I am happy that so many were at Dominican University’s Lund Auditorium for what several conference-goers in their 70s and 80s told me was “the kind of literary/cultural event we only experience once or twice in a lifetime.”
Perhaps the real “headline,” as noted by O’Brien himself within his talk, is that after a silence of more than a decade, he is writing again, and with a power equal to his defining non-fiction piece, “The Vietnam in Me,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 2, 1994. In fact, this talk might have been called “The Hemingway in Me,” if O’Brien had not given it the even-more-intimate title of “Timmy and Tad and Papa and Me.”
This talk marked the re-emergence of one of the most influential living American writers. Something important happened in River Forest last week and will lead to a major, long-awaited publication.
O’Brien and his family were thrilled with the picture of him with his sons that we used on the program, indicating how much the talk was not only about but for his sons.
O’Brien requested that a documentary team, at work on a profile of him, film the entire evening, another clear indication that he seized this invitation from Dominican and the Hemingway Society as a defining moment in his career.
Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, from Ken Burns’ Florentine films have been working with O’Brien for several years on a 20-hour documentary on the Vietnam War. They are now working on a four-hour documentary on Ernest Hemingway and after hearing O’Brien’s talk, they made it clear that they also plan to include his deeply thoughtful and intimate response to Hemingway in their film.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes: “But this too is true: stories can save us.” What we saw and heard and felt Tuesday night was a man saving himself, and us, through stories.
Throughout his time at Dominican, we witnessed dozens of examples of O’Brien’s generosity with others, perhaps most movingly with undergraduate and graduate students. It was humbling to be part of so many conversations in which individuals from very different cultures and experiences had a chance to share some of their stories with O’Brien. And he listened. He really listened.
It became clearer to me than it already was that O’Brien’s stories matter because he listens with so much authentic empathy to other’s stories that others are compelled to listen to him.
On May 2, 1962, Flannery O’Connor delivered a talk called “Some Aspects of Faith and Fiction” at what was then Rosary College (now Dominican University). Our archives show that O’Connor was on campus for two or three days and met with small groups of students and faculty, in addition to her convocation talk. Not entirely by chance, though he did not know O’Connor had been here more than 50 years before him, O’Brien devoted several minutes of his Hemingway talk to O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” More than 50 years from now, Dominican University Archives will proudly document that Tim O’Brien was on campus for four days in July 2016, meeting with small groups of students and faculty from 18 countries around the world. And it was here that he delivered a stunning talk called, “Timmy and Tad and Papa and Me.”
David Krause is associate provost and professor of English at Dominican University. He introduced Tim O’Brien before his talk on July 19.