Let Us Build Us a City

The title of Let Us Build Us a City, Donald Harington’s 1986 “nonfiction” novel, comes from the Bible, specifically from the King James translation of Genesis 11:4. “And they said, ‘Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’” This passage sets up the story of the Tower of Babel, a parable of human pride going before a fall. In Let Us Build, or, as the author referred to it, LUB, Harington tells the stories of obscure towns that, once upon a time, optimistically named themselves “city.” Harington weaves these stories into a meditation on Arkansas ruins, the rejects and leftovers of the American dream after it had passed on to more lucrative climes. It is these stories of actual residents of Arkansas that allow LUB to sometimes be considered a work of nonfiction; some libraries have even cataloged it as travel literature.

But these nonfiction elements live inside a vintage Harington novel. This quintessentially Haringtonian story features dual protagonists introduced in the preface. The first is a deaf, hard-drinking professor of art history who is spending a nasty winter in a Main Street walk-up apartment in South Dakota, where he holds a temporary teaching position. An obscure novelist who has ceased to write novels, he has no prospects, no hopes, and, clearly, no future. His landlady leaves him angry notes mis-addressed to someone named “Harrigan,” so the melancholy writer adopts the misnomer as his persona for the narrative. As in so many of Harington’s books, questions of mistaken identity are never just mistakes but are instead opportunities for existential musings and life-giving connections.

Coming home from work one evening, Harrigan sorts through the usual bills and junk in his mail and is surprised to find a fan letter from someone named Kim, an Arkansas schoolteacher in Beebe (White County) who is fated to become his companion protagonist in LUB. Kim had stumbled across Harrigan’s third novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place. (an actual novel of Harington’s), in a local library and fell in love, quoting back to the depressed novelist the lines that he most dreads being reminded of: “Oh, this is the story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart.”

With Harrigan’s encouragement, Kim visits a variety of towns around the state that added the word “City” to their names, communities that once had high hopes, only to dwindle over time and find themselves lost, more or less, to history. Kim works her way around to eleven of these towns: Sulphur City, Cherokee City, Marble City (Newton County), Buffalo City (Baxter County), Cave City (Sharp and Independence counties), Lake City (Craighead County), Mound City (Crittenden County), Arkansas City (Desha County), Garland City (Miller County), Bear City (Garland County), and Y City (Scott County). Each gets a chapter, and each chapter begins with photos of some of the buildings and places featured.

Kim shares her findings in long letters, which, she is confident, Harrigan will someday turn into a book. Harrigan, for his part, particularly encourages Kim to visit the oldest people still living in the towns, the ones who might recall their glory days or who can at least relate their personal memories of the most colorful characters associated with the towns’ past. Tape recorder in hand, Kim embarks on a clockwise journey around Arkansas, eating in tiny, family-run cafés and diners, staying at hotels and motels as near as possible to the obscure townships, looking through old photo albums with her interviewees, locating rundown cemeteries, and often getting lost herself in the heart of Arkansas Americana. In each “city,” with each person, Kim asks the signal question of the book: “Did you ever have any hopes or dreams that never came true?”

Kim’s wanderings provide Harington (the real author, not Harrigan the avatar) with many opportunities to nestle Arkansas’s lost towns deep in the American experience. The “City” towns often sprang up thanks to the efforts of future business or civic leaders, the ones who positioned themselves best to take advantage of newfound, and usually temporary, economic opportunity. These stories and characters include magic cures, junk stocks, and get-rich-quick schemes, one of which takes the form of an actual Arkansas gold rush. Another memorable grift is Dogpatch USA, a tourist trap that pandered to the stereotypes of hillbillies propagated by Al Capp in his comic strip Li’l Abner. Located near Marble City (also called Marble Falls), Dogpatch emerges as an eyesore blemishing one of the most beautiful stretches of the Ozarks. America once again shows itself to be not just the land of opportunity, but a land of shameless opportunists.

But it is also a place of deep roots and deep yearning, as Harington consistently highlights within Kim’s findings. One of the most magical, whimsical, and powerful of all the characters in the book is the Mississippi River itself, or Old Grandfather, as the author frequently refers to it. Harington invokes some of the millennia’s worth of art inspired by Old Grandfather, ranging from the intricately decorated pottery of the Indigenous inhabitants of Mound City to the literary tributes of Twain and William Faulkner. Uncontrollable and rolling ever on, Old Grandfather Mississippi moves artists to convey their feelings about the “elusive illusion” of water and thus to fulfill the “theme and function of art: to seize the fickle.”

Of course, the great river in question is far from harmless. Most memorably, Old Grandfather was the site of the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, the wreck of the steamboat Sultana near the end of the Civil War. Anticipating by a full decade the film director James Cameron, who used the same narrative device to turn the story of the Titanic into one of the most popular movies of the twentieth century, Harington dreams up a pair of improbable star-crossed lovers to set into the midst of the Sultana’s wreck. A Union soldier who has been freed from a Confederate prison, Sam Dunlap tries to find his way back home to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and ends up taking ship with some 2,200 others, most of them soldiers, on the Sultana, whose maximum capacity (including crew) was 376. Pressed in by the overload of emergency voyagers near the first-class cabins, Sam meets a tourist on her way back from New Orleans whom he addresses as “Miss Adeline,” her last name never identified. Under the massively overcrowded conditions, two people who would never otherwise have met somehow strike up a real companionship, finding solace in each other’s chance company—until the boiler blows and plunges everyone on the Sultana into hell. Old Grandfather, as Harington notes, takes the lives of the non-swimmers quickest and most mercifully, but for the rest—including Sam and Adeline—the efforts to survive the immersion en masse prove as poignant as they are heroic and, for the majority, futile. Harington embeds Sam and Miss Adeline’s story within the larger story of Kim’s explorations of Mound City, where she meets a man named Sam Oliver who has found what appear to be pieces of the Sultana’s boiler in his soybean fields and is working with a young Memphis lawyer named Jerry Potter to exhume the wreck.

While recounting and sometimes creating the history of his home state, Harington subtly lays the groundwork throughout LUB to bring Kim and Harrigan together. The farther she travels, the more Kim is on the lookout for her correspondent, whom she has never seen and has no idea how she would recognize. More than once, she takes one of the locals she meets as a possible Harrigan and asks some questions they find confusing. But it is not until she reaches the last lost town that she and Harrigan finally meet in person.

The real Donald Harington, of course, married the real Kim McClish, the schoolteacher from Beebe who wrote him a fan letter out of the blue. It was their real romance that was eventually transmuted into the novel that came to be called Let Us Build Us a City. Harington’s narrative perspective stays close to Kim throughout, and when Harrigan finally shows up at the end, he is both magical and comical, both learned and silly. One of the funniest parts of the book has Kim turning the tables on Harrigan and insisting that he conduct the last interview, the one in Y City, with results as hilarious as they are poignant. (The subject turns out to be even deafer than Harrigan.) It is the kind of comedic passage that could easily turn disrespectful, even cruel, the deaf person trying to operate in a hearing world that offers no accommodations, but in Harington’s hands, it becomes another meditation on our incorrigible sociability as a species and the complicated gift of human speech.

LUB was Harington’s comeback book after what he referred to in interviews as his “dark ages,” the decade-long period after The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks in which he did not publish any books. For his comeback, Harington secured the editorial services of Helen Wolff, a star in the literary marketplace at the time, who helped sell the book to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Harington would go on to publish his next four novels with HBJ, but not because LUB had turned out to be a commercial success. The story remained the same as with his earlier books: LUB received many favorable notices in various papers, ranging from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dayton Daily News to the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe, which not only ran a glowing review, but also published a flattering cover article on the author and his spouse. And he received plenty of attention in his home state’s primary newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, with another feature article and his own piece published during the work on LUB. Despite all the enthusiastic press coverage, LUB did not, according to the author, come close to selling out its initial printing of 25,000 copies.

But commercial disappointments aside, Harington’s life as a writer got a great boost with the publication of LUB. The depressed vagabond novelist had revived his life and career thanks not just to the woman who became his wife, but also to the book she helped him write, transcribing some 500 pages of personal interviews and reconnecting him as a writer and artist to his home state. Taking up their life together in Fayetteville (Washington County), where Harington landed a faculty position teaching art history at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas (UA), Harington resumed his life work, building the fictional little town of Stay More up over ten subsequent novels that, as the author freely acknowledged, might well never have come to exist if he had not one day received a letter out of the blue from an ardent fan named Kim.

For additional information:
Ferguson, John L. “Exhuming ‘Ghost Towns,’ Raising the Spectre of Human Frailty.” Arkansas Gazette, December 21, 1986, p. 8C.

Harington, Donald. Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Lewis, Bill. “Harington Builds on His Fame with ‘City.’” Arkansas Gazette, November 9, 1986, p. 9C.

Walter, Brian, ed. The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019.