GREAT MAN LOWERED BY HIS TROUSERS
Mark Lawson is probably the only person
in Britain to have read the 'Clinton' novel; he finds it surprisingly pro the President
BOTH WASHINGTON and London have started the new political season with the publication of an insider's novel of politi- cal life. Britain got A Woman's Place by Edwina Currie MP, a silly mess of incredi- ble invented characters and arch name- checks for serving members. Washington, cutting rather the better deal, got Primary Colors, an account of a libidinous Southern governor and his pushy wife running for president in 1992. Everybody knows who it is about, but — a brilliant twist, this nobody knows who it is by.
By a practice virtually defunct in pub- lishing, the book is credited only to `Anonymous', and Random House, its backers, are refusing to drop clues, claim- ing indeed that the book came to them unattributed from an agent. Twenty years after 'Deep Throat', Washington has `Deep Pen'.
There are two views on the reason for the writer's reticence. One is that the anonymity is a publicity stunt, a clever realisation that the only fresh angle on authorial celebrity is total absence. The other — and how much more the political establishment wants to believe this expla- nation — is that, like 'Deep Throat', the writer needs secrecy because he or she is whispering from the very heart of power.
Certainly, Primary Colors carries a remarkably strong sense of someone on the inside typing out. To call it a roman a clef would not do justice to the level of its fidelity to the known world. It is a roman a clone. Jack Stanton, the unknown Southern governor challenging for the Democratic nomination in 1992, shares Bill Clinton's comfort eating, pollen allergies, sexual incontinence, policies and campaign schedule in New Hampshire, even losing his voice at the precise point in the primary cycle that the real-life governor of Arkansas con- tracted laryngitis during his run. Only incidentals on the résumé are different — Stanton missed Vietnam because of a crocked knee.
Nor does the creation of Susan Stanton, the governor's wife, seem to have entailed too many long shifts in the fiction factory. She is the bossy dominator of their mar- riage, tolerating her husband's infidelities partly because of her belief in his abilities, partly because of the benefit to her of his destination. 'Jack Stanton could be a great man', she says, 'if he wasn't such a faithless, thoughtless, disorganised, undisci- plined shit.'
Throughout the book, the game of guess- who? has a generous and helpful question- setter, at least to relatively careful follow- ers of United States politics. Orlando Ozio, governor of New York and epic ditherer about a White House run of his own, would surely have a lot to talk about with Mario Cuomo, former occupant of the Albany mansion. Paul Tsongas, the economically pious back-from-cancer challenger to Clin- ton in 1992, turns up as Lawrence Harris, fiscally dour back-from-heart-attack chal- lenger to Stanton. The book's narrator, Henry Burton, is, black skin apart, identical with the Clinton aide, George Stephanopolous. The foul-tongued South- ern poll expert, James Carville, would sweat in any parade bent on identifying the crazy, cussing Stanton strategist Richard Jemmons. And so on.
Indeed, only one actual protagonist from the Clinton campaign is offered any crowd cover at all. The Stantons have one child, but he is a boy, called Jackie and, appar- ently, an impressive lad: 'Jackie had some- how come out normal. He didn't sulk or strut, like most politicians' kids. . . . Indeed, he was an anchor. . . . ' The tone and technique of the Jackie sequences are so far removed from the rest of the novel that there are moments when you wonder if the secret author is, in fact, Chelsea Clinton.
Whoever did write Primary Colors has a knowledge of American campaign politics from the ash-scattered dregs of the chewed polystyrene coffee-cups up. If the reader out- side the Washington beltway may sometimes tire of the loving satirical glossaries on for- gotten Democrat challengers of 1992, the novel's record of campaign language is insid- er fiction at its finest. Tr-o -Stanton's aides, campaign reporters are `scorps' (short for scorpions) while famous reporters are 'big- foot scorps'. Pollsters and political consul- tants working on a presidential bid must be wary of developing 'TB', short for 'True Believerism'. They must always be ready to cosy up to an opponent if their guy's num- bers start to slip.
Intriguingly, the reader's X-ray of 'Anony- mous' himself or herself shows up a shadow of "TB' towards the Clintons. English reports of the novel have hinted at a vicious and scandalous expose, but, while Stanton is landed with a simulacrum of the Gennifer Flowers affair (here, Cashmere McLeod, a hairdresser), no part of the plot is Whitewa- ter in disguise, and Stanton is presented as a man whose sexual positions threaten his pol- icy ones, yet who is at core an awesome politician: 'He was lovely with the people, dispensing his meaningful handshakes, lis- tening to their stories; he had a knack — no, it was more than a knack, it was something deeper, more profound and respectful for making them think that he had listened to them and understood.' The book is as pro-Clinton, in its way, as the recent Michael Douglas liberal romance movie, The American President.
Who, then, might 'Deep Pen' be? The book glows with literary as well as political know-how. The purgatorial freeze in which the United States primary season begins is caught in a couple of briskly atmospheric sentences: 'The airport was closed. I walked to the office; no one was there and the lock was frozen.' The dialogue is Oscar-screenplay quality, although that might plausibly be the result of careful lis- tening back in 1992.
There are times when the novel seems so knowing that you could believe `Anonymous' really is Stephanopolous or Carville, the latter having revealed a seri- ous way with words in the campaign doc- umentary The War Room, and already the author of one book for Random House. Most American attention, though, has centred on bigfoot scorps, for the novel covers only the period of the early 1992 primaries, when journalis- tic access to the Clinton campaign was relatively free. Certainly, it seems a very New York novel — the real vitriol is reserved for the Ozio/Cuomo characters — and possibly even a New Yorker one.
The most popular candidate at the time of writing is Garry Trudeau, the Doones- bury cartoonist. Oddly, reading the book before this rumour surfaced, sections of the novel had strongly reminded me of a television series called Tanner '88, a clever stunt in which Trudeau and the director Robert Altman entered a fictional candi- date, played by an actor, in the primaries that year, where he mingled with the real candidates. Primary Colors might be viewed as a similar 'happening' and the book's dedication — 'For my spouse, liv- ing proof that flamboyance and discretion are not mutually exclusive' — might fit Mr `I'll never get used to marching on the left.' Trudeau's wife, the NBC anchorwoman, Jane Pauley.
But we cannot know, and that is the point. However Jong the secret now lasts, reading Primary Colors has been a reminder of the extent to which we now read fiction in the light of our knowledge of the author, and with constant subliminal reference to whether or not the work is autobiographical. But the book is now in its sixth printing and so, if this is a cunning experiment by Trudeau or anyone else, it has now turned into another one: will `Anonymous' really be able to become the first late-20th-century American to reject celebrity?
Previous page
