Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable—who we are, why we are—and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

  In a story, explanation is like joining a magician backstage. The mysterious becomes mechanical. The miracle becomes banal. Delight vanishes. Wonder vanishes. What was once surprising, even beautiful, devolves into tired causality. One might as well be washing dishes.

  Imagine, for instance, that Flannery O’Connor had devoted a few pages to explaining how the Misfit became the Misfit, how evil became evil: the Misfit was dyslexic as a boy; this led to that—bad grades in school, chips on his shoulder. Pile on the psychology. Even as explanation, and because it is explanation, there would be, for me, something both fishy and aesthetically ugly about this sort of thing, the stink of determinism, the stink of false certainty, the stink of a half- or a quarter-truth, the stink of hypocrisy, the stink of flimflam, the stink of pretending to have sorted out the secrets of the human heart. Moreover, Timmy and Tad, I want you to bear in mind that explanation doesn’t always explain. Few dyslexics end up butchering old ladies. Evil is. In the here-and-now presence of evil, evil always purely is, no matter how we might explain it. Ask the dead at My Lai. Ask the Misfit. “Nome,” he says, “I ain’t a good man.” In the pages of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor goes out of her way to satirize and even to ridicule such explanation. And for Hemingway, too, explanation is submerged below the waterline of his famous iceberg. In great stories, as in life, we are confronted with raw presence. Events don’t annotate themselves. Nightmares don’t diagnose themselves. With the first whiff of Zyklon B, with the first syllables of a Dear John letter, with the first ting-a-ling of a dreaded phone call, with the first glimpse of your own nervous oncologist, there is what purely is. There is a cat in the rain.

  “Cat in the Rain” and two of the other stories I encountered almost six decades ago have since become great favorites of mine. Each of those dearly loved stories, like all wondrous works of art, presents us with the gift of life’s ambiguity, the gift of participation without a guide dog, the gift of fleeting clarity amid overwhelming uncertainty, and the gift of encountering other lives just as random and murky and doomed as our own. Is there a lesson to be drawn from “Indian Camp”? There is not. Read The Joy of Sex. Is there wise counsel in “Out of Season”? There is not. Read Fishing Tips for Freshwater.

  In the years since my father placed that fat book in my hands, I have returned several times to “Cat in the Rain” and to the numerous other stories and novels of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I finished reading, once again, the 650 pages of the Finca Vigia edition of Hemingway’s complete stories, and once again I found myself surprised at how personally I received most of those stories. Which is to say I have my own Ernest Hemingway, just as you, Timmy, have your own Rick Riordan, or you, Tad, have your own Mark Twain. There are, in other words, at least as many Hemingways as there are readers of Hemingway. My father had his Hemingway. My eleventh-grade English teacher had her Hemingway. Gertrude Stein had her Hemingway—rawer and less mature than, say, the Hemingway of Malcolm Cowley. Hemingway’s sons had their Hemingway. And of course Hemingway had his Hemingway, and Hemingway’s Hemingway almost certainly was not yours or mine or Harold Bloom’s.

  For better or for worse—by far for the better, I believe—a writer of stories can control only so much, after which a story is completed by vanishing fathers and hot summer days and boys who crave love.

  * * *

  For Timmy and Tad, who may one day be curious about their father’s interior life, I offer a personal example of what I’m trying to communicate here.

  I am a fiction writer. I have written about war. And so, not long ago, I found myself in an auditorium, reading aloud a short piece called “The Man I Killed,” which seeks to portray a character’s response to viewing the corpse of an enemy soldier he had blown into eternity with a hand grenade. The story’s details—emotional and physical—were unpleasant. Memories surfaced. My voice broke. It was hard going. Afterward, in a lobby outside the auditorium, I was approached by a young man of about twenty. “I could tell that was tough for you,” he said, “and I appreciate your honesty.” I thanked him. He thanked me. The young man began moving away but then stopped and said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking about joining the Marine Corps. You helped a lot. Now I know for sure I’ll be joining.”

  This was not a singular occurrence. It has happened a dozen or so times over thirty years, virtually the same conversation, occasionally concluding in an awkward hug.

  I am always shocked.

  I’ll go back to my motel room, pull off my tie, look in the mirror, and think: You poor dumb useless yo-yo. I’ll feel old and defeated. I’ll take a shower and smoke cigarettes and stare at CNN and then finally surrender, as I must, to the space in which reader and writer brush past each other as strangers.

  One man’s torment is another man’s imperative.

  * * *

  It is April 12, 2016, and in a few months I will turn seventy. Timmy is twelve, Tad is ten. Basketball has become a problem for me.

  I feel the squeeze.

  This morning, as I sat trying on these shabby and ill-fitting sentences, my father’s urn drew my attention. The urn squatted on its shelf five feet from my desk. Well, I thought, should I try what you tried? There was no answer and there never is. But even so . . . why not?

  I got up, went out to the living room, and asked Timmy if he’d mind reading “The Killers.”

  It wasn’t an order—it was barely a request—but Timmy is a nice kid, and he said, “Sure. What is it?” I told him it was a story by Ernest Hemingway, an author he had encountered a few months earlier when his seventh-grade English teacher assigned “A Day’s Wait.”

  Timmy had been lukewarm about “A Day’s Wait.”

  He was lukewarm, too, about “The Killers.”

  “I don’t know, I guess it’s okay,” he reported.

  Timmy is now almost exactly the age I had been when “The Killers” came through my bedroom door. And the words “I don’t know” and “guess” and “okay” represent the entirety of what I would’ve said to my own father if he had not disappeared on that summer afternoon six decades ago.

  I asked Timmy if he understood the events of the story. He plainly did. Ole had double-crossed somebody in Chicago, and the somebody had sent two nasty guys to kill him. “The boxer took a fall, I think,” said brilliant, literary Timmy, “or else he didn’t take a fall he was supposed to take.” Until that instant I’d had no idea that my son was aware of this uncommon usage of the word “fall.” I was delighted. He had swished a three-pointer.

  “And what about Ole?” I asked. “I mean, near the end of the story, when Nick goes to warn him, why did Ole say he was done running?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Timmy. “I was thinking about something else.”

  “What?”

  “I was wondering why anybody would ever want to be a boxer in the first place. Don’t boxers hurt people?”

  “They do, yes.”

  “Don’t they get hit in the face?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why be a boxer?”

  Timmy has his Hemingway.

  * * *

  Almost seventy years old, and it shows, but nonetheless I’m trying to be a decent father. Books are one way. Bedtime stories are another. I throw footballs and baseballs and go dizzy at the Ping-Pong table. Until a couple of years back, I spent a number of afternoons out on the golf course with the boys, just as I’d imagined doing on the day of Timmy’s birth, but the romantic notion of bonding with my sons over a tiny white ball di
d not pan out. Tad and Timmy do not care for golf. They do enjoy driving the golf cart, which can be heart-stopping on water holes, but golf itself seems to them pointless. (“You mean,” said Tad, “I’m notsupposed to hit the ball a lot?”) In any case, to the best of my recollection, none of us ever uttered the words “Nine more holes.”

  Still, I’ve been present. I haven’t vanished. Not yet.

  Twelve years ago, like my own father, I decided to be a father. I swore off long days at the computer, swore off making sentences, and as a result, my most recent novel was published in the faraway year of 2002.

  There was nothing heroic in this silence. It was in no way a sacrifice. By the early autumn of 2002, when Timmy was conceived, I had come to resent the twelve-hour days that were the price for a half page of passable prose; I resented the loneliness and aloneness; I resented the pitiless subjectivity of it all. What had once been fun for me—tedious fun, frustrating fun—had hardened into something edging up on hatred. At this very instant the hatred bubbles. Should the word “hardened” be replaced by the word “evolved”? Yes? No? Screw it—keep going. Is the word “awaken” too poetic, too precious? Yes. Probably. No. Probably. With every syllable I try to talk myself out of writing the next syllable. Yet here I am, back at it after a long vacation. Five hours a day, not twelve. Plenty of time for checking homework. Plenty of time for soccer and birthdays and Rubik’s Cube speed-solving competitions.

  My loathing for making sentences remains a big problem, but still, at least on occasion, some of the old writerly passion is back. The buzz of imagination now startles me awake at three in the morning. I roll out of bed. I make coffee. Scraps of dreamland language come and go, sometimes affixing themselves to other scraps. As I clean the kitchen counters, still groggy, a swarm of bumblebee thoughts buzz through my head, reminders of all the things I want to tell Timmy and Tad about their father’s time on this planet: a childhood magic trick, a lover’s sit-on-your-lap farewell forever, a booted ground ball, a tambourine jangling at midnight, a war, a dead little girl of not quite and not ever nine.

  Even with writing hell still looming ahead of me over the next few hours, there is again a zippy excitement at three in the morning. This is how it once was, two sons ago.

  * * *

  When I was a kid, I had viewed “Soldier’s Home” as a willful and malevolent choice by the author to write the dullest and most uneventful story he could possibly write, with the glaring exception of “Cat in the Rain.” Where were the machine guns? Where were the thrills? That nifty contraction—soldier’s home—had gone unnoticed, along with its purposeful pun, but even if by some impossible act of precocity I had noted any of this, my yawn would’ve been wide and my verdict identical.

  Squeal “Dear Jesus” and learn.

  The “Soldier’s Home” of my youth is certainly not the “Soldier’s Home” I carry inside me today. I’ve had my own trouble finding words for the horror. “Horror” doesn’t do it. Nothing does it. Silence makes sense. (Timmy and Tad have come to accept my sudden silences, although they are also very careful to avoid me on those occasions. They look elsewhere. They go silent themselves. They wait for the mood to change. Dad’s bad-time, Tad calls it.)

  For people who have killed other people, and for people who have in other ways been immersed in the crankcase evil of war, there is a mute helplessness that comes on hard afterward. Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim had it. Hemingway’s Harold Krebs had it. Heinemann’s Paco Sullivan had it. Homer’s Odysseus had it. O’Brien’s O’Brien had it: “And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You take a feeble swipe at the dark and think, Christ, what’s the point?”

  Was Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” an influence? Yes, almost for sure. No, almost for sure. My discomfort with the word “influence” is no doubt rooted in the knowledge that Hemingway got there before I did. In fact, he not only got there, he got there right—the dense, deep ice beneath a soldier’s silence. But still, as I wiggle with irritation, I’ll sometimes ask the ceiling: Did Hemingway give thought to the notion that he was crossing terrain navigated centuries ago by war-weary Odysseus? Did Dos Passos sometimes irritate Vonnegut? Did Crane irritate Remarque?

  Not long before his death, at an event in Austin, Texas, I was introduced to Norman Mailer, who looked up at me from his wheelchair, first with puzzlement, then with half-formed recognition, and then with an aggressive stare. Forcefully, without solicitation, he said, “Are you that Vietnam writer?”

  I nodded at him. I did not care for the words “Vietnam writer.”

  Mailer kept staring, still aggressively, and then he said, “Well, we all stand on one another’s shoulders.”

  I understood, of course. He had written The Naked and the Dead.

  But for a half hour afterward, and over the years since, I found myself wondering what had brought on the rebuke in Mailer’s eyes, the sharpness in his voice. I’m not a mind reader. Maybe the comment was benign. But we do have to interpret signals—posture, eyes, tone of voice—and I could not and I still cannot ignore the impression that I was in the presence of annoyance bordering on the dangerous. It may have been the annoyance, I sometimes suspect, of a violated proprietorship, of encountering a trespasser, of an author’s understandable sense of forfeiture as others begin to stride across a staked literary claim. It goes both ways. Whether one is the influencer or the influenced, there is an instinct to defend one’s own. I’ve felt such irritation myself, many times: I’ll pick up a book, scan a page or two, and yell, “That’s mine!”

  Mailer was right. We do stand on one another’s shoulders. Yet as we stand on those shoulders, we also try to hold aloft something new and unique to the world—an A&W root beer stand, a shit field, a woman in pedal pushers, an elusive Silver Star. We build our spanking-new houses on seized ground.

  I cherish “Soldier’s Home.” It is as perfectly made as art can get. And in this respect, the story was a formidable and enduring influence—the controlled tensions, the controlled hurt, the controlled language, the controlled interior, the controlled action, the controlled mood, and most especially the controlled—barely controlled, desperately controlled—hero of the story, Harold Krebs. Could form and content, style and theme, event and character be more masterfully unified? Could the aesthetic bar be higher? Still, at least for me, it’s also true that “Soldier’s Home” was as much an impediment as it was an influence, partly because it was and is so wonderful a story, partly because it was and is so beloved by me and by others, and partly because it just was and just is.

  What does a writer do?

  I cannot unlive my life. I was a soldier. I came home. I learned more than I wanted to learn about the boil of silence.

  Despite those brawny shoulders beneath me—among them the shoulders of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, a couple of boxers, for Christ’s sake—I yearned to express my own helplessness in the face of memory, my own fear of telling patriotic lies, my own desire to be polite in the company of family and friends, my own everlasting guilt, my own scared-shitless voice still squealing “Dear Jesus” as people try to kill me in my sleep, my own reluctance to revisit evil, my own moral failings, my own embarrassments, my own inability to utter the word “no” to a war I despised—these were my yearnings and not those of Vonnegut or Homer or Ernest Hemingway. In the end, the most powerful influence on my work was not a literary one. It was the fucking war. It was the replay afterward. I wrote my stories to interrogate my own nightmares, my own frozen and inarticulate memory, even if—not because—Mailer and Vonnegut and Hemingway had earlier interrogated theirs.

  * * *

  When I think about “Soldier’s Home,” I most often think very unliterary thoughts. I think about my own homecoming from war, the emptiness in my head, the dreamy haze where Vietnam once was, and after a while I’ll circle back to poor, silent Harold Krebs. I’ll wonder if he ever discovere
d language for it all. Did he find peace, I’ll wonder, or did he end up with a bullet in his head? This sort of thinking goes sailing down a thousand late-night streets—how this war stuff just will not end—how we never run out of reasons to kill one another, always such wonderful reasons, never bad ones—and how daughters and sons and mothers and wives and lovers must also be counted among the mutilated as they pass by in endless parade—and how wars do not cease with the signing of a peace treaty, how they go on and on at the dinner table, at the VFW hall, and how last night in Orlando an old lady jerked awake and whispered, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” even though her baby had been blown into a tree four decades ago in Quang Ngai Province. I think about my father coming home from the South Pacific, dumping his medals in a drawer, and spending the next thirty-five years selling life insurance in the Turkey Capital of the World. I think about how ridiculously trivial the matter of influence is. We are influenced, if we are human, by all that is around us, including a beautiful story called “Soldier’s Home,” but also including the beautiful stories of Kurt Vonnegut and Homer, and including—don’t forget—the neglected bric-a-brac of English teachers and untied shoelaces and voices on intercoms and missed phone calls and an encounter with bad oysters in Tripoli and a little boy named Tad, my son, who only a second ago asked if I could quit writing—please!—and play Monopoly.