McMahon's small miracle
I'm not sure which scenario gives me the greater pleasure -- finding someone who doesn't know about Thomas McMahon's novel "McKay's Bees," and explaining why he must read it immediately, or discovering a fellow admirer and falling into eagerly allusive conversation about its droll narrative voice and its cast of charming eccentrics and its poetically taut lines. (Here are two of my favorites. Describing the death of a young Cuban woman from yellow fever, McMahon writes, "She went into sleep and then into death as hastily as if actual flames were taking her." And of another's sense that she must escape the incarcerating tedium of her small Missouri town, he says, "She felt her heart being eaten from below the way a tomato is eaten when it brushes the ground.")
It's a mark of the novel's distillate brilliance that it seems to take almost as much space to describe its story as it took McMahon to write it -- and write it fully, richly, not a moment that feels skimpy or events insufficiently detailed. The year is 1855, and a man named Gordon McKay -- a virtual buffoon of outsize optimism -- concocts a plan to add to his Boston Brahmin wealth by traveling to Kansas and founding a town and making a fortune manufacturing and selling honey. McKay has based his scheme on bees, "because of their energy. One never finds them disappointed; they have their plans and they have their hopes and they love their work." And so with his new bride, Catherine, and her twin brother, Colin (whose love for one another flirts, at least in her, with the incestuous), he journeys west, discovering a country in a most "bilious" mood as it moves inexorably toward civil war. Along the way, McKay and his party attract -- as, well, as a queen attracts her colony -- a collection of characters that includes a group of German carpenters; a manic-depressive pastor who's written a seminal treatise on bee behavior; a beautiful, wheelchair-bound young woman who was injured by a bullet from her father's rifle when he mistook a rustling in the berry bushes for the movement of a fox who'd been molesting his hens; the mayor of Lawrence, Kan., who hides from Missouri anti-abolitionist barbarians by dressing in drag and playing piano in the local saloon they frequent. And on and on, while meanwhile, just out of the frame of the central story, we meet, among many others, the abolitionist zealot John Brown; Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Pierce; Stephen Foster; and the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz.
I have read this novel so many times that my first paperback copy (I now own three) literally fell apart, and even so I still can't tell how McMahon did it, how he got so much, so splendidly, into fewer than 200 pages. But that's just what he did, inspiring Time to call "McKay's Bees," when it was first published, in 1979, "a marvel of brains [and] brevity."
McMahon, who died a few years ago, in his 50s, from complications following routine abdominal surgery, was himself a marvel, a remarkable mind. Besides "McKay's Bees," he published two other novels in his lifetime (all recently reissued by the University of Chicago Press), and another, "Ira Foxglove," has just appeared posthumously. But he was also a scientist and academic, holding joint appointments in mathematics and applied mechanics at Harvard, where his work and research reflected the same wonderfully whimsical disposition that distinguishes his fiction. He helped, for instance, in the invention of Harvard's famously fast indoor track, which has resulted in markedly lower racing times.
It only follows, then, that the scientist's spirit of wonder, in two meanings of the word, should drive his characters. Wonder, both in terms of their headlong, selfish, often heedless curiosity. And wonder, also, in the sense of the awe they feel when they're repeatedly confronted with the infinite mystery, the wry elusiveness, the almost coy insolubility of the natural world.
One of the highest recommendations, then, for "McKay's Bees" and for McMahon's fiction generally is as a reminder. We live in a time when facts come to us so relentlessly that we've come to receive them passively, our minds unmoved and unimpressed almost as a way of shielding ourselves from information's continuous assault. But the men and women in McMahon's historical fictional worlds still stalk, hunt down, and explore for their information. His stories are ones that make plots, make suspense, make riveting drama of how it is to wonder.
The ever-wondering narrative voice of "McKay's Bees" asks, toward the end of the novel, "What is it that sustains the energy of a young person who peers into disused icehouses, who stops to read the names of the inhabitants of apartment buildings, who attends the birthday parties of distant cousins? This person is seeking something, but will not be able to tell you what it is. He must remain alert for it, and yet he is not certain he will recognize it when it appears."
At the time of his death, one of the things McMahon the scientist was wondering about was how insects move miraculously up walls and along ceilings. It seems to me that "McKay's Bees" is the analagous literary miracle -- a tale defying gravity and all manner of other rules that ground the narratives of most storytellers.
Douglas Bauer is the author of the novels "The Book of Famous Iowans," "The Very Air," and "Dexterity." His anthology, "Prime Times: Writers on Television," has just been published. He is currently writer in residence at Smith College and the Bennington Seminars.
