Charmed Life

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 by Thomas Mallon.  Knopf.  573 pp. $40.00.  *****

It seems forever since I’ve posted on my website, but I spent much of July reading and reviewing a new biography of Peter Matthiessen for the winter issue of Tricycle.  I’m also still reading bits and pieces of Faulkner stories.  And I spent the past couple of weeks, delightfully, with Thomas Mallon’s diaries.

I hate to sound like a name dropper (at least I didn’t say Bill Faulkner and Sneaky Pete Matthiessen), but I’ve known Tom Mallon for years, though mostly by snail mail and e-mail.  My memory is that we met in the early eighties, when our literary agents occupied the same building.  We subsequently reviewed books for the same newspapers (especially for an editor named Bob Wilson, who was first at the Washington Post, then USA Today) and met several times at the National Book Critics Circle meeting in New York, where I would often hang around Bob to get a free dinner (all the publishers wanted to pay for his food).  One time Tom was at that dinner.  Years later, he gave me a blurb for a novel that everyone else treated as radioactive, and when I lost my agent—by which time he was the literary editor of GQ—he was tireless in helping me search for a new one, an endless process that anyone else would have given up on long before he did.  Through the years I’ve read and enjoyed much of his work, and I reviewed what came to be his breakthrough novel.  But it was another review that put that novel over the top.

This selection from Mallon’s diaries traces a thrilling story, of a young man not yet tenured at Vassar, who decides to move from Poughkeepsie to a crummy apartment in New York just because he loves the city, has ambitions as a writer, and is gay, and New York is where the action is.  It’s also true that he’s moved during the height of the AIDS crisis, and a previous lover—who had been the love of his life—has contracted AIDS and is dying.  It’s hard to remember that time and that situation, but no one was certain what behaviors spread the disease (though people had their suspicions), no one knew what the incubation period was for the virus, or if everyone who contracted it would grow ill; people both wanted and didn’t want to know their status.  Mallon opted not to get tested, as most people did at the time.  So he was throwing himself into New York gay life while trying to be safe, every now and then slipping up a little.  Maybe.  That was the way things were at the time.

Mallon’s first book—the one he’d just sold when I met him in the agent’s office—was, famously, about diaries, A Book of One’s Own.  While I’ve kept journals for many years—jottings of self-analysis or, more often, about writing projects (the analysis turned into writing projects)—I’ve never wanted to keep a diary of daily activities.  Mallon has done so for years, and these brief excerpts from his diary read like a biography, also a history of the times.  Reading them was like looking back at my own life.  Mallon’s first book did well and marked him as a nonfiction writer, though his real ambition was as a novelist.  He also just wanted a career as a writer, and to get away from dealing with the Vassar undergrads, as smart as they may have been (one student, who was signing up for a class in which she would read Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, asked if there would be a lot of poetry to read).

His publisher suggested a book on plagiarism, and he took that project on, eventually became an authority on the subject, though his real interest, at the time, was a novel he had already written a draft of, and which would eventually be published as Arts and Sciences.  I had the feeling as I read these entries that the plagiarism book was a kind of albatross in his life; he kept working on it, but his heart wasn’t in it.

In the meantime, he was meeting men in a variety of places, often gay bars, which were plentiful in Manhattan.  I’ve almost never been part of the dating scene, much less the pick-up-in-a-bar scene, and I was stunned at how easy it was for him to make dates to come back to his place (though he was and is good looking, and a relaxed easy conversationalist; Bob Wilson once called him “the most charming man in New York”).  It was once he was in bed that the problems began, trying to be passionate but also safe, figuring out where to draw that line.  From the start he was looking for someone to spend his life with, and there were a number of brief infatuations that didn’t work out (it got to a point where I could see the problems coming, and would think, no, Tom, not this guy).  But when he did finally find the man to whom this book is dedicated, William Gene Bodenshatz, he didn’t waver, and neither did the man he called Billy.  They got together and stayed together, though the whole thing about where to live and work became a problem, as it tends to in New York.

Erica Jong once said that a writer’s two occupational hazards are paranoia and insomnia; when a writer is trying to establish a career as a writer, he’s dependent on reviews to an extraordinary degree (and though Mallon generally got good reviews, his first two novels got bad ones in, of all places, the New York Times).  My favorite moment in the book is when, after he’d just gotten that first bad Times review, instead of cowering and retreating to Vassar (by that time he’d gotten tenure), he said the hell with it, I’m sick of the office politics, I’m going to resign from Vassar and make a living as a New York writer.  It was a bold move, in a place where the rents are high and there are all kinds of people trying to make it.  But he did make it.  He was actually established long before his breakthrough as a novelist (and probably before he knew it).

Those first two novels are among my favorites, both not necessarily autobiographical but at least reflecting his life; Arts and Sciences focuses on a grad student at Harvard who is realizing he’s gay; Aurora 7 concerned the space program, a lifelong interest of Mallon’s and another area where he became a nonfiction authority.  But his breakthrough came because of a nonfiction project that didn’t work out.  He’d been thinking of a biography of John Wilkes Booth when he heard that another writer was doing one and would probably be out with it before he would.  He gradually became interested in another story from the same period, about the young married couple who had been sitting in the box with Lincoln when he was assassinated.  To say the least, that moment had a major impact on their lives.  Mallon began focusing on them.

Sometime during that period, the editor at GQ, where Mallon had done some writing, asked him to suggest someone as its literary editor, and Mallon said, how about me?  It was three days of work a week, paid a good salary, and—coincidentally—put him in touch with any number of writers, editors, and agents.  That place wound up having its own office politics, of course, but he did an excellent job, eventually writing a monthly column called Doubting Thomas and assigning reviews and other pieces.  Most notably, around the fall of ’92, he suggested that they bump Christian Laettner from their next cover and feature Clinton and Gore instead.  They would need an important writer for the accompanying article, one unafraid of controversy, and they picked . . . Gore Vidal, the most notable American writer of American historical novels.  While working with the man (who seemed reasonable as long as you paid him extravagantly and didn’t make many changes in what he’d written), Mallon asked where Vidal thought he should start his new novel, and the answer Vidal gave is a story I’ve told to many a writer and writer’s class.  I won’t give it away, but the point is to begin with a compelling event.  (As Reynolds Price once told us, you don’t need to start every story, “’Rape!’ screamed the Duchess,” but find a way to grab the reader’s attention).

In terms of these diaries, I knew where Mallon would stop.  Bob Wilson had asked me to review this historical novel, Henry and Clara, and said, as he always did, “He’s our friend, and you know he writes for us, but don’t let that influence what you say.”  He meant that, but I loved the novel, and could see that it was a major breakthrough, but a slightly more notable reviewer saw that too.  John Updike gave the book a major review in the New Yorker, having read all of Mallon’s work, and called him “one of the most important novelists writing in this country today.”  It was one of those moments when an artist’s whole life has changed.  And it makes a wonderful ending to a book about a young man arriving in New York at age 24 looking for love and a career.  He finds both.

That having been said, I’d be happy to read the next ten years of diaries.  And ten after that.