For more than a decade, we’ve been able to make little stops by this small, fictional town of Holt, out on the eastern plains of Colorado. We were first delivered there in Plainsong, the 1999 novel about two aging brothers, cattle ranchers who take in a pregnant, homeless teenager and allow her and her baby to change their lives and their meaning of family. We returned there with them in 2004 for Eventide, which continues the story of the McPheron brothers and Victoria, that teenager turned mother, as they are forced to embrace life with an unexpected child in tow and move on from an unexpected death. In 2013, that question of how we handle death is viewed headon, as Benediction came out with its lengthy meditation on dying and how life coexists alongside it.
The stories are told in spare language and dialogue light on syllables but heavy with subtext. The cutting simplicity of the language eliminates so much of the saccharine or bombastic rhetoric writing about the American West can be particularly prone to. Each of these installations, authored by Colorado’s Kent Haruf have also been adapted to the Denver Center Theatre Company’s stage. That last installation, Benediction, opened this month with some bitter sweetness.
Haruf ’s life, and recent death, are heavy on the mind.
A lifelong writer and teacher, Kent Haruf preached a gospel of hard work outweighing whatever natural endowments a person was bestowed.
“As a writer, I want to be thought of as somebody who had a very small talent but worked as best he could at using that talent. I want to think that I have written as close to the bone as I could. By that I mean that I was trying to get down to the fundamental, irreducible structure of life, and of our lives with one another,” Haruf told Denver Center’s theater writer John Moore in his final interview, given in late November just days before he died.
Haruf had decided he wanted to be a writer in his early 20s and had wedged his way into the writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa through persistence as much as promise. It would take decades, and cost a marriage, before his first published novel, The Tie That Binds, was released.
“By that time I was 41 years old and had been writing as hard as I could for almost 20 years,” he wrote in an essay published in the October edition of the literary journal Granta. “If I had learned anything over those years of work and persistence, it was that you had to believe in yourself even when no one else did.”
Later, he translated that to his graduate students this way: “You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence.”
Plainsong was a National Book Award finalist, and he also received the Whiting Foundation Award, Center of the American West’s Wallace Stegner Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. Benediction was a finalist for the inaugural Folio Prize from the Folio Society in Britain.
Haruf hammered away at a typewriter — stationed, for the last 13 years of his life, in a little shed behind the home he shared with his wife of almost 20 years, Cathy — with his eyes closed.
Haruf was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease in 2007, and told it was terminal in Feburary 2014. In May, he went out to the little shed behind his home in Salida and began to write what would be his last novel, Our Souls at Night.
“The idea for the book has been floating around in my mind for quite a while. Now that I know I have, you know — a limited time — it was important to me to try to make good use of that time. So I went out there every day,” Haruf told Moore in November. “I went out every day trusting myself to be able to add to the story each day. So I essentially wrote a new short chapter of the book every day. I’ve never had that experience before. I don’t want to get too fancy about it, but it was like something else was working to help me get this done. Call it a muse or spiritual guidance, I don’t know. All I know is that the trust I had in being able to write every day was helpful. … In some ways it felt as if that was what was keeping me alive. It was something significant for me to get up for every day.”
That novel, to be published in May, will be another stop into the town of Holt.
He’d been too ill to attend the reading of Benediction at the 2014 Colorado New Play Summit, but the Denver Center taped the reading and Haruf had been in touch with the playwright adapting the novel, exchanging phone calls and notes as the script progressed. At the time he was talking to Moore, Haruf expressed hope that he might see the premiere of Benediction and had purchased tickets for his family for opening night, Feb. 6.
“They didn’t give me any special number of days or anything,” Haruf said, according to Moore’s interview transcript. “But one of the pulmonologists said, ‘You may just smolder on for a while … until you stop smoldering.’ At the time it seemed such a crazy figure of speech, but maybe it’s more accurate than I know. I’ve gone up and down. Right now, 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.”
He was also in the process of reviewing final copy edits for Our Souls at Night, that novel he’d said the work of which had felt like it was keeping him alive. He returned those edits to his publisher just before he died, five days after that last interview with Moore and a month before the Denver Center began rehearsals for Benediction. Haruf ’s loss was keenly felt as those rehearsals picked up — the director, playwright, several cast members and designers had all worked with Haruf on Plainsong and Eventide when they came to the stage.
“I think it was especially hard at the beginning because we have such an attachment to him as an artist and a human being,” says Kent Thompson, producing artistic director for Benediction and the person who first brought Haruf ’s work to the Denver Center.
“I feel like he’s in the room, and some of that’s because I feel like, we wish he was there to give us more specific direction, but we also kind of know what he would say often,” Thompson says.
What he says time and again, and playwright Eric Schmiedl echoes, is that what they most admired in Haruf ’s work and made every effort to preserve in the stage versions, was a sense of authenticity.
“Not only are the stories wonderfully dramatic and vivid, but they’re unsentimental,” Schmiedl says. “They deal with wonderfully celebratory moments in life but also very difficult moments in characters’ lives with an unsentimental, very realistic eye that reflects the communities, in this case, in the eastern plains of Colorado.”
“He’s the anti-Hallmark version of life in a small rural town,” says Thompson, who saw in Haruf ’s Plainsong the Our Town for today’s small town America.
“It’s filled, like the rest of life, with people with good intentions and people with not such good intentions, and Kent [Haruf] was kind of looking at it, almost like a Chekov or Hemingway, with such lyrical and simple language, and he was so compassionate to the characters but never sentimental or never tried to cover up their good and bad sides,” Thompson says.
If there was ever a doubt about whether an artistic choice was preserving that authenticity, Thompson, Schmiedl, a cast member or a designer would go back to Haruf and ask.
Schmiedl recalls Haruf being particularly caught up with a scene in Plainsong when the McPheron brothers were pregnancy testing their cows, a process that would require a squeeze chute, a metal cage that pins a cow in place while a rancher does whatever it is the rancher needs to do.
“Haruf was adamant that if we were going to do that scene, we had to have a squeeze chute on stage and that squeeze chute had to sound and look and work like a real squeeze chute,” Schmiedl says. But a squeeze chute is heavy, and enormous, so the production staff worked to create a modified, slightly shortened version that could fit on the elevator used to deliver set pieces to the stage. He recalls Haruf scrutinizing it in the rehearsal hall with arms folded, waiting and listening as someone threw the lever, and then approving when he heard it make that familiar clanging sound as it banged shut.
“He would come in and he would say things like, ‘Well that character wouldn’t do that,’ or ‘I think the motivation for that character is this,’ or ‘I think the storyline is this from the book,’ or ‘The way I was thinking about this was…’ and we’d talk about that and we’d always try it that way, and about 80 percent of the time, he was right,” Thompson says.
Schmiedl had been in the practice of going back to Haruf with questions and clarifications on how to interpret a moment in the novel. Then, suddenly, Haruf was gone.
“It was heartbreaking,” Schmiedl says, and pauses. “He was very gentle, soft-spoken, very much like one of the characters in one of his novels, very much like the McPheron brothers,” he adds, referencing two of the characters central to Plainsong.
He has pointed to a moment in Plainsong when the McPheron brothers are asked if they will let back in the pregnant teenager they’d housed after she’s left briefly, and one observes that she’s changed them. And that’s how Schmiedl feels with Haruf. An unexpected presence in his life, a stranger who has come to stay, has altered the course of his life.
“For me, he was a mentor and a remarkable teacher,” Schmiedl says.
They’ve all become friends over the years — recovering from an early draft of the script for Plainsong in which Haruf expressed doubts that Schmiedl was the fit for the job, and Thompson counseled patience. He meanwhile advised Schmiedl to take a sense for Plainsong that, although the story was small in some regards, made it epic in scale — 21 cast members in 36 roles worth of epic, an extravagance he wasn’t sure he could afford at the time, but knew was important to build a sense of the community in Holt.
Thompson recalls a connection with Haruf that formed over their shared experiences of having grown up the sons of preachers in farming and ranching communities where struggle was common. Schmiedl talks about bonding over, unlikely though it sounds, football.
Having logged eight years together, when they started Benediction, their third project together, Schmiedl says he relied on that existing relationship and time spent together to make new and different artistic choices for this work, which is so different from its predecessors Plainsong and Eventide.
“I just reiterate that it was remarkably generous for [Haruf] to share, to allow us to explore the stories in a different vernacular, in a different stage, and you know, I can’t say enough what a remarkable investment it is from Kent Thompson and the Denver Center to allow a friendship, a collaboration, to evolve over eight years. It really is unheard of,” Schmiedl says.
He opted not to visit the towns Haruf based his fictional Holt on, instead preferring to see them as Haruf did and as he relayed in his novels.
“Working in adaptation, I’ve always kind of felt like, I always try and look for what I feel like is the heart of the novel or the heart of whatever we’re adapting and then that usually lets you know which parts of the story you need to keep. That kind of gives you the structure of what you’re going to do, and then the most difficult part is trying to find the breath or the vernacular of the piece, and that took us a couple times, honestly,” he says. For Benediction, he says, much of that heart was found in idea of life and death happening side by side.
In Benediction, Haruf returns to some of the questions that were central to Plainsong and Eventide.
“He kept coming back to the question of who is your family, really? Is it the people you’re related to by blood or is it in fact the people that choose to care for you, that choose to try to help you, that choose to try to respond to you and pay attention to you? I find that incredibly resonant in my own life, and in so many people’s lives,” Thompson says. “He was somebody that had a more profound view of people and human beings and what we go through. … He was just so intensely driven to be a writer, and I just admire that kind of ability to, I guess, know yourself and also be willing to express it, to constantly look for what are the truths and the realities of our lives, and he just chose to focus through a small town that he knew.”
Benediction runs at the Denver Center Theatre Company through March 1. Tickets at 303-893-4100. Kent Haruf’s life will be celebrated at a free vent at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 7 at the Denver Center.
Respond: [email protected]
