Tim O'Brien & Hat
[The author of this post, an Emerson MFA candidate and guest writer for Vernacular, has requested that I post it under a pseudonym: Wilmur Makepeace O'Toole. - Peter]
The Things They Carried holds a secure place on the reading lists of American classrooms, from high schools to graduate programs. The book’s international prestige (it won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; past winners include John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, Colm Tóibín), its near-mythic status in the American literary canon, and Tim O’Brien’s honky, awkwardly-charming-and-lisped Minnesota accent and easy humor would, I thought, make for an interesting reading.
Sadly, the success, the hallowed status, of the book seems to have gone to O’Brien’s head. Perhaps the first clue appeared when O’Brien walked behind the podium wearing a baseball cap, the white plaster apse of the First Parish Church arching behind him. Does he fancy himself as a Steven Spielberg figure with an iconic cap that functions like a brand name? Or is he, at sixty-three, still determined to hide his bald pate? Is he bald?
O’Brien then proceeded to read a fan letter from “Nancy,” one of thousands of letters he has received of a similar nature, relating the growth of her relationship with her war veteran father catalyzed by his book. The letter—grateful and tediously sincere—was read in full, nearly bringing O’Brien to tears. He said he had not been sure he would be able to read the letter without crying. He did not cry.
“I’m still amazed that my book continues to be read after twenty years. There have been a lot of good books published in that time to good reviews. But then they vanish. And for reasons beyond my doing, mine got chosen to be read by junior high students and morticians and doctors.” And graduate students. “And when I read letters like this, all the award and accolades and money, it just fades and means nothing.”
As true as that may be, from someone who has achieved O’Brien’s status in the literary world, this sounded pompous and melodramatic.
Here are few more highlights from the evening:
Quote #1: “In novels, miracle can happen.”
When his father was dying, O’Brien’s emotional limitations prevented him from holding his father and comforting him. The story of the emotionally stunted adult’s dealing badly with a parent’s death is, by his own admission, pedestrian. But, he said, transfigure this memory and have the dead father rise from his bed and say to his son, “It’s all right. I know you love me,” and the story seems truer rather than remaining banally factual. Then he said, “In novels, miracles can happen,” without a touch of irony, placing the quote among other aphorisms.
Quote #2: “I was fighting for my soul.”
One fan asked O’Brien if he knew what he was fighting for when he was an infantryman in Vietnam. “I was fighting for my soul,” soul placed on the aisle like an enormous ball of wool—itchy, oversized, unseasonable. I squirmed in my seat.
During the Q&A, someone asked O’Brien:
“When you write and it feels right, do you feel it in your head or your heart or…?”
My companion turned to me and said, in the words of Leon Phelps: “I don’t feel it in my head or in my heart. The only place I feel it when it’s right is in my pants.”
I do not quote the Ladies’ Man facetiously. O’Brien was so devoid of irony that I can’t help but poke fun like a puerile twit. Such bald sentimentality brings out the worst in me. (Not to mention my bum started to go numb from the pew’s wood. Or maybe it was his long-winded responses and tautologous blathering whipping my ass. Never mind my refusal to stand to encourage circulation when the audience gave the reading a standing ovation.)
By the time O’Brien revealed that he had four- and six-year old children, and cracked a joke about his home town folk unable to spell Hanoi if you gave them the three vowels, the same joke he has been cracking since 1999, he sounded clichéd.
I am certain that the man who stood before the apse of the First Parish Church at Harvard Square last night was no longer the man who wrote the book—success and power can get to anyone’s head. Because the book is good. It’s very good. It’s got irony and humor and wisdom and empathy and literary know-how.
So I’ll pretend that the author is dead.
Tags: Barthes · harvard book store · irony · Tim O'Brien9 Comments
You know, it makes me sad, but I really have to agree. I saw him read in North Carolina a few years ago and his selection was painfully sentimental. I don’t even like to think about it… there was a precocious infant character… just terrible. Also, he is like so totally bald.
He took his cap off for your reading? Huh.
Quote #2: “I was fighting for my soul.”
Maybe he meant “I was fighting for my Seoul?”
If that was my bad, then I’ll tip _my_ cap to him as a Seoul sister
He was a writer in residence at UNC. There was a brunch involved.
If you know Tim’s work, you know that most of his author photos depict him wearing a hat, usually the hat he wore at the reading or a BoSox hat. It’s just who he is, certainly not an attempt to be Stephen Spielberg. No one who attended the reading was there to celebrate his fashion anyway, he’s not Tim Gunn, we were celebrating his writing. You were clearly not at the same reading as I was. Although the reading itself wasn’t what I was expecting, the events that took place were genuine. His reading of “Nancy’s” letter was heartfelt, and he clearly got choked up over it, yet maintained his composure mostly for our benefit and so that he could answer audience questions. I did not find his comments about his book being read and re-read for twenty years by a variety of people, “pompous or melodramatic.” He wasn’t overly touting the book, he wasn’t trying to promote it or get you to purchase it. Let’s face it, if you were there, you probably already have a well-worn copy (and if you don’t, sir, maybe you shouldn’t have gone and most certainly shouldn’t have written your review), he was simply commenting on his awe of it becoming a book that finds itself on school curriculum from middle schools to grad programs, and the fact that the topics and events in it are as applicable to today as they were twenty years ago. It was a celebration of the book and a celebration of his success. I think he did it humbly and graciously. I think that if you write a book that has such a strong impact on those who read it, it deserves to be celebrated. I sincerely hope one day, Mr. O’Toole, you will write a best-selling novel that will be read and re-read for twenty years, and has a timeless and important message. Then we can celebrate you and your writing. It’ll be your party and you can wear whatever you want, and some grad student will call you pompous and melodramatic. Until then, sir, I will stick with Tim O’Brien and pretend you didn’t write this.
I was at the reading as well, and I think that the first line you cited in particular would have lost much of its relevance if O’Brien had spoken it ironically. Passive readers–in other words, about 95% of the reading population–struggle with the line between “truth” and fiction in text all the time, and often bring to a text a preconception that narratives relating an “objective reality” possess an inherent validity that surpasses the potential value of any fictional narrative. I think it’s important for writers to combat the notion that “true stories” are worth more than “made-up stories,” and I think that this was precisely the point O’Brien was trying to make. To have spoken this line ironically would have been to belittle the narrative potential of fiction, which would have undone the point entirely.
Also, “to quote” is a verb. “A QUOTATION” is a noun. “A/The quote” is a cost estimate from a vendor or service provider.
Article from yesterday’s NYT about the first publication of Things They Carried in Vietnam:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Steinglass-t.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes
Mr or Ms Turo and Seth,
Tim O’Brien struck me as the reverse of Voltaire’s Candide —rather than coming to the conclusion of cultivating his garden—and seemed to have remained in or returned to that state of solemnity and didactic humility in a (humble) effort to take responsibility for cultivating many gardens. This turn of mind, I suspect, has been cultivated over the years from carrying the weight of responsibility to those people like “Nancy” who confess the influence of his book on their lives.
First, I don’t believe a writer or any artist has any responsibility to reflect back on his readers their projections of an earnest writer behind their earnest experience of a work. The reader’s interpretation of the writing and writer should be irrelevant to him and a writer with integrity should eschew all pressures based on that perception to be so serious about his own work.
Second, while solemnity might be valued by laymen, a wise man knows that all tragedy, including the Vietnam War (and books about in the Vietnam War), is ultimately and rightly vanquished by laughter. “The eternal comedy of existence”—to cite Nietzsche—is the state of living with the paradox that life is serious and stupid, pointless and beautiful, tragic and comic. I expect to see this state of wisdom embodied by, stuck to the bones of, a astute writer. I neither expect nor welcome a reading of a tediously sincere letter by a fan and the writer working himself to the verge of tears. And then confessing that he’s on the verge of tears.
Where was the lightness in the moments of gravity? Where was irony—the only human capacity that keeps people from killing themselves when faced with the eternal precipice where men look down into the abyss and realize that God and truth are fantasies? Where was O’Brien gesturing to his ultimately useless garden cultivated beside this precipice?
Suspicion or contempt is the reasonable reaction to serve a person, especially an artist, seemingly devoid of irony.
So let me say with all the sincerity I can muster: I am not suspicious of you.