Remembering Kent Haruf
Longtime editor Gary Fisketjon on his friendship with the beloved author
I knew Kent Haruf pretty well before we’d ever met. Not because I’d read and admired his first novel, The Tie That Binds, which got a lot of attention when it came out in 1984; certainly not because of his second, Where You Once Belonged, which I somehow hadn’t been aware of. Not even because I loved Plainsong when, in 1998, his agent sent in the manuscript and I suspected, after reading the opening chapters, that it was perfect for me, and for Knopf. It turned out I was right.
No, I came to know Kent in the course of preparing his book for publication. Countless exchanges are part of this process, but the most important of them is the editing. On my end, this amounts to reading a book more closely and carefully than any normal person would dream of doing; to understanding the book not in some cursory fashion but at practically the DNA level; to scribbling responses that might be general but more often are minute, almost persnickety, each meant to draw the author’s attention to anything that might endanger the magical spell he or she has already cast so well.
This is a very intense, private exchange, right there on every page, and the writer always has the last word.
So I went through Plainsong and sent the pages to Kent with this unspoken agreement: If he couldn’t read my handwriting, I’d translate; if he couldn’t see what I was suggesting, I’d try to explain myself better; but most of all, that he could put my comments to whatever use he wanted to, beyond reading them, and moreover that I never looked back to check on a single thing.
This, I like to think, set us off in the direction of friendship, though we’d never once clapped eyes on each other. That didn’t happen until Plainsong was published and I accompanied him on part of his promotional tour.
By the time we met in Milwaukee on a bright fall day, his novel had already won so many devotees all across the country that it was, for me, an unfolding amazement.
Readers who’d taken so much from his work were now lining up to give something — adoration, trust, celebration — back to him. Between those happy, frantic events, in various hotels and cabs and planes, from early in the morning to late at night, we were left to ourselves and finally got to really know each other.
Thus began a dear friendship that grew deeper and deeper over the fifteen years since (though it thankfully feels much longer). We enjoyed our now-familiar engagement with Eventide and Benediction. We spent time together at our homes in Colorado and Tennessee, and in Oregon and North Dakota and New York and Wyoming, all over the place. We each came to know — and value highly — the other’s wife and family and friends. We suffered through a bad TV movie of Plainsong and got to see, together again in Denver, wonderful stage adaptations of both that and Eventide (and, too late for Kent, of Benediction). And then, gradually over a period of years, Kent’s health began to fail, a heartbreaking ordeal that he stood up to stoically, heroically, with the constant care and support and inspiration of Cathy. And what was gradual then became sudden in February 2014, when he was told his condition was incurable, untreatable, and fatal — a diagnosis that now required all of his thought and effort, once he’d given this awful news to those closest to him. For a couple months, outside his home in Salida and amongst his family, Kent was mostly — and understandably — silent. But then, incredibly, his spirits seemed to lift steadily through the summer, with talk of what he was reading, of bizarre hailstorms and spectacular aspens, of football and all the quotidian stuff that makes up daily life. While I didn’t know where this apparent encouragement was coming from, it was a sea-change that made his friends profoundly grateful and happy for him. Still apprehensive, yet hopeful despite all the odds. Kent himself, true to his nature, wasn’t indulging in any wishful thinking.
“I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It’s a strange life. I don’t know how long it’ll go on. I don’t look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales.”
Okay, I’m sure we all felt, but let’s just keep going.
And then, on September 22nd, came an e-mail I’ll never forget: “Here’s a little surprise for you.” In the attachment was Our Souls at Night, which he’d begun writing on May 1st, a novel that Cathy alone knew about and that was, he said later, “what was keeping me alive.” So this was why his mood had lightened over these months when he sounded like himself again. It is, after all, what writers do — they write. In his last interview, Kent describes the importance of concentration, and it seems to me he was a master of it, that this is what powered his ability to reveal, as he hoped to, “the fundamental, irreducible structure of life, and of our lives with one another.” Once more we were back on the horse, with the only difference being that we now had an indefinite but literal and pressing deadline. As before, Kent had revised the book several times before I read it. As before, I gave him every comment I could offer. As before, he had the last word (with Cathy as his indispensable amanuensis). He finished going over the copyediting nine weeks later — around Thanksgiving, as it happens — and died the following Sunday, November 30th.
Two weeks earlier, we had talked about a new book, on which he was already making notes. Less than a week earlier, Kent had told his great friend Mark Spragg that he wanted to be around to see what sort of reaction Our Souls received (this, mind you, seven months in the future). Only days before, he said he was “sure going to work hard” to attend Benediction’s stage premiere in February. Only days before, he said: “I don’t feel like death is right around the corner, but if it is, it’s a bigger corner than I thought it was.”
And so, after facing death down for four years, Kent at long last had to turn that corner. But not until he had seen this magnificent new book through to its completion. He had also seen, and liked, the cover we’d proposed for it. Hell, we were still talking about the Broncos and the Oregon Ducks. So I like to think his final months and weeks and days were as good and as fulfilling as they possibly could’ve been.
And here’s what I know for certain: Before leaving, Kent gave us another wonderful gift.
He believed, rightly, that Our Souls at Night is “completely separate” from his earlier books, with “a different tone and suggestiveness.” He never stopped growing, as a writer, as a friend, as a man.
Read an excerpt from Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night.
Available for pre-order at your preferred book retailer.
