‘My Search for Warren Harding’
By Robert Plunket
Foreword by Danzy Senna
Author’s Preface
New Directions, 256 pages

If you have read one of Henry James’s classics, “The Aspern Papers,” you will recognize Robert Plunket’s novel as a hilarious sendup of a biographer’s effort to obtain, by any means necessary, the private papers of his subject — in this case the letters and memorabilia of a scandal-ridden president outed by his lover, Nan Britton, in the first tell-all book about an American president, published in 1927 as “The President’s Daughter” and retitled in the novel as “The Price of Love” by Rebekah Kinney.

Mr. Plunket’s novel, first published in 1983, received rave reviews yet fell out of print; it is now again available with a perceptive foreword by Danzy Senna and with a new, tongue-in-cheek preface by the author. My advice is to read none of this preliminary material until after you have laughed through a narrative by a Ph.D. student, Elliot Weiner, as he looks for a major, salacious discovery that will clinch his career, and contends with a series of mishaps of the kind you would expect in a shaggy dog story.

It would really spoil the fun to say what Weiner learns about President Harding, especially as the novel’s denouement does not even begin to emerge until you have read 87 percent of the text, according to a Kindle calculation. The joy and the frustration is stimulated by the duplicitous and politically incorrect Weiner, who casually speaks about “Chinamen,” “retards,” “fatsos,” and the like. Unlike Henry James’s narrator, Weiner is obviously no gentleman.

All Weiner cares about is getting that Harding archive, which is in a trunk in the home of his former lover. It isn’t just that he figures he will have a scholarly scoop; he also is determined to write a biography “different from the dull, reverential tomes that most Presidents inspire.” Weiner has already published a paper, “Anything for a Buck: Warren Harding and the Beginning of Modern Political Gossip.” 

He has a thesis: “Warren Harding was inadvertently responsible for a whole genre of American literature that continues today unabated. Just look at My Story by Judith Campbell Exner, or Past Forgetting by Kay Summersby Morgan.” With his own book, Weiner will be able to bill himself as an “anti-establishment maverick.”

Weiner is aware his quest is zany, seeing it as an “obsession” with “the shallowest president in history, trying to find all sorts of metaphysical significance where it doesn’t exist.” What Weiner finally finds is what I won’t tell you, but I’ll drop a hint: Take seriously the word “search” in the title, and don’t be disappointed in what you do not discover.

I was entertained by all the characters who know nothing about Warren Harding, people who get in the biographer’s way and have trouble comprehending the significance of his quest for what he deems “historical smut.” The novel upends the priorities of presidential biography, articulated, Weiner explains, in an academic article by a scholar who dismisses Rebekah Kinney as a “‘historical intruder [who] shouted and shoved [her] way into the history books’, demanding room from the ‘historical personages’ who really belong there.”

Weiner’s desperate plan to pry the Harding papers out of a trunk in Rebekah Kinney’s dilapidated home includes a ruse that has him renting her pool house, and declaring: “I’d rape and pillage to get my hands on those papers.” Indeed, it almost comes to that. At any rate, he is hoping to find the evidence of Rebekah’s adolescent crush on Harding, the “beginning of her adolescent sexuality” that “became so strong that it would go on to change the course of history,” as it did for another president not so long ago.

There are a few snippets from Kinney’s memoir that are a good example of the novel’s humor: “I surrendered myself to Mr. Harding—for that night and forever—somewhere in the Delaware Valley.”

At the ending of “My Search for Warren Harding,” the biographer is called a “skunk” — not as elegant as that condemnation of James’s biographer as a “publishing scoundrel,” but then, if you will pardon the expression, this novel is about a biographer with his gloves off.

Mr. Rollyson writes about “The Aspern Papers” in “Biography: A User’s Guide” and is working on a book-length study, “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”