|
WHEN AUTHOR TIM O'BRIEN REMINISCES about his years
at Harvard in the doctoral program in political science, which
meant spending much of his time in Kennedy School classes,
his memories are rosier than those of most former students.
Living and studying in Cambridge, he recalls, “was like
waking from a nightmare and finding yourself not just in comfort,
but where you’d always dreamed of being. It was a little
surreal in that sense.” The nightmare was O’Brien’s
one-year tour of duty as an infantryman in Vietnam, yet few
of O’Brien’s fellow students and professors at the
Kennedy School knew that he had returned from the war just
a few months earlier, much less that he’d received the
Purple Heart for shrapnel injuries. “I’d wake up
every morning thinking, ‘My God, I’m at Harvard.
I’m not in the jungle,’” he says.
O’Brien’s lifelong interest in history, law, and
politics began in high school, where he embarked on an exploratory
reading program that included writings by Locke and Montesquieu.
“I’ve always been interested in
the social contract and questions of justice,” he says,
adding that such issues seemed particularly relevant in an
era of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. As an undergraduate
at Macalaster College, O’Brien opposed the war, using
his position as student body president to organize peace vigils
and demonstrations. He also campaigned for Senator Eugene
McCarthy’s bid to be the Democratic nominee for president
in 1968. Upon graduation, he received a scholarship to Harvard
— and a draft notice. Social pressure played a part in
his decision to fight, as did engrained Midwestern values.
(“Behave and be polite to people and go to war if you’re
asked to go to war,” he explains.) The decision changed
his life, as it did so many veterans. “It’s what
I’ve written about ever since,” he says simply.
On the surface, O’Brien’s life at the age of 56
couldn’t be further from the cliché image of the
driven writer, much less one haunted by memories of Vietnam.
He lives on a golf course in Austin, Texas, with his second
wife, Meredith; their first child, a boy, is due in June.
He has an enviable schedule at Southwest Texas State in nearby
San Marcos, where he teaches a fiction workshop every fourth
semester. It sounds like a laid-back lifestyle, but it doesn’t
take long for O’Brien’s more writerly obsessions
to emerge. He likes the idea that the golf course is there,
but plays only an occasional weekend round. Instead, he says,
“My days are essentially locking myself into an office,
writing all day, and coming out at night.” Over the course
of our one-hour phone interview, the click of a cigarette
lighter is heard again and again — a habit picked up
in Vietnam. “There’s a sign in front of me that
says, ‘Wait a little.’ My wife put them all over
the house so I’ll think before I light another. Maybe
it means I’ll smoke a pack less a day,” he says,
but doesn’t sound convinced.
Although O’Brien relished the years he studied at Harvard
from 1970 to 1975, where he attended classes in the old Littauer
building which, back then, was home to the Kennedy School,
another urge was percolating inside him: to be a writer. It
was something O’Brien dreamed of as a young boy growing
up in Worthington, Minnesota, the self-proclaimed “turkey
capital of the world.” He took a year off from his Harvard
studies to work as a national affairs reporter for the Washington
Post; earlier, he filed frontline dispatches from the
war with his hometown newspaper, publishing a few in the Minneapolis
Star and Playboy as well. “There was an urgency
to that writing because I thought I might die the next day,”
O’Brien comments. “Having survived, that sense of
urgency — I think for the better — left my work.
I was able to write in more depth and detail and see the larger
canvas.”
In 1973, O’Brien published If I Die in a Combat Zone,
a memoir of his 1969 to 1970 tour of duty in the region around
My Lai. At his editor’s urgings, he tried his hand at
fiction, publishing Northern Lights in 1975. In the
midst of writing Going After Cacciato, the semi-fantastical
story of a soldier who leaves the Vietnam War and walks to
Paris, O’Brien realized he needed to choose between academia
and the writing life. Having already passed his oral exams,
he’d also begun his dissertation. A study in the area
of American foreign policy, it was to examine the political
rhetoric surrounding declarations of war in contrast to the
real reasons for global conflict that lie below the surface
of language. “It felt like I was writing about the same
things in Cacciato, not so much through abstraction
as storytelling,” he recalls. “But it really became
a question of where to devote my time. It was a tough decision,
especially after investing all that energy and hard work,
but in the end I felt I would be a better novelist than a
scholar.”
O’Brien didn’t know at the time that Cacciato
would go on to win the 1979 National Book Award, beating out
such heavyweights as John Irving’s The World According
to Garp and The Stories of John Cheever. His reputation
was firmly established, yet success has never seemed to afford
O’Brien a sense of self-satisfaction or security. Switching
between longhand, a typewriter, and a computer (“Whenever
one’s not working, I’ll try the other.”), he
labors over every sentence, averaging four or five years between
books. “I revise and revise until I think a page is clean
and good, then after 30 or 40 pages I’ll go back and
re-revise, because things change as you go forward. Revision
is 99 percent of what I do during the day,” he says.
O’Brien didn’t learn his craft at an MFA program
— the standard rite of passage for aspiring writers today
— but says he enjoys teaching and seeing his students
progress over the course of a semester. “Teaching writing
is more intuitive than teaching mathematics. I teach pretty
much the way I write, which is by trial and error.” Most
beginning writers, he says, make the same mistake of writing
about a romance in a college dorm or apartment building. “I
show them how to have more than one ball up in the air, to
complicate the story and make it more like the lives we all
lead, which are not uni-dimensional,” he explains.
Books were O’Brien’s primary instructors from an
early age; his father, an insurance salesman, was on the hometown
library board, and “books were coming in and out of the
house all the time. I read adult books by Irwin Shaw and Norman
Mailer, but then I’d also read Timmy is a Big Boy
Now. I learned from everything, good and bad.”
O’Brien says he tends to read more nonfiction than fiction
when he’s working on a book. “Right now I’m
reading a biography by Robert Remini called The Life of
Andrew Jackson. You learn storytelling from biography
because you see someone’s personality developed, and
a lot of what one does as a writer is develop a character.
The temptation is to present a uniformity of behavior, but
people aren’t like that. At one moment, Jackson is embittered,
defiant, and angry; in the next, he’s performing incredible
acts of generosity and thoughtfulness. Yet it’s the same
person.”
In 1990, The Things They Carried further solidified
O’Brien’s stature as “the 900-pound gorilla
of Vietnam war literature,” as one reviewer described
him, yet he’s always resisted that categorization. Yes,
Vietnam figures in all of his books, either directly or obliquely,
but O’Brien has often said he’s driven more by the
larger mysteries of the human heart and the twinge of life’s
fateful “what ifs.” In Things, O’Brien
pushed the boundaries of form and fiction to the limit. Somewhere
between novel and short-story collection, the book travels
back and forth through time, moving from the jungles of Vietnam
to the heartland of America. It includes metafictional passages
that examine the transformative powers of storytelling; “On
the Rainy River” portrays a character named Tim O’Brien
who is drafted out of college and spends a week at a fishing
lodge on the Canadian border, wrestling with the decision
of whether or not to report for duty before deciding he’d
be too embarrassed to face his family and friends if he didn’t.
“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending,”
the piece concludes. “ I was a coward. I went to war.”
Fiction, O’Brien has said, is a way of using lies to
reveal spiritual and emotional truths. It’s also a form
of play — and he enjoys playing in the margins of what
happened and what might have happened.
****
Our phone interview takes place at the end of January; the
war on Iraq, not yet declared, seems imminent. Does O’Brien
see any parallels with Vietnam? “We’re going to
make a lot of enemies in the world,” he responds. “In
my experience, that’s what happened in Vietnam —
with every village we napalmed and every kid we killed by
accident, we made enemies of their families and friends. It
multiplied. We weren’t winning a war; we were making
more Vietcong.
“We have a tendency to demonize our enemies,” he
adds. “They’re always ‘evil’ in Bush’s
rhetoric.”
O’Brien’s next novel centers on an incident that
some would easily classify as an example of pure evil —
the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, in which Jim Jones
ordered 913 followers — more than 270 of them children
— to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch.
Dissenters were shot. “The idea of fanaticism taken to
the extreme intrigues me,” says O’Brien, who has
been reading FBI transcripts of the tragedy. “I want
to know what it would be like to have survived it, to have
run off into the jungle while your wife and daughter died
at the urgings of a fanatic.” While the subject has no
obvious connection to Vietnam, O’Brien sees a thematic
extension from his previous work. “There’s the shame
of survival; every veteran feels a smidgen of that. And the
zealotry is certainly related — that, combined with fanaticism
and ignorance, have got us into a lot of pickles as a country.”
He grants that the topic may not win many readers looking
for a “feel good” experience, but is undeterred:
“If a book satisfies me, I don’t care much what
other people think. You address the human condition and let
the chips fall where they may.” The same goes for O’Brien’s
most recent novel, July, July, which received mixed
reviews. “When I hear praise, I don’t feel elated,
and when I hear criticism, it doesn’t make me very depressed.
You know your work well enough to know whether it’s good
or bad. The book stands on its own. Nothing can change that.”
Julia Hanna is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.
|
