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How a Gay Neocon Writer Survived New York in the '80s and '90s
THE VERY HEART OF IT: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, by Thomas Mallon
Is it possible to be kind, sensible, polite, well-adjusted and cheerful, and keep a diary that's worth anyone's time? That's the question that confronts the reader of 'The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994,' by the gifted but ultra-earnest novelist and critic Thomas Mallon. He's so nice that he drives me out the window. (In a movie, he'd be played by Matthew Broderick in Izod shirts and tweeds.)
Mallon, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Washington, is the author of 11 well-regarded novels that are historical or political in theme, including 'Henry and Clara' and 'Fellow Travelers.' His many nonfiction books include 'A Book of One's Own,' about literary diaries, and 'Stolen Words,' about plagiarism in theory and practice.
For several years in the 1990s he was the literary editor of GQ. This was back when men's magazines a) had platinum-level expense accounts and b) routinely, and in retrospect incredibly, fought to publish the best short stories in all the land. He's also been a stalwart contributor of reviews and essays to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. I enjoyed it when, in these diaries, he refers to this publication's old offices on West 43rd Street in Manhattan as being as 'grubby as a police precinct,' because that's indeed what they resembled — albeit if the detectives had detonated the contents of a used bookstore inside.
I hung in there with Mallon's diaries, and they (sort of) softened me up. This isn't because Mallon cries frequently — upon finishing John Updike's 'Rabbit' series, upon the death of Richard Nixon, when a man he loves hasn't called, when he's had a bad review — but because his diaries capture the youthful mood of a certain period in New York City, because he's a careful observer and because his naïveté is sometimes winning, in the manner of a pensive number in a Sondheim musical about a new kid in town. Every writer probably needs a bit of this quality to see the world plain.
These diaries begin in 1983, when Mallon was in his early 30s and on the verge of obtaining tenure in the English department at Vassar. His second book, the one on diaries, was about to drop. He's new in Manhattan, a gay man bending toward neoconservatism, relatively virginal and unsure in this pre-dating-app era how to meet anyone except in sketchy bars. This is early in the AIDS crisis, and confusion and terror are omnipresent.
Mallon is young, pretty and 'so horny I felt like going out & jumping a sidewalk Santa.' He does enter those bars and writes, wonderfully: 'I am the boy who cried wolf, and then went looking, again and again, for one more wolf.' After an AIDS scare, and a screening of the film 'The Bounty,' he reports:
All day I'd been making bargains with God: Just let me live and I'll be content with work and writing and friendship — I'll retire from sex forever. Then I saw Mel Gibson on the screen and thought: This isn't going to be easy.
The plague is a through-line in these dairies. Friends and lovers die around him. Fearful of Kaposi's sarcoma, he checks his arms for freckles that aren't freckles and worries about colds that may be more than colds. He settles down. He's vastly more interested in gentle lovemaking, this book makes plain, than in injudicious rutting. He wants to be 'protected, cuddled, adored.' Lovers like to take Mallon back to their hometowns, because he so resembles 'a model middle-aged, middle-class homosexual to worried parents.'
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