There’s a guy, David Maraniss, with a biography out about Barack Obama, which is based largely on love letters between him and a couple of girlfriends he had in his young 20s, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook. Cook even kept a diary. (and, as I interpret what she said, she thinks she might have been 1st lady now if she were black)
David Maraniss- because I couldn’t find any pictures of the ladies
The excerpts I read in the Vanity fair article made it look pretty interesting, even though it’s more or less what you’d expect. Very bright, very ambitious college student who could be a bit too stiff and serious sometimes. Neither of the women had anything really nasty, or bitter, to say about him.
Here is the bit that got me – this is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to McNear (back when people wrote letters, folks – Maraniss’s ouevre may be the very last of its kind)
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
First, that first line: “I haven’t read ‘The Wasteland’ for a year….” Most people, Barry, have never read it in their lifetime, much less made repeat readings. I tried it, once, and got through it, but by the end my eyes were just rolling over the page much the way they would over the surface of the sea on a long voyage – not really taking in individual words, much less figuring out what they meant. And that whole bit about going into rooms and coming out of rooms and talking about Michelangelo, what was that all about?
Anyway, what it proves is that despite any political objections I might have with him, he is smarter than I am. And that is a good quality in a president.
I bet old Bullshit Mitt couldn’t talk about Eliot like that.
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