Present at the Creation

Wolf: A False Memoir by Jim Harrison.  Delta.  225 pp.

Having just made my way chronologically through the novels of Toni Morrison—an experience I’m still digesting[1]—it occurred to me that I might do the same with Jim Harrison.  I once wrote, “I sometimes think I could sit down and read through his entire oeuvre, all thirty volumes or whatever it is, then do it again.  I could live out my days that way.”  I’m not sure that’s true.  But it might be a good idea to dip into him regularly and get a jolt of energy, the same way he returned to Henry Miller in his early years.  There’s no energy quite like Harrison’s.

I picked him up this time because I had just read Stewart O’Nan’s Emily, Alone—a beautifully rendered novel about an elderly woman who is coming to the end of her life—and found it a little close to home, in more ways than one.  We all wonder what old age will bring us, and I hope it will be something better than the drab life Emily is leading.  In contrast, you can read the superb collection Conversations with Jim Harrison, and find that, days before his death, Harrison was still savoring enchiladas and knocking back beers for lunch.  I think that’s a better way to go out.  Though he apparently had to get bare-chested to do it.

I must admit, though, that it was with some trepidation that I picked up Harrison’s first novel, published when he was 34 and written on a dare from Thomas McGuane (to whom the book is dedicated) when he was confined to bed with a back injury.  He scrawled the book in longhand, as he apparently did all his writing.  I can’t imagine writing flat on my back (though Marcel Proust and Mark Twain did pretty well).  And though he had been a published poet for some years, he had supposedly not given much thought to writing a novel until his accident.  Could a book written in such circumstances have all the things I loved about Harrison?[2]

Not to worry, as we used to say.  All of the Harrison virtues and flaws are in this book in abundance.  It’s as if he discovered the thing he could do in prose—though in some ways it isn’t that much different from his poetry—and did it for the rest of his life.  It kept rolling out of him.

I don’t know what he meant by A False Memoir.  He briefly explains in an Author’s Note that is entertaining but explains nothing at all, and various incidents are taken directly from his life.  He speaks, for instance, of his two major traumas, the accident where a little girl blinded his eye with a broken bottle, and the dreadful car accident that killed his father and his nineteen-year-old sister.  In a certain way, the young man in this book still seems to be recovering from that trauma, wandering aimlessly and giving himself to the solitary contemplation of nature in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, losing himself in the natural world to keep from going mad.  He’s oddly like Nick Adams in the early Hemingway stories.  The characters are completely different, of course.  Harrison’s narrator Swanson looks at his traumas head on, while Nick Adams was meticulously holding his war traumas off.  But they’re both trout fishing.  They’re both in Michigan.  They’re both expert at what they’re doing, though Swanson’s is a bumbling expertise.

There’s no plot to Wolf whatsoever.  Swanson is on a camping trip in Michigan with no stated purpose, and without many resources, and looks back on the wandering life he’s led up to then.  Passages about the camping trip alternate with passages from the past.  The book supposedly covers the years 1956-60[3], though the memories wander a lot more than that.  There’s no starting point and no particular end.  It’s just a guy writing about a chunk of his life.

But what a guy.  Just because the book is so simple, it’s a great opportunity to examine the Jim Harrison phenomenon, what it is that keeps pulling his readers back.  For one thing, his descriptions of the natural world are astonishingly vivid.  He obviously loves the land he’s camping in, far from civilization and from other people; the feeling is that he’d like to get more into it, not less.  He could become a hermit and live entirely in the wild.

But the descriptions of his forays into civilized life, the young man who left Michigan to become a writer and set out for the literary centers of the world, with the full blessing of his father, are just as vivid, and he’s already fully confessional about his excesses, eating, drinking, and of course sex and longing after sex.  He doesn’t present himself as a Lothario but as a fumbling, bumbling guy who gets lucky now and then.  From my standpoint he gets lucky a lot.  But if that’s true, it’s because he’s completely who he is.  He doesn’t try to hide his imperfections.  It reminds me of a writer who was even more excessive than Harrison, and also did well with women.  Charles Bukowski once had this exchange with one of his girlfriends:

“’You’re all there,’ she said.  ‘What do you mean?’  ‘I mean, I never met a man like you.’  ‘Oh yeah?’  ‘The others are only ten per cent there or twenty per cent, you’re all there, all of you is very there, it’s so different.’  ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”

Harrison, I think, knew something about it.  Being all there was what his life was all about.

Harrison’s writing is a kind of endless pleasure.  Paul Goodman described endless pleasure as the kind of thing we can do forever, like watching the waves in the ocean, or a rippling stream, or the clouds in the sky.  It’s not ecstasy, exactly, but it’s endlessly fascinating, and never disappoints.  That’s how I think of Jim Harrison’s writing.

It had that quality from the start.

[1] I have the feeling that, at least with her best books, I could go and read them again and it would be an entirely new experience.  It would just keep getting deeper.  And it seems there is infinite depth.  I don’t think I could take Beloved again.  But Song of Solomon, Tar Baby.  It’s tempting.

[2] I’ve read the book before, but only caught up to it after starting elsewhere in the oeuvre.  I had heard of Harrison and seen his books—especially the handsome Delta paperbacks—but had the feeling he was a man’s man kind of author, a Northern version of Harry Crews.  But I was working part-time at a bookstore in the early eighties, and found that there was a cluster of female employees who were huge Jim Harrison fans.  These were not people who would have read hyper-masculine novels.  I thought I’d have a look.  I believe the first book I read was Sundog.

[3] It was in those years that Harrison made forays to New York, Boston, and San Francisco.