Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  During this questionable period I was able to mildly endear myself to my mother-in-law through my willingness to play bridge whenever she wished. Part of my so-called obsessive-compulsive tendencies was to throw my entire being into activities not related to my graduate studies. I was a whiz at bridge, pool, and poker and had taken up golf partly because a student could play all day at the fine college course for seventy-five cents. I had played some as a fourteen-year-old caddy at a country club where we were allowed to play free early on Monday mornings and wealthy men we caddied for would loan us their clubs. At the university, though, I was able to ruin golf for myself in a few months. I would cut all of my classes and spend the entire day on the course, once playing three balls for fifty-four holes between dawn and dark. I had to tape my hands which were a blistered mess. I quit the day after I got a thirty-eight on the back nine from NCAA tees. In short, I was nuts.

  By October we were evicted from student housing and moved in briefly with my in-laws, at a loss for what to do next. I was now prepared to take any job but a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature is a virtually worthless degree. I even took a test and had an interview for one of those gimcrack finance companies that prey on the poor with eighteen percent interest. I was proud when the interviewer told me I got forty-nine out of fifty questions correct. Unfortunately, they didn’t want anyone that “smart,” or so he said, though I suspected that my blind eye made me look too shifty. This was early in the morning and I walked down the street to Ellison’s bookstore where I read the entirety of Nabokov’s Lolita by midafternoon while standing up, not being able to afford the book.

  A week later I was a leading candidate for a job that would later remind me of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. The job involved traveling around and visiting farmers and giving speeches to farm organizations on what to do to protect farm animals in case of atomic attack. Seriously, I’m inventive but I couldn’t have made this up. There were many candidates for this decent-paying job and the fact that my father was an agricultural professional got me into the top two before the ax fell on my cringing neck.

  Now it was into November and I was improbably anxious to get out of my in-laws’ house for reasons of friction. Linda and I drove up north to Manton into a landscape I loved in my youth to interview for an English-teacher position that had opened due to medical reasons. I didn’t have the papers to entitle me to teach school though I had taken a particularly wretched education course, but this was deemed an emergency. The superintendent with a wonderful name, I believe it was Hessel Shotwell, asked if I minded “knocking heads” as there was a discipline problem with north-woods louts. I said I was capable and I was hired on the spot. On the way home we were mildly excited because with the job came a very spacious apartment above a store for only a fifty bucks a month. We’d pack up and move north in the coming week right after the Thanksgiving weekend. While the job certainly wasn’t appropriate for a “thief of fire,” the ancient notion of the poet, it would be good indeed to escape the confines of the Lansing area for the Great North, where I could resume my early passion for trout fishing.

  A day later my world imploded. I had thought of going back north with my father and sister to deer-hunt for a day but finally rejected the idea in the midafternoon. For some reason my sister Judith gave me her teddy bear that I had also owned as a child. My father said that they were going to hunt behind Uncle Nelse’s shack. As ever we kissed good-bye and I apologized again for holding them up before I could make a decision, a matter that would haunt me ever afterwards.

  That evening I was back at the Kings’ and I think we had just finished a card game when the phone rang. My father-in-law answered in the kitchen and I could see by his stricken look it was very bad news. He gestured to me and my mother told me clearly that Winfield and Judith had been killed in a car accident. Bill King drove me the five miles home and I sat up with Mary and David who were twelve and eleven at the time. My mother spent most of the night washing the dishes over and over. We talked to my brother John who was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working as a librarian. He drove straight through, arriving the next afternoon with his wife, Rebecca.

  It has often occurred to me that surviving family members meet violent deaths in an enduring state of recoil. Forty years later the mood, the ambience, can return as if someone threw a shroud over you. It was already obvious to me that I didn’t understand life processes, and I understood death less. Maybe none of us has a clue though the religious have their assurances. I have talked to veterans who say that even on the battlefield there is no emotional preparation. Death leaves you speechless, or at least verbless. You simply become a howling primate, audibly or not, with your bloody heart in your hand wondering how it continues to pump. The word “love” becomes mortally imprecise when the objects of love are torn from us and our love whirls off into the void on their invisible track. Luckily we weren’t a TV family because the accident had been announced on the late-evening news before the state police had arrived to tell my mother. Before running out of my in-laws’ house I had told Linda that Judith was fine, not being able to bear the whole truth. During the many raw moments that followed I even wondered if it would have been more bearable if we hadn’t been such a vitally close family. We never missed kissing each other good night and now two of us were forever missing.

  Soon after the funeral we moved in with my mother, Mary, and David. Startlingly enough while reading and working late at night I began to write a couple of finished poems, the first of my life despite my years of ambition to do so. I judged them a little less than contemptible but there is a pleasure in completing a poem no matter that it seemed a mere exercise noting that you were alive. I kept trying to get my little brother, David, to talk but he would continue to have problems doing so in the months ahead. Meanwhile I had refused to honor my agreement to teach in Manton mainly because I privately doubted that I was sane enough to do so. I continued to work on poems late at night and then sleep late in the morning to everyone’s dismay. In my family’s ethic it was unthinkable not to have a job, but then I felt so generally benumbed I wondered if I could do anything but construction work and in midwinter those jobs were in short supply. The most solid effect of the deaths that I could touch upon was that I must answer to what I thought of as my calling since nothing else on earth had any solidity. I made one of the most grievous errors of my life one day at a lawyer’s office when we were discussing a lawsuit over the accident. I was the executor of the minimal estate and had distributed the death certificates, both of which read “macerated brain.” That day when I entered the lawyer’s office I had noticed him shoving a folder of photos under a sheaf of papers and when he stepped out of the office to speak to his partner I was fool enough to glance at the state police photos of the accident. I had known but it was hard to imagine how a deer rifle in the trunk had broken in half. Now I understood. The other driver was drunk and traveling over eighty on the wrong side of the road, and after dodging a car he thought was backing onto the highway he hit ours head-on. The photo images were from the farthest rungs of hell. I still wonder what compelled me to reach across the desk.

  Soon afterwards everyone in the family but myself talked about what should be done with me: my older brother John, my wife Linda and her parents, and my mother. They decided I should be shipped to Cambridge where it was hoped that my brother would have the authority to get me on the right path. It is unpleasant long afterwards to admit the degree to which my paralytic disease was harmful to others. All of the mythologies of manliness that I had instilled in myself from childhood onward were utterly swallowed by the truth of my fragility as a human being. The closest I could get to day-today reality was when I held my daughter Jamie on my lap and read her children’s stories, which allowed me in a peculiar way to begin to start over.

  The day before I left for Boston I was sitting in a snowbound thicket beyond the swamp behind our house and found myself studying a quarrelsome flock of crows. The cold was sharp but braci
ng, and my wet feet returned me to a time when I had found crows quite fascinating, and now suddenly they were again. For moments my mind became light and airy and I felt thankful that I lived on this earth and still had a wife and daughter whom I loved.

  BOSTON AND KINGSLEY

  In the late sixties when I first fished in the Florida Keys I was puzzled when I met men who had recently mustered out from service in Vietnam, sometimes fighter pilots at Boca Chica who had done a couple tours and were trying to get back in touch with their stateside existence. These men often had a thousand-yard stare as if they were wild animals still hearing the hounds of war in the distance. They were generally restless within their skins and redefined one’s notions of free-floating anxiety. It was immediately perceptible when they were able to shed the past and were simply men fishing or playing pool, walking the beach, as if they had quite suddenly discovered the totality of where they were. One day, as in Phil Caputo’s Rumor of War, you’re unloading a few bodies and hosing blood out of a pickup and then not that far in the future you’re walking down Rush Street in Chicago. Quite a jump to fully absorb.

  In Michigan I had painted my entire surroundings with my own often selfish grief and when I boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston I was at the very least plucked from ruins from which I wasn’t capable of salvaging anything. My brother John, though quite scholarly and with a wide range of interests, was also utterly pragmatic. When he picked me up from the bus station he jokingly said, “I think I’m doing everyone a favor by getting you out of Michigan,” a statement that in itself was a lithium bath.

  John and Rebecca had a spacious apartment in Cambridge on Kirkland Street just down from the Swedenborg Church and the Peabody. John worked at the Widener Library at Harvard as the circulation librarian, which offered me the immediate delight of access to the truly vast Widener stacks. Michigan State had an adequate library but the Widener was the very best and it was quite impossible to come up empty-handed when looking for an arcane title. I found Blaise Cendrars’s Transiberian Express translated by John Dos Passos, which William Carlos Williams, a favorite, had mentioned and which Henry Miller had written about in The Books of My Life. There was also an exhaustive collection of French and Russian literature in translation which thrilled me but probably didn’t add a whit to my sanity quotient. I had learned to love the French Symbolists at a seminar taught at MSU by the Canadian poet A.J.M. Smith, certainly the most influential course of my college years.

  Cambridge was a place where it wasn’t awkward to think of oneself as an aspiring writer. In the Midwest to set oneself aside as a poet held peerlessly comic, not to speak of pathetic, potential and having revered Hart Crane and researched everything about him tended to make me wary about my so-called roots. As an instance my first weekend in Cambridge we drove out to Concord. When I was a senior in high school and John was in the navy he had sent me a collection of Emerson’s essays, which I had devoured with energy. Thoreau was one of my father’s enthusiasms. On that cold but sunny afternoon in Concord it meant a good deal to me to see the landscape from which these indisputably great men had emerged.

  Within a week I was homesick for my wife and child though I knew Linda was not yet “homesick” for me. I became quite ill for a month which was unsettling but a good transition. When I recovered I’d read the help-wanted columns every morning in the Boston Globe with a set of feelings that have been experienced by hundreds of thousands of liberal arts graduates. In short, no one wants us, or not very badly. I also visited employment agencies, which were significantly unthrilled by everything I offered.

  I was very lucky to have my brother who was gruffly encouraging. In contrast to the squalor of my first Boston visit I had a sure-thing bed and a guaranteed supper. My dad had commented when I returned from one of my trips and had gone from my normal weight of one-seventy to one-forty that if I had stayed away longer I might weigh nothing. Here we’re back to the young poet who sets himself aside from a culture but with scant interest on how to maintain him self from day to day. A few days without enough to eat and he thinks, brilliantly, “Maybe I should get a job.” There’s an endless susceptibility to the parodie, especially within a Midwest backdrop where all good things come from hard work and grit. For a change I was eager to work if only I could find a job that paid enough to support my wife and child. The countless listings for “management trainees” were quite beyond my ken.

  Meanwhile I had found a wonderful hangout in Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Book Shop on Plymton Street. Poets visited daily, actual poets rather than the sort of student poets I was familiar with back home. I recall meeting Bill Corbett, Paul Hannigan, Steven Sandy, my future publisher Sam Lawrence, Desmond O’Grady, the small-press publisher Jim Randall, the Harvard class poet Bob Dawson, the printer and poet Bill Ferguson, and the future literary agent Andrew Wylie. One day Robert Lowell and Peter Taylor peeked in and nodded hello. Of course I was a complete nothing but then so were many of the others and being mutually nothing didn’t seem to affect our camaraderie. Gordon Cairnie, an old Scotsman, was a rough and taciturn man but a capable though hesitant gossip, full of personal lore of every poet who passed through Cambridge.

  Once at midmorning when I left my brother’s apartment on Kirkland I saw a few police cars down a side street, and a black limousine out of which emerged Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s wife, who was there to visit her friend John Kenneth Galbraith who, along with Charles Olson, struck me as the world’s tallest brilliant man. Seeing the president’s wife in an absurd way reassured me that I was in the actual world rather than trapped breathless in a mid-western academic milieu. At the end of my brother’s hall lived two daughters of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, but they were goofy and pleasant.

  Olson, whom I was to meet a number of times in the coming year, held a specific fascination for me though I had noted he wasn’t held in any especial esteem at the Grolier Bookshop where the Eastern Academic poets were generally favored. My own taste ran toward farther west, to James Wright, Robert Bly, and to California with Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, a disparate group with no association but in my own mind. Even then I had begun to understand how much taste is based on xenophobia. As far as I remember I never met another writer at the time who had been in northern Michigan. Another caveat I felt with regard to the Grolier is that no one was more than vaguely interested in fiction, and though I hadn’t written more than an occasional trial page I had never fully separated the two arts. You could say, “Melville, Whitman, and Faulkner,” but you couldn’t then add another name of any of the living. Later on I was occasionally tempted to add Nabokov and Saul Bellow but by then the game had no particular meaning.

  By spring and after three months in the Boston area I felt I was nearing the absolute triumph of getting an adequate job. Of course this was closer to a mere intuition and in my life I’ve had very few accurate intuitions, but then every morning I would dress in one of my brother’s nice suits, because I had none myself, to “pound the pavement” as they say. After a long day and evening designing a sample ad campaign for BBD&O I had narrowly missed by a single other candidate getting a good position as a copywriter. It later froze my soul to think of what emotional trouble my verbal abilities would have gotten me in at a big ad agency. It seems that so much of good luck and bad are accidental and that the chance meetings that Pasternak had been criticized for in Zhivago are in fact the core of life.

  I didn’t have time to be disappointed about not becoming an ad copywriter because two days later I accepted an offer to become a salesman for a book wholesaler, Campbell and Hall. The idea of being a salesman made me nervous in that I couldn’t make good eye contact what with my blind left eye drifting off at forty-five degrees. The manager, Luther Gosney, who hailed from the Carolinas, assured me that my eye wouldn’t matter because book people at libraries, schools, and stores were already interested in talking about books so it wouldn’t be like selling cars or real estate where customers are indecisive.

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  While flying home to pack up my family, my first time on an airliner, I made notes in a journal about the utter haphazardness of events, perhaps aggravated by the idea that the plane might crash before I had the opportunity to reunite with my wife and daughter. You can find out odd details about people’s character by asking them if they think a plane is more or less likely to crash if they are on it. I remembered a Twain scholar telling me that the phenomenal man had said, “We’re never the same at night.” On certain days, hopefully rare, our brains are as naked and accessible as they are at night, wide open to abrasive distortions and the kinds of questions that swallow the questioner whole. If I had made up my mind about hunting with them a minute earlier, five minutes earlier, moments earlier, my father and sister would have avoided the collision. They would have been ten miles, five miles, a single mile away from fatality. I had also read perhaps too deeply in literary biography and the biographies of painters to know how totally ordinary the struggles of my life had been. Everything in a culture mitigates against the fruition of the individual artist who has been foolhardy enough to set himself aside to answer what he thinks of as a calling. Even apparent encouragement can be a disaster during this early limbo before the heart and mind have achieved their own peculiar balance. The twenty-dollar used typewriter my father had bought me when I told him I intended to be a writer held the possible terror of any blunt instrument, a sledgehammer, an ax, an involved gun that you didn’t yet know how to aim. And now I was going home to pack up for Boston, a place never mentioned in the dreamy talks my wife and I had when first married. Since then we always were where we always were because we hadn’t the wherewithal to be anywhere else, certainly a condition that half the population of the United States finds itself in, a fact I know from my own humble background. Much later, when Ronald Reagan fatuously said that people in areas of high unemployment should simply move he was evidently ignorant that a mere visit to a doctor and the price of an antibiotic brings many families close to financial disaster.