Well, I have some excuse for the delay. Immediately on finishing the first draft of the book, I began, then fulfilled, a residency in psychiatry in Philadelphia. Next, I came home to Walla Walla, WA to busy myself for the next decade in a general practice of the specialty I had just trained for. Still, time, as you all know (or will soon enough) … time waits, as they say, for no one: I’m 77 now; it’s time for this novel to be done, which has never, once started, been far from my mind anyhow.
A precis of the work, which I’m going to name “St. Anthony’s Angels.” A piece of egregious medical negligence in a small city kills a young inmate. Ensuing panic (moral and otherwise), hypocrisy, zealotry, opportunism—and their counterpoints, their resistances—together expose weaknesses and strengths within a fragile yet tenacious integrity of a particular community. Three friends (a surgeon, a young poet, and a priest) characterize the lives and loves they see as most buffeted about in the social storm following on the initiating event—each in his own novella about it, making use of characters of his own invention. Three stories tell one story, three fictions spin into three voices of one fictional narrator, three authors of one author. And three principal themes to unite them: the universal enigmas—inevitably and ineffably—that authoring itself gives rise to; a culture of medical practice made visible, public, suddenly within its surround, that of a small city—a mainly rural world circa 2000; and the ontology, ontogeny, and phylogeny of error.
Friends ask—well, friends don’t, but acquaintances do—why does every piece of fiction I write, whether in poetry or prose, seem to require so much time “in the barrel”? (To make use of a metaphor befitting Walla Walla.) Once I got the hang of it, as a young academic physician in Boston I wrote articles and book chapters without any thought toward delayed publication. I would not have been welcome long in the academic world had I given much weight to such a thought. So, is the difference I’m pointing to an artifact, a simple difference of circumstance within vocational exigencies. As an academic it is “publish or perish.” But not so, for the writer of fictions, one whose means for daily sustenance permits otherwise. I don’t know. My guess is that it has to do, for me as a writer, with the difference between fiction and nonfiction; the former in my mind just takes a long time to mature by comparison with the latter. Must I learn to trust, then, my own fictions? Again, I’m not sure, but I’m doubtful that the bottom line is trust. To me it feels more like the fictional work gets born prematurely. What I’ve given birth to is an infant—absolutely or relatively. It must wait, protected, yes, cultivated, yes, to become grown-up. May seem I’ve mixed metaphors—wine with childhood. But it’s the same metaphor. Maturation. Or “Diotima’s Ladder,” a philosopher-friend has taught me.
