Literary Corner: You Can't Depend on Anybody

 

Watermelon Eater and Man Writing. Pablo Picasso, 1965, via Rabih Alameddine.

The Book of All Books

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I turned down two book deals, from
the most unlikely of publishers, in that
I do not want to do such a deal
right now.

I’m writing like crazy anyway, however,
and when the time comes, you’ll see
the book of all books. Actually, I’ve been
working on a much more important project
right now!

Statement from yesterday, in its entirety.

Of course he's been trying to get a book deal, I can't believe that hadn't occurred to me, or two book deals, one for himself and one for the former First Lady (which he regards as also his, inevitably), mindful of the $65 million in advances the Obamas got from Random House in the spring of 2017. I wouldn't have imagined he couldn't get one, either, but that's apparently the case, judging from the concentrated confusion of this dense little message (I'm refusing to do a book at the moment, I'm doing a book at the moment, I'm doing something more important than a book). Or not from a sufficiently dignified publisher, or not one that's offering Obama-scale money, at any rate: he must be asking at least $120 million plus they pay the ghost who'd better not be one of those traitors like Tony Schwartz who will turn on him and try to take all the credit and badmouth him on TV to boot. The much more important project must be his "platform", which will make him richer than Zuckerberg if those parasites who supposedly work for him ever get off their asses for a change and do it, but you can't depend on anybody nowadays, look what's happening to our country, it's a tragedy.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness dribbling out of their ears

Herbert Brenon, Peter Pan, 1924

OK, so I'm getting a little concerned about David Brooks, who seems to have started worrying about whether he's great or not, and if not, why not? ("Do You Have to Be a Jerk to Be Great?").

Is it because of his lack of insanely single-minded commitment to a single goal? He's been looking at another book (You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett, 2016) about Great Men, and the "total dedication" that enabled them to produce their awesome works:

Rilke had the same solitary focus. With the bohemian revelry of turn-of-the-century Paris all around him, Rilke was alone writing in his room. He didn’t drink or dance. He celebrated love, but as a general outlook and not as something you gave to any one person or place.

Both men produced masterworks that millions have treasured. But readers finish Corbett’s book feeling that both men had misspent their lives.

They were both horrid to their wives and children. Rodin grew pathetically creepy, needy and lonely. Rilke didn’t go back home as his father was dying, nor allow his wife and child to be with him as he died. Both men lived most of their lives without intimate care.

I mean, do you know of any famous people alive now who have been horrid to the wife and kids and may not now be getting the "intimate care" they were envisaging when they married somebody 25 or 30 years younger than they are?

Trump's Book

Commenter Thundermonkey reminds us that Trump used to have a book he was attached to. We've all heard this before, but I never did read the original context of its write-up by Marie Brenner, in Vanity Fair, September 1990, reprinted at the beginning of the last presidential campaign:

Donald Trump has always viewed his father as a role model. In The Art of the Deal, he wrote, “Fred Trump was born in New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden . . . owned a moderately successful restaurant.” In fact, the Trump family was German and desperately poor. “At one point my mother took in stitching to keep us going,” Trump’s father told me. “For a time, my father owned a restaurant in the Klondike, but he died when I was young.” Donald’s cousin John Walter once wrote out an elaborate family tree. “We shared the same grandfather,” Walter told me, “and he was German. So what?”

Although Fred Trump was born in New Jersey, family members say he felt compelled to hide his German background because most of his tenants were Jewish. “After the war, he thought that Jews would never rent from him if they knew his lineage,” Ivana reportedly said. Certainly, Fred Trump’s camouflage could easily convey to a child the impression that in business anything goes. When I asked Donald Trump about this, he was evasive: “Actually, it was very difficult. My father was not German; my father’s parents were German . . . Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe . . . and I was even thinking in the second edition of putting more emphasis on other places because I was getting so many letters from Sweden: Would I come over and speak to Parliament? Would I come meet with the president?”