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So Styron was my mentor in every sense of the work, and several years later when I found myself as a sort of mentor to John Irving, who was hired to replace me during my European wanderjahr leave from Windham College at Putney, Vermont (I was then teaching English, specifically American literature, rather than art history), I had the pleasure of introducing my mentor Styron to my protégé Irving at a symposium being held at Smith College on Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner.  Irving at the time was unknown; his first novel was scheduled for publication [Setting Free the Bears, Random House, 1969].  But I had read that first novel and sensed that he would be famous one day [Irving published The World According to Garp in 1978], and I recall the three of us sitting together with our bourbons on a sofa in the Smith faculty club, Styron on my right an Irving on my left, and I think I was aware of the eventual place of all three of us.

I gave the Irvings my house to live in while we were in Europe, as Styron had given me his guest house, and John and I began a correspondence that threatened at one point to surpass the correspondence I had with Styron.  Upon my return to Windham, I began teaching art history, allowing John to keep my English department job, and we were neighbors for a number of years until he left for greener pastures, as he sensed that Windham was collapsing, and I didn't have the wisdom to get out while the getting was good.

The long friendship I've had with Jack Butler, until recently an Arkansawyer, has also been an important literary association.  He is simply a total master of the English Language.  The size of the Butler-Harington File has already surpassed the combined sizes of the Styron-Harington and the Irving-Harington files.  And that despite the fact that until he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, we were less than 200 miles apart, both here in the state of Arkansas.  Jack's a pessimist - or perhaps "realist" is the better word - while I'm the eternal optimist.  His recent novel, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, is a big, sprawling, difficult masterpiece.  Truly appreciative fiction lovers will be talking about it 500 years from now, when most of the novels of our century are forgotten.  I told Jack that I was reminded while reading it of a bull in a china shop.  So much fine china gets smashed to smithereens.  But then the bull demonstrates that he is capable of ballet.  It is fantastic to watch.  I urge you to read it.

I suppose one could piece together a summary of my life from my books.  One could learn that I was born in Little Rock, for example, that I lived for many years in Putney, Vermont, that I left Vermont to teach a semester at Pittsburgh before going out to remote Brookings, South Dakota, for a year, and subsequently back to Arkansas for good.  But one could not come to know me as a person from studying the "Harington personae" who populate my books.  They are all fictional characters painted with a loaded brush.  None of them are heroic or even particularly appealing.  Why then did I need them?  Because a traditional story (I am thinking of Vance Randolph's collection of Ozark folk tales) always attempts to make the listener believe that the teller of the story was somehow involved in the story.  Recall that my greatest ambition as a writer is to make the reader participate in the story and even in the telling of the story.  I have my character Ingraham - who despite the biographical similarities is not really me, of course, especially not because he gets murdered in the end of Ekaterina, which never happened to me - speak out against the writing of autobiographical fiction.  He tells his writing class to avoid it, while he is seemingly an autobiographical character himself.  And indeed during the one semester of my life that I, like Ingraham, taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh, I told my students to avoid writing about themselves, because they couldn't be objective.  (Indeed, I find for example Philip Roth's use of self in his works offensive.)  To the extent that characters appearing in my books are based on me or offer allusions to me - they are presented as objectively as possible, as if I were writing from a psychic distance about a character not myself.  The "Harington personae" - Ingraham, Harrigan, "G", et alia - are usually depicted as comic characters, seen with a sense of humor that one would not ordinarily be able to apply to oneself.

When I wrote my first published novel, The Cherry Pit, I took pains to make Clifford Stone, though a first-person narrator, as unlike myself as possible.  He is short; I am tall.  There is really not much that our lives do have in common, except that we are both natives of Little Rock.  Nothing that happens to him in The Cherry Pit happened to me, except being snubbed by the character "Hy Norden."  The plot is purely imaginative, not autobiographical.  And yet most readers assumed that I was Clifford Stone, and my own mother said she was glad that she was killed of before the book began (Clifford's mother had died in an automobile accident when he was a boy).  The "Donald" or "Dawny" in Lightning Bug just happens to be about two or three years older than I, and I had no Aunt Murrison I visited as he does o anybody like her, nor did I know anyone resembling Latha or any of the other characters in the imaginary town of Stay More.  And of course Dawny is lost in the woods in the end of the book (which come to think of it is not that far removed from Ingraham getting killed at the end of Ekaterina).  Again, as in The Cherry Pit, none of the events of the plot are ones that befell me in "real life" or that I witnessed.

Probably I identify more with Daniel Lyam Montross or Day Whittacker in Some Other Place.  The Right Place than I do with that book's character "G."  "G" is an art historian native of Little Rock, and familiar with Stick Around (the name for Stay More in that book as well as in Ekaterina), and he is tall, a drunkard, etc., and has enough characteristics in common with me that the reader may be forgiven for thinking that "G" is the author.  But again, nothing that happens to "G" ever happened to me.  I am not recounting personal history.  I do not recount personal history in any of my fiction nor even in a nonfictional work like Let Us Build Us a City, which purports to be partly the story of how a professor of art history named Harrigan met a girl named Kim Gunn and investigated the ghost towns of Arkansas with her.  Of course, my wife is Kim, and of course we did investigate those ghost towns together (all of them, not just the last two, as Harrigan belatedly does in the book), but the relationship between Harrigan and Kim is largely a fictional one: particularly the entire scenes of their meeting in Bear City and sharing a motel room at Y City.

One person who knew me well and had read all my books said that of all my characters, the one most autobiographical is Jacob Ingledew of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and yet there is absolutely nothing in  his life story that has any parallel to my own.  Because he's deaf, Sam the cockroach in The Cockroaches of Stay More is possibly more like myself than any of my characters.  But I hop I don't resemble him at all physically.  Ingraham of Ekaterina is of course "G" in another incarnation.  Since by my own admission I did teach creative writing one semester at the University of Pittsburgh, I can't claim that nothing which happens to Ingraham ever happened to me.  But I can claim that I never met in Pittsburgh or elsewhere any woman who remotely resembles  Ekaterina.  She is entirely imaginary... and non-existent.  Or, to put it a better way, she is too real to be anything but the product of my imagination.  And there are several "fictional" characters from SOP TRIP [Some Other Place.  The Right Place] and from COSM [The Cockroaches of Stay More] who appear in the latest novel.

(By the way, I identify all my titles by mostly three-letter short forms: PIT for The Cherry Pit, BUG for Lightning Bug, LUB for Let Us Build Us a City, COT for The Choiring of the Trees, KAT for Ekaterina, etc.  But there's also TAOTAO for The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.  Everybody who reads my books comes down with incurable wordplay, acronym-itis, and parentheses.)

You asked me, in relation to these seemingly autobiographical characters, whether my work is solipsistic.  I think my style of writing and narrative is a cure for solipsism.  I can remember the time and place as a youth when I first felt the "lightbulb" flash overheard with the idea: what if only I exist and everybody else is only in my imagination?  I think most all of us have pondered that question, however briefly, at one time or another.  I used Descartes' "Cogito, Ergo Sum" as an epigraph for BUG, where themes of solipsism are explored even before SOP TRIP, where it is a major theme.  And of course it's a theme I never let go of thereafter.  Its appearance in COSM is not directly related to Sam's deafness, as you suggested, nor is the prevalence of solipsism in so many of my novels a reflection of my own deafness.  Your don't need to be deaf to solipsize.

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