SOURCE: Mallon, Thomas, and Michael Coffey. “Thomas Mallon: Picturing History and Seeing Stars.” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 3 (20 January 1997): 380-81.

[In the following interview, Mallon discusses the major influences on his work and why he favors writing historical fiction.]

On the landing between the first and second floors of Thomas Mallon's condominium in Westport, Conn., there stands a black telescope the size of a boy. It is directed toward an upper window and the firmament beyond. “I haven't used it much yet,” admits Mallon, giving PW a tour of the house he shares with designer and longtime partner Bill Bodenschatz, “but I've always been interested in astronomy. With this, I can do what the real enthusiasts do: see through the galaxy.”

A slight 5'7” with delicate features, an impish grin and owlish, oversized eyeglasses, Mallon has the look of the eternal student for whom astronomy might be a natural passion. In fact, it is more than that.

“The two things that most influenced my imagination growing up were the Catholic Church and Project Mercury,” he says. “And when I wanted to write about my childhood, I knew that those elements—the religious dimension and the space program—had to be there, because they were what made things happen in my mind.”

Although prefigured in the very title of his first novel, Arts and Sciences (1988), Mallon didn't get to his childhood and the confluence of writing, religion and the larger universe until his second, Aurora 7 (1991), a well-received coming-of-age tale about 11-year-old Gregory Noonan fleeing his suburban school for Grand Central Station on May 24, 1962, the day that astronaut Scott Carpenter endured a near-disastrous splashdown after orbiting earth. The metaphor of a man viewing our planet from on high and suffering difficult reentry proved effective in charting the emotional journey of a sensitive boy dealing with the trauma of a distant, baffled father.

“That kind of governing, central metaphor,” says Mallon over a brunch of muffins, chicken curry and strong black coffee, “relates to what I think fiction should be: it should be about something, it should go someplace, not necessarily make an argument, but do more than render a series of moments.”

Indeed Mallon has gone places in his fiction. In Henry and Clara (1994) he went to the presidential box at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was shot, and told the story not only of that night but also of what happened to the young couple, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, who shared the evening with the president and first lady. Their lives, although ending in spectacular tragedy 30 years later, were all but lost to history until Mallon saved them, in a sense, through fiction.

And in his new novel, Dewey Defeats Truman, just out from Pantheon, Mallon journeys to a place and time—Owosso, Mich. (Thomas E. Dewey's hometown), in the summer and fall of 1948—when all eyes, certainly in Owosso, were on the presidential race that ended in Truman's famous upset.

In Dewey, Mallon tells of the small town's preparations for the seemingly inevitable triumph of its favorite son. But against the backdrop of this civic pride (complete with town council plans for a “Dewey Walk” to attract tourists), Mallon plays out various affairs of the heart: the bookish and beautiful Anne Macmurray's engagement to union organizer (and Truman disciple) Jack Riley; her wooing by the dashing, carpetbagging Republican Peter Cox; the obsessive mourning of Jane Herrick for her son Arnie, lost in WWII; and the silent suffering of Frank Sherwood, a closeted homosexual also mourning for Arnie, with whom he was in love.

“These last three novels,” says Mallon, “Aurora 7, Henry and Clara and Dewey, are really all about bystanders. These are all people who are in some ways connected to the accidents of history. They are going to be acted upon by events, and in some ways I do think that is probably one more very big metaphor for the human condition: we are all bystanders to the plan. I do think there is some graspable divine truth that is out there, and it's what governs us, and it is beyond our control. In that sense, the books may all be about the same thing.”

Mallon grew up in Stewart Manor, N.Y., on Long Island. His father was a salesman and his mother kept the home. He was the baby of the family, with one sibling, an older sister. At Brown University, he wrote his senior thesis on Mary McCarthy, whose essays, rather than fiction, made the young Mallon want to be writer.

“Mary McCarthy is my household god of writing,” says Mallon, pointing to a small bookcase in his study packed with McCarthy's books. “The sheer intelligence of the writing, so crystal clear and severe. She is a real moralist, and I think to some extent I am too, though I like to think I'm a more forgiving moralist.”

But it was the McCarthy style that attracted Mallon more than anything else. He recalls seeing the famous interview she did with Dick Cavett.

“It was the one where she said that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ But Cavett also asked her what style was, and she said it had nothing to do with ornament, decoration, all the things one usually thinks of as style. Instead, she said style was lucidity, perspicuousness, in some ways the absence of what we call style.”

And although Mallon is reluctant to say how the McCarthy style shows up in his own writing, it is clear to his readers, who see but a surface of fact and detail moving with the insistent, forward beat of history without flourishes, his text not a medium or a reflection of the author's identity but simply the story itself. It is a style that makes Mallon most comfortable, and writing historical fiction is the great enabler.

“I think the main thing that has led me to write historical fiction is that it is such a relief from the self,” Mallon says frankly. “It is like getting out of the house: there are times when it is absolutely necessary, and I think I would go mad if I tried to make fiction straight out of my own life. I did it once: Arts and Sciences is a very typical first novel, a comedy about graduate school, a comic rendition of myself in my 20s, but I couldn't do it again.”

The graduate school experience that Mallon wrote about (telling the story of Artie Dunne in Arts and Sciences) was Harvard, where he wrote his dissertation on the little-known English WWI poet Edmund Blunden. He credits the time in Cambridge with allowing him to have the belief that truths are indeed graspable.

EVERY VISION A METHOD OF COPING

“One of the things I loved about Harvard,” he says, “and there weren't many, was that we emerged from there absolutely immaculate of critical theory—and anything that would be useful in getting us a job, I might add. And the study we had done was really governed by the spirit of Matthew Arnold and the Arnoldian notion that literature does have to do with truth and sweetness and light, and that it does somehow push back the brush so that you can approach the truth. Every vision that we have—whether religious vision or ethical system—is some kind of grand coping mechanism. And to some extent just by thinking about what that ultimate truth might be and positing some kind of reason for something to have happened, it allows you to manufacture a truth that you can take up residence in for a while.”

Then, one feels compelled to ask, what is the truth of Dewey Defeats Truman, a title taken from the most famously not-true headline in American history?

“It may be that things often turn out better by not turning out the way they are supposed to,” says Mallon, after long pondering. “It may be the benign flipside of Henry and Clara—which posited the great human truth that we are all in the wrong place at the wrong time, to a certain extent. But in Dewey, what seems wrong might be right. Anne, the heroine, goes off with Mr. Wrong, with Peter Cox, in the end, the one she is not supposed to go off with. She is supposed to go off with the earnest working-class hero, Jack. But Cox reaches toward something deeper in her heart, and to some extent that is the truth of the election, too. I think if you ask even most Republicans they probably have a sneaking suspicion that history worked out better by having the underdog win an upset victory, and that Truman was a pretty good president, all things considered.”

There is also the matter of Frank Sherwood, the young high-school teacher (of astronomy!) in Owosso, and his evolution throughout the book.

“It is clear in the end,” says Mallon, “that Frank is going to go off to New York and be a gay man in a way that is much easier than it would be for him in a small town in the 1940s, and in a way by confessing his love for Jane Herrick's dead son he revitalizes her. At the end of the book where she is dancing across the bridge with her son's ghost, having been given the photo of Frank and Arnie embracing—it is my half-sentence trip into magical realism, and probably as far into it as I will ever go—but she has been filled with life again. When she gets to other side of the bridge, she will come back to the world.”

Despite what Mallon might say about his disdain for the personal in fiction, he seems to be not only writing entertaining and informative novels but also, unwittingly or not, confronting personal issues. In his laudatory review of Henry and Clara in the New Yorker, John Updike gently chided Mallon for the “winsome autobiographical traces” evident in his early work, while congratulating him for finding a way in later books to remove the traces without abandoning the themes.

“You are going to be present in whatever you write,” concedes Mallon, “but I think what Updike was getting at, and I think he was probably right, is that the less directly I have written about myself the more I have gotten into history, the more authentically I've been able to write about myself, or my own feelings. The whole question of sexual identity, for example, is more directly addressed in Dewey than in any other book, even though I don't want to much write about my own life, sexual or otherwise. But in some ways, that question is dealt with more interestingly here than in some of the other things I've done.”

And Mallon has indeed done some other things. Out on the job market in the late 1970s, he interviewed at Wesleyan. The biographer Phyllis Rose was one of the interviewers, and though he did not get the job, Rose recalled Mallon's talk of the book he was working on, a study of diaries. She mentioned the project to her editor, James Raimes, then at Oxford University Press—“probably the single nicest thing another writer ever did for me,” says Mallon—and Raimes, after moving to Ticknor & Fields, published A Book of One's Own in 1984, Mallon's first book. It was met with warm praise.

Eventually, Mallon got a post on the English Department faculty at Vassar (coming full circle back to Mary McCarthy's stomping ground) in 1979. Mary Evans, who agented his first novel and has been his agent ever since, subsequently landed nonfiction and novels at Ticknor & Fields, where Mallon stayed through Stolen Words (1989), a study of plagiarism, Rocket and Rodeos (1993), a collection of essays, and all three novels up through Henry and Clara, which came out just as editor John Herman (his last there, after Katrina Kenison and Fran Kiernan) was fired and Houghton Mifflin closed down the venerable Ticknor imprint. Mallon found some time then to assist one of history's more curious bystanders, Dan Quayle, write his book Standing Firm, which did a turn on the best-seller list. “I'm not technically a Republican,” says Mallon, “though I haven't voted for many Democrats lately.”

But the reception of Henry and Clara made it clear that Mallon had arrived, “one of the most interesting American novelists at work,” as Updike put it. Knopf publishing group president Sonny Mehta offered a two-book contract to Mallon, who had left Vassar after some 12 years to become literary editor at GQ magazine, and assigned editor Dan Frank at Pantheon to Mallon. “And Sonny said something that was music to my ears,” says Mallon: “give us the novel first.” The second book under contract will be a study of letters.

But Mallon is already at work on the research for another novel, tentatively titled Two Moons. It is an historical novel, set in Washington, D.C., in the 1870s, and involves an observatory in Foggy Bottom and the discovery of the two moons of Mars amidst intrigue and illness arising from the malarial Potomac. Surely, big plans are in store for the telescope on Mallon's stair landing, and some distant celestial body will soon play in its mirrors, sharp and clear.