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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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In Closing, I'll Give This Much Away…
In Jon+Merile, Jon Harney pals around with his best buddy from high school and college years, Andy Ferraro. Andy has an attractive younger sister named Dawn, who is always kind of there. Dawn is not a love object but a tall, athletic, pretty but gawky sister object, to her brother Andy of course, but also by extension to Jon.
In Paris My Heart, as I retrieved all of this story netting and kelp from the briney and gloomy ocean floor of my own long ago, I thought about the downer in Umbrellas and how much Jon+Merile was unwittingly so Gallic in the casual luxury of its blasétude, if that's even a word in French (not in my Larousse; I checked). In the Paris version, Marc's best friend Jacques ('Jack') Poncelet has a very similar sort of younger sister named Danielle ('Dani'), who becomes one of two major red herrings that turn the new story on its head with a totally different sort of ending.
The other red herring, I'll hint for you, involves the outcome of Jon Harney's failed trip to see a potential publisher in New York City, and Marc Fontbleu's equally bludgeoning drive across France to see a publisher in Strasbourg. That's all I will tell you. No umbrellas, no Cherbourg here.
When those big bells in the Notre Dame cathedral on the Île de Paris start clearing their throat just before noon, and begin rocking on their rafters and pealing loudly and deafeningly, the ground sways under our feet and the umbrellas are blown away into the Seine, forgotten amid a storm of sudden new emotions… And that is where I'll leave it. I hope, dear reader, that the aroma from my bakery has made you yearn for some chewy and fragrant mouthfuls of European story bread from these ovens of metaphor and simile.
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Aside: Just as the pop song Stereo Love is an ear-worm, so (for me anyway) was another tune from that same part of the world. I'm referring to the Turkish-Kurdish Telgrafin Tellerine which, combined with my love of poetic High SciFi and its finest practitioner (Cordwainer Smith, 1913-1966), led me to branch my SF series Empire of Time in a new direction with the short (I call them Venti Editions) Star Clans of Corduwaine. That's me writing as John Argo, my 3000+ B.C. sense of wonder pseudonym for SFFH, which has nothing to do with my Jean-Thomas Cullen poetry and romantic novels (or does it?). But it's the same principle, in fact, as my sitting in that old Wehrmacht barracks with the moths and Mozart as a young man—or even (this is funny) as a teenager at home, with my broken record player by my side, writing draft after draft of Cosmopolis. I had only two or three 33.33 LPs, including Dave Brubeck's Take Five album. If I remember right, the last piece on Side B was a piano riff. What I needed, as later in Germany, was soft background music that did not distract me. My ancient record player (as we called them in the 1960s) was broken, and the needle would return over and over again—automatically, nonstop, and with no human involvement—to a point about two seconds after the opening of Blue Rondo a la Turk with a little squiggle sound, so that played over and over again while my story took me to remote planets in the galaxy (in Cosmopolis, which I finally published (with a bit of polishing) from a nearly indecipherable ancient only copy of a lost 1969 manuscript.
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