Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I called Mr. Gamble and asked him what my chances were of getting permission to go there—a business trip, I said. He said I could try, but he knew the parole board would refuse. I didn’t want to spar with bureaucrats who make life tedious, so I spent a few months doing extensive research in the Latin American Library at the University of Florida. I read nineteenth-century explorers’ journals (in which I discovered a whole section on Nicaraguan superstitions), I read travel books, I read several histories of Nicaragua. (In my research, I discovered that the reason Nicaragua had always had so much trouble with the United States was that they happened to own the very best spot in all of Central America to build a sea-level canal. Their history is filled with broken treaties over the building of this canal on what the U.S. government still considers to be a strategic site. Nicaraguans didn’t like the idea of an American-owned canal crossing their country, and were not easily pushed around. We even sent in Marines to enforce our will. In five years of fighting, the Marines were defeated by Agusto Sandino.) I had plenty of book information, but I wanted eyewitness details. I put an ad in the paper requesting interviews with Nicaraguans. I talked to several families who told me things I couldn’t find in books. The kinds of beds peasants sleep on. Favorite country meals. I learned that Nicaraguans loved a coffee and cocoa drink, piniolio, that was so common in that country that other Central Americans called Nicaraguans Piniolios. Armed with these details, I invented a peasant village, a cooperative, and populated it with whole families. Eusebio, a teenage boy, became a major character. I modeled his mother, Modesta, on a woman, Sebastiana, we’d known in Spain. I invented life in the village, basing it on the seven months we’d spent in the village of Almonaster La Real. Everything was coming together. Solo would have a place to hide, people to talk to—people who’d use a two-billion-dollar machine to gather firewood and work on their trucks. I had a plot.

Two years after I got out of prison, I sent the completed book to Knox. I decided to call it Weapon. Knox sent it to Viking because Viking had the right of first refusal as part of my contract for Chickenhawk. Gerry Howard refused to buy it, which astounded me. Hey, I thought. Remember me? I’m a goddamn best-selling author, here. What the hell’s going on? Gerry said Viking wasn’t publishing science fiction, which was a nice way of saying he hated the book.

Knox sent it to other publishers and it was rejected. Most of the editors expressed surprise because Weapon had nothing to do with Vietnam. Mason is supposed to be a Vietnam writer, isn’t he?

I sent a copy of the manuscript to Bill Smith in California. A week later, he sent me back a two-page letter pointing out a few weak points, but saying, “If this is science-fiction, then I love science-fiction.” He said that I might try writing a new opening chapter that would introduce the location of the story and some of the main characters more gradually than I’d done.

I agreed with Bill’s suggestion about a new opening chapter. I called Knox and told him to withdraw the book. I was rewriting it.

A month later, I sent him the new version. Gerry Howard said he wanted to read it, and did, and rejected it a second time. This writing business is not a piece of cake.

Months went by. I was getting the same kinds of rejections: I like it, but it has nothing to do with Vietnam. With Chickenhawk, they’d said no one wanted to read about Vietnam; now everybody did. It looked like I had to write about Vietnam or nothing.

Even if I was not having much success being a writer, I acted like one. I enjoyed being around writers. Mike Costello, the writer who’d cut firewood for Patience while I was gone, and his wife, Patti, were now two of our best friends, and we saw them almost every Saturday night.

I met Padgett Powell (who wrote Edisto) at a reading I gave at the University of Florida. I met Jack C. Haldeman II, a science fiction writer, and through him, his brother Joe Haldeman, the author of a science fiction classic, The Forever War. These three guys lived in the Gainesville area and became my friends.

Padgett liked my robot story well enough to recommend that I teach his writing class at the university while he took a year’s sabbatical. The writing faculty at the university vetoed that idea, saying I was too commercial. I knew what they meant. I’d gotten a degree in fine arts, majoring in photography. During my art school days, we were taught that anyone making money selling their work, not in galleries, was highly suspect of not being a fine artist at all, but an illustrator, a common tradesman like Norman Rockwell. Writing popular books, for many members of the literati, borders on prostitution.