Before, there was only chaos. Frantic scrabbling for loose change dropped from the pockets of foundations. Occasional reading gigs at sleepy Southern universities that offer an annual literary prize named for a mountain and maintain a special corner in the cafeteria where Bill Faulkner once put sweetener in his coffee. Automatic inclusion in the small, aging fraternity of Vietnam warrior/writers who are forever analyzing the same retreating events for us as their hairlines recede, in a display almost as incongruous as the Rolling Stones still passing themselves off as rock`s Bad Boys at the absurd age of 50. Permanent inclusion in this Vietnam-wracked circle but no validation as an artist of the larger, transcendent sort, no instant name recognition and, above all, no money rolling in, no coin of the realm, no jack.
Then came the Big Bang, the moment last fall when Chicago author Larry Heinemann was reborn as a fiery celestial object in the literary firmament. In one awesome instant Heinemann, former Army reconnaissance sergeant, Convenient Food Mart counterman, bus driver, cabbie and creative writing instructor who two years ago threw job and security out the window to devote himself full time to the onanism of novel-writing, came out of left field to win what is arguably its most coveted American prize, the National Book Award.
It was on a Monday night in early November that Heinemann left the pack of struggling no-names behind. The brahmins of the New York publishing world had gathered expectantly in the gold-leafed splendor of the grand ballroom of Manhattan`s Pierre Hotel. They sipped champagne and showered admiring glances on the odds-on favorite to win the award, Toni Morrison, author of the highly acclaimed novel ”Beloved.” Morrison, with several best-selling books to her credit, including the much-honored ”Song of Solomon,” is black, popular and very commercial, the right political ingredients in the industry`s eyes for anointment as the country`s top writer of fiction. But if Morrison was to be denied, then almost certainly the prize would go to Philip Roth, the celebrated author of ”The Counterlife,” who, having won a long-ago (1960)
National Book Award for his first significant work, ”Goodbye, Columbus,” was something of a sentimental favorite. The black-tie crowd had to make do, however, with Roth`s aura that evening, rather than his presence, for he was in Poland to attend a theatrical event of no little irony in that country of ancient anti-Semitism and modern Communist squeamishness: a stage adaptation of ”Portnoy`s Complaint.”
Lost in the chic literary parlando swirling about him was Heinemann, author of the 1986 portrait of a hollowed-out Vietnam veteran, ”Paco`s Story,” for which he had been nominated, and the 1976 Vietnam war novel,
”Close Quarters.” ”Paco`s Story” had received critical plaudits, to be sure-Los Angeles Times critic Richard Eder called it ”deeply original and affecting”-but it was hardly on the tip of everybody`s tongue. Truly, the New York Times Book Review hadn`t even bothered to review the novel until the day before the awards ceremony-though it had been published 11 months before. Seated next to his wife, Edie, Heinemann rustled loosely in his rented tuxedo-”for a person in my financial circumstances, it was a very odd way to blow $55,” he says, ”but I figured it`s one night of my life, let`s make it memorable”-while next to him loomed the tall, elegant figure of Roger Straus, president of Heinemann`s publishing house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In contrast to Heinemann`s roomy, lusterless tux, Straus` own shone like black marble and fit like a calfskin glove. All the men at the table, to Heinemann`s lights, looked as if they had spent the noon hour on Bond Street. But if Heinemann felt out of place (”Look out, his shirt`s so stiff, it seems almost alive. It`s . . . it`s climbing out of his cummerbund”) or undervalued (”Oh, him, he lives on Lake Michigan, in that place with the buffoonish city council. Sat out the war protest in Vietnam and is trying to work out his guilt by writing about it. Fair little author, I guess”), it was nothing more than he expected. He had come to New York with no hope of winning, figuring the gods had been sufficiently generous, not to mention quixotic, in letting him be one of five nominees.
Confesses Heinemann: ”We had a little party the Sunday night before, and I told my friends I was going to put all my energy and jive into introducing myself around. There was no reason for me to expect to win the award. Being nominated was recognition enough. All I wanted to do was meet people who could help me, to do the best I could in front of an audience at which I`d only get one shot. At the very least, it was a night on the town in New York with my wife, which we don`t get very often, and a chance to have dinner with my editor and next day a business meeting with my agent. Then I planned to fly home, take my tux back to Gingiss, and that would be that.”
It didn`t turn out that way. As Heinemann and the entire Pierre ballroom listened incredulously, author Hilma Wolitzer, chairperson of the National Book Award fiction jury, stood at the podium, opened the envelope and announced that the 1987 winner for fiction was none other than . . . ”Paco`s Story.”
In Warsaw, Philip Roth`s jaw fell. In the Pierre, you could hear a pin drop. Heinemann`s own reaction was temporary catatonia. ”I was stunned. I sucked in a breath. Then Roger Straus, who, I must tell you, is not given to demonstration-he`s so cultured, he doesn`t even have an American accent-he grabs me around the shoulders and says, `Get up, get up, it`s you, it`s you.` So I get up and start for the podium. My first thought was, `I sure hope my zipper is zipped.` ”
Suddenly Heinemann is in the bigs. His mailbox bulges with offers. His phone squalls from its cradle like a colicky baby. Journalists and talk-show hosts besiege him with requests for interviews. The Chinese government wants him for an April writer`s conference in Shanghai, along with Harrison Salisbury and Norman Cousins. During the December summit, the Canadian Broadcasting Co. asked him to join authors Irving Howe and Jonathan Schell in a panel discussion of American perceptions of the Soviet people.
For all of that, Heinemann still must fight the public perception that he is a chain of bakeries. One gray Saturday afternoon in December, he gave a reading at the Fiery Clock Face, a bookstore in Edgewater. The event had been well-advertised, and the store, a warm little place with a tin ceiling and quilts on the walls, had been made ready for a sizable crowd of readers anxious to shake the hand of the new National Book Award winner. A sheet cake sprawled across a table. The scent of mulled wine filled the air. But in spite of his newfound prominence, all that Heinemann could draw was a group of about 20, including an elderly man in thrift-shop clothes; older ladies who sat holding their gloves; a couple resembling Elmer and Mrs. Fudd who entered, browsed and left in the middle of Heinemann`s talk; a woman wearing octagonal spectacles and the androphobic look of a hardened feminist; a couple of kids
(his own); and the ward committeeman, Robert Remer, representing what prides itself on being an arts-conscious community.
This is in no way a reflection on Heinemann, of course. What it means is if you win an Oscar, Emmy or Grammy, you can be assured that most of America will know your name, and should you happen to pass through Chicago and wish to do whatever it is you do in front of a crowd, you could probably fill a large hall and in some cases-if you are Barbra Streisand or Michael Jackson-even the Rosemont Horizon. But win the National Book Award for a work of literature, and you cannot even attract enough people to make a decent line at one of the Horizon`s refreshment stands. The reason is plain enough. The audience for serious fiction in the United States is even smaller than the audience for classical music. I once attended a reading by Saul Bellow. Now Saul Bellow does not make motion pictures, nor does he sing (that I know of), but he does write like an angel, and he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he does happen to live right here in Chicago. Yet on the night in question, he fell somewhat short of filling the Goodman Theatre with its 650-odd seats, and many of the occupants were VIPs who had been invited by the Goodman to sop gravy with Bellow beforehand and, in effect, paper the house. The man considered by many to be America`s premier man of letters pulls a crowd that, if it were the most that showed up for a Motley Crue concert, would cause the show to be canceled. It`s one of life`s great riddles.
To his credit, Heinemann performed for his two dozen admirers with the same energy as if he were addressing throngs on the Capitol Mall. Wearing a gold-and-purple shawl-collared sweater, which his wife had knitted and which had been put through the wash the night before, producing visible signs of shrinkage, he read liberally and with grace from ”Paco`s Story,” the language of the novel, graphic and scatological, juxtaposing queerly with the prim old ladies holding their gloves. Afterward Heinemann mingled and signed copies of ”Paco” and ”Close Quarters.”
By and by, his 7-year-old son, Preston, who had been sitting restlessly on the floor playing with a music box, began tugging on his sleeve. ”Dad?”
”What is it, Son?”
”Can we go now? This is boring.”
”Yes, Son. We`re just wrapping up.”
There is no way to know how many literary events end because the guest of honor has to get the kids home, but one would venture to say it is not a common experience. It is hard to imagine, say, Norman Mailer rushing off to get the little guy to soccer or Nadine Gordimer splitting to take her brood to the mall. But Larry Heinemann stands out in contrast. He is a corner-tavern, station-wagon kind of guy, a man more at home fixing his kitchen sink than cultivating a literary presence. If the Book Award jury, as has been suggested, wanted to make a statement this year by selecting someone who is outside publishing`s increasingly exclusive club, it couldn`t have made a better choice.
Whether Heinemann will remain unaffected by the withering pressure of heightened visibility is another matter. The night of the awards he was introduced to the more intoxicating aspects of fame. After the ceremonies a group of editors from Farrar, Straus announced they were taking him and Edie to the venerable Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel for a celebration. When they got there, they ran into a stone wall in the form of a haughty maitre d`.
”He told us that the Oak Room had closed and that we would have to sit in the bar,” Heinemann recalls. ”That didn`t seem very inviting for what we had in mind. Monday-night football was on, and it was pretty noisy. So Michael Di Capua, a Farrar, Straus editor, points at me and says, `This man just won the National Book Award, isn`t there something you can do?` And the guy`s body language just changed. He knew what that was. He got his menus out and took us to a big leather booth in the corner of the Oak Room. It had a plaque above it that said, `George M. Cohan used to sit in this booth and pass many pleasant hours.` I later found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald used to drink there, too.” This last is a distinction no doubt shared by many an establishment in New York, but that cannot detract from the head-turning effects of being treated as if one were cut from the same royal cloth as those old boys.
If Heinemann needed an antidote, however, he got it the next day when the New York Times checked in with an article the tenor of which was that New York literati were aghast that a nobody like Heinemann had edged out Toni Morrison. A week later the Times ran a second such article, in the form of an analysis piece.
”What happened? That was the question everyone was asking last week . . . ,” the second article began, going on to compare ”Paco`s Story”
unfavorably with ”Beloved.” The story left the clear implication that Heinemann`s victory had less to do with the quality of his work than with two other possible factors-the public`s sudden passion for movies and books centering on Vietnam and a desire on the part of fiction jurors to bring back the days of the early 1960s when the National Book Awards frequently went to previously unknown writers, such as Roth and Walker Percy, instead of to
”safe” big-name writers, as they so often do now.
These unflattering sentiments rankle Heinemann, but not terribly much. Let the henhouse cackle. After all, he won the bloody thing and has $10,000 and a trophy designed by the venerable sculptor Louise Nevelson to prove it. More than that, he has acquired a prestige and security that a billion other competing authors would quite unhesitatingly kill for, grinding away at their word processors, flinging stories, novels, poems and plays into the cold, infinite void, all the while infuriating their spouses, neglecting their children, teaching no-brainer classes, getting paid almost nil, rubbing up to deans, chasing grant money, forgoing home improvements, forgoing new cars, grinding away, grinding away, steering for the stars and somehow wiping out on the reefs of obscurity.
”What this means,” Heinemann says with the conviction of one who knows, ”is it won`t be so much of a mindless hustle anymore. Now I won`t have to wait tables or drive taxis. It`s for sure my wife won`t have to work the checkout at the Jewel.”
