked chairman of the Federal Reserve, George McCgnger, the North Dakota populist...
...I believe, often tend to prize discretion above all other virtues...
...I found that I almost literally had to fight my way from page to page, it is so uninvolving...
...Almost everyone in the book is to some degree unpleasant, which is no doubt why the book casts a pall of depression over one’s mind...
...The most striking example has been The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein...
...and so they decide to write a novel...
...How do you do...
...when he dcsuilvs Kissinger as a manipulator ot e\ents...
...In recent years, a small number of books have been written about Washington that fit the above description, but fortunately for their reputations, no one has thought to damn them with the epithet “new journalism...
...And there are plenty of Becky Sharps in our midst today, but they are rarely written about...
...Throw out those “Senators” and that “chief of staff” and give us the real-life Becky Sharp, who is with us today, making the move from Adams-Morgan to Georgetown...
...In message novels the range of interest is narrowed even further...
...Chess Pieces All This is strikingly true of William Safire’s Full Disclosure, which is nevertheless the best of the recent Washington novels...
...But in this instance it is easier for the reader to get “involved...
...But the President did not rise...
...For one thing, Safire can write better than most...
...who uudouhlcdh does hiow a lol .ibonl Kissinger and his famous shullle Jiplnmacy, wants to write about these things, then perhaps he should sl.md up .iiul be counted and write a woik H I ii.Mi-liction...
...Becky Sharp would have done marvelously in Washington-the city is made for her, one might say...
...You have nothing to lose 25 but your chess pieces...
...Blind Ambition by John Dean could also be defined as “new journalism” because the book is set in scenes and uses dialogue and enough other detail to read, in parts, “like a novel...
...The President goes blind...
...This technique has since been repeated, with less success, in some chapters of Public Trust, Private Lust by Marion Clark and Rudy Maxa...
...If uinmi.' is iuu-r'l>nn Hi thi'U is u i •irv.rihuiinv...
...A number of old-journalist reviewers got a bit huffy on this account, incidentally , without seeming to 24 $6 notice that Woodward and Bernsteh thus left themselves exposed to the rebuttal that such events had not taken place in a way that they would not have if their assertions had been “hedged” in the usual way by being ascribed to sources unnamed...
...In the Kalb and Koppel book one’s eye is apt to glide over such material as, “Shortly after takeoff from Amman, a red light had been activated on the incoming telex machine in an alcove just behind the cockpit...
...Kissinger thought he had finished...
...Some of them are of great interest, for example the “allegation” that the CIA knew in advance that the 1973 Yom Kippur War was about to start, but was prevented from warning Israel about it by “the Secretary of State” (never identified as Kissinger), who feared that “if the Israelis knew they were about to be attacked, they would strike first, rout the Arabs, and be more intractable than ever at the negotiating table...
...The book is carelessly edited...
...I ilnrTl see I I K I I il docs, ili.iii'-'li not I mill this book II is about the peregrinations of a Secretary of State (..illeil I e l i \ John \ aiulcnherj...
...and covert (or overt) ideological design on the part of the writer-ideology being something that one inhales as inevitably as the humid air in Washington, and thus that exists as an ever-present temptation for the writer...
...Therefore, journalists old and novelists new, stop taking refuge in fiction...
...m.iiiilain [he «.i<nlidenli:ility...
...That way they get closer to the center—the center ol what in Washington is always called "power" pov.u h.iuiij...
...Perhatx the meat untold Washinn ton stor...
...One thinks here almost inevitably of Becky Sharp, the heroine of Vanity Fair...
...Well, the point is that we now have a new step forward in the technology: the assurance that the events described actually happened...
...The central feature of the book is the bureaucratic battle between Mother and Ernest O’Hara, the director of Central Intelligence -the “Colby” character...
...Circles is a novel of murmured soliloquies about broken marriages and solitude, with eyes blurring briefly, identities lost and found, people alone, and further soliloquizing...
...Not that the author tries particularly hard, in most cases...
...The illumination of character is seriously hampered by the use of chessmen instead of people we feel we know, and in some other Washington novels this illumination of character is made dimmer still by the author’s desire to send us a message...
...But Safire has worked out their moves more carefully than is customary, so the chess game becomes interesting...
...because in nonf i . l i on thov would be under an obligation to get all this detail right, whereas in a work of fiction they are I suppose 1 feel a certain sense of pique here because there is no reason at all why one of those journalists aboard the famous "shuttle diplomacy" plane shouldn't take the kid gloves ol lielion olf and tell it s.iaighl...
...but such denials were not forthcoming, although a number of people said that they had not talked to the pair-quite a different matter...
...one sat for hours reading it in an involuntary, reluctant narcosis...
...I think the reason for this is that so many of these characters are mere labels: the President...
...Another telephone instrument had met its doom at the hands of the Mad Monk, he thought...
...This exerts a strong gravitational pull upon the reader’s attention...
...Monckton, or Nixon...
...As with chess, there are an infinite number of ways in which such pieces can be moved, but in any game one queen is indistinguishable from another...
...g., when I read the label “chief of staff,” someone vaguely Haldemanlike comes to mind), and such private reactions are likely to override any impression of character that the author is trying to sow in the reader’s mind...
...It is a novel in name only...
...Co-Chairman, Mrs...
...No doubt because he was insufficiently amused by his Carol Hollywell, humor being conspicuously absent from today’s Washington novel., If Morris hadn’t taken Carol Hollywell so seriously he might have been onto something...
...I felt a strong disinclination to get drawn into playing the game...
...Using the chess analogy, one could say that in these novels the author is not content to let his pieces play a “game,” because he wants to use them to dramatize a certain chess “problem...
...How much of all this really is true is never clear, but Latham says, at least, that he did not make up any of the ‘background detail” about the CIA in the narrative...
...In any event, their material instantly became far more realistic than it would have been with all the elaborate scaffolding of attribution still in place...
...it seems to me that •"manipulator ot people" would be closer to the mark, with Kalb umoni...
...females-them vs...
...Whether this success in ’ characterization was due to the existence of a real-life model, or, more simply, to Latham’s skill as a writer I don’t 20 l know...
...At one point she sets forth a press information sheet for a “Luncheon given by the Ladies of the Senate in honor of Mrs...
...They write: “Nixon got down on his knees...
...When we read these labels, we are inclined to “react” with our own preconceived notions of what such people are like (e...
...tell us what you know...
...The President prayed out loud, asking for help, rest, peace and love...
...This one deals with the CIA...
...spill a few secrets...
...t the same time...
...lie will not, of i i n i i v . share them with his readers, l o I I D ihat would be to write his way out of his charmed "inner circle," to betray his secret society...
...S o m . but thai isn't Kissin-'ei...
...in fact it means doing such detailed reporting on the subject at hand that the writer is then able to write the article, or book, using certain devices of fiction: setting the action in “scenes,” using dialogue, and noting details that illuminate class and status...
...But the great power of the new journalism is not simply its realism...
...then Latham interviewed some other CIA people but got some contradictions in their stories...
...Notice that all the usual attributionsaccording to sources”-are omitted...
...I he idea behind books like this seems to l v I D J raw llie reailer into a kind of guessing game: although Vandenberg in name, is this in fact how Kis<.m".er behaved at Amman...
...Nevertheless he believes that the stories in the book about the CIA are true...
...She has her chess-piece Senator and her chess-piece Media Star, but she uses them not to demonstrate, dispassionately, how the Washington Game is played, but specifically to show how such people tend to make life rotten for women...
...And M I on...
...As Inevitably as the Air It seems to me, then, that there are two frequently encountered difficulties with the Washington novel: cardboard characters-the result of succumbing to the temptation to make “the Senator” the central figure...
...the Senator...
...The notion of “circles” as applied to Washington society is, of course, a promising one, but McCarthy does not even come close to describing these circles...
Vol. 9 • October 1977 • No. 8
