Conversations with Tim O'Brien

Journeying from Life to Literature: An Interview with American Novelist Tim O’Brien

125 Journeying from Life to Literature: An Interview with American Novelist Tim O’Brien Lynn Wharton/1999 Originally published in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 1.2 (Spring 2000): 229–47. Reprinted with permission of Lynn Wharton. Lynn Wharton’s informal interview with Tim O’Brien occurred at the Durrants Hotel, George Street, London, on Sunday, 11 April 1999. LW: I know that some of your characters are based on real people—the character Curt Lemon, for example, in The Things They Carried, who is blown into a tree by a mine, was based on a comrade, Alvin Merricks. Could you talk a little about how you metamorphose your personal experience into fictional form? TOB: The death of Chip Merricks—he’s a real human being. I didn’t have exactly the experience that I wrote in the book—no climbing up trees, no peeling off body parts, and in fact I didn’t even see Chip’s body in person. I was a hundred yards away, looking in a different direction. I was busy on the radio, calling for helicopters to, you know, get him out of there. But he was a friend, and the emotional impact of his death was very great. The idea of sudden death was brought home to me very quickly in my tour—that is something I’ll never forget. I begin the Curt Lemon death out of my own life and experience and memory but, as I write, it is transformed into something new and different—even I don’t know how it will turn out. When I begin writing, I’m not sure what I’m looking for or working toward. I’m finding things out as I go along—in The Things They Carried, for example, where there’s a paragraph an inch or two long, which is discussing seemingness— 126 CONVERSATIONS WITH TIM O’BRIEN what it must have seemed like, both to Chip and to Curt Lemon, that instant of death. The booby-trapped artillery round—it must have seemed as if the light itself were killing them. Who knows what they were really feeling, but one tries through an imaginative act to explore what it would be like to die in such a light as this, and we go on beyond that, of course, to issues of dying in general, and beyond that again to what stories are about, of the ultimate unknowns that haunt all of us. So my writing goes beyond my own experience , which is kind of limited, to an exploration of others’ experience, in that instance to an exploration of death in general. LW: Stories such as “Lives of the Dead” are, in a sense, about how stories resurrect dead people. TOB: Yes—and they resurrect not only the dead, they resurrect those who never even lived—like Huckleberry Finn. Here’s a creature of Mark Twain’s imagination and he’s dead up on a library shelf and you pull the book off the shelf, you open the book and begin reading and there’s Huck Finn alive, floating down the river again. And there’s personal experience of death as well, that I might remember—my father might have died and then, I’m lying in bed at night, before sleeping, so there he is, winking, from the past, a memory. I see him opening the refrigerator door, looking for a carton of milk, and he’s back with us again, he’s no longer dead. Stories have a way of encouraging that process—the process probably of memory, probably also of imagination. This is a primary function of stories, to keep the ghosts with us. Stories allow the dead to say, “Hello guys,” I suppose. Ultimately, also, as writers, we ourselves seek a kind of immortality in what we do. Of course it’s not physical—but Ulysses is checked out, and there’s Joyce and we imagine him sitting in Trieste or somewhere, and he’s no longer dead. LW: Can we talk a little bit about Tomcat in Love? Did you feel you were going in a new direction with your new book? TOB: No, not at all. I was writing about pretty much the same things that I’ve always written about. Not Vietnam, but then I’ve never felt I’ve written about Vietnam. LW: Nevertheless, Vietnam is a very real element in Tomcat in Love. TOB: It is very real...