This attitude makes a lot of sense. I don’t think anyone is capable of discovering all the secrets of SOP. TRP., of seeing what informs its various narrative feints and dodges, in a single reading. It is much wiser, as well as much more generous, to be open to the possibility that there is more to be learned than it is to feel that the failure to understand a work of art immediately means that the work must be muddled. So it muddled you; so what? Doesn’t that, on the whole, just make it more interesting?
Something like this reasoning caused me to visit my local library and withdraw the Jonathan Cape edition of the book I was too poor to otherwise obtain. I read it over a couple of days. Certain parts of the last hundred pages, I read two and three times. I was under no illusions that I understood everything about Harington’s novel, yet I felt enriched by it. The book seemed luminous to me. About eighteen months later, I bought a copy of the mass market paperback, tricked out to suggest that the book was a horror novel. That misleading little edition endured three or four more rereadings over the next two decades. Then another publisher brought out nice trade paperback editions of the Stay More cycle, and I bought and read it again. Finally, Don and Kim Harington appeared on my doorstep on August 4, 1998, and Don surprised and moved me by presenting me with an inscribed first edition of the book. The next day I saw something new in a jacket I had looked at dozens of times previously: In Wendell Minor’s gorgeous jacket painting, the grain of the canvas is visible through the orange and green of the trees, the yellow-green of the marshy grass, and the glowing red of Diana Stoving’s red Porsche 911E. Through the ravishing representations of the imagined world hangs the pebbly texture of the painter’s ground and medium. The visibility of the underlying canvas is a steady, omnipresent reminder of the fictionality of the images. This reminder only makes them more beautiful. They are simultaneously real and imagined, and the dichotomy/dialogue between these two irreconcilables speaks of a lost, more perfect world.
The central, most famous paragraph in the novel, which Harington knew by heart and can be seen reciting, in his late-manner deaf man’s accent, on YouTube a few years before his death, poses the issue more directly:
“Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great host villages of the mind, a story of untold stories, oh, of lost untellable stories, of a boy who loved a girl whose villages had been abandoned, of a boy who took a girl on a long outing to the town of lost dreams, of a boy who wanted to help her find her hidden It, oh…”
He then drops down a line to complete the long sentence in a new paragraph the length of a single phrase:
“…a story of a boy who tried but then lost her.”
Well, in a way; but as you will see, what was lost is also forever held, contained, and protected. Toward the end of this novel, just at the moment Harington moves, as he always did, into the future tense, SOP.TRP.’s long-deceased but still lively main character interrupts the narrative to turn to the sorrowful life of Harington, his author (now “G”), recently alerted by his doctor to allergies involving dust, mold, weeds, trees, dogs, cats, brunettes, book paper, bananas, and babies (though not, alas, bourbon), and that he has achieved a condition “like a town… on the verge of becoming a ghost town.” Thereafter, he is sent spinning off to the Bodarks in search of his lost heroine, Diana Stoving. After he finds her, she miraculously recognizes him as the author of Firefly and recounts to him, step by step, the entire story of the present novel. At that point a mystery occurs: Through the voice of the dead poet Daniel Lyam Montross, whose entire Selected Poems takes up a long, central portion of the novel, SOP.TRP. itself begins to speak to “G” and explains the connection between Montross and the until-now unexplained rescue of the lost child-G, or “Dawnie,” from the forest at the end of Firefly/Lightning Bug.
And everything else, too: for everything else worth explaining is contained in that story. Donald Harington lived by stories—rich, humane, emotion-freighted stories that touch our deepest chords. More than that, he knew that we live by stories, too.
—Peter Straub
To Kim
Contents
Part one
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Part two
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
V. Kelian
Afterword By Clive Henry
Part one
BEGINNING
winter
Shortly after the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, as Ekaterina was taught to call it, the fabulous American poet Theodore Roethke wrote a long poem called “The Lost Son,” the conclusion to a volume of the same title. Critic Lawrence Brace said of it, “No poem in the English language has better light.” The fifth section, last section, is entitled “It Was Beginning Winter,” and it concludes:
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
Chapter one
Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all, where stories always begin, “There was, and there was not at all…,” as if to confute truth or affirm invention, in celebration of the imagination’s freedom to transcend the stubborn facts of “reality”: you were, and still are, Ekaterina: all of this is real, and not a word of it is true: you escaped the clutches of a sadist named Bolshakov (a real name) who could not separate truth from fiction, and you came to America.
There was and there was not at all a great city in an eastern state, a city devoted to the manufacture of a hard but malleable metal commonly used in straight pins, a hilly city at the confluence of two rivers of Indian names and the beginning of a third, a city that, like you and I, gave up smoking—oh, why do I have to shield its name? You did not choose the city, except to whatever extent it may have been chosen for you by your guardian angel, Anangka, and you suspected that Anangka was still half-asleep from jet lag or, at best, becoming frustrated and grim in her efforts to provide a destiny for you.
No, you were sent to this city involuntarily, under the aegis of the Fund for the Relief of Russian Writers and Scientists in Exile, whose New York (a real name) office had met your plane, had interviewed you (in both Russian and English, noting that you were not sufficiently fluent in the latter, and, making you a gift of a purse-size paperback, Akhmanova’s Russian-English Dictionary), had given you in dollars the equivalent of 176 rubles, enough to last out that month of December, and had put you and your pasteboard suitcase (containing one change of clothes, basic toiletries, and a few souvenirs from “camp”) on a bus for the ride of 365 miles to the city of your referral. “Wait,” you’d said in English to your agent from
the Fund, before he put you on the bus. “Am I Writer, or am I Scientist?” He had laughed, thinking your question in jest, and had made no move to answer it.
The bus ride took you through some snow-covered farm country where the people, called Amish (a real name), still wore old-fashioned clothing and the women wore black bonnets. You were wearing a black scarf wrapped around your head like a bonnet, or babushka, knotted into a bow beneath your chin. It covered all of your hair—or rather, your lack of hair, which was just beginning to grow back from the last time it had been shaved in camp. None of your fellow passengers seemed to make anything of your headgear; maybe they thought you were some kind of Amish.
You were, and you were not at all, at least not any longer, Svanetian. It was nothing like Amish: rural and old-fashioned, yes, but not deliberately so, and not particularly religious. Just as the county in which I spent my last years, and our ultimate destination in this story, was and is the most remote of all the seventy-five counties in that (unnamed) state, Svanetia is the most remote district, formerly a principality, of the rugged mountains of the Southern Caucasus in Georgia, once part of a Communist confederation called the Soviet Union, now independent again but anxiously so. You had not been home for three years, not since they sent you to camp at the age of twenty-four, and that was a dozen years ago from now, and you still have not been home…except in some of your splendid writings.
Just the other year, and not any year at all, the people of Georgia, making a bold move to assert their independence from the still-existing Soviet Union, established as their president the selfsame Zviad Gamsakhurdia who had been your mentor and friend and whose arrest as a political prisoner by the Communists had led to your arrest. Zviad (your stringing of consonants is going to give me some trouble, although we ghosts are multilingual) was not a Svanetian but a native of Tbilisi, or Tiflis, the capital, and a son of the writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, whose work you admired; and Zviad was a lecturer in English (American literature) at Tbilisi University when you taught there (not, alas, in English). He had published your first poems in his samizdat journal Okros Sacmisi, which means in Georgian “Golden Fleece,” and you can remember when you fantasied being Medea to his Jason—you were twenty-three and he was thirty-six—and in his fifties he became president of the whole country, something you couldn’t have comprehended in those days when the Kremlin still had all of you under its iron fist.
But you hadn’t gone to jail for Zviady. You had gone to jail for Georgia, and for Svanetia, and for the honor of the royal name you carried, Dadeshkeliani, and for human rights everywhere: after Zviady’s arrest you became co-chair of the Tbilisi Watch Committee, to observe and protest the violations of human rights that were occurring all around you. By then you had stopped writing poetry. No one, as I discovered myself some years ago, reads poetry.
Chapter two
Standing on the sidewalk below the mansion, you studied again the slip of paper in your hand, to verify the address. You had expected perhaps one of those singular dwellings you had seen so often from the bus, what we call “suburban ranch style”: one-story, low or flat roof, cozy, convenient, conventional. But this was urban, and miles from the nearest vestigial ranch. This was a castle, nearly, larger than the ancestral manors of the Dadeshkelianis in Etseri and your own village of Lisedi, manors that had been broken up into apartments when Svanetia, along with all of Georgia, was collectivized by the Communist Soviets. This castle had no tower looming over it, but it was made largely of dark stone, with enough busy classical details in wood to decorate it like certain town houses of Tbilisi. You looked up and down the avenue to see that there were other mansions of similar size if not similar style in the neighborhood, and, in the distance, the soaring gothic tower of the city’s university.
“Im, imte, imetchu, Anangka?” you addressed in Svani your unseen purveyor of Providence. “Have you got in mind for me to live here?” Surely these Elmores were very wealthy capitalists, with servants.
The door was answered not by a servant but by a comely youth: a smiling lad of twelve years who instantly struck you as a synthesis of your Islamber and your Dzhordzha: he was tall for his age and skinny, like Islamber, with the Svane’s slightly hood-lidded eyes that made him look sleepy or sly or Oriental, depending upon whether he looked straight at you or sidelong; but he seemed to possess Dzhordzha’s quality—aura or emanation—of makap, precocious sexuality, of being what your fellow writer and near-compatriot, Nabokov (a very real name, of whom you had not yet heard), called (coined and minted) a faunlet: the male equivalent, if there is one, of his immortal nymphet.
“Ivasu khari, Anangka!” you said aloud, which is to say, Thank thee, Anangka. The boy stared at you, and his smile was uncertain. You were tempted to give him his first lesson in elementary Svani on the spot, or even to introduce him to your invisible companion, but instead you announced, “I am Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadeshkeliani.”
The boy made a sound like “Whew,” and then he said, “How do you, like, spell all of that?” but he giggled (Islamber’s vulgar giggle!) to let you know he didn’t really require you to spell it for him. And then he said, “You must be the die sinner.”
You attempted to repeat the words, “Die sinner?” and your hand instinctively reached for the dictionary in your purse.
“What Mom calls you,” he said. “I’ll go get her.” He turned to leave you on the doorstep but turned back, remembering what little manners he had: “Hey, come on in.” And he motioned to a spot in the spacious foyer where you could stand and wait for Mrs. Elmore.
But in Svanetia one never crosses a threshold without express invitation from the male head of the house, and, unless this pubertal youth was already as mature as you hoped, he was probably not the head of the house. So you remained standing outside the door, the cold air at your back (mild, even balmy by Svanetian standards) rushing through the open door.
You brought out the dictionary. You were sure of die, but checked it anyway for other meanings: singular of dice; to desire greatly, as if pining away; stamping device; but also possibly just di-, prefix meaning twice, double, or two, as in dicotyledon. Of course! Sinner you did not know at all, and you found it quickly: one who sins. Sin: any offense, violation, fault, or error.
You were meditating upon the idea of being a double sinner and the fantastic chance that these people already knew about both Islamber and Dzhordzha, when the hobbledehoy returned, saying first, “Don’t you understand ‘Come in’?” and then, “Mom’s upstairs trying to, like, help Professor Ogden. I think that old sinner is dying! Anyhow, she says for me to, like, fix you a drink and she’ll be down in a minute. I hope you don’t drink, though. Do you?”
Still you hesitated outside the door, searching for the English word for baba (Svanetian), mama (sic, Georgian), otyets (Russian), and remembering it without having to look it up: “Your fadder. Is home?”
“Dad? No, he’s at the Hillman.” (I ought to shade the library’s name, as I’m taking pains to shade so much else, but I like the real name, being a hillman myself.) “Hey, if you’re not coming in, we’d better shut the door.” The faunlet put one hand on the doorknob and the other on your coat sleeve, and began tugging each, to see which would move first. You reluctantly entered the house.
The entrance hall was enormous, with a floor of marble, and all the walls were covered with mirrors. Throughout the house, you would discover, there were mirrors everywhere, as if the original builder of the house were either extremely vain (he was) or inspired by Louis XIV. In Leningrad you had seen buildings that had many mirrors, but not like this, and in Svanetia there were several houses that had no mirrors at all.
You glanced at yourself in one. At a rest stop on the bus route, because you had noticed that some of the other women on the bus had been wearing them, you had taken the one good pair of dzhinsy out of your suitcase and had put them on: they were comfortable and kept your legs warm, and you saw now how they matched almost identically the pair of
dzhinsy that the boy was wearing, just as faded. But your coat, the prison-issue palto, was shabby, grimy, and patched, and, with the black babushka around your head, it made you look like a peasant.
Reading your thoughts, the boy held his hands as if to pinch your shoulders and invited, “You wanta take that off?” and helped you out of your crummy coat. Then he gestured to the left: “This is our apartment,” and led you through some slid-open sliding doors into a suite of rooms, one flowing from the other, each layered with more mirrors, and with shelves and antique furniture festooned with bric-a-brac and lace.
He led you to a polished buffet truly covered with bottles of all sizes and shapes. “‘Name your poison,’” he said and giggled again, and you knew he was quoting his elders, so you did not bring out the paperback to look up poison. His fingers began to hop from bottle to bottle: “Rye…Scotch…rum…bourbon…gin…” His hand stopped and lifted a bottle. “I guess you’d want this one. Vodka. There’s hundred-proof Smirnoff and eighty-six-proof Popov.”
You thirsted. The night of your leave-taking from camp, the other women had pooled their rations of tea to brew a quantity of chifir, a powerful drink, black and thick, invented by inmates, that requires fifty grams of tea leaves; and, in flagrant violation of regulations, they had toasted you with it and helped you consume it, enough of it to make all of you quite tipsy. The chifir had given you your first real high since your arrest and your last one until the possibility that now lay before you.
“But like I say,” the boy was saying, setting the Smirnoff back down, “I hope you don’t drink. You’re, like, too pretty to drink. I could give you a soft drink, I mean, you know, some pop, Coke or stuff.” Your fingers were groping for your purse, for your paperback. But you did not resort to it, waiting, and trying to understand him: one of his strange words had seemed familiar: Coke.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 2