Bull Fire

by MacDonald Harris

At the center of this story stands a most improbably machine--a man-made bull whose ratcheting and heaving on a sunny field one afternoon signal the monumental and wildly funny collision between lust and the Divine. Out of this bizarre sexual union is born Nino--half god, half demon, and at the same time the very human hero of this extraordinary book.As the story opens, Nino begins to tell us about his life on the Mediterranean island where he lives with his sexually and scientifically inventive family. He conceals nothing from us, his bizarre and fantastic childhood, his mother's young literary "friends," his father's dispassionate observation of them all, the "games" he and his sister make up...The novel tells the story of Nino's half-conscious struggle to know who he is and to become human. What he tells us about his family and about his intimates would be pornography if it were in blunt language. But the erotic events are related with an innocence, a naïveté, a candor so total that they become matter-of-fact and natural.The one thing Nino does not tell us, because he is hardly aware of it himself, is the strange web of the mythical in his own personal destiny. Only gradually does the reader recognize that there is something familiar and timeless in the story that is unfolding. The legends that lurk in the human memory, extending far back to the dawn of history, are constantly reborn. As Nino hardly knows that he is living out his own myths, that the story he is enacting has taken place before, so the average man does not know it. It is the impact of so wonderful and contemporary a story with this profound idea that makes the publication of Bull Fire an extremely important event.

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Pseudonym of Donald Heiney

Donald Heiney was born in South Pasadena in 1921. Seastruck from the time he read Stevenson at the age of twelve, he went to sea in earnest as a merchant marine cadet in 1942, sat for his Third Mate's license in 1943, and spent the rest of the war as a naval officer on a fleet oiler. After the war he earned a B.A. at Redlands and a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In 1964 he lived with his wife and son in Salt Lake City where he taught writing and comparative literature.

Taking the pseudonym MacDonald Harris for his fiction, his first story appeared in Esquire in 1947. Since then he has published stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as a number of literary quarterlies. His story "Second Circle" was reprinted in the 1959 O. Henry Collection. Private Demons, his first novel, was published in 1961. Mortal Leap, his second, was finished in the summer of 1963 in Rome.

His novel The Balloonist was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. He received a 1982 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his entire body of work.

Heiney died in 1993, at age 71, at his home in Newport Beach, California.