"CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR PUBLISHED NOVEL!" RESPONSE: "CONGRATULATIONS ARE A BIT PREMATURE."

 “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR PUBLISHED NOVEL!”

RESPONSE: “CONGRATULATIONS ARE A BIT PREMATURE.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 4, 2012

REFERENCE:

The person offering the congratulations is an author with a series of successful mystery novels. We also share the same hometown of Clinton, Iowa, although she, too, lives elsewhere.

EARLY MORNING RESPONSE:

Dixie,

The novel is not yet published.  I often speak at the Kiwanis when I come into town giving me a chance to see Ron McGauvran and Hank Dihlmann among others.  BB is still reading my behemoth. 

1968 was a pivotal year, and from a South African perspective and vis-à-vis the United States of the time, manages to make the present a bit deja vu.

As a writer, and I think I've always been such a strange bird, there is a yearning to belong to your place of origin, yet simultaneously a feeling of being threatened and diminished by it. 

A friend of BB's and mine, a Clinton County judge, at one of these Kiwanis meetings said in the Q&A period after the talk, "Not any chance you'll soon be moving back to Clinton (Iowa) is there?" 

The question threw me, and often when that happens, I answer directly. "Actually," I said, "I feel more comfortable in Europe."  Now, why would I say that?  It is true but arrogant and misplaced as well.

It goes back, I suspect, to my sense of diminishing and threatening that I've already alluded to, that is, part of me feels more close to those back home where my roots lie, feeling a sense of still being one of them, while being able to see them and myself more clearly from afar. 

I could never have become the person I am, or have had the experiences that I have had were I to have remained "back home."  It would have been a zone of suffocation and limitation, possibly spiritual death even, a place where my sensitive intellect could not have been abandoned, as it needed to be abandoned to create. 

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was obviously biographical.  A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA, I fear, will be seen in that same context.

"Green Island," I must admit, could neither have been written had I not experienced South Africa, nor have had its gravitas without the earlier ambience and ambivalence of my hometown. 

I would not have had the capacity, indeed, the passion or attention to detail to transform the squalid into the lyrical and the lyrical into the concomitant squalid. 

Paradoxically, my sense is that my novel, which calls Clinton, "Crescent City," and creates an atmosphere of intense attachment and nostalgia for those roots, which originate in Ireland, could not have been written without this perpetual sense of belonging in absence.  

It is no doubt why I have always felt a James Joyce connection.  He could not have written without Dublin, and had he stayed, could not have written at all.  He needed it but only in his soul while his body and mind was in a constant peripatetic sojourn.

You are far more the creative artist than I am, as my writing allows me -- even in my nonfiction -- to become the center of a small community in my mind suitable for the role I play and the art, as I do believe I create art, that is allowed to develop in that community. 

In my "Shadow" book, I am eight years old.  In my "Green Island," which is a symbolism for paradise and hell combined, thus the reference to "Black Sea," meaning hell and the huge subjugated black population, I am nearly thirty.  The tether to both South Africa and Ireland remains the focus to where I grew up. 

Only a single couple has read my novel in its entirety, and it has been revised repeatedly since.  The woman of the couple was not offended by the earthiness of the novel, but the man was.  He liked the inventive and imaginative and even bold posture of the young executive, but not "the smut" as he put it, which, incidentally, without it would be an empty vessel without meaning, direction, theme or denouement. 

These thoughts occur to me early this day.

Be always well,

Jim