Let a thousand flowers bloom

Robert Reginald

Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 20:30 Written by Administrator Wednesday, 20 January 2010 20:19

ROBERT REGINALD

(Prof. Michael Burgess)

“He was born with the gift of laughter,

and a sense that the world was mad.”

That line, taken from the opening words of the historical novel Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini (one of the author’s literary heroes), defines Robert Reginald, the literary pseudonym of Michael Burgess, about as well as anyone or anything can.

Rob Reginald was born in Fukuoka, Japan during the immediate aftermath of World War II, the son of a career Air Force officer.

“We moved constantly,” he relates. “I lived in Japan and Turkey and throughout the United States, and traveled all through Italy and Austria and Germany and Canada. It was an education of sorts.”

This constant uprooting of his life, this chaos in motion, forced him to learn how to entertain himself. He became an avid reader from age four or five, devouring anything and everything, fiction and nonfiction, whatever he could find. It’s a habit that’s remained with him to this day.

“Books became the center of my world,” he says, “and they’ve never abandoned me. I could always count on one of the classics to carry me through. I still read something every day before going to bed, without fail.”

He received a classical education from the Jesuits in both high school and college, taking Latin and Greek and Russian and French and a myriad of other subjects, from philosophy to calculus.

“The Jesuits gave you a rigorous ride through the halls of ivy, if you had enough wits about you to pay attention. They were strict at times, but in the end you learned how to think. That ability to reason, to identify problems and dissect them and find solutions, seems largely lost in today’s curricula.”

Reginald graduated from Gonzaga University in 1969. During his senior year at Gonzaga he wrote his first book, Stella Nova, the first bio-bibliography of science fiction writers, as an Honors Program project.

“I attended my first SF ‘con’ in September of 1968, and met Emil Petaja, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and many others. They were the first writers I’d ever actually encountered, and yet they took time to sit down and talk at length to a twenty-year-old nobody from the provinces. It occurred to me that no one had ever compiled a ‘Who’s Who’ of the science-fiction field. I bounced the idea off Emil on a bus ride from San Francisco to Berkeley, and he thought it was a good idea. So I did it. I learned more from putting that first book together than from any writing class I took at Gonzaga, however worthy.”

Stella Nova was published in May of 1970. A few months later Reginald grabbed another degree from the University of Southern California, and then took a position at Cal State San Bernardino, the youngest faculty member ever hired there.

“So many academic positions were available in those days that I was able to restrict my sights just to Southern California, and I still got three offers in as many weeks. CSUSB had the potential to expand very rapidly, an exciting prospect for a young librarian, and so I went there.”

He never left.

Reginald also continued writing and editing books and journals for other publishers.

“I could always get contracts without difficulty,” he notes. “I’d send off a group of letters to prospective publishers, and some would ultimately fall on fallow ground. Whatever came through, that’s what I did.”

In 1975 he started The Borgo Press, his own publishing company, with the royalties gained from his first major reference work. About the same time he met Mary Wickizer Rogers, a student at Cal State. They married the following year.

“From the beginning we shared the same interest in literature and history and writing, a commonality that has only grown with the passage of the decades. We shared everything, joys and sorrows, work and play, and more recently, serious illness. Mary is the one person that I trust to edit my work, the one true reader of my deathless prose. If she tells me something is ‘off,’ I better pay attention. If I’ve ever done anything right in my life, this was it.”

As always, Reginald was a pyre of energy. He learned to write high quality prose at great speed, to rework books by other writers into publishable form, and to do all of the things necessary to bring a project from manuscript form into final publication.

“When you’re running a publishing company, however small, you’re doing everything the ‘big boys’ are doing, but in microcosm. We originally had a clunky old typesetter, and we spent thousands of hours laying out books and pasting up copy. We learned everything from scratch, but we had a great deal of fun in the process. Along the way we met some truly captivating writers and editors, very talented individuals all.”

Borgo specialized in literature and history, reflecting the interests of its owners. It published 300 titles between the years 1976-98, before the company was finally shut down.

“We just burned out eventually,” Reginald says. “What had been fun when we were young and full of oats now had become sheer drudgery. It was time to move on.”

Throughout this entire period, Reginald had continued to pursue his academic career as well.

“I was promoted to professor in 1984, a curious coincidence of dates. I worked primarily in Collection Development, Cataloging, and Serials. I’ve always regarded my library and writing careers as symbiotic; what I learned from one, I applied to the other, and vice versa.”

Then he got sick.

“During summer break in ’03 I suffered a massive heart attack. I was lucky to survive. I returned to Cal State in September, and began writing again in November.”

And now he looks forward to retirement from his academic position.

“Partial retirement, anyway!” he notes. “I’ll be going half-time with the beginning of the 2005 school year.”

Meanwhile, he continues to write and edit books and essays and stories. Sometime during ’05 his number of published monographs should finally surpass one hundred.

“Well, what do such things really mean in the end?” he wonders. “Numbers tell you nothing about quality. I do hope that a few of my works will continue to be read after I’m gone. Not much I can do about that myself except to make each book as good as humanly possible. Maybe some will survive.”

“‘He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his legacy.’”

Updated 29 December 2004