“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)

First, this is a strange (war) story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself (the war segment), surrealism and mysticism (in that order).

Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.

So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.

One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”

But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.

So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.

The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.

For instance, the boy saw his father’s garage as a three-ring circus, because (as it turns out later) his father really had been a “Strong Man” in a small-time circus for a while as a younger man. And the garage had been a lively center of town for a while, and many of the mechanics who worked there were also colorful characters, which the boy experienced in the way we experience a dreamworld or fairy tale, where otherwise peripheral, overlooked or repressed elements become exaggerated by emphatic focus into revealing clarity.

And I think his father actually did cartwheels out to the gas pumps sometimes, which wasn’t too unusual for gas station attendants in the 1950s and early ‘60s, when “full service” was a real thing, which included a bit of showmanship.

And apparently, the family did inherit an elephant and a moose from the defunct circus. (Maybe they were two large workhorses named “Elephant” and “Moose”, but I doubt it. I think they were a real moose and a real elephant, which they inherited from the defunct circus where his parents used to work: I don’t “write” these things. I let them unfold in the same way a dream unfolds itself. And I just try to jot it down before it’s gone). And maybe the boy did bring his class to his farm to see the elephant and moose for “show and tell.” And maybe the vignette about the shrunken man who is “all that’s left of optimism” is memorable to the boy, because he himself was beginning to feel hopeless. Your guess is as good as mine.

But the point is, let the glimmer of a life behind the façade of stories (through which we all claim to know ourselves), shine through however you see it. One way or another, the exaggerations reveal both the character’s state of mind and the events in that life, however, twisted, stretched, shrunk or obscured they may be.

The shifts in voice and style, therefore, are part of the story. It’s a story about the evolution of a voice as much as anything.

And that’s my justification for attaching cartoon tires and a wispy dream-trailer to a Mack truck cab (which is the realistic segment at the center of this strange telling).

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Second, is this a “true story”?

For anyone who has read the essays you would know that one point gets hammered here over and over again: Everything is fiction, including these essays. I don’t believe in non-fiction, which is one of the themes of this story: how to relate to the fiction of this dreamed existence, which is a collection of scattered memories strung together by fraying strings out of which we build a homunculus we call our “selves.”

Or, as Nabokov put it:

“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies and birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead” (IBID, page 5)

So, does the timeline implicit in this story correspond to anything in the so-called “real” world? No, it’s my own invented world, which draws on an childhood rooted in a 1950s mentality, and a young adulthood more rooted in the present world, which can’t possibly exist in the “real world.” It’s a fairy tale, like everything else. So, don’t look for absolute correspondence between this war story and a real war. This is my own war.

But is the story a camouflaged story of myself, my father, family, place where I grew up? No. Even though these characters are composed from some of the same clay, they are made into different people, so that I can be free enough from them to let them live a different life. Yes, many of the material and psychological predicaments are taken from what I know directly in so-called “real life”, but they are distinct enough from “me” (from this web of mutual dependencies) to allow them to be seen objectively, without fear of hurting anyone I know or revealing too much of my so-called self. For instance, there is no trace of my mother in any of this, or the relationship she had with my father. This freedom allows a person’s imagination to roam freely, without being constrained by duty and loyalty to family and friends.

Or, as Nabokov put it:

“The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, and if a character or an action fits into the pattern of that world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life.” There is no such thing as rea life for an author…: he must create it himself and then create the consequences” (IBID, page 10)