Like many people (not all of them liberals and Democrats), I was appalled to see Newt Gingrich win the South Carolina primary on Saturday. A passage from T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland comes to mind whenever I think of the former Speaker of the House:
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
Eliot is being nasty here. “Carbuncular,” I think, has to do with acne or boils–it’s as though the clerk is a pus-filled boil–and Eliot spits out the word “low” with sovereign contempt. All of Eliot’s class snobbishness, fed by his own class insecurities (wasn’t he himself a bank clerk?), come out in the description. One can certainly imagine the patrician Mitt Romney seeing Gingrich in these terms. How can such a gasbag and fraudulent intellectual feel so entitled?!
The Wasteland passage yields yet more parallels. The young man, after all, is on his way to a sordid teatime rendezvous with a typist. Their relationship, witnessed by a world-weary Teiresias who has seen the drama of human desire played out endlessly throughout the centuries, is not reciprocal. Indeed, it is as though the clerk is making love to himself:
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…
The scene recalls Gingrich’s own sordid affairs, especially the adulterous relationship that he was conducting even while declaring President Clinton an affront to “family values” and prodding Congress to impeach him for “hav[ing] sex with that woman.” (Gingrich hijacked the country’s agenda for weeks with that prank.) How in the world does he manage to pull off hypocrisy with such assurance? It indeed sits upon him like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
But looking at Gingrich in these terms also helps us understand why he won. Maybe he was the beneficiary of votes of angry clerks feeling they had been patronized enough by the modern day equivalents of Bradford millionaires. Rightwing blogger Eric Erickson of Red State explains Gingrich’s victory this way: “The base is revolting because they swept the GOP back into relevance in Washington just under two years ago and they have been thanked with contempt ever since.” He therefore interprets Gingrich’s victory as “Republican grassroots giving the Washington Republican establishment the finger.”
Eliot tries to deliver a final stab with the woman’s response:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
While the passage invites us as readers to smugly look down at the clueless clerk, however, maybe the joke is on us (and on Eliot). To a supreme egotist it doesn’t matter that what others think. If he sees himself as a great lover, maybe that’s all that matters. And maybe utter self-absorption is Gingrich’s secret weapon. He engages in gutter politics with a “bold stare” whereas when Romney tries to follow suit, he comes across as inauthentic.
To change mediums for a second, I am brought to mind of an observation by Citizen Kane scriptwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Upon watching Orson Welles, another great egotist (albeit a talented one), cross the sound stage one day, Mankiewicz said, “There but for the grace of God goes God.”
I’m assuming that the madness will end some day and that the Republican Party will nominate Romney or some other sensible candidate and that Gingrich will never be president. I’m counting on the grace of God.