Young Man with a Horn

A Good Day to Die a novel by Jim Harrison.  A Delta Book.  176 pp. $7.95 (in 1973) **

It’s startling to realize that, after a first novel that was the semi-autobiographical and rather random ruminations of a poet who loved the natural world, Jim Harrison, with A Good Day to Die, suddenly became a novelist.  After a false start—a fishing trip with a woman our narrator picked up at a party—the novel takes off on a wild plot that keeps us reading in spite of ourselves.  It is as plotted as Wolf: A False Memoir was random.  The plot begins with this exchange.

“’They’re going to dam up the Grand Canyon,’ I said halfway across Duval Street.  Tim stopped and looked at me, puzzled.  A car beeped.

“’You’re shitting me.’

“’Nope.’ . . .

“’Where’d you hear about that?’ . . .

“’I read about it.  It’s true.’  For a moment I had been lost.  It had only been an errant comment.

“’No kidding?’

“’Word of honor,’ I said raising my two fingers in mock cub scout sign.’”

Our narrator—according to the jacket copy; I don’t see evidence of it elsewhere—is a poet, and Tim is a Vietnam vet with plenty of money and too much time on his hands.  They meet shooting pool in a bar.  They decide together to blow up this Grand Canyon dam, and set off on a cross country trip to do so.  On the way they stop in Valdosta, Georgia to pick up Tim’s girlfriend Sylvia.  And this buddy plus a girlfriend novel takes off.

I’m embarrassed and surprised to admit I didn’t enjoy it.  For years I’ve thought of Jim Harrison as my favorite novelist, and I’ve been thinking of reading through his collected novels, the way I just read the much shorter shelf of Toni Morrison, not—as I did with her—to read the work of one of our great novelists, but to enjoy the work of a man I’ve been reading for years.  I figured I couldn’t miss.  I’ve noticed that there seemed to be a falling off in Harrison’s later work, in which he seemed to be writing just to keep living, but I thought the early work was safe.

It ain’t.

Not that this book doesn’t have many Harrison virtues.  It’s beautifully and eccentrically written; there’s nobody like Harrison for writing about fishing, or the natural world in general, and we get some strong fishing scenes even after the novel moves away from Key West, where it begins.  There is of course the great Harrison dialogue, and some wonderful scenes of mighty eating.

But I was surprised by the cargo of booze and drugs that these two guys go through.  I’m not sure I entirely believe it, and I don’t see the point.  Harrison is squarely in the tradition of American big drinker tough guy brawlers, the heir of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner, but these guys drink in a way that makes Hemingway look abstemious; they also snort cocaine, pop pills, and drink while driving.  Maybe as a young man I could read all that without blinking, but these days I can’t.  Harrison has spoken of the excesses of his early life.  Eventually he got over some of them.

What really bothered me about this book was the erotic byplay, what I can only describe as the erotomania, of our narrator, to say nothing of the abusive behavior of both men toward women.  What people have always appreciated about Harrison—I assume this is it—is his honestly about being a horny young man, middle-aged man, and old goat.  He shows men at their erotic worst and seems to admit that he—a brilliant poet and writer—is like a twelve-year-old when it comes to women.  He shows up that way in the late work, and it bothered me.  I didn’t remember that he was the same early on.

Sylvia is a perfectly sweet, and apparently beautiful young woman, in love with Tim; that’s a bit of a puzzler, but women often fall in love with knuckleheads.  (She’s not noticeably Southern, despite being from Valdosta, Georgia.)  He is not much in love with her, or is afraid of commitment, or more in love with the amphetamines he keeps taking, which interfere with his sexual functioning.  Our narrator, in the meantime—though married, with a young daughter at home—is immediately smitten with her, voyeuristically observes Tim and Sylvia on various occasions, and is soon horning in himself.  He does so in what strike me as uncharming and annoying ways, though I assume it’s nice to be desired.  He’s soon telling Sylvia he loves her, though he does no such thing.  He’s just trying to get laid.  As is usual with the Harrison stand-in, he’s so anxious about it, so overwhelmingly greedy, that when he finally gets what he wants it lasts all of about three seconds.  Doesn’t that tell him something?

I’ve read about this situation throughout Harrison’s work.  There is no apparent problem, at least he doesn’t seem to think so, with the fact that he’s got a wife back home waiting in the wings (and doing what we have no idea).  From the early remark, made to a Hispanic man (which makes it that much worse), “Dumbo cunto stupido no fisho,” to the novel’s final line, where he admits he has no wish really to be involved with Sylvia, I found myself disgusted with this man.  I was horny when I was young too.  But I was never this bad.

I also never believed in the plot about blowing up the dam.  I don’t see why he even made the remark.

My memory is that Farmer—which I’ve read a couple of times—is a better novel.  I hope so, or my latest reading project will go up in smoke.