The Cherry Pit

“Why have we come here to this water?” This question hangs over the protagonist, Clifford “Nub” Stone, throughout Donald Harington’s first novel, The Cherry Pit. Published in 1965 by Random House, PIT (as Harington liked to abbreviate it) tells the story of Clifford’s return to his hometown of Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he meets up with old friends, struggles to reconnect with his family, and, most of all, wonders what hold Arkansas’s capital might still exert over him even after he has made a successful life for himself in Boston as a curator of antiquities and an expert on what he refers to as the Vanished American Past.

In Little Rock, Clifford reunites with three old friends who embody important aspects of his hometown. Doyle Hawkins is a police officer and Clifford’s former best friend whom he greets with a body blow, in honor of their high school sparring sessions. A tall, unsightly divorcé, Dall (as Clifford refers to him) is a bigot who uses racial slurs freely and usually speaks a redneck version of English that evokes the harassment of African American students in the Little Rock Nine era in which he and Clifford went to high school. In Dall’s office, Clifford encounters and helps to rescue from trumped-up charges another old friend, Naps, a successful Black bookseller who code-switches seamlessly between an exaggerated Uncle Tom racial stereotype and the sophisticated, successful middle-class businessman that he has made of himself. The third friend is Margaret Austin, his old girlfriend and the only one of the three who does not have an alternative identity to slip into, even though she has become an actress; she is involved with the author of the play she is currently performing in and is contemplating suicide when Clifford unexpectedly encounters her. Even more than Dall or Naps, Margaret comes to embody the town of Little Rock for Clifford: everything that puzzles him about it, everything that attracts him to it, and everything that makes it so difficult for him to accept it as a permanent home.

Clifford’s status as friend and confidante to both Dall and Naps allows PIT to engage timely themes of racism during the civil rights era that are otherwise mostly absent from the author’s work, making this first novel Harington’s most topical and, in theory, the most politically charged. But Harington is far more interested in ironically humanizing even the bigot Dall Hawkins than in making a political statement. Dall spends more and more time with Naps and his wife, Tatrice (who is, like Clifford, an expert in American antiquities), enjoying meals in their home and, later, even receiving visits and gifts from them during an extended convalescence. Harington’s insistence on the extraordinary kindness and generosity of Naps and Tatrice toward a determinedly prejudiced police officer who threatens and harasses them may flout certain dictates of historical plausibility, but it is entirely in keeping with the author’s lifelong insistence that personal relationships trump politics and that human beings, no matter how mean or violent they can be in politically charged contexts, intuitively seek out warm, friendly relations with one another.

At least as importantly, the challenge of serving as a go-between for Naps and Dall deepens and complicates Clifford’s ambivalent pursuit of Margaret, whose struggle to build a stable, independent identity for herself matches Clifford’s. As restless and enigmatic as she is—still living with her abusive, controlling mother, acting in a play written by a pompous playwright who has sexual designs on her as an alternative to his resentful, wheelchair-bound, but conveniently rich wife—Margaret nevertheless comes to serve as an anchor for Clifford in his own life’s battles: unhappy in his marriage back in Boston, disdaining his hometown but drawn to it, scorning contemporary American culture in general and trying to use his work to buffer him from the world he lives in.

Clifford and Margaret fall in love once again and pursue each other through a series of adventures, often spending time late at night walking the streets of Little Rock, discussing each other’s hopes and fears and darkest thoughts, even escaping a variety of dangerous situations together. They are almost helplessly drawn to each other, but Harington attenuates and forestalls the question of their final commitment to one another, which is indistinguishable, for Clifford, from finding a basis for finally embracing his hometown.

Published when postwar literary culture in America was continually playing out crises of masculinity in the works of authors ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Norman Mailer to William Styron (Harington’s friend, who was instrumental in getting Random House to publish it), The Cherry Pit enjoyed some critical success, earning a nomination from the Faulkner Foundation for notable first novel (the award eventually went to Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper). But it would take five more years (a period that included the rejection of a manuscript called A Work of Fiction) before he would get his second novel into print, 1970’s Lightning Bug, which introduced the reader to the town of Stay More, the setting for every novel that Harington would go on to publish over the next four decades.

Viewed in this context, The Cherry Pit can feel almost like an aberration, a city novel that deals with the challenges of racism and alienation that seem antithetical to the themes of rural retreat, munificent solitude, and the yearning for love in the midst of wrenching personal loss that reappear throughout the Stay More saga. But Clifford’s inability to make peace with all that his hometown represents to him presages the deep connection between the residents of Stay More and the Ozarks hideaway that Harington would end up returning his readers to again and again in his subsequent novels. The world of humbling acceptance and overarching affirmation that Harington would eventually build out in Stay More was subtly foretold in the world of rejection and restless self-exile depicted in The Cherry Pit.

For additional information:
Greenberg, Brooke. “Acute Observations.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 13, 2022, pp. 1H, 6H. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2022/nov/13/acute-observations/ (accessed March 7, 2024).

Harington, Donald. The Cherry Pit. New York: Random House, 1965.

Walter, Brian, ed. Double Toil and Trouble: A New Novel and Short Stories by Donald Harington. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2020.

Brian Walter
St. Louis, Missouri