Even with a packed schedule of farewell speeches and his final presidential press conference, Barack Obama managed to find time for exit interviews in his last few White House weeks: There was the 60 Minutes sit-down, the Lester Holt love-fest, an NPR snoozer, David Axelrod’s “Axe Files” podcast, and, who knows, maybe even a Q & A with the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
But of all these elegiac essays, none compares with the profile in the New York Times limned by the paper’s chief literary critic, Michiko Kakutani. It begins with the sort of measured judgment we’ve come to expect of the Times where Mr. Obama is concerned: “Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped—in his life, convictions and outlook on the world—by reading and writing as Barack Obama.”
What is it about Obama that inspires public intellectuals to such piffle? Isn’t it enough for Obama’s admirers to admire the man without the puffery? And it’s not only puffery that comes next, but puffery on stilts. “Like Lincoln,” Kakutani says, “Mr. Obama taught himself how to write.” Obama taught himself to write?
Lincoln had legendarily little in the way of formal schooling (he would describe his education as “defective”). Obama, by contrast, went to the most exclusive private school in Hawaii, followed by stints at Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. If Obama had to teach himself to write, the Punahou School has some explaining to do.
But Kakutani doesn’t mean that Obama had to teach himself spelling and syntax and grammar. No, what she seems to mean is that no one had to give the future president pointers in writing moving prose. He discovered and developed that talent all on his lonesome. But when and how did Obama find what Kakutani calls his “elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound”?
It was in those protean days of community organizing in Chicago, when he wrote short stories about the people he met, “working on them after he came home from work,” Kakutani writes.
In describing the flavor of these stories, Obama is quick to stress his own maturity and eloquence. “There is not a lot of Jack Kerouac open-road, young kid on the make discovering stuff,” he tells the Times. “It’s more melancholy and reflective.” Kakutani likened his work to that of a young Dostoyevsky (actually, she didn’t—but The Scrapbook suspects that was simply an oversight).
Now that these short stories are known to exist, only one question remains: Which will come first, their collection and publication in a slender, achingly handsome volume or the Nobel Prize for Literature?
