Not to worry….I’m not giving up BH. The new guy is Kent Haruf. I found him way too late. In fact, he passed on November 30th at age 71, a few months before his last book, Our Souls at Night, was published. I found him like I find a lot of exceptional writers…in the Book World section of the Washington Post.
He’s a native of Colorado. Small town eastern Colorado. He lived all over the west….Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois, Montana. Working primarily as an itinerant teacher for over 30 years and when he finally retired, he started writing acclaimed short stories. Not an easy genre for a writer.
A few years later came Plainsong, his novel of small town life in Holt, Colorado. There is no such place but it’s a amalgamation of several western communities. His writing would be probably considered stark but the characters he draws envelop us in a world that is both compelling and yet repelling.
Compelling in the sense that I think to myself: Wouldn’t small town life be so simple and safe and stable? However, repelling because I’m an East Coast girl. I have to be within driving distance of a beach. Repelling in that I was raised in a small Florida town and couldn’t wait to escape.
It was just too narrow, too rigid. I needed more adventure. Much more. And yet, I still have nostalgia for the pure souls that inhabit small communities. But, I have a very difficult time with some of the narrow views that abound there.
The contrast is evident in his story telling. Plainsong has several storylines but the main one involves a teenage girl who gets pregnant and is thrown out of her mother’s house. Her high school counselor arranges for her to go live with two farmers, brothers in their 70s who live truly isolated lives.
Although Plainsong was the most popular, two others followed: Eventide and Benediction. All were set in Holt, interspersing characters he’d drawn earlier and introducing new ones for us to examine.
He was in a second marriage to a friend he reconnected with at his 30th high school reunion. She was a special education teacher in Virginia with five children. Their first marriages ended and they married in 1995, living in Salida, Colorado.
In February of 2014, he was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, which zapped his energy fairly quickly. In April, however, he got this creative spurt and told his wife, Cathy, he was going to write their story, his final novel.
Addie, a widow in her 70s, knocks on her neighbor’s door and proposes that he come to her house to spend the nights together. He’s a widower also in his 70s. It wasn’t a sexual tryst she was interested in. She wanted company, someone to share her bed with, someone to speak to late in the evenings. He accepted and began this blossoming friendship that was over the top radical in Holt.
For forty five days, Kent Haruf trudged out to his writing shed and sat down at the Royal typewriter he wrote everything on. He placed yellow paper in the typewriter, pulled a hat over his eyes and wrote a single spaced first draft with no punctuation or capitalization in order not to agonize about word choice or sentence syntax or grammar. He didn’t want to get hung up on one sentence trying to write it over and over.
His philosophy was just get it down and worry about those things later. He wrote a chapter a day. He finished his first draft in late June and sent it to his editor at Knopf who was dumbfounded. He had no idea he was writing a last book. He dropped everything to get to Colorado to help Kent and Cathy finish this stunningly beautiful novel. SPOILER ALERT: The ending traumatized me for days. And, no, no one dies.
The final proofs arrived from Knopf on November 26th. Cathy read them to him and he left us four days later.
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