The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  —

  WE HAVE NO SANG-FROID EQUIVALENT in English. And the French also have l’heure entre chien et loup, literally the hour between the dog and the wolf, which refers to the passing minutes after sunset when the sky darkens. We call it “twilight,” which is not as good, no matter how many vampires are licking each other’s necks on TV. My point is that deadlines are always entre chien et loup—romantic, that is. “I’m on deadline” can get you out of things. Or make the right impression. Whatever kind of work you do, it’s always cooler to be on deadline. At least that’s the cliché from further back than when they first put the words foreign and correspondent together.

  It has occurred to me that my ambition to edit magazines came from wanting to be a version of that guy in the trench coat, but on stage like magazine writers and editors seemed to be. Books were too slow. Newspapers got thrown out. People saved magazines. Magazines were fast channels of ideas. They were trailblazing. They showed you the future. Now it is not agreed that magazines have anything but a past—accelerating into extinction like the climax culture of the Plains Indians.

  Home pages don’t have deadlines. They are brand statements. Deadlines for mobile-first journalism are right now, all the time, faster. I like that. They are almost like the deadlines I’d set for myself when I’d wake in the middle of the night.

  −ENDIT−

  Mozart de Prairie (1,862)

  BEFORE WE WORKED TOGETHER at Outside, Jim Harrison had written pieces for Sports Illustrated under Ray Cave and Pat Ryan, editors he adored. This was in the days when SI editors chartered planes and even freelancers flew first-class. When he read in the New York Times that I had been named managing editor at SI, Jim sent me an e-mail under the subject line “Your New Job”: Victory in our time. As an SI old hand from Ray Cave days I’m quite aware of the honor.

  It wasn’t the big deal Jim was remembering and I’m sure he knew it. The high flying was over at Time Inc., but he had slapped it immediately into a handsome context, even though he no longer cared for sports. And, of course, this initiated a decade of back-and-forth about the attributes of various SI swimsuit models, but by this time most of our correspondence was about food and poetry, and on most of it I copied Will Hearst, who’d been a fan of Jim’s work since Outside, where Will had been the managing editor.

  They became confidants when Will began hosting a Memorial Day ride at his family ranch in San Simeon for a revolving circle of his tech, math and literary friends. It was three days of talking and eating, with rides into the steep country behind Hearst Castle. Jim did not ride but he became a regular, calling the weekend “Will’s Picnic,” with Will sending a plane to pick him up in Livingston. Their correspondence was percipient for both of them, and their subjects ranged from astronomy to Zen koans, and what Jim called “the Black Butterflies,” a malaise he warned Will about.

  Will had been a math major but had always written well, and Jim encouraged him to write more and to write seriously, to permanently quit the nasty business of money and write an eccentric memoir. I was on most of those e-mails, many involving what we should all eat:

  It is our duty to pique our appetites when we’re not really hungry. Earlier in my life I would counter heat waves by preparing monster barbecues for friends and fall asleep out in the yard encrusted with sauce, and the fat of beef, pigs, chickens. Dogs would sleep with me licking my clothes. How noble.

  Jim sometimes seemed distracted over the Memorial Day weekends, but he was the center of attention whenever he would allow it. Other guests who wanted to know him better were shy about photographs but found ways to get pictures with him. He would give me a look about this although he obviously didn’t mind. He took a keener interest in helping Neely the comely bartender make appropriate adjustments to Will’s sequencing of the wines. Because of that one bad eye, the other one would wander as the drinks came, but the unsteadiness I noticed came more from his increasing back problems, which he seldom mentioned. He had gotten a cane, a beautiful carved branch that he used as a prop; but then came a titanium one when he sometimes actually wanted a walking aid.

  It was the worsening scratches of shingles, however, Jim wrote in an e-mail, that were becoming

  …a bit traumatic, right down to being off work…because it’s impossible to write under the constant onslaught of a cattle prod. I know Hunter and Bob Rafelson used to sneak up on each other in Aspen and jolt each other with a cattle prod. They were under the influence of something.

  Like all his e-mails from that time it was deflective, a message of high spirits through a rough patch. He sent poems, too. He wrote them longhand, faxed them to his assistant of thirty years, Joyce Bahle, in Lake Leelanau, where she would type them over and send back for him to make changes. When he was satisfied, Joyce would e-mail them to Jim’s list, which was approaching twenty-five or so when he put me on it. Jim’s “Poetry Friends” made up an ecosystem of eccentric readers that amused him for one reason or another, as well as old friends he just wanted to keep up with.

  Many of the poems were about death. In “Time,” he wrote that it (time) was withering him, but with a galactic smile. There were pretty waitresses in that one, too. Jim said the poems descended on him, and by this time he was working shirtless because of the shingles. He wrote a poem titled “Barebacked Writer” about two years of postherpetic neuralgia, where the pain is always present. I wrote Jim that the pain must be on the edge of unbearable, though I was moved by the poem. Jim wrote back advising me to retire to the arts.

  The next news was that he was to be inducted into the French Order of Arts and Letters (officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) and Jim e-mailed, Think I’ll have a drink. He kept working and the hell with the shingles and the back problems.

  —

  DURING THE LAST WEEK of 2013, Jeff Baker of the Portland Oregonian asked Jim about his health and was told, “About a B-minus.” The headline on the piece read, “Jim Harrison Says He Writes More Because He ‘Stopped Drinking Half-gallons of Vodka.’ ” That quote was Jim’s answer to a question about what critics were calling his “astonishing” late-career productivity.

  Jim was seventy-six and had agreed to a phone interview with Baker to support the publication of his Brown Dog collection, his thirty-sixth book. Over two decades, he had written six novellas about the Brown Dog character, which critics liked to paint as Jim’s alter ego and had likened to a “twenty-first-century Huck Finn.” Well, maybe, if Huck were an itinerant laborer, drinker and trout fisherman of mixed Chippewa-Finnish blood. Jim wrote in the New York Times that Brown Dog was unimpeded, and that he had wanted to write a totally free man, which means he is poor but doesn’t care.

  Brown Dog was jubilant about nature, didn’t have a Social Security card, and the only mail he ever got was a driver’s license renewal form. When a feminist lawyer seemed an unlikely fan and Jim asked her about it, she said it was because Brown Dog’s love of women was without “irony or backspin.”

  Jim wrote about women notably in a woman’s voice first in his 1988 novel, Dalva. Then in 1990, his novella The Woman Lit by Fireflies was about an upscale Detroit housewife who walks away from her husband at a freeway rest stop and winds up spending the night in a cornfield, where she reviews her life in flashbacks that the New York Times said allow “the reader to understand how things have come to such a startling pass—she is reborn into a new, more authentic self.” It was a smart review by Robert Houston, himself a fine novelist, who also wrote that Jim could “convincingly handle a woman’s point of view, once more giving the lie to the inane argument that a writer must stick only with his or her own sex, race, region and so on. A talented writer who understands the human heart, as Mr. Harrison does, understands essence; the rest of a character is accident, and can be learned.”

  Jim had talked about writing women in his Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview. He said it was hard to find the voice and that you had to work it like an ineffective bulldog…you keep worrying it an
d worrying it and finally trust the truth of your heart’s affections and imagination. The strong relationships Jim enjoyed with women editors like Pat Ryan at SI and Deborah Treisman at the New Yorker were part of his creative process, especially if they were improbably alert, like Leslie Wells, who edited him at Delacorte, or Pat Irving, who edited his novel Farmer at Viking and, as he told the Paris Review, had suggested that chapter five should be chapter three and chapter three should be chapter five. So I switched it around and she was totally right. That’s wonderful.

  Great editing, I thought, and wondered if Pat Irving had gotten a call from Bob Datilla.

  —

  WHEN JIM SOLD THE FARM in Michigan to move to Montana, he wrote that he was thinking about an essay for SI explaining why:

  In the past decade there had been an influx of the very wealthy replacing the farmers and commercial fishermen…

  I had this weary leftist notion that I no longer wanted to live on a farm I couldn’t afford to buy. I didn’t want to become the kind of stale geezer who orders a pamphlet from Popular Mechanics on how to carve a violin out of a single block of wood. It takes no more money and effort to make a good movie than a bad movie but sometimes a bad movie is in the cards.

  Now he was in Montana, fishing different stretches of the Yellowstone every day in a Mackenzie boat. That was the backbone of the piece, the only one Jim wrote for me at SI, but I pestered him for advice about, say, a road trip across Nebraska (Highway 12 was his favorite road in the world) or where to eat in Paris or Seville. The year the Super Bowl was in Indianapolis, I e-mailed him from the local Hilton asking where to have dinner and he wrote back:

  My current lawyer agent goes out with a woman that owns part of the Giants. He asked me what to do in Indianapolis and I suggested staying in your room and reading a book. You might try that with a bologna sandwich….

  Right now I’m trying vodka and Jewish food. I’m wanting to go back to France where I am diverted by the landscape. May I recommend that you watch that Werner Herzog film about the cave down in Chauvet full of ancient art. I am hoping to find another cave all of my own.

  Jim’s books had always sold very well in France, and when I heard that “Mozart de Prairie” was the headline of a story about him on the arts front page of Le Monde, I looked for it and found many pieces in French newspapers about him but none with that headline. Maybe it was apocryphal. If it had run, I hoped the photo was the one of Jim as a young poet in overalls without a shirt underneath, leaning back with his arms spread across the side of a farm horse. He was smoking in that picture, but you could see the body of a gymnast, which he had been in high school and college. Jim became famous for his fiction, celebrated internationally as a storyteller of genius, but over all the years and the novels and novellas and the films that came with them, he remained a poet, his life syncopated with complexities and the chromatic cadences of rural landscapes. “Mozart de Prairie” was a brilliant headline, even if it never ran.

  −ENDIT−

  Mix (714)

  “THIS IS A MAGAZINE, not a democracy” is something old-school editors said to end arguments. By “old-school,” I mean those with an imperious confidence to run whatever they wanted in their magazines. This was not always bad for morale. Staffers took pride, even, in how unbending their editors could be. And if an editor had the power to call in a helicopter, like Henry Grunwald did at Time, so much the better. Someone had to have the last word on everything and that was the editor in chief, or managing editor at Time Inc. I find it amusing that the Merriam-Webster dictionary notes that “editor in chief” rhymes with “Great Barrier Reef.”

  What kills morale, no matter how passionate and engaged the editor, is a lack of fresh ideas to spice up the mix. The Other Bob Sherrill always said that the mix of stories was the most important thing for an editor to think about, whatever magazine that editor happened to be editing. It was central to his monkeys-jumping-out-of-boxes philosophy of editing. Avoid sameness, shun formula, let it rip. You just need to pick the right mix of monkeys. This takes confidence, imperious or not, especially now with the shrinking number of pages allowed by squeezed economics. Editors always had a finite amount of print real estate to keep readers’ attention, but this does not mean editors of digital-only magazines can just add more stories online without risking losing their readers’ interest.

  If you’re a reader, you want your magazines to crackle with ideas, but then you pick up one you thought you liked, maybe even your favorite, and it’s suddenly tired, gloomy with clichés. Another overstyled actress is on the cover, with lines touting a “Special Report” and “Inside” information and a “War” somewhere in the pop culture, but there is nothing new or surprising about the pieces inside. You might forgive all that if there is just one story that flares with new meanings, or at least makes you laugh. If not, blame the editor.

  When bad editors talk about mix, they mean formula: how much service, how much news, how much celebrity and, most recently perhaps, how many top ten lists of ways to serve kale. They should think about eccentricity: what is the most surprising piece they can run without leaving readers scratching their heads, or alienated and angry.

  Sports Illustrated readers were famously loyal, and touchy about what went into their magazine. Fifty years of residual goodwill is how I defined it, after reading a shopping cart full of research that was wheeled into my office on my first day on the job. “Reader Satisfaction” and the all-important “Intent to Renew” numbers were generally very high, but when you asked them for specifics, as SI did regularly, readers said they wanted shorter pieces—and more NFL, more college football, maybe more MLB and college basketball, but less NBA and hockey, and no minor sports.

  I was expected to follow that research, but SI had built its readership with long pieces that ranged from serious environmental reporting to takes on cheerleading competitions and rattlesnake roundups—and hit every minor sport as if they were pockets on a pool table. From my first issue in March 2002, whenever I ran an off-center piece, the satisfaction and intent-to-renew numbers both jumped. The readers weren’t lying; it could never occur to them to ask for what they didn’t know they wanted.

  How far could I go? How about covering a chess tournament at the New Jersey State Penitentiary? “Con Games at a New Jersey Prison,” by SI senior writer Michael Bamberger, ran in 2004 and drew more letters (all positive) than the cover story on NBA superstar Kevin Garnett. It was about thirty-two felons competing for a chance to take on an Ivy League chess whiz, and it went deep into the nature of competition and pride. But without that NBA piece and the rest of SI’s traditional sports coverage, the prison chess story would have flopped. So that was my formula. Every piece had to be related within the interest range of what readers wanted, but they all had to compete for attention—maybe like convicts coming at each other with sharpened spoons, or perhaps N-KB6 (check!).

  −ENDIT−

  Robert F. Jones (1,839)

  I CAN IMAGINE BOB WRITING this piece, overnight, on deadline, the way he wrote so many fast words before he shifted into his literary life. And Bob would probably be unhappy and hurt if the piece were not the most important one in this book. Just letting you know, the way Bob always did.

  I didn’t edit Bob in his days at Time Inc., but everyone who was around then and is still around now says no one was better at the newsweekly form. That he was the best at what his SI colleague Roy Blount Jr. was talking about when he said that what he learned at SI was “If you have to write five thousand keep-them-hopping words overnight in a bad hotel room with a couple of drinks already in you, you can.”

  Bob was a national correspondent for Time for most of the 1960s, covering Nixon, Vietnam and all the rest of it, knocking out twenty-two cover stories when counting covers was how you kept score. My favorite detail from those days is that Bob introduced the word “hippie” into Time in a 1967 cover story about “The Now Generation.” Time was so relentlessly unhip then I wondered what it
took for Bob to pull the magazine along with him from Golden Gate Park to communes in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. The answer, of course, is that he was more relentless.

  Bob got to Sports Illustrated sometime in 1968 and that’s where his style soared. He wrote about college football, the NFL and motor sports, salted with a little hockey, golf, boxing and baseball, and slugged it out every week with the aforementioned Blount Jr., as well as George Plimpton, Frank Deford, Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins—an editor’s masthead dream of talent and eccentricity. What Bob brought to SI was his far-ranging knowledge of literature and a voracious enthusiasm for the natural world. His so-called outdoor writing set a standard for the SI “Bonus” pieces, which ran at length in the back of the book, as he carved out far-flung assignments for himself. This from “The Game Goes On,” which he wrote from Kenya for SI in 1978:

  Swahili, the lingua franca of black Africa, is a language of fatalism, of the dying fall, of the story in which cruelty and beauty meld into a swift, soft sunset. Leopards cough at night on the kopje; the stars are like shattered sapphires; a baboon screams in death. Lions rip at a wildebeest’s gut while zebras browse placidly nearby.

  Bob could pin your ears back.

  —

  I FIRST READ BOB’S WRITING in late 1976 when Will Hearst and I were launching Outside out of the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco and I picked up Bob’s Blood Sport: A Journey Up the Hassayampa. You can look it up and see it described as a “pathbreaking, surreal novel of the outdoors.” I never told Bob, but that novel informed almost everything we did during the start-up of Outside. If rock and roll was about more than the music for Rolling Stone, then the environmental movement we were launching a magazine to cover was about a lot more than the Sierra Club. Like Bob, we were hunting unicorns and manticores on our way upriver. I don’t know why I didn’t call Bob when I finished Blood Sport, except that maybe I was afraid of him, maybe his villain in the book, the badass Ratnose, scared the hell out of me—which should have been the best reason of all to call.