It has been a few weeks, but I would be remiss if I failed to mark the passing of novelist Kent Haruf, author of the 1999 bestseller Plainsong.
Mississippi Public Television has a program called The Writers, an intermittent series of interviews of writers with Mississippi connections. It was on The Writers that I first encountered Haruf, a soft-spoken, blue-jeaned and cowboy-booted author whose opinions about fiction writing fascinated me.
So I looked up Plainsong and read it. The novel takes place in a contemporary but fictional Colorado town, and tells the story of a high school teacher, the breakup of his marriage, and the new sense of family he develops when he arranges for the care and protection of a pregnant student of his who is thrown out of her home by her alcoholic mother.
Plainsong is the kind of novel most of us writers dream of writing -- well-crafted, a pleasure to read, even more pleasing to ponder. It has a pastoral tone, even though some of the events were suspenseful, and, at its bottom, an edifying regard for human life. When I read, I am looking for humanism, a sense of compassion for people and their situations that makes me feel more like a person. Not all books do this. Many modernist books specialize in alienation, something I think is very opposed to the purpose of good art. Haruf was very good at writing about what it means to be human.
According to his New York Times obiturary, he died of complications from lung disease in the shed behind his home, the place where he wrote his fiction. No better way to go than while sitting down to write, I say.
Haruf believed in getting the words down on the page quickly and without self-censoring. He thought the way to write was to express one's ideas in as raw a form as possible, without second thoughts, while the idea was still fresh.
To accomplish this end, he would sit down at a manual typewriter and write with a cap pulled over his eyes. Unable to see even the page, he would write in stream of consciousness pattern until he had met his word quota for the day. Editing he left for later. Sometimes the raw product was good, sometimes it was bad, but it always helped him sound the depths of his characters, providiing an intimacy that translated into every sentence that made it into print.
I could never take uncensored writing to that extreme, but I like the idea of it, the pure devotion to creation of the words and sentences.
Goodbye, Kent, and thank you for the words you have spun out for us.