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Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA by Jim Hougan

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Cover of Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, by Jim Hougan

(This was originally written for Astral Codex Ten’s annual book review contest, but did not make the final round. I’m posting it here for anyone interested in American political history, as well as for all the Watergate buffs out there. You know who you are. Enjoy.)

“I had this nagging feeling that the Watergate might turn out like the Reichstag fire. You know, forty years from now will people still be asking did the guy set it and was he a German or was he just a crazy Dutchman?”

– Howard Simons, editor, Washington Post

The master narrative

It’s not an airtight truism, but it appears to be a truism all the same: The first widely-accepted telling of a tragedy or scandal establishes it as the narrative all others must react to. The first popular narrative is “sticky,” and difficult to overcome entirely. This is especially true with the Watergate scandal.

Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men could arguably be called Watergate’s master narrative, even though the first edition was published in 1974, two months before Nixon resigned. It contains all the elements of the Watergate story, from the scandal’s basic outline to the political implications that rocked the nation.

The remainder of the 1970s saw a Senate committee investigation, the release of numerous Watergate memoirs and tell-alls from Nixon’s aides, and two books from Nixon himself. After a legal battle, Nixon’s White House tapes wound up in the hands of the National Archives. Every few years for four decades, transcripts of the conversations Nixon held in private with his aides were released to the public. (The final batch was released in 2013.)

Amazingly, none of these later revelations did much (if any) damage to the narrative that is All the President’s Men. For the master narrative of a major scandal, it’s proven quite sturdy.

My vote for the most significant challenge to the Woodward/Bernstein narrative is Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984). Hougan doesn’t offer a complete re-telling of the scandal, but he does fill in a number of omissions from the master narrative that leads him to many surprising (and some dubious) conclusions.

Hougan did not set out to write another Watergate book. He estimated in 1984 that there were some 150 books on the subject published before his. Secret Agenda emerged from a magazine story he intended to write on a colorful private detective named Louis Russell, an “alcoholic and womanizer” who, in the 1950s, was a “Red hunter” for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. By 1972, Russell was a Washington, D.C. fixture who hung out with call girls and specialized in wiretapping. Hougan’s description makes Russell come across like a character in a James Ellroy novel.

Hougan’s research uncovered that Russell was employed by Watergate burglar James McCord at the time of the break-in. Hougan also learned that Russell was present at the Watergate complex the night of the arrests.

While researching this bit of Beltway serendipity, Hougan came to realize that no one up to that point had done a proper accounting of the Watergate break-in itself. This led him to interview a number of eyewitnesses who’d been overlooked by earlier researchers, such as the arresting police officers. He also obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests “literally thousands of pages” of FBI documents on Watergate that, for most likely internecine reasons, were not made available to the Senate Watergate committee.

To get a sense of the difference between Secret Agenda and All the President’s Men, consider how Woodward and Bernstein’s book opens:

June 17, 1972. Nine o’clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

It’s a terse opening, the kind of brisk pacing one might find in a 1970s political thriller. It also opens the morning after the Watergate burglary. Woodward and Bernstein do touch on the burglary itself, but—like most other histories of Watergate—they don’t delve deeply into the break-in’s motivations, planning, or execution. Rather, they focus on the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by the Nixon White House.

Cover of the first edition of All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

And why should they focus on the break-in? The burglars were caught red-handed. They all pled guilty to the crime. As Hougan writes:

Because the burglars had been caught in the act, the burglary itself had not seemed to warrant intensive investigation. The best efforts of the press, the Senate and subsequently the special prosecutor were therefore applied to questions of political responsibility and culpability in the cover-up. For that reason, many questions about the break-in had been left unanswered—not the least of which was its purpose. [Emphasis mine.]

Those unanswered questions include: Why did the burglars break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)? What did they expect to learn? And who ordered it? Fifty years after the fact, these basic questions have not been firmly answered.

More explosively—or absurdly, depending on your inclination—Hougan proposes Watergate “was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was, secretly, a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in its simplest terms, tripped on its own shoelaces.” He proposes a high-priced call-girl ring in a nearby apartment complex was the actual motive for the break-in. He also speculates the CIA sabotaged the break-in to protect the Agency’s interests.

This might make Secret Agenda sound like sensationalized conspiracy-minded rubbish. It doesn’t help that Secret Agenda has been so overlooked that it’s now out-of-print and nearly forgotten.

The reputation Secret Agenda has earned in Watergate circles comes not in copies sold, but in its influence. Watergate researchers admit Hougan’s work is significant, and have incorporated its revelations into their own histories. BBC journalist Fred Emery (author of the superb Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon) wrote in 1994 that Secret Agenda

effectively explodes the version of the first break-in told at the time. It was never properly investigated, mainly because the FBI, federal prosecutors, and eventually congressional committees became, understandably, more interested in political responsibilities than in forensic detail. Hougan’s is the most thorough expose of all the break-in anomalies. His revisionist version raises perhaps more questions than it answers and Hougan honestly admits ending up in many a cul-de-sac.

This, to me, is what’s required when reading Secret Agenda: To recognize when Hougan is working from corroborated or, at least, primary sources, and to smell when he’s off in a “cul-de-sac” and wildly speculating. As I read the book, I found myself wrestling with Hougan’s wilder claims and wishing he would stick to more sure-footed research.

Still, after shaking out the dross, I remain convinced that there is much gold to be panned here, if we’re ever to understand the entirety of the Watergate scandal.

Prelude to the break-in

Hougan’s book launches with biographies of two of the break-in accomplices: E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both long-time operatives for the CIA.

Hunt’s bio is the more evocative of the pair. His intelligence career began at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II before joining the CIA. He was involved in the Guatemalan coup of 1954 and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. On the side, he penned dozens of spy thrillers and adventure pulps about soldiers-of-fortune and treasure hunters.

McCord, on the other hand, was phlegmatic, hard-working, and demanding—a Baptist Bible-thumper. His resume is less documented than Hunt’s, and what’s known is less colorful. Hougan paints Hunt as cosmopolitan and adventurous, and McCord as the quiet technician who organized the team and got things done. He also presents the pair as the true leads in the Watergate break-in.

This arrangement turns the usual org chart presented by Watergate books on its head. G. Gordon Liddy is generally depicted as the leader of the White House Special Investigations Unit, the secret political team dubbed the Plumbers because they “fixed leaks.” Hunt (and, later, McCord) were nominally underlings taking orders from Liddy. Hougan submits that Hunt was the de facto ringleader.

Liddy was no slouch—he was ex-FBI and ex-Treasury Department before joining the White House—but his resume was not of the same caliber as Hunt’s. Liddy was brazen, outspoken, reactionary, and fond of guns. It’s easy to write him off as a big-mouthed goon. In Watergate circles, however, his 1980 memoir Will is considered one of the more reliable among the tell-alls penned by Nixon’s other men. Liddy also appears to be the only Nixonite who thought his role in the scandal enhanced, rather than stained, his legacy.

Notably, it was Hunt, not Liddy, who rounded up the men the Plumbers would use for their black bag operations. They were a loose confederation of Floridians dubbed “the Cubans,” although not all were Cuban. (They all appear to have been involved with the Bay of Pigs invasion, however.) Hunt spoke fluent Spanish, meaning Liddy had to go through him to communicate with some of the men he was ostensibly leading. Hougan asserts, with evidence, that all the Cubans remained affiliated with the CIA one way or another. In other words, everyone involved with the Watergate break-in—except Liddy and lookout man Alfred Baldwin—had ties to the Agency.

The Plumbers were first organized by Nixon’s White House in response to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. The group’s earliest mission was to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and photograph his medical file.

(Later, the White House team began to work with members of Nixon’s reelection campaign, where Liddy was reassigned. Calling these configurations “Plumbers” is a bit of a misnomer. For clarity, the team is referred to by their nickname whether or not all involved were members of the original Special Investigations Unit.)

Hougan is at his best when he’s covering the nuts-and-bolts of the Plumbers’ operations, and that includes the Ellsberg break-in. (As with the Watergate burglary, most narratives before Secret Agenda avoid investigating the execution of the Ellsberg break-in and stick to decoding its political implications.) Hougan pieces together the minutiae of the operation from disparate sources: Senate testimony, FBI and police reports, interviews, memoirs, and so on. He’s also good at weighing all the discrepancies in the stories. Like a fair-minded boss who insists all voices are heard in a meeting, he airs the Rashomon-like contradictions and attempts to synthesize them, reluctant to discard anything “just because.”

But as happens so often in the book, Hougan finds an unsubstantiated tangent, or a loose thread, or a whispered rumor, and runs with it. In this case, he writes that the CIA in the early 1970s was producing verbal models on foreign leaders (via “parapsychology”). These “machines” could predict those leaders’ reactions to a variety of political events and upheavals. Hougan speculates the CIA planned to turn this innovation on Americans. Once Hunt placed Ellsberg’s psychiatric file in the Agency’s hands, they would produce an “Ellsberg machine.” Even if the claim is entirely accurate, it contributes little to understanding the Plumbers and the Watergate episode.

This is the big problem with reading Secret Agenda, this constant need to sift the wheat from the chaff. I cannot imagine such a convoluted assertion making it into the pages of All the President’s Men, not even to dismiss it.

Watergate

Secret Agenda’s best chapters are devoted to the Watergate burglaries. As with the Ellsberg break-in, he paints a full and convincing picture by weaving together a multitude of often contradictory sources into a semi-cohesive story.

Over the Memorial Day weekend in 1972, the Plumbers tried three times to enter the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex. The first attempt was a bizarre evening. The Plumbers rented an event room at the Watergate under the pretense of holding a corporate business party. (Stupidly, the Plumbers reserved the room under the name of a shell company registered to one of the Cubans.) The evening concluded with Hunt and one of the Cubans hiding in a closet after the others had left. The plan was to emerge later, allow the others to re-enter through a side door, and sneak upstairs to the DNC. Instead, like a French farce, the pair were locked inside the event room all night, and could only leave when building staff let them out the next morning. After another embarrassing failure on the second night, the group gained entry to the DNC on the third.

For reasons unexplained by anyone involved, one of the bugs they set was placed on a phone in R. Spencer Oliver’s office.

Oliver was a coordinator of Democratic state-level activity, and not associated with the presidential campaigns still ongoing in 1972. His job meant he was on the road a great deal. Why the Plumbers or the White House would be interested in Oliver’s phone is one of the great mysteries Hougan uncovers. He spends a number of pages attempting to get to the bottom of it. In fact, it becomes the crux of his theory as to why the burglars entered the DNC in the first place.

The other wiretap target, DNC chairman Larry O’Brien’s telephone, makes more sense at first, but less so on further consideration.

O’Brien wasn’t in D.C. during this time; he was in Miami preparing for the Democrat’s national convention. According to Liddy, the DNC was a “worthless” target, and this was echoed by many of Nixon’s men after the scandal unfolded. Liddy complained that bugging the campaign headquarters of presidential aspirants Edmund Muskie and George McGovern would have produced far more actionable intelligence for the Nixon reelection campaign. (The Plumbers did stake-out McGovern’s headquarters for entry, but failed to follow through.)

Once the bugs were in place, Liddy demanded daily reports of the DNC phone recordings, which he planned to cull and pass upward to White House leadership. Liddy was denied access to the raw conversations, though, because CIA technician James McCord refused to use tape recorders. Rather, an employee of McCord’s private security firm, Alfred Baldwin III, was to room in a Howard Johnson hotel across the street from the Watergate, wait for the bugged phone calls to come over a receiver, and transcribe the conversations by hand. These were typed up into summaries.

Thus, McCord controlled access to the intelligence, supplying Liddy the typed summaries rather than verbatim transcriptions. It’s another reason why Hougan thinks Hunt and McCord were the real ringleaders of the operation.

This is where an already complicated story goes from knotty to Gordian.

What Baldwin did hear over the bugs appears to be exactly the worthless garbage Liddy predicted they’d get. The mysterious wiretap on Oliver’s phone produced little more than a series of risqué conversations. With Oliver traveling so often, it’s speculated that DNC staff used his office as a “phone booth” for making private calls, and that Baldwin was listening in on secretaries erotically teasing their boyfriends. Hougan makes a different connection.

The Columbia Plaza stood near the Watergate complex. A high-priced call-girl ring operated within its apartments, one that was broken up by D.C. police the weekend before the final, fateful Watergate break-in. The call girls were still in full swing when the burglars first planted their phone taps. Hougan speculates Oliver’s private phone was used by the Democrats to arrange assignations with the call girls for high-ranking party members visiting from out of town. If so—and if the CIA was aware of the practice—tapping Oliver’s phone makes much more sense.

Whether the bugs were faulty, had dead batteries, or simply ill-placed and not obtaining the high-quality political intelligence the White House craved—explanations differ—three weeks later, the order came down for one more break-in of the DNC headquarters.

Hougan’s chapters covering the final break-in are Secret Agenda’s centerpiece, which it should be, as it’s why Hougan set out to write a Watergate book in the first place. He offers a rich and surprising narrative of the fateful night, including several near-misses which could have radically altered American history. A sample of some of the craziness:

  • Plumber Frank Sturgis ran into Burt Lancaster hours before the break-in. Hunt and McCord had a similar star-struck moment in the Watergate Hotel elevator with French actor Alain Delon. (Both actors were in D.C. filming the Cold War thriller Scorpio.)
  • The Watergate burglars infamously entered the Watergate late at night by taping the latches open on a side door. Hougan reveals there’s quite a bit of confusion on how and when the latches were taped, and who did the taping.
  • Although they successfully entered the DNC’s headquarters weeks earlier, this night the burglars were unable to pick the front door lock. They resorted to taking the door off its hinges and removing it from the frame.
  • On the eighth floor of the Watergate building, two stories above the DNC’s headquarters, were offices for the Federal Reserve Board, which had its own set of guards patrolling the building. Amazingly, none of them detected the burglars or the taped doors.
  • Almost all the principal figures in the Watergate drama wind up at one point or another at the Howard Johnson’s coffee shop across the street for a late-night snack. This includes Frank Wills, the Watergate security guard who discovered the taped latches on the ground floor doors and called the police.
  • Wills is usually depicted as acting immediately upon discovery of the taped doors. He was actually reluctant to notify the police. Instead, he made multiple furtive calls to his bosses at the security firm he worked for. His run across the street for take-out further delayed calling the police.
  • Around 2 am, during the arrests, police spotted a white male leaving the Watergate lobby. The FBI later declared him the “sixth man” of the entry team. He remains unidentified.

Most surprisingly, Hougan’s meticulous chronology proves Wills’ reluctance to call the police—and his late-night food run—actually led to the burglars’ arrest! No arrests, no Watergate scandal—no Nixon resignation.

“Take all the cameras you need!”

Secret Agenda touches on the aftermath of the break-in, with Nixon’s men frantically destroying evidence and arranging legal representation for the detained men, before winding down. The book doesn’t go deep on the subsequent political cover-up, which is the focus of All the President’s Men. Secret Agenda isn’t a “follow the money” book. Reading it alone to understand the entirety of the scandal would be a mistake.

(Hougan does burn up a chapter to partake in the then-fashionable parlor game of “Who was Deep Throat?” He leans toward Alexander Haig—a swing and a miss.)

Returning to my earlier questions: Why did the burglars do it? What did they expect to find? And who ordered the break-ins?

Last question first: Jeb Magruder ordered the final break-in. (By then, Magruder was Deputy Campaign Director at Nixon’s reelection committee.) In an uncharacteristic display, Magruder yelled at Liddy: “Take all the men, take all the cameras you need!” He slapped the lower drawer on his desk with a bang, indicating he wanted some secret filed away in the DNC.

The Colombia Plaza call-girl ring had been busted three days earlier. Nixon’s men had pressured the D.C. district attorney to turn over the ring’s “trick books” to see if any White House personnel were implicated. With the election mere months away, the call-girl ring was the scandal du jour at the White House. Hougan speculates Magruder was “galvanized” by the vice bust and ordered the second break-in to clean up the wiretap situation.

But who ordered the initial break-in three weeks earlier is less certain. Magruder did send in Liddy’s team the first time (“a waste of time and money, in Liddy’s view”), but it’s never persuasively concluded who made the order to Magruder. Attorney to the President John Dean wrote of confronting Magruder on the subject while both were in prison. “Why did we go into the DNC?” Dean demanded. “Whose idea was it?” Magruder merely stormed off.

A common explanation for the break-in is that the White House wanted to know what incriminating evidence DNC chairman Larry O’Brien may have had on Nixon, either regarding political favors for telecom corporation ITT, or a payoff made to Nixon from Howard Hughes. As Hougan points out, both explanations suffer.

On the first point, Liddy met with White House officials about several “targets of opportunity.” He’s adamant the initial order to break into the Watergate only came from Magruder months after the ITT issue had been discussed. (“While Liddy has been called many things,” Hougan writes, “‘liar’ is not one of them.”) The Plumbers’ other covert operations had nothing similar in terms of time lag.

As for the second possibility, Nixon’s worries about Hughes, the Plumbers were tasked to break into Las Vegas newspaper publisher Hank Greenspun’s office (due to him being “deeply enmeshed in the reclusive billionaire’s affairs”) and to rifle his safe for incriminating documents, either on Nixon or his presidential opponent Muskie. (The break-in never occurred. Also: Greenspun was a lifelong Republican!) It’s too bad Hougan could not have gone deeper on the Hughes angle.

Hougan suggests another possibility for the final entry: To de-bug the Democrats’ phones.

His reasons are not far-fetched. In the aftermath of the arrests, neither the phone company nor the FBI found any wiretaps in the DNC offices. The FBI went so far in their reports to theorize the DNC’s phones were never bugged in the first place. The transcripts produced by Baldwin from the Howard Johnson’s would seem to disprove such a wild claim.

(Of course, the notion that the Plumbers were in the DNC to remove wiretaps is pretty wild too, but notice how Magruder ordered Liddy to “take all the cameras you need”—not wiretaps, but cameras.)

This leads to a full chapter on an all-but-forgotten episode in Watergate history: A few months after the arrests, the Democrats announced they discovered a new bug in the DNC. This “September bug” was found on the ever-fascinating telephone of R. Spencer Oliver.

The FBI and the attorneys prosecuting the Plumbers went round and round pointing fingers. Did the FBI and the phone company miss the bug in their earlier sweep? Did the Democrats plant the bug and “find it” for political points? Was it placed after the arrests by another covert operation? Again, Hougan comes up with his own, somewhat convoluted theory that’s too thorny to cover here. Even if it’s hard to accept, the entire episode is a further indicator of just how tangled the Watergate break-ins are to decipher.

Another tantalizing detail Hougan uncovers via the FOIA FBI documents (and confirmed by arresting D.C. police officer Carl Schoffler) is that one of the Cubans carried a notebook with a key taped to it. The FBI later determined the key opened only one lock in the office: the desk of Ida “Maxie” Wells, secretary to—wait for it—R. Spencer Oliver. During the break-in, the Cubans had assembled a photographic stand on Wells’ desk, apparently in preparation for taking pictures of something inside the locked drawers. Whatever it all means, it does suggest Larry O’Brien was not the sole target that night.

Liddy tells a funny story in his memoir that’s recounted in Secret Agenda: One of Liddy’s early proposed plans was to lure Democrats aboard a Miami party yacht stocked with prostitutes, cigars, and liquor, for blackmail purposes. When the idea was shot down, Jeb Magruder suggested they bring the women to D.C. Liddy rebuffed him: “I told Jeb that bringing whores to Washington was like shipping cars to Detroit…If [Magruder] could justify a trip to Miami, could I fix him up with our girls? Jesus, I thought, the wimp can’t even get laid with a hooker by himself.”

Hougan—always on the lookout for connections, no matter how tenuous—notes that bugging Oliver’s phone (if it was used by the Democrats to contact the call-girl ring) has echoes of Liddy’s earlier Miami plan.

Hougan offers several combinations of reasons why he believes the call-girl ring was the true motivation for entering the Watergate—from White House fears to CIA cover-up—but none of them are especially persuasive to me. The real value in Secret Agenda comes from the other more grounded details on the break-in he dredges up.

Was it Nixon?

The nagging questions that remain unanswered about Watergate—Who ordered the first break-in? Why Watergate?—usually elicit names higher up the chain: H.R. Haldeman (Chief of Staff), John Mitchell (Attorney General, later the head of Nixon’s reelection campaign), or Nixon himself.

For some, there is no mystery. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum thinks historians have timidly skirted the issue and let Nixon off scot-free with a hasty resignation and a free flight to California. For Rosenbaum, circumstantial evidence is more than sufficient:

Nixon is heard on a recording made two days after the news broke of the break-in proclaiming that he was shocked by it and—knowing the tape is rolling—saying it was silly for anyone to break into the Democratic National Committee party headquarters because any savvy pol would know that all the valuable dirt would be found in the (yet to be named) presidential candidate’s headquarters.

And then he delivers one of his most inculpatory statements on tape: “That’s my public line.” In other words, that was how he was going to lie his way out of any connection…

There’s a mild contradiction here: Nixon knows the phone call is being recorded and feigns shock at news of the break-in—then admits into the tape recorder he’s going to lie his way out of it? I don’t doubt Nixon at least suspected his re-election committee was involved. I just don’t see those four ambiguous words (“That’s my public line”) proving Nixon ordered the break-in.

Another point propping up Rosenbaum’s (and others’) argument: In 2003, Magruder claimed to have heard Nixon issue the order:

Magruder said he could hear Nixon tell Mitchell, “John, … we need to get the information on Larry O’Brien, and the only way we can do that is through Liddy’s plan. And you need to do that.” … Magruder concedes that he did not hear every single word while Nixon was on the phone with Mitchell, but “I heard the import,” he said.

Magruder’s allegation is explosive—and one he could’ve made in his 1973 memoir (where he states Nixon had no foreknowledge of the break-in), or at any point in time thereafter. Never mind that Liddy did not propose the DNC as a target, and steadily asserted for years his opposition to wasting time and resources on it. Thus, in 2003, Magruder claimed to have lied and withheld for thirty years—on top of conspiring to cover-up the Watergate criminal acts—and now should be believed.

Hougan goes to great lengths to air all the players’ recall of each event, but one person he cannot help but slam is Magruder. In almost every White House meeting Magruder attends, the others involved more-or-less agree in their recollections. Magruder always spins a wildly different take. Generally, it’s a take that exculpates himself. “To believe Magruder, then, one must also believe everyone else is lying,” Hougan writes.

Still, for people like Rosenbaum, Nixon was guilty, and that’s that: Come on—we all know Nixon did it. But as Glenn Garvin wrote in 2022, “Fifty years later we still don’t know who ordered the core crime or why.” Nixon was guilty of plenty, but that guilt doesn’t answer the question of why the DNC headquarters were targeted, or prove Nixon masterminded the break-in.

An intentionalist view would say that the only way the Plumbers would have broken into the DNC is if Nixon ordered them to do it. Such commands don’t originate from a lowly assistant, goes the reasoning.

The problem is that there’s no evidence of such an order. Even with a taping system in place, testimony and memoirs, and physical documentation preserved, no one has found any hard evidence that Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in.

A functionalist explanation would approach the problem from another angle. It would say that Nixon nurtured a culture encouraging such activities. His inferiors sought to curry favor by meeting, or exceeding, his expectations. Political advantage became the currency of patronage, where an individual is rewarded for bringing capital into the organization—intelligence, leverage, and so on.

Here’s Nixon ordering a break-in of the Brookings Institution on June 30, 1971, a full year before the Watergate burglary:

“You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them out. … Go in around 8 or 9 o’clock. That’s right. You go in and inspect and clean it out. … We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?”

Although the burglary never took place, the Brookings order is far more damning than his “public line” conversation or Magruder’s claims. The conversation indicates Nixon is capable of ordering a crime on the magnitude of the Watergate break-in.

But as the Nixon tapes make clear, Nixon didn’t merely order a burglary of the Brookings Institution, he couldn’t shut up about it. He kept discussing the idea, and even ordered it again a year later. (“…get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.”) If Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in, he was awfully quiet about it, whereas he was more than verbal about a similar, and more violent, burglary.

His order for Haldeman to “blow the safe” at Brookings set off a chain of events in the Nixon White House. Those events culminated with Nixon aide Charles Colson (purportedly) planning to firebomb the institute’s headquarters. (“Not just a fire, a firebombing.”) The order mutated from “break into the place, rifle the files” to deadly arson.

Liddy tells of a similar mutation, where an idle comment that “we need to get rid of that [Jack] Anderson guy” was interpreted as a call to assassinate the journalist, which he and Hunt discussed with a CIA physician. (The plan never amounted to anything more than talk.)

Cover of Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon, by Fred Emery

In Fred Emery’s Watergate, Colson recalls a meeting with Nixon regarding the recent assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer on presidential candidate and segregationist George Wallace:

Nixon’s having a cocktail, he’s sitting there with his feet back, we’re waiting for the FBI to call. As happened hundreds of times under those circumstances, he would say, “Wouldn’t it be great if…oh, wouldn’t it be great if they had left-wing propaganda in [Bremer’s] apartment?”

Sure enough, Liddy confirmed in 1980 he and Hunt sought to plant left-wing literature in Bremer’s apartment, but the FBI had already sealed the apartment. A verbal musing by Nixon—however feigned in innocence it may have been steeped—trickles down the power ladder as a call to illegal action.

Another example is the forged “Canuck letter” that destroyed the presidential campaign of Edmund Muskie. It was penned by Nixon spokesman Ken Clawson mere weeks after he joined the administration. It appears he wrote the letter as a kind of initiation rite to prove his loyalty to the president. An need to prove loyalty wrecks a presidential campaign.

Did Nixon order the Watergate break-in? If he did, not having a recording or a reliable contemporaneous account of it may be the biggest Watergate miracle of all. But a functionalist reading of executive power suggests why: Nixon fostered a culture of patronage whose currency was dirty tricks and illegal acts, which he could later deny originated from his office.

As Colson told a Nixon biographer, “You could always get rewarded if you showed up at the White House with a bit of negative intelligence, so the puppies kept coming in with their bones.”

The lessons of Watergate

Secret Agenda is a curious book on the rather long shelf of Watergate literature. Unlike other histories, which mostly recount the same events and profile the same personalities, Secret Agenda strikes out to cover territory overlooked by the others. Its minute-by-minute accounting of the Plumbers’ covert operations sometimes reads like a thriller and sometimes like farce, but is marred by Hougan’s propensity to wander into wild speculation.

“What follows in this book does not pretend to be a ‘definitive’ account of the Watergate affair,” Hougan admits in the introduction. “It is simply an attempt to correct the record insofar as it is possible to do so, and to suggest avenues of further investigation.”

Yet Secret Agenda left behind a remarkable footprint on that shelf of Watergate literature. Hougan’s research found its way into Fred Emery’s Watergate, the first cohesive post-1970s history of the entire scandal, and Garrett Graff’s more recent Watergate: A New History. Joan Hoff points out in Nixon Reconsidered that “of all the theories to surface claiming to explain the reason for the Watergate break-in, none has been adequately documented. One, however deserves mention,” namely, Secret Agenda.

My Occam’s razor-ish take on Secret Agenda goes something like this:

I cannot help but find myself persuaded by the CIA connections Hougan dwells upon. The CIA did assist the Plumbers with disguises, fake identification, and equipment; this is documented elsewhere. What’s more of a stretch is the suggestion that the CIA was secretly running (or sabotaging!) the Plumbers’ operations without the knowledge of Liddy, Magruder, or the White House.

The White House employing Hunt to gather political intelligence dropped a gift in the CIA’s lap. Hunt could share with the Agency anything gathered by the Plumbers. That meant the White House was funding intelligence-gathering for the CIA’s benefit, and the White House assumed all the risk if caught. For the CIA, what’s the downside? Although the source of Ida Wells’ desk key is a mystery that may never be solved, “the CIA supplied it” is a plausible hand-wavey answer, considering what we know about its activities in that time period.

As for the true reason behind the break-in, it appears everyone involved had their own motivations, often in conflict. Some of those involved had the opportunity to act on those motivations. Hougan does not convince me that the call-girl ring motivated the break-in. The timing of the vice bust in relation to the second break-in, and the bug on Oliver’s phone, does make it seem a potential sex scandal was on some of the Watergate players’ minds.

I can’t help but think if we knew what was in that locked desk, and why Oliver’s phone was targeted, we would have a far better idea of what they were after.

After all, what are the lessons of Watergate? No lessons may be learned until the problem is understood, and on that count, we appear to have come up short.


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The other meaning of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

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Charlie Brown and Linus at the Christmas tree lot. From "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Last night, I saw a live performance of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at the San Francisco Symphony. One of the people I went with had never seen the original television cartoon—yes, it’s true.

Afterwards, she asked a simple question: “Why did Charlie Brown pick such a bad tree for Christmas?”

As we walked, we talked a bit about Linus’ speech at the end, and how the story asks about the “true” meaning of Christmas. This was all fine, but it merely danced around her question of the tree.

What I said next sprung from me. It wasn’t something I formulated or ever considered before:

“Charlie Brown recognizes something familiar in the tree. It’s been overlooked and doesn’t seem to have much to offer anyone, which is what he’s experienced in life. At the end, the other kids see the beauty in the tree, and in decorating it they’re appreciating Charlie Brown too.”

I don’t claim this is a deep insight, or even an original one, but it came to me all at once. I watched the TV show as a child in the 1970s, and rewatched it countless times over the years, and yet I’m still finding meaning in this Christmas tale.

Merry Christmas, everyone.


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Has the digital revolution killed fiction?

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Obituary billboard
by Elliot Brown (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Will Blythe at Esquire asks, “In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?”

Wearily, I started his essay expecting more of the same, and lo, finding it: Computers and the Internet, he contends, has done much to destroy literary fiction. By this point, I’m surprised any writer pursuing such a thesis would bother fortifying their argument with examples or statistics. Blythe does not fail on that count either: Other than some “c’mon, look around, you know what I’m saying,” the argument is made sans corroborative evidence. Of course the Internet has wrecked American literature. Why bother denying it?

It’s telling, then, that Blythe opens with the usual barrage of accusations about digital distractions—”Can you read anything at all from start to finish, i.e. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?”—and then, to prove how things used to be so much better way back when, he segues to life as an Esquire editor in the 1980s and 90s:

[Rust Hill] and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). … Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual.

The jokes about fiction editors at a national magazine choosing stories to publish after a three-cocktail lunch write themselves, so I won’t bother. (Although I should, since, as an early writer, I had high hopes for placing a short story with a publication like Esquire. Perhaps I should have mailed a bottle of Bombay with each of my submissions.)

The dichotomy Blythe illustrates is telling: The hellish “after” is the mob writing Amazon user reviews and him not knowing how to turn off iPhone notifications; the blissful “before” is editorial cocktail lunches and not having to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks.

One counterpoint to Blythe’s thesis: The 1980s had plenty of distractions, including the now-obvious inability to silence your telephone without taking it off the hook. Another counterpoint: If you want to drink Negronis and argue literature over Reubens, well, you can do that today too. A third counterpoint: A short story printed in the pages of Esquire was sandwiched between glossy full-color ads for sports cars, tobacco, and liquor—most featuring leggy models in evening gowns or swimsuits. Distractions abounded, even before the Internet.

But none of these are what Blythe is really talking about. What he bemoans is the diffusion of editorial power over the past twenty years.

Blythe throws a curveball—a predictable curveball—after his reminisces about Negronis and schmears. Sure, computers are to blame for everything, but the real crime is that computers now permit readers to make their opinions on fiction known:

Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one.

I don’t actually believe Blythe has done a thorough job surveying the digital landscape to consider the assortment and quality of reader reviews out there. There are, in fact, a plenitude of readers penning worthy critical insight over fiction. Just as there are so many great writers out there that deserve wider audiences, there also exist critical readers who should be trumpeted farther afield.

Setting that aside, I still happily defend readers content to note a simple up/down vote as their estimation of a book. Not every expression of having read a book demands an in-depth 8,000 word essay on the plight of the modern Citizen of the World.

Rather, I believe Blythe—as with so many others in the literary establishment—cannot accept readers could have any worthwhile expressible opinion about fiction. The world was so much easier when editors at glossy magazines issued the final word on what constituted good fiction and what was a dud. See also a book I’m certain Blythe detests, A Reader’s Manifesto, which tears apart—almost point by point—Blythe’s gripes.

Cover of A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers

When B. R Myers’ Manifesto was published twenty years ago, a major criticism of it was that Myers was tilting at windmills—that the literary establishment was not as snobbish and elitist as he described. Yet here Blythe is practically copping to the charges.

Thus the inanity of him complaining that today’s readers hold the power to “inflict economic power” when, apparently, such power should reside solely with critics and magazine editors. I don’t even want to argue this point; this idea is a retrograde understanding of how the world should work. This is why golden age thinking is so pernicious—since things used to be this way, it was the best way. Except when it’s not.

Of course the world was easier for the editors of national slicks fifty years ago, just as life used to be good for book publishers, major news broadcasters, and the rest of the national media. It was also deeply unsatisfying if one were not standing near the top of those heaps. It does not take much scratching in the dirt to understand the motivations of the counterculture and punk movements in producing their own criticism. The only other option back then was to bow to the opinions of a klatch of New York City editors and critics whose ascendancy was even more opaque than the bishops of the Holy See.

That said, it’s good to see a former Esquire editor praise the fiction output of magazines that, not so long ago, editors at that level were expected to sneer down upon: Publications such as Redbook, McCall’s, Analog, and Asimov’s Science Fiction all get an approving nod from Blythe.

But to cling to the assertion that in mid-century America “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike” is golden age-ism at its worst. Sure, a few writers could make a go at it, but in this case the exceptions do not prove the rule. The vast sea of short story writers in America had to settle for—and continue to settle for—being published in obscure literary magazines and paid in free copies.

No less than Arthur Miller opined that the golden age of American theater arced in his own lifetime. Pianist Bill Evans remarked he was blessed to have experienced the tail end of jazz’s golden age in America before rock ‘n’ roll sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Neither of those artistic golden ages perished because of the Internet.

What caused them to die? That’s complicated, sure, but their demise—or, at least, rapid descents—were preceded by a turn toward the avant-garde. Which is to say, it became fashionable for jazz and theater to distance themselves from their audience under the guise of moving the art forward. The only moving that happened, though, was the audience for the exits.

Blythe then turns his attention to a third gripe in his meandering essay. Without a shred of evidence, he argues that the digital revolution of the last twenty-five years metastasized into a cultural Puritanism in today’s publishing world:

Perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families… Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.

I cannot deny that there appears to be a correlation between the rise of the Internet in our daily lives and the shift over the last decade to cancel or ban “problematic” literature. What I fail to see is how pop-up alerts or a proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots is to blame for this situation.

If Blythe were to peer backwards once more to his golden age of gin-soaked lunches, he would recall a nascent cultural phenomenon called “political correctness.” P.C. was the Ur-movement to today’s sensitivity readers and skittish editors. Social media whipped political correctness’ protestations into a hot froth of virtuous umbrage—a video game of oneupsmanship in political consciousness, where high scores are tallied with likes and follower counts. Using social media as leverage to block books from publication was the logical next step. But blaming computers for this situation is like blaming neutrons for the atom bomb.

After a dozen paragraphs of shaking my head at Blythe’s litany of complaints, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in agreement with him:

The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. … Good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness.

At the risk of broken-record syndrome, I’ll repeat my claim that Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives” (penned twenty-five years ago, near the beginning of the Internet revolution) quietly predicted the situation Blythe is griping about today. Back then, Baxter noticed the earliest stirrings of a type of fiction where “characters are not often permitted to make intelligent and interesting mistakes and then to acknowledge them. … If fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.” He noted that reading had begun “to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” and that this type of fiction was “pre-moralized.”

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Unlike Blythe, Baxter did not fret that literary fiction would perish. Baxter was a creative writing instructor at a thriving Midwestern MFA program. He knew damn well that writing literary fiction was a growth industry, and in no danger of extinction. What concerned him was how much of this fiction was (and is) “me” fiction, that is, centered around passive protagonists suffering through some wrong. He noticed a dearth of “I” fiction with active protagonists who make decisions and face consequences.

As Blythe writes:

Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical.

If Blythe is going to roll his eyes at the glut of reader-led cancellations and moralizing editors, perhaps he could consider another glut in the literary world: The flood of the literary memoir, with its “searing” psychic wounds placed under microscope, and its inevitably featherweight closing epiphany. These testaments of self-actualization may be shelved under nonfiction, but they are decidedly fictional in construction. In the literary world, stories of imagination and projection have been superseded by stories of repurposed memory, whose critical defense is, invariably, “But this really happened.”

It was not always so. Memoir was once synonymous with popular fiction. Autobiography was reserved for celebrities such as Howard Cosell and Shirley MacLaine, or a controversial individual who found themself in the nation’s spotlight for a brief moment. It was not treated as a high art form, and perceived in some quarters as self-indulgent. No more.

There remains an audience for great fiction. Readers know when they’re being talked down to. They know the difference between a clueless author being crass and a thoughtful author being brutally honest. They also know the difference between a ripping yarn and a pre-moralized story they’re “supposed” to read, like eating one’s vegetables.

The death of literary fiction—especially the short story—will not be due to iPhone notifications and social media cancellations. Perhaps the problem Blythe senses is the loss of a mission to nurture and promote great fiction. The literary world has turned inward and grown insular. Its priorities are so skewed, I’ve witnessed literary writers question if fiction can even be judged or critiqued. The worsening relationship of class to literary fiction should not be overlooked, either.

If Blythe laments Asimov’s Science Fiction, perhaps he should check out the thriving Clarkesworld. Substacks of regular short fiction are regularly delivering work to thousands of readers. I don’t know if these publications’ editors are gulping down Negronis during their daily Zoom meetings—but as long as they’re putting out quality fiction that challenges and questions and enlightens, maybe that doesn’t matter, and never did.


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The Christopher McCandless mystique continues

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Kat Rosenfield at Unherd claims she knows why men are no longer wild: “Our sense of adventure died with Chris McCandless.”

I last wrote about the mythology around Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in 2015. Rosenfield’s article motivated me to survey the situation once more.

I won’t summarize here Krakauer’s book or Chris McCandless’ life and death. My earlier blog post (“Into the Wild and the continued fascination with Christopher McCandless’ death”) covers both. Wikipedia articles on the book and the man are good starting points too. And there’s no substitute for reading Into the Wild itself.

Why men are no longer wild

The meat of Rosenfield’s argument lies within this claim:

McCandless’s story became the object of fascination — and not long after that, backlash. His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity; his death was either a tragic accident or an idiotic, avoidable bit of foolishness.

My motivation for this post started right there, in the above assertion. Compare it to what I wrote in 2015:

If this framing—reckless versus romantic—sounds wearily familiar, it’s because the debate over McCandless’s death has become nothing more than a flash-point in a broader argument we’ve had in America since he and I were born…

McCandless’ life has been converted into a proxy for this country’s culture wars, a string of battles where no one—no one—raises the white flag. … I’m unable to see how this situation honors or respects Christopher McCandless’ life.

Eight years later, Chris McCandless is still serving as a proxy for whatever culture war debate is on our collective brains at the moment. His life and death, cleansed and romanticized, provide a mythic framework to hang any number of ideological flags: anti-materialism, anti-woke, anti-technology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and more.

This is vital to recognize. Culture war ushers in an inevitable and putty-like transitive logic: Criticism of Krakauer is interpreted as an attack on McCandless; criticism of McCandless is read as an attack on his values; criticism of McCandless’ fans is an attack on progressivism; and so on.

So, yeah, I have and will criticize Krakauer, the actions of some of McCandless’ legions of fans, and the politicization of Into the Wild. I’ll even criticize some of McCandless’ choices. I’m trusting you to recognize that doesn’t make me a “Chris hater.”

“He’s emerged as a hero”

From there, Rosenfield takes what has become a standard approach in modern rhetoric: She claims her reasonable and clear-eyed position is the one under attack, even if she has trouble locating the hordes mounting said attack:

The lumping-together of McCandless with Thoreau was inevitable, and not just because the latter was a major inspiration for the former: here was an expression of the timeless desire to take these icons of male self-sufficiency down a peg. Today, the mention of either man tends to elicit a snarl — but the bulk of the anger is saved for McCandless, fuelled by a contemporary media ecosystem that keeps finding new ways to tell his story. [Emphasis mine.]

I cannot recall anyone “snarling” over Thoreau, who remains required reading in American high school and university curricula. He may have been dismissed in his time as a fraud or a crank, but I’m pretty sure Thoreau’s preeminence in American culture and letters is secure.

As for McCandless, Into the Wild has been translated into thirty languages and has remained in print since it was first published in 1996. It was made into a major motion picture by Sean Penn. It’s on high school and college reading lists across the nation, and was selected by Slate as one of the best nonfiction books of the past twenty-five years. A web site dedicated to Chris McCandless (christophermccandless.info) is still going strong, hosting papers written by young people affected by McCandless’ life story, a memorial foundation, a documentary, and more. The PBS special “Return to the Wild” promised to “probe the mystery that still lies at the heart of a story that has become part of the American literary canon and compels so many to this day.”

Yet Rosenfield somehow concludes McCandless and his life story are under a brutal and withering assault. If the debate could be placed on a scale like produce aisle apples, I’m certain we’d find any snarling criticism of Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer is far outweighed by McCandless’ legions of fans and sympathetic media sources.

It doesn’t help that Rosenfield’s adoring portrayal of McCandless as the kind of masculinity we need more of in our on society is framed just as she outlined at the top of her article: “His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity.” There are no alternatives, apparently.

“But lately,” she writes, “the controversy surrounding McCandless as a mythological figure is no longer an accompaniment to the story; it is the story.”

I don’t know that “lately” part is true. The controversy around McCandless began almost immediately after Krakauer’s story was published in Outside magazine. Its editors reported they’ve never received as much mail about a single story, before or since. The controversy became the focus of all subsequent accounts of Chris McCandless for the same reason Twitter melted down over the color of a dress: People couldn’t believe any sane person would disagree with their interpretation—and if you did, there was something wrong with you.

Here’s a good question: Why is McCandless a mythological figure? He was a human being, “full of vim and vigor, a complicated young man of effusive talents, predictable weaknesses, and eccentric foibles,” as I wrote in 2015. We can valorize a man, we can valorize his values. Why valorize his avoidable death?

Sherry Simpson of Anchorage Press put it this way in 2003:

Much of the time I agree with the “he had a death wish” camp because I don’t know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the “what a dumbshit” territory, tempered by brief alliances with the “he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest” partisans. Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.

I don’t agree with the “death wish” angle, nor do I think he was a “dumbshit” for entering the Alaskan interior. (I would say “grievously unprepared.”) “An all-American quest” ticks a few of my personal checkboxes, as does “I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero.”

The diary

In an aside, Rosenfield complains that McCandless’ sister’s memoir The Wild Truth (2014) has been weaponized: “It was received less as additional context to his story than a debunking of it: McCandless wasn’t a latter-day adventurer, he was a spoiled trust-fund kid with daddy issues.” (It would have helped if Rosenfield could have linked to an actual “debunking.” The single link she provided goes to a perfunctory summary of the memoir by USA Today.)

Carine McCandless does offer eye-opening “additional context” to Chris’ story. The real issue her memoir introduces is that Krakauer agreed to withhold these key details from Into the Wild at the request of the family. By doing so, Krakauer created a hole in his narrative and in our understanding of McCandless’ motivations. The Wild Truth was not weaponized for a mass “gotcha” campaign, or if it was, the campaign made not a dent on the beatification of Chris McCandless. Rather, as with the evolution of the poisonous seeds (explained below), its details were smoothed over by sympathetic media sources as completing and supporting Krakauer’s story, and further buttressing the McCandless hagiography.

The only “debunking” of note was from McCandless’ parents:

“After a brief review of its contents and intention, we concluded that this fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, or his character,” they wrote. “The whole unfortunate event in Chris’s life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams—not a spiteful, hyped up, attention-getting story about his family.”

There was another narrative hole, though, that is more substantial and of far more interest to people like me: The contents of the journal McCandless kept while in the Alaska wilderness. Initially only Krakauer had access to the diary, which he used while writing Into the Wild.

When the journal was finally released, it amounted to

approximately 430 words, 130 numbers, nine asterisks and a handful of symbols. Other than this, all Krakauer had to go on was several rolls of film found with the young man’s body and a rambling, cliche-filled, 103-word diatribe carved into plywood in which McCandless claimed to be “Alexander Supertramp” off on a “climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.”

Craig Medred of Anchorage Daily News has much more to say about “the fiction that is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild“. That Krakauer reconstructed McCandless’ last weeks in minute detail from such sparse documentation should be a flare in the sky to anyone who still believes the label “nonfiction” means something.

“It is as if the late writer Ernest Hemingway found a 430-word journal written by Nick Adams containing the words ‘railroad,’ ‘fish,’ ‘forest fire,’ ‘camp’ and a few others,” Medred writes, “and from that wrote ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as the true story of Adams’ biggest fishing adventure.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, then reread the final three chapters of Into the Wild and reckon them against the source material Krakauer was drawing from. Here’s a portion of the journal, from the McCandless’ memorial site:

Day 2: Fall through the ice day. Day 4: Magic bus day. Day 9: Weakness. Day 10: Snowed in. Day 13: Porcupine day…. Day 14: Misery. Day 31: Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Squirrel. Gourmet duck! Day 43: MOOSE! Day 48: Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life. Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster. Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared. Day 74: Terminal man. Faster. Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming. Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy. Day 100: Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in wild—no game. Day 101-103: [No written entries, just the days listed.] Day 104: Missed bear! Day 105: Five squirrel. Caribou. Day 107: Beautiful berries. Day 108-113: [Days were marked only with slashes.]

Chris McCandless’ entire diary, from day 1 to day 113.

McCandless notes on day 69, six weeks before his death: “Rained in, river looks impossible.” (I assume he means the river between him and civilization looks impossible to cross.) On day 100, he realizes “have literally become trapped in wild.” Earlier he writes, “Lonely, Scared.” Earlier still, he writes, “Weakness.”

“Male self-sufficiency”

McCandless entered the Alaskan wilderness packing ten pounds of rice, a .22-caliber rifle, ammunition, a camera, and a selection of books. Although his exact date of death is unknown, it appears he only survived for 113 days, or about sixteen weeks. All evidence is that he leaned heavily on a single food source, the seeds of a wild plant.

Rosenfield takes a crack at those who knock McCandless as unable to distinguish a moose from a caribou (“He could, actually”), although that’s beside the point. The real failure was him bagging a beast and lacking the skills to preserve it. After mere days he lost the carcass to maggots. Properly preserved, the meat and organs could have fed him for months, providing him with vital protein and fat. He wrote the waste was “one of the greatest tragedies of my life,” one of the few lucid and complete entries in his journal. Other than the wild seeds, he appears to have had no success in securing an additional food source.

The usual rejoinder to these failures is that the seeds he foraged were a good source of nutrition but, due to understandable circumstances, McCandless was poisoned by them, or some substance growing on them.

The seeds are, without a doubt, the most frustrating aspect of the entire affair. It’s oft-reported that over the years Krakauer required three tries to explain the puzzle of the poisonous seeds. As I wrote in 2015, the count was actually four, and is now closer to five:

  1. The explanation in his original Outside article;
  2. a modified explanation in Into the Wild;
  3. a third he offered in 2007 just as the movie was being released;
  4. a fourth in 2013 for New Yorker;
  5. and a modified fifth explanation in a peer-reviewed 2015 article, which he also discussed in a 2015 New Yorker article.

Diana Saverin of Outside magazine has a good summation of the history of the questions surrounding the seeds. (This article is also the first and only time I’ve seen a major media source acknowledge that the debate over McCandless’ legacy may be more than a Manichaean battle of “Chris supporters” vs. “Chris haters”: “[Some] readers don’t dismiss McCandless’ intention—spending time in the wilderness—as invalid or stupid. Rather, they reject his endeavor because of the consequence it led to: his death.” While not exactly my position, at least there’s an acknowledgment of a spectrum.)

With Krakauer’s later explanations for the seeds came sympathetic media outlets announcing he’d “solved” the mystery once and for all. NPR has declared the case closed on a couple of occasions. Salon originally titled their 2013 article “Chris McCandless’ death wasn’t his fault” before changing it to the blander “Into the Wild’s twist ending”. (The original title is still there in the page’s URL.)

The Salon switcheroo neatly encapsulates the stakes in play: By declaring McCandless was not culpable for his own death, the lessons and morality people wish to attach to McCandless’ life are preserved. Krakauer’s first explanation paints McCandless as fallible, and perhaps even liable for his own death (that Chris mistook poisonous seeds for edible ones). The later explanations (a mold or bacteria growing on edible seeds) reassures the faithful that McCandless’ death was understandable and unavoidable.

The various poisonous seed theories led to disputes between Krakauer and biologists. Even after the dust settled, the best the scientific minds could declare was “it is possible” the seeds were poisonous and “contributed” to McCandless’ death. That is not the indisputable evidence that some sources reported.

I’ll say it here, just as I said in 2015: I do not think McCandless was an idiot. I do not think he was reckless. He was far more prepared to enter the Alaska interior than a high majority of his admirers who’ve made similar attempts—but he was not prepared enough. I suspect he only realized his mistake when he could no longer trek out of the area (day 69, “river looks impossible”). Unlike living off-the-grid in places like the American Southwest, where he did well, McCandless’ resourcefulness was not enough in a truly remote and brutal location.

But even if rock-solid evidence arrived showing McCandless was poisoned by the potato seeds and nothing more, that does not prove his death was unavoidable. His survival in Alaska hinged on a single food source. He suffered from a single point of failure, and when that point failed, he was doomed. That is not “self-sufficiency.”

The cult

Rosenfield again:

On the 15th anniversary of McCandless’s death, Men’s Journal published a story titled ‘The Cult of Chris McCandless’, an examination of the young man’s legacy in and around the wilderness in which he perished. One gets the sense that there’s still little sympathy amongst Alaskans for McCandless’s death, and the quotes from locals range from pitying to contemptuous.

It’s true: A magazine wrote an article quoting some Alaskans’ contempt for Chris McCandless.

But it’s bewildering that Rosenfield could read the Men’s Journal story and come away with nothing more than the Alaskan angle. It’s titled “The Cult of Chris McCandless” for a reason. The bulk of the article regards the number of people—in particular, young men—inspired by McCandless to enter the wilderness and make a go of it themselves. They are almost always far less prepared for the ordeal than McCandless was when he entered Denali National Park.

I question the choice of the word “cult,” but confess I cannot offer a better alternative. The obsession with McCandless has made him a kind of secular saint, and the location of his death has become a pilgrimage site. TripAdvisor offers several pages on how to reach it; Google Maps still points to the site of Bus 142 before it was removed by the Alaska Army National Guard to discourage further sightseers. Authorities are routinely called in to rescue lost and stranded hikers. Deaths continue to occur. (Tellingly, Rosenfield mentions the reasons for the bus’ removal without pondering the implications of people losing their lives in the name of “authenticity.”)

If McCandless’ story truly inspires people to learn self-sufficiency—if it leads them to pause and hone the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness—I can only applaud that person for making the vision a reality. But when the inspired believe self-sufficiency is simply a matter of good intentions and a canteen of Evian, there’s a problem.

Compare the evolution of McCandless’ story—the beatification, the successive theories on the seeds, the guarded interpretation of his diary—to Charles Baxter’s observation of a proliferation of “dysfunctional narratives” in America:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Chris McCandless’ story over the span of thirty years.

The politics

Krakauer:

A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless.

Rosenfield picks up where Krakauer leaves off…and makes a serious detour:

The guy who hunts his own food, chops his own wood, and builds his own home, is a suspicious character: a little too trad, a little too in-your-face masculine, probably a Trump voter. And the guy a step beyond that, the one who doesn’t just paint outside the lines but wants to buck the system entirely? There’s something really wrong with him. He’s no pioneer; he’s a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel. … We’re afraid of men like this, and we’re afraid of the people who admire them.

This characterization is off-the-rails.

Without exception, criticisms of McCandless as an irresponsible privileged twerp are coded right-wing. The type Rosenfield describes sounds more like a standard-issue take-down of libertarians and hard-right Republicans (“a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel”). Those take-downs inevitably come from sources coded as left-wing—the same sources who trumpet McCandless as a modern icon (Salon, NPR, etc.) These sources will question the myth of rugged individualism in American history—and then, with no apparent introspection, hold up high Chris McCandless’ rugged individualism as an example to follow.

If anything, the animus toward Chris McCandless is a mirror-image of the one Rosenfield describes. Critics like to portray him as a coastal elite, a hipster from a privileged enclave who foolishly launched a narcissistic quest for authenticity, and certainly not as a Trump voter. I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as “fearful” of McCandless’ admirers. “Idiots” is the terse word one acquaintance used when I brought up the subject.

Recall Sherry Simpson: “Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.”

“Gather, cook, and eat”

If you still think of me as a “Chris hater,” in return I ask for your opinion of other individualists who forsook modernity and escaped to the wild.

There’s Alastair Bland, the student I wrote about eight years ago. The similarities between Bland and McCandless are remarkable: Both were anthropology majors who believed hunter-gatherer societies were freer and enjoyed more leisure time than agricultural/industrial ones. Both expressed a sharp disdain for modern consumerism and materialism. Bland did not penetrate the Alaska interior, but he did live off the land in and around U.C. Santa Barbara in 2002. Bland found people around him cheering him on:

They marveled at how great [his experiment] was and exclaimed that they would some day try to do something similar. They thought it was a good thing to boycott the American market and a shame more people didn’t appreciate nature’s bounty the way I did.

Like McCandless, Bland wound up concentrating on a single food source—tree figs—which left him bleeding from the mouth and nauseous. His days were spent scrounging for his next meal. He dreamed of climbing trees and eating figs. His life became “gather, cook, and eat.”

Just as McCandless attempted to flee the Alaska interior sooner than planned, Bland too quit his experiment early:

Even now I don’t believe what I did was very constructive. It was a memorable time in my life, to be sure, and it was a good thing to have tried. But to carry on like that forever would have been, for me, social suicide.

There’s Timothy Treadwell who, like McCandless, found a spiritual refuge in the Alaska interior. He lived there for thirteen seasons among the coastal brown bears, both alone and with his girlfriend. Like McCandless, he came from a well-to-do family, and was athletic and gifted. After some failures as an aspiring actor and a bout with alcoholism, he turned his life around. He grew famous for spending time close to the bears in Alaska, daring to approach them to gain their trust. He was immortalized in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

In October 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked and killed by a bear. Treadwell’s running camera captured the audio of the attack. It was the first and only incident of a bear killing a person in the history of Kitmai National Park.

John Rogers of Kitmai Coastal Bears Tour writes of “The Myth of Timothy Treadwell,” although this myth never took on the heroic proportions of McCandless’. While Rogers says, “Timothy Treadwell was not the foolhardy person the media portrays him to be,” he does not acquit him of culpability in his own death, either.

There’s Christopher Thomas Knight, the recluse who lived twenty-seven years in isolation in the north of Maine. In a bit of philosophizing that could have come from McCandless, he said by living alone “I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for … To put it romantically, I was completely free.”

But Knight survived while habitually breaking into nearby cabins. He was accused of performing over 1,000 burglaries over a quarter-century, pilfering goods and supplies for his own survival.

Note that McCandless has also been accused of breaking-and-entering by Craig Medred:

Three cabins — two privately owned and one a property of the National Park Service — were broken into while McCandless was at the bus. It had never happened before. It has not happened since.

There’s Robert Bogucki, raised in Malibu and a student at Georgetown University. As a young man, he began to question materialism and capitalism. He traveled to Australia to walk solo across its interior desert.

He entered the desert carrying a week’s worth of food and 26 liters of water. When his supplies ran out, he began digging for moisture, and cutting himself to drink his own blood. His absence sparked what was the largest and most expensive manhunt in Australia’s history. After forty-three days, he spelled out “HELP” with rocks and was rescued by a search helicopter. Bogucki “lost more than 30kg [66 pounds] from his 86kg [189 pounds] and it took him a full year to regain his previous strength and stamina.” (McCandless’ corpse weighed 66 pounds—half of Bogucki’s final weight—when he was discovered.)

Why did Bogucki do it? To see God. He desired to model Jesus’ forty days in the desert. He claimed God spoke to him and directed him to water sources. Where McCandless packed in a book on Alaskan horticulture, Bogucki carried a Bible.

Why are these “self-sufficient males” not idolized by the legions of McCandless followers? Why don’t we praise their “sense of adventure”?

Perhaps due to the faulty optics of each story: Bland’s admission of failure in a soft Southern California beach town; Bogucki’s distasteful Bible-thumping; Knight’s “self-reliance” revealed as a reliance on others; Treadwell’s violent attack recorded on tape, supplying us an unromantic record of nature’s grim realities.

Are optics really what makes McCandless different? Doesn’t such a cynical and relativist view smack face-first into McCandless’ values of authenticity—honesty with others, and honesty with one’s self?

It’s taken me nearly a year to write this post. I gave up twice. Researching and writing this has been exhausting. Why spend so much time and energy?

As I wrote in 2015:

Jon Krakauer introduced me to a vivid and lucid life, one that will stay with me for years.

That life has been flattened into an icon, propagated as a cult of personality, and used to buttress petty political divisions. In the least I must register my protest.


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Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

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Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?

In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we read and tell each other today.

Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expounded and expanded upon it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from poet Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”

One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.

Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”

To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.

“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

Don’t merely consider Baxter’s descriptions in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your daily feed, even the way your best friend goes into how their boss has slighted them at work—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.

It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.

(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)

Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omissions to block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.

“Mistakes were made”

Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. It describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.

Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”) He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:

No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.

Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a TV show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.

More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and grows into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”

In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It centers on a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.

Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.

This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.

Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.

There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.

A literature of avoidance

In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:

onetwothreefour
abcbcdcdedef

Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or various factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.

Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.

Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they need to buttress their message:

  • A disarmed protagonist
  • An absent antagonist
  • Minimal secondary characters
  • An authorial thumb on the scale
  • “Pre-moralized”
  • A vaporous conclusion
  • Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations

The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” Baxter differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.

And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the people around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:

…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.

Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways, but often it requires a surgical omission of detail.

Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”

Poet Marilynne Robinson
Poet Marilynne Robinson

Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash. This is by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice. Even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.

No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is now recorded and notarized like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.

The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.

And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character.

“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)

This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on your life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned (hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements). If the author introduces secondary characters, they can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters.

Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse.

A Cambrian explosion

What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.

When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims these dysfunctional stories are produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.

Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.

The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the numbers of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upwardly-striving classes. And, as part of the workshop method used in these programs, it also led to a rise in those people having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.)

With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in aspiring writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are lodestones when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. Naturally, these writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter.

Another reason related to the Program Era is the heavy-handed emphasis on character-driven fiction over plot-driven fiction. I explore this theory here.

Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time.

The natural next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. (This is different than working hard to produce a high-quality experience, which, in my view, is a better use of time.) And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a climate where you’re either with me or against me. Inaction in fiction has come to be praised as a literary virtue. Stories with characters who take matters into their own hands often are derided as genre fiction.

Pick up a university literary magazine and read it from cover to cover. The “smell” of dysfunctional narratives is awfully similar to the smell of social media jeremiads.

These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or perform acts of score-settling. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to connect dots. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.


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Hell freezes over: Netflix adapts “White Noise”

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White Noise promotional photo

While I’m mildly optimistic about the announced adaptation of Neuromancer to Apple TV+, I found myself…stunned? aghast? tickled?—when I heard Netflix has adapted Don DeLillo’s White Noise to its streaming service. As I wrote on Mastodon and Twitter:

White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.

This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netflix’s latest project.

If you’re not familiar, the novel White Noise is a 1985 literary comedy about Jack Gladney, a “professor of Hitler studies,” and his nuclear family in a fictional Midwestern college town. The early chapters depict suburban life as one soaked in crass consumerism, commercialism, and the ubiquitous nature of mass media. Things go pear-shaped when a railroad car spill on the edge of town triggers an “airborne toxic event,” leading to an evacuation and the concomitant strain on the family unit.

Remember, this is branded a comedy. The comic thrust of White Noise comes from its supposedly scathing parodies of American middle-class life. Take the novel’s opening paragraphs, where Gladney observes the college’s students returning to campus in single file:

The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

You’re forgiven if you stopped reading halfway through and skipped down. You didn’t miss anything.

Critic B. R. Myers categorizes this manner of list-making as a symptom of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” That’s pretty much what the first half of White Noise adds up to. There’s more of these dreary lists in the book, and plenty of tin-eared dialogue to boot, as evidenced in this exchange between Gladney and his wife:

“It’s not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.

“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

“Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.”

“It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”

Or this moment—the most famous in the book—when Gladney’s school-aged daughter talks in her sleep:

She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform.

I suppose for a certain type of person, this is a scream, gold-shot and looming. I’m not that type of person.

It’s the phoniness of White Noise I can’t let go of. The excuse of “it’s a satire” does not forgive the writer from grasping and depicting the reality of a situation. The power of satire is to capture the genuine and turn its underbelly over to tickle it—to reveal its absurdities in both premise and execution. DeLillo never accomplishes this. Professors don’t inventory their students’ goods from afar; husbands don’t tell their wives that the station wagon has a junky door (when any wife would full-well know this); and if a daughter was repeating a car make and model in her sleep, no one would declare it a religious experience. The absurdity of White Noise is not the mindless consumers populating it, but that this novel somehow is considered a smart skewering of them.

Compare the above to George Carlin’s ridiculing of American materialism in his infamous “Stuff” sketch:

DeLillo’s range-finding jabs are timid compared to Carlin’s honed wit, from the basic observation that homes are just lockboxes for our precious objects, to the game-theoretic anguish of weighing which personal goods make the cut for an overnight excursion. He even indulges in his own Consumerland-like list (“Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray”) that is far briefer, funnier, and better-curated than DeLillo’s weary catalogs. The laughs aren’t merely at Carlin’s on-stage antics, but in the gnawing sensation that we’re guilty of what he’s describing—and Carlin’s tacit admission that he’s guilty of it, too. Meanwhile, in White Noise, we’re supposed to be chortling at the mindlessness of our inferiors. DeLillo is othering America—for whose benefit? Why, Americans like him: Americans who deny their American-ness.

(In this sense, I suspect the Netflix adaptation will execute much like Adam McKay’s smug Don’t Look Up, a spoof also predicated on an America stupefied by cable television and fast food.)

It’s not merely the elitism that fails to connect. Gladney’s field of “Hitler studies” is never really fleshed out. It could have been a fascinating device (although it risked from page one falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law). As the book wears on, the Hitler studies thing feels like a gag DeLillo thought would reap comic gold, and only realized chapters in that the idea had run out of gas. The best he can do is have Gladney deliver a lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis Presley—there’s your Godwin’s Law at work. When Gladney admits he’s only recently learned German, you realize how thin the satire really is: This is not a real professor of Hitler studies.

When I say “Gladney is not a real professor of Hitler studies,” I don’t mean it in the same way that W. H. Auden said Shrike is not a real newspaper editor in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Auden meant that Miss Lonelyhearts is not about newspapermen or journalism—the premise of a man taking a position as an advice columnist is merely a convenience to place the book’s heart-wrenching confessional letters into his hands. Gladney’s field is very much intended to satirize him and academia, but the joke is never explored and left unfulfilled. It becomes a shingle to hang around Gladney’s neck, doing precious little to inform his worldview or way of life.

The main course for White Noise, though, is the American bourgeoisie. The metaphysics of supermarkets are discussed by the book’s characters (always with a straight face). Death is discussed in excruciating abstractions and legalistic terms. The book concludes with Gladney looking out over a hazy dusk, the air thick with toxic chemicals, and admiring its beauty. (No—really.)

White Noise by Don DeLillo

What’s the problem with Netflix adapting the book? In truth, I don’t care much one way or the other. What stunned me—and motivated those posts on social media—is that White Noise was always intended to be a sharp poke in the eye for middle America, with plenty of scorn reserved for major corporations and the mass media.

In other words, White Noise satirizes the type of corporation that’s adapting it into a movie, mocks the people that corporation will be marketing the film at, and despises the corporation collecting its profits as the mindless mob watches on from the comfort of the sofas in their McMansions, with their living rooms, their family rooms, their bedrooms, their candy rooms, their office rooms, their great rooms.

Why do they have great rooms?

What is a great room?


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Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective

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Sherlock Holmes

Mystery and Suspense Magazine has published my article “Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective” on their web site. In it, I explore the traditional reasons why critics and fans think the Baker Street detective remains popular—even immortal—to this day, and offer in return my own thoughts on the subject:

What is the enduring appeal of this shape-shifting character? Doyle gives no indication that Holmes is particularly attractive or magnetic in personality. He can be cold, abrasive, and downright rude in moments. One cannot help but feel Dr. Watson is a man with a remarkable reservoir of patience. How many Sherlock Holmes adventures open with the detective challenging Watson to discern the history of a person from nothing more than a walking stick, a battered hat, or a muddied shoe? Watson entertains Holmes and his games of deduction, but always as the lesser, never as the equal. (In my experience, medical doctors are not the sorts of people who take well to being talked down to.) Why would such a man continue to fascinate and entertain well into the 21st century?

My thinking on Doyle and his creation has shifted over the past few years due to a renewed appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon and, of course, writing a reinterpretation of his classic The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Mystery and Suspense article is here.

For more background on my thinking, there’s “Sherlock by Train” and “Why I wrote ‘A Man Named Baskerville'”.

And you can learn more about A Man Named Baskerville, which is available in Kindle and paperback.


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