Writer James Morrison talks about crossing Oscar Wilde with Vladimir Nabokov for defective Fever.

Writer James Morrison talks about crossing Oscar Wilde with Vladimir Nabokov for defective Fever, his evocative new memoir of growing up gay

Childhood may be a novel time, but rarely is it written about in as unimpaired a manner as James Morrison, an plainly gay professor of English at North Carolina State University, has managed to. Morrison's hesitating Fever: Reflections of a Gay Boyhood (St Martin's) exquisitely mixes essay, memoir, fiction, and a slew of Wildean epigrams ("Lack calls forth desire, unless it is desire that charms lack"). And through serpentinely worded, stylized episodes involving crushes, family fit of peevishnesss Pinocchio, and the removal of his tonsils, Morrison dissects a gay identity that always was--even if it wasn't intuited at the time.

"I wanted to essay and express the thought proces of a kid in the language of an adult," says Morrison, 40 who was published in 1995's Lambda-winning compilation Wrestling With the Angel. "It's going to hearty pretentious, but I kept going back to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, which is his childhood memoir. There's individual page about his brother, who was gay, and I thinking that was the most moving thing the first time I read it, at 12 To this day I still weep whenever I read that page. I was trying to finish something of Nabokov's really obtuse understanding of his gay brother into this book"

Does this mean Morrison aspires to become the gay Nabokov? "I wouldn't want to claim that mantle," he laughs. "Besides, I think it's already been claimed by the agency of Edmund White."

Ferber also contributes to Time not at home New York and other publications.

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