“I’m sort of annoyed that Trump came along,” novelist Robert Plunket tells me from his trailer park home in Sarasota, Florida. “Because Trump is the one that everyone will remember as the worst. Not that he is or he isn’t,” he adds quickly. “I don’t care about politics.”
Plunket has reason to resent Donald Trump’s status – he has his own pet favourite as the worst president. Warren G Harding, who was president from 1921 until he died in 1923, was “way down the list of good presidents”, he tells me, and is the subject — in a way — of Plunket’s novel My Search for Warren Harding.
The novel, a frantic comic romp of the kind that the word “madcap” might have been invented for, was published in 1983, and this month is reissued by Penguin Classics.
Plunket, who is now 79, is naturally delighted. He talks to me openly and affably, occasionally pausing as he doesn’t want his neighbour passing by outside to hear our conversation. (“Let me just wait a minute till he goes away.”)
The book is a little controversial, from the fact that it’s so politically incorrect and out of step with current literature
Why, I ask him, does he think the book has been resurrected after 40 years? “You’re asking the wrong person,” he replies. “When you write fiction, you think it’s timeless, it’s going to last forever. So to me, it makes absolutely perfect sense!”
My Search for Warren Harding tells the story of an insufferable snob named Eliot Weiner who reads a memoir by a woman who had an affair with Warren G Harding, and who wants to get close to her so that he can obtain her cache of Harding’s love letters. The means he goes about this, by ingratiating himself with the woman’s family, are bizarre, desperate, and always very funny. It will likely be the funniest book you read all year, perhaps for many years.
But “it’s very based in fact”, Plunket tells me. “There was a book that was written by [Harding’s] mistress about their affair and their illegitimate child.” The fiction comes in the form of narrator Weiner, who is deeply rude about everyone, usually in ways that are, in today’s terms, highly offensive. The fact that Weiner’s jibes – about everything from other characters’ weight to their sexuality – are intended to reflect badly on him doesn’t change how some may view them.
“The book is a little controversial,” agrees Plunket, “from the fact that it’s so politically incorrect and out of step with current literature.” When it was reissued in the US two years ago, “they were very nervous about publishing it”.
Was he tempted to take out any of the “controversial” stuff for the reissued edition? “No, and I don’t think it would work. I think [Eliot] has to be the way he is. And ironically enough, when I was writing the book, I didn’t know how to develop the main character, so I decided, I’ll just pretend I’m the main character and make him do whatever I would do in that situation.
“And I did, and I thought it made perfect sense. Then I realised later I’d created this self-loathing gay man who hates everybody! And I don’t know what that means, because I’m a really wonderful person.”
In my father’s family, there was always a deep prejudice against Irish Catholics. I know nothing about them ... I’m the other kind, which is the mean, nasty, Irish people
I’m about to ask Plunket another question when he goes silent – I realise he’s muted his Zoom while his neighbour passes outside the trailer. “This is driving me crazy,” he says. Another long pause, and then, “He’s going. He’s going away. Ask me quick.”
Was My Search for Warren Harding as much fun to write as it is to read? Or is that sort of intense, sustained comic-style hard work to do? “It was a lot of fun to write, I must say. It was the first long piece of fiction I ever wrote, and I was kind of discovering how to do it, but I enjoy writing. It’s not an effort. A lot of writers go crazy and agonise over things and I just enjoy it tremendously.”
In that case, the obvious question must be: why hasn’t Plunket written more? After Warren Harding, he published a second novel, Love Junkie, in 1992, but there have been no more. Plunket didn’t stop writing, but he was writing as a journalist, mainly in Mr Chatterbox, the gossip column in his local Sarasota magazine.
But, he tells me, he has been writing more fiction, even if he hasn’t published it, with at least two other novels on the way – probably. The first is about an interior decorator – “theoretically, that one will be published”, he tells me. “It has some glitches I’m trying to iron out” – and the other is about the social circle of the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the US confederate states in the 1860s.
“That’s the one I’m going to keep writing and revising until I die,” he says. “It’s like Scheherazade; when she stops writing, she dies. So I’m going to keep writing and writing and writing to stay alive.”
Well, I point out, he’s a Penguin Classics author now, and most of those already are dead. “Thanks for that!” he laughs. “I often wonder if I was dead would this have happened? In many ways, it would have been a better story if I was dead.”
What about when he was younger – did he read growing up? “Oh yeah, I was a big reader as a kid. One of the reasons is that I grew up in Latin America and back in those days, there wasn’t much to do in Latin America.” Where exactly? “All over. Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela.”
But wait. I digress – surely with a name like Plunket, there must be some Irish blood in him? “I wish I was a little more Irish! I’m, like, only one-thirty-second Irish. And the Irish in me is very Irish Protestant. Which is Northern Ireland, right?” Right, more or less. “In my father’s family, there was always a deep prejudice against Irish Catholics. I know nothing about them.” I thought Joe Biden claimed to be an Irish Catholic. “Yes, and that’s what I’m not. I’m the other kind, which is the mean, nasty, Irish people.”
We return swiftly to Plunket’s childhood. “So I was a big reader as a child and everything stems from that. I started reading adult books when I was 10 years old.” He names writers like John O’Hara, but also writers less well-known here, like Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr, who wrote “funny little stories about family life. Women [with] very, very strong, funny voices. And I love that. I thought they were telling the truth about life as it is, and to a certain degree, my style is derived from that”.
Can Plunket write without being funny, I ask, or is it an essential part of him? “I can write without being funny, but then I read it and it’s dead. I always felt I have talent, but it’s very small and very limited. And the interesting thing is that I’ve been able to make a career out of a very limited amount of talent.”
[ A Time Outworn by Val Mulkerns: a sunlit novel, with shadowsOpens in new window ]
That’s true of most writers, isn’t it? They do something very specific, very well. “Exactly. And those are the ones that become successful. It’s got to come from some place in you that’s very driven and you feel very deeply about. [Whereas] writers who can write any kind of novel and go from one genre to another – there’s something off there.”
The writer who means most to Plunket is the British 20th-century novelist Barbara Pym. “In my mind, she’s the best writer ever. She’s taught me so much. In one paragraph, she can write a whole chapter. What she chooses to tell the reader is so precise, distilled down to its essence.”
The writing of a gossip column in a small town is the greatest job a writer can have. It was absolutely perfect for me
That seems to be a rare quality these days. “Yes, and most books are too long. I read novels these days and I just want to get the red pen out and start cutting them.” But then, he adds, “I want to cut Madame Bovary too! It’s too long. You should always write as short as you can.”
So when Plunket wasn’t writing novels and was writing the gossip column instead, how was that? (His persona, Mr Chatterbox, was named after the gossip columnist in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, one of Plunket’s favourite novels.)
“It was the best job in the world. And sometimes I think, well, I only wrote two novels. What does that mean for me in terms of being a writer? [But] the writing of a gossip column in a small town is the greatest job a writer can have. It was absolutely perfect for me. These were real people doing real things – and you had to make stories out of it. I made them into little stories. And I did that for 40 years. It was a wonderful career.”
Before we go, I recall Plunket saying earlier that he wasn’t political. Is that even possible now, especially in Florida? And with Donald Trump, who, when Plunket and I spoke, was soon to return to the White House? What does Plunket make of Trump’s return?
“On the one hand, I’m thrilled,” he says. “Talk about material! Look at the man. He’s got this crazy family, these nutty children. Some of them are smart, some of them are idiots. He’s got this wife who used to do porn. You can’t make it up. And so from that point of view, I want to see what happens.
“Now the world may end because of this. But that doesn’t bother me. It’s going to be worth it.” Still, “One thing I’ve learned in the United States these days,” he concludes – perhaps a little too late – “is that when it comes to politics: keep your big mouth shut.”
