Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  “I hope I’m not disrupting your writing day too much,” I said, as we sat down inside his studio. Not to worry, Harrison said. “I just finished a second section of a Brown Dog.” Brown Dog, who has featured in five novellas thus far, is one of Harrison’s more singular creations: a lusty and maleducated Upper Michigan Indian whose adventures include finding a frozen body at the bottom of Lake Superior and working as the errand boy of a craven Los Angeles screenwriter. Harrison described the section he just finished, in which Brown Dog overhears two well-heeled women in a restaurant discuss the importance of having a clean colon. Brown Dog wants to know: How do you know if your colon’s clean anyway?

  This seemed as good a time as any to ask Harrison about his health, which I had heard was not great. He was feeling okay lately, he said, but he had not been the same since a book tour five years ago, in which, at sixty-seven years of age, he did nineteen cities in twenty-four days. It “ruined” him, he said.

  The shades in Harrison’s cabin were all pulled and the wall above his desk was bare; he does not like distractions while he writes. Arranged with still—life exactitude upon his desk were some shotgun shells; a few feathers; a copy of Nabokov’s Ada (“a completely deranged book,” Harrison said approvingly); two Ziploc bags, one filled with bark from a Michigan birch tree and the other filled with sand from the shores of Lake Superior; three separate pairs of eyeglasses; and a Pompeiian amount of cigarette ash.

  Pinned to the big bulletin board next to his desk were photos of Anne Frank, Arthur Rimbaud, a woodcock, a polar bear, several of Harrison’s Indian friends, his deceased Zen teacher, the poet Gary Snyder, and his grandchildren. Behind him, on the far side of the room, were shelves piled with animal skulls and turtle carapaces and various Native American artifacts, including a tenth-century soapstone pipe, something called a peyote rattle, and a rather formidable tomahawk. Also here was a self—portrait of a bare—breasted fan of Harrison’s, who had sent him the photo with a letter indicating that she was a lesbian.

  I was most surprised to find a photo of Ernest Hemingway the writer to whom Harrison has been most frequently compared. The New Yorker, for instance, once called Harrison “one of the more talented students of the ecole du Hemingway.” But this is not a school the student ever willingly attended: Harrison once nastily described Hemingway’s work as a “woodstove that didn’t give off much heat.” Harrison still resents the comparison, he told me, “because there’s no connection whatsoever” between his and Hemingway’s work. For what it is worth, I agree with Harrison, whose large, ecstatic voice is more indebted to Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, and García Márquez. But Harrison writes of hunting and fishing and Michigan, as did Hemingway: for critics who neither hunt nor fish nor know Michigan from Minnesota, these are literary doppels that ganger. “In my lifetime,” Harrison told me, “the country has gone from being twenty-five percent urban and seventy-five percent rural to seventy-five percent urban and twenty-five percent rural.” He writes, in other words, of a world and type of people increasingly unimaginable to the cultural elite. A critic from a major American magazine once asked Harrison if he had ever personally known a Native American.

  Harrison has outlasted those critics who initially wrote him off as a Hemingway-derived regionalist, and at times he has been as successful as a modern American writer can possibly be. For the first half of the 1970s, however, Harrison was trapped in the odd half—success of acclaim that had no commensurate financial recompense. From 1970 to 1976, he made around $10,000 a year. Things got so bad for him and Linda that several people came to the Harrisons’ aid. The novelist (and eventual suicide) Richard Brautigan, for instance, loaned Harrison the money he needed to write Farmer, which a few Harrison fans, myself included, regard as his most perfect novel. Jack Nicholson, whom Harrison had met through McGuane, kept him afloat through another difficult period. Harrison’s financial troubles were considerably worsened by the fact that he did not file tax returns for half a decade.

  Harrison’s unlikely solution to his penury was to write Legends of the Fall, a book of novellas—a genre considered so defunct in 1977 that several publishers claimed not to know what a novella was. Harrison thus helped to resuscitate a venerable literary form, and few American writers have written more great novellas than Harrison. (Short stories, alas, are another matter: “I think I’ve written two short stories in my life,” Harrison told me. “I just can’t do it. I’ve tried.”) He wrote the title novella of Legends in nine days, basing large parts of the story on the journals of Linda’s grandfather. “Legends,” which is written in prose with the angry density of cooled lava, concerns a father and three sons whose fortunes wrathfully diverge around a woman. In 1977, Esquire published “Legends” in its 15,000-word entirety—an impossible thing to imagine today assuming James Franco does not try his hand at novellas—and the movie rights for Legends’s trio of novellas were quickly purchased. David Lean originally wanted to direct the title novella, while John Huston expressed desire to direct its companion work “Revenge.” Neither project came to fruition, but two pretty good movies resulted farther down the line, with Edward Zwick directing Legends and Tony Scott directing Revenge. In 1978, Harrison was stunned to realize that he made more money in the previous year than the president of General Motors.

  This led to several years of what Harrison has described as a “long screenplay binge.” He is admirably clear-sighted on what drove him into screenwriting (greed) and what kept him from succeeding more (he was not very good at it). As a producer said to him: “I didn’t hire you because you were a good screenwriter but because you can make up interesting people.” (Later, while working for Warner Brothers, Harrison had the chance to read some of William Faulkner’s screenplays and “was appalled and amused by how terrible they were.”) Harrison’s Hollywood years had him lunching with a young Michael Ovitz and palling around with Warren Beatty. Sean Connery and Jack Nicholson had their first meeting at a lunch with Harrison. He did coke with George Harrison and was planning to write the screenplay for John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces for John Belushi before the comedian overdosed. He wrote an unproduced western for Harrison Ford, who later made Harrison the godfather of his daughter. Werner Herzog was so determined to convince Harrison to write the script for Fitzcarraldo that during a hotel-room negotiation he followed Harrison into the shower.

  This period strained his family life. Harrison has never shied away from discussing the years he spent chasing “actresses, waitresses,” as he recently admitted to the New York Times. Still, he and Linda have remained married for 51 years.

  Harrison and Hollywood had a less perfect union. “I’m an arrogant person,” he told me, “and I just couldn’t deal with them. Once, in a meeting with a producer, I said, ‘If your script girl uses the word agenda again, I’m walking out.’ Because she’d say, ‘What’s your character’s agenda?’ That was the word they’d use for a while in Hollywood; I think they’ve stopped.” He attributes some of his irascibility to “the problems everybody had at the time. Cocaine, you know?”

  His literary friends, meanwhile, were as full of misbehavior as the loosest starlet. In the Key West, Florida, of the early 1980s, McGuane, Caputo, Harrison, and several other writers and artists often gathered to fish and destroy themselves. McGuane, whose appetite for destruction had earned him the nickname Captain Berserko, designated this Key West demimonde Club Mandible. Harrison described for me one notably druggy Club Mandible convocation, during which he was sticking a straw in “a big Bufferin bottle of great coke. We didn’t even bother doing lines.” He shrugged. “Well, how are you gonna survive that?” When he returned home to Michigan from Key West he could not remember his cat’s name.

  “How many of your Key West friends didn’t make it?” I asked him.

  “Quite a few,” he said. “I was thinking, though.” And here he paused. “That writer who hung himself—”

  And here I had to pause, for I knew Harrison was thinking of David Fost
er Wallace. Ten years ago, I published an essay about my efforts to quit dipping tobacco. The story was greatly influenced by a couple marathon telephone conversations with Wallace, who shared the habit. When the essay was published, I was delighted to find that I shared the issue in question with an essay by Harrison called “How Men Pray.” Wallace wrote to me about my essay, but also made time to compliment “Harrison’s prayer thing,” which he “really liked.” Wallace went on to say how “highly seducible” he was by Harrison’s voice. I knew the feeling. For a young writer just starting out, this was indescribable. Two of my literary heroes were talking to each other, as it were, through me. It was one of the first times I felt that my work as a writer was greater than my computer, my bedroom, my mind.

  Shortly after Dave killed himself I reread “How Men Pray” and remember wondering whether, in the midst of Dave’s torment, he might have found consoling Harrison’s belief that a writer is someone who “consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness,” and perhaps even smiled at Harrison’s belief that the writer’s gift is one of “excessive consciousness.” Harrison could have finally reminded Dave of this: “There is no self—destructiveness without the destruction of others.”

  Harrison, who I now learned had corresponded with Wallace “just a little bit” about poetry, brought up Jonathan Franzen’s much-discussed New Yorker piece about Wallace, in which Franzen revealed that he could never get Wallace interested in his great passion of bird watching. “This is interesting,” Harrison said. “Of the twelve or thirteen suicides I’ve known, none of them had any interest in nature. In other words, they had no interest in what Rimbaud called ‘the other.’ The otherness, say, of nature.” They could not make, Harrison said, “that jump out of themselves.”

  I told Harrison how much I wished he and Dave could have met.

  Harrison sighed. “Well, you know, it’s funny, because I know he liked my religion piece. Which was completely daffy.” We were silent for a while. “You know,” Harrison said finally, “he loved his dogs for that last year, but he should’ve been having dogs for thirty years. Every day of the year, the first thing I do after breakfast is take the dogs for a walk. They absolutely depend on it. But also it’s what’s best for me.”

  That afternoon we went for a drive in Harrison’s truck, lingering at a crossing above the swollen banks of Yellowstone River, its water all gray, churning turbulence. Harrison asked how my hangover was doing. Not great, I said. Harrison confessed to having grown weary of hangovers. “Moderation is no fun,” he said, “except it feels better.”

  Harrison surprised me by asking if I wanted to check out his property’s gassed rattlesnake den. “Do you want to?” I asked. That depends, he said. “If you want to spend an hour being incredibly careful and alert, we can go.” Before I could answer, he told me that rattlers were locally evolving to lose their rattles. Loud-rattling snakes, after all, have a tendency to be eaten by wild pigs and shot by humans. This left more Darwinian room for quieter rattlers to breed. I decided there would be no visit to the rattlesnake den.

  We talked of writers whose reputations had dimmed, of our mutual love for Norman Mailer’s nonfiction, and of a young writer whose work Harrison had recently discovered and greatly admired. This was Elif Batuman, with whom I had a small, pointless public feud after she wrote something dismissive about my work. Pettily, I told Harrison about Batuman’s and my contretemps. Harrison looked over at me queerly, as though to say, Why are you telling me this?

  Then, possibly to make me feel better, Harrison confessed that he was unable to enjoy the work of Cormac McCarthy. When I told Harrison that the galley copy for The Great Leader compared his novel to McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Harrison laughed, as I knew he would, given my strong suspicion that he did not bother reading his own promotional galley copy. But he laughed, I think, for another reason. No Country tries to sneak into what is ostensibly a thriller all manner of soul—squeezing metaphysics. Harrison’s one attempt at something similar, the early “rural noir” novel Warlock, is the only book of Harrison’s that he claims to loathe. McCarthy’s novels are cold and coiled and nervous—rattle—snake novels. Harrison’s novels are warm-blooded snake-trained setters that go instantly on point in the presence of such theatrics.

  The hero of Harrison’s forthcoming novel is Simon Sunderson, a retired U.P detective poking around the American southwest in search of a cult leader with a penchant for underage girls. Other than Sunderson’s mid-book stoning by some fanatics, very little actually happens. It is a chase novel in which the chase never gets started, a mystery novel whose mystery-novel motor has been removed. While it is hugely enjoyable—Harrison is probably incapable of writing a novel that is not enjoyable—it is also slightly shambolic. Several of Harrison’s later novels have a similarly loose-limbed quality: gone is the piano-wire tautness of his earlier books. (The language, though, remains stunning, such as when Harrison describes U.P. winters as a “vast, dormant god” and describes some men “as a new kind of tooth decay in the mouth of the room.”)

  What The Great Leader is really about is divorce (Sunderson’s wife has recently left him), napping (a pastime in which Sunderson—like his creator—frequently engages), the appropriation of Native American religion (which is common among cults), and the curse of sexual persistence. Sunderson, Harrison told me, was “sort of in his last push, sexually. And it drives people a little bit crazy, that sense of waning sexuality. We don’t get so much work on what it’s like to be getting older.”

  The singular pleasure of age, Harrison said, was “really not giving a shit.” Critics, for instance. Earlier in his career, he resented what he calls “the west of the Mississippi problem,” whereby Western and Midwestern writers are marginalized by coastal arbiters. Today, though, he no longer cared. “I don’t trust anybody that doesn’t do good work. I don’t give them any credibility at all. If they can’t write, why should I believe anything they have to say?” Quite a few writers I know claim not to read their reviews; Harrison is the only one I believe.

  When I was first reading his work, I told Harrison, the thing I responded to was the anger. “Your work gets better when you let go of your anger,” Harrison said. “Because anger is always didactic, and the didactic is of no value for a novelist.” He looked at me. “You gotta let a lot of people into your novels. Not people you made up, but people you allow to make up themselves, you know?”

  If Jim Harrison did not exist, Jim Harrison would have had to invent him.

  I drove out to Harrison’s again the next morning, and again he offered to take me to the rattlesnake den. This time I said yes. We drove up into pale green hills, which soon became barren pastureland. When Harrison’s truck ran out of gas we got out and walked. As we neared the den, Harrison pulled on my arm, and I realized we were standing amid forty, seventy, a thousand rattlesnakes, their tongues evilly forking from squat, ugly faces. I woke up. It was four in the morning and my hotel sheets were damp with night sweat.

  A few hours later I pulled into the Harrisons’ driveway and saw a tall and beautifully redheaded bird high-stepping around in the gravel. Inside I told Linda I was pretty sure I just saw a turkey. Linda was surprised and asked me to describe it. I did. “That was a pheasant,” she said. “You’re from Escanaba. Shouldn’t you know what a pheasant looks like?”

  “Don’t tell Jim,” I said, adding, a moment later, “I’m joking.” She knew I was not joking. I had already humiliatingly confused a crow with a raven in Harrison’s presence. (Harrison: “Most writers know only four birds—hawk, gull, crow, robin.” I could not even fulfill this pathetic mandate!) While Linda smiled at me, I thought of one of my best writer friends, who once opened a magazine piece by making note of the “sugar pines” along a hill. I asked my friend how he knew what those trees were; such sensitivity to flora seemed unlike him. My friend told me he had no idea what a sugar pine was. He simply asked someone what kind of trees grew in the area. We both laughed.


  The assumption of false authority was a useful writing trick, one I had used again and again, but maybe it’s also insidious. After all, it actually means something to know what things are called. If you begin to assume false authority here, you will be tempted to assume it there, and then everywhere. You cannot share anything worth knowing unless you make it clear what you do not know. Harrison, for instance, has a wonderfully guileless way of refusing to hide his research. If Harrison reads a book to learn about something, the characters in his novels will invariably read the same book. It makes the stuff Harrison does know that much more striking.

  Nature is slow, Harrison told me. “That’s how I saw so much—because I was out there all the time. When it’s slow you don’t, of course, always see something. You just see what’s there that day, and sometimes it’s quite extraordinary.”

  It’s this patience that has allowed Harrison to write lines so lovely as this: “A creek is more powerful than despair.”

  On the conservative talk radio station I was listening to on the way to the Harrisons, the host had said, “Unfortunately, Americans are not getting up in the morning thinking about the Constitution.” When Harrison appeared from his writing studio I asked him if he believed Americans should be waking up thinking about the Constitution. He asked me what the fuck I was talking about. I told him about the radio lunatic. Harrison’s face turned grave. “It’s a dark day in America,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I just made that up.”

  We sat down for the last time in Harrison’s writing studio. On his desk was a letter he had begun writing to McGuane; he had gotten as far as “Dear Tom.” Harrison usually wrote McGuane on Sunday, and was planning to finish the letter before I arrived, but had fallen asleep. He showed me the most recent letter McGuane had written him. McGuane thanked Harrison for recommending Elif Batuman to him and ended with a postscript that maybe they should start thinking about publishing their forty—five—year—long correspondence.