Author Has His Award and Loves It

A funny thing happened to writer Larry Heinemann at the 1987 National Book Awards ceremony. His book, “Paco’s Story,” won.

It was as much a surprise to the 44-year-old Chicago writer as it was to New York’s publishing Establishment. But Heinemann adjusted to it a good deal more quickly.

When the announcement for the fiction award winner was made, the president of his publishing house, Farrar Straus & Giroux, “grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Get up, get up, it’s you.’ There couldn’t have been 20 people in the whole place that knew who I was,” Heinemann recalled.

Obligingly, in an ill-fitting tuxedo rented for $55 the day before, a dazed Larry Heinemann got up and accepted the award.

“There is a prevailing opinion that the U.S. could have won in Vietnam,” the Vietnam veteran and novelist cautioned his well-dressed audience. “I don’t know where this idea comes from. It certainly didn’t come from any Bravo (Heinemann’s company) grunt I ever knew. That’s saying we didn’t fill our hearts with enough hate. . . . If we allow the same thing to happen in Central America, it will be the shame of our lives.”

The publishing world was shocked. Heinemann’s win for “Paco’s Story,” the haunting story of the sole survivor of a fire base massacre in Vietnam, came out of literature’s left field. The conventional wisdom was that Toni Morrison would win for “Beloved,” her critically hailed novel. If by chance “Beloved” fell short, the award was supposedly destined to go to one-time National Book Award winner Philip Roth for “The Counterlife.”

In the four months that followed Heinemann’s victory--almost until Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a month ago--the National Book Award was the subject of a literary storm. Forty-eight black writers and critics published a formal protest statement in the New York Times Book Review, saying that due to “oversight and whimsy” Toni Morrison had never won a National Book Award or Pulitzer.

The New York Times, whose Book Review reviewed “Paco’s Story” only a day before the NBA awards dinner, advanced less than flattering theories about why the jury chose the “unlikely” “Paco’s Story” and why the decision was in error.

While it is hardly unusual for a literary award to be debated, “it is unique for the winner to be so searchingly re-examined by the New York Times as if he were guilty of a crime,” said Richard Eder, a juror for the 1987 NBA and Los Angeles Times book critic.

By telephone, Barbara Prete, executive director of the National Book Awards, said she had taken the New York daily to task for treating “Paco’s Story” and Heinemann “unfairly.”

A Gleeful Warning

In its April “nice issue,” Spy magazine advised the newspaper to “be nice to Larry.” Spy gleefully pointed to a publishing industry newsletter that admonished the New York Times for its treatment of Heinemann, “but unfortunately made the mistake of referring to the prize-winning “Paco’s Story” as “Poco’s Story” not once but four times.”

Back at home in Chicago after three weeks in China for a writers’ conference, Heinemann is taking it all in stride. Indeed, the writer with two well-reviewed war novels to his credit has taken to smoking cigars to celebrate his win. “I was so happy that nothing could penetrate the good feeling that I had. I was high as a kite for a month.”

Little wonder. For a writer, the National Book Award is one of the nation’s top prizes. Literary giants like Roth, John Updike and Bernard Malamud credit it as having launched their careers. And, in addition to the Louise Nevelson sculpture and $10,000 honorarium that go to the winner, it can mean a lot of money in increased book sales.

“It was real clear to me going into the NBA that it wasn’t my ballpark,” Heinemann said. “But they can squawk all they want to. I ain’t giving back the Nevelson and the $10,000 check has been cashed.”

Far from New York’s literary swirl, Heinemann said he never planned to be a writer. He grew up in a home where books were nonexistent and where learning was assigned no value. His father, a bus driver for 30 years, was a product of the Depression. The important thing was that you had a steady job.

Had he not been drafted into the Army and shipped off to Vietnam in 1966, Larry Heinemann surmises that he, too, would probably be driving a bus instead of writing fiction.

Began With the Story

“I came to writing with a story rather than the other way around. I had never been a very successful student. My literature education was eclectic, sloppy. I read every war novel I could get my hands on. I had to teach myself spelling and punctuation and all the rhetorical technicalities.”

But what he had after two years as a “grunt” in Vietnam was a story worth telling. And the telling, he insists, preserved his sanity.

Three weeks after his return to Chicago from Vietnam in 1968, Heinemann married. Before their marriage, his wife, Edie, had written him every day while he served overseas. Later he enrolled in Chicago’s Columbia College story workshop where he remained for 14 years, as a student and then as a teacher of fiction.

“I was not one of those guys who got home and went to their room and shut up. I know guys who the war’s been eating up for 20 years,” he said. “Anybody who asked me about it, I told them. I shot my mouth off about everything--the whore houses, the endless hatred, the ugliness, the real work of the war. It took two to three years of talking to get the story out.” It took another five years to write it as “Close Quarters,” his first novel, published in 1977.

‘Used, Wasted and Dumped’

“Everybody who came back (from Vietnam) knew that the war was a lie and that we had been betrayed and lied to. Basically we were used, wasted and dumped. The sort of bitterness and disorganized resentment we felt towards the government was extreme.”

Yet Heinemann steered clear of the anti-war movement. “The movement made it very clear to (veterans) that they wanted nothing to do with us.”

Heinemann ached to put the war behind him. But to do so has meant telling three stories. “Close Quarters “ the first, put away part of it. “Paco’s Story,” about the “reverberations of the war,” proved there was still more Vietnam to expunge.

The expected completion of a third book this year--an extended essay about post-traumatic delayed stress and a group of veterans on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state working through it--will mark the end of Heinemann’s Vietnam trilogy.

“When this one’s done that will be it. I will have had my say. Vietnam will finally be out of the house,” he said.

By his own definition, Heinemann is thriving these days. Shortly after receiving the National Book Award, he was notified that he had won a Guggenheim Fellowship for $26,000. “That just about pays the bills around here for a year,” he said, and will finance what he calls his “Chicago book.”

To be titled “Cooler by the Lake,” it will be about “baseball and politics and yuppies and working stiffs. I’ve lived here all my life so I must know a little about what it’s like to live here,” said the one-time bus driver, convenience store counterman, cabbie and teacher.

Relishing His Life

Today he is relishing life, happily discussing future books, projects and plans.

“I’d love to work in film for two reasons,” he said. “First, in writing that’s where the money is. Let’s not be silly. I like to be paid for what I do. Second, when you write a screenplay, what you get to do is retell the story and I’d love to do that . . . in a different medium.

“If Shakespeare were alive you can bet he’d be making films,” he said. “If Dickens were alive he’d be making films.” But Heinemann has no film offers on “Paco’s Story”--a result of the subject and raw language of the book, he suspects. So for now he is busily at work on his final Vietnam book, eager to put the war behind him.

“It’s important for any artist to stay a little lean, stay a little hungry. Starving isn’t fun but it produces good work,” he said. On the other hand, he smiled, “thriving is much more fun and also produces good work . . . The National Book Award makes the hustling easier, it really does open doors.

“For one night I was the toast of the town in New York. I could have had anything I wanted,” said Heinemann, launching into a story he has told, with gusto, many times since winning the award. He recalled how the Plaza Hotel opened the Oak Room, its elegant dining room, after hours solely for him and his entourage the night his NBA victory was announced.

“The maitre d’ took us to a leather corner booth and above the booth--I swear to God--was this large bronze plaque that said: ‘George M. Cohan sat in this booth and passed many pleasant hours,’ ” he recollected, relishing the moment.

“We ordered two bottles of champagne for $48--that’s $48 apiece--and that’s when I started smoking cigars. “