Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
‘A spiritual kinship’
Scholar, friend remembers author Donald Harrington in biopic.
Ask Brian Walter about parallels between his life and that of novelist Donald Harington, and he is surprised. It’s a question he’s never considered, he says. He admits a “spiritual kinship” with Harington, “connected to my own sense of life being an experience of impossibly tangled joy and sorrow.”
But when Walter, who has just released a documentary film about Harington, talks about his childhood, it’s easy to see how he was drawn to the fictional Ozark town of Stay More and its creator.
ROOTS
Based on the Madison County town of Drakes Creek, where Harington spent summers with his grandparents, Stay More was, for Harington, a refuge he simply could not leave.
“I discovered that there was no way I could escape from the Ozarks, so I might as well settle down and realize that I had to devote the rest of my life to Stay More,” Walter quotes Harington as saying.
He had all kinds of good reasons to “stay more,” as the residents of the fictional town always say to anyone departing.
Born Dec. 22, 1935, in Little Rock, Harington lost his hearing to meningococcal meningitis when he was 12. His father was abusive, his life in Little Rock unsettled, and in Drakes Creek “the young Harington developed his love of the Ozarks … absorbing the local accents and idioms from the residents who nicknamed him Dawny and who shared tall tales and humorous yarns with each other from their porches in the evening,” Walter writes. Walter, too, had reasons to seek roots. “I didn’t have anything like the hardships Don went through,” he says. But, he adds, “I used to joke I grew up in a U-Haul on I-80.”
Walter’s father was a minister, he explains, and he’d attended seven schools in three states by the time he was in eighth grade.
“People always ask me if that was a problem, but I don’t remember until I was about 12 really feeling sorry or sad we were moving. … Wherever we went, I had my books with me.”
DETOURS
Also like Harington, Walter took a less traditional route to professional success.
“The pattern of life depriving Harington on the one hand but richly rewarding him on the other would continue through the decades,” Walter wrote in his obituary. Harington earned a bachelor’s degree in art history and a master of fine arts in printmaking at the University of Arkansas but was “exiled” from Harvard’s doctoral program in art history “when one of his professors informed him that his papers read more like novels than traditional scholarship.”
Walter, influenced by Time magazine’s selection of the personal computer as “machine of the year” in 1983, enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore., as a math and physics major.
Harington
“Fortunately, I had picked a liberal arts college,” he says, so along with college calculus and firstyear physics, he had a humanities class he loved. He became an English major.
It was the norm for Reed graduates to go on to get advanced degrees, and although Walter “had no idea what graduate school entailed,” he followed that path — somewhat more successfully than Harington.
“My master’s exam at the end of my first year did not go well,” he says of the program at Washington University. “My first semester in St. Louis was a rough one. The second semester went better,” but in the spring of 1989, his father had a heart attack.
“So while all of my firstyear classmates spent the summer running their own class and inviting professors in, I was off on my own, with my dad recuperating.”
He squeaked in to the doctoral program and made it through, in spite of his adviser’s assessment: “You grew so much at the end,” implying how far behind he started.
“I had to if I was going to get out of there,” he says.
Harington found solace by turning Drakes Creek into Stay More. He published “Lightning Bug,” his first of 13 Stay More novels, in 1970.
“In one of my early novels,” Harington told Walter, “the narrator says, ‘Oh, this is the story. You know it, don’t you? Not the story of ghost towns where actual people lived and died, but the story of lost places in the heart,’ and it’s been my job as a novelist to seek out those lost places in the heart.”
Walter found film, an extension of his own passion for storytelling and, as such, his own life.
“All of us are writing about ourselves, all scholars and critics, in some way or another,” he says.
INTERSECTION
Walter and Harington met in the late 1990s while Walter was teaching English at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville. Both were fans of Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita,” and Walter says they met either in an online discussion forum or when Harington saw one of Walter’s pieces in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Either way, Harington invited Walter to Fayetteville for lunch.
“The mortifying part was I hadn’t read any of his work,” Walter remembers.
“Ekaterina,” Harington’s take on the “Lolita” story, won Walter over, and the two became friends.
“We had kind of an irascible relationship,” Walter says, recalling that when he admitted his faux pas to Harington, “he just gave me a look that said, ‘It was about time you learned I was a brilliant writer.’”
“He gave me some hard times about some other things, too,” Walter says, but he also dedicated “With” to Walter and made him a character in the final chapter of his final work, “Enduring.”
“I was hardly the first person from his life to end up a character in one of his books, but to be in the final novel, in the final chapter, was a marvelous and unexpected gift,” Walter says.
JOURNEY
Walter’s film, titled “Stay More: The World of Donald Harington,” was an extension of his friendship with Harington and his work teaching film studies at Washington University before he became an associate professor of English and director of convocations at St. Louis College of Pharmacy, he says.
“It’s a film that hopefully will appeal to people who love Don’s books and will introduce them to people who don’t,” Walter says. He describes it as a “talking head movie,” but says Harington was “a wonderful teacher. You can just let yourself fall under his spell.”
The timing couldn’t have been better. In 2006, Harington was in a car accident that broke his ankle and caused pulmonary complications that robbed him of his ability to eat and drink.
“A friend of mine said, ‘You really ought to video record him. It would really be valuable to scholars of his work,’” Walter recalls. “So I emailed Don and asked, ‘Would you mind if I invaded your home with a camera?’”
In their discussions — which were facilitated by wife Kim, who often acted as Harington’s ears — Walter learned more about “how brutal his father was to him and what that did to his relationship with his mother.” Together, they traveled to the cemetery where Harington’s parents and grandparents are buried, the cemetery where Harington was interred in November 2009.
“It was really touching,” Walter says, watching Harington try to decide whether to visit his parents’ graves or those of his grandparents first.
“His relationship with his parents was really difficult and really complicated and had ramifications throughout his life,” Walter says.
Getting the film from conception to release was no less complicated, although working with Harington was the least of the challenges.
“Because he’d lost his hearing, it couldn’t be a conventional Q&A,” Walter explains. “I wrote out questions beforehand, sent them to him, and he still would get frustrated, even using the 3-by-5 cards he had been using for years to field questions in his class.
“During the interviews, there were plenty of times he’d say things I wanted to follow up, so Kim had to translate a lot,” he adds. “She was his go-between in all sorts of ways.”
“I was often his ears for him, yes,” Kim Harington says. “I am not sure people understood just how impaired his hearing was as he was such a participant in mainstream life.
“He relied on me for so much. The wonderful part of this was that we felt very much a team; he called me his helpmate, a role I was glad to fulfill. If there were a downside, it was that I felt I was on call just about all of the time.
“He very much liked the idea of Brian’s documentary,” she adds. “He always enjoyed the interview process, especially when interviewers asked challenging questions that caused him to ponder and remember, examine and evaluate. Brian was such an interviewer. He had the highest respect for Brian, and that made a huge difference.”
Ultimately, Walter’s project took seven years, and Harington died before it was completed. But he did get to see a trailer.
“(We’ve) watched it more than once and are convinced that you sorely missed your calling,” Harington wrote to Walter in an email. “Instead of teaching druggists how to write, you ought to be doing Burnsian documentaries. It is very neatly put together, that is, well-edited and paced, and I think there is a detectable sense of humor to the whole thing. It will certainly whet appetites for the whole picture.
“Unfortunately, it makes me look like an old codger, but on reflection I suppose I am an old codger, and I’d better get used to it.”
DESTINATION
The University of Arkansas Press released “Stay More: The World of Donald Harington” in November.
Bob Zebroski, senior associate dean and chairman of liberal arts at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy, was among early viewers.
“Most people read the book and then see an interview with the author, but I came to it backwards because of Brian,” he says. “I’m a historian, so I’m not a big fiction guy, to be frank. Through the interview, I could see this very intricate, well-read mind — acerbic, trenchant at times, but incredibly gifted. This is clearly the Ozarks’ Faulkner.”
In the end, Walter says, he “would love for (the film) to be a resource for scholars of his work. But my real wish would be if it could bring a few new readers to his work,” as it has drawn in his colleague Zebroski.
“Don’s work is remarkable, artistically inspired in the way he constructs his narratives, the stories he tells, his characters. There’s comic relief in his tragedies and tragic relief in his comedies,” Walter says. “The sweet never comes without the bitter or the other way around.”
Walter says he once asked Harington what “projects” he currently had under way — a word he chose carefully to “describe anything a writer and art historian might be working on.”
“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.’”
Ask Walter what he does, and it takes longer for him to answer.
“I get to watch lots of movies and read lots of books and talk to students about them and write imaginative and hopefully constructive things about them.
“I guess I am a professional reader.”
Who better to tell the story of Harington, who was once described by fellow novelist Fred Chappell this way:
“Donald Harington isn’t an unknown writer. He’s an undiscovered continent.”