All Things Considered

Author Tom Bissell finds his father in Vietnam.

by Sam Tremble

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Published: Apr 4, 2007

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In his new book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon), Tom Bissell cuts a narrative path through the 30-year overgrowth in the war-torn jungles forming both his father's identity and the history of Vietnam. The book not only maps the profoundly mysterious complications of these terrains, but also reveals a writer who can travel through them and, it seems, anything he chooses. We talked in Manhattan last week before he began the final reading of his recent book tour.

City Paper: Is this the first you've written of Vietnam? Did you write about this as a kid or anything?

Tom Bissell: Yeah, I had a couple of stories of war vet fathers and stuff like that, and short stories about people with fathers who were war vets — I definitely had approached this topic before, but never in a nonfictional guise, so this was the first nonfiction approach taken to it.

City Paper: Are you done with it now?

Tom Bissell: Done with Vietnam?

City Paper: As far as publishing goes.

Tom Bissell: Well, I wrote another long piece about being in Vietnam that was in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

City Paper: 2005?

Tom Bissell: 2006. [And reprinted in] Best American Travel Writing. Not the excerpt that became the book; this is a completely different piece, which is about going to Vietnam and getting in some trouble with the government.

City Paper: I haven't read that yet. Was that when you did all the interviews for the end of the book?

Tom Bissell: I did some of them then. Some of them I did when I was there — I mean, I did those interviews literally all over the world as I was going along. I did about 40 interviews and I think I used about 19 of them? Or 18 of them, something like that.

City Paper: Why did you keep them anonymous?

Tom Bissell: That was a last-minute decision. I dunno, I just felt like that sort of equalized everyone in some way, y'know? And you had to actually read them closely to figure out where the person was coming from. I felt like if they were all identified maybe it wouldn't be so — they wouldn't read them quite so carefully.

City Paper: You'd be able to typecast them.

Tom Bissell: Yeah, yeah — exactly.

City Paper: It felt like a chorus or something at the end.

Tom Bissell: That's exactly the effect I wanted.

City Paper: I thought the kid whose dad went to Canada —

Tom Bissell: He was a draft dodger and he successfully overcame his prosecution for draft dodging and he won and it became the basis [for President Carter's pardon for all draft dodgers.]

City Paper: Yeah, yeah —

Tom Bissell: That's my friend Morgan. He's the guy I wrote the other Vietnam piece ["After the Fall," BATW 2006] with. He and I went there together and we got kicked out.

City Paper: But you didn't get kicked out though.

Tom Bissell: I didn't get kicked out, but only by the skin of my teeth did I avoid expulsion. I was told not engage in any more journalism and that's a quote.

City Paper: Was that the end of your journalism? Or did you keep doing it?

Tom Bissell: I did a little, but not much. It was very secret, private journalism.

City Paper: That's almost an oxymoron or something. It's like, "I just do journalism for myself."

Tom Bissell: Yeah, "It's just a hobby, it's just something I do."

City Paper: Do you feel like you're at a turning point now? You've got the book deal with Pantheon, you just came back from the Rome fellowship.

Tom Bissell: I have to go back to Rome, actually. I'll tell you, I've not really written much at all lately and I've had a huge struggle in the last eight or nine months writing. So maybe I am at a turning point and I'm not sure which direction I'm turning.

City Paper: Towards becoming an accountant?

Tom Bissell: It might not necessarily be a good one. I appreciate the height-of-my-powers thing, but man, it doesn't feel that way from this end. Yeah. When I get back to Rome on the 5th of April, this is when all my 'Well the book is coming out,' 'Oh, I gotta do this tour,' all the things that I've been using to excuse myself to play Guitar Hero for five hours a night will have been erased, so now I can actually get serious about writing again.

(s_tremble@citypaper.net)

 

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