The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Sharon was the second person to read the manuscript. She apologized for being a slow reader, which she was, apparently not able to read it as fast as Joni Lynn had typed it. And she was not as well read as Joni Lynn, having confined her novel reading to Jesse Stuart, James Still, and of course Ingraham. I had mentioned to Sharon that my next step, in finding a publisher, was perhaps to locate Ingraham and send the manuscript to him and ask him if he could recommend it to his publisher. But when Sharon finally finished reading it, the first thing she said to me was, “You’d better not give this to Ingraham. It’s so much better than anything he ever wrote that it would leave him crazy with envy.”

  Good advice, perhaps, but unnecessary, because I couldn’t locate Ingraham, anyway. He had left Rolla, Missouri, the previous summer and taken a teaching job in art history at the only place he could find, some college in South Dakota, of all places. But he had left no forwarding address.

  Sharon hadn’t cried at the end of the book, she said. Why not? I asked her. “I realized that what is sad about it was my own invention,” she said. It was indeed, I allowed.

  But Sharon had a rather naïve conception of how authors get their first novels published, although her conception, I admit, was not all that much more innocent than mine. She thought Georgie Boy was so good that all I would have to do would be to mail it off to a publisher, and anyone who read it would accept it. Because of some of the “marketing tips” that Ingraham had given that class at Pittsburgh, I was skeptical of this notion, but partly to humor Sharon, partly to see for myself, I mailed the manuscript off to Random House. Knowing what I do now, I realize it was probably seen only by a young clerk whose job was to affix a standard polite rejection slip to it and return it. Sharon thought I ought to frame the rejection slip because it would be the only one I’d ever get. She told me I should send the returned manuscript to Ingraham’s publisher with a covering letter saying that I was “a former student and very good friend” of Ingraham’s. But when I mailed this letter with the manuscript to Little, Brown and Company of Boston, I received the standard rejection slip, upon which someone had written in pencil the information that they no longer considered themselves to be Ingraham’s publisher.

  Sharon had been asking around, among her more artistic friends in Arcaty, about the best way to get published, and she told me, “You have to have an agent.” But I attempted to explain to her what Ingraham had explained to his class: the so-called “Catch 22” of publishing: You can’t get published without an agent, but you can’t get an agent unless you’ve been published. “Okay, so what can you do?” Sharon asked.

  I told her of Ingraham’s “Solution 23”: It helps to know somebody who knows somebody who has an agent. “Do you know anybody in Arcaty who would have an agent?” I asked.

  “I don’t know her, but I know of her,” Sharon said, and told me all she knew about Halfmoon Berryfairy. She was originally from New York City, with a Jewish name, and like so many among the influx of hippies in the early seventies she had chosen an alternative name of memorable countercultureness, taken in part from the town’s major hotel. When she began to write she decided to keep her hippie name as a pen name, and had published several books, children’s books, poetry, murder mysteries, and now a cookbook under that name. “But again,” Sharon said, “if you showed Georgie Boy to her, she would just die of envy.”

  As it turned out, Halfmoon Berryfairy was too busy, at that particular time, proofreading the galleys of her latest book to have any time for reading my manuscript, and, furthermore, she had promised her agent that she would not “unload” any aspiring Arcaty writers on her. But Halfmoon (who has become a good acquaintance if not a close friend of mine in recent years) knew of another agent, not her own, who might be willing to take a look at an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown and unpublished ex-Soviet. This woman told Halfmoon that if I would write a covering letter describing my background and stating in twenty-five words or less why the book was publishable, she would “see” if she could find time to read my book.

  So I carefully wrote and rewrote a brief autobiographical sketch, omitting any mention that the Dadeshkelianis had been royalty but attempting to depict Svanetia in a nutshell (or in a Fabergé Easter egg) and summarizing my troubles with the KGB, the special psychiatric hospitals, and the camp at Ishimbay. Then I wrote, This novel is based freely and loosely on the author’s own nightmarish experiences as a victim of the Soviet Union’s campaign to quell dissidence with psychiatric “treatment.” Twenty-seven words, two over the limit, so I cut and loosely, and Halfmoon was kind enough to send my manuscript to the woman who might consent to become my agent. Solution 23 was put into effect.

  Then I waited. And waited. Spring passed into summer. Sharon had a violent breakup with Michael, and she stopped going out to her night spots, spending her evenings in her room talking to herself and listening to music. Jason, Michael’s son, managed to sneak away from home a few times to visit me before his father put a stop to it—not because he had any objections to the relationship as such but because he didn’t want Jason visiting Sharon’s house. So Sharon and I were alone, together often, but more often entirely alone, she in her room talking to herself, trying to cheer herself up or trying, as she put it, “to give a purpose to my dumb life,” and I in my room talking not to myself but to Anangka. My fate goddess had done a great job so far, but now she seemed to have abandoned me.

  “Still waiting to hear from a publisher?” Diana asked me on a Saturday in July when Sharon and I decided to escape from our apartment and return again “up home” to Stick Around for a visit. At least it wasn’t a drought summer this year; there were plenty of toad-strangling downpours and plenty of mushrooms in the woods. I wanted to put some flowers on Dan Montross’s grave, and Sharon wanted to inspect the old building that had once been her grandmother’s house, store, and post office. She was giving serious thought to restoring it and moving into it.

  “Still waiting to hear from an agent,” I answered Diana, and added, gratuitously, “only an agent.”

  And then I took my flowers up the hillside to place on Dan’s grave. There I soon discovered that I could talk to him more freely than I ever talked to Anangka. Not only that, but I began to believe that he had more power to help me than she did. I didn’t want to eliminate Anangka; she had been so good to me for years. But it was almost as if I had moved beyond her territory of expertise.

  IV

  Whether or not Dan had anything to do with it, on a day in mid-August two significant things happened: I received a letter of rejection from the agent along with the returned manuscript, and we had a visit from Sharon’s old boyfriend Larry Brace. The agent was even chattily informal: You wouldn’t believe all the problems I’ve been having lately, she wrote, and she described a few of her more interesting problems, including a broken foot. The upshot was that her main problem was simply too much to read. I’ve found scarcely a moment to give your novel the attention it deserves. I gather that it could be made into a much-wanted book. I don’t feel that I have the time or enthusiasm to give your work the necessary care to secure a publisher for it, but I want you to know that I sincerely hope you will find a person who can bring to the task the qualities that I lack.

  Sharon read this, swore, jumped into her Cam, and returned shortly with a half gallon of vodka. “Let’s get loaded,” she said. We sat on the porch of the house and proceeded to do precisely that. I hadn’t become so tipsy since some of those days in Pittsburgh, and Sharon, who had a great talent for nursing one drink at a night spot through the whole evening, didn’t hold herself back. Soon she was yelling at passersby. There weren’t a lot of them, summer tourists choosing to tour the town’s picturesque neighborhoods on foot instead of in their cars. “YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ALL THE PROBLEMS I’VE BEEN HAVING LATELY!” Sharon would yell at anybody who came along, and, if they stopped to listen (most of them didn’t, but hurried on), Sharon would add something like, “I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I SIN
CERELY HOPE YOU WILL FIND A PERSON WHO CAN BRING TO THE TASK THE QUALITIES THAT I LACK!”

  Soon I got into the spirit of it myself and joined her in the yelling. “SCARCELY A MOMENT!” I would yell.

  “THE ATTENTION IT DESERVES!” Sharon would add.

  “I DON’T FEEL I HAVE THE TIME!”

  “OR THE ENTHUSIASM!”

  “TO GIVE YOUR WORK!”

  Perhaps our noise was frightening off the pedestrians, for eventually we were reduced to yelling only at passing vehicles. Some of these vehicles would slow down and pause long enough to attempt to hear what we were yelling, then speed up and go on.

  “I GATHER THAT IT COULD BE MADE!”

  “INTO A MUCH-WANTED BOOK!”

  One of the cars, a Ford Fairlane, came to a complete stop and parked at our curb, and its lone occupant sat listening to us run through the whole sequence of phrases yet again. My first inkling that this was not a tourist came when Sharon slightly modified what she was yelling:

  “BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW, LARRY, THAT I SINCERELY HOPE YOU WILL FIND A PERSON WHO WILL BRING TO THE TASK THE QUALITIES THAT I LACK!”

  He yelled back at her, “GODDAMMIT, SHARON, THERE ARENT ANY QUALITIES THAT YOU LACK!”

  “WELL, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THAT OIL BURNER AND COME HAVE A SNORT WITH US!” Then, as he accepted her invitation, she said to me in her normal voice, “Here is ole Larry, my onetime best fellow.”

  It did not take Larry very long to catch up with us, in consuming the vodka, and when that ran out he had his own half gallon in the Ford. He was a good-looking man, although his beard and mustache were so heavy it was difficult to imagine what he’d look like cleanshaven. My first impression of him was that he was what the late Knox Ogden must have looked like thirty years before. Sharon showed him the letter from my agent—or rather, would-be but never-was agent—and Larry declared, without any inkling of what manuscript of mine had accompanied it, “What fatuous bullshit!”

  And he added his loud bass voice to our streetward yellings for a little while, until Sharon decided she’d rather just talk. “So what brings you to the Bodarks?” she asked.

  “You, of course,” he declared. “But I want to see your Stick Around before you disappear thither. I’ve been thinking. As soon as I finish the Ogden study, I’d like to do some research on this Daniel Lyam Montross.” I did a genuine double take. Two different names he’d dropped, both of intimate familiarity. Or was I just very drunk? “Pardon,” I said. “Did you say Ogden?” He smiled, and nodded. “Knox Ogden?” I said.

  Again he nodded, and he smiled even bigger. “Do you know his work?” By way of answer, I jumped up, stumbled, staggered into the house and into my room, and got the book and brought it back to show it to him, The Final Meadow, with the inscription on the flyleaf. He peered closely at that inscription, and then his mouth fell open. He stared at me. “This is you?” he asked. “Are you Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadiankeliani?”

  As I had once done for Knox himself, I corrected him. “Dadeshkeliani,” I said.

  “I told you,” Sharon said to him. “I wrote and told you I had a roommate named Ekaterina.”

  “But I had no idea…,” Larry said, and then he drew himself up and declaimed:

  “Ekaterina, hear my final song:

  The dying bird drops down from breaking bough

  To perch on earth, and not continue long

  The notes and cries that deafened broods allow.

  “I think that’s what it says. That’s all of it I’ve been able to decipher at this point,” Larry said. “I was just inspecting it the other morning, among his papers at the Hillman Library in Pittsburgh.”

  “Larry makes a specialty,” Sharon said, “of writing books about poets that nobody’s ever heard of. So who is this Knox Ogden?”

  I told Sharon, “I lived next to him the last few weeks of his life. And Larry has just been quoting from the very last thing he wrote.”

  “Isn’t it a small world?” Sharon said.

  Larry stayed a week. It was, he revealed, the last week of summer before the fall semester began, and he’d meant it as a kind of vacation, a final fling after a stint of hard work at the Hillman, but now it looked like it was going to turn into a “working vacation” for him, especially because he needed to preserve, on his tape recorder, everything that I could remember about Knox Ogden, and also because Sharon wanted him to use his nights, instead of trying to sleep with her, reading the manuscript of Georgie Boy. She promised him that if he would read it and give us his honest professional English teacher’s opinion of it, she would take him to see Stick Around, and, possibly, she might even consent to sleep with him.

  Sharon and I gave him a good tour of Arcata Springs, dining out evenings (at his expense) at the Plaza, the best restaurant in town, and having great lunches at Bubba’s Barbecue, and we even went swimming, one splendid afternoon, at Lake Lucerne, a tiny fraction of the size of its namesake in the real Switzerland and obviously so named because it was the only substantial body of water in close proximity to “America’s Little Switzerland,” as the Arcata Springs Chamber of Commerce called the town.

  The fifth morning of his visit, Larry announced, over breakfast at the Paragon Café, that he had been awake until approximately 2:30 A.M., finishing Georgie Boy. He took a dramatic pause to stuff his mouth with a doughnut, which required several long moments of munching before he could answer Sharon’s “Well—?” and my “So—?”

  “What did Knox think of it?” he asked me.

  “He didn’t read it,” I answered, “for the simple reason that I hadn’t started writing it before he died.”

  “Have you shown it to anybody?” he asked.

  “Sharon, of course,” I said, “and the girl who typed it, and that agent, who didn’t, I think, take even a peek at it.”

  “Knox would have loved it,” he said. “In some ways it confirms his final view of the world.”

  Sharon put in, “But did Larry love it? Does it confirm any of your views of the world?”

  He nodded. “Can you ladies give me a couple of days to think about it? Just to think about it, before I let you have my thoughts?”

  “Let’s go to Stick Around,” Sharon suggested.

  We took Larry for the full tour of Stick Around, such as remained of it. Sharon introduced him, first, to her grandmother, Lara Burns. “I didn’t know anybody lived in log cabins anymore,” he remarked, then was surprised to discover that in Lara’s modest library were volumes by two of the poets, John Clare and Christopher Smart, on whom Larry had written monographs, copies of which he promised to send to her as soon as he got back to Chicago. Sharon and I conducted him on a tour of what was left of the village, including the building, its post-office boxes still intact but dusty, that Sharon was thinking of turning into her next home. She showed him also the house that had once been a hotel, now vacant and deteriorating rapidly, in the attic of which he found, among the detritus of yesteryears, a letter once written by Daniel Lyam Montross to the woman who had been the last occupant of the hotel. Larry asked for permission to borrow this and photocopy it, but Sharon had to explain that the house and any contents of it legally belonged to her brother, Vernon. We took Larry to meet Vernon and his Jelena in their extravagant nonconformist house (yurt? dome? bubble?) on the mountain, and Larry got permission to borrow the letter. Larry asked of Vernon, “Would you consider renting that old hotel sometime?” For what? Vernon asked. “For a scholar’s retreat,” Larry said.

  We also introduced Larry to Day and Diana and showed him the upstairs room where I’d written Georgie Boy…although I didn’t boast of this; the reason we showed it to him was so he could see all of the thousands of words on the walls, in the handwriting of Daniel Lyam Montross. “God! I’ve got to come back!” Larry declared. “I’ve got to come and photograph all of this!”

  Our last stop was Dan’s grave. The flowers I had put on it a month before were still miraculously fresh…Or else somebody, maybe Diana, had
replaced them with fresh flowers of exactly the same kind, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and buttercups. Larry stared, properly reverential, at the gravestone for a long time, and then he demonstrated his ability to quote the rest of the poem that provided the gravestone’s inscription, a pretty villanelle called “The Dreaming,” whose message is that the purpose of sleep is the manufacture of one’s future.

  “He’s living his sleep’s extremes,” Larry observed. “Knox Ogden and he would have really appreciated each other.”

  “Maybe they did,” I said, and then corrected my tense: “Maybe they do.”

  That night, back in Arcaty, Sharon let Larry sleep with her. I listened, almost envious, until they hushed and went to sleep. And in my own dreams, later, I joined them.

  The next morning, before getting into his car to drive back to Chicago, Larry said to me, “Let me keep your manuscript. I know a novelist in Chicago who would love to read it. He’s not famous, but he’s important. And he’s got a wonderful agent. Your book must be published, Ekaterina.”

  19

  I

  Liz Blaustein thought so, too. And she did not keep me waiting forever for her answer. In late September, just a month or so after Larry had taken the book to his novelist friend (a brilliant but little-known writer whose entire output of thirteen books I have since read, and who, in his enthusiastic report on the novel, promised to “fix me up” with his agent, Liz Blaustein, on condition that I never tell anyone that he had done it…so he must remain anonymous here), I received a letter from her that began, You did not give me a telephone number, or I would have called you sooner with this good news: You and I were meant for each other. Georgie Boy is everything that __ __ told me it was, and more! It literally and figuratively cannot be put down. I have already sent it to a publisher who has a special interest in this kind of book.