by Jim Harrison
In England for a writer all roads lead to London and even more so in France it is Paris. In France it seems easier to go back to Paris and start over than to move more laterally. In America for a writer no longer do all roads lead to New York, or less so than in the past. To be sure, most of the publishing still occurs there but I no longer sense that New York City has the magnetic intensity it did when I moved there at nineteen or taught near there in my mid-twenties. Maybe like Paris, New York has simply priced itself beyond a young writer’s range, an economic variable I’ll never quite comprehend. If my room and a half on MacDougal cost forty dollars a month in 1957 why should it be at least fifteen hundred a month now? Wages haven’t multiplied by forty times. Not even five times, in fact.
Every area now seems to possess its aggressive literary geopieties, complete with active or burgeoning presses, often backed by universities. Maybe that’s better than everything outside of New York being considered “regional.” I’m unsure because it doesn’t faintly matter if I’m right on the matter. The middle class seems to be disappearing and class lines are drawn more specifically. A casual look at the media in general would make you think that there are the enviable rich and then there’s everyone else. At one time it was the town against the gown, and now it is closer to the gown against the real world. Academic critics and reviewers tend to prefer work that reflects their own puzzling realities over any other kind. The recent controversy over the literary worth of Steinbeck makes one wonder if there is any academic awareness of what is still demonstrably our working class. In university writing programs metaphor can’t be taught so it is held in disregard and in the thousand or so galleys I’ve been sent for “blurbs” in recent years I’ve noted a faux Victorian sincerity as the main direction. This misses me as I read novels for aesthetic reasons and if the writing isn’t artful I stop at the end of page one. In my youth there was still a fading remnant, perhaps a mixture of the Romantic and the religious, that each of us has a personal destiny, something I haven’t heard talked about in decades. Maybe that’s a good thing. Last year when I wrote about Ana Claudia Villa Herrera, the nineteen-year-old Mexican migrant who died of thirst, I couldn’t avoid the dominant perception of cruelty. In the arroyo, the dry wash where she lay curled, everywhere in the sand and rocks you see traceries of the water that was once there. The idea of destiny shrivels up to the size of the dead bug off the tip of your left shoe.
It may have been presumptuous but I didn’t tell the stories within my stories in this memoir. Why would anyone care about my memoir unless they directly cared about my novels and poems? Anyway it’s hard to stomach the egregious notion of the “master plots” we are force-fed in high school, and by Hollywood, and in bad novels. A novel is about what it is. Period.
Two years ago while fishing in Mexico I dreamt my body was the trunk of a tree and in my head there were billions of small shimmering leaves. The tree was out in the open rather in the thicket my temperament prefers. Life moved too fast this year and life usually moves fast only on television. There was the usual nearly insufferable roll and pitch of politics with a fresh war against the environment hiding behind a smoke screen of the justified war against terrorism. Politicians don’t seem to care that their grandchildren will learn the good reasons for hating them. Among many difficulties were my potentially fatal blood-pressure attack caused by contraindicatory medicines; my dog Rose was lost four days in the wilderness during which I sobbed uncontrollably like the seven-year-old who still hides within me; I was lost, as I have mentioned; my wife’s beloved “mind doctor,” Mildred Newman, died; we had three months of nerve-wracking litigiousness over the borders of our farm in Michigan that we were trying to sell; and finally this week’s fire that seared our brainpans. Perhaps shamefully I can hide in my work up to a point while Linda lives in the present. Another death looms in the background as a mountain, beside which our own problems diminish to foothills—my cousin’s husband died in the World Trade Center, leaving three fatherless children.
I once felt enlightened when a scholar pointed out that when Dylan Thomas began a poem, “In my craft and sullen art … ,” the “sullen” meant in the archaic sense “solo,” although sullen and solo are emotionally frequently married. When a writer feels embattled the next step is paranoia which is only rarely justified. Two years ago in Marseilles I had a liberating nickel-ante satori. I was sitting in a room at a favorite hotel, Le Petit Nice, which is built on an anse protruding into the Mediterranean. I was supposed to be writing a small essay on literary reputation and xenophobia for the back page of The New York Times Book Review but, in contrast to the dark blue sea out the window, I was swimming in a mud puddle of conflicting notions. There was a strong antique sense of the dog in the manger. I had read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider while I was a senior in high school. As a writer I had long felt like an outsider as opposed to the apparent “insiders” along the Eastern Seaboard, but when I met these supposed insiders they were always rather pleasant and welcoming. My thoughts wandered north and west to Les Elysies to a visit I had made in the Dordogne to the area of the caves of Lascaux and how at night at the Hotel Centennaire I had imagined the wandering prehistoric tribes in the area. If I live remotely and travel to New York City less than once a year, it is unlikely that I’ll ever feel like an insider. I don’t appear to be anonymous but in my entire career I’ve been asked to be on an award jury only once, although it is altogether natural that writers closer at hand would be asked. And doubtless thousands of writers in the East fashion themselves as outsiders. Of course the literary world as such is more tribal than it thinks, based on its peculiar social contiguities. It is a loosely formed guild and nothing is finally at stake except the destinies of each writer’s books. There was also the thought that if I was doing as well in America as I had done for several years in France I would have to divide the year between British Columbia and Vera Cruz in Mexico for the grace of privacy. A French critic had told me that one of the reasons my books were well received in France is that American novels were usually about either the life of the mind or the life of action and I combined both.
In short, in Marseilles I knew that my essay on literary reputation was doomed, and The New York Times Book Review promptly rejected it with Charles McGrath, the editor, eventually telling me that the subject would require a book. They did, however, print a longish poem of mine called “The Old Days,” which came out of my abortive attempt to cover the subject.
The Old Days
In the old days it stayed light until midnight
and rain and snow came up from the ground
rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.
Every time you’d see one, two more would appear,
walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.
Money didn’t grow in the leaves of trees but around
the trunks in calf’s leather money belts
though you could only take twenty bucks a day.
Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran
up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women
were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri
faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis
could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.
A few political leaders were executed for betraying
the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon
of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day
a year and lovely choruses funneled out
of hospital chimneys where every room had a field
stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk
on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,
my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love
needed only to wear pig’s ear slippers or garlic
earrings. All dogs and people in free concourse
became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas
everyone won the hundred dollar lottery. God and Jesus
didn’t need to come down to earth because they were
already here riding wild horses every night
and children were allowed to stay up late to hear
them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches
with Episcopalians serving Provencal, The Methodists Tuscan,
and so on. In those days the country was an extra
two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand
miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys
to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed
though some tribes chose to found new nations
in the heretofore unknown areas between the black
boundary cracks between states. I was married
to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.
Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang
lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly
in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast
to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented
not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.
Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple
fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music
in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums
and everyone was able to select seven days a year
that they were free to repeat but this wasn’t a popular
program. In those days the void whirled
with flowers and unknown wild animals attended
country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower
and vegetable gardens. The Hudson River was drinkable
and a humpback whale was seen near 42nd Street
pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,
its voice lifting the steps of people
in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.
I could go on but won’t. All my evidence
was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed
on by all the dogs that inhabit memory.
One by one they bark at the sun, moon, and stars
trying to draw them closer again.
In Patagonia I’ve been giving the seven cow dogs up here at Hard Luck Ranch extra biscuits because I’m leaving in a few days. I’ll drive to Montana and leave our dogs with my daughters, then fly to Michigan to help Linda pack up the farm for the move. I’ll kiss the farm goodbye in various places, a real big woman who has been kind to me for over thirty years. In May I’ll return to the Upper Peninsula to the cabin in order to fish and see the budding of the thousands of acres of dogwood and sugarplum bushes and trees. When I return to Montana I’ll start a novel I’ve been thinking about for years, and explore the few areas of the state I haven’t visited, keeping my sharp single eye out for fresh thickets for future use. I might need a thicket or two, though I’ve come to think of rivers as moving thickets, truly lovely and safe places. I don’t feel an ounce of “closure” about finishing this memoir. I’ll just see how far this life carries me. There’s a lot left to be described. My life could have been otherwise but it wasn’t.