In My Beginning — Lewis E. Birdseye

From the opening tale of this volume of novellas and short stories to its final work, the reader is given adventure, tragedy, and humor that tell us in effect that their origin can be found not only in the shaping imagination of the author but in events experienced by everyone in their own lives. From the tragic murder of a young man the narrator had come to admire, to love experienced in a wholly unconscious way, and the cruel manipulation of the narrator himself that leads him to commit a terrible crime he will never have to admit or make reparations for, the reader is permitted to participate in events far from his or her own life, events nevertheless which either echo or adumbrate what lurks in our own past or future. Each tale takes us to an intriguing location: a wild and scenic river somewhere in the still-primitive wilderness of the South; a long-forgotten age of radical innocence no longer possible or perhaps even imaginable in today's so wise, so jaded world; the laboratory of a scientist whose powerful mind moves with a degree of precision and speed that invites and causes catastrophe; the simple soul of an endearing man whose sensitivity drives him to actions few of us would ever consider; the mind of a man so deformed by self-satisfied egotism that he cannot see beyond the physical deformity of a man maimed, but somehow ennobled, by terrible war injuries; the impossible, but beautifully innocent, yearning of a boy for imagined perfection.
IN MY BEGINNING shows the force of imagination that has given to its owner, as imagination does to all of us, a vision, one we can shape and reshape exclusively for ourselves.