First, some obvious facts. Donald Harington was born December 22, 1935 in Little Rock. He earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arkansas, the institution which he currently serves as an associate professor, and holds advanced degrees from Boston University and Harvard. He has served as an instructor, visiting, or distinguished professor of art at numerous institutions, ranging from the defunct (Bennett College) to the venerable (University of Pittsburgh) to the downright unlikely (South Dakota State). The list of awards and honors occupies a healthy chunk of his vita, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Fund for Authors, the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, and the University of Arkansas Alumni Association’s award for teaching excellence.
Of course, impressive as they are, none of these professional credentials would matter that much to us here in this room tonight were Don not also a superb novelist. His career as a novelist began in, of all places, graduate school, when, at the tender age of 24, he was dismissed from Harvard’s doctoral program because, according to his dissertation committee, his writing was "too breezy and novelistic to be scholarship." Now, those of us in the audience tonight who have had the inexpressible pleasure of passing our work before the skeptical eyes of a dissertation committee know all too well that failure as a scholar is hardly an automatic sign of our inevitable future success as novelists, but Don, nevertheless, took his dissertation committee’s "advice" (and I use that term "advice" with circumspherical looseness) and ran with it. Five years later, his first novel, The Cherry Pit, hit the shelves, to be followed in the ensuing three-decades-and-change by seven more, his most recent offering appearing just last spring, the acclaimed Butterfly Weed, from which he will be reading tonight.
Teaching, you see, has turned out to be just a hobby for Don; it is literature, and especially that most social of all forms of literature, the novel, that has tickled his ear with his true calling. This became clear to me this past November, a week or two before Thanksgiving, when Lynnea and I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Don and his wife Kim in Fayetteville. In the course of lunch, I asked Don what "projects" he had currently underway. I chose the word "projects" carefully, I thought, a neutral enough term to describe anything a writer and art historian might be working on. But not so, I quickly learned. With precisely the right combination of surprise, amusement, and mock indignation, Don threw my term right back at me. "Projects?" he asked. "I write novels. I don’t do projects."
That particular exchange, that apparently simple declaration, "I write novels," stayed with me all the way through Ekaterina, the novel of Don’s that I soon went on to read. For what impressed me most in this delightfully clever, touchingly funny novel was the almost casual but comprehensive expertise with which it interweaves character, theme, setting, history, narrative frame, and allusion one with another. I kept straining as the reader to catch any notes of strain on Don’s part as the writer, perhaps the least trace of compositional tension, even just the barest hint of the duress of generation, but the quest proved vain. Despite a healthy complement of narrative tension, despite the unstinting complexity of the story-line, despite the fullness of the characters, the impeccable detail of the imagery, and the breadth of the dictionary, never does the novel seem to labor in any of its difficult achievements. I have often told my composition students that the prose that reads the most easily, the most smoothly, the most naturally is the most difficult to compose. But my experiences with Don’s books have so far jeopardized this favorite teaching bromide of mine, or at least have confronted me with an apparent and arresting exception. The rest of us might work on projects, burning midnight oil by the barrel in the ceaseless labor of setting our sentences right, but Don writes novels, making the very difficult -- perfectly-modulated, perfectly-crafted, perfectly-toned, superbly entertaining prose -- look alarmingly easy.
Given this gift of Don’s for writing, this novelist’s unerring ear for the lift and range and nuance of his native tongue, it is tempting to think of it as something of a minor cosmic joke that nature deprived him of most of his hearing at the age of 12. Literary history, of course, offers ample precedent for this kind of loss. I recall spending far too many hours as a junior English major contriving plausible similarities between Homer and John Milton after a slightly sadistic professor of mine (who consistently enjoyed his own humor rather more than we students did) jokingly suggested that he was going to ask us, as our final exam question, what the connection between blindness and epic poetry was. The answer I would give now, of course, is that there is no intrinsic connection between physical debility and the gift of art, but that their cohabitation in so many artists through history only makes us value, makes us appreciate, the work all the more. In Don’s case, his gifts as a stylist are his gifts as an artist, the gift (at the furthest remove) of logos, the divinely-inspired word. It is the the gift of a scholar who is also a story-teller, the gift of a traveler who has ascended the steps of the ivory tower to its loftiest penthouses, but who prefers to bestow the kiss of his lovely prose upon that little postage-stamp of imaginative Ozarks soil he has dubbed Stay More. It is the gift, most simply and enormously, of a born novelist.
Donald Harington.