Magic Hours (34 page)

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 books 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?”).

“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.