My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket
First published in 1983 and due for reissue in February 2025 as a Penguin Modern Classic
Described as “a breakneck comic tour-de-force” set in Hollywood in the 1980s, the plot is a simple one: the search for a collection of letters. Not just any letters, they’re love letters to and from Warren Harding, 29th President of the United States.
Widely thought of as similar to Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, a book the author confesses it’s based on, ‘My Search for Warren Harding’ is so much more: more detailed, more readable and, if you can overlook the occasional – and not so occasional – misogyny and homophobia of the time, more amusing. Much of the language isn’t appropriate in the 21stcentury, but it demonstrates brilliantly the sort of self-absorption common in certain groups of people at the time.
There are hints of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ as regards complexity, but stylistically, it reminded me of Kerouac’s writing: the lack of a clear plot structure, abandoned in favour of episodic encounters and themes. In the case of the latter there’s the conflict between letters as souvenirs of a very personal relationship and their potential as historical documents or, in the case of historian Elliot Weiner, the key to fame and fortune even if it means selling his soul to the Devil.
Elliot is the driver of this story, having long been obsessed with tracking down information to support rumours and to produce a book on Harding’s life. His obsession is described by his girlfriend. as “trying to find all sorts of metaphorical significance where it doesn’t exist”.
It’s a complicated story with some deeply unpleasant, unkind and self-absorbed characters, who are dismissive of others’ problems and fears and who rarely admit their own. That said, they are a product of their families and others in their peer group thus, apart from poor Jonica, they probably deserve each other.
The reader is left wondering whether it is fact, fiction, comedy, exaggeration, satire or “all of the above.” It’s certainly the antithesis of woke, the sort of cult novel that was a “must read” in my youth and is enjoying a revival.
Interesting, detailed and the very definition of a “marmite reading experience”. But, what of the letters…? You’ll just have to read the book.
.