8. but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. The “count on it” is a little piece of hippie-esque locution that brings you inside the more intimate, colloquial speech Herr will use. The interjection forms a kind of bond with the reader. On a literal level, he’s also saying the military will never rethink their maps’ accuracy, because they lack the curiosity or fluidity of thought that makes changing their minds possible—and also makes truth impossible for them.
9. It was late ’67 now. A simple statement of fact, this locates us in the time of his being there, at the height of the conflict. The phrase is also an infusion of quotidian reality after the “spookiness” of the sentence before.
10. even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore. Again, you can’t get true information from military maps and “official” evidence. We’ll come to depend on the suggestively “spooky.”
11. reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. This beautiful metaphor makes even the native citizens impossible to “read” or serve as a source, and it makes mysteries of the indigenous. The wind is also invisible, mysterious as the veil of moisture over the map or the ghosts that haunt him.
12. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. This is the first time Herr uses “we.” It seems to mean everybody but high command, but in some ways it also invites the reader into his wondering. Again, the impossibility of locating the true “story” is what he wants throughout the book—what drives him.
13. We also knew that for years now there had been no country but the war. Despite all the disinformation, there is one fact “we”—him and other correspondents? him and everybody in the war? him and us readers?—know. I sort of think he encompasses all those possibilities. The war has devoured everything. The war is everything.
This setup about the curious uses of information leads us to Herr’s first three characters. These three voices are the three main arenas of (dis)information—an American press official, who’s clueless; a great, scary, medicated warrior in a tiger suit, a man at home in combat; and Herr himself as hypervigilant mediator, crouching in terror in combat. The press officer and the warrior are both confident in their beliefs; Herr’s the confused one. And his confusion becomes our home, our certainty, our resting place.
The characters throw each other into relief, starting with the officer reporting in official speak. On a helicopter tour, he shows Herr from the air how strikes had leveled the ground beneath what had been the Ho Bo Woods—a place wholly denatured by chemicals and plows and endless fires, “wasting hundreds of acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike.” Describing the process seems to thrill the officer, who’s been telling the same story over and over to every visitor from “half the armies in the world.” Herr’s cool eye studies the guy’s seeming thrill, letting him celebrate the story, till Herr eventually incorporates the guy’s own voice into his interior. Herr’s head just eats the guy’s voice at the end, entering into a long sentence of official-sounding bullshit that warps at the end to Herr’s judgment:
It seemed to be keeping him young, his enthusiasm made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife were full of it, it really showed what you could do if you had the knowhow and the hardware. . . . And if in the months following that operation incidences of enemy activity in the larger area of War Zone C had increased “significantly,” and American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you’d better believe it.
This is the first time Herr appropriates somebody’s voice to channel it like a medium—“none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you’d better believe it.” Moving someone else’s voice into his own head is one way he makes you feel intimate with him as a narrator and with the otherwise wild experiences he writes about.
The officer’s voice stands in stark contrast to the surreal magic of Herr—a man “not nervously organized for war.” He’s the next character, and we see him embedded with troops in a state of profound, ass-clenching fear. How close is he to the grunts? He starts out smelling the awful breath they get from doing speed for night patrols.
Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes too long in a jar. I never saw the need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear. . . . A couple rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for breath.
And from there, he shows the other side of the horror show of war—a guy who’s great at it—a long-range reconnaissance patroller, “Lurp,” in a tiger suit, with Dexedrine in one pocket and downers in the other.
I think he slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway. All I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like looking at the floor of an ocean. He wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar. Even at division he never went anywhere without at least a .45 and a knife, and he thought I was a freak because I wouldn’t carry a weapon. . . . His face was all painted up for night walking like a bad hallucination, not like the painted faces I’d seen in San Francisco only a few weeks before, the other extreme of the same theater.
All these different people are like places on that earlier map. They’re brought together by the accident of history and geography, but what unifies them is that they all pass through Herr’s curious, loving, horrified, beautifully worried mind.
So right off, he readies us for voices weaving together and for radical shifts in tone from light to dark. As a writer you can’t just start jamming stuff together, hoping the reader will magically know what’s in your mind. You have to start out slowly, by laying transitions—like leaving breadcrumbs for the reader. Then the transitions get quicker through the book. As you get used to the method, the breadcrumbs grow fewer and eventually vanish. By the end, it’s all sped-up jump cuts with invisible connections the reader’s already mastered.
A serious student of memoir can pick apart or analyze any master this way to start dismantling the underlying architecture of an otherwise seamless piece of prose.
24 | Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time “losing” than “winning”—if success means typing a polished page that lands in print as is. Scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision. Look at Yeats’s chopped-up fixes in facsimile form, or Ezra Pound’s swashbuckling edits of Eliot’s Waste Land. Without radical overhaul, those works might have sunk like stones.
In fact, after a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I’ve heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful—it’s “fun” only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.
Reading stuff in an antique-sounding idiom is hard for many readers. Young, I hated the oldsters and often swallowed them with my nose pinched, as for a stank spoonful of cod-liver oil. They were rich and white and male. So I started off very slowly, reading closest to my time period and feeling my way back. Frank Conroy mentioned Robert Graves, who was just one generation back; Graves mentioned Samuel Johnson, whose biography I read first. T. S. Eliot mentioned Mallarmé and Valéry and Baudelaire. I started with existing heroes and read back through time.
Since I was always interested in how to be a writer, I also gobbled up literary biographies—
Walter Jackson Bate on Keats and Coleridge; Enid Starkie on Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Diane Middlebrook on Anne Sexton; Ian Hamilton on Robert Lowell; Paul Mariani on William Carlos Williams. Getting a sense of the person’s time in history often helped me to understand their styles in that context—what literary pressures and fashions and values of the day were forging their pages.
Reading through history cultivates in a writer a standard of quality higher than the marketplace. You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history. History’s harder, but also more stable—and the books are better because they’ve been culled over time. Yes, the canon remains deeply flawed and has only begun to open up, but it’s invariably true that work that’s lasted for centuries has been sifted through over that time. Compare this to current work written to express a current trend or fashion—writing about 9/11, say. Writing to try to endure forever also lifts your eyes from the fickle vicissitudes of the wickedly unfair (and often way-dumber-than-you-are) marketplace, which is populated by loads of frauds and charlatans.
Before you can work consciously, though, you go through a phase of developing a critical self, which makes a writer wicked self-conscious. Some students in our three-year MFA program come in defending every word; by mid-term second year, the more determined ones find themselves in despair at their own pages. Through reading and thinking, they’ve raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what’s in their heads onto the work.
These students can’t go back to their old tricks—they can see through those now. But the self-consciousness that hits them weighs them down. It’s like trying to dance with armor strapped on, bulky and awkward. By third year, though, most seem to grow muscles to maneuver in that armor. The self-consciousness becomes simple awareness. Others can’t stand to revise; instead they decide they’re avant-garde, so everybody who doesn’t like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now . . . well, garde.)
Revision is the secret to their troubles—and yours. That, and a sense of quality that exceeds what you can do—that gives you something to strive for. Actually, every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.
In the early draft, the generative self shakes pom-poms at every pen stroke and cheers every crossed t. In a month or so, this diligent and optimistic creature gins out, say, two hundred pages.
The editor self then shows up to heft the pages, give a sniff, and say: Yeah, but . . . The editor condenses two hundred pages down to about thirty. I don’t mean she cuts the rest; she may well boil the whole thing down so the same amount of stuff happens more economically.
The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience. She can’t turn her complaints and suspicions and doubts off.
I find generative me harder to get going. But through sheer hardheadedness, even I can grant myself permission to run buck-wild down the page with sentences dumb as stumps and few glimpses of anything pretty. The idea is to get some scenes down. Let your mind roam down some alleys that may land in dead ends—that’s the nature of the process.
For Lit, I spent maybe two years writing about short stints in California and Mexico and the UK and some old boyfriends before I realized that those stories—by then hundreds of pages—lacked emotional gravitas. They were youthful years of drinking and frittering time away—shallow, easy, sparkly, rather than the more tormented phases in my life, which were less glisteny on the surface and, ergo, harder to rout out. Plus they had zip to do with my mother, whom I’d vowed not to write about anymore. But—surprise!—that was exactly what I needed to write about—how making peace with her legacy was something I had to do to become a mother myself.
Still, those early pages I threw away were somehow necessary, even if I wrote past them. They were way stations I needed to visit to eliminate them from the final itinerary.
In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor. Each page takes you somewhere you need to travel before you can land in the next spot. You zigzag, and in the low moments, you just have to keep plodding on—saying the next small thing about which you feel strongly, trying to nestle down into that single instant of clear memory you know without shadow of doubt is both true and important to who you’ve become.
When it works, it’s like a spell has been cast. For me, it’s less the old world that comes in clear as the old me—how I felt, what I schemed about, who I lied to. But the writing’s seldom pretty—the sentences are just banal.
The pushing comes when editor me comes back to comb over—and over and over—the pages, unpacking each moment. Mostly I take general ideas and try to show them carnally or in a dramatic story. I also interrogate a lot of what I believe: Are you sure that happened? How would he have told it differently? And because the carnal is where I write from, I write a lot of kinesthetic descriptions of my body in old spaces.
All the while, I question. Is this really crucial? Are you writing this part to pose as cool or smart?
For me, the last 20 percent of a book’s improvement takes 95 percent of the effort—all in the editing. I can honestly say not one page I’ve ever published appears anywhere close to how it came out in first draft. A poem might take sixty versions. I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser.
In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity. Each editorial mark can’t register as a “mistake” that threatens the spider ego. Remind yourself that revising proves your care for the reader and the nature of your ambition. Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. And you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts.
There’s a strange freedom in keeping the bar so high that—poor me—I’ll never make it over. If Shakespeare’s my standard, I’m at least free from worrying about the muddy, fickle sales market. Oddly, when I’m working well, the work ceases being about me, even in memoir.
Rewriting on the page is safer than revision in, say, painting, where you can paint past a good place and wreck a canvas. Performers can’t revise at all. A writer can always go back to an earlier draft. The point is to have more curiosity about possible forms the work could take than sense of self-protection for your ego.
So try learning how to cut out the dull parts. Even the smallest towns have coffee shop bulletin boards or community centers with a writer’s workshop now. Even the less good groups can help you by speaking for your potential reader—they’re way better than the echo chamber of your own head.
One of the greatest memoirs of all time is G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. Nearing the end of his life, Hardy felt his mathematical abilities wane and tried to kill himself. He was a nerdy guy with few deep emotional connections, a Sunday cricket-watching bachelor of the type the UK breeds. His friend from Cambridge, C. P. Snow, found him in the hospital, bleakly mocking what a mess he’d made of his near-fatal overdose. Snow’s intro to Hardy’s story is heart-rending:
As a touch of farce, he had a black eye. Vomiting from the drugs, he had hit his head on the lavatory basin. . . . I had to enter into the sarcastic game. I had never felt less like sarcasm, but I had to play. I talked about other distinguished failures at bringing it off. What about the German generals in the last war?
Hardy decided to go on living. Snow says, “His hard, intellectual stoicism came back.” But he was infirm, and he waited for death as many of the infirm elderly do. As most of us someday will.
Hardy’s survival is a profound act of courage, and often when I’ve been despondent about my own work, or when that ghoul, self-pity, has tempted me from the shadows—Your work is aggressively minor, you poser!—I’ve taken comfort in Hardy’s slender book about a subject that bored me un
til his passion became contagious.
Hardy ends with one of the most brutal, yet somehow hopeful, credos for anybody trying to make anything.
I have never done anything “useful.” No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. . . . Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil, and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. . . . I have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more; and these somethings have a value that differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.
I often hand this out to students as they graduate, to remind them that anybody struggling to make something—no matter how they succeed or don’t in terms of the marketplace—has entered into conversation with giants. We’re all in the same arena, and our efforts differ “in degree only, and not in kind.”
Just picking up a pen makes you part of a tradition of writers that dates thousands of years back and includes Homer and Toni Morrison and cave artists sketching buffalo. It’s a corny attitude to revere writers in this celebrity age, when even academics cry the author is dead. Go to any book award ceremony, and we’re like America’s Homeliest Video. We are the inward-looking goofballs who spill on our blouses and look befuddled in our selfies.
But I still feel awe for us—yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.