Desperate to undo the damage of its first review — Michiko
Kakutani described Bill Clinton’s book as “eye-crossingly dull” and
“self-indulgent” — the New York Times scrambled to post
on its website a positive review of the book this week. The
Times found for the task Larry McMurtry, a fiction writer,
a spinner of tall tales like Lonesome Dove. In other
words, a peer appropriate to Bill Clinton.
According to press reports, McMurtry’s review wasn’t supposed to
appear until July, but the Times had to slap it up quickly
to stop the bleeding from the Kakutani review. McMurtry hails the
book as “the richest American presidential autobiography” ever — a
claim as convincing as McMurtry’s saying, “I happen to like long,
smart, dense narratives and read ‘My Life’ straight through,
happily.”
McMurty admits his speed reading didn’t yield much insight into
the man. He writes, “I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I
did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely
can’t hurt,” faint praise that suggests McMurtry is faking his way
through the review for an ideological ally.
Straining hard to talk about everything but the prose in the
book, McMurty tries to romanticize Clinton for having written it in
“longhand.” “Had Clinton become our Balzac, working all night at
his office up in Harlem…?” he wonders.
Yes, there Clinton was, quill in hand, itemizing his diet during
his Georgetown days: “At lunch, I splurged to thirty cents. Half of
it bought a Hostess fried pie, apple or cherry; the other half went
for a sixteen-ounce Royal Crown Cola. I loved those RCs and was
really sad when they quit producing them.” (If Clinton has to fend
off charges that the book was ghosted, he can always point to these
lines about the passing of RC cola.)
Though other liberals have interpreted the book as permission to
stop lying about Clinton’s moral disorders, McMurtry is a holdout
on the issue of Clinton’s unruly appetites. “The one literary
figure Clinton does not suggest is Don Juan,” he writes. “From the
massive evidence of this book he’s still obsessed with politics, as
he always has been. Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for
bedroom sports, but not much time.” To buttress his case, McMurtry
could point to page 70, where Clinton expresses moral distaste for
coed college housing: “when Hillary and I took Chelsea to Stanford
in 1997, it was still somewhat unsettling to see the young women
and men living in the same dorm,” Clinton writes, recalling that he
didn’t enjoy that option at his Alma Mater, Georgetown.
Clinton is a product of Jesuit education, a fact McMurtry thinks
deserves more attention. Vatican II-era Jesuits, implies McMurtry,
taught Clinton how to lie: “During the silly time when Clinton was
pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of ‘is,’ I often
wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits,
for whom the meaning of ‘is’ is a matter not highly resolved,” he
writes.
Bill Clinton, S.J. — it might have been. On page 76, a couple
of pages after Clinton writes of a trip to New York City where “I
saw my first streetwalker,” Clinton says a Jesuit took him out to a
Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Georgetown to ask if he would like
to join the order. “He asked me if I had ever considered becoming a
Jesuit. I laughed and replied, ‘Don’t I have to become a Catholic
first?’ When I told him I was a Baptist and said, only half in
jest, that I didn’t think I could keep the vow of celibacy even if
I were Catholic, he shook his head and said, ‘I can’t believe it.
I’ve read your papers and exams. You write like a Catholic. You
think like a Catholic.’” Clinton missed his chance, and on such
quaint grounds. It was very generous of him to think that inability
to uphold the vow of celibacy and lack of belief in Catholic
teaching posed insuperable barriers to the Jesuit order.
McMurtry concludes his review with an attack on Ken Starr’s
hometown, Thalia, Texas, which lies on the “Floydada corridor,” a
nickname popular with “local wits.” “It’s a merciless land, mostly,
with inhabitants to match,” McMurtry writes. “Proust readers and
fornicating presidents will find no welcome there.” McMurtry then
oddly urges the Balzac of Harlem to visit the town. To learn more
about his nemesis, he says, “Bill Clinton should check it out.”
