Dazzlingly Ordinary

n the first page of The Very Heart of It, Thomas Mallon, right, is talking with Rachel Kitzinger—both Vassar professors I’d admired—about a mutual friend. I feel a small thrill: They knew each other. By page 50, their friend was dead from AIDS.

In 1989, when I was his student, I knew Professor Mallon taught at Vassar but lived in Manhattan. I knew he reviewed books for GQ. I knew he was working on a novel. I knew these things because they mattered to my ambitions—he was doing what I wanted to do. What I didn’t know: That he was watching friends die, that he was terrified of his own test results, that he was living the AIDS crisis from the inside.

It’s hard to overstate how much the specter of AIDS weighed on Professor Mallon during the years represented by this book. As a collection of his diaries in the 1980s and early 1990s, it represents in real time the pleasures, concerns, obsessions, small rivalries, and major triumphs of a writer, professor, and editor. I, too, am all those things, and have been for thirty years now.

I’ve stood in front of students while working for eight years on finishing my first book, sending queries, fielding rejections, basking in small signs of success. (I’ve never felt more in common with Professor Mallon than when he notes with minor delight that, standing in a campus library in Texas, he sees that his first novel has been checked out thirteen times.) I’ve taught through divorce and my mother dying young of lung cancer. The students had no idea. That’s not a failure—that’s the job. You show up. You read their work. You say to them, as Professor Mallon did to me, that I was a pretty good writer but I could be so much better. The rest stays private.

As a student, Vassar wasn’t just where I took classes—it was where I slept, ate, made friends, made and lost relationships, figured out who I wanted to be. As a professor, I know now that working at a college is a job, not an identity. That was especially true for Professor Mallon, who yearned to spend his time in New York City, writing, rather than reading our work, though he was unfailingly kind and incisive in his suggestions about our writing.

The diaries show what I couldn’t see: the literary anxieties (worrying his reviews weren’t good enough, that his novel wouldn’t sell), the romantic disappointments, the ever-present fear of AIDS. They also show him slowly detaching from his Vassar life, ultimately giving up the steady income and status of being a tenured professor to bet his future on making it as a writer.

In 1990, the year that I studied with him, Professor Mallon finally took an HIV test, after avoiding it for years. He waited for the results as he taught us about Joan Didion and Bruce Chatwin, and as he challenged me to write deeper, more meaningful stories—a moment he could not possibly remember but which altered the course of my work. He came home from Vassar to a phone call from his doctor. “You’re negative,” the doctor said. A couple of days later, he wrote in his diary, “Life is dazzlingly ordinary. I walk in disbelief.”

The last time I saw Professor Mallon, several years ago, he was speaking to a packed house at the country’s largest writing conference. The crowd was so big, and the line to sign his new book so long, that all I could do was wave in his direction after the talk and say, “Hi! I was your student at Vassar.” A minder hustled him to the book signing before I could tell whether he recognized me.

Reading his diaries now, it’s not the current Thomas Mallon I want to speak with. It’s the young professor from back then, who so thoughtfully read and commented on my writing, even though he was awash with his own concerns. Don’t worry, I want to say. Life, love, writing—it looks like it all turns out just fine.—Kevin Haworth ’92

Kevin Haworth is the author of five books, including the award-winning novel The Discontinuity of Small Things. He is Giles Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University.