The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  Such travel, like a powerful book, left an untraceable mark in terms of evidence but then what in pragmatic terms can you do with five hundred acres of porpoises tearing graceful holes in the sea. On the day he was sick, cramps brought him low. Lying on smooth rock beside a tidal pool thinking the shallow water was full of pale spiders he looked closely to discover the puddle was full of tiny crustaceans smaller than his little finger’s nail, entangling with one another, and that all around him plover-shaped birds were feasting, some fairly close but with a wary eye on his still form, then closer until he could have touched them. It was a childhood trance as if he were back in preschool years staring at a spider spinning a web under the bed in the loft of the cabin, the roots of grass or the wormlike roots of corn or disturbing anthills inches from the nose.

  Next came England where he could feel the physical reality of literature in London and the Lake District which he had with lesser impact felt in the Steinbeck country near Salinas while picking beans. Hampstead Heath with its unmown grass became permanent in his collection of mental photographs, imagining also that his feet were on the ground where Keats had walked and doubtless coughed. Great poetry is rarely poetic, a word that belonged to the aesthetically naive. Wordsworth’s grave was as it should be, another poet he had only read deeply after escaping the confines of institutions. It was an amiable area, even more so when he learned that there were brown trout in the lakes and mayfly hatches to draw the fish out of the depths up to the surface. He saw a drunk girl one evening in Derwent Water. She was as lovely as Catherine in Wuthering Heights must have been, or so he thought, and didn’t correct himself when she vomited in a dark hedgerow. He wondered if she was happy drunk but that seemed unlikely as her pale face when she stumbled past looked inconsolable.

  He went back and forth each year to Key West and Montana wondering if he wouldn’t finally squeeze these worlds dry with his writing. Wallace Stevens kept coming to mind, how it might have been better to keep your true love distant from the livelihood. Often he craved the freedom of wild animals who after they’ve fed themselves spend a great deal of time doing nothing whatsoever. His talents as a journalist were severely limited by the ever-present desire to write fiction and poetry. He thought of an old Indian he had met while fishing up in Canada named Two-Face. As a young man he had been hit between the eyes with a hatchet during a fight and the two sides of his face, possibly due to nerve damage, didn’t look like they belonged to each other.

  He noted this character of longing in other writers. He spent several days around Truman Capote in Key West and Capote doubted he’d ever finish his magnum opus which he was presently changing from the third person to the first, a work in progress which was eventually revealed not to exist. Writers try to talk their way into anything. He was seated on a plane to New York next to Tennessee Williams who glumly and boozily said that a writer never quite manages to write what his heart wants to write. Williams didn’t say why.

  Like any drinker with a microdot of honesty left in his soul he began to question the delusional aspects of alcohol and began to make his first steps toward moderation. Drunkenness fed the need for a woman that never could have existed, a place to live the totality of which could only find itself in the imagination, and an unfocused ambition to write with a degree of excellence that had never been accomplished except in a drunken mind. Stepping back a bit was only a first step but then he had been amazed that scholars of Hemingway and Faulkner had failed to perceive the effects of pure drunkenness on these writers’ lives and work. An excess of alcohol turns the life inward where it becomes utterly self-referential.

  He discovered in this traveling to make a living that the attentiveness required drew him out of his garden-variety moping, the slightly-less-than-clinical depressions, the worried thoughts of home about which he was anyway helpless. And to his surprise on returning he would discover that his wife and daughters had thrived in his absence in an atmosphere that was less regulated, less dramatic with none of the storms that came with his presence. His wife, always his first reader, was singularly uninterested in the business of literature and reputation. It was anyway so totally beyond her control that it paled to nothing next to their dogs, cats, horses, her flowers and large vegetable garden. Her interest in family finances was as minimal as his own as there was never enough money for a sensible budget, though they got by from month to month and a paycheck meant a steak and a half gallon of Hearty Burgundy, a movie, a dinner for friends. The friends and other locals tended to think that anyone who got to leave town now and then was in an enviable position.

  Friends took them to Africa and a stop in Rome offered another fantasy place to live, and Africa also added to the brain stores of improbable images and experiences. Soon after came Russia, uncomfortable and a bit fearful before the thaw, and on the way home a stay in France to do a story about the use of dogs in hunting for stag up in the forests of Normandy.

  Another singular change came about with travel as if in the movement the self was largely left behind and everyone he met seemed more intriguing than his literary friends who were somewhat monochromatic like himself. Water guides, commercial fishermen, the master of the hounds, chambermaids, cab drivers, everyone had become interesting and would with a friendly prod give up at least part of their own stories. If your own personality was almost carelessly absolved and you were open and interested, the stories floated into the mind in amazing quantity. There seemed to be a place in every culture for the writer as listener and most people wanted to be heard, or they seemed to have a suspicion that this would be one of their few opportunities to tell a story that might be written down by a stranger, thus a wisp of immortality was a possibility. He was invited to employee taverns in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Bahamas and it was easy to see that these black people were similar to working people everywhere, telling the most striking stories of their lives whether it was time in the army in Korea, a hurricane in which a brother drowned, a long safari where when encamped in the wrong place the camp crew had quietly killed five cobras and three mambas because the white hunter drank too much and didn’t want to move the camp. In the stories told, the more the pain the more the general laughter. There was the permanent image of a man hoeing a few rows of red-dirt corn while several elephants watched him in the distance.

  Russia was striking at first in its absolute foreignness which quickly resolved itself into the familiarity of the people who had many of the attributes of Americans west of the Mississippi. He had the advantage of some knowledge of Russian history, most especially the revolutionary period, plus had read dozens of Russian writers in a long streak in his late teens and early twenties so there was again the feeling of living geography even more strongly than in England. Dancing and getting drunk with an ex-ballerina in the antique National Hotel, she in a satin gown and wearing a big ruby ring, swept him backward in history as did visiting the riding academy, and the shabby horse race, the palace of the fur trade, the wide specter of street drunkenness, and the public singing of dirgelike songs. His profoundest leftist impulses which had largely dissipated when reading about the Hitler-Stalin Pact disappeared totally in the presences of soldiers everywhere carrying machine guns as if they were the only bolts securing the heavy lid of government. The air lightened perceptibly in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) partly because of the unique architecture, long walks along the Neva River, the eeriness of the Byzantine St. Basil’s, the beauty of the withered Nabokovian linden trees in front of the Hotel Europa down the street from the Kirov Ballet. He kept thinking of Blok, Mayakovsky, and Yesenin and Voznesen-sky and Joseph Brodsky who had not yet been exiled. People were definitely more European in St. Petersburg and seemingly made a greater attempt to raise their own morale. If you were having a drink at a bar of any sort and mentioned Yesenin there were invariably several patrons who could quote him at length, freely throwing in Pushkin and Mayakovsky.

  Not much past his mid-thirties he had begun to wear out at an accelerated rate. It was p
artly alcohol, but mostly the month-to-month effort to make a living, scarcely a fresh problem except that on some days the exhaustion was paralyzing. There was a secret desire to become dumb and have an ordinary job but the only possibility, teaching, was repellent to him. He was still the claustrophobic child who felt he would die if restricted indoors. After the complete failure of a novel (Farmer) the slide became precipitous so that he occasionally had tunnel vision. Nothing engrossed him but walking the dog, or the effort of building a campfire on a wet day of fishing, or something as simple as eating a ripe pear, staring at a river, or picking morel mushrooms. Journalism would only pay for the time it took to travel and write the piece, the same with two apprentice screenplays. Oddly, the specter of depression that he didn’t realize was already there caused him to minimize drinking and walk even farther, which in turn allowed him to slowly emerge from the depression. A trip to Los Angeles or New York City to look for work had the interesting oxygen of travel but arriving home empty-handed placed him lower than before departure. The fact that he wanted a living from poetry and his novels struck him as preposterous, enlivening again the recurrent theme of his own stupidity. Like Nonnius he had made “a heap of all I have met” but the heap needed to be put in an empty stall in the barn.

  He thought it was his duty to eat the world but had no idea what to spit out. He had carelessly become everything in order to write—men, women, trees, lakes, the landscape which absorbed him, dogs, deer, cats, the noises he heard, the night sky. He didn’t think it pompous but his responsibility. He had anyway built himself so that there was no control over the emotional process. You fling yourself into life and in the process of eating it, it ate you. He was aware, however vaguely, that there was a time when simply wearing out wasn’t a bad thing. How else would it occur to you to discard aspects of your life that no longer worked?

  On impulse he drove far up into Canada thinking he might see a way out of his confusion not realizing that he had to go down a bit further before he could get out, somewhat like a bird beats against the ceiling not realizing that the door is below him. He had been a rather casual Zen student for years, really an “aficionado,” a dabbler, a lover of the concepts and the tradition of poetry in Chinese Ch’an and Japanese Zen. In Canada all of this unfocused knowledge came home to roost in an improbably unpleasant way. On the way north Lake Superior was on his left, vast and impersonal, without reassurance. Paths through the forest he took were paths through a forest so huge that he was a mouse hopping along. He caught some brook trout and fried them and his only pleasant memory of earth other than what he was doing was his wife and two daughters. All of his movement through life had seemed random, accidental. People brushed against each other and sometimes stuck.

  A half day farther north he walked a long path to the water near a small village. Two Indian girls were sitting in a junked car without tires or windows studying the sunset and drinking beer. They nodded. Human contact. On the long way home, a full day’s drive, his pickup broke down and two very old commercial fishermen installed a carburetor from a junked dump truck from out behind their shack. They wouldn’t accept money but a drink would be nice they said. He drove down the road for a bottle and they sat sipping the whiskey in their tiny parlor. On the chest there were many photos of children and grandchildren. They were both in their late seventies and both of their wives were dead. They still gill-netted for lake trout and whitefish though they avoided the big seas in which they used to thrive. They told stories about their children and grandchildren and then fried some fish for supper at which point it occurred to him that there were no obligations to art or anything else except to support his wife and daughters. Above all else he was still his father’s son.

  Part III

  What the Older Man Saw

  LOW CAN EVOKE THE POSSIBILITY OF LOWER, BUT THEN accurate perceptions begin to step in. If depression is largely an inability to accept life as it is, then what could we possibly expect? Money problems always seemed to be the same schmaltzy song played on an untuned piano or violin. In the middle of these difficulties friends would wonder aloud why he didn’t take this or that university teaching job, freely and repeatedly offered. He always said that he couldn’t bear to take his family away from the country but back in the poorly lit corners of his consciousness he knew it was because all of the underpinnings of his life were mythologically oriented rather than drawn to accepted and rather ordinary agreements with what constituted reality. He even knew that part of the whole sweep of the nation’s economy in the second half of the twentieth century was from the country to the city, from sustenance farming like that of his grandparents and all of the peripheral small-town low-paying jobs to the factory jobs in cities that paid well, perhaps more true in Michigan than places farther west but then they would catch up as if only the country seats would survive. And then there was the almost silly irony in America that you could be relatively well known in the literary world, have your photo on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and still be shoveling the snow off the roofs of cottages to meet the food-and-drink budget. His willful but subdued arrogance often puzzled him and it was impossible not to treat it comically. The most absurd aspects of Don Quixote were still very much alive in thousands of young poets and writers across the land, paradoxically forgetting all that they had heard about the predictable lives of literary writers. It was a self-made setup with a tinge of the small-town carnival barker who felt he should be with Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey.

  Nearly a decade before he had been anxious to reach thirty which would certainly mean leaving behind his rather maniacal twenties. Now, closing in on forty, he realized that though he had seven books to his credit a good living was not in the offing and was never meant to be, but that you simply plunged on with your calling. He found it strange but then it became clear that he had begun to do his best work when the problems became flatly insurmountable. Maybe this was only a condition of nine-tenths of the citizens of the planet. All of his friends and their families seemed to be struggling to either get up in the country or stay there, except a few friends who were wealthy by birth which was none of their doing. In fact it was easy to banish the envy of the poor and understand that rich friends all in all seemed no happier than him and his family, and often less so.

  He had started a book of novellas, an unrealistic project with publishers because no one was writing them at the time, when two crises appeared. He had been worried about putting his oldest daughter through college when suddenly she became a full National Merit scholar. With that one out of the way there was an inquiry from the IRS which he threw away before his wife could see it. He hadn’t filed in ten years and was sure prison was in the offing.

  A note came from a renowned actor he met briefly in Montana and then spent an evening with in Hollywood on one of his not-very-successful forays to get a screenplay job, a mixed blessing because he got a job for a five-thousand-dollar screenplay but had no idea how to write one. The actor suggested they meet in Durango, Mexico, where a movie was being shot.

  On the road again, for the very first time borrowing money from his father-in-law because all other sources had been tapped. (Not accepting money from his father-in-law was another testament to his false pride at the expense of others.) There was a pleasant stop in Cozumel. This was in 1978, well before the island’s tourist boom. There was a specific sense of Key West in a different language that exceeded the tropical setting, a sleepy resonance and then the music was also predominately Caribbean. Already there was a sweet otherness that began to remove the lump in his throat that had been there for several months. At a humble café with fresh flowers on every table a young very pretty German girl was sucking her thumb while her boyfriend began to cry, then hid his face in his hands. Despite her beauty she had a touch of evil in her eyes looking at her boyfriend with the emotion she might offer a gum wrapper.

  He was trying to write a little essay to defray expenses but no words offered themselves. He flew o
n to Durango via Mexico City and after a week of hanging around the movie set and seeing the territory the actor, Jack Nicholson, offered to support him while he wrote his new book. The meeting took minutes. By then he was so mesmerized by Durango, a traditional mountain city, that the good fortune took hours to sink in. The desk clerk helped him call his wife because he couldn’t figure out the phone. He stared at the mountains in the distance where a few days before on a hike some loggers had given him a bowl of bear posole, a kind of stew.

  He wrote the book quickly because he had thought about two of the three novellas for years. The book was sold to a studio before it was published for more than he had earned in eighteen years of marriage. He flew back and forth to Los Angeles many times, the kind of travel without otherness. The walking at daylight in the summer was pleasant with the preposterous Beverly Hills flora. In late fall, winter, and early spring it was best to stay in Westwood where UCLA had many gardens or, better yet, Santa Monica where the grand beach was empty in these seasons. Other than walking he “took” meetings, got drunk, and snorted cocaine, generally carousing around town like any recently successful hick from the Midwest.