The boy done bad
Anthony Howard
MY LIFE by Bill Clinton Hutchinson, £25, pp. 1024, ISBN 0091795273 Speaking and writing represent two very different disciplines. The most spellbinding orator I ever heard was Aneurin Bevan. Yet when, in 1952, he published his one and only book, a combination of personal history and political philosophy entitled In Place of Fear, it proved a flatulent embarrassment. Bill Clinton, for all his folksy, husky charm, has never been an orator in quite the same league as Nye Bevan. But, alas, as a writer he has courted and suffered the same fate.
The first 200 or so pages of this mammoth autobiography are still, though, pretty good. A past master at relating a verbal anecdote, the former president of the United States has always known how to tell a story; and in spinning the tale of his own upbringing as a poor boy in the poor state of Arkansas he has found a rich seam. Claiming that he was forced to lead 'parallel lives' — a relatively normal one at school and one full of guilty secrets at home — he skilfully lays the foundations for what later on is to become the main line of defence for his misbehaviour in the White House. But he manages to do so with a gentle touch, and what emerges is the portrait of a chubby, self-possessed little boy born, appropriately, in a town called Hope but soon transferred to the wickeder ways of the local gambling city known as Hot Springs.
He was plainly devoted to his mother, an anaesthetist but also something of a local femme fatale, but, more strikingly, he contrives to depict his drunken, violent stepfather (his own father was killed in a motor accident before he was born) in a surprisingly sympathetic light. He is good, too, on his early, impoverished days at Georgetown university in Washington, DC, where he was lucky enough to secure a part-time job on Capitol Hill as an assistant clerk to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It was in this capacity that he first got to know the committee's chairman, and junior senator from Arkansas. J. William Fulbright. This, far more than his much vaunted meeting as a 17-year-old with Present Kennedy in the White House rose garden, was to provide him with his first decisive break. Would he ever have got a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford without the backing of Fulbright, already responsible for the scholarship programme bearing his own name? He discloses here that Fulbright wrote a generous letter of recommendation on his behalf and the suspicion has to be that this made all the difference. (Full credit, though, to Clinton for candidly admitting that applying from Arkansas 'was a big advantage — I probably wouldn't have made it if I'd been from New York, California or some other big state'.) Then, at least through his first year at Oxford — like his daughter, Chelsea, he was at Univ. — Clinton contrives to keep his reader's interest. There is a particularly vivid portrait of the college's chief porter, one Douglas Millin, whose gruff, informal ways obviously appealed to the future president — more, unfortunately, than his more formal studies appear to have done (his failure to take any form of degree is passed over in silence). Nor is much light thrown on the central mystery of Clinton's time at Oxford: how was it that a relatively dedicated student in his first year became virtually an absentee vagrant in his second? The best we are offered by way of explanation, and that only by reading between the lines, is that lurking very much in the background in his second year was anxiety over his 'draft status' and a fear that, despite his own best, resourceful efforts, he might still be called up for service in Vietnam. But it has to be said that the details presented here of how in the end he did manage to evade the draft are not much more illuminating than the explanation he offered at the time of the New Hampshire primary during his first presidential campaign of 1992.
When does his book start going downhill? To answer, 'once Hillary first appears on stage' must sound ungallant; but the process of her beatification (to which the whole work seems dedicated) does inevitably slow the pace and diminish the narrative's momentum. It says something, though, for changing standards not merely in America but even more in boondocks, Baptist Arkansas that the author is able casually to reveal that the two of them lived together for four whole years before they were eventually married in 1975. No evidence exists that this was every brought up to impede the progress up the greasy pole of the 'boy governor' — he was 32 when he was first elected.
Sadly, however, it is that pole that finally does this book in. What starts off as a picaresque romance — and, come to think of it, Bill Clinton is a bit like Tom Jones — gets transformed into a boring political chronicle. The fault may well lie with the kind of engagement diary that every officeholder has kept for him — for somehow, once our hero gets his feet under the desk in the governor's mansion, no base is left untouched, no tribute unpaid, no celebrity unsung. It all becomes rather like swimming through treacle, a daunting experience not helped by sentences of such total banality as 'The White House is special at Christmastime'.
In the acknowledgments at the end of the book Clinton offers lavish praise of his American editor, Bob Gottlieb — 'I was told that he was the best there was at his craft and he turned out to be that and more.' Not on this form, he didn't. Somewhere in this fat, bloated tome there is a lean, muscular story struggling to get out. But it never quite makes it and all we are left with is a wobbly heap of political blancmange.
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