by Tim O'Brien
* * *
It’s a dead horse, but one last thought about influence. Among the most potent of influences, in literature as in life, are models of what to avoid. Student manuscripts are an influence. “Dear Abby” is an influence. The potholes on the road to a line of decent prose are many, and it is good to be reminded of them. Cliché. Walmart language. Predictability. Sentimentalism. Grammatical error. Gracelessness. Wordiness. Staleness. Contrivance. Disunity. Beating dead horses. Although shining exemplars can be one kind of influence—do this!—mediocrity can often be another—don’t do that! I mention this as a reminder, especially to myself, that when we talk about literary influence, we must not overlook the Hardy Boys or underestimate the first-love influences of The Cat in the Hat, The Boxcar Children, and Larry of Little League.With a full heart and without apology, I can declare that Frank and Joe Hardy made reading fun for me. In the absence of those two resourceful guides, I may not have so eagerly hopped aboard Huck’s raft, and may not have later found my way to Paris and Spain and The Sun Also Rises.
And so, Timmy and Tad, that is why I have been feeding you book after book all these years, and why I will keep feeding books to you even after I’m gone. I have prepared lists. I have drawn up lesson plans to be consulted when you turn thirty or forty or fifty. I want to be there for you. I want you to receive the pleasures I have received. I want you to think about what you read, and I want you to read things that incite hard thinking.
* * *
I remember that as a young boy, no older than six, I had been distinctly uneasy with a slim little volume called Busy Timmy. I took it personally. How, I wondered, could the author of Busy Timmy, a complete stranger, know so much about me: that I was able to tie my own shoes, that I was able to walk to school all by myself? With the same surprised uneasiness, now, I often wonder how Erich Maria Remarque could understand me so well, and Hemingway, too, and many other writers whose stories seem to expose to the world the secrets of my own heart. So, of course, Busy Timmy was an influence—a magical and lasting influence. Bambi was an influence. Daffy Duck was an influence. The influences, literary and otherwise, entwine and modify and abridge and qualify and finally fuse with one another. Updike modifies Hemingway, who modifies Shakespeare, who modifies “Hansel and Gretel.”
Also, because it’s important, I must mention that it was my father—a good man who himself was sometimes hard to find—who delivered Busy Timmy into my hands at an outdoor birthday party in the early fifties. It was my father who had taught me to tie my shoes. And it was my father who, in the years ahead, would fill me with mystery and dread of a much greater magnitude than anything inside “Hansel and Gretel.” As clearly as I see the words I am typing at this instant, right now, I can see my father as he was sixty-some years ago. He is seated in a chair in our living room. Dark is approaching. Behind him is a lighted lamp. He’s reading a book, and on his face there is such peace, such shocking contentment, that he seems to have become the younger and happier man I know only from yellowed photographs—an assistant hotel manager in Nassau, a clerk at the 1939 World’s Fair, a chief petty officer looking lean and confident aboard a destroyer off Okinawa in 1945. The living room is still. It’s winter, I think. It’s twilight. My father is wholly focused on the pages of whatever that book might be. But not just focused, he is elsewhere, he is wherever the book has taken him, and he’s delighted to be there, he’s relaxed and half smiling and sober, and for a few seconds, as this image captures my attention and then forever impresses itself on me, I am seized by a fierce and impossible desire to become that book. I want to be those words. I want to be those pieces of paper. I want my father to look at me that way.
Do you not sometimes wish, Timmy and Tad, for a restore button on your life? I would take the risk. I would squeeze between the covers of that magical book.
Books themselves—the physical artifacts, the objects—are an influence.
* * *
A few months back, Meredith and I took our sons to an evening of modern dance. It was an outdoor performance, in a horse paddock on a ranch in central Texas, and the dance involved nine young women and a very large horse. There was a great deal of spinning in the dirt. There was swift running, much kicking, many horse-like movements of the head and shoulders. It was strange and very beautiful. At one point, midway through the performance, Meredith leaned over to Timmy and asked if he understood what the dancing was all about. Timmy said no. Meredith said, “Well, right now, for instance, that dancer over there, she’s like a baby horse—a foal—trying to stand up for the first time. Can you see that?”
Timmy nodded. He looked puzzled.
“Well, yes,” he said, “but what about all the other shenanigans?”
That word “shenanigans” caught my ear. I laughed. I’m still laughing. I vowed to deploy the word, somehow, someday, in a piece of writing. I have just done so.
For a writer, the word “shenanigans”—its sound, its sense, its collision against the artistry and spectacle of modern dance—is the sort of utterance that will occasionally find its way from lived life into a character’s mouth, or will even sometimes lead to an entire story or novel. Out of nowhere a word will catch a writer’s eye or ear—a common noun on a passing billboard, an unexpected epithet in a dispute overheard aboard a train. “All my life I’ve looked at words,” Hemingway says, “as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
In exactly this way, as I return to Hemingway’s stories and novels, I am often stopped—in awe, in surprise, in confusion, in recognition, in delight, in contention, in envy—by a single word or phrase. For instance, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” the writer in me is stopped by the word “plunging.” Plunging—“the steady plunging gait” of a galloping bull buffalo. Plunging—“the plunging hugeness of the bull.” Plunging. It is a conscious word choice; it appears three times on the same page. It is also a miraculous word choice. Search through a thesaurus, look diligently for that just-right adjective, and you will not type the word “plunging” unless by some similar miracle. It is, of course, the miracle of memory and imagination and close observation—that repetitive downward-forward motion of bone and muscle as the beast thunders across your field of vision. I stop and stare. I think: Forget the damned thesaurus. I think: Make the animal your animal and not someone else’s. I think: Oh, Christ, I cannot under any circumstances, in any novel or in any story of my own, use the word “plunging.”
That same limitation applies to the words “old sport,” and to the word “fine,” and to the words “by and by,” and to the word “phony,” and to the word “yes” if used more than three times in a sentence.
Similarly, in “The End of Something,” I am stopped by the word “it” in this scrap of dialogue from Nick Adams: “It isn’t fun any more.” The “it” to which Nick is referring is his relationship with Marjorie. But “relationship” is a sterile and ugly word. And so too are other such nouns—affair, romance, togetherness, liaison, intimacy. (Imagine Nick saying, “Our togetherness isn’t fun any more.”) The pronoun “it,” partly because it is a pronoun, seems to my ear entirely in harmony with the evasive, guilt-ridden, and slightly frightened sound of a young man telling a young woman “it” is over. The word “it” relieves pressure on Nick’s tongue; the pronoun lightens the burden. If you have been in love, and if one day you are no longer in love, you understand—as Marjorie instantly does—all the beauty and horror that is embraced by a single heartbreaking pronoun.
To read as a writer is to read not only with attention to artistry. It is also to read with jealousy, with ambition, with disputation, with rivalry, with fellowship, with fear, with hostility, with celebration, with humility, with proprietorial vigilance, with embarrassment, with longing, with despair, with anger, with defensiveness, with pity, and with a wolf’s steady contemplation of its next meal.
It is true that a writer’s reading will often have a keen aesthetic component, but it is also true that aesthetics w
ill be amended by the ferociously personal and the ferociously human. In just this way, as I return for the sixth time in a week to “Cat in the Rain,” I am confronted by bits of language that jerk me back sixty years, back to the image of my father reading a book by lamplight on a late winter afternoon. I’ll look up from “Cat in the Rain” and then I’ll look down again and read this: “She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.” Supreme importance! That’s what I craved as a young boy! And then I’ll read this: “George was not listening. He was reading his book.” I admire the undecorated bluntness of this language. I admire the trust Hemingway places in his reader. I admire Hemingway’s confidence in himself and in the declarative sentence. But what freezes me is this: I am a cat in the rain.
For everyone, I think, a single word can carry enormous power. If F. Scott Fitzgerald were to encounter the proper noun “Julian,” surely a rusty floodgate would swing open in his stomach. Julian would not mean Julian. Julian would mean betrayal and fury and hurt. Or if one day you were to receive a postcard from San Francisco, where the love of your life is enjoying a two-week honeymoon with your old college roommate, I’m pretty confident that “San Francisco” will never again mean San Francisco, and that the word “postcard” will stop your heart as swiftly as any lethal injection.
Only a few sentences ago my own heart stopped. I had typed the word “confidence.” My father’s face flashed before me. And there he is. He stands aboard a destroyer off Okinawa, half smiling, so youthful, so sober and lean and confident. He’s thirty-one years old. He will never die. Not at Okinawa, not ever. He’s confident. He’s confident in the way youth is confident. There is a scheme of things. There is tomorrow. There is the prospect of joy just down the street, foreverness just off the edge of the calendar. There is a heaven or a samsara or a patterned physics or an Oz or a never-never land or a “Somewhere over the Rainbow” or a something of the sort, and although my dad is in no way religious, in most ways profane, his youthful confidence in the year 1945 contains within it elements of faith and belief and a sense of purposive destination. It all means something.
In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Ernest Hemingway uses the words “confidence” and “confident” five times within about two inches of printed text. As someone who frets over word choices with the neurosis of a scab picker, I’m confident that Hemingway was confident about the word “confident.” I’m even more confident that he was far, far more confident than I will ever be when it comes to trusting one’s own instincts with vocabulary. “Confidence” is the right word. It embraces, but is not limited to, the theological. It is inclusive, also, of an ordinary sense of personal worth. A confident chief petty officer. A confident insurance salesman. A confident young waiter in a well-lighted café. And beyond that, the word also comprehends negligence and forgetfulness; in youth, after all, it is easy to ignore the coming dark. And beyond that, the word implies at its very center some vague, ill-formed notion of truth, for without truth, or without some wispy approximation of truth, how could one have confidence in oneself or in the proposition that one plus one equals, and will forever equal, two?
All those decades ago, in the summer of 1957 or 1958, I took no notice of the words “confidence” or “confident.” And if I had taken notice, which I did not, it would have been the sort of notice one gives to a relaxed, self-assured shortstop.
Now, with birthday number seventy near at hand, I’m beginning to understand what that waiter in Hemingway’s story meant when he said, “An old man is a nasty thing.” Confidence is eroded, and eroded confidence is unpleasant indeed. I awaken at three in the morning. I put on a baseball cap and do dishes in my underwear. I flit around in history—Vietnam, lost friends, love gone ugly, a little boy barricading himself in his bedroom out of fear of his father. I mumble in my head. I plot revenge. I rehearse bits of dialogue. I imagine the phone ringing with overdue apologies, the clever things I would say. Former drill sergeants receive scant mercy; Norman Mailer and his Vietnam-writer bullshit are sent packing. I talk to dead people. I revisit humiliations. At three in the morning, in my underwear, polishing the kitchen counters, I’m at an event in New York City, a literary event, and I’m surrounded by the famous and their many lieutenants—Vonnegut is there, Roth is there—and a cocktail party is in full swing, and I’m happy to be among the famous and their lieutenants here at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I’m almost confident. I could be mistaken for one of them. But then to my lasting embarrassment I somehow cut my finger, which bleeds, and someone suggests I apply alcohol to the wound, and by terrible, terrible chance I’m standing within nine inches of an open bottle of Scotch, which I snatch up and into which I dip the bleeding finger—it was impulse, like this sentence—Christ, if that bottle of Scotch had been ten feet away, or two feet away, I would have surely had time to reconsider—but it was automatic, it was reflex, I wasn’t a boor, I wasn’t a moron—and at that moment, which has lasted forever, a fancy woman in a fancy dress, perhaps the wife of a famous composer, perhaps the grandmother of a Pulitzer Prize recipient, gasped. Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus for eternity. It’s three in the morning. I am a moron. I watch helplessly as the bottle of Scotch is retired by a waiter—a young and handsome waiter—and twenty years later, at three in the morning, in my old-man underwear, I’m still trying to explain the impulse shit, the automatic shit, to a fancy lady in a fancy dress, who will hear none of it, not then, not now, not even after the passage of twenty excruciating years, no, the old biddy keeps gasping and glaring—she calls attention to my baseball cap as if it were part of the problem, the cause of the problem—she can’t stop and won’t stop proclaiming my hayseed sin to the handsome young waiter, who smiles his movie-star smile and keeps retiring that fucking bottle of Scotch, which never seems to retire, and this in the age of AIDS, this in the company of silver-haired society, this in the company of the accomplished and decorated and bejeweled and confident and beautifully mannered—Updike is there—and now at three in the morning, with the number seventy staring at me like Ted Bundy, I wonder if this is why I will never be at home in the presence of these unfailing exemplars of literary probity. Or is it just my crappy Vietnam stories? An old man is a nasty thing.
Seventy.
I will not see Tad’s twenty-seventh birthday. I will not see Timmy’s tears.
For me, as for my father, and as someday for Timmy and Tad and you, there is the burden of being human, which is the burden of consciousness, which is the burden of knowing that the lights will go out and that the café will close its doors.
27
The Language of Little Boys
Last week, Meredith asked Tad if he was prepared for an upcoming vocabulary test. “Sure,” Tad said. “The words are already in my lexicon.”
* * *
Why, I don’t know, but Tad had been thinking about vocabulary from an early age.
“Why do cows go moo?” he asked as a four- or five-year-old.
“Because they have to,” I said.
“But why do they have to?”
“Well, because it’s the only word they know.”
Tad thought this over.
“Did they learn that word in school?”
“Cows don’t go to school.”
“Well,” Tad said, “they better try at least kindergarten.”
* * *
As a vocabulary builder, back when Timmy and Tad were eleven and nine, we played a rhyming game as we lay in the dark at bedtime. I would toss out a word and the boys would take turns coming up with a word that rhymed. One night, the game went like this:
“Born,” I said.
“Corn,” said Tad.
“Torn,” said Timmy.
“Worn,” said Tad.
“Clown,” said Timmy.
I hesitated and said, “Huh?”
“Clown,” Timmy said. “You have to say it with an r, like you grew up in Canada.”
“I don’t think anybody in Canada says ‘clorn,’ �
�� I told him.
“No,” said Timmy, “but I bet they say ‘porn.’ ”
* * *
Something had ignited my very, very short fuse one evening—maybe a newspaper piece, maybe a TV interview—and I was complaining to Meredith about how blithely and matter-of-factly people send other people off to war, and how nothing seems to stop it, and how useless my own books had been. “The only book that might do the trick,” I said, “is one that shoots off your nose and lips and ears and tongue when you open it up.”
Tad had been listening to this.
“I guess you shouldn’t hold that book in your lap,” he said.
* * *
Last summer, my longtime friend Richard Bausch, an accomplished novelist and short story writer, was scheduled to deliver a lecture to aspiring writers. The night before his talk, as our families dined together, Dick looked at my son Tad and said, “I don’t know what to tell these people. I’m desperate, man. Give me some ideas.”
“About what?” said Tad.
“You know—about how to write well.”
“Sure,” Tad said. “Let me think for a second.”
The conversation went elsewhere for a while, and then Dick looked back at Tad.
“Learn grammar,” said Tad.
“Excellent,” said Dick. “Check.”
“Be clear.”
“Check.”
“Be interesting.”
“Check.”
“Don’t keep using the same word a million times.”
“Absolutely. Check.”
“Stop when you get to the end.”
“Check,” Dick said. “Hold on, I need to find a pencil.”
