I am getting over a virus (vi)

from the Janitor at the Viet Nam Literature Project

I coughed up the last of my lungs a week ago. I still sit quietly between each chore.

There I was in 2008, much more tired after a grave illness, charging off to track down Robert Anderson, the author whose 2 novels my cousin had recommended to his brother. First, I considered the work:

[You should also consider reading Robert A. Anderson, and reading with him.]

He is the only author with two books in my cousin David's stack. He may be in the process of joining Bill as a US author from the Viet Nam war with an oeuvre, a body of work that makes sense.

I reached first for the shorter one, Service for the Dead, a hardback with the bright dustjacket of forgotten light novels from the 1970s and 80s I buy like candy at used-book stores. I opened Service for the Dead here and there and read parts until I got interested and started from the beginning.

It's a war story about Marines patrolling, and about a wounded Marine coming home. Why tell you the details when I want you to read the book? It has the buoyant quality of deliberate fantasy and reminded me of the Phantom Blooper, by Gus Hasford, the war novel he wrote after Short Timers.

Blooper didn't appeal to me twenty years ago, but Kali and David Willson loved it. Online, at the Viet Nam Generation archive, I find that we published a PCA paper Kali wrote while she was getting into Hasford, about Service for the Dead.

A terrific historian, Kali is an English major at heart, the kind of person who always knows how a movie is going to turn out. She noticed details such as that the hero's best friend in Service for the Dead, who endlessly tells stories, is from Hollywood.

She takes the book seriously as an investigation of American fantasy. On my couch, trying to stay put, I wanted the denser stuff, the mingled fantasies of social life. I picked up Cooks & Bakers, small-print, in what looks to be a paperback original. David Willson says there is a hardback, too.

This is the Anderson book for me so far. The title refers to non-combat personnel. In theory, every Marine can fight as a rifleman. Cooks & Bakers ends, like Bill's book, at Hue city, where after Tet 1968 all the REMFs were fighting.

Outstanding qualities of the book include details of the administrative procedure of war. Like Gus and David Willson and Bill, one reason Robert is around to write is that he wasn't in the mud 24/7. He did office work. His title speaks to the condition of possibility of his novel itself.

Another unusual quality of the novel is the presentation of Vietnamese language and Vietnamese people. The author’s alter ego speaks some Vietnamese, and the language he reports is just what such a person would use, engaging with the locals.

They present with the same odd, uninventable level of detail that characterizes the whole book. Anderson was writing the novel at the war, catching things as he saw them.

Bill's memoir, written well afterwards, very creditably works up one RVNAF character who presents a local point of view that fits with Bill's solid but limited reading of English-language scholarship on the war.

Anderson's novel, by contrast, catches all the weird stuff that happens in life. None of these stray details would mean anything to most of his readership, but they jolt me. I'll never forget picking up Charles McCarry's 1976 thriller Tears of Autumn and realizing the author had to have been a Vietnamese-speaking American spy in 1950s Ha Noi.

Then I hunted the author:

So, on my couch, noticing these details I don't have time to recount to you now, I wondered who Anderson was. Kali had written about him but we broke contact years ago. I wrote to John Baky, who had never met Anderson but asked for his manuscripts if I got in touch.

Bill, the basic scholar of Viet Nam vet poetry, had never heard of Anderson. David Willson had corresponded with him in Walton, New York, in 1984. The dustjacket on Service for the Dead says he graduated from Yale College, but the online alumni directory doesn't list him.

It does list a man of the same name, about the same age, a portrait painter outside New Haven. That Robert wrote back to say he did serve in Viet Nam, in the Navy, but has written no novels. He couldn’t find Anderson in a print directory from the 1980s.

I called David Willson again to put our heads together. It didn't look good. Anderson's pattern of two novels, one basically a diary and the other a more deliberately imaginative reworking of the experience, fits that of many war writers you've never heard of.

The reason many have heard of Joe and Tim is that Forever War and Going After Cacciatto, their imaginative ones, their second published ones, sold enormously well. Do that once and you have carte blanche with publishers to natter on at a good wage for the rest of your life.

After the second book is when naive authors of literary books for the trade, who have not hit the bullseye, notice that they will likely never make a living or reach a public, and so must work two shifts alone. They stop.

The mid-1980s, when Service for the Dead appeared, would also be about the time a lot of Viet Nam veterans checked out entirely. Mid-life for boomers, my age now, for a demographic who began killing themselves one way or another in the 1960s and 70s.

David also thought Robert was likely dead, but suggested I find his agent, Joseph Spieler, thanked in Cooks & Bakers. I found Joseph on the Web and he gave me a call on my couch. He loves the book, and we discussed how many such good titles are out of print.

Joseph passed my name on to the author, who called some days later. I have got undated notes - I was sicker than I thought, they are not only undated but gappy and illegible - and a followup email from Robert.

I found the man:

He's a Yalie, in Wright on Old Campus for freshman year like my junior-year girlfriend, then Pierson College like another one of my cousins, my Exeter girlfriend, and my father's law-school squash partner's sons. He was a lieutenant, like his focal character, with eight months at Quantico. He became a Vietnamese speaker in three months at Monterey.

He started work on Cooks & Bakers while he was in Viet Nam, as the level of detail suggests. He always thought the real story of the war would "be written by the other side". He read Bao Ninh's Sorrow of War in English and was tremendously moved.

Most important, Robert is at work on his oeuvre. He had dropped out of sight to write theater for local venues. That is about the most challenging and satisfying way to write, and a quick ticket out of national notice and literary history.

I noticed in one of my first big reading projects, European and American drama since the appearance of the avant-garde, that the figures who most interest me vanish from the record after they decide to sit tight and work with whoever is around.

Robert is so local that he had not heard of the William Joiner Center, which runs active programs for authors like him, although Joiner is at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Robert is in the same state. I remember him telling me Dorchester, and my checking to see that Dorchester is 40 miles from Boston, but I don't see that in my notes.

A vita he sent along lists live and radio productions in Rochester, MA, New Bedford and Fairhaven. There have been productions in Ohio and in the state of New York. The plays, local in production, are national and international in focus: Newt Gingrich, the Persian Gulf war, Martha Stewart, the Wall, and Manjiro Nakahama, the first Japanese to make his life in the US.

There is wordplay in the titles. "MacBush" refers of course to Macbeth as well as MacBird, a satire from the movement against the Viet Nam war. The titles of "Pear Newt" and "Exit the King? Martha Stewart in a Prison of Desire" pun on two or three classic titles in world drama.

If Robert isn't a Yale graduate, he should have been. We're excessively literate, take survey courses, form nationally oriented local elites, and are entrepreneurial. Robert founded Teatro Gumbo Limbo himself and Miracle Fish Puppet Theater with others.

If I lived in Massachusetts I'd be at every opening. Fortunately, Robert's current project is a book, something I will be able to read here in North Carolina. My notes seem to say it is now called Providence/Quang Tri.

I wish I had left it at that. That is where I leave every author these days. What I can do for any one of them, what I have done, is to find, read, and write about their work.

What I have instead desired was to publish them but failed again and again in guilt and shame. I got up out of that sickbed of 2008 and drove myself off another cliff.

Portrait at All People Soul Food Grill, Hillsborough, North Carolina, © 2007 by Tim Duffy. Link to the essay “I am getting over a virus” here. The first and second and third and fourth and fifth Viet Nam letter on “I am getting over a virus” appeared on February 7 and February 10 and February 13 and February 16 and February 19, 2024.