Donald Harington 1935–2009

I came to him late. The one I read first—With—will always be with me. There is no way to explain the wonderment and generosity of someone who could enchant so thoroughly. He made magic from misfit lives. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez represents Latin American literature, Harington represents ours. I don't mind that most Americans don't yet recognize it. He and his other devotees understand that literature is not about the Nobel Prize—and it certainly is not about the bestseller lists. One famous, successful, and unprincipled writer I studied with said, I won't consider you a real writer until you demand money for your work. He sneered at the naive concept of art for art's sake. But what DH said to me at every encounter was about effort: You must keep writing. His position, a rarity, is that writing is a gift not a stickup. Those encounters—I tried to explain to him how his writing had affected me profoundly but I was inarticulate, small, and sloppy. I wanted his lovely Kim to know that I loved her husband passionately as I imagine many women do but I hoped she understood, which of course she does. I feel broken hearted for her and for those more traditionally attached to him than I. But even as we mourn, all of us who sheltered in his poetic, ribald, weird, tender novels can remember his perspective on death—and that if anyone is floating around Arkansas right now it is Mr. H, chuckling. From Ekaterina, another masterpiece: "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 am waiting for some sort of plot twist now, for his existence, like that of his characters, has merely paused—

—CAF