Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  In the spring of that year I went down to Central Michigan University to do a reading and the trip was difficult. The only sensible route would lead me past the site of the death of my father and sister. Luckily I took another shirt because I soaked the one I was wearing with the coldest of sweats, and the highway had become a swirl of images of that final moment. Along with my mother I had attended several legal meetings dealing with the lawsuit over the matter, endlessly delayed by insurance lawyers in their usual war of attrition. Our suit requested only the lost wages of the innocent father but that doesn’t mean a great deal in lawyer circles. We ended up settling for far less because my mother, simply enough, found the idea of going to trial unendurable. When I summon up the recollection my face still burns with the verbal filth and sheer trickery of this legal language. The fault was never in question, only the manner in which they could wear us down and send the widow home with as little as possible. Even at that our lawyer blithely took nearly half of what came our way. Later when I was called up for jury duty my normally sturdy stomach churned with nausea as I entered a courtroom where the strong so frequently grind the weak under their expensive boot heels.

  After the Central Michigan reading I had a perception that has stuck with me ever since which was not without the cluttered ironies that abound in our lives. Literature teachers whether in high school, college, or at the graduate level look at you shrewdly, apparently judging whether you should be accepted into a club in which it is unlikely that they themselves will ever be members, but because of their affection for their own literary favorites they view themselves, perhaps properly, as guardians of some thoroughly imaginary gate, forgetting that time herself will tell, and not all that accurately in the short term. It is startling indeed to look at old anthologies or see prize lists in almanacs and see the “disappeared ones,” not from political terror but by the way time stretched them thin to the point of invisibility. About the time I was in Boston, Conrad Aiken, a friend of Gordon Cairnie, the proprietor of Grolier, had said that he had acquired a major reputation without being caught in the act. Not really. An amazing number of literary professors, especially along the Atlantic, seem irritated that the long-dead Steinbeck slipped through the gate without their permission. Poor Tu Fu never published a book while alive.

  Late in the winter I seemed to be slipping toward depression because my own romantic delusions about life in the North had left us literally cold. Herbert Weisinger came to my rescue, summoning me down to East Lansing for a meeting at which he proposed that I write a master’s thesis on how I wrote my first book of poems, Plain Song, and then he would facilitate my getting a degree which would allow me to find a “proper job.” The department now looked at their black sheep as white though only a few of them were outwardly friendly. If I had been them I’d also have gotten rid of me.

  I wrote the paper, which was eventually published in a book of my nonfiction called Just Before Dark. I never looked at the long essay myself, leaving the proofs to my oldest daughter, Jamie, who edited the book. Herbert used his power as chairman of the department to waive certain exams, not wanting to gamble on me taking a test or flying off the handle again, as it were.

  The degree was awarded, a pure acknowledgment of the power of New York publishers, and Linda and I headed farther north to Northern Michigan University for an interview and I was promptly given a job. It was early summer now and the Upper Peninsula countryside was wild and beautiful. We were a bit unnerved but encouraged though we failed on that first visit to find a place to live. It turned out to be lucky that we didn’t sign an apartment or house lease because a scant week later Herbert called to say he had accepted the position of chairman of English and hoped I would join him as his assistant at the State University of New York at Stony Brook out on Long Island. Herbert would get me out of the contract I had signed with Northern Michigan University.

  Normally poetry and fiction, not unlike painting and sculpture, are considered to be solo acts but I’ve been forced to note recently how many others have had some specific influence on the occasionally helpless arc of my life. It seems that I can effectively deal with practical problems as long as I’m not actively writing poems or fiction, but if I am my good sense is confined to that “métier,” and I can’t deal well with anything outside the arena of the imagination. This is embarrassing to admit for someone who grew up in close confines with the iron-hard facts of life as it suggests the somewhat mysterious experience of “possession,” of the creative (loathsome word) act as a seizure. I’m afraid so, though it makes me uncomfortable to think about it. The material at hand slowly takes over the brain and other considerations fall away. Certain friends and acquaintances have noticed this failing and have moved politely toward solving the messes caused by my ineptness.

  I had known Herbert at Michigan State where I was a prominent, if obnoxious, student in comparative literature after abandoning English and American literature as too small a piece of the pie. Even then nationalism in the study of literature seemed to truncate possibilities. Herbert Weisinger, though from Brooklyn, was in the grand tradition of European scholarship that saw its full flowering when refugees from World War II joined the faculties of American universities. Herbert still is the most brilliant man I’ve ever known, quite at home as a scholar of Shakespeare, a mythographer, an expert at art history, and apparently familiar with the semi-secret corners of world history, not to speak of anthropology, and the history of science. He had studied at the Warburg Institute in London and also spent a year at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

  We had stayed in touch and after the death of my father, Herbert did his best to help me. His best friend other than his wife, Mildred, was a Canadian poet of some repute, A.J.M. Smith who had known Malcolm Lowry of Under the Volcano fame. Being around these two men made the world of literature close to home, though not quite as close as I felt in New York. Both men understood that I felt “called” to be a poet rather than a scholar though we never talked about it and I had nothing to show for my intentions except a notebook from which I read to my father a single time a month before his death.

  Herbert was able to get a collar on me with great subtleness so that I was nearly unaware of his concerns. His old friends like the Panofskys at Princeton, the critic Kenneth Burke, Joseph Campbell, or the anthropologist Loren Eiseley had their names arise only in the form of diffident witticisms, not name-dropping. He was not quite shy but certainly avoided being forward. I was a very late bloomer and Herbert quite naturally stepped in when I lost my father. From the time I first met him we had spoken jokingly of my self-improvement binges. When I was mentally troubled I would read Karen Horney, Adler, or most likely Jung, while Herbert was more of a Freudian. He did not discount Jung but reminded me deftly that I had to function within the realm of the ordinary. When I expressed nervousness about helping him run a large English department he assured me that I would find it “nearly child’s play” now that I had published one book, which had done well enough in terms of attention that I had a contract for another. Herbert’s faith reminded me of that of Bushrod Campbell at the Boston book wholesaler.

  When I drove out east for my perfunctory interview I spent the night in Branford, Connecticut, with my brother John and his family, then drove early to catch the ferry from Bridgeport to Port Jefferson on Long Island. It was a warm August morning with the sea calm, the air clear and delicious. Despite relentlessly battling my superstitious streak I felt the omens were auspicious. Traveling toward a new job by boat seemed vaguely mythic and I felt a surge of optimism that hadn’t been there since I held my first book in my hands. The meeting with senior professors was pleasant and brief and I returned home to gather up my family.

  We naturally make much of our survival dramas. The fantasy of having the rest of your life off to simply write becomes transparently silly when it happens, and you lapse back to your childhood dreams when you wished to be an Indian, a fireman, or just a plain old hero. At any age y
ou can wish for a miracle that life is ill suited to deliver. When you look at the billions raked in by state lotteries where the odds of the big prize are fifteen million to one your mind softens toward the sheer goofiness of human behavior.

  Good luck and bad are confused notions. I was very lucky to come to Stony Brook, to be dropped into, for rather haphazard reasons, an academic and literary atmosphere far more intense than anything the Midwest could offer. Working for a book wholesaler had given me an abrasively raw look into how the end product of publishing works. This was an eventual advantage as I didn’t indulge in wasting time with the unrealistic expectations of hinterland writers. On my first day on the job when the department had gathered for the new semester I was introduced to Alfred Kazin and Philip Roth. Since I had read everything they had written this was a rather heady experience. I can’t say that either was very friendly at the time but then I was the new kid on the block who might eventually have a real influence on what they taught and their schedules. There is also the point of Buckminster Fuller that a “high energy construct” doesn’t waste time. Being brusque with a tinge of politeness is mostly a way of saving your sorry ass from the multiple demands of people trying to get you to do what you don’t want to do.

  Stony Brook could easily draw on so many first-rate people because New York City was only sixty miles away. I had known Herbert Weisinger for years but wasn’t prepared for the delight I took in being around so many Jewish intellectuals who spoke about ideas as if they were living organisms. In contrast to the laid-back, soporific Midwest, ideas became part of the day’s contents. I remember Kazin, Peter Shaw, Vivian Gornick, and Jack Thompson, who was part of the Trilling group out of Columbia, wrangling about a literary point in the hall outside my office at a level that made anything similar I’d heard before look amateurish. This was at a time, 1966, before poets and novelists had become accepted fixtures in English departments.

  * * *

  At last we were living in a grown-up house, a bit run-down but in a pleasant neighborhood with less than a block to the Long Island Sound from which our daughter Jamie would return with horseshoe crabs. I quickly became friends with Robert White who taught in the art department. Robert White was the grandson of the architect Stanford White and lived on the beautiful wooded and expansive family compound in nearby St. James. One day soon after we met, Bobby asked us over to dinner with William and Rose Styron and Deborah and Peter Matthiessen. Again, this was a startling experience because I had read the work of these literary giants. I had heard that Bobby White “inspired” Styron’s Set This House on Fire. I also noticed that people drank a great deal so I felt right at home. Later on, after living quite remotely for over thirty years, it occurred to me that this social contiguity among writers tends to matter more than it should, or when people pretend that it doesn’t matter they’re speaking either innocently or falsely. I’m not absolutely sure that when I eventually had lunch with Kazin at his club in New York and we had a drink with Gordon Ray who was president of the Guggenheim Foundation that it had anything to do with me getting a grant but I don’t discount it.

  I was back writing at night as I had done as a book salesman but the Stony Brook atmosphere had enlivened me so that I wasted far less time brooding. It is often a good idea for a writer to move to the country but it’s probably a mistake to do so too early. It was a comfort to write at night knowing when the furnace came on that I could pay the fuel bill, and a greater comfort yet to know that the furnace would rouse the house to a livable temperature. If only our dog Missy hadn’t eaten my Collected Yeats, my Christopher Smart, and chewed on a number of others.

  It’s hard to step back from the incalculable messiness of life. In fact, the messiness is your life into which you hope to install a perceptible narrative line. Since childhood I’ve loved to watch birds and I’ve imagined when buried in my own mess what it would be like to be a bird with high human intelligence, with the ability to see life topographically and to see time holographically. Amid the welter you’d always be able to grab the main chance like an avian predator, say like a goshawk with its unique degree of concentration and irritability, but then as a human your total perspective most likely arrives when you’re sitting in the confined environment of a bathtub.

  Way back when I used to jokingly quip to whining fellow writers, “Tell it to Anne Frank.” Over thirty years later I can look into the tiny sunroom of the house in Stony Brook from which I could see the moon and stars around leafy or bare trees when I wrote at night. The dog was apologetic about eating books but the damage was done. The comers of a volume by Mandelstam were also missing. At the time I resented the idea that my early religious passion had merely been taken over by literary passion because it stole all possibilities of cool sanity from my endeavors, of stepping back far enough to design a less confusing life.

  The inventor of Parcheesi was doubtless enthralled by the life steps that led him to his discovery. In the seventies in Montana at McGuane’s ranch in whatever drug and alcohol haze we used to read to each other from a biography of the inventor of black-velvet painting who made the breakthrough in the South Seas while on the track of the spirit of Gauguin. The wild humor was in the vast distance between the flowery and pompous language and the end product, which you can still find at yard sales and certain stores. How can you measure banality when looking into your own heart and mind? What was Timoshenko really thinking before his maps of war? Had Henry Kissinger finished his orange juice that morning when he made the phone call that cost the lives of another hundred thousand Asians? Of what precise concern is the recent interest in the sexual behavior of Picasso and Einstein? Many appear to have a deep interest in it. For our immediate purposes how could Mandelstam have continued writing so beautifully as he faced his gruesome concentration camp death? What is poetry that we continue writing it as history unravels around us? Of course it was always thus. I think of the careers of some of my favorite Chinese poets, the obvious Li Po and Tu Fu and the transcendent Su Tung-p’o, who suffered war, exile, imprisonment, and the deaths of two wives, and it seems unimaginable that they wrote this immortal work. It continues to be a mystery as does the scientific fact that birds rehearse their songs and vary them during their dream life. We can’t stop.

  Back to the confusion and living within the confines of our fragile minds. One day recently I learned that my last book of novellas, The Beast God Forgot to Invent, would be published in Thailand. A half hour later when I arrived at my studio at the Hard Luck Ranch I found out that my favorite cow dog had died suddenly while choking on food. I went out in the backyard and wept because I loved this girl who had lived only a single year. Every morning on hearing my car she would run up the road a few hundred yards to greet me, then pretend she was leading me into the yard, trotting smartly and making sure I was following. Naturally I gave her biscuits as a gesture of our not very deep understanding of each other. It is in the nature of the human mind that in the future when I think of Thailand, see my Thai book, or eat Thai food, I will most poignantly remember Mary. We can scarcely extricate ourselves from our own true nature.

  I wasn’t very long at Stony Brook when it occurred to me that the English department had all the charm of a streetfight where no one ever actually landed a punch. Intelligent people have greater powers of contentiousness. The nexus of difficulty was that many faculty members who had been there for a long time and lived locally resented the newer members, referred to pejoratively as the “stars” who commuted from New York City. The stars preferred or tried to insist on teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays which would offer them four-day weekends for their “research” or whatever. Tempers flared when crossed, the kind of ice-cold verbal tempers that I wasn’t used to. I had been a straw boss of large labor crews on the university horticultural farm but this didn’t quite prepare me for telling a New Yorker that he had to commute three days rather than two, or informing an old hand but lesser scholar that the new Yeats man would be teaching a coming graduate
seminar. Herbert had a propensity to shove difficult problems my way, including those with the graduate students, most of whom seemed to live as I had as a graduate student—in a perpetual state of anguish. I tended to favor younger and brilliant assistant professors over the kind of old grumps who had tortured me at Michigan State. I was also there at the indulgence of Herbert and totally immune to power plays. Absolutely everyone was “working on a book” and thus wanted to teach as little as possible. How was I to deal with the accusation that the New Yorkers weren’t taking part in the evening intellectual life of the college community when it wasn’t apparent that there was such a thing? In somewhat quarrelsome meetings it was easy to see that most problems were considered problems of language and that once you got the language right it was presumed the actual problems would go away. There’s a torpid subgenre in fiction called the “academic novel” but if you read Mary McCarthy or Randall Jarrell on the subject you need go no further in this fulsome area of the human comedy. My very gradual solution over my two years at Stony Brook was to become more autocratic, not a very popular way to be but then none of the professors seemed prone to act out of anything but immediate self-interest. I had studied the salary schedules and the pay was ample. Herbert’s wife Mildred redefined the tough roots of feminism so we as quickly as possible equalized the salaries of male and female professors of equal rank. This was an important point and it was easier to see that later in the history of the feminist movement equal pay for equal work should have been the primary point.

  Late in high school when I read Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago I was distressed to see that “garrulity is the refuge of mediocrities.” I hadn’t yet met a single living writer and was hoping to talk to number of them. A few years ago when John Updike reviewed a volume of Edmund Wilson’s diaries in The New Yorker he isolated a passage wherein Wilson regretted the thousands of hours of literary social contiguity, the drinks, dinners, assignations, events, meetings, award ceremonies, lectures. Of course much of literary reputation is based on social contiguity though not in the longest haul. It is alarming to see how this year’s flavor can quickly disappear. I know that some enjoy intense activity and find memorable what is essentially the gossip of past years in memoirs, but then social laundry lists quickly pall. From my own point of view I would have preferred social grocery lists: a case of Domaine Tempier Bandol Tourtine, twelve veal chops, two lobes of fresh foie gras, three tins of duck confit for a salad for twelve, the oldest Calvados affordable. That sort of list, rather than that of the insouciant Mimi, or Bob for that matter, who screwed their way to publication by Knopf, then got tenured jobs at an ivy-strewn Eastern Seaboard campus. Last year a friend sent a memoir by the writer Frederic Prokosch that was densely lumpish with meetings with every famous writer here and in Europe between 1920 and 1940, resolving questions that no one has ever asked and reconfirming the tenuousness of reputation. Literary ice is thin indeed and nearly everyone disappears in the same manner as a coal miner, a farmer, a disenchanted realtor. Long ago I made one of those daffy bargains with fate that I would ask only that my books remain in print. I’m sixty-four and they all are. What more?