”I`m bitter, too, about being manipulated, lied to and betrayed. They told us this was a good war, a righteous war, and it wasn`t. It was one of the most evil things I`ve ever been a party to. It was evil, and no amount of self-justification can change that. What could possibly have been redeeming about corrupting an entire culture from the ground up? The worst thing was we really corrupted ourselves. We threw away something that was good in us. As a people, we squandered something very important in Vietnam, and it has to do with our own good opinion of ourselves and our generosity of heart.”
Heinemann returned to Chicago from Vietnam in March of 1968. He was self- indulgence waiting to happen. Scrawny, randy as a goat, his skin still crawling from the filth of months in the jungle campaign, all he wanted to do was eat, take baths and have sex. ”Basically, I was just interested in making my body feel good,” he says.
To earn money, he took a job driving a CTA bus-like father, like son-and that summer he remembers pushing the lumbering vehicle around the streets of the Near North Side, observing the crowds of intense young war protesters gathering in preparation for the Democratic Convention and watching the cops run them out of the park. ”The night of the police riot in front of the Hilton, I was driving my bus down Clark Street and came to Congress Parkway, and between the `L` tracks at Wabash and the Dearborn Station overpass, there were bumper-to-bumper CTA buses loaded with cops. All I could see was busload after busload, probably 2,000 to 3,000 cops. And they were all wearing riot gear. And I knew exactly what was going to happen, because I had already been there. I understood exactly the look in their eyes. I knew there were going to be atrocities and body counts. I understood those cops better than anybody because they reminded me of me. By the end of the convention, I was very depressed. I felt the war had followed me home.
”It wasn`t until later that I actually turned against the war,”
Heinemann recalls. ”Friends of mine were still overseas or dead by then, and I thought it was very peculiar not to support them personally. But I began to change around the early part of 1969. I`d been reading stuff and paying attention to things reported and written about the war. Also, I had begun to go to the VA (Veteran`s Administration) Hospital for treatment of nervousness, delayed stress. The treatment was useless, a bunch of horsy nonsense. They didn`t know how to deal with people coming back from Vietnam. Even so, I had to go there to get my medication. I was taking Valium, Librium,
antidepressants morning, noon and night. I wasn`t sleeping, and I was just in a p——off mood.”
Two important things happened to Heinemann at that point. The first was he married Edith Smith, the Long Island coed whom he had met at a Kentucky college mixer while he was stationed at Ft. Knox during basic training and whom he had corresponded with almost daily while in Vietnam. The second was he enrolled in the story workshop of Columbia College of Chicago.
Heinemann had come back from the war with a burning desire to tell about what he had seen. But with no creative-writing background, he hadn`t the slightest idea how. With Edie working full time to support them (how he must have plied her with soaring allusions to Hemingway!), he now threw himself into the disciplined atmosphere of the story workshop, a formulaic, highly structured approach to the teaching of writing that had been devised by Columbia`s John Schultz, himself a writer of note who had covered the Democratic Convention for the Evergreen Review and written a book about it.
The workshop breaks writing down into certain discrete elements, particularly the ability to visualize and the ability to recall past events. Says Heinemann: ”I came to Columbia with a story already in mind. But the workshop gave me the ability to train myself to see with a kind of vividness. It taught me how to organize my imagination. After a while I could recall everything that happened to me during the war, every shot fired, every breath.”
Schultz says he could tell early on that Heinemann had talent. ”He had the ability to see and to make other people see what he was seeing. I can still remember the first time he ever contributed in class. He recounted a vivid image of two guys who were sitting outside their bunker with their duffels beside them. They hear mortar rounds coming in and they duck into their bunker just in time. The mortar hits outside. When they come back outside, they see that the duffels have been wiped out. And they just start laughing, high on pot. Oh, Larry had talent, all right.
”Larry`s problem, though,” Schultz adds, ”was that he was riddled with uncertainties. He was uncertain about his talent and uncertain about the amount of effort it would take to tell his story. Plus he was overcoming a lot of emotional drain.”
From the start Heinemann had his sights set on writing a novel. To acquaint himself with the form, he read every great war novel he could get his hands on, from ”All Quiet on the Western Front” and ”War and Peace” to
”The Red Badge of Courage” and ”From Here to Eternity.” He remembers being especially impressed by ”Eternity`s” author, the late James Jones.
”He was a no-nonsense storyteller,” Heinemann says. ”He used real language, not contrivances like `fugg.` He had seen the inside of the stockade and knew what it was like to get beaten by guards for no reason. He was able to put into amber something about Americans as a people in the years 1940 and `41, and it was important that he did so because after World War II we were never quite the same. I honestly regret I never got a chance to meet him.”
Heinemann labored singlemindedly on the assignments he turned in to workshop. Every story represented a prospective chapter for his novel. Much of it was raw-only 30 pages of those early writings ever saw their way into finished manuscript-but gradually the shape and form of what was to become
”Close Quarters” evolved.
It was during this period that Heinemann`s writing got a major lift, when he took time out to write a play for the Body Politic in 1972. He took a narrative from the embryonic ”Close Quarters” and converted it into a one-act drama. ”I learned a great deal from that,” he says. ”It was then that my writing took a leap for the better. There is something about seeing your work on stage, getting physically involved in that way, that illuminates the writing event.”
In 1974 Heinemann`s career received another boost-one that many writers of fiction never attain-publication. Sweeter yet, it was not mere publication in the Southern University Bill Faulkner Mountain Review. It was publication in a widely circulated, if not tremendously highbrow magazine-Penthouse. Sandwiched between all the skin was a chapter from Heinemann`s gestating book. Elated, Heinemann decided he had a future as a writer. ”It really began to occur to me that I could make it, that being a writer was something I excelled at. A long time before, I had decided that the important thing about the book was to get the story straight. Even if nobody ever read it. Now all of a sudden the book changed from being a catharsis to an actual piece of journeyman art.”
He decided to test the waters. From a friend he got the name of a New York agent, Ellen Levine, and sent her his ”Close Quarters” manuscript. She wrote back a simple and immensely welcome sentence, ”I can sell anything you can write.”
Heinemann began working on the book in earnest. Though he had by now graduated and taken a job teaching creative writing at Columbia, he still attended story workshop religiously like any student, grasping for feedback and pointers. He acknowledges a deep debt to Schultz, who consulted with him tirelessly in whipping the manuscript of ”Close Quarters” into publishable shape.
”One of Larry`s biggest difficulties,” Schultz recalls, ”was that he had a contradictory passion to tell his story. He wanted to tell it, but at the same time he had tremendous reluctance, for fear that it was too provocative, too disturbing, in terms of how the audience might react. So there was always the issue of getting him to tell more of the story. He tended to avoid much of the atrocity stuff at first.”
In the end, largely at Schultz`s urging, it all went into the mix-gang rapes, torture of suspected Viet Cong, wanton executions. The result was a book of extraordinary and brutal imagery. With his manuscript complete at last, Heinemann fired it off to Levine. And true to her word, she quickly struck paydirt. An editor at Farrar, Straus responded that he would be strongly interested in the 180-page manuscript if Heinemann polished up certain parts.
There followed an intensive three-day session in which Schultz, closeted with Heinemann, critiqued the book line by line. The effort bore fruit when Farrar, Straus agreed to accept the rewrite. Heinemann would later repay Schultz`s tutelage by thanking him publicly in the book`s introduction.
With perhaps a touch of pedantry, Schultz still maintains that the book was unfinished. ”I would have preferred that Larry rewrite it yet another time,” he grouses. ”But he had put seven or eight years in on it at that point, and Farrar, Straus was pressing him, so he went with what he had. Had he made the attempt to go the last mile, I think he would have had a truly great book about the war. But it is a very fine book, in any case.”
”Close Quarters” was received well by the critics. Besides establishing Heinemann as a significant voice among the maturing crop of Vietnam chroniclers, a group that includes such names as Tim O`Brien, author of
”Going After Cacciato”; Robert Mason, author of ”Chickenhawk”; Jack Fuller, author of ”Fragments”; Robert Olen Butler, author of ”The Alleys of Eden”; and C.D.B. Bryan, author of ”Friendly Fire”, it gave him instant visibility among the ranks of young Chicago writers bumping like moths against the screen door of fame.
”Paco`s Story,” for which Heinemann received a $10,000 advance from Farrar, Straus in 1979, had much the same genesis as ”Close Quarters.”
Though teaching creative writing full time, he squeezed in room for story workshop, attempting to lay the foundations for a second novel. The theme this time, he had determined, would be the war`s effect on a returning infantryman. Once again he sought early input from Schultz and from another faculty member, Betty Shiflett. But here, the story takes a turn.
Bad blood had begun to develop between Heinemann and Schultz. According to Heinemann, the issues were entirely job-related-he chafed over certain scheduling and personnel decisions Schultz had made in the fiction department. But one wonders if there wasn`t also some of the protege`s inevitable desire to be free of the mentor`s influence. In any case, matters eventually came to a head. In January of 1986 Heinemann quit the only full-time job he had ever known, with nary a sou to his name.
He had never been one to accumulate money, treating subsistence with a certain cavalierness that at times had alarmed Edie. Years before, he had driven a cab but quit because the dispatcher, irked that Heinemann refused to pay him the customary baksheesh, kept giving him clunker cabs. Later Heinemann walked out on a job as a Convenient Food Mart counterman after receiving his fee from Penthouse, grandiosely telling the manager that he had just earned more money than the manager could ever afford to pay him.
But now, with two children, a wife who had left the workforce and a large old house to maintain, Heinemann was suddenly up against it. By his own estimate, the family had ”enough to live on for only about three months when I quit.”
Edie remembers being only slightly frightened by the cutoff of income. Her predominant feeling was elation ”because it meant he was finally going to focus on what was important to him, his writing. I felt Columbia was getting in the way of his creativity and self-concept, and I was eager for him to separate from there.”
While a teacher at Columbia, Heinemann had had the luxury of time to fiddle with the manuscript of ”Paco`s Story.” As was the case with ”Close Quarters,” he was assembling it from modular pieces, not striving
particularly hard for organization. And as also was the case with ”Close Quarters,” he had taken seven years to put together a couple of hundred pages. Not terribly fast when one considers that James Joyce had, in a similar seven years, written the thousand-page text of ”Ulysses.”
Now, however, the need to complete ”Paco`s Story” asserted itself.
”All of a sudden I had to finish it because I needed the money,”
Heinemann says. ”But I didn`t do it half-a—-,” he adds quickly. ”I took six months and did it right.”
He insists that if he had stayed at Columbia, ”the book would still be on my desk and I would still be horsing with it. Since I left the story workshop, my writing and my life have thrived. I really have to thank John Schultz in a backhanded way for showing me that teaching was not my life`s work. John helped me up, and then he helped me out.”
Indeed, the world has opened up for Heinemann like a green and fragrant flower. Since quitting Columbia, he has not only finished ”Paco`s Story” but received a $37,000 advance from Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a nonfiction book on delayed-stress syndrome among Vietnam veterans and a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also won, in addition to the National Book Award, the prestigious Carl Sandburg Medal awarded annually by the Friends of the Chicago Public Library and the fiction prize of the Society of Midland Authors, all for ”Paco`s Story.”
Heinemann`s success has also opened up the world for Edie, whose years of self-sacrifice are about to come to a close. ”I was brought up to be a supportive woman,” she says, ”but at the same time I had my own ambitions. It was hard balancing my recognition that what Larry was doing was the necessary fulfillment of his talent with my own desire to find out what I could do. But I feel free to do that now because he`s on his way.”
Consequently, she has begun to pursue a career as a mediator, settling the legal disputes of private citizens for the Neighborhood Justice Center of Chicago. She is considering entering law school.
”Paco`s Story” is a wisp of a book, barely 200 pages soaking wet. But it compresses economically within its covers the haunting tale of Paco Sullivan, the sole survivor of Alpha Company, which has been obliterated at Firebase Harriette in Vietnam by a sudden holocaust of artillery fire. Paco lies for two days in the hot sun, his body in shreds and tatters, before being picked up by friendly forces and tended by a burned-out medic, whose own fragile hold on health and sanity is destroyed by the plight of this mutilated, ruined young soldier. Paco is ”saved” on the operating table and shipped home, where, gimpy and horribly scarred, he begins a bleak and aimless odyssey, seeking relief from the memories that torment him. He gives a bus driver all his money and tells him to take him as far as the money will permit. The driver complies, letting Paco off in a forsaken little prairie village called Boone, where Paco is treated rudely and with smug indifference by the self-absorbed townspeople. He finds work, after a humiliating search, in the Texas Lunch Diner, a hashhouse owned by a World War II veteran who hires him to wash dishes. By day Paco performs the symbolic task of trying to clean the uncleanable, dishes and pots destined to become dirty again as fast as he can wash them. By night he sweats it out in the darkness of his fleabag hotel room where, in spite of all the pills and cheap wine he can consume, he cannot insulate himself against the ghosts of Vietnam that rage through his brain-ghosts of death and savagery and ghastly rape-murder. Paco`s pain and alienation are only intensified by his unfulfilled lust for a young woman named Cathy, who has the adjoining room and whose energetic lovemaking he must listen to every night through the paper-thin walls. One day he steals into her room and reads her diary, in which she has inscribed her own sexual fantasies about Paco`s battle scars, leading to a curiously poignant and nihilistic denouement.
It is a book that attempts to capture, on both a realistic and metaphoric level, the living death faced by some who left their youth in the hellholes of Viet Nam. How well does it succeed?
