NIXONCARVER
By Mark Maxwell
Buzz Books/St. Martens Press, 178 pages, $19.95
There is a peculiar kind of immortality that overtakes those people who become fictional char-acters. One thinks of King Arthur and Vlad the Impal-er, or, in a less remote in-stance, Roy Cohn’s appear-ance in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Facts blur or disappear, and per-sonalities themselves are scattered like the bleached bones of dinosaurs, to be reassembled into strange new shapes. Mark Maxwell’s “nixoncarver” is a very conscious attempt at such mythmaking, and the crea-ture that emerges is an un-usual animal indeed.
“Nixoncarver” is some-thing of a puzzler, a work of fiction that includes a bib-liography and makes odd use of those facts it does retain. Fans of Raymond Carver’s fiction will be startled to see him iden-tified as “the legendary American poet.” This is rather like referring to Richard Nixon as a former vice president. But the most remarkable thing is the premise of the book itself: that Nixon, in post-resig-nation exile at San Clemente, Calif., encounters Carver during a stroll on the beach, and the two walk on to-gether as friends.
This is a somewhat mis-leading summation, since the bulk of the book con-cerns the separate lives and histories of the two men rather than their unlikely friendship. “Nixoncarver” is structured as a series of brief, largely self-contained episodes, inviting us to meditate on the myriad shapes the novel has taken at this late point in the century. For whatever rea-son, there is a good deal more Nixon than Carver in “nixoncarver.” Probably because Nixon, as historical figure, personality or cari-cature, remains an irresist-ible subject.
Maxwell’s Nixon is a man born to be humiliated. His father manages to turn Quaker beliefs into a series of brutal pieties. His sickly but sadistic older brother never misses an oppor-tunity to put him in his place. His schoolmates call him “Gloomy Gus” and “Iron Butt” and invent social cruelties that will cause even the most severe critics of the real Nixon to pity the fictional version. Indeed, the indignities suf-fered by Nixon are so gra-phic and unremitting, the low jokes so low, that the best way to read it is as a kind of Freudian comic book.
The Nixon who grows up to be president is haunted by jeering ghosts, is endless-ly profane and forever exulting over those he has bested. Of course, he never bests anyone for long enough, or completely enough, to fill the vasty deep of his anger. This is a canny portrait. Anyone who remembers the you-won’t-have-Nixon-to-kick-around-anymore speech will find it recog-nizable. This Nixon is also delusional, petty and given to public absurdities, as when he plays a piano con-cert that deteriorates into furious dissonant noise.
By contrast, Maxwell’s Carver is sympathetic and low-key, suffering even his terminal cancer with dig-nity. The scenes we are offered sketch Carver’s alcoholic father, his own alcoholism and the dis-solution of his marriage, but in distant, once-over-lightly fashion. There are many nicely observed mo-ments, as when Carver is struck by remorse at the Donut Joy, or accompanies his widowed mother to buy his father’s casket. But Carver as a personality seems elusive, given to saying things like, “I guess we all get what we deserve in this life,” and, “We’re all damn lucky, you know.” He is a kind of antidote to Nixon, a fellow American born into similar poverty and hardship, but who manages his public and private lives with the grace and humor Nixon so lacks. And this may be as good an explanation as any as to why Carver is the one paired with Nixon rather than, say, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf or Tonya Harding.
There is no plot as such in “nixoncarver,” although both characters travel from youth to age and into physical decline. Nixon and Carver and the tag-along narrator go fishing to-gether, play cards, take in a baseball game and clean a garage, just like regular guys. They talk about sex in the kind of raunchy detail that makes the Monica Lewinsky scandal seem prim. There’s not much about politics or poetry in “nixoncarver,” at least not as much as one might expect. (“How do you go about making a poem?” Nixon asks, and Carver replies: “I don’t know yet. I’m still trying to figure it out.”) At its best, “nixon-carver” generates a kind of manic comic energy, a loopy inventiveness as Nixon, flying first class, invites George McGovern up from coach for a drink, or Carver watches a rat beg for french fries at a laun-dromat.
“Nixoncarver” invites us to speculate about how much we ever know of “real” personalities, and how this knowledge be-comes lost or altered over time. “All those private facts drudged up and passed off as fiction and all those fictions masquerading as fact . . . ,” Carver meditates. “The poems obliterated and magnified his life at the same time.” Nixon, brooding over the dis-tortions of his public image, laments that “everybody has some little myth they’ve remembered all these years. . . . It’s all a bunch of useless crap, but they remember it like it happened to them, like it’s part of their biography.” “Nixoncarver” may accelerate that process of distortion, particularly for Nixon, but it does him at least one service. Richard Nixon was a man so bereft of intimate human contact that his staffers once at-tempted to hire him a friend. Here he is finally allowed to find one.
