Rewriting History: Five Historical Novels

Every story is a form of history, no? “Once upon a time…..”

Five of my favorite novels, described below, are historical fiction, a form that inhabits a continuum from the telling of known historical events using real historical characters but with a fiction writer’s omniscient consciousness; to the creation of fictional characters inhabiting an historical period that is front and center (almost, one might say, where the historical period is the story itself); to the inversion or scrambling of known historical events to create an “alternative history.”

(One could, I suppose, spool out the concept of historical fiction to encompass just about any story; after all, anything that happens and that can be told as a story must have taken place at some point in time. But at that same point, if the historical aspect of a story disappears into the mists of a writer’s invention, then it is no longer historical. Historical fiction is, if nothing else, about history, even when what is being offered up is “alternative” to the known facts.)

Three of these books are by the same author who has made the retelling of American history in fiction his vocation. Thomas Mallon has a great gift for getting the inside story. And by that I very much do not mean the Washington journo’s version of the “inside scoop,” though he resides in Washington and the city is the setting for the novels of his I will attempt to celebrate below. I mean, instead, that he understands how events on the public record are driven by the private passions of the men and women who make the history. This is preeminently on display in Watergate which is rendered, in Mallon’s telling, as a story of many private intentions gone haywire. (Okay, Finale does include quite a lot of “insider-y” stuff, the sort of narrative gets traded around among D.C. people-in-the-know in that gossamer middle zone between gossips and news. But it’s there as atmosphere; the real story he tells of the Reagan years is on even deeper-background, where only talented novelists tread.)

The other two, the best of them, my favorites, share something else. Libra, by Don Delillo, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, are masterpieces of sentence writing. One brilliant, wickedly funny or penetrating sentence builds upon another, each one all alone seeming to tell a whole story, each and every sentence wholly original and unspoiled by cliché. I have read both of them over and over, sometimes just picking them up and opening anywhere to begin reading sentences. I should add that they share something else: both of them are, in very, very different ways (to steal Christopher Hitchen’s description of the novels of Wodehouse), incandescently funny: very darkly so in Libra and antically, hilariously in Yiddish Policeman, But the dark is never far away in Chabon’s story either.

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“There’s something they aren’t telling us,” says David Ferrie to Lee Harvey Oswald in a grim New Orleans bar. “Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”

To appreciate Don Delillo’s Libra you need only be an American, and to have imbibed the peculiar American political air for any prolonged period as a sentient adult. For then you will be familiar with the odor of paranoia, never very far off in American affairs, that “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” described by Richard Hofstaeder in “The Paranoid Style in America Politics” more than 60 years ago.

It helps, too, to have wasted a fair amount of time reading all sorts of conspiracy junk about the Kennedy assassination, of which there is no shortage. All of the real-life characters who have figured in conspiracy narratives—Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw—stalk the pages of Libra. Shaw, who also makes an appearance in Fellow Travelers, has only a walk-on role here, appearing as a shamanistic confidant of David Ferrie’s, a host of gay sex parties. In real life, he was the lawyer who was slandered and defamed by the megalomaniac Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who was the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s paranoid blockbuster, JFK. Garrison brought Shaw to trial on charges of conspiracy so paper-thin the jury came back with a not guilty verdict in a matter of minutes. (One of Garrison’s delusions, along the way to becoming the hero of Stone’s movie, was that the Kennedy assassination was a gay “thrill killing” perpetrated by a coterie of New Orleans homosexuals.)

Delillo spins a scarily plausible conspiracy involving embittered CIA and Cuban mercenary veterans of the botched Bay of Pigs operation, Mafia types, and assorted right wing lowlifes (Bannister and Ferrie). The plot originates with the aging CIA guys, sidelined now after the Bay of Pigs, who hope to rekindle the nation’s flagging zeal for toppling Castro by staging a false flag operation, an attempt on the President’s life that will fail—the killers are supposed to miss their mark—but will be traced to Castro.

Oswald appears on the scene in Dallas and New Orleans where he is discovered by the conspirators, out of a wretched and dyslexic background in the Bronx, coddled by and bullying his maudlin, self-pitying mother.  To the conspirators he is a convenient cut-out, mercurial, with a dizzyingly strange and eyebrow-raising background—the stint at a U2 base in Atsugi, Japan, the strangely easy entry into the Soviet Union and the even more strangely easy exit—the perfect patsy.

Along the way, Delillo conjures up magically the chilliness of the coldest episodes from the Cold War: his rendering of a fictional interrogation of Oswald by the KGB after the American U2 spy plane is shot down and Francis Gary Powers is arrested is very good.

Delillo’s portrayal of Oswald is exemplary and prescient. He appears both grindingly plain and pitiable in his grinding poverty, an American everyman, and at the same time surpassingly weird. For the weird version, here’s one of those sentences I mentioned: Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko’s mind as a kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.

For the plain version, there is this: After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

(Sixty years on, looking back again at Oswald after so many mass shootings by lonely, emotionally disturbed, sexually deprived men with access to a gun, would we today, be so quick to assume a political, rather than a personal motive?)

The original plot spins out of control—it is a genius of Delillo’s storytelling to intuit how really impossible it is to keep a conspiracy contained—and the shooters will assume their own agenda. The story draws oxygen from the venomous hatred that Kennedy inspired in certain quarters, a hatred that was nursed into a poison by some of those who felt betrayed by Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs. (That debacle, one of the great cock-ups in American history, was itself born of a kind of paranoid obsession with Castro). But Kennedy hatred took on a life of its own, was ventilated by the man himself and the primitive feeling of inferiority his own privileged and rarified upbringing could evoke in the susceptible. Listen to New Orleans private detective and right-wing gun runner Guy Bannister cursing the man through his teeth:

We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurt to be great? He thinks he can make us different kind of society. He’s trying engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on my nerves just to look at him…Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets….All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with Castro?....There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. 

In just this way is Libra only superficially, or anyway secondarily, a version of the Kennedy assassination.  It is really about paranoia itself, how “the truth” becomes a function not of empirical, testable facts, but of our fears and our wishes. Birthers, truthers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe thrive in this zone. Delillo wrote Libra 25 years before Alex Jones came to prominence and another President of the United States would tell an audience, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Libra a story for our time.

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Casting about for how to introduce The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I find I can only reproduce for you one or two of those matchless sentences I mentioned.

“According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

The problem with this approach is that those are followed by others, only better, only more fun, so I find I have to keep going.  

Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shames in the District of Sitka, the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier husband, and caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It’s like there’s a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.
If you’re not ready the read the book already, you may be dead to language. But, okay, maybe what you need is a story, a plot, so here’s how it is: Meyer Landsman is a cop, a detective and he is the offspring of a Jewish remnant that settled in Alaska after the Holocaust and after the fledgling state of Israel was defeated in 1948. A precarious “interim state” was declared by the United States Congress for the Jews of Sitka, Alaska—interim because, well, no one wants Jews around permanently—and it is in this interim state that  Landsman chances upon a murdered Jewish kinsman in the flophouse hotel in which he lives, and is driven to solve the mystery in the weeks and days before he and his tribesman will be forced, yet again, to wander the earth in search of a home.

The young dead Jew, it turns out, was—before a heroin addiction “turned his brain into a great lapping tongue”—a man of great promise, the greatest promise actually. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the righteous man of his generation, of whom there is never more than one. As Meyer Landsman explains to his supervising officer (who just happens to be his ex-wife):

So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.

The unraveling of the murder of this would-be tzaddik will bring Landsman into contact with a rabbinical Jewish crime family and a gang of militant zealots bent on rescuing the Jews of Alaska before “the Reversion” scatters them to the winds again. Along the way the reader meets chess masters, a husband-wife-and-daughter family famous for baking pies for pilots and passengers at an obscure airport in the frozen north, a midget police officer named Willie Dick, a disgraced Irish journalist with a macroencephalitic head, and a just barely sane dentist who specializes in recreating the tools and utensils of the ancient Temple rituals described in the book of Leviticus.

The hallucinogenic imaginativeness of this set-up allows Landsman to inhabit every single gumshoe stereotype—drunk, cynical, a fuck-up in every aspect except busting bad guys—and yet still seem like no detective you have ever, ever read or heard about. I like to push this novel on people—it’s so much fun, it’s so funny. Yet it is a high, high game that the novelist is playing. It rolls along with every convention of the detective story, but all of those conventions are translated into a higher form of imagination—a story ultimately about that sense of contingency, of living on the lip of an abyss, of ever-waiting and hopefulness leavened by a past of disappointment and disaster that has characterized wanderers of the world everywhere seeking a home, but has been most quintessentially the story of what it means to be a Jew.   

“Landsman has no home, no future, not fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”

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The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended 44 years ago this month with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service. Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right and was regarded at the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust of government and of what has been regarded for most of American history as the dignity of public service. The seeds of the Trump phenomenon can be found in Watergate.

Such are the ironies of history.

But the episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle school year book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard Hunt’s wife and talked like a Damon Runyon character when testifying before the Senate investigative committee?

It is a bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when the scandal was making headlines.  I was fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. The summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly taking the President to the cleaners. 

Washington at the time had a lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.”  It was a profoundly segregated city and the ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for white people).

Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and clairvoyantly. They are all there—the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha Mitchell. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues, crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections.

It is a tale of humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis--although wildly imaginative--is entirely plausible.  John Mitchell, the attorney general, is hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife tearfully, when the gig is up.

The central figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep them quiet. But LaRue—in Mallon’s telling—also carries a terrible secret from his childhood, one that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?

This is history from the inside--history written by the random chaos of the human heart--and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to which this tall tale is entirely believable. At the end of the novel, after much chaos has spilled, LaRue ponders the nature of history itself, the fact that each moment, each event, is preceded by other moments, other events; that all of them are linked in a chain of causation, so that searching for the precise origin of any one event becomes an exercise in the absurd.  

No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started he would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson, Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate depended on Fred—or Ike—LaRue’s having been born.

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The paperback cover of Fellow Travelers is a black and white photograph of a young man in a jacket and tie, the tie only barely loosened, hoisting a beer stein with a hearty bonhomie at some happy hour bar with his colleagues. He wears the groomed good look of a stylish young man in the 1950s. The photo might have been taken anywhere, but it somehow perfectly conjures up the kind of young men—combining idealism and ambition—who populated the nation’s capital in the late 1940s and 1950s, the city’s era of enormous postwar expansion.

They sought jobs in the “Situations Wanted” section of the Washington Post, with advertisements like this:

Young man, 27, B.A., Yale, three years experience legislative research. 3 yrs. formal legal training, desires position with trade assoc. or law office. Box 61-V. Star.
Young man, college education desires a responsible position. Wall WO6-8202.
Young man, colored, desires evening or night work of any kind. Phone LI8-5198.

It's those kinds of details and countless other period artifacts by which Mallon recreates an era with nearly photographic precision. This noir story of love and betrayal, secrets and blackmail is everything House of Cards would be if it were set in the 50s and better written. Its a gay love story set  in the era of McCarthy and the “lavender scare” when government officials suspected of being homosexual were outed and dismissed, especially in the State Department where they were deemed to be security risks.

Tim Laughlin, an earnestly Catholic, earnestly anti-communist young Capitol Hill staffer falls in love with Hawkins Fuller, an older, mid-level State Department official who works in the Department’s congressional liaison office. Fuller goes by the name “Hawk,” a bird of prey, and he haunts the city’s gay underground with the casual ease of a man who is never denied, who takes what he wants and discards what he doesn’t. It is an almost painful mismatch—Tim and Hawk. Their affair is played out against the backdrop of the Army McCarthy hearings, and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and fear and extortion. McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and David Schine are among the real-life characters brought to life again. We also meet one of Mallon's most inspired creations, Tommy McIntyre, a boisterous Irish Capitol Hill player who, driven by his own rage and vengefulness and sense of betrayal, traffics in a sordid marketplace of secrets, of who has what on whom.

The novel renders, in a way that no one can miss, how the closet worked to reinforce the stigma. Not just in the obvious sense (or the sense that should have been obvious even then) that gay men were only security risks because they could not be openly gay; that a gay man who is not ashamed of being gay, and does not care who knows it, automatically ceases to be a security risk.

It is also that the closet actually mandated the behavior that confirmed the stigma. Thus: gay men are presumed to be depraved sex fiends; therefore, they must not be allowed to date or be openly affectionate, let alone have a “courtship” and marriage. So, what are gay men to do? Well, as Mallon depicts—as was true in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, as actually happened—they find an abandoned brownstone building in Foggy Bottom, haul a mattress up to the attic, and have heated, surreptitious, late-night trysts there. See? Very depraved.

Most Americans today regard with a mixture of scorn and incredulity the fact that there was in America a time when a restaurant would refuse to serve black people, as if looking back on a people who were slightly out of their minds. But did you know, as Mallon’s novel recounts, that some government officials, suspected of being gay, were required to read a portion of Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” as a test? If he read it with too much ardor—or something, god only knows—then the secret was out. 

Young gay men should read Fellow Travelers, for a sense of what it was like before the world changed. Tim desperately wants to believe his love affair is the real thing, a love on which God could smile. But the times won't allow it. When it's over he tries to explain to an uncomprehending priest that he cannot be truly sorry it had happened.

Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

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In the thick of Finale, Mallon’s re-telling of the Reagan years, the novelist renders a phone conversation between Richard Nixon and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Nixon was, then, clawing his way back to respectability by playing a deep background advisor and trader of information to the powerful. Kirkpatrick was the ‘80’s era queen of neo-conservativism, staunch defender of Israel, Cold Warrior and anti-communist. They are discussing Reagan’s Reykjavik negotiations with Gorbachev, which form the heart of Mallon’s drama.

    “Well,” said Nixon, “Reagan’s got two sessions to go over there, though only the last one will count. How do you think he’ll do? You’ve seen him face-to-face more than I have in recent years.”

   After a pause, Mrs. Kirkpatrick spoke deliberately. “I told this to my husband when I first met Reagan, all of six years ago: he doesn’t talk like anybody I’m familiar with. He doesn’t sound like a politician, or an academic or a journalist. But I can also tell you that he’s the most impersonally warm man I’ve ever encountered. They won’t know how to figure him out over there.” 

Reykjavik. The Iran-Contra Affair. The AIDS epidemic. Over all of these 80’s era relics hovers the figure of Reagan himself, whom few it seems, outside of his wife, ever really figured out. Mallon captures exactly this astral quality of the man, the impersonal warmth, the sense of a man whom many found to be genuinely there and yet not quite all there.

He captures it through indirection because Reagan, the man himself, only rarely makes an appearance in the book. The story of Reagan’s presidency is told instead through the heated doings of his underlings, the conservative activists who gravitated to Reagan after their long, long winter in the years of liberal Democratic dominance; the hangers on and journalists who tried to keep up; and its told through his ever-anxious, ever watchful wife Nancy.

There’s more than literary purpose in this. Joan Didion has observed that the uncanny calm at the eye of all this activity—the man, Ronald Reagan—created a kind of outward centrifugal force of enormous energy. It made for a lot of interesting drama. There was, for instance, the peculiar convergence on the outer rings of the Reagan presidency of a coterie of closeted gay conservatives, fiercely anti-communist, some of whom raised money that was funneled through various interesting ways to the Contras in Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinistas. A few of these men also would die of AIDS, denying on their death bed that they were gay and only very tepidly condemning the Reagan administration for its lethally dismal response to the epidemic.

One of my favorite writers, the late Christopher Hitchens has a large role in Finale working (as he did in `real life’) as a fiercely socialist journalist for The Nation, the Spectator and other leftist journals in the U.K and the states. Hitchens is pursuing several lines of story—the money to the Contras, that coterie of gay cold war cowboys, and who has the President’s ear at Reykjavik (the hardliners, like Kirkpatrick) or those who want him to make an historic deal to end the threat of nuclear war (Nancy).

Mallon was friends with Hitchens and captures the man’s charm, ferocious wit, and terrifying facility with argument. Here he is interviewing one of those cowboys, a fellow named Terry Dolan who is dying of a disease he swears is not AIDS.

“…[I]t wasn’t my intention, but now that I’ve gotten a look at you, I feel the inclination to ask: What do you think of Mr. Reagan’s AIDS policy?”

                “Well, they need to speed up the AZT approval process. Get it out of the FDA bureaucracy.”

               “Ah, yes,” said Hitchens, “the libertarian view. Let’s assume that AZT proves a bit more effective than, say, laetrile did against cancer. And let’s assume that it’s made available to all. How do `all’ afford it?”

                “Oh, the market will work that out.”

                “I thought it might. You know, it would be a welcome spectacle to see people on their deathbeds crying for socialism instead of God. Tell me, Dolan: you’re expressing this faith in the market as someone who does not have AIDS?”

                “That’s right.”

                “What do you have?”

                “Anemia,” answered Dolan. “Complicated by diabetes.”
                “Type 1? Type 2?”
                “Not sure.”
                “Really? How about whether or not you’re a homosexual? Sure of that?”
                “I’m not. A homosexual, that is. But I have nothing against people who are.”

Hitchens is interviewing him, mind you, in a gay bar.

And that isn’t even remotely the weirdest stuff that was going on as the Cold War wound down—take, for instance, Nancy’s consultations with an astrologer named Joan Quigley. 

                “…in a moment of weakness, ten minutes before boarding the helicopter, she had called Joan Quigley, who’d warned her that Uranus, the planet that had caused Watergate (she’d never mentioned that before!) was now fully in league with Saturn in its operations against Ronnie. Uranus was `a throne toppler,’ said Joan, using this term for the first time, while warning that there wasn’t just impeachment to worry about but new threats to Ronnie safety as well.”  

There’s a lot of satire in Finale, but it is in the end an admiring portrait of a presidency. Mallon is a Republican, of the sort that must be now be considered outmoded. (I met the author once, on a Metro train in D.C. He writes on occasion for The New Yorker where, he told me, he is considered “the house Tory.” But then he rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This stuff”—meaning Trump—“I don’t know.”)

 Approaching forty years after Reagan was first elected, liberals must be wishing now they had not been so dismissive. (Although I think they—we—can be certain that Reagan would be contemptuous of current White House occupant, and his enablers.)

It seems impossible not to recognize now that Reagan was the right man for the moment, when a wicked regime would finally fall. In the epilogue, Reagan does appear, dying of Alzheimer’s.

                “…he begins to touch and examine some of the pictures and souvenirs, all of them laid out so carefully, everything recently dusted….He knows that these things are beautiful, clever. They have been brought to him as gifts, and he has sensed the happiness in the givers. Picture after picture, object after object, all of them infused with good feeling, except for the one thing just past the end of the table, the one object that always displeases and perplexes him: a jagged block of concrete, ripped from something immense, smeared with paint and pocked with hammers, bearing the numbers 1961-1989 and placed on a wooden stand all its own. Whatever it may be, this object, too, has been brought here to make him happy, but it is something cruel, different from everything else in the room, and often, when he stands before it, he feels an impulse to knock it down.”