Ann Beattie Builds Character
Asked about a common thread in her early stories, Ann Beattie answered that they were “filled with my personal worry beads: music, more music, dogs, digs at Nixon.” Now, as if to do penance for all of those digs, she has written a book about Mrs. Nixon. Not Pat Nixon, for that would imply a specificity and a solidity that Beattie never quite achieves, though this failure (or flailing) is deliberate. For the book is as much about how difficult it is to create a character, to know someone, even a person about whom much is known, as it is about Watergate or being a First Lady.
Rather than being hamstrung by Mrs. Nixon’s silences, Beattie is liberated by them. “For me,” she writes, “Mrs. Nixon became a minor character who would not keep quiet. She was so often silent (the Checkers speech, her final exit from the White House) that it’s tempting to think she had little to say.” Beattie’s technique in Mrs. Nixon is to impart lessons — a little writing, a little life — interpolated among her observations about Mrs. Nixon:
Writers tend to love people who volunteer very little, for their silence frees them to project onto them, though such characters are also confusing. Why are they so quiet? We now know Mrs. Nixon was too pained, leaving the White House, to speak; that she was given no lines to say in the highly orchestrated Checkers speech…but a penny for her thoughts, years earlier, as she sat ramrod-straight in a chair while her husband explained their finances to the nation, on TV, and his insistence on keeping their gift dog. Those thoughts could have been pretty much anything, but if they appeared in fiction, the reader would, justifiably, have certain expectations that had to be met. Interpolating with a unique approach (perhaps Mrs. Nixon was thinking: I should be a Buddhist) would seem to suggest that the writer was obtuse, or worse, that the writer was revealing something about himself/herself but nothing, really, about Mrs. Nixon, who would have to have the thoughts anybody might have in that moment.
For those unfamiliar with them, Beattie describes the context of the Checkers speech above. Checkers was the “gift dog” in question, and the rest of Nixon’s speech (in which Nixon creepily refers to himself in the third person) enumerates the Nixon’s finances to disprove accusations that he had mishandled funds earmarked for political use. Several times during the speech he refers to his wife — perhaps, most famously, when he claims, “After all, her name was Patricia Ryan and she was born on St. Patrick’s Day, and you know the Irish never quit.” So Beattie’s fierce desire to know Mrs. Nixon’s thoughts while she was sitting there, “ramrod-straight,” on display, being talked about in an almost intimate way on national television, well, it’s understandable.
More interesting is the point Beattie raises about audience expectations: this is at the heart of building character. The writer can’t stray too far from what “anybody” would think, Beattie concludes, for this would be in the service of the writer, not the character of Mrs. Nixon. But isn’t to put anybody’s thoughts into Mrs. Nixon’s head to rob her of personality, to keep her as Mrs. Nixon rather than venturing into the territory of Patricia Ryan? Beattie plays with this notion throughout the book, imagining what Mrs. Nixon was like as a girl, as a young woman before she married Dick Nixon, as a mother to Tricia and Julie, and in her role as First Lady.
Yet some of the most engaging parts of Mrs. Nixon have nothing to do with Mrs Nixon at all: when Beattie brilliantly reads Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” to illustrate how a metaphor can reveal character, or lets it slip that she wore heels to graduate school (no hippie was Beattie, despite all that music and those digs at Nixon), or when she gives what amounts to a mini-lesson on dialogue in the short story using Gish Jen’s story “Duncan in China.” Mrs. Nixon is about so much more than Mrs. Nixon it is hard to say what it is about, fitting for a book with a cipher at its center.
