by Tim O'Brien
Chapter 23, “Home School”
The George Orwell quotation appears in “The Freedom of the Press,” Orwell’s proposed preface to Animal Farm. This eloquent, tightly reasoned essay is well worth reading in its entirety and is as pertinent to our circumstances today as it was more than seventy years ago. Written in 1945, the essay was discovered in 1972 among Orwell’s papers and first published in the Times Literary Supplement on September 15, 1972. See: https://www.slideshare.net/belike_Abee/george-orwell-preface-to-animal-farm-or-the-freedom-of-the-press.
The Picasso quotation is from “Picasso Speaks,” The Arts, vol. 3, May 1923, pp. 315–29, ed. Marius de Zayas. Reprinted in Alfred Barr, Picasso (1946).
The Marianne Moore quotation is from her poem “Poetry,” which can be found at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/poetry.
Joseph Conrad’s “the sitting down is all” is from a letter to Edward Garnett (March 29, 1898), who is credited with discovering and nurturing Conrad’s literary genius. See https://www.williamlanday.com/2012/11/16/conrad-the-sitting-is-all, and “The Editor Who Pulled Joseph Conrad from the Slush Pile,” at https://lithub.com/the-editor-who-pulled-joseph-conrad-from-the-slush-pile.
Chapter 29, “Turkey Capital of the World”
For information on the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota, I consulted a fascinating and lavishly detailed contemporaneous account, originally published in the New York Times and reprinted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on December 26, 2015. The account can be found online at http://www.startribune.com/dec-26-1862-38-dakota-men-executed-in-mankato/138273909.
For most of the demographic and statistical information about Worthington, Minnesota, I relied on the city’s data website at http://www.city-data.com/city/Worthington-Minnesota.html. For information on Worthington’s settlement by the white man, General Judson W. Bishop’s “History of the St. Paul & Sioux City Railroad, 1864–1881” describes in striking detail his wagon journey across a “desolate prairie.” The town of Worthington would soon be founded at a lakeside spot along the route Bishop had explored by wagon. Bishop’s narrative can be accessed at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/lhbum/0866e/0866e_0436_0455.pdf. For background on Worthington’s settlement by Scandinavian and German immigrants, I relied on Nobles County History, edited by Al Goff. A brief but enlightening overview of Worthington’s early days can be found at http://www.noblescountyhistory.org/nobles-county-history. Other valuable information, both descriptive and statistical, appeared in a lengthy portrait of my hometown by St. Paul Pioneer Press writer Tad Vezner. Vezner’s report, published in the Pioneer Press on September 17, 2011, and updated on February 3, 2017, is available at https://www.twincities.com/2011/09/17/worthington-minn-was-dying-then-enter-the-immigrants.
Information regarding the incident of alleged excessive force by Worthington Police Department officers was obtained from a variety of sources, including the city’s newspaper, the ACLU of Minnesota, and Minnesota Public Radio. These sources can be accessed at http://www.dglobe.com/news/government-and-politics/4367954-citys-independent-investigation-still-underway-aclu-lawsuit; https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/press-releases/worthington-man-sues-local-law-enforcement-over-assault; https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/06/22/aclu-calls-for-probe-of-violent-arrest-in-worthington; and https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/over-year-ago-i-was-assaulted-police-officer-im-still-waiting-justice. A video of the violent incident can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzrOobi5BRY&feature=youtube.
An example of how the nation’s contentious immigration issues have spilled over into the small city of Worthington is available at http://www.citypages.com/news/worthington-father-of-four-ordered-deported-after-24-years-in-america/447754933e.
Details about the inspiring life of my childhood friend Mike Bjerkesett can be accessed at http://www.startribune.com/obituary-mike-bjerkesett-a-pioneer-of-handicap-accessible-housing/412617083.
Chapter 30, “Pride (III)”
The Wendell Berry quotation is from his essay “The Failure of War,” which can be found in Berry’s book Citizenship Papers. The essay can also be retrieved at https://www.lionsroar.com/the-failure-of-war.
The Gandhi quotation can be found on several online websites simply by typing the quotation into a search engine. However, I was unable to locate a precise citation. Although the quotation may prove unattributable, or apocryphal, I have included it anyway, for obviously someone has expressed a thought I wish had been my own.
Chapter 32, “Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (II)”
For information and opinion about the presumed connections between “Cat in the Rain” and Hemingway’s personal life, I relied on Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway; Carlos Baker’s biography, also titled Hemingway; Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography; Carlene Brennen’s Hemingway’s Cats; and Simon Lavery’s analysis at http://tredynasdays.co.uk/2013/10/ernest-hemingway-cat-rain-critique-pt-ii.
Chapter 33, “Home School”
Calculations of war deaths, even in contemporary times, are at best approximate. Statisticians do not stroll with their calculators through ongoing battles or into burning jungles and cities. Even if war deaths could be accurately counted, categorized, and reported, little such effort has been expended over recorded history. Numerical evidence is thin and suspect. Estimates of fatalities can vary, as in the case of World War Two, by as many as 30 million people. And there is frequently no way of retrieving or evaluating methodologies used to compute war deaths that were reported in ancient, medieval, and some modern textual sources. Still, as a starting point, I consulted an online website that attempts to estimate “all deaths that are either directly or indirectly caused by war,” including “the deaths of military personnel which are the direct result of military wartime activities” and including the deaths of civilians that have resulted from “war-induced epidemics, diseases, famines, atrocities, genocide, etc.” The web site can be accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Works_cited.
Information gleaned from Wikipedia, in my experience, is not uniformly trustworthy, therefore I consulted the relevant references cited there for each of the wars mentioned in chapter 33. Where I had reason to question either the accuracy or the verifiability of any range of estimated deaths in a particular war, I reported only the lowest available estimate. I reported no estimates that could not, in some way, be independently justified. But in a certain sense, the precise number of wartime casualties is irrelevant. To a grieving father, one is a large number.
Chapter 34, “Home School”
I am indebted to Mark A. Nichipor of the National Park Service, whose knowledge, wisdom, and encouragement were invaluable, and who cheerfully responded to my barrage of naïve questions about the battles at Lexington and Concord. I also wish to acknowledge a privately printed work of scholarship, We Were There, by Vincent J. R. Kehoe. Rich in human detail, this two-volume work offers a compilation of British and American accounts of the battles on April 19, 1775, including diaries, letters, and after-action reports. I found many of the quotations in chapter 34 in Kehoe’s compendium. Among other sources consulted: Allen French, The Day of Lexington and Concordand A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston; Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord; National Park Service map of the British expedition’s route of march; Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 2; and Richard Frothingham Jr., History of the Siege of Boston and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. It was also instructive to spend a day walking a considerable distance along what is now called Battle Road. Though I was burdened only by my clothing, the hike soon lost its romance.
Chapter 39, “Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (III)”
The Andrea Pitzer quotation can be found in her biography The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Pitzer’s superb book offers a reminder that Nabokov flatly dismissed the work of Hemingway, whose prose style could not have stood in greater contrast to his own. Hemingway, perhaps with Nabokov in mind, issued his own famously dismissive comm
ent: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” It is interesting to note that both writers had taken instruction in boxing. How entertaining it might have been to sit ringside as these two ironed out their aesthetic differences.
The quotation from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Arch of Triumph appears in a Random House e-book edition translated by Walter Sorell and Denver Lindley.
Chapter 43, “War Buddies”
Beyond anecdotal evidence, I was able to find very little precise data regarding the moral and political judgments of present-day Vietnam veterans looking back on their war. A handful of studies shed oblique light on the matter, however, and the following sources were helpful: Jonathan D. Klingler and J. Tyson Chatagnier, “Are You Doing Your Part? Veterans’ Political Attitudes and Heinlein’s Conception of Citizenship,” http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095327X12471932; Farai Chideys, “This Election Is Testing the Republican Loyalties of Military Voters,” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-impact-will-the-military-vote-have; Frank Newport, “Military Veterans of All Ages Tend to Be More Republican,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/118684/military-veterans-ages-tend-republican.aspx; and Rebecca Burgess, “After Johnny’s Marched Home,” American Interest, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/11/after-johnnys-marched-home. My thanks to Lucas Frank at Florentine Films for locating three of these sources. The letter to the editor mentioned in chapter 43 appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, April 30, 2016.
Chapter 49, “Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV)”
The quotation from Remarque’s The Night in Lisbon appears in a Random House e-book edition translated by Ralph Manheim.
Chapter 55, “Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V)”
The Frederick Crews quotation is from Matthew C. Stewart’s “Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War.” An abstract of the article is at https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-63045302/ernest-hemingway-and-world-war-i-combatting-recent.
Kenneth Lynn’s opinion about the internal focus of “Now I Lay Me” appears in his biography Hemingway.
A contentious, occasionally vituperative, and highly entertaining exchange of opinions about the literary importance of Hemingway’s World War One experience appeared in the New York Review of Books, October 22, 1987: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/10/22/pressure-under-grace-an-exchange.
My reference to Jeffrey Dahmer in chapter 55 is neither casual nor flippant. Antisocial personality disorder, which incorporates elements of the now out-of-favor terms “psychopath” and “sociopath,” is typically diagnosed by a number of clinical factors that include absence or paucity of remorse and shame, egocentricity, impoverished major affective reactions, absence or paucity of empathy and compassion for others, superficial charm and good intelligence, and inadequately motivated antisocial behavior. In the comrade-shooting episode in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry exhibits all but one of these traits. (He is not particularly charming, except perhaps in the presence of Catherine.) Without compelling evidence to the contrary, including evidence drawn from the behavior and thoughts of Hemingway’s character, a reader may reasonably conclude, as I do, that there is little or no emotion to report, and that Frederic Henry is in fact coldly and abnormally indifferent to killing, either by nature, by iron volition, or as a result of battlefield trauma and desensitization. Also, on a personal level, which is the level on which stories and novels are received, I cannot discount my own wartime experience, which contains no examples of actual human beings who displayed anything close to the profound, dense, and relentless absence of affect exhibited by Frederic Henry and Hemingway’s other martial protagonists. The only such examples that come to mind, in fact, are those I’ve encountered in cartoons, horror movies, murder mysteries, fairy tales, and YouTube interviews with war criminals and incarcerated serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Arthur Shawcross. (When asked about empathy for his victims, Shawcross said, “It’s not there . . . Something inside me is weird.”) Finally, it should go without saying that I do not direct these reflections at Ernest Hemingway, but only at the writer’s fictional wartime heroes. Though I am not a psychiatrist, I would certainly be uneasy if Frederic Henry were to step out of a novel and buy the house next door. See Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door; James Fallon, The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. Fallon discusses in depth the “sliding scale” by which psychologists measure the presence and severity of antisocial personality disorder. As a neuroscientist, he also discusses relationships between physical brain abnormalities and behavior that laymen call sociopathic and psychopathic.
About the Author
TIM O’BRIEN’s acclaimed novels include The Things They Carried; July, July; and Going After Cacciato, which received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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