(Professional driver on a closed course: Do not attempt this in your family car.)
One of the funny things is that I knew pretty much what I wanted to write about the hidden history of the book, about what actually went into the making of Lizzie’s War.
One of the funny things is that I knew pretty much what I wanted to write about the hidden history of the book, about what actually went into the making of Lizzie’s War. The personal stuff, all “that David Copperfield kind of crap,” as the immortal Holden Caulfield put it. I could have written about how I remember standing on my writing desk in a chilly cottage on Eighth Avenue in San Francisco’s Sunset district in 1985, painting a mad visionary mandala mural of my future writing work that spilled over parts of two walls and a portion of the ceiling. What was then called Careers of Faith was a purple smear fairly close to the center, about a foot down into the lower right quadrant. It was to be a novel about the nature of vocation, about the calling to a certain kind of work that forms the backbone of a life, and it was to be part of a mad vast visionary bildungsroman in five parts: Journey to Babel, inspired by Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest cycle, Children of Violence, and a kabalistic reading of the Pentateuch, with elements of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga, and Proust. A few of the surviving notes for the book date back to that period, but most of the notes are dated after 1989, which is when a girlfriend of mine in the process of becoming an ex-girlfriend threw out everything in my file cabinet. The folder is the same folder from 1985, though: she was a practical woman, and kept all the empty folders for re-use.
I could have written about how there is a thread through the labyrinth of my history just in the first scrawled copies of what became the book’s epigraphs.
I could have written about how there is a thread through the labyrinth of my history just in the first scrawled copies of what became the book’s epigraphs. (One of my favorites, one close to the heart of the novel, “The truth is that the more ourselves we are, the less self is in us,” was copied from Meister Eckhart in a little coffee shop then called The Owl and the Monkey, on Ninth Avenue near Irving Street in San Francisco, in October of 1993, a month after my best friend died of cancer.) Or about how the seeds of scenes often precede the writing of the scenes by decades, for me: there is a barely legible note about love and toothpaste etiquette, written on a slip torn from a memo pad and dated early 1992, that didn’t find its place until late in the writing of the novel, some twelve years later.
I could have written about the early attempts at getting the novel started, found in the drafts from as early as 1996, when I was still trying to write the story in first person. (The book’s original first line was “I am the son of a Marine Corps officer and an actress, which I believe explains a lot.”)
In early 1997, there was a huge period of historical reading about Vietnam and the sixties in the U.S. that generated such a volume of notes, scenes, and sketches that it all proved indigestible at the time. I set the book aside to begin That Good Part, which would eventually become The Monk Downstairs. And there is the second real run at writing the book, mere weeks after my mother died in late 1997, when the first sixty-five pages of That Good Part struck me as so insipid and inadequate in the light of mortality that I couldn’t go on with it. But that turned out to be true of everything I tried to write for the next two years.
So the next deeply serious run at writing the book dates to 2000, a sand castle effort that left very little after the tide went out except the shedding of the first person perspective and what eventually became the book’s real opening line, “Detroit was burning.”
And then there is the actual beginning of the coherent work on the book, in the late summer of 2001, the first three chapters written while living in a residential hotel in Virginia Beach in the nightmare weeks after my marriage of nine years broke up. My ex-wife had always said, with her characteristic perceptive edge, that I wrote best when I was lonely and miserable. And so I suppose that at that point I was finally lonely and miserable enough.
My ex-wife had always said, with her characteristic perceptive edge, that I wrote best when I was lonely and miserable.
I could write about how, long after it was conceived, the book was enriched by ongoing, deeply moving talks with beloved veterans; about Fred Boze, a former Marine recon guy, who would ply me with bourbon and daze me with truth; about the vets I met at churches and on beaches and in bars; or about how my father finally began talking about the war (or at least my brother and I finally learned how to let him) in the late nineties. I could write about the unforeseen miracles of healing that my work on the book led to in my relationship with him, about sitting with him at his kitchen counter while he read through early drafts of the Vietnam material, correcting my radio procedure, personnel deployments, and weaponry, the process of reading throwing off precious new stories from him, like sparks from a struck flint.
If I were a grad student and all this was previously undiscovered working notes of Faulkner’s, my career would be made.
I could tell funny stories about the historical accuracies and inaccuracies of the book, about squabbling with my editor about the birth date of Slurpees, the model year of the various species of Ford station wagons, and what was on television in the summer of 1967 (“Gentle Ben,” it turns out, did not debut until that fall, requiring the change of a lunchbox theme to The Jungle Book). About exchanges with my copyeditors about the currency of AA jargon, the hyphenation of the M–16 rifle, and what the vocabulary of the attitudes toward the war was at any given moment in those days.
It’s all here, in sloppy piles of paper, and it’s interesting enough. If I were a grad student and all this was previously undiscovered working notes of Faulkner’s, my career would be made. I’d love to see that book myself. But I’m not Faulkner, and as it is, this stuff will most likely get lost or thrown out the next time I move. My ex-wife, a genuinely decent person, recently redid her attic and discovered six archive boxes stuffed with the working notes and drafts of my earliest novels, and took it upon herself to drive them over here for me. I had nowhere to put them (my modest little apartment here in Virginia Beach resembles nothing so much as a phone booth stuffed with books), and so she and I sat on the bumper of her car with the trunk open and went through them all, box by box. It was a lovely, poignant walk down memory lane, as she had shared in the journey of all of those books. We laughed, we cried, and then she helped me carry the boxes one by one to the dumpster outside my apartment building and we heaved them over the edge. That was that and we went and had a couple beers.
In the end, impaled on the horns of the dilemma of writing an honest essay, I did what I always do, which is get up in the morning and start the coffee and plunge into the unfathomable to grope and grapple with the ungraspable.
“The only real rest comes when you’re alone with God,” Rumi says, in a bit of his poetry that I have taped above the keyboard on my computer. “Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you have an address here.” The spirit behind the words resides in that nowhere, and the sustaining and renewing joy of writing, for me, is to dissolve into that nowhere like sugar into tea or salt into a stew. And the flavor and substance of what results, to be served for better or worse at the addresses here, is as mysterious to me as to anyone.
It’s often said that everyone has at least one good book in them, which I tend to believe, and as anyone who has sat beside a stranger at a bar in the proper mood and fed the story of his life with a couple beers can attest. Maybe there is even a novel behind the writing of any given novel. But maybe, too, books like that are best left to the oral tradition, to be spun out on porch swings on summer nights and in letters written at kitchen tables at 2 A.M., in fishing boats and in bars, where after two-and-a-third beers it all seems just fascinating enough. The books we put our sober energy into have a life of their own, apart from the stories behind them, and maybe that is for the best too.
&nb
sp; The books we put our sober energy into have a life of their own, apart from the stories behind them, and maybe that is for the best too.
So perhaps it would be best if we think of this letter as an extended monologue by one more maniac in a bar, or a wild screed you just got in the mail from an old friend, dependent mostly on your patience and willingness to buy the next round or decipher the handwriting, and let it go at that. It is my understanding that people are allowed to babble about God and destiny in bars or at AA or in letters written at 2 in the morning, and it is in that context that I offer you this poor effort at saying something about the spirit behind the words of this book. Tomorrow Lizzie’s War will get on with its life on the shelves of the world, for better or worse, despite my best efforts to enhance its interest for you, the reader. And tomorrow my morning self will get on with the real work of that blind wrestling with the One whose face we cannot look upon and live; and my afternoon self, when his shift comes on, will take care of his business too, as best he can, trying to keep up with the rent payments on the address here, somewhat handicapped, as always, by a conspicuous limp.
Best wishes, and thank you for your patience,
—Tim Farrington
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL to Renée Sedliar of Harper San Francisco, a writers’ editor if ever there was one, for her guts and smarts, her road-tested sense of humor, and her marvelous ear. Thank you, Miki Terasawa, for all the poetry and the Sacred Rothko. Thanks also to Margery Buchanan, Terri Leonard, Carolyn Allison-Holland, to Priscilla Stuckey, Michael Maudlin, and Mark Tauber, and to Steve Hanselman and the rest of the awesome team at Harper San Francisco.
I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the veterans in my life: to my father especially, and to Col. Howard Lee and all the Marines of my childhood, for making service and heroism a daily reality to me from the beginning; and to the vets at St. Aidan’s, especially Fred Boze, who have so generously shared their lives and experience with me. Thanks for all the sessions with Dr. Jim and Dr. Jack, Fred, and for the trip to the Wall.
A special thank-you to Elizabeth Letts, for lending both her fine novelist’s eye and her obstetric expertise to a reading and repair of the relevant chapters. Any remaining medical discrepancies are my own damn fault.
Thanks too to Anne Poole for keeping me laughing throughout; to my Aunt Mary Ann and the rest of my family for all their love and support, and for keeping the “fun” in dysfunctionality; and to Andrea Marks, the Diamonds and Springers, the Waides, and the rest of my church “family,” who make it all worthwhile.
I am grateful to the always-refreshing Laurie Horowitz, and to Matthew Snyder of CAA, for their intermedial labors.
Heartfelt thanks, as ever, to Linda Chester, of the Linda Chester Literary Agency, for steadfast friendship and elegant support. And my agent, Laurie Fox, remains my truest literary friend and comrade, an inspiration and a joy. Thank you, Laurie.
ALSO BY TIM FARRINGTON
The Monk Downstairs
Blues for Hannah
The California Book of the Dead
Copyright
The book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
LIZZIE’S WAR. A Novel. Copyright © 2005 by Tim Farrington. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 9780062016706
Version 06212013
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