The Real McKay

TAKE A FAMOUS CHARACTER as protagonist, add a wife and kids and a few servants, mix in a fair amount of imagined 'typical daily life' and arrive at the typewriter with the ready made historical novel. Thus we learn how Freud puts on his shirt, or how Lincoln liked his eggs. Our interest in these quotidian events lies mainly in the protagonist's eventual fame or historical dimensions.

McKay's Bees has perhaps a roomful of such figures--Henry David Thoreau comments on the biology of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz terrorizes his students and commits indiscretions with his housemaid. John Brown and his gang of Missouri border ruffians wage war on free-staters in Kansas. Even President Pierce gives an audience or two, once weeping, once belligerent.

Thomas McMahon choose less domineering figures to make his entrance into historical fiction. McKay himself, the owner of the bees, was a contemporary of this crowd, though not of the same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life, and intersected his life with other', real and fictional. But in the end the real McKay surfaces, a great deal more intriguing for the reader than such a philanthropist would have appeared in fact. McKay's Bees makes a mockery of historical fiction, upsetting its priorities and challenging its authors' imagination.

McKay "based his plan for a new city in the West on bees because of their energy." He gathers up his family, his wife's twin brother, and a crowd of German clockmakers, and heads for Kansas. And the bees of course; once in the prairie, the labors of the bees will be the foundation of the community. The Germans would process their honey, and in the winter they could make clocks. By careful calculation, McKay determined that in five years, his ten hives would multiply to 10,000. Such were his prospects.

There is, of course, the possibility of failure in anything...But the bees never let themselves fall into reveries of worry and speculation on their fortune. Instead, they conduct their affairs with confidence and optimism.

In 1855, when the McKay expedition sets out, the West seemed a welcoming, fertile frontier. McMahon so skillfully intertwines fact and fiction that the experience of his protagonist is not merely typical; it is vivid, and exacting, and the two strands are often hard to sort out from one another.

Once settled in his new town, Equilibrium, Kansas, McKay falters. The bees become diseased, his wife unfaithful and unhappy, and the Germans never get over the strangeness of the land. The process of discovery is both exciting and fearful--and relentless. By putting himself at the frontier, McKay, along with those who accompanied him, has relinquished the possibility of retreat. He has himself face to face with the challenge of nature; the bees bring it home.

Bees are never tame, even when they live in movable frame hive boxes and work in the service of a beekeeper. Even, then, they are perfectly wild...Beekeepers are generally old men, white and sterile. The bees themselves are old women, women without children, past softness. They are each other's captives, partners in a marriage where there are no smiles, no kisses, no words even, only slavery and stinging.

And these are terrible tortures, slavery and stinging! In a beautiful landscape, among flowers and calm rural prospects, the beekeeper and his bees struggles with one another in loveless arrangements. Every day the bees fly thousands of miles in his service, and each one makes a drop of honey. He is their master, the owner of their product from the moment it is created. But there is no stability in this arrangement, because it is unnatural. They may decide in an instant to swarm away, or kill him with their stings, or both.

McMahon ties his characters up in a web of natural images, emphasizing their closeness to the land and wilderness: "The sun stings Catherine's shoulder, a dark yellow bee...She felt her heart being eaten from below the way a tomato is eaten when it brushes the ground...Enthusiasm spread like a disease bacillus in a kissing game...Cows moved slowly over the fields crossing the veins of tiny streams, like white worms on a leaf." This fertility of his imagery becomes explicitly sexual in a young man's sense of spring.

The corrolas of May flowers had spread open, and now their stigmas waved about, lewdly coated with sick secretions. The pollen which fell in showers from the pines would adhere to them and attempt a kind of sodomy, but success would be reserved for pollen of the same species...In the forest, maple twigs could not be bruised in this season, in fact could barely be touched, without causing the sweet sap to ejaculate into the air.

McMahon's pen falls into the hands of his characters--his descriptions enhance their moods, drawing natural parallels to their conflicts.

McKay, driven mad by his bees, returns to the East. Once removed from the constant press of the wilderness, he becomes a standard of social stability. "In the midst of this epoch of disintegration, McKay's machinery stitched the uppers to the lowers." McKay lives on Arrow St., in a blue house with yellow trim. He keeps a garden whose products he shares with each year's graduates. A satisfied man, he at last encounters the bees with equanimity:

Wealth! Its attainment is such a paradox! The bees were after it, and came to McKay's garden expecting it. But none of them ever became rich, because a fortuitous accident is required for that; hard work is never sufficient. Bees are not eligible for much in the way of wealth, in spite of their integrity. This was how McKay explained it to himself as he knotted his tie