From the back cover: "In the spring of 2018 at the age of 81 the author attacked a stack of manuscripts which had sat on various shelves for over fifty years. Three short novels, some stories, and many fragments made a dusty pile many inches high. Privateer, the earliest novel, had been written while at Harvard and published in the literary magazine MSS in 1964. In this work an armed merchant ship in the aftermath of World War II sails into New York Harbor to wreak havoc on the lives of brother and sister Primo and Marie, who live in a brothel by a live chicken market. Zoyhaique, started at Harvard and finished in the Navy, a novel of revolution in a South American country, follows the life of Hensoldt, a German with a checkered past and his co-conspirators. Theo and Kia, started in the Navy and finished at Hopkins, chronicles the loves of Theo, an agent working it appears for the Israelis hunting down apparent Nazis for a bounty, and Kia, whose relation to the Third Reich is ambiguous."

 

      From the end of the Author's Foreword: “I will caution the reader: The person who wrote these novels no longer exists. I buried him long ago. And if he does exist, he is not the narrator. The author is not responsible for his narrators. They live a demented life all their own. I always kept a safe distance from them. You should, too. Finally, I thank Frauke Palmer for allowing me to use her work, the aptly named original graphic, 'Into the Abyss,' for the cover design.”


     William Palmer
     Columbus, Ohio, 2018

 

Availabe from Amazon:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Short-Novels-1955-1965/dp/198454702X

 

 

 

 

 

Foreword

          Between 1955 and 1965 I wrote three short novels, Privateer, Zoyhaique, and Theo and Kia, the first while I was at Harvard, the second while I was in the Navy, 1958-1961, and third while I was in graduate school in physics at Johns Hopkins.  There is some overlap, as Zoyhaique was started while I was a college senior, and Theo and Kia was started while I was in the Navy.  This was a busy decade for me, when I finished my undergraduate degree in Physics, served as CIC officer and Navigator on the USS Chilton, APA-38 in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and finished a good deal of my graduate degree in physics.  During the same time I courted my wife Frauke and married her at the end of 1963. 

            At Harvard I was encouraged by John Hawkes and Albert Guerard with whom I took writing courses for three years.  I published a story in the Harvard Advocate (1957), as well as other early work in the magazines Audience (1960) and Genesis West (1965).  Privateer was published in 1964 in the literary journal MSS, edited by John Gardner.  I thank Lisa Rosenberg, John Gardner’s widow who later took MSS over, for granting me republishing rights. Some desultory efforts were made to publish the other novels, spurred on by John Hawkes, but as I became more absorbed into physics and family that aspect of my life became more or less shelved.  I received my doctorate degree in 1967, worked as a post-doc at Argonne National Laboratory for two years and when I became an assistant professor at Ohio State in 1969, my literary career was over, I thought.  The MSS publication in 1964 was a pleasant surprise but it did not spur me to take to the pen; the writing bug had been purged from my system.   The other novels were consigned to desk drawers and then a shelf in a closet in our Columbus house where they resided as fading typescripts until the spring of 2018 when, retired for eighteen years, I at last faced up to the problem of what to do with these relics of my wayward youth. 

            A fading typescript is but a paltry thing.  One easy solution, and I must admit I have often taken the easy way out when faced with similarly messy problems, was to contribute these pages to the recycling bin.  But I had second thoughts about this route and decided they did merit a stab at some kind of preservation, if only that it forced me to come to terms with a distant former self.  I did not have the energy to retype them into a Word file nor was paying someone else to peruse my errant prose a comfortable solution.  I then discovered an easy technological fix right under my nose: our scanner/printer had precisely the function I needed, namely to scan the typescripts using optical character recognition (OCR) software into a rich text file which was easily converted to Word. 

            Alas, the typescripts were now of such low quality – I did not often change my ribbon -- that the OCR software produced files so error-ridden that one might just as well key them in again.  Then my wife Frauke thought of a trick, which was a great step forward: recopy the faded typescript using a copier/printer function that darkened the test, and then scanning this improved copy using the OCR function.  This did produce a file which I could cope with, still seriously error ridden, line by line, but an acceptable starting point, and I went to work.

            Looking at something you have written between 50 and 60 years ago, belonging to what you thought was a closed chapter of your life, is always fraught with a heavy mixture of voyeuristic curiosity, remorse and regret, and even active dislike for youthful indiscretions. I was doing excavation into the psyche of someone who for all practical purposes did not exist, someone I had known only imperfectly, a skin I had shed so many years ago. 

            Privateer, the first novel, was still entrenched in my warm memories of my Harvard years and my teachers Hawkes and Guerard.  I had from time to time over the last half century flipped through some pages of the one copy I had of MSS magazine and so I thought I was pretty familiar with it.  Yet when I went at it and had to read every word – there were OCR induced typos in every sentence – there were surprises.  I wondered at times why John Gardner published it.  Joyce Carol Oates appeared in the same issue, and John Hawkes and Willian Gass in other issues, so he was not desperate for contributors. 

           I did like the first sentence of the novel.  After that there was much to admire and much to deplore.  I was working through lots of New York experiences, though I had never been in a Brooklyn whorehouse where much of the action takes place, nor had I ever found a newborn in a subway urinal, but the appearance of a privateer in New York Harbor carrying vestiges of the German World War Two navy did reflect some of my experiences as a midshipman on summer training cruises, suitably repurposed.  In producing the Word file for this little republication, I did not make any changes apart from correcting a slew of spelling errors though it is possible that other changes crept in when I was fixing the OCR scanned document.

           I will not attempt a plot synopsis of Privateer because there is no need for that.  Suffice it to say that the brother and sister Primo and Marie become involved with the crew of a privateer which appears in New York Harbor.  Perhaps they lived near where my ship was dry docked for repairs in the winter of 1960, several years after I wrote the novel and was working on the second.  Primo works at a live chicken market much like the one my mother took me to on Myrtle Avenue in the late 1940s.  Primo drives a truck.  Marie is a magnificent women.  A lascivious secret agent is in cahoots with the privateer’s German captain and crew who have questionable pasts and very nefarious motives.

           Another magnificent women, an actress, appears in the second novel about revolution in a South American country.  Originally named Coyhaique, I changed the name to Zoyhaique because Coyhaique, unfortunately, is a real place in Patagonia.   The actress is the wife of Hensoldt, another German with a checkered past, who is plotting a revolution – or counter revolution, I can’t be sure, with his side kick Agrado and the Chief of Police Leignadier.  Narrators come and go.  Agrado sometimes narrates, sometimes does not.  The novel was finished on board the USS Chilton, APA-38, originally a merchant C-4 hull laid down as the S. S. Sea Needle but converted during construction to an attack transport for the amphibious navy in WW II.

          Zoyhaique, started at Harvard and finished when I was in the navy, still had a certain freshness in my memory when I unearthed it again in the spring of 2018.  I knew I had written a second novel.  I knew what it was about.  I cannot say this about Theo and Kia.  I vaguely remembered that I had written fragments about these two lovers but evidently I had completely suppressed that there was a completed novel in an envelope with a note from Gordon Lish, then at Esquire magazine, dated 1970; evidently I was sending this around in case he wanted an excerpt, which he did not, stating he was still looking rather at Zoyhaique/Coyhaique. It came as a surprise to me and my wife Frauke as well in 2018 that my stuff was being shipped around so late in the game – 1970 --when to my memory I had abandoned these efforts years earlier.

          So the really big surprise was the Theo and Kia manuscript.  How had I ever squeezed that project into my time at Hopkins?  I worked at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory during the summers of 1962 and 1963 before starting thesis research, and I suspect this is when I found the time.  Theo derives from a real person, the salesman with rotten yellow teeth who sold me a German car, a Borgward Isabella, in 1961 on my last Mediterranean cruise.  Kia was the name, I assume nickname, of a girl I met in Salonica who I was to see in Athens, our next port of call, but she stood me up.  Kia, like Hensoldt’s actress wife, was magnificent.   

           Theo is an agent working it appears for the Israelis hunting down apparent Nazis (though that term is not used in the text) for a bounty.  Kia is the daughter of Hausner whose relation to the Third Reich is ambiguous.  The mysterious Stroem is the mastermind of a shoot-out in an Athens hotel where the American agent Claudius and others take bullets.  Theo is also a mountain climber who conquers the Jungfrau.  Who is Jew and who is German and who is a German Jew, who is Dutch and who is German, seem always in question.  The novel ends with a paraphrased quotation from Goethe for which I can find no basis, this in the age of Google.  Yet I doubt that even the now dead vestige of myself could make such things up. 

            I have not attempted any rewriting apart from fixing typos and errors introduced in the OCR scan.  No doubt many glitches remain.  The novels are presented in the reverse order in which they were written lest the reader expect to find any signs of increasing maturity.  

            Germans, German, Germans.  They infest these novels like cockroaches in the Baltimore apartment of my graduate student days.  Along with them there is a certain darkness that pervades these pages, even in the moments, if you can find them, of comedy. For that, in lieu of begging forgiveness, I will caution the reader:  The person who wrote these novels no longer exists.  I buried him long ago.  And if he does exist, he is not the narrator.  The author is not responsible for his narrators.  They live a demented life all their own.  I always kept a safe distance from them.  You should, too. 

William Palmer

Columbus, Ohio, 2018