Replies

I promised...

A new book due out next month, “Barack Obama: The Story,” by Washington Post reporter David Maraniss finally reveals the identity of two of Obama’s long-lost girlfriends. As if that wasn’t fascinating enough, it also includes excerpts of the love letters he sent to one of them and diary entries from the other.

“The six page excerpt [published in Vanity Fair] focuses on two of Obama’s early girlfriends. One, named Alex McNear, Obama met at Occidental College before he transferred to Columbia,” the Post writes in a teaser. “She came to New York for a summer, the start of a long-distance, letter-based relationship in 1982.” The other, Genevieve Cook, was a diplomat’s daughter he met at a party.

Alex McNear

Maraniss got a hold of many of the letters Obama sent to McNear. And those letters, Maraniss writes in an excerpt for Vanity Fair, reveal “the loneliness of Obama’s New York existence.”

One letter featured Obama’s reaction to McNear writing a paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

“His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy,” Maraniss writes. Here‘s what he’s talking about:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex? [Emphasis added]

“He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals,” Maraniss adds, then delivers another passage from the same letter:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.