Nomadic Hedonism: On Robert Plunket’s “My Search for Warren Harding”
Robert Plunket | My Search for Warren Harding | New Directions | June 2023 | 286 Pages
One great trick any coercive organization—be it a fast food restaurant chain or the executive branch of the federal government—can play on an unassuming public is to purport to have a “face.” It’s the line cooks who drop newly hatched chicks into blenders, the Department of the Interior that sells the playground to Exxon; not, of course, the waxy figure on the television with no obviously functional facial muscles we nevertheless call “the King“ or “president.”
Historians have long studied the dynamic between the image of such “faces” and the behavior of the institutions they represent in an attempt to understand the marriage (and divorce) of rhetoric and policy, celebrity and influence, appearance and reality.
Not Elliot Weiner. The narrator of Robert Plunket’s black comic novel My Search for Warren Harding, reissued by New Directions for its fortieth anniversary, is the kind of green humanities scholar and arrogant, closeted bigot who focuses too much on people’s looks without taking that next step of exploring what they may conceal. To Elliot, the content of the 29th president’s “filthy” love letters is more interesting than the fact some were written on White House stationary when Harding could have otherwise been, I don’t know, slinking into Interior Secretary Albert Fall’s office to ask why the oil lease numbers weren’t adding up in Teapot Dome:
The first one I picked up was all about somebody named Howard Hardwick and how much he missed “Becky,” and then some extremely complex and lengthy statistical data having to do with his size, weight, etc., that made absolutely no sense until I realized “Howard Hardwick” was not a person at all but Harding’s nickname for a certain part of his anatomy. In the second letter, he “celebrates” Rebekah’s body for thirty pages, fifteen above the waist and fifteen below, but in the third letter it was Howard Hardwick again, this time making some interesting comparisons between himself and a certain donkey that had apparently been quite famous back in Marion—
Pretty good, I agree. But just as executive phallus captivates Elliot more than the administration’s corruption, his work on Harding is less interesting than the story of how he came to study “the shallowest President in history.”
For years, Elliot belonged to a group that was “overeducated, bitter about their take-home pay, trapped in Manhattan without cars, deprived of the profit motive in their dull but harried jobs, too timid to take charge of their lives but too intelligent to be satisfied with the little they have.” He liked his work—which mostly consisted of bringing heiresses to dinner so that they’d write donation checks to his nonprofit zoo—but even happy frauds are susceptible to identity crisis. Elliot retreats to Columbia to study history. One day, while procrastinating writing a major term paper for which he’d done no research, he and his unwitting beard Pam, an otherwise no-nonsense Ford Foundation official, visit a thrift shop. Pam picks up a copy of The Price of Love, a memoir by Rebekah Kinney, the failed actress who claims to have been the mistress of one Warren G. Harding. Elliot is intrigued: “Virtually everything written about the poor guy was scandal and gossip of the most malicious sort, radically different from the dull, reverential tones that most Presidents inspire.” He cobbles together what tell-alls he can find and submits a paper titled “Anything for a Buck: Warren Harding and the Beginning of Modern Political Gossip.” Voila: a new school of thought and academic celebrity. Elliot wins a grant to produce a book. He uses the money to fly to Los Angeles, where Rebekah Kinney is rumored to live in solitude.
Celebrity is not just a subject to Elliot, but something he desperately wants for himself. When he locates Rebekah’s decrepit house, he walks straight in to ask the eighty-four-year-old if he can rent a room. He knows he can get something valuable out of Rebekah. But it’s her granddaughter Jonica who reveals exactly what: a trunk full of letters from Harding, tucked away for decades. Salivating at the idea of the bestseller he could write based on this bedroom archive, Elliot tells a friend “I’d rape and pillage to get my hands on those papers,” and he’s barely exaggerating. He lures Jonica, a chirpy single mother whose weight and naivete he compulsively maligns, into a romance he believes will net him Rebekah’s trove.
How thrilling an affair can be. Whether a means to an end, as Elliot would have us believe, or a twitch at “death’s feather on the nerve,” as Dylan Thomas wrote, for Plunket fresh sex always changes more than mood. Lovers rush to impress one another, like when Jonica introduces Elliot to the movie star of his childhood (who happens to be her best friend’s mother), and like Harding did when he took Rebekah for her first-ever ride in an automobile. These small pops of confetti for one are life-altering experiences for the other. How thrilling indeed, but also how delicate, that exquisite disproportion where love’s potential energy blossoms into ecstasy; then sudden, intense cruelty.
In one scene, Jonica is watching a TV show she likes when Elliot, bored, starts to pester her about the Harding letters. She shushes him. He erupts. Elliot twists Jonica’s arm. Over her screams, he yells, “I don’t know why I’ve put up with you as long as I have. All you do is stuff that fat face of yours. It’s sickening. I want to vomit every time I watch you eat. You fat pig slut.” Until this moment it’s easy to laugh at Jonica, not because the cracks about her weight are always funny (sometimes they are), but because they are constant. But when Jonica lies there on the bathroom floor looking up at Elliot for affirmation that the attack was not the end, the full extent of her desperation becomes clear, and for once Elliot understands it:
So, Elliot, the moment of truth. What on earth did you expect would happen if not this? Are you happy now? Here you take this forty-watt product of the California school system, this emotional basket case, then you lavish attention on her, wine her and dine her, treat her like she was Liv Ullmann—my God, the poor girl must have been terrified the whole time. Your interest in her didn’t make any sense. She was dumb, but she wasn’t that dumb. She was just waiting for the balloon to burst. And it finally had. I looked down at her, huddled on the bathmat like a beached whale, her thrift-shop skirt hiked up around her thighs. What am I going to do now? What in God’s name am I going to do now?
He need not worry. She swiftly forgives him, foreshadowing that her role in this relationship will mirror her grandmother’s with Harding.
After a few months in Los Angeles pursuing acting, sickly Rebekah Kinney appears unannounced in Washington, D.C. pleading to see then-Senator Harding. She is pregnant. “I don’t want you to worry for a minute. I know exactly what must be done,” Harding says. The devout Baptist returns from the closest pharmacy with homeopathic abortion pills. When they don’t take (Rebekah had only swallowed half as many as Harding ordered), she is dispatched to the second floor of a wholesale poultry business where an unkempt, bloodshot doctor says he’s game to “give it a try.” Seconds after she is sedated, Rebekah reconsiders. She bolts out of the window in her nightgown “fighting off unconsciousness and terrifying passers-by, until a trolley conductor took pity on her and returned her to her hotel.” The affair never recovers. When Elliot finds Rebekah decades later she is impoverished, in cognitive decline, and bound to a wheelchair. In the early hours of one morning, Elliot is looking out the window of the pool house he's been renting on the Kinney property when Rebekah appears. She seems to be looking for her infant grandson, named after her lost love:
“Mrs. Kinney?” I repeated, breathless. “Are you all right?”
She stared at me, bewildered.
“Where’s Warren?” she asked, grabbing my hand.
“He’s in the nursery,” I told her.
“The nursery?”
And then I realized she didn’t mean little Warren at all. I felt my skin crawl.
“Help me to find Warren,” she said.
She began to cry. Her grip on my arm was so strong.
“I will, I will,” I said.
From any other person these two words, “I will,” would be a kindness. Harding has been dead no less than fifty years; Rebekah isn’t asking to visit his tomb. She wants to be transported to that day in Elm Thicket when she first fell for the bright young publisher of their hometown newspaper, the Star. Or maybe to the Pennsylvania woods where she once joined him for a weekend at the Hotel Callicoon, only tiptoeing out of their suite to fetch more doughnuts. When Elliot agrees to help Rebekah find Warren Harding, he’s agreeing to let the doddering woman believe this is possible while he schemes after her most intimate correspondence.
The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way in which Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel. Why enlist the reader in a mad academic detective caper poised to confirm that President Warren Harding ain’t nothing but a hound dog delivered his election by the “deliberate and brilliant accomplishment of his wife, Florence,” herself acting on the spiritual guidance of a Beltway mystic, only to dodge every opportunity to take that fascinating story head on? Save for a few interesting snippets of Elliot’s recent scholarship, Plunket admirably betrays no interest in smuggling theory into fiction, but the book is no mere fusillade of high camp snark either. My Search for Warren Harding is a thoroughly original exercise in scavenging each day for anything of entertainment value. Written with a journalist’s sensibility for following leads but without burdening its narrator with moral convictions, My Search captures the fluidity of disaffected intellectual life in oblique style, showing how easily—for a bored, melancholy creature accustomed to concealing his sexuality, if not his libido—one hour of tangential research can spiral into a weeks-long cross-country trek that leaves one person paralyzed, another dead, a building in ashes, and the office of the presidency regrettably intact.
Elliot can’t help himself from comedy club jeers—“Wait, I’ve got another one. She was so fat...”—and crass insults—he refers to the only out gay man as merely “the faggot.” These are not funny enough or consistent enough to elude suspicion of some deeper instability than internalized hatred within Plunket’s world. True, our men’s-only Morris dancing club vice-president (in absentia) only acts on his true sexuality toward the end, when he propositions a starving actor, begging the 20 year-old to join him in New York; it’s no chore to read some sexual frustration into Elliot’s generally catty attitude. But his casual racism toward virtually all non-whites is baffling in its specificity: “Mexicans tend to be polite, short of stature, barrel-chested, and sentimental. They dote on children but kick dogs and cats. They don’t understand the concept of pets.” The only Black character in the novel is an “amazon...[who] seemed to be describing, in the most graphic terms, group sex in a coed prison.” It would be understandable if Plunket has trouble deciding between the rich wry humor of a Don Rickles and the cheap sarcasm of an Andrew Dice Clay, but it jaundices the novel whenever he seems unaware that there is a real difference. We get a kind of adjudication when Pam scolds Elliot in a fight:
Never in my life have I met somebody who is more out of touch with his feelings than you are. You have no idea who you really are or what you really want out of life. Look at the pattern: the zoo, a seven-year waste. Then Columbia, because the only thing you were ever good at in your life was being a college student. Then Warren Harding, this obsession you have with the shallowest president in history, trying to find all sorts of metaphorical significance where it doesn’t exist . . . And, of course, now that this hasn’t worked out, you’ll go on to something else, thinking, well, maybe this time . . .
Yet unlike the work of, say, Alfred Hayes, whose mid-century novels like My Face for the World to See and The End of Me evince disenchantment with entertainment in general and Los Angeles in particular through a decadent descent into the shadows of ennui (read: Manhattan), My Search for Warren Harding falls from nowhere. The title itself is a trick. There is no attempt to grasp reality; only appearances. There is no aim, only ambition; no object, only a subject; no super-ego, only pure id.
And where better to unleash one’s id than a party. My Search may be a belated entry to that stream of satirical novels, like Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge and Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After, intended to scandalize the polite cocktail party culture of the upper classes where gay men still feel compelled to present as the kind of respectable effete gentleman deserving of equality under the law. Small wonder why Elliot would rather rub shoulders with a stranger talking about their problems than confront this dilemma. Recall Elliot’s three P’s of hosting: Planning, People, and Props.
The plan: Plunket based Elliot on the real-life Harding biographer Francis Russell, who while conducting his own research in 1963 came upon letters between the president and Carrie Fulton Phillips. The discovery led to a years-long ownership battle with Harding's heirs, widely covered in the popular press for years until finally being resolved in 1971 as the letters made their way to the Library of Congress. My Search for Warren Harding replaces historical questions that cannot be answered with new ones that can, in an attempt to reveal what attracts one person to another in love and politics.
The people: Our main characters of past and present are ripped out of their respective periods, nestled instead within an artful parallelism of intimacy and meaning. While we may never know whether Warren Harding truly loved his mistress, we know all too well how Elliot feels about Jonica, and what it’s like when the affair of a lifetime ends in turmoil.
The props: Robbed of their subjectivity, every character is flattened to their most obvious qualities. The most glittering display of that superficiality takes place at an A-list gala where paintings by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill are auctioned to buyers including Carol Burnett, Robert Mitchum, Bob Hope, Desi Arnaz, and Lucille Ball. “Single-handed, they support a children’s hospital near Acapulco complete with body scanner,” Elliot says of the organizers. In contrast with Elliot’s own party, which he throws only as a scheme to get Jonica drunk enough to divulge information about her family history, this gala may as well have served eucharist with crème fraiche. And yet somebodies and nobodies shed their status and come together as guests one and the same, like interchangeable pieces of decor.
In My Search for Warren Harding, Plunket brilliantly exposes both the pleasure and the danger of taking celebrity at face value. He knowingly averts every opportunity to show people treating others well for any significant duration because more time and care would lead to an intolerable degree of honesty. Whether the truth would get a queer person booted from a party or deflate the mythology of the nation-state, there are real stakes inherent to maintaining appearances. But as any talented drinker can attest, a person’s looks can change from one hour to the next. Why go on drinking, fucking, campaigning, and writing when we know that hedonism is nomadic and our search for fulfillment without end? According to Elliot, the face of the licentious, “Nothing makes us feel more superior than philistine vulgarity, particularly when it’s masquerading as culture.”