Some of you may be old enough to remember ADVISE AND CONSENT when it came out. I am and I do. I remember reading it and feeling as though I was privvy to the goings on behind the scenes of Congress and the rest of government. The following essay appears in the latest (6/25/09) issue of the NYT SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW.
It's a really good essay. Have any of you read any of Allen Drury's books?
Essay ‘Advise and Consent’ at 50 BY THOMAS MALLON June 25, 2009
Of all the real-life senators serving when Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was published 50yrs ago this summer, only Robert C. Byrd remains in office. At this long remove one may be tempted to see him as Drury’s model for South Carolina’s Seabright Cooley, whose ornate, quavering oratory was made so memorable by both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Charles Laughton’s performance in the film that followed. But then one remembers that Byrd, only 41 in 1959, didn’t grow into the part of Cooley until decades later. Drury’s Senate is such a passionate, full-throttle place that “Advise and Consent” never has occasion to quote George Washington’s famous wish that the Senate serve as a cooling saucer for legislation that boils over from the more demotic House. His mid-20thC senators certainly speak better than those serving today, most of whom, during debate, could scarcely pronounce, let alone deploy, its orotund courtesies and barbs. Indeed, much of the ambience in which these fictional senators work and preen has vanished. In Drury’s capital, printed newspaper editorials still drive the action, and the head of General Motors calls up senators from Michigan not to rattle a cup but to dictate and threaten At the parties given by Dolly Harrison (a more genteel version of the real-life Perle Mesta), guests stay twice as long and drink 3x as much as they would allow themselves to do at any Washington party today. And yet, 50 yrs later, most of the subject matter remains recognizable. Drury’s 99 men and lone woman wrestle w/the issue of pre-emptive war, the degree of severity w/which lying under oath must be viewed, and the way the cover-up is invariably worse than the crime. Part of what kept the bk on the best-seller list for 102 wks is its comforting assumption that many politicians come to Washington hoping to do good. Of course, the novel wasn’t entirely believable even in its own day. When tempers flare in debate, Drury tends to bend the limits of decorum almost as much as “Law and Order” breaks the rules of cross-examination. But he creates such a thick texture of procedural detail and biographical background that a rdr tends to overlook large improbabilities, like whether a new nominee for secretary of state, however con troversial, could so convulse the country in the 7th yr of an administration. One doubts, too, that the majority leader would chat about the appointment w/the British, French, Russian and Indian ambassadors, all at once, in an upstairs room during one of Dolly’s entertainments. And would even mild, misunder estimated Harley Hudson, a VP closer in nature to Gerald Ford than to Richard Nixon, spend so much of the time he has on his hands actually presiding over the Senate? After working as a reporter and columnist for papers in Ca and Washington, Drury joined The NYT in 1954 as a reporter in the Washington bureau. He was only 40 when he fulfilled the common newsman’s dream of hitting it big w/the novel he’d been banging out between dead lines. In its preoccupation w/the mesh of personality and process, Drury’s bk resembles not so much any Washington novel by Henry Adams or Gore Vidal or Ward Just as it does one of C. P. Snow’s schematic renditions of high drama in the faculty lounge and parliamentary cloakroom. Drury knew politicians well enough to provide the principals in “Advise and Consent” w/meaty, plausible résumés; more important, he gives them complicated emotional histories. Drury was intrigued by men of feeling, the kind whose political ambitions and convictions spring from other passions, often early romantic ones. Even implacable, grudge-collecting Seab Cooley, who came to Washington w/Woodrow Wilson and has spent the long decades of his bachelor hood tyrannizing over the Senate Appropriations Committee, was in his youth shaped and scarred by love. The novel’s plot turns on the blackmailing of Brigham Anderson, a young senator from Utah whose wartime homosexual affair, once exposed by extreme proponents of the nominee for State, leads the senator to shoot himself inside his office on a Sunday after noon. The episode was suggested by the actual suicide of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming in 1954, and its treatment perhaps conditioned by Drury’s own rumored homosexuality. Unfor tunately, Drury was the kind of nonfiction-writer turned novelist who remains better at telling than showing. Fact-filled back stories are so plainly and well presented that his characters often seem more lifelike when being wound up than when put in motion. There are also, of course, a number of entertaining roman-à-clef puzzles to be worked. Is Lafe Smith, the skirt-chasing young senator from Iowa, meant to be a cornfed version of the Senate’s own Pulitzer Prize winner, John F. Kennedy? (Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford would play Smith in the movie.) The bk’s terrifically vivid president may vacation in Key West like Harry Truman, but he’s otherwise all Franklin Roosevelt: charming, theatrical, double-crossing; a love-him-or-hate-him chief executive who’s called “that seducer”-DeGaulle’s word for Roosevelt-“in the White House.” Drury’s people are better at making speeches than conversation. The author’s dialogue tends to sag not under the weight of exposition-the common hazard for writers of political and historical fiction-but from the pressure of emotion, those feelings he honors but can’t quite believably utter. His attempts at drawing-room repartee meet w/occasional success; efforts at a Rock-and-Doris-style sexual banter leave rdrs fleeing for the exits. The anti-*Communism of “Advise and Consent,” which Drury began working on full-time the month Sputnik was launched seems robust and entirely rational. The novel’s complaints about a “flaccid and flabby age” of American decline-Drury even hints at a missile gap-sometimes make it rd like a New Frontiersman’s urgent envoi to the era of Ike. But Vasily Tashikov, Drury’s cartoonish Russian ambassador (“You will choke on words, you weaklings of the West”), is one portent of the wildly strident novels that would follow. Another is Senator Fred Van Ackerman, the pawn of Comfort (Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce) and the blackmailing trigger-man for Brigham Anderson’s suicide Drury’s growing extremism-his taste for apocalyptic scenarios and belief that American liberalism was actively abetting international Communism-would especially affect his treatment of former colleagues in the media. The newsmen in “Advise and Consent” are already a disproportionately fatuous left-leaning and scornful lot. In later bks these unnamed self-important commentators will goofily harden into Walter Dobius and Frankly Unctuous. Even reviewers impressed by the plotting and insider*liness of “Advise and Consent” had doubts about its literary merits, and the author’s prose got no subtler as the sequels piled up and his ideological fever spiked. By the time he published “Preserve and Protect” in 1968, one critic wondered when Drury would “cease and desist.” Over the decades, before his death in 1998, Drury went from being a spectacular dark-horse success to looking something like Harold Stassen, the Minnesota governor who hopelessly kept trying to redeem his early promise at the ballot box by running for president at least 9x. But it’s hard to tell the winner of a Pulitzer that he ought to stop writing, and it’s no small thing to have produced at least one bk whose orating, battling characters, 50yrs on, can still hold the floor.
Thomas Mallon is the author of 3 novels set in Washington, including, most recently, “Fellow Travelers.” His bk “Yours Ever: People and Their Letters” will be published in the fall.
It's a really good essay. Have any of you read any of Allen Drury's books?
Essay ‘Advise and Consent’ at 50 BY THOMAS MALLON June 25, 2009
Of all the real-life senators serving when Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” was published 50yrs ago this summer, only Robert C. Byrd remains in office. At this long remove one may be tempted to see him as Drury’s model for South Carolina’s Seabright Cooley, whose ornate, quavering oratory was made so memorable by both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Charles Laughton’s performance in the film that followed. But then one remembers that Byrd, only 41 in 1959, didn’t grow into the part of Cooley until decades later. Drury’s Senate is such a passionate, full-throttle place that “Advise and Consent” never has occasion to quote George Washington’s famous wish that the Senate serve as a cooling saucer for legislation that boils over from the more demotic House. His mid-20thC senators certainly speak better than those serving today, most of whom, during debate, could scarcely pronounce, let alone deploy, its orotund courtesies and barbs. Indeed, much of the ambience in which these fictional senators work and preen has vanished. In Drury’s capital, printed newspaper editorials still drive the action, and the head of General Motors calls up senators from Michigan not to rattle a cup but to dictate and threaten At the parties given by Dolly Harrison (a more genteel version of the real-life Perle Mesta), guests stay twice as long and drink 3x as much as they would allow themselves to do at any Washington party today. And yet, 50 yrs later, most of the subject matter remains recognizable. Drury’s 99 men and lone woman wrestle w/the issue of pre-emptive war, the degree of severity w/which lying under oath must be viewed, and the way the cover-up is invariably worse than the crime. Part of what kept the bk on the best-seller list for 102 wks is its comforting assumption that many politicians come to Washington hoping to do good. Of course, the novel wasn’t entirely believable even in its own day. When tempers flare in debate, Drury tends to bend the limits of decorum almost as much as “Law and Order” breaks the rules of cross-examination. But he creates such a thick texture of procedural detail and biographical background that a rdr tends to overlook large improbabilities, like whether a new nominee for secretary of state, however con troversial, could so convulse the country in the 7th yr of an administration. One doubts, too, that the majority leader would chat about the appointment w/the British, French, Russian and Indian ambassadors, all at once, in an upstairs room during one of Dolly’s entertainments. And would even mild, misunder estimated Harley Hudson, a VP closer in nature to Gerald Ford than to Richard Nixon, spend so much of the time he has on his hands actually presiding over the Senate? After working as a reporter and columnist for papers in Ca and Washington, Drury joined The NYT in 1954 as a reporter in the Washington bureau. He was only 40 when he fulfilled the common newsman’s dream of hitting it big w/the novel he’d been banging out between dead lines. In its preoccupation w/the mesh of personality and process, Drury’s bk resembles not so much any Washington novel by Henry Adams or Gore Vidal or Ward Just as it does one of C. P. Snow’s schematic renditions of high drama in the faculty lounge and parliamentary cloakroom. Drury knew politicians well enough to provide the principals in “Advise and Consent” w/meaty, plausible résumés; more important, he gives them complicated emotional histories. Drury was intrigued by men of feeling, the kind whose political ambitions and convictions spring from other passions, often early romantic ones. Even implacable, grudge-collecting Seab Cooley, who came to Washington w/Woodrow Wilson and has spent the long decades of his bachelor hood tyrannizing over the Senate Appropriations Committee, was in his youth shaped and scarred by love. The novel’s plot turns on the blackmailing of Brigham Anderson, a young senator from Utah whose wartime homosexual affair, once exposed by extreme proponents of the nominee for State, leads the senator to shoot himself inside his office on a Sunday after noon. The episode was suggested by the actual suicide of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming in 1954, and its treatment perhaps conditioned by Drury’s own rumored homosexuality. Unfor tunately, Drury was the kind of nonfiction-writer turned novelist who remains better at telling than showing. Fact-filled back stories are so plainly and well presented that his characters often seem more lifelike when being wound up than when put in motion. There are also, of course, a number of entertaining roman-à-clef puzzles to be worked. Is Lafe Smith, the skirt-chasing young senator from Iowa, meant to be a cornfed version of the Senate’s own Pulitzer Prize winner, John F. Kennedy? (Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford would play Smith in the movie.) The bk’s terrifically vivid president may vacation in Key West like Harry Truman, but he’s otherwise all Franklin Roosevelt: charming, theatrical, double-crossing; a love-him-or-hate-him chief executive who’s called “that seducer”-DeGaulle’s word for Roosevelt-“in the White House.” Drury’s people are better at making speeches than conversation. The author’s dialogue tends to sag not under the weight of exposition-the common hazard for writers of political and historical fiction-but from the pressure of emotion, those feelings he honors but can’t quite believably utter. His attempts at drawing-room repartee meet w/occasional success; efforts at a Rock-and-Doris-style sexual banter leave rdrs fleeing for the exits. The anti-*Communism of “Advise and Consent,” which Drury began working on full-time the month Sputnik was launched seems robust and entirely rational. The novel’s complaints about a “flaccid and flabby age” of American decline-Drury even hints at a missile gap-sometimes make it rd like a New Frontiersman’s urgent envoi to the era of Ike. But Vasily Tashikov, Drury’s cartoonish Russian ambassador (“You will choke on words, you weaklings of the West”), is one portent of the wildly strident novels that would follow. Another is Senator Fred Van Ackerman, the pawn of Comfort (Committee on Making Further Offers for a Russian Truce) and the blackmailing trigger-man for Brigham Anderson’s suicide Drury’s growing extremism-his taste for apocalyptic scenarios and belief that American liberalism was actively abetting international Communism-would especially affect his treatment of former colleagues in the media. The newsmen in “Advise and Consent” are already a disproportionately fatuous left-leaning and scornful lot. In later bks these unnamed self-important commentators will goofily harden into Walter Dobius and Frankly Unctuous. Even reviewers impressed by the plotting and insider*liness of “Advise and Consent” had doubts about its literary merits, and the author’s prose got no subtler as the sequels piled up and his ideological fever spiked. By the time he published “Preserve and Protect” in 1968, one critic wondered when Drury would “cease and desist.” Over the decades, before his death in 1998, Drury went from being a spectacular dark-horse success to looking something like Harold Stassen, the Minnesota governor who hopelessly kept trying to redeem his early promise at the ballot box by running for president at least 9x. But it’s hard to tell the winner of a Pulitzer that he ought to stop writing, and it’s no small thing to have produced at least one bk whose orating, battling characters, 50yrs on, can still hold the floor.
Thomas Mallon is the author of 3 novels set in Washington, including, most recently, “Fellow Travelers.” His bk “Yours Ever: People and Their Letters” will be published in the fall.