Your guide in the paths of power

Art, as Yeats famously declaimed, allows its makers perfection of the life or of the work -- but never both.

Among writers, it’s a notion that has worked its way so far down the food chain that many journalists on their melancholy way out of the divorce court have consoled themselves with the thought that they had at least been faithful to the fierce either-or of the arch-poet’s proposition.

The late Marjorie Williams was one of those preternaturally liberated spirits with a keen eye for cant, even the Kierkegaardian kind. That left her free not only to be a much-loved wife, mother and friend, but also to become one of the best American journalists of her generation. Her early death, in 2005 at the age of 47, was a loss not only to her family and admiring acquaintances but also to all those who believe there is a special value to intelligent observation, elegantly expressed on the page. That writing incorporating those qualities seldom surfaces in the torrent of reportage spewing daily from the nation’s capital is testament to what journalism lost when Williams succumbed after a long, somehow dignified struggle with liver cancer.

“Reputation: Portraits in Power” is the second posthumous collection of her work to be edited by her husband, Slate columnist Timothy Noah. The first, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate,” was a surprise bestseller -- in part, as Noah writes in his introduction -- because it incorporated examples of her weekly Washington Post column and unpublished essays that opened an autobiographical window on an extraordinary woman.

As her colleague David Von Drehle wrote in Williams’ obituary: “She wrote trenchantly on topics ranging from the presidency to parenthood, from Julia Child to Jennifer Lopez. She ran the octaves from trivia to timelessness with speed and harmony. She could do funny and wise and sad all in the same paragraph, with no seams showing. Many more people liked Ms. Williams than could easily explain her, for she defied easy categories. Her prose was razor-sharp, her personality gentle. Her mind was relentless, her manner good-natured. Her standards were exacting, her impulse forgiving. She was by nature the center of most rooms she entered, yet preferred to draw out others, to listen.”

“Reputation,” though lacking the first collection’s punch of intimacy, offers its own bracing rewards to anyone interested in Washington, the uses of power and the craft of the journalistic portrait. As Slate’s Jack Shafer, the best and least sentimental media critic working in America today, says in a cover blurb: “Someday the great Washington novel of power and scheming, of campaign hacks and backroom deals will be written. But until that day comes, my key to that world will be the collected journalism of Marjorie Williams.”

High praise, amply justified by the dozen portraits and prologue on offer here -- profiles of figures including James A. Baker III, Clark M. Clifford, Larry King and Laura Ingraham, all done for Vanity Fair and the Post. The engagement is journalistic, but the antecedents are in the deep literature of social observation. Jane Austen and Edith Wharton come quickly to mind. Take, for example, these paragraphs from the prologue, “Welcome to Washington,” first written for a travel magazine:

“Washington’s priorities are simply different from those of other cities. Although there are a great many six-figure salaries here, the super-rich are almost absent, and along with them the need for plumage. Washington is less about money than -- exactly as the flabby cliches insist -- about power. Its credit system is proximity; its currency information. . . . A cabinet secretary has social firepower, but it’s the analysts who report to the deputy assistant secretaries who are really writing the rules, along with certain staff members on certain Senate and House subcommittees -- the men and women who live for the day the Post will describe them as ‘key staffers.’ And they aren’t out at Hollywood’s idea of a Glittering Washington Party; they’re back at their scrungy government-issue desks, scarfing down a Domino’s pizza over another late-night assignment.”

Or take this appraisal of Baker’s enduring appeal -- and, therefore, influence:

“Few public officials have worked the press as assiduously or as successfully as Baker has, and the Washington press corps has been one of his firmest allies. Robert Wright of the New Republic terms him ‘the man who has turned smelling like a rose into a job description.’ . . . It is all part of Baker’s talent for associating himself with success. . . . Jim Baker is known as the man who can walk on water. You say he only tries in January, when the water is frozen? So much the better, answers a dazzled Washington; that only proves his wisdom.”

Her profile of Colin L. Powell has a palpable prescience for those inclined to regard the accommodations he made during George W. Bush’s first administration as a dispiriting chapter in an otherwise edifying American life: “The hallmarks of Powell’s career have been great political finesse and a very conscious caution. . . . People who try to describe what made Colin Powell so good as an insider cite the classic attributes of workaholism, clubbability and guile. The one rarer quality they grope to define is Powell’s great and natural smoothness. ‘My sense of Colin Powell,’ says Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, ‘is that if Colin Powell were angling for something, you’d never know it.’ ” Or, as someone else who worked with him told Williams, “ ‘Colin is forceful, yet he doesn’t have edges.’ ”

As these brief excerpts make clear, one of the things that distinguished Williams’ work was a genuine independence of viewpoint -- something wholly different from its fashionable counterpart, contrarianism. The latter is a stance, designed to make possible a particular sort of argument -- a key, in other words, to performance. It makes for good television and turns its adept practitioners into minor-key celebrities of a transitory sort. Independence of mind, on the other hand, is a perspective that opens onto a method -- a path of inquiry whose ultimate end is unpredictable.

Williams’ fearless traverse of that path less traveled is ultimately what makes “Reputation” immensely satisfying reading.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com