About the Time H. Lee Barnes Introduced me to John Gardner

More than a decade ago, I completed a creative writing program at the College of Southern Nevada. I took up the program because I foresaw a shift in my vocation. I knew my future included writing so I wanted to learn to write well. While I’m unsure if I do, in fact, “write well,” I do believe I write better today than I did before I started the program. And, of course, I’ve added a decade of writing, reading, and formal education to my experience, so there’s that.

I don’t remember the name of the program’s chair, the fellow who interviewed me and gave the final approval on my writing project for the program; but I know my fiction writing professor was H. Lee Barnes. I didn’t forget his name.

I don’t know if it was because he told me I was writing melodrama, that my figures of speech were too clichéd, or that any real writing professor would have stopped grading after the first page because I couldn’t seem to recognize the difference between your and you’re or there, their, and they’re.

He wasn’t mean by any stretch; he was just flinty and unsympathetic. Yet, he didn’t stop correcting at the first page. He filled the pages of my story with copious red ink (not blue) and he gave me a couple of days to edit my work and resubmit it. 

What is most memorable, however, is that Barnes instructed me to read a book that wasn’t on the college’s assigned reading list. On Moral Fiction was my introduction to John Gardner and it was John Gardner who, in great measure, raised my awareness to something I would later learn was called the great conversation.((The great conversation refers to the three millennia of classical, medieval, and early modern writing on history, philosophy, religion, art, culture, and aesthetics.))

It was also from John Gardner that I first learned about “art’s morality.” Gardner says, “Art, in sworn opposition to chaos, discovers by its process what it can say.” And, that “art is essentially and primarily moral—that is, life giving—moral in its process of creation and moral in what it says.”((John Gardner, On Moral Fiction, 15.))

While I was still living in Las Vegas, I collected a few of Barnes books but had only read one of them, Talk To Me, James Dean. It wasn’t until this January, six years after leaving Las Vegas, that I read the second in his corpus, his Vietnam memoir, When We Walked Above the Clouds. It was one of the few memoirs I would have read in a single sitting if time had permitted. As it was, I read it in just a few short sittings.

As I frequently do when I read a book I can’t put down, I wondered why this book captured my attention when so many don’t. Maybe it was because I knew Barnes. He had been my professor, so there was that connection. But I only interacted with him less than a dozen times, and once was when I ran into him at a local gym. That wasn’t it. Perhaps it was the charge of war, the danger and mystique of former French Indochina, Vietnam. But I’ve read numerous war novels and memoirs and knew that wasn’t it either. 

I settled on the prose. Hemingway-esque seems ironically too grandiose a description but there was something about the crisp, uncluttered prose that reminded me of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.

Sure Barnes drops a few of his own tired expressions characteristic of those I heard throughout my own military experience and from veterans I have come to know over the years—even Homer nods—but his prose was so clean. It was easy on the mind without being stupid. It moved me seamlessly through the story, like looking through a window without noticing the window frame.

Consider these randomly (but not capriciously) selected excerpts:

We stood our stations. For us there was nothing but the grim master Duty and the matters that occupied our thoughts. One was defending the camp, the other concern for our teammates. We clung to hope despite all the signs that told us it was a fool’s hope. Maybe the patrol got lucky and our teammates were hiding in the brush, waiting for the cover of nightfall before they attempted a return. I wanted to believe in luck. For them. For me. I’d heard of a player holding the dice for a half hour in Vegas. There was the story of Hector Camacho and his unbelievable escape. He had to have been lucky. Sometimes luck dictates a good outcome. Aristotle said as much, claimed that a man has to have luck, that it is an ingredient to a full life. Sometimes it favors soldiers, too. Then sometimes it doesn’t. The French on Highway 1.((H. Lee Barnes, When We Walked Above the Clouds, 139.))

Outside, the Vietnamese camp cook squatted before the grill. The air smelled of steak and potatoes. Inside, we gathered at the table and sat in silence. Those with food on their plates sliced off bites of steak or potatoes and forked them in their mouths. They chased the food down with beer. The idea of rewards for surviving seemed obscene. We should have been in harness and scouring Binh Hoa for our teammates. Between bites we glanced at the back room where Major Truesdale and the sergeant major had set up shop and one at time called team members back and debriefed them. Vietnamese were interrogated in an adjacent room by an interpreter who spoke nearly impeccable English. The accounts, inconsistent in details, were consistent in terms of bleakness. Nothing they offered indicated our teammates had survived. I. V. told me one had said, “Trung Si Hep,” meaning Jake, was killed at the onset. Though prepared to hear that, I still took it hard. After the food was gone, we kept our seats and waited, passing the time by playing solitaire or tossing darts. A bag of mail had come on the plane. Some read or answered letters. Envelopes addressed to our missing teammates lay unopened on the table.((H. Lee Barnes, When We Walked Above the Clouds, 156.))

Researching for this post, I Googled H. Lee Barnes and learned that he was born in Moscow, ID where I have been living for the past half-decade. Ironic. I also learned that he recently retired from teaching and settled in Kingman, AZ, my stomping grounds as a child, and where my grandparents lived and died as long as I knew them. Irony turned weird.

According to his author website, H. Lee Barnes’ short fiction has been awarded the Willamette Fiction Award and the Arizona Authors Association Fiction Award. Gunning for Ho, his first book, was a finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters First Fiction Award, and his Las Vegas novel, The Lucky, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Fiction Award. He was inducted in 2009 into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. In 2013 the Vietnam Veterans of America organization honored him with an excellence in the arts award at the national convention.

Since this post isn’t technically a book review and it’s not a writing lesson, what is the take-away here?

Really, this is just a personal reflection on a book that recently captured my attention and on the ways in which the author who wrote it contributed to my growth in the craft of writing. Perhaps, after all, it is of no interest to you.

On the other hand, perhaps, something written here will inspire you to invest in someone else’s learning. Maybe it will provoke you to read more good books, write more good prose, and make more of that which is life-giving and opposed to chaos—art.

I hope it’s the latter.

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