Send Me a Man Who Reads : THE JAUNDICED EYE

Newt Gingrich created a storm the other day by saying the United States should recognize Taiwan as a free and independent country . . . .

“It came out of a scene in ‘Advise and Consent,’ toward the end of the novel, where the Russians are bullying the new American President,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. “And he says, ‘Here are the three things I can do.’ And he goes through three things, all of them so outside the Russian planning that they were aghast. They said, ‘You can’t do this.’ And he said, ‘Watch me.’ ”

--New York Times, July 18, 1995

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“If you really want to know,” French President Jacques Chirac told an interviewer when pressed to explain France’s decision to resume nuclear testing, “it came out of Balzac’s ‘Cousin Bette,’ a book I read in ecole haute .”

“I was listening to all these pious, two-centime U.N. members, with terrible table manners and no palate for good wine, trying to deny France her rightful freedom and glory, and I suddenly flashed on how Bette kept up this facade of being Miss Nice-Nice among her family but inside, the old bat just itched to, how do you say, stick it to them. When she got her chance, she went for it--and so did I.”

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister John Major told an astonished Parliament today that he would resign immediately for the good of the nation, citing as his reason a sentence he had happened upon the previous night in a copy of Boswell’s “The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson.”

“He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others,” Major quoted. “I can take a hint.”

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who suddenly vanished from Bonn five days ago, has now been traced to a sanitarium in Thein am Stein, near Konstanz, where he had registered under the name of “Castorp” and posted a “Nicht Behruhren” (Do Not Disturb) sign on his door.

“No big deal,” Frau Kohl told reporters. “A delegation from China gave Helmut a hand-carved, Naugahyde-bound copy of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” a few days back and, well, he just got absorbed. Couldn’t put it down. Before you knew it, he was mumbling about all Europe being a sanitarium and he was Castorp and we were all doomed. It will pass. Last month, he thought he was Stephan Dedalus.”

Thousands of miles to the east, in Russia, Moscow was reported calm today, although President Boris N. Yeltsin was still being described as “critical” after throwing himself under a train at the city’s main railway station.

“It was the damndest thing,” related a close Yeltsin aide. “One minute he was just sitting around the dacha, knocking back the brewskis and reading a book, and next thing he’s all blubbering and orders his car. I picked up the book, and it was Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina.’ Best as we can figure, he got Vronsky and Anna mixed up. The girl goes under the train, the guy goes off to war. If only he’d switched to Evian, like we begged.”

Asked for his reaction to these traumatic events, all inspired by literary associations that, in turn, might have been triggered by his “Advise and Consent” brainstorm, Gingrich responded quickly.

“It comes out of a scene in a best-seller written by a daughter of my own home state of Georgia,” he snapped, “where this hen-pecked guy tells this pushy feminist-type woman, ‘Look, Scarlett, I’m not exactly in a caring mode just now.’ And she says, ‘Say what?’ And he says, ‘You heard me’ ”