A decade or so ago, I got into one of those irresolvable conversations with a coworker whose field and its particular conventions were entirely different from my own. When I asked her to clarify what she meant by some statistical practice or principle she’d referenced, she expressed surprise that someone with a PhD wouldn’t know what she was talking about. A PhD in what, though, I countered? Although undoubtedly helpful in plenty of research, statistics weren’t the most useful tool for the literary and philosophical studies I’d focused on, where instead, knowledge of other languages was essential. As I pretty romantically put it then, statistics in themselves didn’t tell you much about the state of a person’s soul.
My interlocutor wasn’t having it. But, she asserted, you can look at how many times someone’s read Dante’s Inferno! Which tells me nothing, I responded; said person could’ve been assigned the thing in multiple classes, or was just a fan of terza rima, or was comparing John Ciardi’s translation to every other version available in English. Maybe our Inferno fan really was jazzed about the nutty theology found there—but it still said nothing about how the reader was applying it all, or how she felt about it, or how it was affecting her in any number of ways.
The remembered conversation reared its head this week as I dove into a collection of Walt Whitman’s writings. Sure, I read Leaves of Grass at some point in high school or college, but not particularly impressed by it at the time, I hadn’t read much more of Whitman’s since then. This time around, I’ve been cheered by the realization that I’ve become a much more tolerant reader, less assured of my own adolescent opinions and more interested in understanding how the writer is doing what he’s doing—so that’s nice. But I’ll also admit that I’ve been laughing quite a lot—not at the poetry itself, but thanks to my memory of the hubbub that erupted over Bill Clinton’s bestowing Leaves of Grass upon at least two romantic partners, years apart from each other: i.e., Hilary (then) Rodham and Monica Lewinsky.
Why the laughter? Well, from the benefit of middle age’s sensible hindsight, Clinton’s move looked so ridiculously obvious, and so ridiculous, period, because a gift of straight-up erotica would have been much more dignified for everyone involved: a statement of intentions without the affectation, the need to pretend that the recipient should be charmed by the giver because he was a connoisseur of good and important literature—not because he was into the supposedly naughty bits, and hoped she would be, too. The gift said something about the giver’s need to be perceived in a certain way—as more sophisticated than a simple lothario with simple intentions—and about the permission he was granting himself for self-celebration. (It also said his act hadn’t changed much since he first gave the book to Hilary.)
The giggles were also brought on by what I remember as the public’s reaction to the gift. Memory is admittedly unreliable, but I recall a mixture of condemnation (largely and predictably from people who’d never read anything by Whitman, certain that gay porn was being passed through the halls of the White House) and low-level awe that the president was such an intellectual guy: he read poetry! And knew enough about one poet’s work from another’s to think someone else would like it! He could discuss it, and even use lines from Whitman in his speeches—and then use it to make a smooth move with the ladies, rather than just being crass and demanding a speechless quickie with an easily discardable nobody. That’s some suave shit right there.
Lewinsky’s just a few years older than I am; we both grew into adulthood in the mid-‘90s, before #MeToo really started to bring some mainstream attention to how gender-based power games are played out. The tail-end of the twentieth century in the US was hardly The Handmaid’s Tale. But as Allison Yarrow has pointed out,1 in spite of the ways in which women were moving into the public sphere and breaking down professional and maybe other barriers, assumptions about who and how girls were supposed to be for boys (whether as private individuals or public figures), and the sort of guy a smart woman could hope to hang around with, were still holding strong as we neared the twenty-first century. The decade was steeped in the cultural environment that celebrated Dr. Phil’s gently patriarchal relationship advice, had a field day with Lorena Bobbitt’s reaction to years of abuse, and laughed along with Dazed & Confused’s low-grade misogyny—which we were supposed to be OK with, since it was set in the ‘70s and all.2
It's really no surprise, then, that as I thought about that bygone poetic scandal, I realized that, had I been in Lewinsky’s shoes, I probably would’ve fallen for the schtick too, even if, I try to convince myself, it would have played out with different details. A really important guy recognizes the fact that I have a brain, and can read, and he’s interested in what I have to say about this book he gave me! He must think I’m special; he must respect me! If my own experience was representative, that wasn’t exactly what you could hope for from dudes in your age group. And as I also recall, bookish and educated and ambitious in my own way as I was, yours truly in her twenties and even beyond was all-out naïve, when it came to understanding men and so many of their motives.
I’ve been doing a lot of head-shaking, then, and feeling grateful that even if we’re still stuck in quite a lot of retrograde assumptions about gender, I can at least see a bit more clearly what’s going on around me. But then that coworker’s assumptions about statistics keeps playing in my head, along with the way she brought in a work of literature to back up her argument. Because Clinton’s famous use of a book provides good proof of the fact that the number of times you’ve read something, or even know about it at all, doesn’t necessarily say one thing or another about what sort of person you are.
Where Whitman’s concerned, scholar Ed Folsom reflects that you could take any of many facets of the man’s work and stake it as a claim about your identity or MO.3 A president like Clinton might have made public use of the poet to advocate for LGBTQ rights; his successor might have been more prone to employ him in support of imperialist ventures. And then we have to remember, too, that just because an important writer’s lines get pulled to serve the purposes of a political speech doesn’t even mean that the orator knows where those lines are from or what they mean in the larger context of the piece itself or the author’s work as a whole—because we’ve long had a thing called speech writers who provide the material, relying on the speech giver to bring it alive in performance.4
But let’s admit, too, that you can sometimes glean hints of where people stand, based on their favorite books, or the ones they recommend, or whether they’re into reading at all.5 Consider Ronald Reagan’s love of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October: would anyone be surprised that a Cold Warrior would dig it, or would probably allow fictional scenarios to influence his work? Or that service-minded Jimmy Carter would be moved by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? The jolt in some cases is that the name of a book ever passed through some people’s mouths—as in Donald Trump, the notorious nonreader, saying to someone at some point that All Quiet on the Western Front was a great book. I’d love to hear his summary of that one.6
And every now and then, what you can tell about politicians via their use of written works is refreshingly striking. Take Robert F. Kennedy’s unplanned speech in Indianapolis in 1968: having intended to do some campaigning for himself, he was instead faced with the responsibility of telling the crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been killed. I’m guessing a lot of people would’ve chosen to cancel the whole thing and gotten someone else to get up there and make the announcement about why the candidate wasn’t going to appear that night. Instead, Kennedy went out and essentially delivered an off-the-cuff eulogy—in which a slightly misquoted few lines from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon not only conveyed a general sorrow,7 but linked the feelings they expressed to his own life and his hope that those words might help those in the crowd process their grief, just as they’d helped him. Yes, being able to pull those words out of his head was evidence that Kennedy was well educated and was good at memorization—but that wasn’t the point at all. Among other things, the candidate’s use of Aeschylus showed he trusted the audience’s ability to get it, to hear him out as the person he was showing himself to be, and to trust in the sincerity of that person. A lesser politician, or person, might have pandered, thinking a quote from an ancient Greek tragedian would mean people would tune out or feel alienated, seeing him as a stereotyped version of the patrician he was. Kennedy, though, seemed to have been truly affected enough by what Aeschylus was saying to know those lines could also affect others, and with such power that people would understand why and how he was sharing it with them.
No one, of course, can really get into anyone’s head, especially someone they’ve never met. I can’t say whether Clinton really read all of Leaves of Grass, or anything else by Whitman, or whether he found much there worthy of consideration, as opposed to prurient glee or good soundbites. And I can’t say how often politicians or their speech writers have actually read the books or authors they use in making any number of points or insinuations or inspirational gestures, or whether those works change or influence how they view the world or themselves.8 I can’t say what would have happened had Clinton made a more straightforward move, à la elementary school conventions of having a go-between express his intentions via a folded-up note: “Do you like me? [or here, Wanna get down?] Check yes or no.”9 But I do wonder what would have happened had Lewinsky insisted on discussing the contradictions in Whitman’s declarations about freedom and slavery and war and nature and industry and imperialism and sympathy, and how it influenced Clinton’s approach to policy and politics and people. I’m curious what that conversation would have looked like, one person upending or confirming or refining the other’s expectations—thanks to the careful consideration of complex ideas put down on a page—of who each thought the other was, and where they would go from there with that new knowledge.
For an excerpt of her book, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, see Allison Yarrow, “How the ’90s Tricked Women Into Thinking They’d Gained Gender Equality,” Time, 13 June 2018, https://time.com/5310256/90s-gender-equality-progress/. For a review, see Rhaina Cohen, “What the 1990s Got Wrong,” The New Republic, 29 June 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/149491/1990s-got-wrong.
Note, the particulars I’ve brought up here—Dr. Phil et al.—probably aren’t part of Yarrow’s case, but are what I remember as part of the general atmosphere at the time. Dazed & Confused was a favorite of my early adulthood. But I recently rewatched it, and could barely stomach a solid portion of what I was seeing.
Ed Folsom, “’What a Filthy Presidentiad!’: Clinton’s Whitman, Bush’s Whitman, and Whitman’s America,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2005, https://www.vqronline.org/essay/what-filthy-presidentiad-clinton%E2%80%99s-whitman-bush%E2%80%99s-whitman-and-whitman%E2%80%99s-america.
And now, of course, we’ve got chatbots that can pull up any number of useful quotations, and whose allure to speechwriters is probably not negligible.
For some examples, see Jeremy Burke, “These Are the Books that 10 US Presidents Think Everyone Should Read,” 12 March 2018, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-us-presidents-think-everyone-should-read-2018-2 and Katy Guest, “All the US Presidents' Reading Lists,” The Guardian, 19 August, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/19/all-the-presidents-reading-lists. More recently, Early Bird Books has taken a stab at Biden’s preferences: Kaytie Norman, “What Are President Joe Biden's Favorite Books?” 8 February 2021, https://earlybirdbooks.com/joe-biden-favorite-books.
See Burke. Maybe the point here is rather that one reads books, period.
Christopher S. Morrissey provides the text of the Edith Hamilton translation from which Kennedy quoted alongside the latter’s actual words in Indianapolis: http://morec.com/rfk.htm.
Consider all the times King’s hope in his “I Have a Dream” speech, that his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” gets wielded by people who work against everything King ever stood for. Mother Teresa, too, seems to get brought in quite a lot in support of ideas or actions she’d probably condemn—and among other things, is apparently seen as a great business guru. For a recent stomach-churning appropriation, see Ellyse McCallum, “10 Powerful Lessons That Brands Can Learn From Mother Teresa,” Better Marketing, 9 March 2021, https://bettermarketing.pub/10-powerful-lessons-that-brands-can-learn-from-mother-teresa-207b0b8ced2c.
Or even a mixtape, which brings in the related question of what you can tell or not about a person via their musical tastes, along with frequently more infuriating bouts of trying to figure out whether or not the giver is Saying Something by having put it all together for you—and/or whether he’s made the exact same one for five other people (or even worse, maybe, one other special person).
Sometimes I think that people's reading patterns say more about them than the actual titles they're reading. For example, reading widely across forms and genres versus being narrowly focused on a set of themes in fiction. Perhaps the former style reflects an unbridled curiosity about the world while the latter might point to a more solipsistic view.