Magic Hours (35 page)

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 Foster 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.