Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

This skilfully fictionized chapter of American cultural history entitled Penhally deals with a theme that has a curiously ancient, almost archeological, ring, for it is concerned with the ownership of land and its influence upon the lives of people. Settlers in the colonies along the Atlantic brought with them a passion for broad acres, some of them because...