Historical fiction and an examination of White House speechwriters top our fall reading list.
By Elisabeth Crean
As the art of photography evolved, skilled practitioners demonstrated that the medium’s power extended far beyond presenting a journalistic snapshot of the world. In an artistic photograph, reality intensifies or softens; focus shifts among people or objects, whose relative importance grows or recedes according to the lensman’s choices.
The writer of historical fiction wields similar tools to give life and shape to a skeletal narrative of facts. Extensive journals, letters, and interviews don’t exist for many famous figures whom we’d love to know more intimately. So the novelist selects intriguing biographical elements, and then uses a storyteller’s eye to construct thoughts, emotions, and dialogue. In a luminescent debut novel, The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007), Emily Mitchell ’97 reimagines the early life of American photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973).
Mitchell’s story centers on the summer of 1918, as the scarred countryside of northern France endures its fourth year of World War I. The 39-year-old Steichen has volunteered for the American army and translated his artistic skill with a camera into pioneering aerial-reconnaissance photography of battlefields. The front lines are within miles of the French farmhouse that he, his wife Clara, and his two young daughters called home when the war erupted and forced them to flee.
Chapters set during the war’s waning months alternate with episodes from the artist’s early life. Each prewar interlude is constructed around the title of a photo, usually one from Steichen’s actual oeuvre. The eager, artistically restless Steichen had arrived in Paris as a young man just after the turn of the century and began keeping heady company. “Most people follow the rules because they are afraid not to,” he reflects. So why not show up at sculptor Auguste Rodin’s studio and ask to take his picture? Steichen does and soon becomes known for his portraits of famous artists, who also become his friends.
Rule breaking may make for great art, but it creates trouble for Steichen in his personal life. In Paris, he meets and marries Clara, a lively, talented American pianist. Her personality soon darkens, however, when household duties and Edward’s burgeoning career leave little time for her to pursue music. Rodin encourages his young friend to have dalliances; Steichen travels a lot for work, and thinks he is being discreet. Clara begins to see her husband as “a man whose charm means he can get away with anything.”
When painter Marion Bennett—an old friend of both Steichens—visits the couple in August 1914, Clara mistakes an innocent moment between Marion and Edward as evidence of an affair. Clara’s fragile trust in her husband shatters and soon after, the Steichen family becomes estranged. Edward concentrates on his military work, but powerful emotions emerge when the wrongly accused run into each other in a French hospital as the war’s final summer unfolds.
Clara reflects on the disconnect between the polish of her husband’s work and rough edges of their life together. “The real world is far messier and more confusing than these photographs betray. As many dreams are denied as fulfilled; as many loves fail as endure.” Sadly, she finds painful ways to retaliate for her sense of loss.
Mitchell’s prose flows effortlessly, with edges as smooth and clear as Steichen’s sharpest portraits. Passages of description—beautiful, yet succinct—evoke vivid imagery. Especially compelling are Steichen’s aerial observations of the battle-ravaged French landscape. “The trenches bit back and forth into the ground, incisions trembling maniacally across the fields ... designed by a god with the shakes.” Mitchell’s language resonates: commanding, sensitive, deeply perceptive. She has a gift for slipping quietly into a character’s head without a jarring shift from the omniscient narrator’s tone.
In its hardcover release last year, The Last Summer of the World landed on several Best of 2007 lists and was a finalist for New York Public Library’s 2008 Young Lions Fiction Award, which recognizes outstanding work by writers under the age of 35. This year’s paperback edition just makes it easier to send the book to lots of friends.
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Before the age of radio, presidential speeches gained their widest audience in newspapers. At most, a few thousand citizens actually heard them delivered live. Warren Harding was the first to face microphones, and the reviews were not kind. Journalist H. L. Mencken’s acid pen tarred his 1921 inaugural as “rumble and bumble ... flap and doodle ... balder and dash.” Harding soon became the first commander in chief to reach for professional assistance in drafting his remarks.
Beginning with Harding’s reliance on lone “literary clerk” Judson Welliver, Robert Schlesinger ’94 chronicles how modern presidents crafted speeches and honed catch phrases as part of making policy as well as communicating it. White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters (Simon & Schuster, 2008) is an exhaustive history, and the wealth of detail sometimes makes it hard to discern larger themes.
Schlesinger’s desire to be comprehensive creates an unwieldy cast of characters, because burnout and backstabbing meant frequent turnover on speech-writing teams. Grueling White House hours and combative egos often led to a revolving door of personnel.
That said, the author has brought together a remarkable amount of research. The son of historian (and JFK aide and speechwriter) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. became interested in the topic when he accompanied his father to meetings of the Judson Welliver Society, an organization of former presidential speechwriters. The colorful behind-the-scenes yarns eventually led him to interview more than 90 former White House staffers, explore the archives of nine presidential libraries, access private collections of personal papers (including his own father’s journals), and amass nearly 30,000 pages of documents.
Speechwriting began as a secondary duty of policy makers on the president’s staff. It evolved gradually into a specialized task as the number of presidential public appearances grew over the 20th century, from Herbert Hoover’s average of eight per month to Bill Clinton’s 28 per month. “My job,” said one of FDR’s key scribes, Raymond Moley, “was to sift proposals for him, discuss facts and ideas with him, and help him crystallize his own policy.”
Later writers often lacked such direct, regular access to the Oval Office. Capturing the leader’s ideas and idiom became more difficult as layers of aides came between penmen and president. For major addresses, such as the State of the Union, cabinet departments began insisting on edits or contributing turgid blocks of their own text. The deadly process of speech by committee endangered the art of speech writing.
Fortunately, most presidents were gifted editors, and many had excellent ad-libbing abilities as well. Clinton was famous for juggling coffee and a marker in a limo as he tinkered with words on the way to delivering an address. “He never met a sentence he couldn’t fool with,” Hillary Clinton noted. His speechwriters compared him to a jazz musician, a skilled improviser riffing on the basic structure.
The book is filled with irresistible backstage scenes for American political history junkies. Nixon scribbled “I am not a crook” on a briefing book (prepared by speechwriter Patrick Buchanan) before making the statement in public. Ford aides Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney essentially fired new speechwriting hires with tricks such as “missing” parking passes and “lost” security clearances that prevented them from entering the White House to do their jobs. These details in Schlesinger’s history show that what seemed like polished policy pronouncements were often seat-of-the-pants, last-minute miracles, products of an often-dysfunctional process. The ghosts tell fascinating tales, indeed.