Two Moons

...The American Spectator " Ju~ e ~ o o o 69 Understanding and rest never come...

...At his best, like Hugo and Tolstoy, he sees human beings not only in the light of history, but in the light of eternity...

...70 June 2000 _9 The American Spectator...

...The assassination is recounted from Clara's point of view, and, as the president lies dying, she has the "strange feeling that she had been painted into history, inserted into a tableau...

...The cab grazes Gregory and knocks him down...

...Carpenter's spacecraft splashes down hundreds of miles offtarget, and for forty-five minutes his peril is on everybody's mind...

...The novelist's favored method was a sort of defiant complication, a refusal to limit himself to the people and occurrences that command the historian's attention...

...the unschooled reader, the physics involved may be elusive, but the poetry of the notion is captivating--as it is to Cynthia, who falls in love with the dreamer and his dream...

...Lives lost to history ignite in the novelist's mind, and light up inexhaustible spiritual vistas...

...Thomas Pynchon's Mason ~ Dixon, E.L...

...M allon's recurrent theme is the way the men and events that will go down in history alter the trajectory of ordinary people's lives, as the gravitational field of a star or planet bends a passing beam of light...

...Mercy" is not a word expounded upon by the Baltimore Catechism, and as such is not an idea that Gregory Noonan ever pondered before falling asleep and into his dreams tonight...

...Stendhal, Hugo, Thackeray, Tolstoy all wrote of crucial battles in the Napoleonic Wars, and they made sure to tell that part of the tale which historians ahnost invariably leave out...

...a life of no apparent consequence can seize the imagination and open up the entire world...

...That he has contributed a number of essays to The American Spectator surely suggests a certain disposition, but the only feature of his fiction that might hint at his political orientation is the absence of any explicit political orientation...

...Five days from now the papers will report that twelve-year-old Kevin Shickley, Jr., while chasing a squirrel near Shamokin, Pennsylvania, has falIen down a 55o-foot mineshaft to his death...

...Increasingly unable to distinguish past from present, Henry at last goes violently out of his mind...

...Hugh comes down with malaria--a common affliction, in the marshy precincts of Foggy Bottom--and consequently with Bright's disease, a fatal kidney aihnent...

...Elegantly constructed, intensely pondered, marvelously alive, Mallon's novels constitute an impressive body of work...

...this lawmaking satyr," as Cynthia thinks of him, presides over a patronage empire, and his boys run the Customs House in New York City...

...He returns from war a troubled soul...

...The most obvious difference is that he has no ideological ax to grind...

...Pushing fifty, with nine books to his credit--five novels and four works of non-fiction, including well-received studies of plagiarism and of diaries-Mallon is a writer of an unusual, perhaps even extraordinary, turn of mind, which takes history as its starting point but lives by the truth as the imagination sees it...

...None too pleased with a God Who can kill one child and spare another on an apparent whim, Mallon exercises the human privilege of casting an ironic eye on the deity responsible for the world's cruelty, and tempts the reader to forget that it was God Who made the novelist and not the novelist who made God...

...One feels lucky to be whirling along on the same planet as Thomas Mallon...

...Confused by the traffic signals, he steps into the path of a speeding cab--the speeding cab, driven by the now familiar cabbie, Nowicki...

...Yet while Mallon does place his hero and heroine in a flattering light, Two Moons is by no means a work of simple moral uplift from the Endure Indeed Prevail School...

...There are no Hugos or Tolstovs among current historical novelists (Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the nearest thing going), but in America there exists a terrific appetite for the historical novel...

...And they are persons of sufficient strength that the contest never lacks interest, though it is no secret who is going to come out the winner...

...Alone, poor, sorrowing, her beauty fading, she nevertheless refilses to give up hope, as she "strugglIes ] back to something like life...

...If he hopes to cheat death, as he puts it, he doesn't have much time...

...The elders' capitulation moves Clara to rejoicing: "Maybe this war is a blessing--God forgive me for saying it--hut if it's what brought them around...

...But the worst comes after the war is won, for it is Henry and Clara who accompany the Lincolns to see Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre on Good Friday, 1865 . After shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth slashes Henry's arm with a knife, and he almost dies from loss of blood...

...Mallon might be understood to suggest that the heroic struggle against death, however doomed to failure, can be considered a sort of triumph, in a certain light at any rate...

...Henry Rathbone loves Clara Harris, and Clara loves Henry, but there is a hitch: Although they are not related by blood, they are stepbrother and stepsister, and his mother and her father are not keen on the romance...

...It was a terrible feeling, though at moments exhilarating-this sense that she would forever be as she was now, arrested, like the play across the street, which would never move beyond the second scene of act 3." That night proves to be the defining moment of Henry and Clara's lives...

...history as the once potent vision of America's moral grandeur is discredited as the patter of carnival barkers...

...The rescue planes just found him...

...For Mallon, simple piety, the belief in God's ultimate goodness, rests on something less than the whole story, which it is the novelist's responsibility to tell...

...But he did say his prayers before going to bed, and he did make the customary petition that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven...

...If you want something remarkable, you pay, perhaps with a cherished part of your own integrity...

...In Aurora 7 MalIon grants the reader the pleasure of seeing tragedy-tragedies-averted, by God's Own mercy...

...it is a questionable pleasure, for the book ends with the reminder that there is no shortage of other tales to tell that have a sad and bitter end...

...Not only does Mallon make the reader feel the reality of every life the novel depicts, he also undertakes to penetrate the heavenly reality behind the human...

...History debunked can still be bunk...

...At first Cynthia attempts simply to charm Conkling into waiving the customs du~', but it soon becomes clear that he has no intention of delivering the goods to Cynthia until she has delivered the goods to him...

...While in some cases that could be a good thing, even then it tends to be pap that replaces pap, and the new is ahnost always less savory and substantial than the old...

...John May, in his hasty grave in Tennessee, and Sally, inside her mean box in the Presbyterians' cemetery, were actually sitting with her, fellow passengers, just across some narrow aisle separating life and death...

...In the manner of a late Tolstoy story, like "God Sees the Truth but Waits," the clockwork plot bespeaks a guiding divinity Who makes the world run just so, althougt~ Mallon does not exactly share Tolstoy's faith in the perfection of the arrangement: The mind of Mallon has a born novelist's capaciousness, with room for everyone...

...Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," Charles Dickens begins David Co#perfield...

...She was conscious of a new peacefulness within herself, a swelling of what she'd begun to feel with The Principles of Trigonometry...

...The war, to which Henry goes off, makes her feel differently soon enough: "Her own deepest feelings were being pressed into service by the Abraham Lincolns, distracted toward an object unnatural to them, Everyone's nature was being snatched from itself, displaced, by the man directing this war...

...On a 68 Ju~e ~ o o o ' The American Spectator television at school Gregory sees the crowd that is watching coverage of the event on a large television screen at Grand Central Station, and he heads off on a mission of his own, determined to join the excitement...

...swampbottom is the native habitat from which Hugh and Cynthia hope to raise themselves, clean out of this world...

...and the boy answers, "He's fine...

...Their various peregrinations turn out to have a providential coherence...

...They were all on the same wheeled mote, ineffably whirling with Herr Winnecke's comet...

...The Earth seemed nothing more than a streetcar doing a wide endless loop of the celestial city...

...Triumph, if triumph it is, cannot be had without tragic loss...

...Aurora 7 (1991) tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy Yfrom Westchester County, Gregory Noonan, who can think of nothing but the o orbital flight that astronaut Scott Carpenter is making on May z4, 196z...

...He had intended for some weeks to send this one of- His field's lilies, this one of His sparrows, whom His eye is always on, to his death, nnder the wheels of Checker cab number 7Dzz, just as He had planned to let Carpenter skip off the earth's atmosphere and keep orbiting until he suffocated...

...Mallon interweaves Gregory'S adventure with the exchanges between Carpenter and Mercury, Control as well as the meanderings around New York of a cab driver going about his business, a young Puerto Rican man looking for work, a wayward priest in pursuit of a lovely young woman, and a Mary McCarthylike writer who despises the whole outer space business...

...M allon is a haunted man-haunted by histou, but most of all by the thought of death, from which, as one sees in the splendid novel ~I~o Moons, there is no getting away...

...Eighteen years after the fatefnl event, Henry tells Clara that he saw Booth standing at the door to the presidential box for several seconds, that their eyes met, and that he deliberately did nothing to stop the assassin, because he wanted to avenge all the soldiers whom Lincoln had sent to their deaths...

...The historiography of our time owes a lot to the colossal nineteenth-century ALGIS ~v~IUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...Hugh takes little interest in the work he is supposed to be doing, but is ablaze with a project that he is convinced will gain him immortalib', after a fashion, and the only fashion he cares about: He wants to soar beyond the reach of time itself, climbing up inside the unfinished Washington Monmnent and using an aplanatic-mirrot projector to send an image of his own face into the infinite depths of space...

...Doctorow's Ragtime, Gore Vidal's Burr and Lincoln and 1876 have topped the best-seller lists and incited purportedly serious critics to admiring riot...

...These are real people, Mallonized...

...Cynthia May has suffered loss upon loss, and she broods upon them all: her husband of three months killed in the Civil War, her young daughter dead of diphtheria, her father and mother gone in due course...

...In fact, there is little enough to admire: These novelists traffic in threadbare goods that still pass for rare treasures at the intellectual bazaar...

...But the projector he needs for his scheme must be imported from France, and the customs duty is more than he can pay...

...Mallon tells the story well enough to rattle, if not to dislodge, the pious reader...

...Henry, in particular, finds himself returning to it ceaselessly, and becomes an obsessive student of history, as the need to understand why things happen as they do torments him like an infected wound...

...In the losses that memory cannot shake free of, and as the prospect that looms ever larger moment by moment, death is the supreme adversary, against whose strength Mallon's characters measure their own...

...I'm not sure if I've just made that up or if I've indeed seen a book like that mentioned somewhere, perhaps in the New York Times Book Review...

...She is being hotly' pursued by' Roscoe Conkling, Republican senator from New York, whom she bumped into at an astrologer's parlor (and who, unlike Hugh and Cynthia, is a figure from history...

...The novel was bent on capturing the sensation, thought, and emotion that ordinary men experience in the face of death, and that their loved ones endure as they wait for their men to return victorious or defeated, alive or done for...

...Their aspirations to the sublime never quite disentangle themselves from the trammels of the ordinary, even of the sordid...

...Thomas Mallon, whose newest book is Two Moons, writes historical novels of a different sort...

...Cynthia comes to her lover's aid...

...the high are brought low, and the low elevated, and not in the manner of the Sermon on the Mount...

...It has been the traditional prerogative of the historical novelist, who portrays real men in imaginary circumstances and imaginary men in real circumstances, to assert the significance of those whom history cut out of the picture, to render momentous events from the viewpoint of men too small to deserve the historian's notice...

...Incomprehensible tumult was the defining feature of the greatest events, and the historian in his magisterial smugness could never hope accurately to describe, let alone to explain, them...

...Her skill with numbers gets her a job at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.--the year is 1877--and her not yet vanished beauty attracts the notice of the astronomer Hugh Allison, who is several years younger than she...

...Henry then proceeds to shoot Clara dead and to hack himself repeatedly, though not fatally, with a knife...

...Of course, Hugo and Tolstoy had explanations of their own that outdid those of most historians for grandiose aspirations to omniscience...

...But when the American Civil War breaks out, Henry declares that unless their respective parents allow them to marry, he will spend the war in England--an intolerable embarrassment to the family, for Clara's father is tire Republican senator from New York, Ira Harris...

...And from the novelists who claim that their fictions tell more of the truth than histories do, modern historians of the most fashionable sort have derived the notion that history is just another fiction...

...When Walter Cronkite announces that Carpenter has been found, Gregory joyously walks out of Grand Central and onto Forty-second Street, "with no idea where he's going but with perfect certainty he's headed in the right direction...

...novelists, above all the belief that previous writers of history overlooked countless small lives every bit as significant as those of the great and powerfuh Hence the proliferation of monographs on such topics as religious mania among cheese-lnakers in sixteenth-century Provence...

...Henry and Clara (1994) plunges deeper still into dark waters...

...The mind of Mallon, on the other hand, has a born novelist's capaciousness, with room for everyone...

...Fog, mud, miasma besiege the Observatory...

...Was he not exalted, and leveled, to the same degree of mystery, wondrous and infinitesimal, as a Ulysses Grant...

...Dostoevsky did not let Ivan Karamazov, who renounced God for permitting innocent children to suffer, have the last word...

...In Hem?, and Clara Mallon tells one of those tales: Death breeds death, in a man who cannot come to terms with the tragedy-- tragedies-into which history thrusts him...

...He is after something more than Doctorow and Vidal's game of scoring points with the right people and showing contempt for the wrong ones...

...To He is a haunted man~ haunted by history, but most of all by the thought of death...

...Gregory's mind is so full of Carpenter's heroism that there is no room for his own life...

...somebody asks, "Is he all right...

...the priest with lust in his heart shouts out a warning, the Puerto Rican man kicks at the cab, and the lady writer grabs the boy by the coIlar just in time...

...In their novels every man of any eminence is mad with ambition or lust...

...they are good enough that one does not feel foolish in hoping he might have a truly great novel in him: one for the history books...

...This summation is not quite worthy of Mallon's elaborate meditation on history, fate, mortality, and the cosmic ambitions of men...

...so who speaks for the rest of us...

...As for Henry, he is wounded in battle, and has a vision of Hell itself...

...Here are Cynthia's thoughts prompted by a murdered pencil seller whom she has read about in the newspaper: Did his humble life mean more, or less, when contemplated against the heavenly immensity she had just seen...

...Improving on History Two Moons Thor~as Mnl.lon Pantheo~ Boo/~s/303 pages / $24 R E V I E W E D BY Algis Valiunas E yen in the age of democracy, those men whose names win so much as a line in the history books are a precious few...

...Once he understands, he tells himself, his mind will be at rest...

...There are complications...

...But His moods change...