The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  In his senior year the main question was suicide which evolved from the struggle of whether to stay in your head or go outside and meet the world. He nearly lost the battle during two weeks in the hospital when both eyes were covered after an unsuccessful operation. On the evolutionary curve it’s pain that is most memorable. Ultimately it was the melodious voice of a nurse that saved his life. Only once more was he tempted and that on the senior trip his class of thirty took to New York City on the train. When they stopped at Niagara Falls and walked across a bridge to the Canadian side to get drunk the turbulent river far below was incalculably inviting so that his body turned warm and loose. A friend noticed and dragged him toward beer, the conclusion coming at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village where he was privileged to see Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and understand that there’s a whole world to be described which each writer views differently. The pain of his self-taught failure as a painter floated away, the days in his attic bedroom trying to copy the old masters with a hundred bucks’ worth of tubes of caseins. The one trap he didn’t recognize that ran in the family was that any form of alcohol made him feel better. With his Uncles Arthur and Walter drunkenness was comprehensible as they seemed not to have recovered from World War II. His father was an extremely careful and occasional drinker and had warned him jocularly that only water was safe, advice which, to his peril, he ignored.

  The small Modern Library volume of William James brought great relief (the Modern Library Giant of Schopenhauer didn’t and neither did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason offer a single consoling sentence). James told him what the human mind was doing in its biological mischief. Maybe it was an advantage, finally, to be from a farm family and know that even in the middle of reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or you were still very much a mammal. Kierkegaard was a favorite of his the summer of his eighteenth year in 1956, as was the Dostoyevsky of The Possessed and Notes from the Underground. These were scarcely fodder for mental health while cleaning autos in a used-car lot. Just months before the eye operation had cleaned out the money saved for a half year in New York City (about twelve hundred dollars) or perhaps a trip to France to see where his new hero Rimbaud had lived.

  Perhaps it was also his eye that saved him. Of course he was a failed painter but he remained a painter who couldn’t paint. Everywhere he looked he could limit the actuality to selected rectangles or squares and there was a painting, and often the detached accumulation of shapes would be otherwise incomprehensible. His largely unformed and relatively untaught mind developed all sorts of naive theories. Art existed, it just had to be uncovered in a form that seized us. Stories lay everywhere half-buried. He thought his mind was full of many countries and when one of the mind’s countries was fatigued from overtravel you simply went to another. Everyone on earth had a different texture of voice and appearance and despite the joking comments of his friends all girls seemed to be notably different from one another though boys seemed less so. When a ninth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bernice Smith, told him to read Walt Whitman and Willa Cather the reading experience of Leaves of Grass and My Antonia was colored by the two days he spent with his brother John helping a farmer de-nut several pens of piglets for fifty cents an hour. When you looked in the mirror nude the resemblance to an upright animal was striking. When you helped clean a shot deer the placement of the organs reminded you of the mannequin with movable parts in biology class. There was a deep sense of inferiority built into coming from such a background. Byron and Shelley were high-class by birth but he favored the work of humble Keats. His father teased, “The Queen of England also shits.”

  The outside-inside dialect was natural if uncomfortable. You could read your Keats or Kierkegaard, then Friday night after the football game, bone weary and exhausted, you could have a hamburger, chocolate malted, and French fries with your cheerleader girlfriend and then neck until your dick was sore and red and your testicles were a toothache.

  His older brother, John, was in the navy after an unsuccessful year at Michigan State, the local college. After this lucky military seasoning John would do well in his studies, lucky because he was a helmsman and signalman (which required intelligence) on a destroyer escort that visited Cuba, Lebanon, and France in a single year. Presents arrived including Colin Wilson’s notorious The Outsider which enabled him to get even further outside than he already was. John also sent a jackknife from L’Aigle in France, which he sniffed hoping to catch the odor of the country of his revered artists. He was a little startled that working in a used-car lot with a young black man named Richard was lifting his depression over not being able to move to New York City, much less France. He was proud that he won a contest for mounting and installing four new tires the fastest, a curious sense of victory given his reading habits. He went to his black friend’s house one evening and played whist which these people didn’t know was a British card game. They ate a delicious bowl of beans with hot peppers on it and cornbread fried in bacon fat like his own grandmother had made. A beautiful black girl told him that he was a jerk but she said it very nicely. Another victory came when he threw his thousand-dollar artificial lens into the swamp behind their house. It didn’t work. He was supposedly bright, or so he had been told, but he never felt bright. Reading Immanuel Kant, or even Reinhold Niebuhr, made him feel humiliated by his lack of comprehension. The school principal had told him that really intelligent students entered the sciences and he had never felt inclined in that direction much beyond bird and animal watching. The history of science seemed more interesting than science. His brother John had bought him Bollingen’s collected Carl Jung which was fascinating but wasn’t intended as science. Meanwhile his imagination was always out of hand, dropping itself into whatever void to balance either the meanness or the banality of everyday life. He had somehow evolved the idea from his reading or misreading that his brain was like the earth herself, sort of round and full of fascinating activity. In tenth-grade literature class Bernice Smith had read them Emily Dickinson who had said, “The brain is just the weight of God” which was the most startling single line of poetry he had ever read. Naturally he felt his head which didn’t offer much of a clue. When Grandma Harrison had made “souse,” or headcheese, from a large pig’s head he had deftly chopped in half the pig’s brain which had on close inspection looked unimpressive. “That’s where he does his thinking,” his brother John said poking the brain with a forefinger. The odor of the inside of this head was sweeter than regular pork meat. It brings it closer to home when you knew the pig.

  Late in the summer before college he had driven north with his father to install indoor plumbing at his grandparents’ farm. Hulda was getting arthritic and the fifty-yard walk out to the privy in the dead of winter was getting unpleasant. Quite suddenly, or so he thought, everyone was getting old. At age eighty Grandpa John had walked the fifteen miles home from the hospital in his nightshirt on a winter night, the only time in his life he had stayed in the hospital and this for one night. (Hulda, who lived to be ninety-seven, had never spent a night in the hospital.) Now there was only one cow left and chickens, the pigs and horses gone. It was a mere two days to turn the old pump shed into a bathroom. Each day he and his father took a break and drove to a nearby lake to catch a mess of fresh bluegills and perch for dinner. These were always fried and eaten with cucumbers and onions in homemade sour cream, sliced tomatoes, and heavy Swedish rye bread.

  On the second day of fishing they talked a long time. His father was not optimistic about his college prospects. There was the question that maybe he should study forestry so he could have a livelihood until he made enough from his writing. He sat there in the leaky wooden rowboat realizing that he burned up everything too fast. He was far too anxious to get beyond whatever he already was mentally and physically. How could you eat the world with no money? He was a little relieved, though, that he no longer felt the strong pull of the north and wasn’t drowning in sentimentality over his lost forest and trout rivers, the unmet I
ndian maid he would marry in a hidden room behind a waterfall. The fifteen-pound brown trout that would be caught on dry fly, the black bear that would become a pet. The essence of the fantasy life changed so that being a gypsy wrangler herding stolen horses over the snowy peaks of the Carpathians receded along with becoming Ava Gardner’s secret lover on an island in the South Pacific. The mental life began a voyage down to earth but ultimately not all that close. Studying art history and the French language, poetry and literature exploded the possibilities so that he lived in a stone hut above the Mediterranean but more often in a garret with at least three art models that looked like those of Modigliani.

  Walking the streets of East Lansing a scant seven miles from home and a very long ways from New York City there was at least the solace of meeting other young people who read books and loved art, including the first young women other than his sister Judith. He hung out in the Quonset huts left over from World War II that housed the art department until the ever-so-slow planning of the art building was accomplished. In the fifties, in the Eisenhower senescence, art students had a lively wildness to them not shared by students of literature who mostly planned to be schoolteachers except for a few aspiring writers who were mostly drunk on a daily basis. At a lecture he heard a Jewish professor from Brooklyn quip to a question that no one had any business becoming a writer unless they were familiar with the entirety of the Western literary tradition, adding that a bit of the Eastern was helpful. His brother John back from the navy had bought the Loeb Classics though fresher translations of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, and Horace were becoming available but so were young women, drinking, and talking. Young women after a few days’ exposure sensed the depths of his insincerity about love. One lovely and wise graduate student to whom he realized he was a mere toy said, “You seem to start fresh every day with existence except for books.”

  In truth he had begun to understand the range of his instability. A psychiatrist likely would have given him pills had he encountered one. In two short quarters he had become a sophomore on an accelerated program but he definitely had entered a decline in his ability to accept reality. He ignored his studies and read French poets, the international bilingual quarterly Botteghe Oscure, New World Writing, but the downfall seemed to be the Russians and, especially, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which was an intoxicating paradigm of how the mind worked. This was a book that he drowned in. Ulysses was life on land but Finnegans Wake was a vast night ocean in which you found exhaustless places to swim. Joyce returned him to his senses so that he understood why he loved the art department Quonset huts. They smelled good with their rich stew of oil paints and through every open door you passed you saw easels holding paintings, often wildly colored and clumsy. The professors and students laughed out loud unlike the literature students and at their parties the music was at high volume and everyone danced rather than just sitting around talking about Jean-Paul Sartre. The art department was a wildflower garden in the muted, stolid Midwest of southern Michigan with its cornfields and auto factories and preposterously flat landscape where the field of vision only faced into more of the same. University buildings were mental torture barracks with walls painted beige or pale green and the floors covered with brown plastic tiles. If it hadn’t been for the groundskeeper consulting with the horticulture department the campus would have been unendurable. It was the usual hubris but he took to reading psychoanalytic texts to discover what was wrong with the functioning of his mind. From the high school flirtation with William James he went on to Freud, Rank, Karen Horney, and Jung. A side excursion into Nietzsche didn’t help the equilibrium. Why would anyone wish to be a rope dancer? You didn’t choose it, it chose you. Too often the evolution of his mind struck him as fatal and he felt like a self-taught hayseed blown here and there by books. When he announced repeatedly to his bohemian friends that he was moving to New York City to become a poet they were appalled by his sin of pride but then he had also talked briefly to visiting painter Abe Rattner and David Siqueiros and they’d flippantly agreed with his plan. He had no money and no prospects but became happy with his decision though there was a definite tinge of the manic to this new happiness. He kissed each member of his family good-bye. His mother and sisters wept. His brothers were teary. Early on a fine April morning his father drove him out to a main highway and he hitched his way east with a thick cardboard carton tightly bound by his father with rope, in which there were a few clothes, a bag of cookies, his twenty-buck typewriter, a few books, the Bible for luck, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and Rimbaud. It wasn’t quite the song of the road but heart and mind kept rehearsed his emancipation proclamation and he kept thinking of early life at the cabin after a night in the woods wrapped in a blanket or having slept in a musty pup tent in the rain. Walking at daylight wet to the waist from bushes and thickets out to Kilmer’s farm where he’d take a bridle from the shed and ride June, a mix of quarter and plow horse with a big smooth black back, a sweet horse though you couldn’t keep her away from the many small uninhabited lakes and ponds in the area which she would head for and swim in a broad circle before continuing northward to a place of broad gulleys, huge white pine stumps, and dewy or rain-wet bracken that smelled of Thanksgiving turkey sage.

  As he had hoped New York City drew him out into what he thought of as real life. A friend from college on spring vacation helped him find a room on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx which he thought quite literary as it was only a few blocks from the cottage near the Grand Concourse where Edgar Allan Poe had lived. He walked for a week before he got a job at Marboro Books on Forty-second Street. He walked from the middle Bronx all the way to Greenwich Village which took nearly a day at a sauntering pace. He checked out the East and Hudson Rivers for further close study and spent a couple of days at the Museum of Modern Art which only cost seventy-five cents though that was close to his food budget for a day. Picasso’s Guernica and Monet’s Water Lilies were close to each other in separate rooms and down in the garden you could drink a cup of coffee next to an enormous sculpture of a woman by Maillol. At the bookstore the other rather fey employees thought it funny he lived in the Bronx and spent so much time on the D train that he moved down to MacDougal just across Houston where a room with a tiny kitchenette was ten dollars a week, not bad because he was making thirty-five. He discovered he was free to use the New York Public Library across the street from his job. Gradually he learned that all of his workmates were homosexual except a young man from Kansas. Perhaps recognizing him as a fool they all were kind and clued him in to cheap performances, George Shearing in Central Park, or André Eglevsky or Erik Bruhn dancing at Lewisohn Stadium which only cost fifty cents, or chamber music way up at the mysterious Cloisters. There were ten thousand beautiful girls to try to fall in love with but hard for him to approach. The ones he loved best, generally in their twenties or thirties, were totally remote and nearly beyond fantasy. They hung out at Pandora’s Box, a coffee shop on Sheridan Square, or Rienzi’s on MacDougal. They looked like French actresses and talked fast to their friends. He fell in love with a pale-skinned red-haired Jewish girl who was heading to Barnard in the fall on scholarship. He noted that love, work, and walking were devouring his reading and writing time but then thought, “I’m collecting memories.” There was significantly a question of how he could become a poet and novelist at age nineteen when he had no idea where to begin. He had a yellow law tablet but the first page was only half full after a month. Life on the streets was far more interesting than anything in his head. He walked so much and so far he became quite thin. His brother John sent him twenty dollars and he took the Jewish girl to a Scandinavian restaurant where they ate so many shrimp that they both vomited in Central Park, then rolled around on the grass laughing. She sat on his lap facing him and a passing cop said, “Change positions.” She was so bright and well educated that it embarrassed him when they walked through any of a half dozen museums and she could offer vignettes on the lives of many of the artists from Goya to Sheel
er.

  He began to suspect that it was delight that kept him alive. One hot morning on Tenth Street he stood and listened to Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka through someone’s open window. The poor people he saw on Fourteenth Street seemed noisier and happier than the poor people in the Midwest. Several times he was up all night reading and stood on the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge for sunrise. A big bearded man in a skullcap at a Lower East Side delicatessen yelled at him that he was too thin and made him an extra-large salami sandwich with hot mustard, onion, and schmaltz which was strong-flavored chicken fat that reminded him painfully of his grandparents’ chicken coop. The secret ingredient at the chain of Romeo’s Spaghetti Houses was garlic, virtually unknown in the rural Midwest. You could add meatballs to the marinara sauce for fifteen cents apiece, large meatballs. Some bars on the West Side in midtown offered free snacks including herring when he bought a beer. The city landscape enlivened the books he had read so that memorized lines from Hart Crane became amazingly alive on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Hell’s Kitchen revivified Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. He knew he was a little too young and undereducated to do what he was doing. On a friend’s scale he weighed himself and watched a party at Carl Van Vechten’s on a neighboring roof. In four months he’d dropped from a hundred sixty to a hundred thirty-five. He wrote victorious letters to his fifteen-year-old sister, Judith, but in truth he was burning up. He tried to control his walking and beer drinking but sitting in the room before the ominous bare page of a tablet he found he had nothing to say. The girl broke off with him in the busyness of starting Barnard. He hitchhiked home in defense.

  But didn’t stay for long. After a disastrous term in college he was off to Boston in January with a fresh tablet. James Joyce had clearly driven him crazy so he dwelt on Dostoyevsky and other Russians from Turgenev, to Gogol, to Blok and Yesenin, to the melancholy Vyacheslav Ivanov, rather grim fare for a small room on St. Botolph Street in the middle of the winter. He worked as a busboy in an Italian restaurant so he had enough to eat. After a couple of months of unendurable cold he hitchhiked back to New York City and found a windowless room on Grove Street. He started to drink too much, then read all night with an empty tablet beside the book. He found a number of young women but didn’t love them. He worked at Brentano’s for a while in the Bible and religion section. He developed a crush on a black stock girl but she kindly distanced herself. A couple of gay friends gave him wise advice on women.