Fellow Travelers a novel by Thomas Mallon. Vintage Books. 354 pp. $16.00. *****
Thomas Mallon is a historical novelist of much renown; Henry and Clara—his breakthrough book—told the story of the couple who occupied the booth with Lincoln on the night he was shot. I’ve always thought it took colossal nerve to write such a book. Dewey Defeats Truman brought his readers a little closer to contemporary life (and to his own life; Mallon was born in 1951), and in his Washington trilogy, Watergate, Finale, and Landfall, he portrayed the administrations of three Republican administrations, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger. He hasn’t taken on the most recent Republican administration. I’m not holding my breath.
Mallon has an incredible ability as a writer to create scenes that further his narrative, are interesting in themselves, and also contain a maximum number of important historical personages. (At a funeral in this novel, for instance, we see a young Senator Kennedy—that’s John Kennedy—walking out with his left hand in his jacket pocket and his right flipping his hair. How perfect is that for a quick cameo?) I don’t understand how a writer can do that. It’s like juggling six balls at once.
In Fellow Travelers, Mallon writes about the administration he missed, the Eisenhower administration. He doesn’t concentrate on the President, but on perhaps the most difficult threat to our government that preceded our current troubles, the McCarthy hearings of the early fifties, in which, with no concern for the necessity of evidence, McCarthy denounced communists right and left. He found them under every rock, and even in important government positions. He was accompanied by a young but already vicious Roy Cohn, the model lawyer whom Trump longs for. And people split on his actions largely along party lines. I was stunned, in fact, with the similarity to our current situation. McCarthy started talking, and you never knew what the hell he was going to say, or who he was going to denounce.
But at the heart of this novel is a love affair between two men, both of whom work in government, Hawkins Fuller, who works for the State Department, and Timothy Laughlin, a devout Catholic who recently graduated from college and works for Senator Charles Potter. Hawk is the older, more experienced man, who has had plenty of experience before he shows up in Tim’s life; Tim is totally gaga over this older guy and will do anything, endure any humiliation, to keep the affair going. Gay life, of course, was much more perilous and closeted in the fifties than it is now; people on McCarthy’s side were also outing gay men and ruining their careers, though McCarthy himself seemed to be polysexual (at one point he gives Tim a big Bourbon flavored kiss, though he barely knew him) and Cohn was gay (though he hid it well). But hypocrisy ruled the world in those days, as it often does today. If you were leftist or homosexual, or—God help you—both, it was a perilous world.
I’m not the political junkie that Mallon is; he has an amazing interest in the machinations of politics, and an ability to keep it all straight. But for the first time in a Mallon novel, I found myself thinking, let’s dispense with all this political crap. I want to find out what happens with Hawk and Tim.
Things look tough from the start. Hawk is really just getting laid, and Tim is not the only man that he sees. He does have affection for the young man, more than for some of his other guys, but doesn’t want a deep involvement. We know from the book’s opening—a peek into 1991—that Hawk eventually marries, a common ploy for gay men of that era and, in Hawk’s case, a good financial move. His elderly parents were spending up his inheritance, and he couldn’t live on his salary from the state department. Marriage wasn’t the end of his life as a gay man; it just made it more complicated.
Tim is the more interesting character for me. His primary problem is that he’s so young, no match for the sophisticated Hawk. He’s also conflicted about his sex life and his Catholic faith; he sincerely believes that he can’t be a gay man and communicant at the same time. His priest asks if he regrets the “sins” he’s committing, and he won’t say that he does, so he doesn’t receive absolution.
I thought I saw the direction all this was heading, but the novel’s second half is much more complicated and subtle than I imagined. Tim grows up in many ways; you can almost read this as a coming-of-age novel about him. McCarthy eventually fizzled out, losing his credibility at the same time the Republicans lost their majority; if that hadn’t happened, there’s no telling where things might have ended up. And though I’m making a distinction between the political and the relationship parts of the novel, they actually work together perfectly. It’s all one story.
This is my favorite of Mallon’s novels. He always delivers on the political front. But this one packs an emotional wallop.
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