The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  People who do not read acknowledgments will miss the real climax of this story, buried in the above paragraph.

  Once the tedious transcription of all her interviews is accomplished, Kim will be able to resume the correspondence she has carried on since childhood with her pen pal, Jane Bowers of Wisconsin, whose long letters will contain countless observations of interest to this story of lost cities. From faraway New Zealand will come a wedding gift from an old pen pal of Don’s, Martin Lawrence, who will send David McGill’s Ghost Towns of New Zealand (1983, Reed), a down-under counterpart of this volume.

  Other people outside of Arkansas will hear about and encourage this project: Don’s former editor, Llewellyn Howland III; his friends John Irving, Doug Wood, and Linda Hughes, a third member of the “Rolla triumvirate.” Martin Moreman of Kentucky will send a crucial newspaper clipping from a Lexington paper about a professor finding lost towns in that state.

  In Arkansas, Don and Kim will have contact by mail or in person with individuals who will help with the particular cities. Sulphur City: Geneva Price Brashears, Harold and Charles Cate, Alan Clack, Hildy Crawford, Mrs. Louallen Fine, Ouida Harkreader, Lloyd McConnell, Dave McKee, Austin and Carrie Reed, and Marie Wofford. Cherokee City: Fannie and Lloyd Baxley, Kathryn Clausen, Janiece Elder, Maurice Loux, E. Alan Long, Mickel McClish, Dott B. Rumsey, Maggie Smith, and Mr. and Mrs. George Wolfe. Marble City: Mrs. Thomas J. Bardin, J. E. Dunlap, Jr., Tollie Ervin, Joy M. Geisler, Mrs. H. K. McCaleb, V. N. “Bud” Phillips, Gene Raney, Irby E. Russell, Mrs. Frank P. Russell, and James Villines. Buffalo City: Phyllis Hanson, Alyce Marbury, Alice and Joe Misic, Margaret Ross, and Lyle Wood, as well as the “Mountain Home triumvirate” of Sue Brown, Sonny Garrett, and Rick Rankin. Cave City: Debra Allen, Anna Lee Carreiro, W. K. McNeil, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Matlock, Caruth S. Moore, Craig Ogilvie, Eugene Street, and Sherry Watson. Lake City: strangely, no one other than Hershel L. “Plug” Eaton, who will have given such a long interview and who will write several letters to Don and Kim. Mound City: Maridine Sievers, of Memphis. Arkansas City: Marjorie Buckley, Edgar Gannaway, Etta Montgomery, Connie Nations, and Michael Rice. Garland City: Linda Callahan and Mary Medearis. Bear City: Margaret Arnold, Inez E. Cline, Bill Curie, and Bob Lancaster.

  Among the Arkansas lost cities that Don and Kim will not be able to include, and the people who will have been waiting to help, will be: Bluff City, Jerry McKelvy; Carbon City, Otto Schmalz; Central City, Vernon H. Carter, Sr.; Dodd City, Pam Mclntyre and R. D. Owen; Forrest City, Ree Routon; Gin City, Wade Cryer, Elliott Gildon, and F. J. Schweitzer III; Golden City, Patricia Curry and Vernia Lovett; Hackett City, Dr. Robert R. Harriage, Mrs. I. J. Robinson, and Mrs. Bill Terrell; and Kress City, Frances Chamberlain McJunkins. Nancy L. Am of the El Dorado library and Mrs. Sam B. Allen of the Fort Smith Historical Society will also help.

  Helen Wolff, a genius at topiary in the garden of words, will become the editor for this work.

  Finally but rather primarily, the Author, who will have to exclude from responsibility for the opinions expressed herein his colleague, collaborator, and wife, will want most fervently to dedicate the entire project:

  To Kim

  Afterword Treasures of Ruin: Donald Harington’s Covert I

  I was reading along through Donald Harington’s charming novel Butterfly Weed (1996), content to enjoy the story and its manner of delivery, banishing all thoughts of critical analysis to my cumbered pedantic attic where they suited well with the stuffed owls, acrid stacks of ancient pulp magazines, old resentments, and hopeless crushes that clutter that thoroughly ransacked mental space. Then a detail I no longer recall alerted me that the myth of Asclepius underlay this tale of Ozark love and wonder. When I next turned to The Cherry Pit (1965), I had been forewarned and began to read the story not only as a modern novel of love and reclamation but also as a retelling of the familiar fairy tale romance in which a knight in shining armor rescues a captive princess from the thrall of an evil sorcerer. In these books the archetypal matrices are not awkward extra baggage, they add unanticipated delights. No least delight is the suspense in waiting to see if the novelist can bring it off, if he can assimilate his archetypal narratives without making his designs tricksily ingenious or dryly mechanical.

  When I read Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972), I figured it was a different breed of unicorn. This story of reincarnation, ghostly possession, sexual initiation, temporal paradox, and occult detective odyssey is so odd, it seemed improbable that any matrix narrative underpinned its labyrinthine structure. But now I think there is a recognizable classical parallel for its central section.

  The story of Place is constructed as a nest of Chinese boxes, but the revelation of the boxes’ contents is not linear. The largest frame is the story of Daniel Lyam Montross, born in 1880 in Connecticut, deceased 26 May 1953, in “Stick Around,” Arkansas. The next story is that of the search by the 21-year-old Diana Stoving for information about Montross, her grandfather who abducted her when she was three. Inside that quest-tale is the story of the relationship that develops between Diana and the Eagle Scout, Day Whittacker, in whose 18-year-old corpus the spirit of Diana’s grandfather has been reincarnated. This relationship results in the disappearance of Diana and Day from the ken of their parents and associates and it motivates the final narrative frame. This last framing story is another quest, as the clever but unreliable art history professor known only as “G” sets out to find Diana Stoving. His object is not to restore her to her unpleasant parents but to restore himself to himself. G has fallen upon evil days of alcoholism and depression and undertakes his detective project to try to establish a temporary sense of purpose in his life. There are other stories too, of Montross’s professional and erotic careers, of helpful friends, of vanished towns, and so forth, but the ones I’ve listed here are principal.

  The story of Diana and Day occupies the central section of Place; it is the longest section, partly because it is interleaved with the story of Montross. Diana often interviews her mentor by putting Day under hypnosis. FThis is an easy, even a casual, procedure. “Go to sleep,” she says and he obeys and then she can talk to her grandfather at any point in his life she cares to hear about. She cares to hear a great deal, so we learn much about the daily life of late nineteenth-century backwoods New England and especially about its sexual myths and mores.

  But this information also serves the purpose of educating the virginal Day and the only slightly experienced Diana. To be able to interview Day at length, to talk with Montross at will, Diana persuades Day to go away with her, to live in the summer woods at the site of the vanished Dudleytown where her grandfather had lived. Now the process of discovery becomes a double one; as Diana teaches Day about sexuality and love (and learns some surprising things herself in the process), so Day teaches Diana about the ways of field and forest, how to survive in the woods and enjoy the rustic life.

  At first the relationship of the couple is tentative and awkward. Though they desire each other, pudeur and the duties of good manners prevent their immediate coupling. But friendship ripens into affection and affection blossoms into intimacy and before too long they are Pastorella and Faunus, the sprightly fertility genii of the place.

  They belong, in fact, to a long line of literary young lovers who are isolated in some Arcadian wilderness or other. As You Like It tells such a tale and this sort of story became so familiar that in the eighteenth century the genre became known as bergéries. Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul et Virginie was long a popular favorite. Now and again Hollywood will revive the story to show off some nubile lass like Brooke Shields.

  The classical source is the short novel Daphnis and Chloe, by the mysterious “Longus.” Scholars date this author variously from the second century CE up through the sixth. He might have been born on Lesbos, but this circumstance too is conjectural. The personal obscurity of Longus would well suit Donald Harington, one of whose constant themes has been the disappearance from history of towns and pe
rsonages.

  But I cannot posit Daphnis and Chloe as a specific literary source for Some Other Place. The Right Place. any more than I can name a specific fairytale as a source for The Cherry Pit. Harington informs me that he has never read Longus. Yet I shall still persist in choosing this locus classicus for purposes of comparison, not only because it bears such close resemblance to Harington’s novel, but also because it best exhibits the form and embodies the spirit of the bergérie.

  There is first the matter of the characters’ origins. In Longus both hero and heroine are foundlings and both were suckled by animals, Daphnis by a goat, Chloe by a ewe. Though Diana Stoving has parents, she is alienated from them and finally the novel reveals that Burton Stoving, being sterile, is not her real father.1 After Diana and Day escape to the woods, the parallels multiply quickly. Harington underscores the musical and artistic intentions of this section with a series of subtitles, beginning with “First Movement / Landscape with Two Figures.”2 The Movement begins in Harington, as it does in Longus, with shy tentative steps at first. Diana spies upon Day as he urinates and then masturbates while thinking of her. This latter image arouses her; she masturbates; they reach simultaneous orgasms but still do not make love together. As in Longus, there is a long intimate foregrounding: nude bathing, voyeurism, holding hands, kissing. But all around them the landscape throbs with sexual impulse. The ghost of Montross describes this landscape when he speaks, through Day, of the nature he observes at Dudleytown. The language is figurative of Venus genetrix, relentlessly fecund:

  Wetness is each and every. The maple tapped in March seeps its sap. The pine oozes resin. The earth itself pours out water through its springs…. My eyes weep. My nose runs. My sisters have their monthly courses. Cows milk. Snow melts…. All is burble and surge, and spurtle and spume, and steep and jet, and dissolving and flowing.3

  Longus’s lovers, though they kiss and fondle, bathe together and lie naked with each other, never engage in full-fledged sex. Like the pairs in Shakespeare’s romances, they hold off copulation until their marriage, though after their initial reluctance their abstention is enforced more by circumstance than by resolution of will. Harington’s couple suffers no such hindrance. Once the preliminaries are out of the way, Day and Diana are upon each other like—well, like newlyweds, I suppose, though marriage is not projected. They go through stages: masturbation, oral sex, and intercourse. The process is fervid but ceremonial; it is classical in outline but intensely local and personal in its terms.

  It is, then, idyll, as the section’s subtitle makes clear, with its allusions to the ballet music of Ravel and to the paintings of Corot, Hubert, Robert, Watteau, and others. As far as I can tell, Harington describes no particular painting in his pages; he would probably consider such a stratagem too dully obvious and, as a connoisseur of art, he does not prefer the eighteenth-century court painters who so often illustrated this theme. But for me the spirit of Francois Boucher abounds in the middle passages of Place and any three pages together may suggest productions like Le pasteur complaisant, Bergers en voyage, Pensent-ils au raison? and La Bergére endormie. It was Boucher’s habit to place his young lovers among the ruins of antiquity, articulating the carpe diem theme. The result is depictions of fleeting joy tinged with melancholy by reminders of crumbling time.

  That is the atmosphere of much of Harington’s work, not only in Place, but also in Lightning Bug (1970), When Angels Rest (1998), and especially in Let Us Build Us a City (1986). In Place, this atmosphere of wistful regret is heightened by the unintended but seemingly inevitable parallels to Daphnis and Chloe; Longus’s story stands as a classical “ruin” inside which the modern love story is enacted. (We may wish to recall that Boucher designed stage sets utilizing classical ruins.) Other important similarities would include the use of ritual dance, the mutual saving of each other’s life, scenes of orgy (Diana and Day participate, Daphnis and Chloe do not), the tutelary presence of the wise elder (Philetas in Longus, Henry Fox in Place), the ruined garden, and a series of abductions.

  The violent intruder is probably a necessary motif in idyllic literature. It is part of the charm of the artists’ paradises that we recognize them as ideal, that is to say, as artificial, as dream-work of transcending beauty. But this is a beauty that would be inconsequential if it were not brought into conflict with the world outside, with the “real world” of hardship, fear, and violence. Into the Garden of Eden comes the serpent; into the island of Lesbos come pirates who abduct Daphnis and an invasion troop that abducts Chloe. In Place the intruders comprise a group of ex-hippie men and women who, half-heartedly invited, squat on the space the lovers had staked out. They wear long hair, have given themselves names like Barnabas and Zeresh, and talk in a godawful pseudo-scriptural patois: “Behold, thy dwelling place is fair,” and “Dost thou hear good chimes?”4 As in Longus, the lovers are rescued by the local citizenry.

  One passage in Longus ought to be particularly remarked because it parallels in loose fashion Montross’s paean to the Venus genitrix quoted above. Daphnis and Chloe learn from Philetas that they have fallen under the special care of Eros. They have never heard of this deity, so Philetas enlightens them:

  A god is Eros, my children, young and handsome and winged. Therefore does he take pleasure in youth, and he pursues beauty and he endows souls with wings. He possesses greater power than Zeus himself. He rules the elements, he rules the stars, he rules his fellow deities…. All flowers are the work of Eros, all these plants are his handiwork; it is through him that rivers flow and breezes blow. I myself have seen a bull in love, and he bellowed as if stung by a horsefly; I have seen a goat in love, and he followed his she-goat everywhere. I myself was once young and in love with Amaryllis, and I forgot my food, and took no drink, and had no sleep…. I called on Pan to help me, for he had himself loved Pitys.5

  This theme is a familiar one in Harington’s work. The backwoods landscapes he depicts are not only pastoral Arcadias; they are arenas of rampant, ceaseless sexuality. It is important too that these romping fields are usually located in Arkansas because the novelist alludes often, and almost reverently, to the work of Vance Randolph. In fact, the great folklorist shows up as a character in the novel Butterfly Weed. In a number of his scholarly notes Randolph observes that the obscene folktale ordinarily speaks of city dwellers as being ignorant of, and inexperienced in, sexual practices while their rural counterparts are knowing and expert. “They Couldn’t Learn Him Nothing” in Pissing in the Snow is a good example.6

  The irruption of the outer world into the Arkansas Arcadias signals the corruption and debasement of sex. In When Angels Rest the result is rape and murder. In Place both Diana and Day engage in promiscuous sex with the invading hippies and the result is a profound change in their relationship. This change is not fatal to their association; it means, in fact, a deepening and a maturation, but the idyllic mode is afterward no longer the dominant tone in the story and, unlike Longus’s tale which ends in marriage, as traditional literary romances do, the final arrangement between Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker remains unresolved, and we know about it (the lovers having deliberately dropped from sight of the world) only because of the detective work of “G.”

  “G” is the novelist himself, Donald Harington, a figure who—in the usual parlance—is “thinly disguised.” The transparency of the mask is purposeful. Harington insists in his books on the interpenetration of fiction and the “real,” the “real” being history and biography and autobiography, texts that to some extent at least can be verified factually.

  Butterfly Weed is fiction, but Vance Randolph appears in it, both as a real person and, because of the treatment of the episode, as a fictional character. Harington has also published an impressive book of “nonfiction,” Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns, which is a travel and history book but also a novel. And I suggest that it should be regarded as a companion novel, or even as a sequel, to Place.

  To illustrate: In recounting the hi
story of Mound City, Arkansas, Harington tells the story of America’s worst maritime disaster, the loss of the Sultana. The sinking of this troop ship, which was returning soldiers northward home in 1865, resulted in more casualties than did the sinking of the Titanic. The author rises to the occasion with a splendid set piece centered around the figure of a “paroled” prisoner of the Confederacy, Sam Dunlap. Dunlap had enlisted in Tennessee, was captured, and is now free on condition that he “never fight against the Confederacy again” (272). On board the Sultana he encounters a passenger he calls “Miss Adeline” and for whom he develops a hopeless romantic longing. In the hour of destruction, the boilers explode and, with the ship on fire, Dunlap saves Miss Adeline from drowning. In the shelter of an islet, tortured horribly by mosquitoes, he proposes marriage and is accepted. But in the confusion of the rescue they are separated. After he recovers from the ordeal, Dunlap searches for Adeline but is unsuccessful. He never sees her again.

  The story of Sam Dunlap is one of the most striking of many striking stories in City. But it is a fabrication; it is fiction. Harington made up the whole episode and has confirmed this fact in a personal letter addressed to me dated 10 July 1999. In this missive, he avers that most of the other accounts are true and that he did not invent any of the lost towns the book records. His description of City is similar to the way Huckelberry Finn speaks of Mark Twain’s writing of Adventures of Tom Sawyer, namely that “he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” So we may read City as being “mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.” Not that Harington was really trying to deceive anyone. The jacket copy describes City as “a luminous blend of history, folklore, contemporary Americana, and a gentle, moving love story.” Promotional material like jacket copy is not admissible as literary evidence, but in this case it does describe closely the contents of the book. Even so, the inclusion of a fabricated episode and the employment of a few stretchers does not turn a travel history into a novel. Such a transformation requires novelistic structure.