Rest in Peace, Mr. Godwin

When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I bought a book based on its cover.

The book turned out not to be what it might look like ... I'm not sure whether I really experienced that nor cared at the time.  I loved the novel from the very first time I read it.  When the edition above slipped away at some point, I ended up replacing it with a used one from Bibliofind (long since subsumed by that perniciously helpful, ubiquitous behemoth, Amazon).

This one has a great very late 60s/early 70s feel, but is even less relevant to the story than the first one I had. I might not have bought this one.  I might have missed out on The Best.

Lions is the best piece of historical fiction I have ever read.  Only very recently, I was excited to find several friends online whose opinions I respect very much, who loved this book too, and others of Parke Godwin.

Godwin was not a young man.  But he died yesterday.  And I am sad, but grateful for his work.

Godwin and Donald Harington wrote two of the works I have loved most in this world.  Very briefly, after I had begun work on The Ax and the Vase, but many years ago now - I had the joyous honor of corresponding with Harington via email.  He was working on a new novel at that time, and he himself was about seventy then.

My brother - not a cover - first introduced me to Harington, when I was in college.  He lent me The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and I loved it, and ... that year for Christmas, my brother gave me his own copy, because I had asked for it and he could not find a copy to give me.

I am a wide-eyed and trusting fool, and when many years later I became friends, online, with a woman who worked at the same University with Harington, I sent her the book.  As things go ... I've never seen that book again.  For years, she would email me periodically, apologizing.  But the getting-him-to-sign-it and the sending it back never happened.  I hope she still has that copy somewhere; the idea of its not being merely lost, but actually trashed, or recycled, or otherwise destroyed as an artifact - breaks my heart.  I feel less personal loss than immensely guilty about being such a careless steward of the GIFT that was given to me.  And the loss of my brother's note to me, in that copy, is more painful than the novel.  (Of that, oddly enough, and in a very weird and squicky way actually, I have another copy - a first edition in hard cover.  I've never once opened nor read that one; with the result that I haven't read TAOTAO in quite a few long years now.)

I don't even know what became of my first copy of Lions.  In that novel's case, the cover's first-look magic notwithstanding, the artifact doesn't matter to me.

Both of my favorite authors have died.  Both wrote histfic - and many other things, too.  They were immensely unalike - yet peers in their great talent.



I will miss you, Parke Godwin.  May peace be with your loved ones and friends - and with you.  I know many readers' gratitude always has been.