When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
One of the funniest things in that comic treasure-trove, Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton, is the revelation that T. S. Eliot is la Lewinsky’s “favorite poet”—indeed, he is referred to therein as “her beloved” T. S. Eliot. Now there’s a thought to make the Old Possum sit up in his grave! As a bit of transparently disingenuous image-mongering by the loathsome Morton, hitherto best known as the second-hand biographer of and mouthpiece for the late Princess of Wales, this nugget of information is only surpassed by his tribute to Monica as an angel of mercy to the “homeless man living in a doorway near her hotel to whom she took food and drink every day.” With the same purpose, Monica herself told Andrew Golden of the London Daily Mirror: “I like to be able to reach up on my bookshelf for one of Shakespeare’s plays, and I would like to think that people will do that with this [i.e., Morton’s] book.”
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent…
Talk about the Use of Poetry! And the Use of Criticism!
In fact, “The Love Song of Monica S. Lewinsky”—complete with the proud bourgeois distinction of the middle initial— might seem at first glance to be
