Now that the Mid-term elections have lead to the fall of Newt Gingrich and President Clinton's approval ratings go beyond the stratosphere towards the nanosphere, perhaps The Starr Report will soon achieve its spiritual destiny of becoming nothing more elevated than an airport novel. Indeed, the only bearable way of considering the Lewinsky case is as the basis for an interesting, but flawed novel, strongly influenced by Vladimir Nabokov.
The Warren Commission Report into the assassination of President Kennedy became, quite aside from its perhaps doubtful investigative use, an insight into the social history of the time; a not-quite underworld of political extremism, crime and poverty from whence sprang Lee Harvey Oswald (possibly Kennedy's assassin) and Jack Ruby (certainly Oswald's assassin.) Lee Harvey Oswald, a strange blend of Walter Mitty and Hitler, emerges as a powerfully troubling figure; intense, individualistic, doom-laden. Norman Mailer's book "Oswald's Tale" is recommended if you don't feel like wading through the many volumes. The Warren Commission Report is a portrait of a society; ranging from Oswald's stint in the marines to the rabidly anti-Communist Russian �migr� community of Texas to the memorable figure of Oswald's mother. The great investigative report of our era, the Report of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is, or at least aspires to be, a bourgeois morality tale; where the Warren Commission delved into Oswald's grandiloquent political fantasies, Starr occupied himself with stains on Monica Lewinsky's dress. Here the politics is personal as opposed to the Great Themes with which Oswald occupied himself. The tenor of the plot is reminiscent of a French farce or a what-the-Butler saw peepshow.
But what makes the Starr report even more interesting, literary speaking, is the figure of the narrator. The Starr Report features a Dramatis Personae featuring "The Principals" (including " William Jefferson Clinton President of the United States Paula Corbin Jones Plaintiff in a civil suit against President Clinton Monica Lewinsky Former White House Intern and Employee"), yet Mr Starr is far too modest in excluding himself. Any literary critic would identify three protagonists; the President, Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr.
No-one can doubt that Starr's eye was as much for drama as for constructing a coherent legal case against Clinton; the sheer mass of detail designed to gross out Middle America is proof enough of that. Starr intended not to prove that Clinton had committed high crimes and misdemeanours but leave the "jury"(in this case, in real terms, not just Congress but also that great abstraction, The American People) Clinton's idiosyncratic use for a cigar (bringing to mind Kipling's quote "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke") hardly had any purpose aside from destroying Clinton's personal dignity.
Starr's literary conceit of, despite the forensic, dispassionate tone, allowing his intention to be clear (in the epilogue, with a rather post-modern touch, he complains about his subject's lack of co-operation) is not entirely original. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that every writer creates his (or her of course) own precursors; apparently disconnected sources can be discerned as being influences. Starr's literary precursors include Victorian moral melodrama, the substantial French preoccupation with infidelity and affairs between young women and substantially older men (much French cinema is derived from male sexual fantasies), and in terms of this intrusion of the narrator into the tale, Vladimir Nabokov.
Two works of Nabokov with strong influence on Starr are "The Real Life of Sebastien Knight" and, in particular, "Pale Fire." "The Real Life of Sebastien Knight" is an attempt by the half-brother (only known as "V") of a recently deceased novelist, the eponymous Knight, to rescue Knight's reputation after the publication of a biography by a Mr Goodman. Goodman's main case seems to be that Knight failed as a writer because he was too aloof and cut off from life; V's apparent mission is to refute this, yet as the book goes on it V actually confirms thus more and more, despite his authorial will. As the Starr Report progresses, Clinton, who initially seems to view Lewinsky brutally and exploitatively as a receptacle for his lusts and indeed cigars, grows to become tenderer and more sympathetic. The sexual acts proceed to become reciprocal and engaged. Yet Starr's ire increases as Clinton becomes more sympathetic as a human; for the narrator's obsession is with how Clinton and Lewinsky's behaviour conforms to a legalistic definition of "sexual relations."
"Pale Fire" is another work of Nabokov's which is an obvious literary precursor of The Starr Report. This consists of the last poem written by John Shade, a recently murdered poet, along with a preface, lengthy notes and an index by his editor. This mirrors the structure of Starr's magnum opus, with its myriad sections and subsections. Furthermore, the actual poem "Pale Fire" is a restrained and often moving retrospective, but the increasingly unhinged editor puts his own fantastical interpretation on the whole work that oozes out of every footnote, just as Starr's determination to do Clinton in is obvious at each step. The eccentric editor of "Pale Fire" feels persecuted and complains about enemies in academia and the non-co-operation of Shade's wife; Starr moans "this office extended six separate invitations to testify," further proof of Clinton's guilt.
The Starr Report is Nabokovian in many other ways. The similarity of the names "Monica" and "Lolita"; early in Nabokov's novel, the narrator rolls the trisyllable "Lo-lee-ta" off his tongue, as we can imagine Starr doing ("Mon-ic-ah") as, having made her life misery, the offer of immunity allowed him to reel in his quarry. Indeed "Ken Starr" is a rather vacuous, identikit name, reminiscent of "John Shade", and surely without too much imagination can be made to symbolise something ("persecuting zeal" perhaps?) The gifts the two lovers exchanged were a mix of the high-mindedness and the absurd; from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" to "Oy Vey! The Things They Say! A book of Jewish wit" (one can imagine Nabokov having fun thinking that title up) to "a mug emblazoned 'Santa Monica'" to "a letter opener depicting a frog." The sad comedy of the line "Many of the 30 or so gifts that she gave to the President reflected his interests in history, antiques, cigars and frogs" is pure Nabokov.
It would have taken a trashier novelist than Nabokov however, to provide the sensationalist touch of making the main protagonist President of the United States; it would be more restrained to have a Senator or Supreme Court Justice in the role of sinner. Another literary precursor of Starr would be JG Ballard; his stories "The Index" and "Replies to a Questionnaire" (from "War Fever") smuggle a narrative into these unpromising forms, just as Starr transcends the narrow confines of his literary remit.
William Blake said of "Paradise Lost" that Milton "was of the devil's party" without realising, since his proud, rebellious Lucifer was a more sympathetic character than judgmental Jehovah. Similarly, The Starr Report, while trying to build a case for the impeachment of Clinton, instead has a tone similar enough to Lolita; occasionally repulsive but more often finely poised between hilarity and sadness, often at the same time; a rather sad affair whose sometimes mundane elements are made strange by their presence in what purports to be a legal document. At $45 million, I doubt if any of Nabokov's works cost as much as "The Starr Report" by Kenneth Starr, and despite this expense Starr fails to emulate his master.
