I have a “confession” to make to you, Richard. As one of your early readers and as an old friend, I was afraid the novel would be too intellectual because I know how scholarly and accomplished you are. Yet, your story is a real page turner. Tell me, what was the inspiration for your novel?
The novel began in a conversation with Eudora Welty, in which it struck me how relatively few southern novels contain characters shaped by the educated, upper middle class milieu from which Ms. Welty herself comes. I have always been an avid reader of suspense and mystery novels, as was Ms. Welty. So I decided to write a suspense novel set in that milieu, with a plot that had been with me for a number of years.



Do you remember when you started work on the book?
Yes. While I was at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program working on a libretto for an opera called Achilles for the composer, Alva Henderson, I also began making notes on the novel. Somehow, the California landscape and culture brought into focus by contrast the Southern milieu I wanted to capture, but the novel was not inspired by any particular persons or events.

I know that you were not born in the South.  Can you describe your background?
I was born in 1939 in New York City. My father was drafted into the army as a doctor and I spent my first seven years on various army bases, where my two sisters, Susan and Martha, were born. We then lived in Massachusetts and Maryland. I attended St. John’s College (the “Great Books” College) in Annapolis with dreams that afterward I would move to New York and become a writer.  But because of the draft, I pursued another dream, that of studying philosophy.  I entered the Classics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley to study the Western founding philosophers.  Instead I was unexpectedly captured by and wrote my dissertation on a Latin poet, the master of achieving maximum effects with minimal means, the wonderful Horace.



Water is so important in the novel and you write about it with such confidence that I imagine water figured in your early life.
Dad left the service when I was seven, and we moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, to a second story apartment across the street from the ocean.  After a storm we sometimes found lobsters blown up onto our second floor porch, which were a wonderful supper.  About three years later, we moved to Maryland, first to Bethesda and then to Silver Spring.  We had a family boat in Annapolis which we used for vacations, so I was always near water.



What about your experience on the Gulf Coast? Your descriptions of the area ring very true.
After my wife, Catherine, and I moved to Mississippi in 1975, and when our children were young, we spent a lot of time on the Mississippi Coast, primarily in Ocean Springs, at a house owned by the mother of one of Catherine’s friends, Pat Stevens. I have used the experience of the Gulf from those summers in Confession.  That house was on the Mississippi Sound and had a beautiful pier (which I describe in the novel). Best of all, it was next door to Shearwater Pottery, the home of the great Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson, whose work has immortalized the flora and fauna of the Gulf Coast region.



So, tell me about Catherine---what is her background, how did you meet her, when did you marry, I know you have both been professors at Millsaps College in Jackson; what drew you here?
You know some of this from your long friendship with Catherine.  You know she was raised in a traditional Italian immigrant home in Brooklyn near Coney Island. We met at Berkeley where Catherine was also studying the classics. Her intellectual competence and curiosity, her ability to draw the best from individuals and groups, her openness to adventure have made my life better for forty-eight years.  She would have been happy to stay in California.  I was the one who wanted to accept the job offer from Millsaps.  I was always interested in ways of formulating a liberal arts and sciences undergraduate education, and I recognized in the faculty at Millsaps the kind of decency and sense of mission I wanted to emulate.



































Photo: Richard and Catherine on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.



So how has it worked out---living all these years in Mississippi? First of all, did you get to do what you wanted to do at Millsaps?

Yes, at Millsaps, I became the second director of the Heritage Program, an interdisciplinary humanities program embracing western civilization into which I and my staff integrated lectures on the west- and then world-shaping history of science. Now, a dream realized after my period as director, the Program has been reformulated to embrace world civilization.  

 

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