I’m an Educated Man: A Norfolk Romance

I’m an Educated Man: A Norfolk Romance written by Phil Rowe is the first of three novels he wrote that loosely follow his life in the 60’s through his time in the army and then in graduate school at Rutgers University. He described A Norfolk Romance briefly as follows. Once upon a time, actually in the early 60’s, when Dick was in the Army, he had some adventures with his true love, Karen, a wonderful violist, and he wrote a novella which dealt in some large metaphoric way with those adventures-or at least with what he took to be the principal issues-concluding that he had a lot to learn. That was … the first of this series. Phil was a mystic, a blues guitarist, a novelist, an avid reader, a film maker, an Appalachian Trail hiker, a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, a poet, a Risk player and risk taker. He pursued each enthusiasm with that passion for living intensely in the moment that did much to define the sixties. And yet, he struggled, all his life, with the long term, unanswerable questions posed by those inclined to philosophical speculation. Many of his enthusiasms as well as his philosophical speculations inform his writing, so you can expect literary references, and even characters that reflect other literary figures like the seductive Zenobia, think Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. You’ll find literary critiques ranging on back to Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, movie references particularly to Shane, even a mysterious western ‘gun slinger’ named Wilson packing a ping pong paddle. All come together and/or clash, as young people, even talented young people, do, at Yale’s summer school for musicians and artists in Norfolk Connecticut, a bucolic setting not well known as a haunt for western avengers.