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Magic Hours

Page 25

by Tom Bissell


  My father and Harrison, who is now 73, are old friends. They met through the writer Philip Caputo, with whom my father served in Vietnam. My father, like Caputo and Harrison, is a keen bird hunter, and during the autumns of my childhood the three of them would head up to Grand Marais and hunt pheasant and grouse. A few times, while passing through Escanaba, Harrison came by our house for dinner, seeming less like a man to me than a force of nature with a Pancho Villa mustache.

  “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.” Or so the London Sunday Times once said—a high—mileage blurb Harrison’s publishers have understandably splashed across several of his books. Once I developed an interest in writing, I would sometimes stop and ponder my father’s Harrison collection, which comprised almost all of the fiction and none of the poetry. (It is not actually clear that my father knows Harrison writes poetry.) I noted the paperback jackets’ comparisons of Harrison to Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but I was also aware of the Harrison Legend, which in the meantime has only grown: the films made from his work, the friendship with Jack Nicholson, the immense foreign readership, the incomprehensible appetite (he once ate a 37—course lunch and lived to write about it). There was also the way he wrestled with nature in his work. For Harrison, the natural world was not something to be cherished because it was pretty; rather, it was something to be howled at, gloriously, in the night.

  Imagine my puzzlement. The man who occasionally sat at our dining room table wrote stories set in the U.P., and critics in New York, London, and Paris regarded these stories as literature. Until that point in my life, I had heeded the inadvertent lessons of my English classes: literature was something written by the dead for the bored. Literature was decisively not about the towns I knew.

  One day I pulled Harrison’s first novel, Wolf, from my father’s shelf. Subtitled “A False Memoir,” Wolf is about a Harrison stand-in named Swanson who retreats to Upper Michigan after youthful city living in an attempt to spot a wolf in the wild. I stopped at the line where Swanson says something about “the low pelvic mysteries of swamps.” I was fifteen years old and for the first time in my reading life I underlined a phrase not to retain its information but to acknowledge its mystery.

  I followed Wolf with Just Before Dark, a collection of Harrison’s nonfiction. I latched onto its first essay, which moves from an opening account of Harrison ice fishing on the bay in front of my father’s house to an anecdote involving Harrison’s dinner with Orson Welles. How was it possible, in life or in writing, to go from ice fishing in front of our house to dinner with Orson Welles?

  The simple fact of Harrison’s existence demonstrated that you could slip from one world to the other, Escanaba to Orson Welles, smuggling literature both ways. Maybe it was time to thank him.

  Harrison no longer lives in Michigan. Nine years ago, he and Linda, his wife of forty-one years, sold their cabin in the Upper Peninsula and their farm in the Lower Peninsula and relocated to the environs of Livingstone, Montana, for the summer and Patagonia, Arizona, for the winter. It was the early summer, so off to Montana I went.

  States do not get prettier than Montana. Driving across its landscape is like being trapped in a beer commercial wrapped in the National Anthem. The only place I have visited that rivals its rough, mountainous beauty is Kyrgyzstan. I kept this to myself. MONTANA: AMERICA’S KYRGYZSTAN was a motto unlikely to appeal to locals. I was supposed to meet Harrison and Linda at the 2nd Street Bistro, Livingston’s best restaurant, at (for some reason) 6:07 p.m. I arrived at 6:00 and was promptly seated at a table that had been set with a hefty cheese and salami plate around the edge of which WELCOME HOME JIM & LINDA had been written in drizzled milk-chocolate script.

  Harrison and Linda arrived at 6:07. “My son!” Harrison said in greeting. It was the first time I had seen him since 2006, at a party in New York City. At the time he had been so afflicted with gout that he needed a cane to walk. Now Harrison’s cane was gone; his gout was mostly under control, as was his diabetes. His shingles, however, were dreadful, and he moved as deliberately as a cold-slowed bumblebee. This was not easily reconciled with the humongously vigorous Harrison of my youth. I suspected that Harrison’s current condition was rather more difficult for him to accept.

  If you are describing Jim Harrison physically, you are pretty much forced to start with his eye. When he was seven, a young girl, her motives unknown, pushed a broken glass bottle into his face, permanently blinding his left eye. When Harrison looks at you straight on, his left eye appears almost cartoonishly miscentered, as if he had taken a blow to the head and needs another, corrective blow to fix the problem. After six decades of double work, Harrison’s right eye has weakened, as evidenced by a milky blue rim around its iris. (These days, Harrison told me, he could read no more than twenty-five pages of prose before the headache became unbearable.) But it is an amazing face, an iconic face, and Harrison’s goofy left eye was like the bump in Anna Akhmatova’s nose: an essential, defining imperfection.

  Everything else about Harrison seems big. His round, substantive head looks as though it belonged on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate. His body is big, too, but not really fat. Rather, it seemed full—the body of a skinny person that had been forcibly stuffed with food. Harrison’s face and hands are an identically bright blood-pressure red.

  It was something of a relief when we finally took our seats. Linda, whom Harrison has described as “the least defenseless woman I’ve ever known,” was seated beside me. She and Harrison have known each other since they were teenagers. One day Harrison spotted her climbing stairs in her riding pants and thought, I must have her. She was fifteen, he seventeen.

  When I told Linda that I had last seen her when I was twelve, she laughed, lightly, as though this were the most absurd thing she had ever heard. The Bistro’s head chef, Brian, brought a basket of fries to our table. Harrison greeted him, too, with “My son!” Brian’s fries were maybe the tastiest I had eaten outside of Paris, so I asked him, one Harrison boy to another, for his secret. Here it was: salt, fresh garlic, skillful frying.

  Harrison was studying the wine list. “Do you like wine?” he asked me. Harrison is a wine hound of international note, so this was a bit like being asked by Popeye if you like spinach. The first bottle came and, suddenly, another. I do not recall much of the night after the second bottle’s splendid arrival, and by the end of the evening I felt as though I had been beaten up by our meal. Harrison was in comparable shape. Outside, he hugged me—an act of affection nearly triggered emesis. Harrison asked if I was familiar with Chief Joseph’s famous dictum of dignified defeat. I nodded. “‘I will fight no more forever,”’ I said grandly. Harrison smiled and said, with identical grandiosity, “I will eat no more forever.” Somehow I doubted that.

  This fall Harrison will publish The Great Leader, his seventeenth work of fiction, and Songs of Unreason, his fourteenth book of poetry. A large number of these books were written in the last fifteen years, an unusual burst of late-career fecundity. When I asked about this, Harrison explained that after a high-impact life of travel and sport and carousing, all he really did anymore was write and fish. “I’m trying to make my life smaller,” he said. “I’m tired of living a bigger life.”

  Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, in 1937, to intensely practical but literary parents. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a government agriculturalist who worked with local farmers. He grew up in a close, warm family in what he “was slow to learn... was poverty,” as he writes in his memoir, Off to the Side. After his blinding, Harrison became a “berserk waif” whom Michigan could not hold. After lying about his age, he found work as a bellhop at a series of resorts in the American West’s quadrilateral mountain states. These first, wondrous travels ended when a cop spotted Harrison putting a blackjack in his boot. The sixteen-year-old was unceremoniously shuttled back to Michigan.

  He was just getting started. The following year he hitchhiked t
o the “threadbare nirvana” of New York City, where he lost his virginity to a sex worker. In Massachusetts, at nineteen, he met one of his early literary heroes, Jack Kerouac, who was impressively tanked. Eventually Harrison returned home and completed a bachelor’s degree long-delayed by hoboing at Michigan State, where his classmates included the novelists Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. (McGuane remains Harrison’s close friend: they have exchanged weekly letters for the last forty-five years.)

  In 1962, when Harrison was twenty-two, he delayed the start of his father and sister’s hunting trip by debating whether he should accompany them. In the end, he decided not to. Judith, Harrison’s sister, was the only member of his family who shared his obsession with art and literature; the day Harrison waved goodbye to her was the last time he saw her alive. A few hours later, a drunk driver plowed into his father’s car; there were no survivors. Soon after the funeral, he wrote the first poem he was able to consider finished. When I asked Harrison about these events, he said that his father’s and sister’s deaths “cut the last cord holding me down.”

  A few months following his father and sister’s death, Harrison was sent to Boston to stay with his brother, John, who was working at Harvard’s Widener Library. Through a chance connection Harrison managed to get some of his poems to the poetry consultant for the great independent publisher W. W. Norton, which offered him a contract. Until this point, virtually no one but Linda had seen Harrison’s poetry.

  One can discern how utterly everything has changed—culturally, commercially, even tonally—when one reads the flap copy of Plain Song, Harrison’s first book: “In his late twenties, Jim Harrison is a mature person and a poet who has found his own voice.” (When I read this aloud in Harrison’s presence, he disputed the factual basis of both statements.) “After graduating from Michigan State University, Mr. Harrison became a teaching assistant while he worked for a while on his MA, but he abandoned the academic life because it was in conflict (for him) with the life of poetry.” (This was more accurate.)

  The publication of Plain Song landed Harrison at SUNY-Stony Brook on Long Island, where his colleagues included the literary critic Alfred Kazin (who argued for Harrison’s promotion to assistant professor) and the young writer Philip Roth. “I wasn’t very long at Stony Brook,” he admits in Off to the Side, “when it occurred to me that the English department had all the charm of a streetfight where no one actually landed a punch.”

  He returned to Michigan after being awarded an NEA grant in 1967 and a Guggenheim the following year, at which point he realized the woods meant too much to him; he could not go back to teaching or Stony Brook. During Harrison’s otherwise liberating Guggenheim year, however, he fell off a cliff—literally. The spill left him miserably bedridden for months. At the urging of McGuane, he used this time to write Wolf. When he finished, Harrison, who did not have an agent, sent the only copy of his manuscript to Simon and Schuster, but a postal strike stranded the manuscript somewhere between Michigan and New York City; Harrison assumed it would be lost forever. When the book, at long last, made it to New York, Harrison was offered another contract.

  Manuscripts of which a single copy exists? Postal strikes potentially derailing careers? Young novelists without agents being published by major American houses? Such are the antique emblems of a vanished world; we may as well be talking about illuminated manuscripts. Harrison is aware of this, and refers to his jobless, institutionally unattached literary ascendancy as “the old way.”

  At the beginning of my writing career, a decade ago, the “old way” still seemed an available, even noble, path for the young writer to try to follow. The literary world in which Harrison came up, and of which I caught the very tail end, has now been tectonically ripped apart. How to navigate the adrift plates of this new literary world is not yet apparent—not to me, and not to most of the thirty- and forty-something writers of my acquaintance. In this respect, visiting Harrison was not unlike climbing to the top of a mountain in search of a wise man. You want him to say the old way is still there because he is still there.

  One Jim Harrison aperçu or another is usually floating around in my mind. Here is what bobbed to the surface while I drove to his house the morning after our dinner: “No matter how acute, the pain of hangovers can’t rise above farce.” My farcical hangover was not helped the rental-wreckingly potholed dirt road along which the Harrisons lived. At least the view was spectacular. To my left: the Yellowstone River, swollen with snowmelt, and the snow-topped Gallatin Mountains, which looked like what a child might come up with if asked to draw mountains.

  As I pulled into the Harrisons’ driveway, the man himself emerged from the small cabin he uses as a writing studio, which is adjacent to the main house. “Look around!” he called over. “What don’t you see?”

  “What?” I called back.

  “Any other houses,” he said. I met him halfway between the cabin and the house. He was wearing a fleece vest, unbelted pants, and rubber boots. With his cowlicky hair and potbelly, he looked a bit like a friendly garden gnome. When I complimented his view of the mountains, he nodded and said, “They’re full of grizzly bears that will kill you.”

  His dogs came running up: Mary, an elderly black English setter; and Zil, a squat-legged Scottish retriever with a stick clamped between her teeth. “Don’t throw her stick,” Harrison told me. “Under any circumstances. It will never end.” Harrison looked at Zil—wet and filthy from a recent dip in the Harrisons’ pond—and shook his head. “She’s such a fuckhead,” he said. “But she’s a free woman. I adore her.”

  Linda came out after the dogs and regarded the long-sleeve thermal Patagonia shirt Harrison was wearing beneath his fleece vest, which looked as though it had been recently used as a barmaid’s rag. “That shirt is filthy,” she said.

  “I know,” Harrison said. “It must be washed. Eventually.”

  Here the Harrisons started telling me about the rattlesnakes. At the dawn of creation, apparently, Montana received a generous helping of rattlesnakes. Until recently an ungodly amount of the fell serpents considered the Harrisons’ property home turf. Linda admitted that she had long been terrified of snakes, but no more; she stabbed one to death last summer. “It’s amazing what you learn to live with,” she said. In 2003, one rattler, startled from its indented glide by Harrison’s beloved English setter Rose, reared up and nailed the dog. Rose lived but was so neurologically damaged Harrison had no choice but to put her down. This was war. On one legendarily sanguine afternoon he shot twenty rattlers variously nestled around his property. The creatures kept turning up until he hired a local snake guy to find their den, which turned out to be about five hundred yards from where we now stood. The den was gassed, after which Harrison’s snake guy filled two barrels with dead rattlers. The thing with rattlers, Harrison said, is this: You have to kill the alpha male. If the alpha male leaves the den and does not return, he will not be followed. Harrison smiled, as though this had all sorts of other implications.

  He took me inside the main house and showed me his “business” desk (upon which were five differently diminished bottles of aspirin) where he pays his bills and answers his mail and signs his contracts and daily faxes his handwritten pages to his assistant, Joyce Behle, in Michigan, who types up the pages and faxes them back. “I can’t revise except in the type form,” Harrison told me. “I don’t get a sense of it, the language, without it being typed.”

  On his desk I noticed a letter from Harrison’s French publisher. “Those people saved me financially,” Harrison said bluntly. Indeed, Harrison’s books sell in the hundreds of thousands in France, where he is known as “the Mozart of the Plains.” Over the years, he told me, he has met four or five dozen little French girls named Dalva, the titular heroine of what many regard as Harrison’s best novel. A French critic once told Harrison that his countrymen so adore Harrison’s books because most American fiction is about either the “life of the mind” or the “life of action”; Harrison’s bo
oks were about both.

  Harrison handed me a small steel mess kit, which, he said, a Frenchman had given him at a reading a few years ago before hurrying away. Harrison opened it for me. Inside were a hundred beautifully tied handmade fishing flies. “This is weeks of work,” Harrison said. “I’m trying to figure out how to find him and thank him.” He paused. “They don’t have very good fishing in France.”

  By now Harrison was smoking. Harrison smokes so much that even when he is not smoking it still seems like he is smoking. While he lit up, he diverted my attention to a lovely framed photo of some autumnal Michigan woods. Did he miss Michigan? I asked. “Terribly,” he said. “I’ve thought about it every day for nine years. I don’t miss the Lower Peninsula at all. The cabin I owned in the U.P. for twenty-three years saved my life.”

  When I asked why he loved the Upper Peninsula, he said, “Because it’s isolated and there’s all these millions of acres of what I call ‘undifferentiated wilderness.’ It’s empty because, other than pulping, you can’t really make any more money off of it. It’s been utterly and totally plundered by logging, mining, and everything. All the areas I love in the U.P, nothing more can be done with them.” I thought of how Harrison had once described his own career as “an independent contractor in a non-extractive industry. I drilled and mined by head, as it were.” The natural world and the human mind had that much in common, at least: Strip them of resources and, sometimes, a terrible beauty was born.

  As we headed out to his writing studio, Harrison talked. He talks unceasingly, about everything, his endearingly permanent Midwestern accent a cross between Blackbeard the Pirate, Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, and Harvey Fierstein, and his mind wonderfully crammed with both experience (“I ate of gross of oysters once, to see if I could. I could. I got gout the next morning”) and knowledge (“Certain bears eat eighty pounds of moths a day. Can you imagine?”).

 

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