My colleague John Callahan has spent his life much engaged in the complexities of history. As he wrote in his 1972 study The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (U. of Illinois Press), “History’s purpose is to articulate facts and consciousness as those things are united through action in the world.” Callahan’s actions in the world have been multiple. He has taught at Lewis & Clark College for forty years. As Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, he has edited many of Ellison’s works, including his posthumously published novel Juneteenth, which Callahan assembled from a vast store of Ellison’s papers. He ran as Eugene McCarthy’s vice-presidential candidate on the Oregon ballot, and in 1970 he ran in the Demoncratic primary for Congress, taking a stand for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. He discusses this latter candidacy in the opening chapter of his In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (U. of Illinois Press, 1988). This chapter helps to explain how his confrontations with his Irish-American identity and stories led to his interest in the ways that identities are formed in the midst of history’s muddiness and constant shifts. He points out that he found in much African-American fiction a sense of “American identity as a condition subject to a collaborative improvisatory national tradition of call-and-response.” His own call-and-response work in literature and politics has yielded a sophisticated vision of the constant motions of human identity in the call-and-response work of everyday life.
He has recently brought this vision to a work of fiction, his A Man You Could Love (Fulcrum Publishing, 2007), a political novel spanning the decades from the sixties to the year 2000, during the infamous presidential-election recount in Florida. It is during this recount that the novel’s narrator, Gabriel Bontempo, recalls meeting Mick Whelan–later Congressman Whelan then Senator Whelan–on the Washington Mall. The meeting leads to a working friendship that has Gabe Bontempo assisting Whelan at every political turn. As Bontempo recalls his life in politics, he enters into the labyrinths of memory, and Callahan enters the tradition of social fiction characterized by George Eliot, Dickens, Faulkner, and Ellison himself. Here is a characteristic passage:
“During the summer of 1975, as the press and the American people began to absorb the magnitude of American defeat and disgrace in Vietnam, Mick Whelan bided his time. In the Democratic Steering Committee, Congressman Henry Hart argued that after Watergate, the country wanted more-open politics, in which leaders put an end to secrecy and discord and honestly debated difficult issues, such as military service. At his instigation, the Selective Service Subcommittee held hearings.”
Whelan is waiting in hopes that a “deadlock would create the opening he needed to introduce compulsory national service.” With its focus on such issues as national service, the novel is in part a meditation on what it means to be a citizen. But it is a call to action as well, for the novel’s stand for social justice and engaged citizenship are unmistakable.
Equally unmistakable is the novel’s relevance to the present day; for example, Mick Whelan’s work to promote a national service program in the seventies chimes very much with Barack Obama’s call to expand national service programs today. Also relevant, hauntingly so, to our present situation is Mick Whelan’s opposition to a presidential resolution asking “Congress to endorse a doctrine of unilateral preemptive action in Latin America anwhere and anytime he or a future president sees fit.” The image of a president acting in a manner quite unchecked by the balance of powers and with little regard for the advice of other nations, along with a doctrine of preemptive military force, necessarily calls to mind the tragedy of America’s invasion of Iraq, an eerie repetition of the war in Vietnam. Here is Callahan’s Senator Whelan addressing the Vice President in his role as President of the Senate: “Mr. President, I share the national security concerns of those who have risen in support of this resolution. But I do not share their unilateral, preemptive framework. When the founders were creating this nation, before there was a president or a Senate, the Declaration of Independence tied the American cause to ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’ Where is that ‘decent respect’ in the resoluton before us?” Whelan goes on to call the resoluton an “imperial decree” and points out that it could lead to “even graver consequences than Vietnam.” The times call for many Senator Whelans.
A Man You Could Love is, in short, a timely novel that both recalls the complexities of the last decades and articulates concerns that remain urgent at the present time. It also provides a vision of the cost that many in politics pay for their public service. At a time when the public discourse sometimes compares prominent politicians to celebrities, it is good to be reminded of the day-to-day grind that they must endure.