In Addition to History

PHOTO BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
is more fluid. That’s where Mr. Hitchens, not
included in the early Finale plans and whom
Dr. Mallon first met at a GQ party in Washington
in the late ’90s, snuck in. Dr. Mallon says
he needed a Greek chorus character, someone
like Alice Roosevelt Longworth in Watergate,
who could do play-by-play and be funny about
it.
The micro outline for the Landfall prologue
alone is eight double-columned pages
and gets as specific as “Bush waves.” From
the micro outline, Dr. Mallon handwrites
a first draft—he says the micro outline is so
detailed that this part is “almost rewriting”—
which he then marks over with pencil before
typing. Draft 2 is printed and marked in pen.
So is Draft 3. Draft 4 is a full-on edit of a finished
manuscript. It’s the same procedure for
a novel, for an essay, for a review, for anything
he writes that isn’t his morning diary entry.
“I still don’t like writing,” Dr. Mallon says.
There’s always a Starbucks to-go cup on his
desk. There’s one there now. “I find writing
difficult because there’s still, with all that
planning, even with all the outlining, there’s
still a certain fear of the blank page—that I’m
not gonna be able to come up with that first
draft.
“But I love rewriting because once I have
something done, it may not be very good, but
I can always make it better—I can make it
measurably better. To me, the real stuff is in
the revisions. … If I can balance the self-loathing
with a bit of self-flattery, I know what I’m
doing when it comes to it.”
IDEALLY, THOMAS MALLON
says, he would write the way Rosemary
Clooney sings—at least he’d write in the
style, of his interpretation, of the way
Rosemary Clooney sings. To Dr. Mallon,
Ms. Clooney is all intellect and vocal tautness,
pared lean of aural fat to a mellifluous BMI.
To his ear, she sings with a sureness of voice,
of delivery, of elocution. She sings ex cathedra,
and Dr. Mallon wants a drop of that lyrical
infallibility.
Still, being a specific man, Dr. Mallon is
specific about the Rosemary Clooney he wants
to channel, and, for him, there are two incarnations.
First, there is the Rosemary Clooney
of White Christmas and of her first hit, “Come
On-a My House,” a jaunty song with a vaguely
wicked feel and words that are both benign
and suggestive at the same time.
This is not Thomas Mallon’s “Rosie.”
“Rosemary Clooney’s probably my absolute
favorite singer,” Dr. Mallon says. “When
she was young, she was this very pretty, perky
pop singer who sang a lot of these novelty
songs, a lot of junk, even. She wanted to be
a much more serious singer—a jazz singer
and a much more complicated practitioner
of American standards. She really had two
careers. She disappeared for a while, she had
a lot of personal troubles and then she came
back toward the end of her life and she made a
whole huge series of albums with the Concord
Jazz Quartet. They’re fantastic.”
That’s his Rosie.
“She had such an intelligent delivery of
lyrics,” says Dr. Mallon, who wanted to do a
magazine profile on Ms. Clooney, but nothing
ever came of it. She died in 2002 at age 74.
“She never gets in the way of the lyrics. She
knows exactly how every word should fall. It’s
very simple and elegant.”
While elegant, Dr. Mallon’s style isn’t
succinct. There are clauses and parentheticals,
reiterations and reestablishings. It’s all
well-crafted, but to Dr. Mallon, it’s just not
in Ms. Clooney’s spirit of essential leanness.
Her style, he says, has been elusive, and
it’s when he’s listening to her—say, to the
matured concision and clear consonants on
1983’s aspirational “My Shining Hour”—
that Dr. Mallon considers his limits and that
maybe his strength is also his weakness: thoroughness
and information.
“I think my writing has too many bells and
whistles,” he says. “Too many parentheses,
too many flourishes—not so much stylistic
flourishes, but there’s too much stuff.”
The line here is fine. The issue is balance
and the ability to get out of one’s own
way and not muscle up on a strength.
“Rosemary Clooney’s
probably my absolute
favorite singer...”
Hear a
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
made by Thomas Mallon,
inspired by Rosie.
go.gwu.edu/MallonPlaylist
gwmagazine.com / 33