Writing for his Life

Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard.  Black Stone Publishing.  518 pp.  ****

In the late seventies, when my writing career was getting started, I followed the literary world the way other men follow the sports pages, and I vividly remember the event that put Jim Harrison on the map: Esquire published the entirety of one of his novellas in a single issue, and promised to publish another in an upcoming one; that book of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, brought Harrison fame and fortune.  My impression was that he was (as a college friend used to say) one of the tough guys of American literature, like Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Norman Mailer for that matter.   I wasn’t interested in such people.  I was reading a lot of women’s literature at the time.  I didn’t think the world needed one more hairy-chested male.

But when I got a part-time job at the Regulator Bookshop and began discussing books with fellow employees, I found that a couple of the hardcore feminists counted Harrison as one of their favorite writers.  I was startled.  Dell was bringing out a uniform edition of all his books in paperback, and though he looked tough in his photos (his squinting left eye, which he had lost in an accident when he was a child, added to the feeling), he was lying in the grass with his daughter, which added a touch of humanity.  I also loved the looks of those editions.  You can’t tell a book by its cover, but sometimes I like the damn cover.

I picked up one of the early novels, I think it was Sundog, and was immediately hooked.  I started reading everything he had written, and through the years he became the one person whose book I would buy as soon as it appeared in the bookstore.  I didn’t give a damn what the reviews said.  I have a bookcase which houses favorite writers, and Harrison occupies the top shelf, his books ranging all across it.  I’ve read every book on the shelf, many two or three times.

What I loved about Harrison had nothing to do with macho or not macho, male or female (though my favorite of his novels, Dalva, has a female narrator).  I loved his offhanded way of delivering information, his idiosyncratic prose, which seemed somehow intimate and personal in a way that other writers are not.  It’s hard to describe what I’m talking about, but it never fails to be true, in his novels, novellas, even in a lot of his poetry.  I’m not a big poetry reader, but I read all of his, and it had the same quality I find in the prose.  It’s not that he was writing autobiographically; I don’t think he usually was, but he was writing from a unique sensibility, and you had a feeling of knowing the person.  And he admitted to his worst foibles.  He was gluttonous, drunken, drug-added, horny and apparently (it seemed) unfaithful to his wife (I used to wonder what she thought).  He put it all down on paper.  I loved his honesty.

He said in various places that he read Henry Miller—another writer with similar qualities—to get a jolt of real life from him.  I felt the same way about Harrison.[1]

These characters reached their apotheosis in one named Brown Dog, who was the protagonist in novellas that Harrison regularly published as books of three (one Brown Dog story per book), and eventually merited his own collection, a 525 page volume.  Brown Dog was a walking Id.  He did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, and if that involved eating some massive amount of food with several gallons of alcohol, then making an awkward pass at the closest woman within reach, so be it.

But I have to say—and my self from twenty years ago would have been stunned to hear this—I eventually grew tired of it.  Behavior that seems funny and painfully honest when a character is 35 or 40 can seem willfully stupid when he passes age sixty, then seventy.  It’s one thing to admit to your foibles when you’re young, another to continue that behavior into old age, by which time you might think a man would acquire some wisdom.  Also, frankly (I say this at age 77), a man in his seventies who’s still making passes at women in their twenties and thirties is not funny, he’s embarrassing.  At some point a heavy drinker is just a drunk.  And as for still being a glutton, when it involves a lunch that includes 37 courses, with multiple wines, it seems a bit over the top.

I also felt that, in his later novels, Harrison fell into the familiar trap of parodying himself.  A Jim Harrison character had to do Jim Harrison things, and at some point you want to say, I believe I’ve read this before.  He seemed to keep writing in order to keep living—I understand that impulse—but he wasn’t letting the tank fill after he finished something.  And the mystery novels he wrote at the end of his life were painful to read.  He had adopted a new genre, but it hadn’t adopted him.

All that having been said, I anxiously awaited the biography that I knew must be in the works, and I was delighted to find that Todd Goddard has done an excellent job of reporting on Harrison’s life.  He mentions things I suspected but didn’t actually know.  For one thing, Harrison considered himself first and foremost a poet, all of his life, even though his vast fame came from his novels.  He kept writing poetry until the end (and had just written one when he died, of an apparent heart attack, at age of 78).  He did love his wife and his family, but spent most of his life apart from them; he had the same kind of wanderlust that Peter Matthiessen had, but for a different reason; Matthiessen seemed to be looking for some utopian ideal, while Harrison seemed to be running from something.

He had plenty to run from.  A little girl had poked out his eye with a broken bottle when he was seven years old, and his father and sister, both of whom he loved dearly, were killed in an accident with a drunk driver when he was just getting started as a poet.  In a way he never got over those things, despite years of therapy, and often struggled with depression.  He seemed to face his pain squarely in his writing, but in his life just kept running.  It’s amazing that he accomplished as much as he did

So I have mixed feelings about the man, even though he’s still on the top shelf of that bookcase.  I think Dalva is a great novel, along with The Road Home, a kind of sequel.  I would actually recommend nearly all of his novels; he just fell off toward the end.  The poetry too, though I’m hardly a judge of poets, but it’s very much the work of Jim Harrison.  And the many occasional essays, including lots of those about food, which you can read until you feel stuffed.  (One essay, not on food, bore one of the all-time great titles: “Ice Fishing: The Moron Sport.”)  I wish he had settled into a more comfortable old age, the way Henry Miller himself did: he never renounced his early books, but he took up other subjects.  But Harrison was who he was, and he occupies a huge space in my reading life.  I’m glad he found a worthy biographer.

[1] Miller is on the second shelf of that bookcase.