James Reston's 13 Obsessions
"Like most writers the wellspring of obsession came for me in my early life. I was the child of privilege... But there must have been something deep within me that led me to reject the easy path that was laid out before me."
I see my writing life as a series of obsessions. Over the past 40 years there have been thirteen of them. In the beginning, after my first novel [To Defend, To Destroy] was published in 1971, these intense preoccupations seemed to be discreet and last for three or four years. Later on, the fascinations melded together, but there were touchstones I returned to, time and again: civil rights, immoral and ill-advised war, literature and the arts, skepticism of authority, and the moral imperative of a writer to be engaged in the central issues of his time.
Like most writers the wellspring of obsession came for me in my early life. I was the child of privilege, growing up comfortably in Washington as the son of a prominent journalist. But there must have been something deep within me that led me to reject the easy path that was laid out before me. Instead of going north to Harvard or Yale where I was accepted and courted, probably more for my athletic ability than my brains, I chose to go south to the University of North Carolina. There, I found myself instantly thrown into the middle of a great American revolution: the movement to desegregate public accommodations in the segregated south. A quarter of Chapel Hill's restaurants and public accommodations were segregated when I arrived there in 1959; the town was 95% integrated when I left four years later. I became deeply involved in that struggle. It was my first, and perhaps most important experience of engagement.
And then came Vietnam and the impossible moral burden that was placed on my generation. I was a classic example of inner conflict: to join up begrudgingly, heeding the demand of a draft-centered conscription?....or to resist and avoid, like nearly all of my peers? Uncertainly, full of inner doubts, I signed up for military service, feeling that I could not, in good faith, represent that I conscientiously objected to this war and all wars. My three years as an Army intelligence officer gave me a profound, abiding sympathy for the American soldier, especially that soldier who is forced to risk death for reasons he or she does not fully understand and may secretly dispute. And if my empathy for the soldier is deep, so is my contempt for the politician who blithely puts men and women in harm’s way for abstract, theoretical geopolitical reasons without pondering the human cost.
Thus, these obsessions find their root in the racism of the old, segregated South and the conflict over dubious war. They find their branch in my efforts to write imaginatively and accurately about a wide range of important and heart-felt subjects, exploring different literary forms for the best result. To use a theatrical term, there is a "through-line" to this work, from my first novel through these essays to my last book, The Nineteenth Hijacker (2012), and I can honestly and happily say that in the entire oeuvre I've never written about anything to which I had no emotional attachment.
Like most writers the wellspring of obsession came for me in my early life. I was the child of privilege, growing up comfortably in Washington as the son of a prominent journalist. But there must have been something deep within me that led me to reject the easy path that was laid out before me. Instead of going north to Harvard or Yale where I was accepted and courted, probably more for my athletic ability than my brains, I chose to go south to the University of North Carolina. There, I found myself instantly thrown into the middle of a great American revolution: the movement to desegregate public accommodations in the segregated south. A quarter of Chapel Hill's restaurants and public accommodations were segregated when I arrived there in 1959; the town was 95% integrated when I left four years later. I became deeply involved in that struggle. It was my first, and perhaps most important experience of engagement.
And then came Vietnam and the impossible moral burden that was placed on my generation. I was a classic example of inner conflict: to join up begrudgingly, heeding the demand of a draft-centered conscription?....or to resist and avoid, like nearly all of my peers? Uncertainly, full of inner doubts, I signed up for military service, feeling that I could not, in good faith, represent that I conscientiously objected to this war and all wars. My three years as an Army intelligence officer gave me a profound, abiding sympathy for the American soldier, especially that soldier who is forced to risk death for reasons he or she does not fully understand and may secretly dispute. And if my empathy for the soldier is deep, so is my contempt for the politician who blithely puts men and women in harm’s way for abstract, theoretical geopolitical reasons without pondering the human cost.
Thus, these obsessions find their root in the racism of the old, segregated South and the conflict over dubious war. They find their branch in my efforts to write imaginatively and accurately about a wide range of important and heart-felt subjects, exploring different literary forms for the best result. To use a theatrical term, there is a "through-line" to this work, from my first novel through these essays to my last book, The Nineteenth Hijacker (2012), and I can honestly and happily say that in the entire oeuvre I've never written about anything to which I had no emotional attachment.