By the Author
The Cherry Pit (1965)
Lightning Bug (1970)
Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)
Let Us Build Us a City (1986)
The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)
The Choiring of the Trees (1991)
Ekaterina (1993)
Butterfly Weed (1996)
When Angels Rest (1998)
Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)
With (2004)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Lightning Bug - Text copyright ©1970 Donald Harington
Some Other Place. The Right Place. - Text copyright ©1972 Donald Harington
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Text copyright ©1975 Donald Harington
The Cockroaches of Stay More - Text copyright ©1989 Donald Harington
The Choiring of the Trees - Text copyright ©1991 Donald Harington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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eISBN: 978-1-61109-436-7
Table of Contents
The Joyful Noise of Donald Harington
Donald Harington’s Grand Jamboree
Lightning Bug
Some Other Place. The Right Place.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
The Cockroaches of Stay More
The Choiring of the Trees
About the Author
The Joyful Noise of Donald Harington
No oeuvre in American literature, past or present, can equal the combination of joy, humor, and wonder contained in Donald Harington’s fifteen novels. He is America’s Chaucer. Ever since I first discovered Harington’s work twelve years ago, I have expected each new novel to be the one that brought its author the literary awards and acclaim his work deserved. When With came out in 2004, I told a fellow writer that if the novel didn’t win the Pulitzer or National Book Award, it would be a damning indictment of our nation’s literary sensibilities. Yet With appeared and disappeared with hardly a review, much less any award. The novels Fred Chappell described as “an undiscovered continent” remained so. Chappell made that comment over a decade ago and, unfortunately, little has changed.
My hope is that this republication of Donald Harington’s work will finally bring him not just literary acclaim but a large popular audience. Harington’s mythical town of Stay More is a delight for any reader to visit. As with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, each novel reveals more about the place. We meet generations of Stay More’s denizens. We learn the town’s history, and not just of its humans. Animals and ghosts reveal their place in Stay More’s existence as well. Even the cockroaches weigh in with their perspective. As John Dryden once said of Chaucer, “ ’Tis sufficient to say, as according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.” Best of all, though we can leave Stay More, a switch in tense will not allow Stay More to leave us. As Harington once explained in an interview, the use of the future tense “is specifically designed to help prevent the book from ending, because anything in the future tense does not end.”
Donald Harington died in November 2009. During his lifetime, he did not get the recognition he deserved, but perhaps, finally, the time has arrived for the continent to be discovered. Those of us who love and revere Harington’s work call ourselves Stay Morons. Delve into one of these novels and you will likely become one too.
—Ron Rash
Donald Harington’s Grand Jamboree
Right here at the beginning I want to say that I loved Donald Harington, loved him as both a human being and a writer. He filled these essential roles magnificently. What he offered as man and writer was manifold and multisided: passion, laughter, dignity, sensuality, pride, playfulness, honesty, intelligence, a huge capacity for appreciation, and an astonishingly fertile and original imagination. In both capacities he had wonderful style, too.
Although once he took me through the campus of the University of Arkansas–Fayetteville and into a handsome old building to show me the big, shadowy room where for decades he had taught courses in art history, I never saw what Don was like in that classroom, and have always been curious about it. Because he was severely hearing-impaired, he could not have depended much on class discussions. So I wonder if, on many, many days, he did not turn off the lights, project a series of blown-up slides onto a screen, and go through for the benefit of all, including himself, the central act of art history professors: to muse aloud, speculating, thinking, describing in eloquent and ravishing detail what he saw on the surfaces of the paintings. I bet he burnished those paintings with the richness and sensitivity of his responses to them; I bet he made them glow. His students, most of whom would have had no idea their professor was a great novelist, must have loved him; I bet the accuracy and emotional depth of his responses to works of art every now and then moved a couple of them to tears.
Don Harington was a master of language to whom the rhapsody, the elegy, and the soliloquy were native nearly from the first, and because he always had a sort of down-home experimental sense, an innate tendency to push the formal boundaries and subvert the usual narrative structures, the way he built his words into phrases and his phrases into sentences and paragraphs always seemed fresh, vital, moving. It was as though the complexity and power of his thoughts and feelings demanded that he move into extravagance and daring. He took risks most novelists of his vintage would never have considered, firstly because of their sheer difficulty, secondly because to most American writers these techniques were simply unimaginable. (But not so to Marques, Milorad Pavic, Javier Marias, or a clutch of other non-Americans.) Yet Harington never really feels like an experimental writer. He is always anchored in the basic stuff of storytelling, in ongoing, interconnected accounts of bawdy, painful, comic, mysterious human relationships in a thoroughly defined and witnessed locale.
The setting for nearly every scene in every one of the sequence of novels beginning with Lightning Bug is the village of Stay More (in two cases morphed into Stick Around) in the Arkansas Ozarks, which Harington sometimes liked to call the Bodarks. In the same spirit, he liked to insist that the residents of his state should not be called Arkansans, but Arkansawyers. Hamlet may be the right term for Stay More. It is a tiny ville out in the boondocks, too tiny to appear on any map and so friendly in the backcountry way that when visitors declare the intention to depart, its citizens say something like, “Stay More and have some food with us.” These citizens are sometimes referred to as Stay Morons, though not because they are at all moronic. In fact, their inventiveness, high good humor, and love of life propel them through scrape after scrape, adventure after adventure (many of these erotic), and novel after novel, from 1969’s Lightning Bug to Enduring in 2009.
Perhaps not so much anymore in these days of sensibility watchdogs alert for signs of offensiveness, people who, like the inhabitants of Stay More, lived in tiny hamlets in the Ozark Mountains, did not have electricity or running water, made their own liquor, owned guns, were almost entirely self-sufficient, and spoke in a pungently colorful regional dialect (“If I had the sense God gave a chipmunk, I’d get up and get Joel’s gun and shoot ya.”), were once commonly known as hillbillies. And hillbillies were a national jo
ke, two-dimensional rubes with bare feet, a jug in one hand and a rifle in the other. They were cunning but not very smart. From the thirties through the sixties, the cartoonist Al Capp, an urbane type from New Haven, Connecticut, had a lot of cornpone fun with hillbillies named Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine, who with many others of their kind lived in his fictional Dogpatch. Donald Harington didn’t object to having his characters referred to as hillbillies; in fact, the term seemed pretty accurate to him, but when Don thought of hillbillies, he didn’t see the uncomplicated denizens of Dogpatch or even the slightly less comic-strip Lum and Abner, Arkansas yokels popular on film and radio. Instead, he saw fully developed human beings with rich interior lives who happened to inhabit a particular region.
Harington had a particularly insightful and comprehensive understanding of that region, but he did not grow up there. He was a city boy from Little Rock who every summer was sent up into the mountains to visit his relatives in the tiny village of Drakes Creek. I think that is why he understood the region and its people so thoroughly, but also so poetically, so generously, with such passionate yearning: he was an outsider. For a writer, outsider status confers certain built-in advantages. The single most representative case I can think of is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who grew up on the fringes of a moneyed world in Buffalo, New York, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and at seventeen went to Princeton, where he pressed his nose so firmly against the glass he nearly succeeded in passing through it. In Fitzgerald, all the magical glamour and beauty of the very blond, very blue-eyed, and very wealthy emanates from the whole-bodied yearning for immediate assimilation on the part of the bright young man from the provinces who stands posted, hair combed and eyes wide open, on the sidelines. He’s hoping you cannot see that he is memorizing the codes of speech, dress, and manners of the golden children of America’s gentry.
As an outsider, I mean, a boy whose urban background must have aroused at least some degree of wariness amongst the natives of Drakes Creek—who nonetheless had to grant him semi-native status as “Jimmie’s boy” (Jimmie being his mother)—the young Harington was positioned to take in the mores and language of a way of life he found both deeply entertaining and deeply rewarding. The other half of this process, as for Fitzgerald at Princeton, involved the thorough internalization of the so ferociously and joyously observed. Although you are not and never can be the Other, you do become a version of the Other.
Harington beautifully described this bittersweet, ambivalent process in a 1994 interview published in the Appalachian Journal. “I am too educated to be a hillbilly…I forfeit my hillbilliness in order to write novels about hillbillies. It is some consolation that certain characteristics of hillbillies—fierce independence, shyness coupled with loquacity, a wry if not sardonic humor—remain in my bloodstream, remain in my genes, and permit me never to forget what it is like being a hillbilly, at the same time that they deprive me of complete objectivity about hillbillies. I can’t laugh about hillbillies because I am still laughing with them.”
In the same interview, Harington also reveals that in Drakes Creek, he read like a demon. For hours each day, he parked himself on a swing chair at the end of his grandmother’s porch and devoured novels by Twain, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner. One after the other. In a swoon of pleasure, aided by an absolute separation from the familiar, daily self. I really do think that this is how it’s done. At the age of ten or twelve, the true, the most dedicated, the fated reader, the reader destined for a life at the forge, disappears into the text and can be pulled from it by only the need to pee or the necessity of eating something. This is how you begin to create a literary sensibility, by gorging on stories other people have written, the best stories you can find. Later, at seventeen or eighteen, you begin to notice how these great writers go about doing things, how they use language, how they set up episodes that grow into scenes, how chapters begin and end. Something like this movement from rapture to awakening would certainly have been going on in young “Dawny,” Jimmie’s boy—that nice, good-looking kid from the city who spends so much time reading books on his grandmother’s porch.
Reviewers have often described Harington as a regionalist, and although if you squint it is possible to see him that way, when applied to him the label has always struck me as a sort of confinement. Harington is not a writer like Zona Gale, Hamlin Garland, or August Derleth. He is bigger than that, weightier, trickier, more inclusive, less solemn. Calling him a regionalist has always struck me as inaccurate as it would be to say that Stephen King, too, is a regionalist because most of his books are set in Maine. I don’t even think Harington wrote southern novels, particularly. He lived in the South, yes, and his novels are set there, but his fiction does not feel like the work—as different as these writers are from each other—of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Reynolds Price, Walker Percy, or Harper Lee. Though it is just as deeply felt as the work of any of these fine writers, Harington’s fiction is more aerated and propulsive, more effervescent, bawdier, more playful, more open to transformative brainstorms. He’s like a weird combination of Twain and Nabokov—I can almost imagine Twain deciding to write a novel about anthropomorphized cockroaches, and Nabokov’s influence, visible everywhere in Harington’s work, emerges undisguised in one of my favorite Harington novels, Ekaterina, an inversion of Lolita set in the daffy, ebullient resort town of Eureka Springs.
My absolute favorites here, though, are Lightning Bug, Some Other Place. The Right Place., The Choiring of the Trees, and Enduring. The first and the last of the Stay More novels, plus the second and the fifth. He was thirty-five on the publication of Lightning Bug, and seventy-three on the publication of Enduring, which looks back over the thirty-nine years between it and the first of its kind and remembers every word and phrase. (It remembers every bit of all the other novels, too, for in it all of their characters and each of their situations parade right past the reader, chapter by chapter, as—in a literal parade—does every single character in The Sun Shines Bright, John Ford’s own favorite of all his films. In both cases, the effect is almost unbelievably moving.)
Thirty-five years of age, more or less geriatric senility for tennis players but springlike youth for novelists, is an excellent time at which really to stretch your arms and see how much of the world you can encompass. Harington just simply parachutes into the first pages of his novel, calling them “Beginning” (later followed by “Middling” and “Ending”) and slipping in a lovely, reverberant line of stage direction:
From a porch swing, evening, July, 1939, Stay More, Ark.
So we have a tone, immediately, and I believe it to be the tone of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which is to say that of the ordinary and everyday imbued with the miraculous and eternal. By way of beginning “Beginning,” Harington then sets up what is seen and heard from that porch swing, and does so with great tenderness and patience, concentrating first on the most musical element of the scene, the delightful, ravishing, complex sounds that reach the boy on the swing, who bears his own name but is not he.
Music and musicality have a prominent role in the Stay More novels. Those odd part-titles indicate “Movements”; the conversation of lovers at the end of the book will be in adagio un poco mosso. And the first words in the entire Stay More cycle are:
IT BEGINS WITH THIS SOUND:
…which is that of a screen door, instantly familiar to anyone who has ever lived with or near one, “a plangent twang,” which Harington represents as “WRIRRRAANG,” and tells us that it “seems to evoke the heart of summer, of summer evenings there in that place” just before he drops down a line space and delivers the next bit of stage setting:
IT BEGINS WITH THESE PEOPLE:
Grover’s Corners may be in New Hampshire, but it is not far distant. In place of Wilder’s stage manager we have the omniscient narrator, who both is and is not Donald Harington, a young writer discovering new muscles he had (I bet) always hoped and secretly known he’d had, and doing so by the foolproof method of paying close,
reverential attention to everything near at hand, especially that which he most loves, in this case the village postmistress, Latha Bourne, “the heroine, the demigoddess, of this world.”
The narrator, the grown “Dawny,” says, “I love to look at Latha Bourne, which is something I do more often than anything else, except sleep. Maybe I disturb her, looking at her so much.”
In all of Thornton Wilder’s work, there is no Latha Bourne. Nor in Saul Bellow’s, Philip Roth’s, or John Updike’s; and not in David Foster Wallace’s, Michael Chabon’s, or Jonathan Lethem’s; and certainly not in mine. In American fiction written by men, women with such powerful moral and erotic force fields tend to be manipulative, untrustworthy, unreliable, if not treacherous, and witchlike. It is unimaginably difficult to create a universally loveable female character, a woman taken to be ideal, even as she is a normally functioning human being. It cannot be done by cheating, by which I mean by craft alone—the writer must be fully present, completely open and engaged, vulnerable to his own creation. The only other such female character I can think of now is Lady Glencora Palliser, whom Trollope burnishes to a warmly persuasive glow over the six “Parliamentary” or “Palliser” novels.
The emotional honesty and readiness that permitted the creation of Latha Bourne, along with an even more stunning level of ambition and an even greater degree of imaginative immersion, went into shaping Some Other Place. The Right Place. into—to put this as simply as I can—one of the great American novels of the era that followed World War II. It was the first Donald Harington novel I read, and it both puzzled me deeply and opened my eyes to what was formally possible in the English-language novel. Whatever this writer thought he was about, he was fearless.
In the early seventies, while I was living in London, I read a review of SOP.TRP., to use Harington’s own shorthand system for his titles, in the daily Times. The reviewer liked and admired the novel, that much seemed certain, but he appeared to be less positive about his grasp of the book than reviewers (especially male English reviewers, especially in the Times) ever wish to seem—the impression I had was that the man was not at all unhappy to feel that he had been left on the shore of some greater understanding than had been granted him.
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