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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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5. Case-Bound: My First Poetry Book, etc.
The 1976 manuscript (Jon+Merile) that I brought home with me from Europe upon my ETS to CONUS, which sat in the garage with my other early writings, in 2016 became On Saint Ronan Street. I titled it after one of my favorite atmospheric streets (more a green, leafy campus drive than a city street in my memory).
The hero of that novel was a young poet (Jon Harney) who had an intense, romantic fling with a beautiful, slightly older faculty wife (Merile Doherty) whose Yale professor husband was away in Australia on an archeological dig and digging the women there. I have no idea why I chose those names. I had a sense of humor, and maybe Harney was meant to be a pun on 'horny.' Who knows. Jon is usually short for Jonathan, and I didn't want to sound too autobiographical, though a great deal of my youthful persona walks around in that young New Haven poet's grass-stained clothing. He mowed lawns around campus to earn a barely living wage (as I did, though as a security guard). The woman (Merile, pronounced like Merill, for shadowy reasons alluded to in the story) is pure fiction; although there was at last one highly passionate, tempestuous, unforgettable slightly older divorcée in my life for a while, whose feminine memory I no doubt peeled and dropped into the blender).
Jon and Merile met and happened—a love affair as intense as it was clouded by gnawing uncertainties; and maybe that made it all the more spicy and breathless. I won't give away the plot (much) except to say that Jon Harney (no pun on horny, I'm sure) was an aspiring and struggling young poet trying to 'get published' in New York City—a fictional poet using a fictional pseudonym (Charles Egeny, which he hoped sounded somehow vaguely Russian emigré in the mode of maybe Vladimir Nabokov). When I finally was able to polish and publish the manuscript in 2016, I realized that, while Jon Harney was not strictly autobiographical (and all the characters were 100% fictional), I too was a poet who had been published in a few small magazines but hoped for a book.
So as I will now relate, my own youthful poetry grew into and fused with the fictive poetry of the fictional Charles Egeny, himself a fiction of the fictional Jon Harney. I had been storing not only my (ultimately over 425) poems in that binder from age 23, plus another collection finished by about age 27—but also this short, enigmatic manuscript (Jon+Merile). Both mss demanded to finally see the light of day and reach readers. I had my poetry in that durable old binder, looking by 2016 already yellow and tattered as a medieval manuscript, plus a hand-stitched anthology titled Pauses of which I bound twelve copies in Kaiserslautern. Plus I had another battered old binder with the yellowing typewritten (pre-word processing) ms of Jon+Merile. That was when the inspiration struck me to combine my poems with those of Charles Egeny in the world of John Harney in 1970s New Haven (all fiction, of course). And that is why the manuscripts of On Saint Ronan Street (1977) and Paris Affaire (2016) contain poems! And that is why my publication of On Saint Ronan Street (the novel, in 2016 or 2017) is twinned with a poetry anthology titled Cymbalist Poems. Pauses and other old poetry of mine wound up in Cymbalist Poems, a title meant to convey
a nod to my teenage love of the early 20th Century Symbolist movement (among many other influences). Those two books, in turn, became a third volume titled 27duet, recalling Prof. Uhlig's dicta about lyrical poets (he didn't mention rock stars, and probably had not heard of any; Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died within a short time of each other, age 27, a while after my sojourn in Prof. Uhlig's class. Today, 2019, one adds Amy Winehouse and many other '27' flame-out tragedies to that list.
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