In a Quiet Moment. What, if anything, are our politicians reading?

In a Quiet Moment: what, if anything, are our leaders reading?

The matter of what politicians read has tended to be a moot one. This is understandable: few things indicate singularity in people so much as our taste in books, apart from perhaps our political opinions (and, the cynic is apt to add, politicians certainly can’t be expected to have any of these anymore). The fact is: we live in a climate of centre-ground politics, and so politicians, in the constant search for votes are, when they are not actively in the business of encouraging consensus, then certainly in the business of avoiding stepping outside it.

Perhaps it is because it is an area liable to lead to distressing faux-pas before the pitiless gaze of a complicated and whimsical electorate, that information has remained scarce on this topic.

What is President Obama reading?

The question of what heads of state are reading has tended to bug writers more than politicians. There is a lingering sense that if we didn’t ask, they’d be very happy not to tell. Yet, from on high, we do receive the occasional hint as to what lesiure reading (and we ought to accept that there may not be time for much) is going on in the corridors of power.

Fortunately, the present incumbent of the most powerful office on earth is comfortable with books, and comfortable talking about them. We know – and would be able to infer from the eloquence of his addresses and ex tempore remarks – that he reads regularly, even that reading is a genuine need of his soul. This is rare for a politician since the seeking of office must inevitably curb the opportunity for the withdrawal and peace of mind required in order to read. This unfaked literariness is an important unremarked-upon part of what seals the otherness of this President. We know that he regularly reads political biography: he read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln in the weeks leading up to his inauguration; and in the weeks after his setback in the mid-term elections he was reading (admittedly with opportunistic symbolism) a biography on Ronald Reagan. This is not surprising: Presidents need to be seen to study their predecessors.

More impressive is the obvious breadth of his reading. His taste in fiction runs to Marylinne Robinson, E.L Doctorow and Jonathan Franzen (he reportedly took Franzen’s new novel Freedom away with him on his summer holidays to Hawaii this year). He has also been pictured with Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems. And here is Obama speaking revealingly about his love of Shakespeare’s tragedies:

“Shakespeare’s tragedies, whether it’s Hamlet or [King] Lear… there’s so much in each of those tragedies. You can read them once a year and each year, there’s something new, there’s something you didn’t notice. There is some insight into the human dilemma. It’s powerful stuff.”

This is revealing as it suggests a man with a reading programme: the President both thinks of his reading as an annual cycle as those who read a lot somtimes do, and is also able to distinguish between books that can and ought to be reread and those that can’t. “There is no reading but rereading,” wrote Nabokov. Obama understands this.

Obama the Reader v. Brown the Reader

When Obama first came to power and looked across the negotiating table at the British delegation he would have seen another reader in Gordon Brown (perhaps it was the failure of his team to remember this, less than the cheapness of the gesture, that was the true inappropriateness of the gift of DVDs which Obama gave Brown on Brown’s first visit to Washington).

At the beginning of his Premiership, we heard much about Gordon Brown as a great reader, and interviewers who have spoken with him about books are unanimous in reporting a genuine love. It is a shame then in retrospect that Brown’s love of literature was somewhat violated by his press team who pounced on his intellectual strength as something to highlight in a marketing strategy they ought never to have embarked upon. The fact is they had somebody unspinnable in everything but intelligence: in trying to spin what ought to have been self-evident, they surrendered the one asset they indubitably had.

It is hard now to recall the bounce that greeted Brown’s election. But at the time of his assuming office, there was a sense that finally a man of substance had taken over at the helm. There were also a number of articles, lightly garnished in snobbery, of the ‘Finally, a Prime Minister who reads’ ilk. Downing Street and friends in the media pounced. It was calmly and routinely claimed that the Prime Minister was capable of reading any book within a few hours. Before pausing briefly to wonder aloud whether such a brag, if subjected to any sort of analysis, could possibly prove to be as true for the ex-Prime Minister of Ulysses (pp. 820) perhaps,or Man of Qualities (pp.1125), as it might very plausibly be true for almost anyone of, let us say, Animal Farm (pp.102), it is questionable whether or not, if true, it would really constitute a worthwhile boast. In substance and intent, it reminds me of George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s “reading race” in the dying months of the Bush White House. In this case, reading that ought to have been undertaken before assuming office – Macbeth was one of the books proudly alluded to – took place hurriedly as the administration neared the finishing line.

In any case, reading is not a race, as I’m sure Brown, if not Brown’s PR people, know. When Christopher Hitchens went to visit Jorge Luis Borges during the last years of his life, Hitchens was asked to read Kipling aloud to his blind host. When Hitchens read ‘Song of the Dane-Women’ too fast, Borges interrupted with the injunction: “No, no. Long slow sips.” This rings true. In the republic of letters, it is vital that we sample flavour. Speed counts for little.

And Cameron? Clegg? Miliband?

As to what our current Prime Minister reads, we have heard little, a gap which might say something about the much-touted though never satisfactorily proven anti-intellectualism of some sections of British life but probably tells us more about David Cameron’s marketing strategy. A Prime Minister is in a position to feed public perception of himself. It would have been impossible to follow the news in the past few years and not know, for instance, that David Cameron likes to jog or ride a bicycle, but we know surprisingly little about his beliefs and intellectual interests.

On Desert Island Discs, the Prime Minister selected The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingtsall, a choice not brimming over with revealingness, which even has something of the dodge about it. Elsewhere, he has said that his favourite book is Goodbye to All That, bizarrely a book about breaking free from the confines of the public school mentality – a mentality which Cameron, with his heavily public school Cabinet and slashing cuts, now seems so much to represent.

 

There is not the same gap, however, when it comes to the Deputy Prime Minister. Nick Clegg has even entertained literary ambitions, penning as a young man which he has called ‘absolutely awful’. He has also said that he is an admirer of Samuel Beckett, further confirmation of Clegg’s admirable decision to be frank about his atheism: another man might have named a cosier writer so as not to risk giving offence to the pious.

 

As for Ed Miliband, in a survey for the New Statesman, he named The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe as his book of the year for 2010. Plouffe was Obama’s campaign manager in 208 and Miliband no doubt hopes that some of the Obama stardust might sprinkle onto him. He has also claimed that The Blind Side, an American Sporting Manual, has been an influence as being a metaphor for the decline of capitalism. Again this has the flavour of a politically-motivated choice and not the ad-libbed admission of literary love which one sees with President Obama whom he would emulate.

Read Well, Govern Well?

I raise these matters in order to ask the question: “Does regular literary immersion make for a good leader?”

Well, language can certainly help. It is no coincidence that the politicians we tend to think of as among the finest were fine users of the language: Pericles, Julius Caesar, Lincoln, Jefferson, Churchill, Roosevelt. Each could turn a phrase and showed a feel for his language. (It is true that one of our worst, Adolf Hitler, was also a notable orator). But this in turn suggests that there is a manner of reading which sparks off literary talent. Lincoln was himself a great admirer of Macbeth, and in his Inaugural Addresses and letters he does sometimes approach the Shakespearean.

The ability to make a fine speech may not however derive from diligent and orderly reading. Nobody would doubt Churchill’s oratorical power, but there is a charming story in Violet Bonham Carter’s Churchill As I Knew Him in which she recounts sitting next to Winston at a dinner party:

Later on he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and a music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head:

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again – it is marvellous!” “But,” I objected, “you know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’” He had apparently never read it and never heard of it before.

It seems that Churchill was eager to make up for the gap in his knowledge however for Bonham Carter continues:

(I must however add that next time I met him he had learnt not merely this, but all the odes of Keats by heart – and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable).

This is enthusiasm as it might spark a man to emulation. The story almost convinces me that somewhere within the famous Churchillian cadence the Keats line can also be found – transformed but still a palpable presence.

Perhaps it was this failure to emulate that caused such trouble to one of Churchill’s successors. Gordon Brown never seems to have read with any reciprocal effect of poetry in his own soul. Sometimes to watch him speak was a surreal experience: he seemed to view the language not as something to be caressed or played with, but as a thing to flay. And all his reading didn’t provide him with judgement over the Cancelled Election debacle, a blunder which it is hard to imagine his comparatively unlettered predecessor ever having made. There is such a thing as political aptitude which can’t be found between the covers of a book and it is probably more a question of temperament than of learning.

Regardless of whether or not they would have time for reading, few politicians seem to like it anyhow. It may be that if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do the job. It is certain, that few people who love reading (leaving aside the aberrant example of Harold Macmillan) would want the job of PM: the reading bug once caught, tends to preclude a desire to enter public life (as Alan Bennett’s An Uncommon Reader marvellously shows). It was true of Blair (favourite book: Ivanhoe), Thatcher (favourite author: Frederick Forsyth) and Major (favourite book: The Small House at Allington) that none of them particularly liked reading although each found a way to use language effectively. Most current prime ministers, presidents and heads of state, asked if they like books, would almost certainly hazard a yes.

Asked which ones, each must feel in dangerous territory.

Stephen Harper and the solution?

As unproven as the relationship between reading and good governance might be, we should give our politicians the chance to read, if only because reading encourages an appreciation of nuance and of lives not our own. A politician wholly involved with nuance and the shaping (often with their expressly wishing they wouldn’t) other peoples lives, it is hard to feel that reading might be harmful to the competence of a government leader.

Life of Pi author Yann Martel thinks so. Martel once found himself next to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a function and found himself wondering:

“The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness. For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.”

Out of this brush with power came the project ‘What is Stephen Harper Reading?’ Martel sends a book every two weeks (titles range from The Death of Ivan Ilych to the lyrics of Paul McCartney) to the busy PM. So far replies have come exlcusively through scrupulously well-mannered aides.

But it is pleasant to feel that there might be a smiling Stephen Harper somewhere in a public building in Canada finding that each fortnight he looks forward to the arrival of Mr. Martel’s next suggestion for his reading.

Were it not for an abiding fear of being unoriginal, I believe I would do the same for Mr. Cameron.

About the Author

Christopher Jackson is a poet and journalist. He lives in London.