Hello! This is our fourth interview of this issue — and our second with Alex Vernon, professor of post-1900 American literature, film, and writing. This week we speak to him about his biography on storied novelist Tim O’Brien, Peace is a Shy Thing. We spoke about the process of writing, and how O’Brien deals with the questions of truth and morality.
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How do you approach a biography like this? Where do you even begin? How did you get the impulse to start?
Yeah, this is actually my only biography and it probably will be my only biography, because of the circumstances. I like to think I was the right person for the job, and I can't imagine being the right person to study a different person's life.
I met O'Brien back in 2003. Over time we ran into each other at conferences or on my research trips, and eventually we got to be good friends. He never wanted a biography written about him, because who does? I mean, who wants people poking around? But he realized someday somebody would, and so he asked me to write it. This was in 2018.
And how do you write a biography? You just dive in. I mean, really. I remember those first interviews I did—I interviewed over a hundred people. I had no idea what I was doing [laughs]. You dive in and you go to the archives and you put all the pieces together as you go along.
I think to maybe back up and set the stage a little bit for readers—why did you find Tim O'Brien so fascinating?
Tim O'Brien is, it's safe to say, the preeminent creative chronicler of the American war in Vietnam. The Things They Carried is his most famous book. There's good evidence out there that The Things They Carried is one of the, if not the, most taught books in American high schools and colleges. He has, I think, easily supplanted Hemingway. Hemingway was the war guy people went to. Now it's O'Brien. If you talk to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and they're readers of literature, they all know and adore O'Brien's work. He is profoundly influential. I read The Things They Carried—it was the first book of his I read—in the late 1990s and I was just blown away. I had been in the Gulf War of 1990-1991; I was deployed when the book was first making waves and capturing imaginations. I was in grad school when I read it. I bawled.
Did you feel like you had the “correct” lens to take on this project?
I feel like I'm suited for it because I'm a combat veteran who studies war literature, and I'm in this unique position because the Gulf War is a weird bridge between Vietnam and the 21st century wars. The more senior officers and professors who trained me were of the Vietnam era, right? So I speak that language. I'm familiar with them, but also I was in the desert in a tank, just like the 21st century war guys and gals. So I like to think of myself as being in this interesting position of bridging those warring generations–and not just for veterans.
This is probably a basic — or too big of a question, but are you able to pinpoint how his experience in Vietnam impacted his writing?
I mean, it's both very basic and very big. When he was a kid, he had a fantasy of being a writer. He's from a small town in southern Minnesota, a rural town. Even though he had that fantasy, he never thought it would happen. But then he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. And his language over and over again is: “Vietnam made me a writer. I became a writer when Vietnam collided with my life.” It is foundational to him as a writer. My biography’s first chapter is titled “Collision.”
It wasn’t just the 13 months in-country, it's also the fact that he opposed the war with every fiber of his being. He thought about resisting; there were times when he almost ran to Canada. But he somehow, and he uses this language, he essentially slept-walked to the induction ceremony. A kind of paralysis, he has said.
There are all kinds of reasons why he allowed that to happen. He's an American citizen. What would happen to his family in this small town if he goes away? What would happen to him? At the time, 1968, if you went to Canada, you might be on the run in Canada. What would life be like? So he let himself get drafted, and has always considered it the great moral failure of his life.
Another thing. Growing up in the Midwest, you were told not to hit people, to be nice, not to hate people. And suddenly somebody shoved a gun in his hand and said, "You hate those people. Go kill them.” It screwed with everything about the way he thought he was supposed to be in the world.
So yes, Vietnam is absolutely fundamental. It's what made him need to write in the first place. He's written a bunch of books not about the war in Vietnam, a bunch of novels, but most people think his Vietnam novels are far better because they have the moral urgency that the other novels don't.
Do you agree with that?
Yes [laughs]. I like his other novels, but I think his war novels will endure and his war memoir will endure in a way that his other ones will not.
What do you think about his style or approach that has made him so lasting?
A few things. One is, there's zero bluster on his page. He always describes himself as a bookish kid, kind of a nerd growing up, ill-suited for the military, and that comes through in his writing. There's no grand heroic charges or anything at all. In The Things They Carried, he was very careful that when American soldiers die in that novel, they never die heroically. One guy drowns in a communal outdoor latrine—he drowns in shit. That's the kind of thing O’Brien does in his books.
I feel like most war literature has a "you weren’t there, let me tell you how it was" proposition, even if it's a novel, even if it's trying to get you in somebody's footsteps. But there's something about O'Brien's writing where he is able to bring you in and make you a part of the experience.
A lot of his books are about imagination. His soldiers are imagining things, even in some cases imagining being a soldier, which is how he felt. He didn't feel like he was a soldier, but he's out there in the jungle and he's got to imagine himself into this role. By having his characters imagine themselves in that role, and imagine the things we civilians can imagine too—that's a way we can meet him in the same headspace.
So it's never really a "let me tell you how it was" narrative. His prose is very inviting and draws you in. And even when he metafictionally thinks about his writing on the page for us, that invites us into his space too.
Yeah. The sort of disorientation is a helpful device, because when your social fabric collapses, and I don't know how else you are supposed to make sense of the situation.
Right. In The Things They Carried, for those readers who know it, there's a character named Tim O'Brien in the book, who is not the real Tim O'Brien. They overlap in some ways, but it's not really him. And that confuses people. Some people think it's a memoir and when they find out it's a book of fiction, they get mad.
I think one reason he does that is because his experience in the war was: you don't really know what's happening to yourself. Things happen. You're looking one way, something else is happening over here. You're always confused, and afterward, it’s like, what was that? What just happened? Did I imagine that? There is the sense that this whole thing feels unreal even though it is firmly in reality.
So by having a Tim O'Brien character who's not really Tim O'Brien, readers are asking the same questions and feeling the same things he was: "What really happened to Tim O'Brien? Did he imagine that? This doesn't feel real, yet it also does. It is."
Yeah. Well, I think that is a nice place to end. Thank you so much. This was super informative and your work is really, really interesting. Thank you.
Thank you. That was fun.