Richard Martin turned 75 in 2020 and Oranges for Magellan (scheduled for publication in 2022 by Regal House) will be his first published novel. He wants to suggest that if you are doing what you love to do and you believe in its value, though the world is slow to recognize it, continue doing it anyway. Regardless, continue.
When Richard was 13 his beloved father died suddenly. He turned inwards, marked as the only fatherless boy in the world, or so he felt. It was 1958—no therapy, no grief counseling, no family talks about what had struck them, him and his three sisters and his mother. He put on a mask and pretended to be himself, when a wall a mile thick and a mile high might as well have dropped from the sky between him and the life he had led before his father died. All of his fiction, in one sense or another, is grounded in that loss, in surviving it, and in finding some mystery in life that transcends the mystery of death.
Most of Richard’s jobs have been solitary and isolated—mail carrier, gardening, ghost writing, warehouse clerk—reflecting the isolation of Joe Magellan, the long distance flagpole-sitter of Oranges for Magellan.
After high school, at UC Berkeley, far from home, alone among 25,000 other students, Richard learned the craft of letter-writing, which preserved his sanity there and later in the army in Germany. Letters taught him both to say what he had to say, truth or lie, contemplative or comic, and to develop and express contradictory parts of his character and personality. The person he was when he wrote his sisters was not the same person who wrote his mother or his rowdy friends or his high school sweetheart back home in West Covina, California. The thread running through the letters was loneliness, expressed or well hidden, often in the humor of the absurd (a frequent guest in all his fiction).
He drank heavily and used drugs for twenty years, from the time he got out of the army at 22 until he was 40. Of the numerous acid trips he found himself on, four wound up with him alone in various wildernesses, including the first one deep in the woods of Big Sur where he spent a frantic night scrawling in a stranger’s journal that he found in a small teepee in a moonlit clearing.
Alcohol brought out both helpful and harmful storms of emotion dammed up from his father’s death to his first drink at 17. (What saves us in one circumstance can kill us in another.) When he left the army he had vowed never to belong to another organization ever, and that held until at 40 he walked of his own free will through the open doors of AA. Richard has been sober for 34 years.
He was married for the first time at 57. His ad in the LA Weekly that his wonderful wife-to-be answered in 1995 began, “Hermit Seeks Lone Wolf” (which would become the title of another novel of his, a ghost/love story).
Richard’s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Bachy, North American Review, Adirondack Review, Night Train, Wind, Greensboro Review, and others.
“Just about everything I write,” says Richard, “starts with a conflict or contradiction that strikes an internal tuning fork, some subject that will sustain its mystery as I write, always just beyond my understanding, something bigger than myself that I can enter, lose myself in and remain intrigued and impassioned by.”
Oranges for Magellan, for example, was inspired by a newspaper article about a man in Los Angeles, a preacher without a church who had gone up on a pole to sit and minister to passersby. The man’s wife ran a small restaurant at the foot of the pole. After only a few days, tremendous Santa Ana winds arose, knocked down the pole and put the man in the hospital with a broken leg. Richard looked up the restaurant and called the man’s wife. All he remembers of their conversation was asking if her husband was going to go back up and try it again, and her response, “Not if I have anything to say about it.” And Richard’s imagination was off to the races.
The uniqueness of the book’s subject (the obsessive flagpole-sitter with a family below) speaks for itself. Dreadful happenstance (covid-19) aligns Joe Magellan, the book’s would-be hero, with all of us today, all of us transformed overnight into hermits, all flagpole-sitters of a sort, isolated, near to loved ones yet out of reach as long as the virus remains.
The book, like most of Richard’s fiction, is addressed to readers who feel deep down that they don’t fit in, that they are disconnected from a “normal” life by trauma or circumstances or personality, who are most themselves in fact when they are not entirely fitting in, who are willing to go to uncomfortable lengths to follow the call of the unconventional, even though on the surface they may appear to lead conventional lives. Joe Magellan is such a man, fairly happily married, with a decent relationship with his son, a not despicable job, not particularly ambitious in any socioeconomic sense, but driven to do something the world would call mad, selfish, deluded. In fact, Richard considers his writing of Oranges for Magellan a similar kind of mad, transgressive quest.
