A Trickier Dick
Before Maxwell’s nixoncarver–a fantasia revolving around a meeting between Nixon and writer Raymond Carver–nobody had ever wondered what would have happened if young Dick’s stern Quaker father had caught him dressed in his mother’s clothes masturbating atop the family tractor. Nobody had ever imagined that as an infant Nixon dreamed “of bluebirds fluttering out of his mother’s asshole.”
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No one ever wrote a psychoanalysis of Raymond Carver, so he’s the flatter of the two characters. Carver, known for his spare, deadpan prose style, is portrayed as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, blue-collar guy trying to support a young family and tap out short stories and poems in the garage. Maxwell, 32, was attracted to Carver’s work because he saw parallels to his own life. Maxwell married when he was 23; to support his young family, he taught high school English during the day and poured drinks in a bar at night. Carver married his pregnant girlfriend straight out of high school and worked in a morgue. “There’s a lot of relationship struggle in his family,” Maxwell says of Carver, “and there was that issue–how do you write in the chaos of everyday life, find the emotional and physical space? He had two kids when he was 19, so I figured if he could do it I could do it.”
Carver spent a lot of time in bars. So did Maxwell. For 17 months, while he was working on nixoncarver and teaching at Wheeling High School, Maxwell tended bar part-time at the Ubaa, a tavern two blocks from his home. Arriving at the Ubaa today, Maxwell carries two books under his arm: a copy of nixoncarver and a palm-size album containing snapshots of his son, Charlie, who was born on April 10, exactly six weeks after Saint Martin’s Press published the novel. Most of Maxwell’s friends here are more interested in the baby pictures than in nixoncarver.
“One day I was writing a scene in which Raymond Carver was getting a haircut from his wife, and in the scene I had newspapers on the floor,” he says. “I wanted a concrete detail, so I looked at the newspaper laying on my desk, which ironically was the Chicago Reader, and the headline on the paper was ‘Nixon in Hell.’ So that was the first time they appeared together in the same scene.” Shortly thereafter, Maxwell read a poem of Carver’s in which William Carlos Williams goes fishing with Ernest Hemingway. “That’s when the great ‘what if?’ happened.”
“I’ve always been fascinated by Nixon,” Maxwell says. “He was the tragicomic figure of our era. He was the first president I remember. I remember vividly watching the resignation on TV, and I remember things like Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small album, where he imagines Nixon combing the beach with his metal detector and his Bermuda shorts. What I was trying to do was make him seem a very human figure, not just this mythological figure we all hate. He was just someone who wanted to be liked.” o
