The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  I am prepared to argue that City does have such structure but also to admit that this structure is submerged, largely camouflaged. Nevertheless, it is present and imposes a unity on material that otherwise would have been nearly impossible to unify.

  If we read City as a picaresque novel, the main plot is simple. A young researcher named Kim—her last name is concealed—is intrigued by places that began with hopes of becoming actual cities and then failed of their dreams and more or less disappeared from existence. She travels from place to place in her Zephyra, inspects buildings and sites of former buildings, graveyards, rivers, general stores, modest and less-than-modest eateries, and she interviews locals about the histories of their neighborhoods. This episodic, strung-bead organization is common both to picaresque novels and to travel diaries, but City is fitted more tightly together than most examples from either of those genres.

  It opens with a Prologue entitled “Let Us Build Us a Book,” and this Prologue begins with a self-portrait of “Harrigan,” an alcoholic college professor almost at the end of his tether. Divorced, morose, eremitic, despondent, he rarely ventures out of his dismal flat in Brookings, South Dakota, and he rarely returns to it at night sober. When the sun goes down he sits alone and enters into his habitual “Meditation Upon Ruins” (ii).

  Then occurs the incident that sets the story in motion. He receives a letter from Kim, who read one of his books and found it full of “Suspense and romance,” “fascination, sadness, and finally, awe.” At first the letter disheartens “Harrigan”; he feels that it has come too late, but then his correspondent’s enthusiasm infects his mood. When Kim says that his novel has inspired her to trace down the histories of Arkansas places like Marble City and that she will keep him informed of her progress, he responds, “Oh, by all means, Kim, keep me informed” (vi).

  The book that has so excited Kim is the “Harrigan” novel Some Other Place. The Right Place. In her letter she quotes a lyrical passage she finds “haunting”:

  Oh, this is the 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 ghost villages of the mind….7

  “Harrigan” advises Kim in his reply to ask her interviewees “who was the most colorful or interesting individual.” She says, “Our book will have to have lots of hermits. And suicides. The village idiot…. The town drunk.” The novelist is surprised. “Our book?” Yes, she answers. She will do the interviews, “Harrigan” being extremely hard of hearing, but he must do the writing and handle the illustrations (vii).

  The joke is mordant and unsparing, but it is still a joke. The characters Kim says are necessary to the book, the kind of characters she expects to find in her eleven lost towns, are precisely the kind of person “Harrigan” imagines himself to be. In fact, his habit of meditating upon ruins is his means of self-examination and it is with some trepidation that he allows, or invites, Kim to share this exploration with him. The portraits of the defeated towns will comprise a self-portrait of the novelist.

  The literature of ruin is long-lived and voluminous. Rose Macauley, in her examination of the fascination of the subject, Pleasure of Ruins, begins by quoting Isaiah and continues a string of quotations through the nineteenth century, instancing poets and writers from Lord Kames to Henry James. She takes her text from the latter’s Italian Hours: “To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity.”8 She also includes an unattributed quotation that is germane to Harington’s design: “L’homme va mediter sur les ruinesdes empires, il oublie qu’il est lui-même une ruine encore plus chancelante, et qu’il sera tombé avant ces débris.” Chancelante—“fragile” or “staggering” or even “falling down”—is an apt adjective for the figure of “Harrigan” in the Prologue to City, and one of the threads that weaves the book into a novel is the story of his rehabilitation.

  This is accomplished through the agency of his interviewer, Kim. She sets out upon her quest without having met “Harrigan” in person; they are to join when his semester’s teaching duties are fulfilled. “She did not know whether to believe him or not. In the weeks ahead, she would sometimes encounter a person in some ‘city,’ a village idiot or a town drunk, and wonder if it was Harrigan in disguise, playing a joke, planning to surprise her.” Then she decides simply to await the encounter: “It was something to look forward to, for her, for him, for both of them who, like these lost cities, had abandoned all ambition” (viii).

  The identification of landscape with personality could hardly be more explicitly stated. Kim’s journey through the eleven lost cities describes a rough geographical circle and the book too, in which landscape has become a paysage moralisé, comes round again to where it started, with the actual meeting of Kim and “Harrigan,” fulfilling the promise of the Prologue.

  In Bear City Kim searches for Dallas Bump, a chair-maker reputed to know all about the history of the place. In Bump’s workshop she encounters a stranger whom she mistakes for her interviewee:

  He has large hands, capable of having made ten thousand chairs, but they are not gnarled or arthritic or scarred: they are smooth and young. His full head of long, soft hair is not exactly silvery but sort of pewter. Dressed in an old flannel shirt in a brown plaid, and blue jeans so faded that Levi Strauss himself must have hand-stitched them, he stands up…using his right hand to take hers and hold it tightly. He towers above her, a very tall and big man. “You are lovely,” he says, and the way he says it does not embarrass her at all. (390)

  This person is “Harrigan,” of course, though by now we ought properly to call him by his real name. He is Donald Harington, the novelist who wrote Place, an expert on many subjects, including the history of Arkansas. He tells Kim—in his own words, the novelist’s words—the story of the failed gold rush in Bear City. When the genuine Dallas Bump, the chair-maker, appears, Harington seems to fade away, though there is an interpolation on the topic of neighborliness in his own voice. As the book closes, the novelist’s own voice—with its puns, Latin quotations, etymologies, and bemused humor—is heard more and more frequently and finally he shows up in person in Y City, the most lost of all the lost towns, a place that is no place at all, but is for Kim and Harington the right place.

  Let Us Build Us a City is a picaresque romance and, as romances ought, it ends with a wedding at which we finally learn Kim’s true identity. Her last name is Gunn—well, actually now it is Harington, but it was Gunn when she was making her pilgrimage as the Arkansas Traveler. The marriage service is performed by “Justice of the Peace Steve Anderson, an old friend, and featuring a backyard pig roast, or cochon de lait, whose chef will be father of the bride, Mickey Gunn, assisted by his wife, Jacque.” Other participants of the wedding are listed, including “Professor Mike Luster representing the deceased Vance Randolph.”

  And then the clinching sentence that makes City truly a novel: “People who do not read acknowledgments will miss the real climax of this story, buried in the above paragraph” (464).

  Or does that sentence settle the question of genre by making the book an autobiography? It would be a double autobiography—or, to use one of “Harrigan’s” pet words—a “bigeminal” autobiography because, like Daphnis and Chloe, it tells the tale of both lovers.

  The book does not, however, tell the stories equally. Even after the revelations of the Acknowledgments section, we still don’t know all that much about Donald Harington. City is much more concerned to draw, a little at a time and with all respectful diffidence, a portrait of Kim.

  Our first glimpse of her as a physical presence is swift and efficient: “The girl with yellow hair…is named Kim, who additionally has blue eyes and is very tall and is a teacher of ninth-grade civics and tenth-grade Engl
ish in Beebe, Arkansas. She was married to a farmer eight years her senior and the civics textbook she is required to teach is so dull that she would do anything to escape it” (25).

  Yellow hair and blue eyes rarely add up to an ugly woman and Kim is seen as remarkably comely. The menfolk think so, at any rate. In Smitty’s Café in Elkin, they “ogle her appreciatively and wink and maybe even grunt and sigh” (42). In the Riverfront Café in Lake City they also observe her “appreciatively” (217). When she meets “Harrigan” for the first time in Dallas Bump’s dim workshop, his admiration is obvious but not vulgar. “He is not simply looking steadily at her, she detects as her eyes become adjusted to the darkness, but almost ogling her, although his eyes never leave hers to roam to other parts of her image” (389). There is a photograph of Kim, and twelve pages farther on, it is described for us, as she steps from the outdoors into the obscurity of the workshop:

  The moment is frozen, and preserved. With the blinding sunlight behind her, her hair becomes the color of the precious metal that men once hoped to find in this town. She stands still, letting her eyes adjust to the dark interior…. A man stares at her in wonder. (389)

  If City is considered as a novel, this moment is actually the climax, as errant soul mates meet for the first time. (Their later marriage is the resolution.) But it is a novel of an odd sort, its main theme being the Deserted Village. The photograph emphasizes this main theme and not the love story. Kim is close to the left-hand frame of the picture, her figure bisected by the sharp edge of the extremely bright doorway. (The photo appears to be overexposed.) Her legendary blond hair glows with the light but her features are indistinguishable. Her figure is slender and the slimness is accented by her blue jeans and her long arms down by her side.

  But most of the picture is taken up with the odds and ends of the chair-maker’s workshop, a clutter of boards and sticks and staves and corners and dusty shadows intersected by taut lathe belts. The scene looks, in fact, more like detritus than like a workplace, and its dishevelment suggests the general dilapidation of Bear City and of the ten other lost towns that have enchanted two souls, heretofore also lost, but at this precise moment—found.

  We learn other details about Kim. They are widely scattered and we have to pick them up as we travel with her through the Arkansas backwaters. She likes to catch fish (109) and to eat them (369); she has some knowledge of art, recalling Edward Hopper (160) and recognizing Renoir (360). She is something of a worrywart (79, 118). She does not fear graveyards (149), but she does intensely fear old age (180).

  She was formerly married; in fact, she was wed at age sixteen, a circumstance she has “always regretted” (168). On her journey she meets people who might be distant relatives; “the man who took Kim as a child bride of sixteen was a McClish, from eastern Arkansas.” She wonders if her interviewee in Lake City, Nellie McClish, might have been an aunt or cousin of her husband but “will never know” (237). No details are given about the nature of the marriage and the divorce but desertion is implied. “Suddenly Kim realizes that the desertion of a town is like the desertion of a spouse; you never know what will happen while you’re gone” (245).

  It is clear that the marriage was not a happy one and that it has left Kim not only with heartache but also with the apprehension that she has lost all opportunity ever to enjoy love again. On her way to Buffalo City, she detours, “for the fun of it, through the hamlet of Eros, one of Arkansas’s numerous four-letter towns.” But the hamlet is so small that it is unfindable and she begins to hear an imaginary music as she approaches the hills before her:

  As she pulls over beside the road to listen, she cannot remember whether she has passed through pale Eros or has yet to discover it, whether it is already history, a place passed and not again to be seen, or imagination, a place dreamed and yet to be seen. She is lost in music as these towns are lost in time, and decides at last that the sound comes from within her, the Theme of the Faraway Hills that invents itself inside anyone alone and tugged by distances. (141)

  This melancholy fancy is common to the Meditation on Ruins theme. The traveler who pauses to ruminate on the past and its vanished erotic joys is especially familiar in eighteenth-century art and literature. Goethe and Gibbon penned famous passages on the subject and Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” addresses it with this poet’s characteristic directness:

  The bashful virgin’s side-long looks of love,

  The matron’s glance that would those looks reprove.

  These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,

  With sweet succession, taught even toil to please;

  These round thy bowers their cheerful influence shed,

  These were thy charms—But all these charms are fled.9

  Alas.

  —And yet bear ye up a little while, Kim, never forget that Eros is the most powerful of all the gods, and rules, as Longus’s fable assures us, the elements and the stars. City is a romance and all will come well at last, even if we must wait until the closing credits, the Acknowledgments, to see it happen.

  But at this moment she sits in her car by the side of the road between Newton and Yellville and falls almost into despair, wondering if all possibility for love has fled from her. It is the most telling passage of her characterization.

  The lovers find and rescue each other. The “Harrigan” of City is the “G” of Place, a human ruin that, like Kim, stands in dire need of salvation, as, in talking to himself, he gloomily admits: “In short, G, you will be like—I grope, I grovel, for the just-right metaphor—you will be like a town which is on the verge of becoming a ghost town.”10

  We might say then that it is the spirit of the past, of forgotten history, that has brought, after their long wandering, the fated lovers together. Yet that is not the case—or not precisely the case.

  Rather, the bonding agency is the aesthetics of deserted places, that traditional wistful plangent poetry that suffuses the canvases of Robert, Boucher, Corot, and Lorrain, the same aesthetic that animates the verse of Browning, George Crabbe, and the Anglo-Saxon scops, that imbues the music of Vaughn Williams’s Antarctica Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Aipensymphonie and Carl Ruggles’s Star-Treader. This consonance of tastes and deep sympathies is almost as powerful a sentimental bond as sex is a physical one. It is poetry, after all, that is the proper language of Eros, as G discovers in his research into ghost towns, “places whose sounds are not exactly poetry to your ears, but romantic all the same: Aberdeen, Cabin Creek, Fair Play, George Town, Harrington, Hix Ferry, Jackenport, Iceledo, Norriston, Napoleon, Paraclifta, Plum Orchard, Rome, Rough and Ready, Rush, and St—…” 11

  The incomplete phrase here is “Stick Around,” the novelist’s playful pseudonym for Stay More, the liveliest of all deserted villages in literature, the other place, the right place, where Donald Harington’s sad and funny and tough and tender stories are set. For as “Harrigan” and Kim have now learned a great deal about themselves and, as they tacitly avow to each other, borrowing the unspoken but well considered words of G: “A ghost town isn’t really dead. It’s just sort of gone some other place for a while.” 12

  Eros was once a lost city but it was never a lost destiny.

  If the last words of this essay, written six years ago, were read as prophesy, I would for once be entitled to the name of prophet. Eros endures as the inescapable bigeminal destiny of Kim and Donald. This new edition of Let Us Build Us a City marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of their union and, though these years have been distressed by problems of health, the union stands whole and hale. Their love endures; Eros must now be counted not a lost city but a found one. Where it was once “some other place,” it is now more than ever the right place and because it was never spotted on the official maps, it can never be erased from them and shall stand forever in its own private, but not secret, place. Happy Twenty-fifth Anniversary, Kim and Donald Harington! Happy Twentieth Anniversary, Let Us Build Us a City!

  Fred Chappell
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  Appendix: The Cities, Found and Lost, of America

  (Larger cities are in boldface type. An asterisk identifies places currently without population.)

  ALABAMA

  Alabama City

  Alexander City

  *Bluff City

  Bull City

  Central City

  Choctaw City

  Clay City

  Coal City

  Cobb City

  Columbus City

  Daisey City

  Eady City

  Falls City

  Flint City

  Ford City

  Frisco City

  Garden City

  Gate City

  Glen City

  Hobson City

  Hooper City

  Liberty City

  Mason City

  Midland City

  Morgan City

  Muck City

  Nitrate City

  Park City

  Pell City

  Phenix City

  Pinkney City

  Plant City

  Pratt City

  Rainbow City

  Reece City

  Rock City (2)

  Rossland City

  Sardis City

  Scant City

  Scott City

  Tarrant City

  Vulcan City

  White City (2)

  ALASKA

  *Copper City

  *Dall City

  *Golden City

  *King City

  *Railroad City

  Tin City

  ARIZONA

  Arizona City

  Black Canyon City

  *Bradshaw City

  Bullhead City