That is the last line of the preface to the novel I have worked on and off for several decades. I have decided that it is time to release it, warts and all. You might have wondered over the last few postings why I am releasing long ago writing projects to the virtual world. It is really just a form of house keeping, call it a sort of bucket-list of past creativity. I need to finally clean out the old stories so that I can hopefully, imagine, articulate, and tell some new ones.
“The Good Comrade” is based on events that actually happened to a friend of my parents, and my parents, and sister Kathy, were involved as well. My Mothers cousin was intimately involved and it was because of a betrayal of my mother, that the girl who was taken, was at a public place and could be taken by her mother and several other people. It involves the taking of a child, by one parent, from the other. This was during the McCarthy era, and it so happened that the Mother, although she was born and raised in Farmington, Utah, had become during her college years, the mid to late 1930's, at the University of Utah; a communist and later, after she had been married to my parents friend, and later divorced, she married an African-American. Remember this was in the early 1950's before Rosa Parks famous bus ride, and long before meaningful civil rights legislation. In several states miscegenation was still against the law.
The novel although based on these real events, is a work of fiction. I have no way of knowing how anybody, other than maybe my mother, father and sister Kathy, felt about all of this, but I did hear the story many times, and my father's point of view varied from telling to telling. There are characters that I have made up, to help, in my opinion; the narrative, and there are others that just let me, in the frame-work of the story, describe somethings about the landscape of the West, that have meaning to me.
I hope that some of you will find this interesting enough to read the book. I would be more than happy to discuss any of it, with anybody, at any time. It is available directly from createspace, or through Amazon and Also through the Kindle Store.
Now that this is done, in the sense of being released by me so that completely uninterested parties may read it, if interested, I find that a kind of burden has been lifted, my sense of holding this, has been expiated and I can go on and maybe write, tell and think about some new stories.
The line referring to the saddest story I have ever heard, comes from one of my favorite Novels. “The Good Soldier,” by Ford Maddox Ford. The first line of this novel, which some critics have said is the finest French Novel ever written in English, is “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
https://tsw.createspace.com/title/3466557 or through Amazon or the Kindle Store
