The Education of Uncle Paul

Paul Rivers returns to England after twenty years in America, and the simple blue line of coast on the horizon strikes him like a revelation. On the ocean liner nearing Liverpool, he is flooded with childhood memory, longing, and the sense that homecoming is also a confrontation with the inward life he has spent years unable to speak. A rough old steerage passenger, returning after fifty years of failure, breaks down in tears and tells his story openly, and Paul is shaken by the healing power of such honesty as well as by his own emotional silence. Orphaned young and forced away from Cambridge, Paul found his vocation as a wood cruiser in the American lumber woods, where forests, rivers, weather, animals, and solitude nourished a mystical imagination he never learned to express. Now forty-five, still shy, boyish, and inwardly rich, he fears he does not belong among ordinary society, even as his sister Margaret welcomes him into her country home. Their affectionate conversations, and Margaret's mention of Joan's work with London slum children, stir Paul's sense that he may need a larger purpose. As night gathers and a storm approaches, Paul's creative life awakens. Writing in the dark, he feels united with the garden and the silence, and for a moment his hidden desires seem real. Then an unseen disturbance begins to move through the house, and Paul and his black cat Smoke wait in tense wonder for whatever transformation is coming. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.