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Vietnam War

Harry Ransom Center acquires Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection

October 23, 2017 - Suzanne Krause

The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin is now home to the Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry Collection. The collection was started in the early 1970s by Dean Echenberg, a flight surgeon during the Vietnam War who later became the director of disease control for the City of San Francisco during the first years of the AIDS crisis. [Read more…] about Harry Ransom Center acquires Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection, literature, poetry, release, Vietnam War, WWI, WWII

“The Attempt to Keep Day and Night Together”

October 23, 2017 - Suzanne Krause

An interview with Dean F. Echenberg on his war poetry collection

The Ransom Center is the new home for the Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection, a collection of more than 6,500 volumes of poetry related to people’s experiences with war. The collection was begun in the early 1970s by Dr. Echenberg, a flight surgeon during the Vietnam War who later served as an emergency room staff physician in Detroit Receiving Hospital, worked in private family practice, and served as Director of Disease Control in San Francisco during the first years of the AIDS crisis. [Read more…] about “The Attempt to Keep Day and Night Together”

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts Tagged With: Dean F. Echenberg, Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection, poetry, Vietnam War, WWI, WWII

Celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Things They Carried

November 11, 2015 - Alicia Dietrich

2015 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. [Read more…] about Celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Things They Carried

Filed Under: Authors, Books + Manuscripts Tagged With: archives, literary archives, literature, National Book Award, soldiers, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, Veterans Day, Vietnam War, war

Memory as source in Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Machine Dreams”

June 20, 2013 - Alexandra Wetegrove

An assemblage of photos with handwritten captions for "Machine Dreams."

Known for the family dynamics she enmeshes in her work, Jayne Anne Phillips uses her own family history as a source for character and plot development in her debut novel Machine Dreams (1984). Phillips chronicles one family, the Hampsons, to explore narratives that span from the years leading up to World War II through the Vietnam War.

Phillips’s papers, which are now accessible at the Ransom Center, include letters, travel ephemera, army pamphlets, and public service announcements. Drawing on wartime and post-war letters written by her father, and addressed to his aunt, Phillips captures the distress of mid-twentieth-century America. The letters also inform character development in Machine Dreams.

Phillips incorporates specific language and usage from the letters throughout the novel. Her father continually sends love to “the kids,” but seldom makes specific mention of the names of his young cousins. Borrowing this language in a chapter titled “The House at Night,” Phillips writes:

“She heard faintly her brother breathe and whimper; in these summer days the artificial disruption of school was forgotten and the fifteen months of age separating them disappeared; they existed between their parents as one shadow, the kids, and they fought and conspired with no recognition of separation.”

Seeing Phillips’s papers is like gaining access to an era of American life. Family photographs in the archive supplement the early drafts of Machine Dreams, which Phillips scribbled in spiral notebooks. Annotations on photographs give meaning to otherwise nameless faces, revealing the ways Phillips develops her characters and narratives. It appears that personal relics guide Phillips’s process in the most intimate of ways—through family memories.

Phillips was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for her novel Lark & Termite and is the author of MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994), Black Tickets (1979), and Fast Lanes (1984).

 

Please click on the thumbnails below to view full-size images.

 

Wartime literature for troops in New Guinea. This pamphlet belonged to Jayne Anne Phillips' father.
Wartime literature for troops in New Guinea. This pamphlet belonged to Jayne Anne Phillips’ father.
1944 correspondence from Phillips' father becomes a letter from a character, Mitch, in "Machine Dreams." The marginalia shows how Phillips draws from her family's history to develop characters in her fiction.
1944 correspondence from Phillips’ father becomes a letter from a character, Mitch, in “Machine Dreams.” The marginalia shows how Phillips draws from her family’s history to develop characters in her fiction.
Phillips' handwritten notes for "Machine Dreams" reveal analysis of family dynamics.
Phillips’ handwritten notes for “Machine Dreams” reveal analysis of family dynamics.
Phillips' father sends his regards to "the kids" in a 1944 letter.
Phillips’ father sends his regards to “the kids” in a 1944 letter.
An assemblage of photos with handwritten captions for "Machine Dreams."
An assemblage of photos with handwritten captions for “Machine Dreams.”
Airmail came by way of San Francisco for troops stationed in the Pacific Theatre of World War II.
Airmail came by way of San Francisco for troops stationed in the Pacific Theatre of World War II.
Phillips' handwritten notes for "Machine Dreams" reveal analysis of family dynamics.
Phillips’ handwritten notes for “Machine Dreams” reveal analysis of family dynamics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Black Tickets, Fast Lanes, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite, literature, Machine Dreams, Motherkind, National Book Award, Shelter, Vietnam War, World War II

Fellows Find: “How to Revise a True War Story”

November 8, 2012 - John Young

 

Snapshot of Tim O'Brien in Vietnam. Unknown date and photographer.
Snapshot of Tim O’Brien in Vietnam. Unknown date and photographer.

John K. Young, a professor of English at Marshall University, reflects on the production history of Tim O’Brien’s novels and their implications for the kinds of narratives that are possible for soldiers’ experiences in the Vietnam War. Young received a fellowship from the Norman Mailer Endowed Fund.

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in “How to Tell a True War Story.” As the O’Brien papers at the Harry Ransom Center reveal, perhaps the most prominent American novelist of the Vietnam War has kept on telling true war stories not only by mining his experience as a foot soldier across numerous works that often blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, but also by continuing to revise those books, from the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and even to paperback reprints. While the Center’s collection does not include O’Brien’s earliest manuscripts (most of which he destroyed), it does enable scholars to trace O’Brien’s process of revision across multiple stages of a work’s production. In keeping with this refusal to let a text settle into a fixed, final form, O’Brien returned most recently to The Things They Carried, his 1990 masterwork, for a 2009 edition that contains substantial changes to the stories “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and “The Ghost Soldiers,” although these revisions are too recent to have made their way to the Austin archive yet.

During a month-long fellowship in the summer of 2012, I made my way through five of O’Brien’s major works: If I Die in a Combat Zone, his Vietnam memoir; Northern Lights, his first novel; Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award for 1979; The Things They Carried; and In the Lake of the Woods, O’Brien’s fictional response to the My Lai massacre. In each case I found fascinating instances of what the editorial theorist John Bryant calls “revisions sites,” moments in a text that offer divergent readings in response to author’s and publisher’s multiple versions. While many of these changes seem minor—adjusting punctuation or reworking the order of a sentence—even such small moments can take on striking interpretive implications. The closing lines in the opening chapter of Cacciato, for instance, describe the protagonist, PFC Paul Berlin, as he watches the title character on his AWOL escape from the war: “‘Go,’ whispered Paul Berlin. It did not seem enough. ‘Go,’ he said, and then he shouted, ‘Go!’” The exclamation mark did not appear in the book’s first edition or in the versions of the first chapter that had been previously published in Ploughshares and Gallery. For a 1986 paperback reprint, O’Brien changed the punctuation, subtly heightening Paul Berlin’s emotional connection to the runaway soldier and, by extension, to his own fantasies of flight, which make up much of the narrative. Similarly, one of Cacciato’s several “Observation Post” chapters—in which Paul Berlin reflects on his tour of duty so far and the comrades who have been killed—first included a paragraph in which he attempts to reconstruct the sequence of those deaths, ending with the line “Then Cacciato.” This suggests the possibility that Cacciato has himself been dead from the time the novel begins, a reading that would add another layer of imagination to the platoon’s journey from Vietnam to Paris. But O’Brien deleted this line for a later paperback edition, returning Cacciato’s fate to greater levels of ambiguity.

Some revisions are much larger in scope. To take one example, the typescript of The Things They Carried originally included a chapter entitled “The Real Mary Anne,” which followed “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” a powerful narrative about a high school girl from Cleveland who visits the war and eventually so embraces its chaos and moral rupture that she leaves the Green Berets behind, disappearing into the jungle. Whereas Things often returns to an episode to announce that it was not “true,” at least not in the factual sense, “The Real Mary Anne” (in Box 15, Folder 7) insists on perhaps the book’s most improbable story as entirely accurate, declaring, “there is substantial evidence that the pivotal events in this story actually occurred.” At the suggestion of his editor at Houghton Mifflin, O’Brien cut this chapter altogether from the published book, an omission that locates “Sweetheart” along the same lines as the book’s other chapters, in which the truth of a reader’s experience of the war trumps fidelity to historical detail. Readers often take this story to be the most clearly “made up,” even as such reactions may say as much about ongoing social assumptions about gender and war. While the inclusion of “The Real Mary Anne” might have more overtly interrogated those cultural biases, without it Things still oscillates artfully between metafiction and real expressions of trauma.

It is at this level that the array of revisions in the O’Brien archive is most telling: how they depict the ongoing effort in O’Brien’s texts to represent the trauma of war, and of Vietnam in particular. On the one hand, O’Brien’s work articulates the impossibility of not telling these stories; on the other hand, “How to Tell a True War Story” and other texts respond to the intractable problem of only a few readers—other Vietnam veterans—being able to truly understand the stories. Dr. Jonathan Shays, a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with Vietnam vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, explains in his book Achilles in Vietnam that “Traumatic memory is not narrative. Rather, it is experience that reoccurs.” For Shays, one of the most important steps in addressing—which is not to say “curing”—the effects of post-traumatic stress comes from “rendering it communicable, however imperfectly.” Readers of Cacciato and Things, especially, have long known the ways in which these texts respond to the difficult necessity of rendering the war communicable at the level of fractured plots and thematic resistances to closure, but the materials in the Ransom Center allow them to discover as well the ways in which O’Brien’s processes of writing and revising themselves speak to the undying truths of war.

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Research + Teaching Tagged With: Achilles in Vietnam, Fellows Find, Fellowships, Going After Cacciato, If I Die in a Combat Zone, John K. Young, Jonathan Shays, Manuscripts, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Research, The Real Mary Anne, The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, Vietnam War

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