Don Harington: A Tribute

By Deborah Meghnagi Bailey, Editorial Director of The Toby Press
 

One fine afternoon in June 2003, my boss handed me a manuscript titled With. “Read it, tell me what you think,” he said. In a press created for the pure love of literature, the slush pile wasn’t handed to an intern to deal with, but tackled by the boss himself. And this manuscript, from someone neither of us had ever heard of, had come in, and had intrigued.

So I sat down, and started reading. Immediately I was drawn in, and also slightly puzzled. There was something a little bit off about this narrator, she had a unique way with words, something wasn’t quite right…I kept reading, until a couple of pages in, it dawned on me… the narrator was a dog! I was charmed, and kept on reading, and I met a variety of different narrators, including a pedophile, a young girl, a sort-of ghost and various wild animals. I read all the way to the end, and I called my boss, and I said – “It’s brilliant. We have to publish it.”

That was my introduction to Donald Harington. Better writers than me have found the words to praise him and his work. He has been called America’s Chaucer; an undiscovered continent; America’s greatest unknown novelist; one of America’s greatest contemporary authors. I discovered this to be true as we collaborated on With, and as I learned that there had been eleven prior novels published over the past thirty or more years.

When I am talking to friends about the joys and challenges of editing, With is the example I give to explain what the real pinnacle of the work can be. Finding a truly wonderful book that needs but a tiny nudge to achieve completeness. Don’s writing was always fluid, elegant, almost flawless; there was never very much to do in the way of line-editing. If there was ever anything to address – which was rare – it was in a more macro sense. There was one particular question I had at the end of With, which of course I don’t want to describe, because who wants to give away even  part of the ending of a book to someone who may not yet have read it? But that first time I read it, to give my boss a critique, I was left with a feeling of incompleteness, a feeling that would have nagged at me and left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied if I had bought the book as it was then. But being the editor, I could ask the author this question, and ask him if he could address it. How great is that? So I did, and Don not only addressed it, but used my one line query to further the plot and the themes and the characters of the novel in such a way that he enriched it immeasurably. He could have just added a line or two and the issue would have been resolved, but he did so much more than that, and in so doing, showed me how creative, how brilliant, a writer he was.

Had I known then what a body of work Don had already created, I don’t know if I would have been so confident to send him my critique, rookie editor that I was back then. I knew there were more Stay More novels, and I wanted to read them, but I hadn’t yet, and although Don had very generously put together a package of books for me, they had got delayed en route. I got them eventually, and one by one, as we republished his backlist, I used them to refer to when I was proofreading. I insisted on doing the proofreading myself, of course; I needed to understand Stay More fully, as Don’s editor! But of course it wasn’t just professionalism driving me, but a love of Don’s work and an eagerness to read all of it. And what a read it was! The Cockroaches of Stay More had me laughing and almost crying, and I could never look at a cockroach the same way again. When Angels Rest started out as a gentle fable of children’s lives and then came to a shocking climax with a chapter of some of the most powerful writing I have read, ever. The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks gave me a wonderful introduction to Stay More from beginning to not-quite-end (for Stay More, of course, will never entirely end). The Choiring of the Trees had me on the edge of my seat, horrified and moved by Nail’s predicament, and never entirely sure whether he would escape it or not. In Ekaterina I met a character very much like my friend Don, and yet not him – something that would happen in many of the books I read. Lightning Bug gave me Latha as the major character, and what a character she is. Some Other Place. The Right Place. was strange and wonderful, incredibly clever and moving. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. And of course, along the way, I was privileged to work with Don on his new books; to edit The Pitcher Shower, Farther Along, and Enduring. I became a Stay Moron.

But Don was more than an immensely talented author who I was privileged to work with. People often warn readers not to judge authors by their books; not to expect someone wonderful to be behind a wonderful book; it doesn’t always work that way. And it’s true, it doesn’t. But Don was everything you would expect from his books. Don had a love of humanity, of our passions, our failures, our fears, our needs, that blazed forth from his books; his books that gave us that wonderful, innocent, devastating, whacky world of Stay More; that gave us Latha, and Dawny, and Doc Swain, and the Ingledews. He was unfailingly generous in our communications, in his responses to my editing, and in his friendship beyond the page. When I met him in New York, he dubbed me Princess of Stay More. He was part of my life when I got engaged, when I got married, when I had my son: he had, of course, wonderful words to share with me on the advent of my marriage and on becoming a parent. An email from him always made me smile. He was my friend.

Don had more than his share of physical trials; his last two books we worked on after he had had a serious car accident that led to the discovery of a recurring pneumonia that left him unable to eat and drink properly, and he had to have all his sustenance piped directly to his stomach, to avoid worsening his condition. Despite this blow, he continued, unflagging. He remained concerned and curious with the world around him; I never heard a word of self-pity. And he kept on writing.

When I asked him if he’d add some more details about Latha’s husband, Every Dill, into Enduring, the book we published two months ago, he told me he was saving them for his next novel, which would be all about Every. He was about to start work on it when he had the fall that led, ultimately, to his death last week. He had every intention of writing at least two more books; he knew what they were going to be. I was looking forward to them. A talented professor of art history, despite his retirement he was so used to starting the writing of a novel during summer break that he was waiting for that date to arrive. An author who appeared in person in his own creations, at the end of Enduring he describes his own death, which would be at the age of eighty-six, from complications of pneumonia. Even while he was in ICU these past few months, suffering from complications of pneumonia, I felt certain he would pull through. He was seventy-three. He had thirteen more years. He seemed invincible to me; the man who had already survived meningitis as a child, had survived throat cancer, had survived his previous accident and pneumonia, would surely survive this; he had a wonderful wife he shared his life with, and many more books to write.

I felt immense sorrow, and real surprise, when his devoted wife Kim told me, a few days before the end, that he would not recover. I have been devastated ever since I was told that he had passed on.

Any reader familiar with Don’s work will know that he is not a fan of endings. All of his books switch tense to the future tense for the last chapter or so; in that way, they cannot end. I am not a fan of this ending; I wish Don had been able to stay more. I miss a brilliant author, I miss a kind friend. I can’t quite believe that I will never receive another email from him, or that I will never have the privilege of editing And God Saw Every, which remained unwritten.

We have Stay More; we have fifteen brilliant, inventive, inspiring, funny, ribald, weird novels of a town and a world that will remain, that can’t help but remain, vital and alive. Don knew the human spirit, and was, perhaps unfashionably, optimistic about it. His books, his mythic village, despite some very dark events, contain that optimistic, almost Edenic vision. One of his close friends, Brian Walter, wrote to me that he’s often said “that one of Don’s greatest gifts as a writer is to nestle the most devastating loss within the broadest and most enriching of comedic visions, to get us to smile through even our most devastated tears.”

Ultimately, Don will leave us smiling, and that is a true gift he has bestowed upon all those lucky enough to have found him and Stay More. Today, with this loss all-too-fresh for me, I can’t quite get past the tears.

In Enduring, Don wrote: “Latha will come to realize that only the survivor will understand the depth of the loss, while only the lost will understand that they are not lost at all, but found. And she will remember what she herself had realized years before, that the secret of enduring is not to harden oneself against loss but to soften oneself in acceptance.”

And in Ekaterina, he wrote: “Death is not an isolation or a loneliness but their antithesis, like a surprise birthday party, only with, if you can possibly imagine it, the entire departed population of earth in attendance.” And: “Death is unimaginably not solitary but social.”

I know that Don is right: we, the survivors, are only beginning to understand the depths of our loss, and we must learn to soften ourselves in acceptance. And I hope that he is right, too, about where he is now. I hope he is having a ball; I hope he is hearing music. I hope he is found.

Don, you are and always will be loved, and you will be very much missed.

Your friend,

Deborah

Home | Books | Frontlist | Booksellers | Submissions | Press | About Us | Contact Us