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Paris My Heart (2017) • On Saint Ronan Street (1976)
Two Novels, Same Story, 40 Years and Two Cities Far Apart.
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2. First Things, 1976, Nostalgia & Naïveté
With the glorious new artistic freedom of print-on-demand and e-books, I was finally able to start reaching readers, and find some exposure for that long-ago young poet and novelist. In regard to On Saint Ronan Street and its clone, Paris Affaire: The result of rescuing my ancient texts from garage oblivion was several things, among them a trio of books. One is the novel On Saint Ronan Street, a nostalgic love story about a young poet in the college town of New Haven, Connecticut (where I lived my adolescence and early young adult life). I was a young, single soldier stationed far from home ('the World,' as we called it). Every one of us yearned for ETS, for CONUS, for a return home to friends and family and familiar streets. We dreamed of our Estimated Time of Separation and our return to the World, or the Continental United States.
While entertaining those feelings, I'm sure we all idealized the past into something of a lost Eden (which home never really was, but this is fiction, poetry, romance, so anything goes). During that same time period (age 27, flame-out of lyric poets and singers, dramatic death for some of the great rock stars), I realized my poetry days were over (complete, not finished). I had known of this long ago, because of a course in German Lit I took with a Professor Uhlig at UConn. I was always interested in Rainer Maria Rilke, among others (a Prague poet of the Austro-Hungarian Empire vintage, who wrote in German and in fact lived in Paris for a time). Dr. Uhlig informed us that most lyrical poets (e.g. Rilke) seemed to flame out by age 30 and turn to other things, usually powerful, poetic prose, so I had my compass set in that direction as a teenager already. In fact, before leaving New Haven at age 23 to hitch-hike (yes, a starving artist, a post-Beat hippioid, whatever) around the U.S.A. and settle in Southern California, I sat in a power station in New Haven Harbor (employed as a minimum wage security guard) and, in between clock rounds among the docks and cargo ships, typed my poetry and bound it in a durable thesis binder purchased at the Yale Co*op. I was to open that binder again in my late sixties, get a friend to type the poems (which have a direct impact on the two novels in question here), and published three books of poetry.
Nearly a decade and many adventures later, as a young soldier in West Germany, I continued writing, which included novels and some of my last poems. I hand-bound and registered copyright on my first self-published book, titled Pauses for reasons explained in my age-27ish introduction. It all went into that dusty box that followed me to my new home in San Diego, California upon (using Army lingo) my ETS and return to CONUS in 1980. That was that for the poems and this novel (Jon+Merile), for over forty years.
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