Between the Lines

I've found myself reading Bill Clinton: An American Journey by Nigel Hamilton recently (and I only add the Amazon link as a guide to what I'm up against, rather than any endorsment, of either the book or Amazon), I had nothing else in the house to read and while scanning the shelves I noticed this book which I'd, mistakenly (due to some dodgy advertising by mail order book company and some idiotic wishful thinking on my own part), bought ages ago and never got round to reading.

I'm not a big fan of biography anyway, if it's someone I really like (which Clinton isn't) I can get away with them, but otherwise I generally try and avoid them. The writing style always seems so bloody functional: fact, fact, fact, opinion, opinion, fact, revised opinion, fact, tenuously connected fact, definitive opinion. So flat. They are biographers rather than writers.

Which is of course a massive generalization. But still.

This biography utterly conforms to type.

There is one reason I'm continuing to read (this isn't strictly true, I'm taking a break from it to read something else someone suggested I should read, but I have every intention of going back to it, every intention...), and that is because of its bizarre insistence on defenses of adultery. Of course, when looking at Bill Clinton's life, one can't really avoid talking about adultery but this book takes it to extremes, not so much in its chronicles but in the discussions of male sexuality. There is constant mention of some biological imperative forcing the male into promiscuity and this same imperative forces the female into clinging to the man no matter what. I don't really have the relevant background to critique these claims, and I don't really want to. I shall just say that I always find such theories rather self serving and, coming from a school of thought which gives primacy to language, unconvincing,which is to say that any biological (or genetic) imperative is always put through the lens of the symbolic, even the biological becomes symbolically loaded: I have sex, but how I have sex is determined, not by biology, but by the symbolic.

He doesn't only use this biological thing though, oh no, he also explains it away by reference to psychoanalysis, Clinton's upbringing, changing American culture, etc.. We can see in this Freud's Borrowed Kettle, where mutually exclusive reasons demonstrate exactly what he's trying to be denied, in this case: that Clinton was personally responsible for his own infidelity.

My way of continuing to read this book then is to view the entire thing as a long letter from the author to his wife after being found out having an affair. I don't have any information to this end, and I really don't care to look for any biographical information on the author, for that would ruin my reading enjoyment. What I mean is that I am reading the book as a fictional account of the authorial voice's marital problems. The actual living author doesn't come into it, doesn't interest me, and he's taken any interest I might have had in the life of Clinton away with his plodding prose, so what I'm left with is a book that only exists between the lines. And I'm quite interested in seeing how it ends.