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The Wilderness

The Wilderness began life in Africa in 1964. I had drifted south, hitch-hiking, from Mombasa. At the border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) I was hired by a magician. I studied his work with the same attentiveness I gave to works of prose. Magic, I decided, was the same as art: the same technical tricks, the same interweaving of fact and fiction, of control and misdirection, the deliberate use of confusion to take an audience where you wished; and the same thrill, too, the same miraculous dance at the edge of the world, the same cruel ecstasy of mystery and horror and love. Magic was art, I saw. Art was magic.

I began writing The Wilderness there in Rhodesia. I wrote between acts, so to speak, between tricks, a palmed card, a levitating woman, a bullet caught between teeth....

I was 25 years old. I had already been wandering for some years. I had worked my way through the south seas on a fishing boat, and taken a motorcycle up the center of Australia. Moro pirates smuggled me into Borneo, where I ran a small mining company. In those days life seemed an accumulation of adventures. I carried with me an old typewriter, an Underwood, balancing it on one shoulder. I remember using it as a weapon in Bombay, beating away an angry taxi driver. A red-haired girl watched me. Do you carry that with you everywhere you go? she asked, nodding at the machine. Everywhere, I said. Then you are always armed! she cried.

The book was finished something over a year later, in southern California. How does one reconcile the long dusty roads of Africa with the concrete highways of America? Perhaps one cannot. When I finished The Wilderness I put it in a box and headed south. It was a relief to resume wandering. I traveled by canoe up the Usumacinta River, taught English at a girls' college in Costa Rica, wandered down the Amazon. Soon enough I began other novels. The Wilderness, however, pleases me in ways the others do not. I see dancing among its pages the nimble fingers of my youth....

Only recently has it been published, by Fiction Collective Two, the fourth of my novels to so appear. It is available there or at Amazon.com.