philipmartin’s posterous

We are bereft. Donald Harington is dead. Not since Beethoven has a deaf man made such music.

We can’t say how he did that, so let us imagine: It begins with seeing, with finding and sorting with some magpie instinct, to collect that which is sharp and interesting ... to apprehend the shadows and hauntings, the nuance of the human heart.

Maybe the compensatory rumor is true. Maybe when the deafness descended on 12-year-old Donald his eyes grew more acute, he began to see more, to notice and retain, to read the gestures and to feel the beat of the language that rained all about his dry eardrums.

Maybe he watched and saw, insulated in his enforced stillness, catching the gist (and more) of what is unsayable but true.

We don’t know, but it is a reasonable guess. What we do know is it takes stuff like courage to gin what you’ve gathered through that black box in your head we might call the novelistic imagination, to process it and drizzle it, hot and vital, like blood on white sheets.

Check that - Harington was no action painter, no Jackson Pollock drizzling on his canvas. Some writers, they write like that, it all comes out like forensic blood splatters on the wall (the writer’s palm print inevitably, incriminatingly, on the bedpost) and sometimes you can get caught up in the surge, the adrenaline pull that pushes forward and drafts you along.

Harington was not that kind of writer. He was a painterly writer, a painter who knows how to render. He did a house and it was a house more real than most of the houses banks hold notes on. It’s more than a house too, because Harington built his worlds - there’s more than one, though they have the same name - of haunted stuff.

How he did it was his business, maybe a trade secret, maybe a dead art or something as inexplicable as a knack. It is harder than it seems - plainsong wrought a passion of selfdoubt and deep worry.

In every story that was written about Harington there was note made of the fact he wasn’t rich from writing, that he was not the big deal bull genius with movie deals and an entourage of bare-chested Chinese boys to bear his silk litter aloft. Fred Chappell, the poet and critic, famously called Harington “an undiscovered continent” and everyone repeats it because they wish they’d thought of it, because it seems apt and wise.

Because if you read Harington - and admittedly not everybody has - you start to understand pretty quickly that he is large, he contains multitudes, that there’s a Yoknapatawphaesque universe looming within his work. It’s not that he’s undiscovered - Harington has been tracked over and mapped by a few discerning readers.

Not that it’s such a chore hiking the great unknown Harington; it’s beautiful country, but it’s a long way. It’s not a small continent and it has lots of mountains and when you get way up there in the rarefied air, you can get loopy. Giddy. Free to think it all through again.

You can find yourself feeling a little bit like Nail Chism in The Choiring of the Trees (1990), making that long walk back to Stay More. Harington isn’t rough going in the way a lot of the other guys who fool around with this metafiction stuff can be, but he isn’t all about reassuring whatever readers he may have either. Things can go nasty with Harington; they can get irrevocably black quick. Like life.

The problem with deconstructing Harington is roughly the same as deconstructing a butterfly. You can pin it to a board, you can stretch out the wings for inspection, but in doing so you extinguish the animating force. On the examination table, Harington becomes more and more like any other writer, any other stringer-together of words in English. You learn nothing from diagramming his sentences or charting his plots; you pull the flesh away from the skeleton and you’ve got meat and bones but buddy, the soul done fled.

Reading Harington requires an act of faith - you have to believe in the invisible and ineffable, in the evanescent quality that makes us all more than a complicated adventure in chemistry.

You have to believe in the final irreducibility of things like a writer’s voice, like his ability to aspirate - to breathe life into - his characters. You have got to believe that language, when it’s done right, is real music, and that the rhythm and the phrasing and the voice have to work together and that there’s a genuine mystery to the why and how of it that can’t be properly taught.

But maybe you can feel it. Maybe it crosses the back of your neck like a cool holler shadow or catches you up in your throat and makes something hot and moist develop in your eye. Maybe it rings some tuning fork in you, makes it shiver like a crazy bone, just the way the old codger rammed those two unexpected words together - like a kid playing with his toy fire trucks - and sparks fell out.

It’s like any mind trick. You’ve got to make yourself available. You’ve got to be willing to start walking, to pick up your bindle and hobo it through Harington, maybe not knowing much about Newton County or the Ingledews or that crazy Russian fellow who wrote the dirty book about the little trampy girl. You have to be willing to get lost in Harington.

For decades some of us have lived in expectation of the next Harington, and the good news is the work persists. If you don’t know about him, it’s not too late - you can buy yourself some of his novels and see for yourself. All critics can really do in the face of a talent like this is go, “Oh, wow, this guy is smarter than I am and he writes better too.”

And that’s sometimes hard for critics to do, though they do tend to do a better job with Harington than they do with some others. Even so, any honest writer will tell you that a book review or a critical essay is just another opportunity to write, to show off, which leads one to wonder how come Harington never seemed to be doing just that.

He was simply always there, a tender, patient and sometimes wicked god, beaming down mostly beneficence on his creation. I looked into my copy of his most recent book, Enduring, last night. Though I miss him, he’s still there.

This essay is based partly on a piece that ran in 2004.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 29 on 11/17/2009

There are exceptions, of course, hypocrites and smiling assassins, sociopaths who somehow manage to pass as ordinary quiet men who kept to themselves until the day their floorboards are pulled up to reveal the grisly byproducts of their existence. It happens.

But most of us are who we will ourselves to be. Some of us are more introspective than others, more given to questioning the authenticity of our feelings and pangs of existential dread. But we are defined by what we do in the world, not by prattling internal monologues. Motives matter less than effects: Give money to do-gooder causes and you are charitable. Comfort a crying child and you are being kind. Apply your attention and care to the needs of a fellow creature and you are loving.

While there may be a real and persistent voice inside you announcing your uniqueness and indestructibility, the evidence of the world contradicts those notions. You are special only to the extent that your life is a mathematical improbability, you are as dispensable as any of the funny names in the musty old books. What your heart tells you is not always correct-the world does not recognize your exceptionalistic claims. The world knows you only through your deeds.

Practice living decently and you become decent, no matter what mad bats flap in your heart.

Idid not meet Anne Pressly until the Thursday evening before the Sunday night she was murdered. We exchanged a few words at a charity event called Paws on the Runway; she was one of the emcees and our puppies were canine models.

Though I didn’t know Anne, I was very aware of her. We had many mutual friends. She made her movie debut the week before, playing a TV commentator obviously modeled on Ann Coulter in Oliver Stone’s movie W. Though the role was small, she’d made an impression with her few moments of screen time and there was a general burble of excitement around her. People were genuinely proud of and happy for her: No one seemed to doubt that she was special, the sort of person to which extraordinary things happen.

I cannot pretend to know more than I do, but I have never observed a situation where there seemed to be such consensus about a public person’s virtue than there was about Anne Pressly’s, even before she was beaten to death by a stranger. While everyone who lives a semi-public life is subject to a degree of jealous snark and lascivious speculation, I never heard anyone who knew her say a disparaging word about her.She was as she seemed, a bright and dutiful girl who worked hard and acquitted herself with dignity, who never took her gifts for granted or presumed that her small measure of celebrity made her in any way more worthy than the rest of us.

She was as she did: She was good.

There is no perfect way for men to redress the damage done by reckless, desperate brutes. Bereaved families cannot be made whole; friends will not be assuaged by the application of “justice”-whatever that may be. Trajectories of untold lives are deflected in unknowable ways by insensible violence. Our world is not what it could be or might have been and there is nothing that an executioner can repair.

We are tough and determined animals when we are cornered, and most of us are lucky that we never have to meet ourselves at the extremes of behavior. Most of us are never tested in violent situations, most of us have no idea of what hard choices we might make to try and save ourselves. We should be thankful that our lives are no more dramatic than they are; every night that we are able to fall asleep imagining ourselves safe is a gift we should appreciate.

It is difficult for most people who read newspaper columnists to imagine a life scuttling through the alleys of other people’s neighborhoods, looking for a chance to perpetrate some opportunistic crime. Maybe we have been-maybe we still are-poor, but we’ve never known the sort of despondent hopelessness that might cause us to consider the kind of nihilistic invasion of home and person Anne Pressly’s killer committed.

Most of us live in more or less ordinary ways and commit only the most quotidian offenses. Most of us have a moral floor which we’ve never felt fall away, which we imagine is as low as we can possibly go.

But we are not naïve, and we understand that monsters are more likely made than born, and that we have limited powers of comprehension. It is difficult for most of us to contemplate what happened to Anne Pressly-the details that were brought out at trial were sickening and sobering. They laid open an ugly, visceral part of the world that our culture often caricatures as horror gore. They make you want to cry, not just for the victim, but for a world that admits such cruelty and any thinking thing that would design it.

And so you come around to accepting that bad things happen to good people, and that the tritest words are sometimes all there are to mumble. There is an evil in the world, against which none of us have been inoculated. All we can do is trust in each other, in the imperfect systems we’ve installed to enforce peace. All we can do is weep and pray and try to do the right thing, especially when it’s hard.

All we can do is try to be good.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 84 on 11/15/2009