Congenial-speak #53

Hearing Equilibrium

A reviewer stated that my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota lacked balance. I lacked balance, still do. That is the essence of ataxia, the chronic neuro-muscular condition I write about in the book. The reviewer found an imbalance between history and poetic memoir. I thought it was a fair and honest assessment of the book, and I somewhat agree with that reading. I could say that it was some contrived literary device, done intentionally to illustrate my own imbalance in every page after the MVA I write about in 1971. I use the years of therapy, the thousands of steps compiled as I walked with my dad on one side and a Northern Minnesota lake shimmering through trees on the other. It wasn't intentional or even conscious. I was what I wrote, how I wrote then. It was the final product of numerous revisions, of months of personal and professional editing. The balance of the book's substance was the culmination of months of deliberative divisions.

A writer chooses his words, his style, and hopes they can mesh with his voice. He hopes that his voice will translate well to his audience, that the style will resonate with them as well. A writer writes a line to tell, to show the way though a needle's hole, clear-eyed to a book's whole. With Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I felt compelled to provide information that could be universally embraced, such as the 1969 moon landing in chapter one. That one worked, fortuitously, delicately and latitudinally slicing through history and poetic memoir. In that respect, from the opening first person narrative, “In 1969 I spent my first summer in cabin land,” I think it is one, maybe the only, chapter that got it exactly right. It is smooth, fluid, no coloring outside the lines of writing memoir, poetic or otherwise.

The point of the book (as I constantly reminded myself) was memoir, to artfully, perhaps poetically, convey the energy and occasional convergences of the nation's growing pains and mine. I set out to tell my parents' story, and the stories of the DFL Party members who dissented from their party to end a war their president refused to end. They supported their own anti-war candidate, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. It wasn't a general history lesson, those books are out there already. They are, hopefully, textual and dry by comparison. I struggled to find a comfortable balance between the two, a copacetic compromise with which I and a general audience could live. A writer can't please everyone, as much as a politician can't. The review claimed I got bogged down with facts arduously, and I must say, compellingly researched. I agree in many cases the history was gratuitous and the book could have told its story without them. I felt I had to establish a base, a reason the Vietnam War grew incrementally less credible. I needed to explain why in 1965 with the entirely illegal offensive air and ground campaign Operation Rolling Thunder the war began to lose support. This political action affected my parents, the DFL, and coincidentally began the month that I came into the world. I felt a background of the Diem regime, for example, was necessary in the chapter of my book where I tell about my mother's involvement in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). I thought it was helpful to the reader, it provided a context, to tell why it was crucial that he went to Washington D.C. in November of 1963.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident and its confounded resolution may have been done to death. I cut out at least four paragraphs detailing events, true or false. I became obsessed in the feeling that I needed to explain this government trickery , this deception, this doctrine of political spin that essentially enabled Operation Rolling Thunder and the perpetual dispatch of troops thereafter. I thought it was important. I saw it as arguably the key, the “blank check,” that set American politics—and the jungles of North Vietnam—on fire. Without that card to play, without the conflict it caused with its contested repeal, history would be very different and, by extension, my story and the DFL's story.