The experiences of that winter and spring went into the writing of my novel Luggas Wood, including a mention of the daffodils, and many people and situations encountered then, and this I have decided is the problem with that book.
I have only now learned of the death, over a year ago, of Fr. James Coutts, former vicar of St. Mary’s, Monmouth. The news brings a rush of memories of a most gentle and saintly man, and a reminder of a debt.
An implicit frontier thesis, ironical, detached, elitist, so very different from the American one, for people who disliked and mistrusted the United States and were disliked and mistrusted in return. Perhaps not so much even a frontier thesis—the frontier in the American sense is a process of repeated renewal and self-invention—rather a wilderness thesis, a bush thesis, a narrative of clinging to the edges of forbidden zones.
These novels—and Luggas Wood, which has nothing at all to do with Brooklyn—seem to me ultimately about the possibility of action in the narrow space between the brute facts of human violence and cruelty, and an increasingly impotent and fragmentary religious culture.