Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, came to Kenyon about a week and a half ago. He spoke to a crowded auditorium, though I’m not certain he knew how full that auditorium was: the power went out about an hour before he was scheduled to speak.
And though all we could see of his face was by the light of a tiny book lamp on the podium, and though he couldn’t see his own notes, O’Brien delivered an excellent and entertaining lecture.
O’Brien began by emphasizing the importance of fiction and lies in general. “In a way, most of my work, and The Things They Carried, is a lie but, I hope, a sublime one.”
He passed on some basic grammar rules:
1) Avoid ridiculous and long, flowery language.
2) Avoid excessive, falsely poetic language.
3) Watch your modifiers. (He reminded us all of the correct use of the word “hopefully.”)
“If you don’t watch your modifiers,” he threatened, “you could end up president.”
O’Brien shared a story from his childhood:
He and his friend Herbie (a neighbor with two missing teeth, who “foamed at the mouth” when he got excited) nailed two pieces of plywood together, painted them green, and spent a summer riding this “airplane” around their yard. Tim finally asked his father for an airplane engine. His father, apparently trying to get Tim and Herbie off his back, said, “No sweat – one airplane engine coming right up.”
“Herbie said, Y’know, when that airplane engine comes, we’re gonna have to do something useful with this plane. I said, Yeah. He said, Yeah, like bomb stuff. I said, Sure, that sounds… productive.”
So they practiced bombing Herbie’s house and the school, filling Mason jars with gasoline for airplane fuel. Tim nagged his father relentlessly for their “real” airplane engine.
Finally, after a summer of grief, Tim’s father brought home a turtle.
Herbie stared at it. Tim stared at it. His father stared at it.
Herbie said what the rest of them were thinking: “That’s a turtle.”
Tim’s father said, “I know. Best I could do.”
O’Brien paused here for dramatic effect. Then he explained, “Because you’re nine, you believe that turtles and engines have something in common.” They just couldn’t figure out what the link was.
He added that he was very afraid for his father, because Herbie was a scary little kid. He even defended his father’s reparation for a while, but eventually he couldn’t fight Herbie any longer. He hadn’t a clue how this turtle might substitute for an engine.
Herbie dragged the two pieces of green plywood toward the garage, stuck one end in the ground, and said stubbornly, “It’s not a plane anymore. It’s a cross.”
He then convinced his sister, Lorna Sue, to come to the garage. Herbie scraped up two rusty nails and a hammer, and just as he and Tim prepared to nail Lorna Sue up, Tim’s mother appeared and asked what they were doing.
“Lorna Sue uttered a line which I wish I could use in the real world. It was, ‘It’s Sunday School. I get to be Jesus.'”
O’Brien called this “the kind of line you try laboriously to make up” in a fiction piece.
Returning to the story, he said his father tried to explain the difference between playing pretend and actually crucifying Herbie’s sister:
Tim’s father: “That hammer, is it a real hammer?”
Tim: “Yeah.”
Tim’s father: “Those nails. Are those real nails?”
Tim: “Yeah. But is that turtle a real airplane engine?”
O’Brien added, “To this day, I believe I had a point.”
He ended the story and began to talk about his fiction.
“You don’t have to go to wars to write stories. All you have to do to be a writer is breathe, and the world will deliver to you material… By the time you hit puberty, you have enough material to write your whole lives and then some.”
He talked about the internal dictionaries in our lives – words like “turtle” that are so charged with meaning in our heads, but mean entirely different things to each person. These dictionaries, he explained, are what writers use for a living.
He discussed disillusionment and his experience in Vietnam: “You go over to the war bearing all these myths [about your country]… and most of all about yourself. People who do the killing or the dying for our country don’t come from places like Kenyon. It’s so easy to forget that there are people out there like Herbie.”
O’Brien said that as a fiction writer, he strives to document “the kind of atrocity that happens every minute or two.” He discussed a short story in which a blind old man, who had been giving the American soldiers showers, was hit in the eye with a carton of milk. He gave “a speech-giver’s guarantee” that we would all see something in our lives “that will make you gape with wonder.” He said he wrote this story because it’s something he doesn’t fully understand.
“Nobody said a word. Myself included… my silence that day and many days like it in Vietnam is at the heart of The Things They Carried. There are times in life when it’s lethal to your conscience, lethal to your dreams, to be fearful of embarrassment. You do what your conscience tells you to do, without fear of blushing.”
Finally, O’Brien admitted, “I made up almost everything tonight. Yet, to me, it’s true.”
He discussed layers of truth: “In fiction, lying is a sort of virtue. Truth evolves; it changes.” He said this principle, of layers of truth, “carries over into every textbook, every news article you’ve ever read.” He gave the example of telling two stories: one where a person walks into a store, buys a box of Wheaties, and leaves; the second, where that person buys a box of Wheaties, holds the cashier at gunpoint, and walks out with all the money in the register. “They’re both true,” he explains, “the first just left out the robbery.”
Let this be, then, “a kind of caution: watch out for the word TRUTH. Let us not, as Americans, commit the same sin [as the robbery story]. We can’t go back and say ‘I’m sorry.'”
The title of The Things They Carried was intended to carry over to the reader “about the things all of us carry – you included.” This ties back in to that internal dictionary, of turtles and other emotionally charged words.
The Things They Carried was also about the power of story, “to make you feel. I told you those stories tonight not to lie to you, but to make you find a little truth… to give a life or reality to the statistics.”
He added, “I couldn’t see my notes; I had to do something!”
O’Brien then took several questions from the audience. When asked about the war, he said, “You get seduced by danger and your own proximity to death… you’re so electrically alive, you become a different type of human being.”
When asked about the James Frey scandal, he said he could see how someone could get so caught up in a lie, they had to keep expanding it. He said that a friend of his finally came clean after pretending he was a war vet for twenty years. This guy had been in a car with O’Brien and some girl they were trying to impress said, “Oh, you were in the war?” and O’Brien said he understood that that was when he’d had to start lying. He said he forgave his friend for this.
Finally, O’Brien told a story about one of his readings. He had written about a fellow soldier who “seemed almost amoral” to him (I believe this character’s name was Azar in the story); he said he wrote about this man “almost stridently.” After one reading, a boy waited to see O’Brien. His father had committed suicide, and the boy had never known him, but his father was this “amoral” character in The Things They Carried.
The boy thanked O’Brien for this portrayal of his father. He didn’t care that it was unflattering. He said, “I just wanted to see my dad.”
O’Brien said at that moment, “My reason for becoming a writer was somehow elevated. I wanted to make people see – really see.” This kind of moment makes his lies worth telling.