“A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.”

January 7, 2016 5:24 PM

Obama as Literary Critic by Edward Mendelson [The New York Review of Books]

“Recently, while writing an essay on T.S. Eliot for The New York Review, I read or reread the work of many earlier critics, and was impressed most by two of them. One was Frank Kermode, who was ninety when he wrote, in 2010, one of his greatest essays, “Eliot and the Shudder,” [London Review of Books] a breathtakingly wide-ranging and sharply-focused piece about Eliot’s unique response to the common experience of shuddering. The other was a twenty-two-year-old college senior named Barack Obama, who wrote about Eliot in a letter to his girlfriend, Alexandra McNear, when she had been assigned to write a paper on The Waste Land for a college course.”

- Obama’s letter:

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?

posted by Fizz (30 comments total)

On the one hand I would be utterly mortified if anyone ever tried to use my (often asinine) college writing to draw conclusions about me as a person. That said, what an interesting perspective on Pres. Obama (at least as he was expressing himself at that time and place). Cool.
posted by Wretch729 at 5:34 PM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Wow. Now I'm prepared with a response for any "answer" involving TS, if I ever get selected to be on Jeopardy!
posted by mean square error at 5:48 PM on January 7, 2016 [15 favorites]

This type of letter seems like such a throwback, even for the 70s. This is like something from the 1870s. It's almost like Obama knew someone would care about his letters some day, so he ought to write some.
posted by bleep at 5:59 PM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Thanks, Obama! That was an interesting read.
posted by uosuaq at 5:59 PM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sorry. I'm having a great time imagining right-wing lunatics reading this letter, scrunching up their face in bewilderment, struggling to wrap their minds around how they might use it against him and renewing their anger that a brilliant and thoughtful Black man is president.
posted by ORthey at 6:04 PM on January 7, 2016 [35 favorites]

A close reading of a close reading in epistolary form! If I actually had time to do real supplementary research on my literary analysis essays, this would've been a thing in one of my essays. It's a very cool thing to learn, how to close read. Wish my more youthful, fresh English major side got to see this earlier.

On an aside, something I learned today from this FPP: Yes, I can use my liberal arts education and the pedagogy I learned to pitch an article. Don't give up!
posted by yueliang at 6:05 PM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sorry. I'm having a great time imagining right-wing lunatics reading this letter, scrunching up their face in bewilderment, struggling to wrap their minds around how they might use it against him and renewing their anger that a brilliant and thoughtful Black man is president.

I was trying to find out more about Alexandra and found this:

[H]e would have been a snore to have a beer with. (BREITBART WARNING)

Anyhow, I'd love to know more about the person the letter was written for.
posted by adept256 at 6:42 PM on January 7, 2016

From your (adept256) link:

It’s a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man — and it shows a self-absorbed “internationalist” with delusions of grandeur.

Yeah I mean he only became president of the Unites States lol
posted by ORthey at 6:47 PM on January 7, 2016 [26 favorites]

Regarding this:

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.)

Mendelson writes this:

Obama sees that Eliot’s conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot’s conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere.

i.e., bourgeois liberalism.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:49 PM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think contemporary bourgeois liberalism is less about bringing a certain sense of personal morality into the political sphere than it is about declaring choice to be the best arbiter of the good and insisting that whichever outcome we get, as long as there's some argument to be made it's the outcome that was popularly chosen, it's the best/most desirable outcome. That's scary shit to students of WWII because sometimes entire populations adopt popular ideas and develop mass cultures that lead to large scale programs of morally repugnant and self-destructive behavior. The problem is that our social affinities and affections can blind us to the realities of what we're doing sometimes.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:12 PM on January 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

I love how the only explanation which that Breitbart article can fathom for Obama feeling like an outsider in America is they think he sounds like a self-absorbed nerd.
posted by straight at 7:14 PM on January 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

The interesting thing is that I can hear Obama's cadence in what he wrote in that letter. I'd love for him to be put behind a podium to deliver that letter as a speech. Dollars to donuts it would sound like what I hear in my head right now.

That said, as an English major, this makes me like him more as a person (despite the various failures I think he had as a hopey-changey president).

So yeah, what straight said.

This is attack material for the right? Fuck me. Talk about grasping at straws.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:26 PM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'd actually encourage people to read the Breitbart piece: tl;dr - young people meet and write some florid prose about the whole thing. Breitbart says quel scandal she was 22 when he, 25, "picked her up" at a party.

Even though it was text, I instinctively turned my heaphones down because I was worried there was an autoplay screeching dog whistle embedded in there somewhere.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:39 PM on January 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

tl;dr -- Obama cooler at 22 than any Breitbarter is or ever will be
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:16 PM on January 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

Liking him as a person is why I voted for him in the first place. I don't really agree with him politically. I still don't, and there are some things he's done as president that I didn't like. But I thought it would be interesting to have someone who thinks like this as president.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:28 PM on January 7, 2016

You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really sexy line? Or am I just having flashbacks to college boyfriends? Glad to know those sweet-talking intense literary guys never change.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 8:43 PM on January 7, 2016 [19 favorites]

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City City, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Andrew Breitbart hold
Inexplicable bigotry, both white and old.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:43 PM on January 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

"I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes."

Ok. That's evident.

And Yeats Blueshirt period. What Obama lacks with his assertions is chronology to add context to societies ambevilance and angst during the 20s and 30s.
For example:

"Mussolini's conception of power and authority, the New York Times wrote in November 1923, “has many points in common with that of the men who inspired our own constitution – John Adams, Hamilton and Washington.” One of the most widely read magazines of the period, The Saturday Evening Post (with almost three million subscribers in 1930) published numerous articles praising Mussolini and his regime."
But wait...

"President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for the Italian leader, and sent him cordial letters. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to an American envoy: “... I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.” In another letter a few weeks later, the President wrote: “I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.”"
Oh my!

And who re-wrote 'The Wasteland'...?

So, "The Four Quartets" are really something more then " less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak."

And the reactionary dichotomy of fatalism...it's called 'Rock Drill', baby.
Fertility and death? Does he mean society, his own life, what?
Sorta effete but at 22, eh.
posted by clavdivs at 10:14 PM on January 7, 2016

Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere.

huh, i just saw this twitter conversation, re: 'You cannot talk about universal rights and not be a kind of imperialist.' :P

also btw check out yuval noah harari on personal/popular choice vs. data/empirics!* viz. technocracy, cf. the myths we need to survive
posted by kliuless at 10:40 PM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Come on, guys. This isn't really anything new.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:32 PM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wonder what Trump's position is on Rilke?
posted by Devonian at 12:59 AM on January 8, 2016 [6 favorites]

Heh. Eliot would have said:

"What is late November doing with the disturbance of spring?"
posted by clavdivs at 1:07 AM on January 8, 2016

> [H]e would have been a snore to have a beer with. (BREITBART WARNING)

That made me think of John Oliver comparing something (don't remember what) to "a Ukrainian sausage - absolutely stuffed full of unpleasantness."
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 1:12 AM on January 8, 2016

I think Trump is probably more Team Gerard Manley Hopkins, to, er, um, probably nobody's advantage, really.
posted by Chitownfats at 2:09 AM on January 8, 2016

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really sexy line? Or am I just having flashbacks to college boyfriends?

I swooned.

I've said it before: Michelle is a lucky woman.
posted by thivaia at 7:59 AM on January 8, 2016

Googled "George W Bush" + College essays and got this as one of the top ten results.
posted by zerobyproxy at 8:01 AM on January 8, 2016

I'm sort-of surprised the attack line isn't something like "Obummer cheated for college girlfriend; wrote her papers"
posted by chavenet at 8:02 AM on January 8, 2016

Bill Clinton as Literary Critic by Stephen Greenblatt:

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me .. “Mr. President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?” Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

posted by verstegan at 3:25 PM on January 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

I came back here just to comment on this - letter writing as a medium really impacts the words and alacrity of what you say, and I wonder how my thoughts would form if I wrote more letters in addition to texts and Mefi comments and FB messages.
posted by yueliang at 11:40 AM on January 9, 2016

Barack Obama and the Intellectual as President
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:03 PM on January 17, 2016