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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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4. Nostalgia, Poetry, Moths, Mozart, and Updike
Aside from my soldierly duties that each of us performed, I worked as an office clerk in Personnel Actions, OAG, at a major logistics command and had a good overview of our command's mission. In the evenings, I often walked from the barracks across the parade ground, back to the office, to type novels and short stories. There are those who say those old Hitler-era barracks buildings were haunted. I was too busy writing to care, although I remember being startled every once in a while by a loud cracking noise (wood or stone cooling off from the unusually hot summer days of 1976-7) and sounds of voices, echoing on the stone tiles of four stories of hallways and echoing stairwells, from some of our U.S. troops or civilians working late, along with local nationals (German, French, Belgian, you name it).
I spent many hours writing fiction, including my nostalgic New Haven novel. There were no window screens, so the windows were open, and a mild (often rainy) night wind would blow in during the colder seasons. The barracks had been built during the 1930s for a mechanized Wehrmacht unit that served in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War. Each of the sandstone doorways still had the carved head of a heroic (mythological) figure from German history. The long vanished German soldiers' rifle racks still sat in the walls of the barracks corridors, as I am sure they still do in the new century.
I had a small boom box at my side, on the steel radiator under the open window, and a handful of cassette tapes. Mostly, I would compose fiction (and some of my last poetry) to the gentle swellings of Mozart symphonies and the like. In the summer months, moths would flutter in and out of the open windows (no screens, no air conditioning).
I remember there was also a wonderful, unforgettable U.S. Army library system with branches at Kleber Kaserne up the road, and Vogelweh on the other side of town. Being in the library was, for me, the one moment where I could forget the pain of exile, and feel as if I were back home in (a glorified) New Haven. Nevermind that I had left New Haven for San Diego, over 3000 miles away. I had a B.A. in English, and read a great deal. In typing up Jon+Merile (new published as On Saint Ronan Street), I remember being especially conscious of John Updike's New England-based, sometimes soap operatic fiction taken to literary heights and commercial success. I had grown up in a New England college town with its powerful, emotionally and poetically evocative seasons. I'd found my best friends and my first loves (girls, women) there. As a townie, I was as much at home around the Yale campus as later at the Storrs campus of UConn, where I went. I grew up wandering around the marvelous faux-Oxford buildings and arches and little courtyards of Yale Univerity; I was a townie, not a gownie).
New Haven, for all of its diverse, colorful history, was a great place to grow up; not to mention having the Atlantic Ocean within a mile or two of my parents' doorway in West Haven, in the form of Long Island Sound. On foggy nights, I could drift off to sleep listening to oil tankers and cargo ships talking to each other in a now vanished language of horns: some booming, some talking short light fweeps, others interjecting their location and soundings in a series of slow, thoughtful wahhhh…wahhhh…wahhhh… sounds (now replaced by silent, unromantic GPS radars at the pilot station on the bridge).
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