In the White House the first lady builds a literary room of her own

Gainesville-Sun ^ | 10/10/2002 | Elizabeth Busmiller

[Utah Girl]

WASHINGTON -- David Levering Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois and an eminent black historian who considers President Bush's policies on Iraq "a menace," was flabbergasted when he received an invitation from Laura Bush's office to be the keynote speaker at a White House symposium on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Ursula Smith, who with her partner, Linda Peavy, has chronicled the ordinary lives of the American frontier, was similarly taken aback when Laura Bush's office extended an invitation for both historians to speak at a symposium on the women writers of the West. "I didn't think I could with any kind of integrity walk into a White House that I take such exception to," said Smith, who disagrees with President Bush on Iraq, the environment and many other issues.

And Justin Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain who says President Bush has a "troglodytic" approach to social and economic problems, was so surprised by his invitation from the White House to a symposium on Twain that he told the aide in the first lady's office he would have to get back to her.

But all four not only turned up in the East Room, they came away startled and impressed by a first lady who is quietly creating her own separate space within a presidency focused on war. While Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, gives the president political biographies and invites like-minded historians to speak, Bush has reached out beyond ideology.

"There's nothing political about American literature," Bush said in a telephone interview Saturday, acknowledging that some of her guests were not sympathetic to her husband. "Everyone can like American literature, no matter what your party." .

Bush, a former teacher and librarian who will be the host of the second annual National Book Festival on the lawn of the Capitol this weekend, has so far held three White House events showcasing American literature, all of them open to the press but largely ignored except for reruns on C-Span. "I wish they had a bigger audience," she said. Each symposium -- Twain last November, the Harlem Renaissance this past March and the women writers of the West in September -- was held on a day when news of Afghanistan or Iraq completely overshadowed it.

But many participants are convinced that publicity is not Bush's primary motive, and that the events are rooted in the identity she established before she married into the Bush family. Certainly the audiences of 200 invited by the White House for the events -- District of Columbia high school students, spouses of administration officials, old friends of the first lady -- is not designed to impress social Washington or otherwise attract attention.

"I think it probably nourishes her and feeds her," said Patricia MacLachlan, the author of the children's book "Sarah, Plain and Tall," who was a speaker at the symposium on women of the West. "It validates who she is, where she came from and what she values."

Participants have also been surprised by the contents of the two-hour events. Although they do not break academic ground, they are often highly literary and tackle topics, like race, feminism and class, not normally discussed in the formal splendor of the East Room. Kaplan, for example, bluntly told the crowd last fall that Mark Twain was far more interested in writing about money than about sex.

"It was a kind of pornography of the dollar," Kaplan said. "He adored money, but at the same time he was terrified of it."

Bush always sits in the front row, often nodding and beaming. "I chose Mark Twain to start with because I believe that Mark Twain is the first real American writer," she said in the interview. "I think Mark Twain really talks about everything that is at the crux of what America is, even now."

Participants have also been surprised by the choice of authors, who are always selected by Bush. When Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West and the author of the influential revisionist history "The Legacy of Conquest," was asked to speak about the Western writers Willa Cather, Edna Ferber and Laura Ingalls Wilder in September, she had to read Ferber's "Giant" for the first time -- and came away stunned.

Bush welcomes authors from different backgrounds to her literary symposiums

(Con't from page 1)--"It is quite a penetrating, mocking portrait of Texas rich people, and particularly of people making their money in oil," Limerick said, adding that she at first could not imagine that the first lady, with her roots in Texas, would have selected such a book for White House discussion. But when Bush spoke in her opening remarks at that symposium of Ferber's shock at "the swaggering arrogance of men in 10-gallon hats," Limerick knew that Bush was no stranger to the themes of "Giant."

"I did Bush a terrible disservice thinking that maybe she didn't know, that she thought these were all little houses on the prairie," Limerick said.

Bush said she chose the Harlem Renaissance as a topic because she has always loved the poetry of Langston Hughes. Not surprisingly, one guest at the Harlem symposium was Arnold Rampersad of Stanford, Hughes' biographer, who recalled overhearing Bush talk informally after the event about what writers she should select for the next symposium.

"She talked about Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter," Rampersad said. "That was the moment when it became very clear that she was seeing this world from the inside, not the outside."

Bush, who is currently rereading the memoirs of Lillian Hellman, said she was already thinking of what writers should be next. She said she was toying with the idea of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but was also thinking of Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

"And I love Truman Capote," she said. "I think he'd be fabulous."

[AnAmericanMother]

True enough, but the New England writers were a separate group unto themselves (although Melville was a bit of an outlier). Their culture was so separate and distinct (of course it's gone now. Old New England is dead), and very self-consciously not "typical American" - they held themselves apart.

Moby-Dick is indeed a great novel, but I don't see it as speaking with a distinctly American voice as Clemens did. If anything, it's Melville's individual voice, not typical American. (I can't imagine that very many Noo Bedford whaling captains spoke the way Ahab does. They tended to be men of few words, not Old-Testament style rhetorical diatribes.) I mean . . .

"Hark ye yet again, - the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn - living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards - the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak! - Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

Do you remember when a young Mark Twain went to N.E. to speak at a dinner, and made a little gentle fun of Emerson, et al? He talked himself into being embarassed about it, afterward, but I think he was right. And as he said in his "Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper", no Scottish general would talk this way . . . and neither would an old whaling captain.

That said, I think Melville was a brilliant (but deeply troubled) man, and Moby-Dick is a great book. But it's a massive personal creation/hallucination, not a record or comment on America.