FELLOW TRAVELERS
By
Thomas Mallon Pantheon, 354 pages, $32
A journalist once said that he wished all news was gossip exchanged over drinks at 5 o'clock. Fellow Travelers is his book, so full of juicy, dense Washington gossip that it goes down with the ease of an iced gin on a hot day. Thomas Mallon slyly mixes real and invented people to spread 1950s buzz while paralleling public and private affairs.
This is the time of McCarthyism, and gullible fellow traveller Timothy Laughlin has landed in Washington only to discover his Catholic conscience colliding, rather than coinciding, with his political beliefs when he falls for State Department careerist Fuller Hawkins. He finds that the hunt for homosexuals is as enthusiastic as it is for communists.
Mallon's been in Washington before ( Two Moons, Henry and Clara) and, as is his habit, he distances himself from the present, using dates as chapter headings, giving us timelines of public and private lives: Timothy Laughlin and Fuller Hawkins meet on the day that Joseph McCarthy gets married (a wedding blessed by the Pope) and their love affair ends, more or less, when McCarthy is defeated.
While McCarthy searches for communists in the army, Tim craves Fuller's love. Both quests are doomed. McCarthy's attempts to get preferential treatment for David Schine in the army brings about his downfall and censure in the U.S. Senate. Tim's affair gives him scant happiness even while it is ongoing. To ease his pain, Tim longs for the grace of God. But that, too, is denied him, since he cannot repent of his love as sinful. In fact, he even begins to think of Fuller as his vocation. Without a confessor, Tim uses Mary Johnson, a co-worker of Fuller's and aware that both men are gay, as his confidante.
Tim cannot discuss his romance with his Irish-American family. He can't even tell them about his essential nature. They get their opinions, both secular and spiritual, from TV personalities like Bishop Sheen and Father Coughlin, and would find it unbelievable that McCarthy had a taste for the boys or that McCarthy's army hearings were like "an interminable midnight mass."
The United States makes stars of its villains: Yesterday it was McCarthy, today it's George W. Bush. Then, as now, there were colour identifiers (lavender and pink versus red and blue), fear- mongering and nuclear threats, nepotism (Tim gets his job through Fuller and Fuller gets his from the recommendations of "both Dulleses and Cordell Hull") and hearings on torture, although the offenders were them, not us. All the while, Mallon is tracing the exploits of his cast, from the perfidious Roy Cohn to the artful Tommy McIntyre, that Washington indispensable, a man in the know.
Mallon is tough and dynamic about Washington, but lowers his tone when it comes to Fuller and Tim. Anyone looking for carnal descriptions will be disappointed; penetration is given short shrift and gives way to lap-sitting and kissing. It is in Tim's suffering that we have intensity. While Fuller teases his "Skippy" (he likes to think he owns Tim and, like Dubya, is fond of nicknames, calling Tim's boss, the legless Senator Potter, "Citizen Canes"), Tim's heart is breaking as his romantic longings, slight enough, are dictated by the treacherous Fuller.
Mallon leans towards the sleazy rather than the lofty in realizing agendas or bringing about the collapse of the mighty. But Tim remains pure-hearted, and if he loses his appetite for McCarthyism, his anti-communist feelings remain strong. He champions the cause of Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty, avowed foe of communism and the separation of church and state.
Mallon heightens the period feel with what fashions were in favour, what journalists were being read (Mary McGrory) and listened to (Walter Winchell), with references to which television stars were hot (Milton Berle, Mr. Peepers) and even what the weather was like. His research is impeccable, and although we may pick up a lot of arcane information - sparse press attendance is blamed on the strike of photo engravers at The New York Times, a one-time flag-raising is done so the banner can be sent on to an elementary school - it is never arbitrary, and, like Ike's heart attack or McCarthy's baby, it is always married to the plot.
We like to think of the 1950s as an innocent time. It wasn't. Ignorant, yes; innocent, no. Fuller, with a combination of cold calculation and luck (the lie detector fails to identify him as gay), is the insider. Timothy is condemned to be the outsider. Currently, the politics and ideology of right-wing Christians make tax cuts and privatization a priority; in the past, it was communists and homosexuals. In both instances, not only were casualties created among the opposition, but also among their own fellow travellers. Tim was one of them.
Freda Garmaise is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a screenplay, Putting Out.