In the many tributes that have been paid to John McCain over the last
few days, he has been praised as a warrior, prisoner of war, leading
member of Congress, presidential candidate, and statesman. Despite
their differences with him, many if not most commentators have been
quick to praise McCain as a great American.
But there's another
group also quietly mourning McCain's passing last week. These are
book lovers, saddened by the loss of an active and passionate fellow
reader.
One of McCain’s
role models was Teddy Roosevelt, another political leader who was
also an avid bibliophile. For Roosevelt, a man perpetually on the go,
reading wasn’t a passive act, but a wellspring of inspiration for a
fully engaged life. McCain used books in much the same way, drawing
on literature as a source of intellectual and spiritual sustenance.
McCain often
mentioned his abiding connection with Ernest Hemingway’s "For
Whom the Bell Tolls," a book he discovered by accident as a teen
when he pulled the book from his father’s shelf to press some
clovers he’d found in the yard. McCain regarded the book’s hero,
an American professor named Robert Jordan who volunteers to fight in
the Spanish Civil War, as a model of what a leader should be. “For
a long time, Robert Jordan was the man I admired above almost all
others in life and fiction,” McCain told readers of his 2002
memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." “He was brave,
dedicated, capable, selfless, possessed in abundance that essence of
courage that Hemingway described as grace under pressure, a man who
would risk his life but never his honor.”
The title of "Worth
the Fighting For" comes from something that Jordan says as he
contemplates his mortality. McCain quoted the line in full in his
final book, "The Restless Wave," published this year: “The
world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to
leave it.”
When he was a
presidential candidate in 2008, The New York Times, in a piece called
"How to Read Like a President," also noted that McCain had
a great enthusiam for the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, “The
Great Gatsby,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and James
Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, especially “The Last of
the Mohicans.” The Times also noted that he had twice read Gibbon’s
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
There was also some
space for poetry in McCain's literary samplings. He liked to quote
from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Glad did I live and gladly
die, / And I laid me down with a will.” The poem, “Requiem,”
appears on Stevenson’s tombstone:
Under the wide and
starry sky
Dig the grave and
let me lie
Glad did I live and
gladly die
And I laid me down
with a will
This be the verse
you grave for me
Here he lies where
he longed to be
Home is the sailor
home from the sea
And the hunter home
from the hill
McCain’s
admiration for Stevenson is understandable. The Scottish writer
celebrated for his poems, essays, and travelogues, as well as novels
such as "Kidnapped" and "Treasure Island," was
seriously ill through much of his short life. Living so closely with
the risk of death gave Stevenson a deep sense of urgency to get
things done, to make his mark.
The prospect of
death also shadowed McCain as a naval aviator and prisoner of war in
Vietnam. That grasp of life’s fragility shaped his sense of purpose
and ambition.
Stevenson’s long
periods of convalescence forced him to marshal his mind against the
hardships of confinement. His children’s poem, “The Land of
Counterpane,” captures the way that imagination can liberate a body
bound by circumstance to a single room.
McCain drew on
similar mental resolve to survive his harsh imprisonment. To sustain
their sanity, McCain and fellow prisoner Bill Lawrence, who was in a
cell next door, would use coded taps to recite poetry to each other
through the wall.
In the final months
of his life, McCain sought solace at his beloved Arizona ranch.
Like Stevenson,
McCain, who had traveled the world as a celebrated senator, perhaps
sensed that life’s most profound moments are spent at home.
“You may paddle
all day long,” Stevenson wrote, “but it is when you come back at
nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or
Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful
adventures are not those we go to seek.”