Grow Slowly Eden

About the Book

Proto-mystic Jonah Killifish, prone to visions, lives in the Florida Everglades with his tarty mother (Strete Killifish), abrasive father (Major Killifish), beloved but antagonistic brother (Dirk) who is in love with Jackie. Whitfield. Her father, Bill Whitfield, detests Dirk.. The Major, Jonah’s wise old acquaintance, Eugene Welgrove, mute friend, Syno, and minor characters fill out the cast. What, Jonah wonders, lies behind the facts and facades of nature and people? He seeks heights and the essence of the ineffable. He desires the approval if not the love of his putative father, the Major, who rejects all gestures of affection. Jonah dimly realizes that mundane life is rich in myth and ritual which progress and pragmatism threaten to destroy. He spins strands of desire in an attempt to catch the elusive insect of the Major’s affection, or failing that, the approval of his father who believes Jonah unmanly, deprecates, and rejects him. The ambisexual Loveworthy pins Jonah with every glance as does Father John, the Catholic priest, who in the past sexually seduced Jonah. A skin-shedding Egg Man also attacks Jonah sexually.

In part, Jonah’s spiritual yearnings are fulfilled, not by the priest, but by the nature Jonah ties to and does penetrate through spontaneous visions and the teachings of Eugene Welgrove. Like his namesake, Jonah compulsively broadcasts his ideas and prophesies, But the Major, frustrated by having been fired from his sugar mill job by Whitfield, finds Jonah’s "babblings" intolerable and would have him incarcerated in the state psychical hospital.

Disliking to expose the skin-tags on his shoulders, Jonah is compelled to swim in competition with Dirk, his beloved brother, and Syno, his mute friend, to retrieve a bird’s egg from distant Turtle Island. Jonah severely wounds the trick-playing Syno, wins the contest physically, but loses technically to Dirk, yet wins psychologically when he recognizes the shades within himself and nature.

Suffering from "affect amnesia," Jonah hopes for an emotional thaw. Easter Sunday and the frozen subtropical Everglades provide no food for human, bird, or beast. Because the Major believes Welgrove is in fact Jonah’s father, he detests both. Jonah recalls a fishing adventure of the previous summer in which he and Welgrove caught the mysterious "Ancient of Days," a fish, which when freed pilots them to Goose Island, a mere dot in the middle of the lake. On the way, they encounter Loveworthy whom Jonah once saw in bed with his mother, Strete. In the absence of Welgrove, Loveworthy makes a sexual pass at the bewildered boy. Jonah floats in the waters of intellectual and spiritual awakening to the mystery and meaning of existence and his prophetic future when Welgrove informs him of the glue of cosmic love that holds the universe together as mirrored in the phenomenon of Goose Island. Ecstatic, Jonah faints.

On that frozen Easter Sunday, crafty Jonah captures hungry geese and turkeys to feed his starving family. The outraged gander attacks him with wings, beak, and claws. The struggle leads to Jonah’s first vision. Welgrove saves him from the savage bird.

Having touched the numinous in these experiences, Jonah thaws emotionally and anticipates a journey to Turtle Island in spite of the Major’s objections. Killifish and Welgrove discuss the values of factuality and spirituality and the meaning of child sacrifice as once practiced by the Indians in a cave on the Island. Jonah wonders how the sacrifice of a child serves as a marriage gift to the lake’s androgynous deity.

Jonah and his mother have reached an impasse. Will he continue to accompany her on her distributing food for charity? She uses her occupation and Jonah to disguise her sexual assignations. Jonah loves her feistiness, d

About the Author

At eight, the author moved with his parents to the Florida Everglades. He served five years in divisions of the Infantry, Paratroops, and Air Force. After World War II, he earned a master’s degree from the University of Iowa and a doctorate from Brown University. The author has taught at various colleges and universities: Brown, Idaho, Nebraska, Pacific, Wheaton, and Ripon. He has published on Anglo Saxon poetry, Medieval Drama, Marlowe, Herrick, Herbert, Marvell, Melville, Twain, Kafka, Hemingway, Porter and Wallace Stevens. He is co-editor with Charles Clerc of Seven Contemporary Short Novels (in print since 1970) and co-writer with Diane Borden of books on Bergman and De Sica. For ten years the author served as contributing editor for Twentieth Century Literature, and College English. With Neil Issacs he co-edited an anthology of short stories (Chandler). Retired, he lives and writes in San Francisco ROWING IN EDEN is his first published novel. He is revising a second novel, THE LIMESTONE TREE.