I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is, essentially, a New England–sized forest with the population density of Siberia. As of this writing, the U.P. has coughed up a major league pitcher, a couple world-class coaches, and exactly no movie stars, film directors, celebrity chefs, giants of finance, reality television geeks, or (as far as I know) porno queens. Its sons and daughters, by and large, dream feasible dreams. For the U.P.’s young writers, though, it is a little different. This difference is largely due to Jim Harrison, who has been publishing fiction and poetry about the U.P. for the last forty years, a good deal of which was written in a cabin up near Grand Marais, a two-hour drive from Escanaba, the U.P. ore town in which I grew up.
My father and Harrison, who is now seventy-three, are old friends. They met through the writer Philip Caputo, with whom my father served in Vietnam. My father, like Caputo and Harrison, is a keen bird hunter, and during the autumns of my childhood the three of them would head up to Grand Marais and hunt pheasant and grouse. A few times, while passing through Escanaba, Harrison came by our house for dinner, seeming less like a man to me than a force of nature with a Pancho Villa mustache.
“Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.” Or so the London Sunday Times once said—a high-mileage blurb Harrison’s publishers have understandably splashed across several of his books. Once I developed an interest in writing, I would sometimes stop and ponder my father’s Harrison collection, which comprised almost all of the fiction and none of the poetry. (It is not actually clear that my father knows Harrison writes poetry.) I noted the paperback jackets’ comparisons of Harrison to Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but I was also aware of the Harrison Legend, which in the meantime has only grown: the films made from his work, the friendship with Jack Nicholson, the immense foreign readership, the incomprehensible appetite (he once ate a thirty-seven-course lunch and lived to write about it). There was also the way he wrestled with nature in his work. For Harrison, the natural world was not something to be cherished because it was pretty; rather, it was something to be howled at, gloriously, in the night.
Imagine my puzzlement. The man who occasionally sat at our dining room table wrote stories set in the U.P., and critics in New York, London, and Paris regarded these stories as literature. Until that point in my life, I had heeded the inadvertent lessons of my English classes: literature was something written by the dead for the bored. Literature was decisively not about the towns I knew.
One day I pulled Harrison’s first novel, Wolf, from my father’s shelf. Subtitled “A False Memoir,” Wolf is about a Harrison stand-in named Swanson who retreats to Upper Michigan after youthful city living in an attempt to spot a wolf in the wild. I stopped at the line where Swanson says something about “the low pelvic mysteries of swamps.” I was fifteen years old and for the first time in my reading life I underlined a phrase not to retain its information but to acknowledge its mystery.
I followed Wolf with Just Before Dark, a collection of Harrison’s nonfiction. I latched onto its first essay, which moves from an opening account of Harrison ice fishing on the bay in front of my father’s house to an anecdote involving Harrison’s dinner with Orson Welles. How was it possible, in life or in writing, to go from ice fishing in front of our house to dinner with Orson Welles?
The simple fact of Harrison’s existence demonstrated that you could slip from one world to the other, Escanaba to Orson Welles, smuggling literature both ways. Maybe it was time to thank him.
Harrison no longer lives in Michigan. Nine years ago, he and Linda, his wife of forty-one years, sold their cabin in the Upper Peninsula and their farm in the Lower Peninsula and relocated to the environs of Livingston, Montana, for the summer and Patagonia, Arizona, for the winter. It was the early summer, so off to Montana I went.
States do not get prettier than Montana. Driving across its landscape is like being trapped in a beer commercial wrapped in the National Anthem. The only place I have visited that rivals its rough, mountainous beauty is Kyrgyzstan. I kept this to myself. MONTANA: AMERICA’S KYRGYZSTAN was a motto unlikely to appeal to locals. I was supposed to meet Harrison and Linda at the 2nd Street Bistro, Livingston’s best restaurant, at (for some reason) 6:07 p.m. I arrived at 6:00 and was promptly seated at a table that had been set with a hefty cheese and salami plate around the edge of which WELCOME HOME JIM & LINDA had been written in drizzled milk-chocolate script.
Harrison and Linda arrived at 6:07. “My son!” Harrison said in greeting. It was the first time I had seen him since 2006, at a party in New York City. At the time he had been so afflicted with gout that he needed a cane to walk. Now Harrison’s cane was gone; his gout was mostly under control, as was his diabetes. His shingles, however, were dreadful, and he moved as deliberately as a cold-slowed bumblebee. This was not easily reconciled with the humongously vigorous Harrison of my youth. I suspected that Harrison’s current condition was rather more difficult for him to accept.
If you are describing Jim Harrison physically, you are pretty much forced to start with his eye. When he was seven, a young girl, her motives unknown, pushed a broken glass bottle into his face, permanently blinding his left eye. When Harrison looks at you straight on, his left eye appears almost cartoonishly miscentered, as if he had taken a blow to the head and needs another, corrective blow to fix the problem. After six decades of double work, Harrison’s right eye has weakened, as evidenced by a milky blue rim around its iris. (These days, Harrison told me, he could read no more than twenty-five pages of prose before the headache became unbearable.) But it is an amazing face, an iconic face, and Harrison’s goofy left eye was like the bump in Anna Akhmatova’s nose: an essential, defining imperfection.
Everything else about Harrison seems big. His round, substantive head looks as though it belonged on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate. His body is big, too, but not really fat. Rather, it seemed full—the body of a skinny person that had been forcibly stuffed with food. Harrison’s face and hands are an identically bright blood-pressure red.
It was something of a relief when we finally took our seats. Linda, whom Harrison has described as “the least defenseless woman I’ve ever known,” was seated beside me. She and Harrison have known each other since they were teenagers. One day Harrison spotted her climbing stairs in her riding pants and thought, I must have her. She was fifteen, he seventeen.
When I told Linda that I had last seen her when I was twelve, she laughed, lightly, as though this were the most absurd thing she had ever heard. The Bistro’s head chef, Brian, brought a basket of fries to our table. Harrison greeted him, too, with “My son!” Brian’s fries were maybe the tastiest I had eaten outside of Paris, so I asked him, one Harrison boy to another, for his secret. Here it was: salt, fresh garlic, skillful frying.
Harrison was studying the wine list. “Do you like wine?” he asked me. Harrison is a wine hound of international note, so this was a bit like being asked by Popeye if you like spinach. The first bottle came and, suddenly, another. I do not recall much of the night after the second bottle’s splendid arrival, and by the end of the evening I felt as though I had been beaten up by our meal. Harrison was in comparable shape. Outside, he hugged me—an act of affection nearly triggered emesis. Harrison asked if I was familiar with Chief Joseph’s famous dictum of dignified defeat. I nodded. “ ‘I will fight no more forever,’ ” I said grandly. Harrison smiled and said, with identical grandiosity, “I will eat no more forever.” Somehow I doubted that.
This fall Harrison will publish The Great Leader, his seventeenth work of fiction, and Songs of Unreason, his fourteenth book of poetry. A large number of these books were written in the last fifteen years, an unusual burst of late-career fecundity. When I asked about this, Harrison explained that after a high-impact life of travel and sport and carousing, all he really did anymore was write and fish. “I’m trying to make my life smaller,” he said. “I’m tired of living a bigger life.”
Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, in 1937, to intensely practical but literary parents. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a government agriculturalist who worked with local farmers. He grew up in a close, warm family in what he “was slow to learn…was poverty,” as he writes in his memoir, Off to the Side. After his blinding, Harrison became a “berserk waif” whom Michigan could not hold. After lying about his age, he found work as a bellhop at a series of resorts in the American West’s quadrilateral mountain states. These first, wondrous travels ended when a cop spotted Harrison putting a blackjack in his boot. The sixteen-year-old was unceremoniously shuttled back to Michigan.
He was just getting started. The following year he hitchhiked to the “threadbare nirvana” of New York City, where he lost his virginity to a sex worker. In Massachusetts, at nineteen, he met one of his early literary heroes, Jack Kerouac, who was impressively tanked. Eventually Harrison returned home and completed a bachelor’s degree long-delayed by hoboing at Michigan State, where his classmates included the novelists Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. (McGuane remains Harrison’s close friend: they have exchanged weekly letters for the last forty-five years.)
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 and sister’s deaths “cut the last cord holding me down.”
A few months later, 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 might 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 by 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 my 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 a 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 école 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 gänger. “In my lifetime,” Harrison told me, “the country has gone from being 25 percent urban and 75 percent rural to 75 percent urban and 25 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.
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 Bros., 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 fifty-one 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 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, 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 the 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—rattlesnake 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.
“Why?” I asked.
“I just made that up.”
We sat down for the last time in Harrison’s writing studio. On his desk was a letter he had begun writing to McGuane; he had gotten as far as “Dear Tom.” Harrison usually wrote McGuane on Sunday, and was planning to finish the letter before I arrived, but had fallen asleep. He showed me the most recent letter McGuane had written him. McGuane thanked Harrison for recommending Elif Batuman to him and ended with a postscript that maybe they should start thinking about publishing their forty-five-year-long correspondence.
When he woke up from his nap, he realized he wanted to tell me something, which was his dislike of “nifty gear” outdoormanship, such as the kind he imagined was favored by the readers of Outside. He wanted to make sure I got that into the piece. He quickly had second thoughts, though. “Take that out,” he said, waving his hand. A moment later he said, “No, put it in; they need to hear it.”
Sometimes when you are talking to Harrison he gets incredibly still. He looks away and starts breathing wheezily from his chest, and his eyes fade, and you begin to worry that he is in the middle of some kind of cardiac event. Other times, when he is talking about drinking or writing or his wife or his daughters or grandchildren, he becomes boyish, all the wrinkles ironed out of his face and his eyes slits of joy. Other times, when he is losing his patience, he resembles some kind of Indian werebear with a face wrecked by pit fighting. With Harrison it was impossible to feel something so simple as friendship. He suddenly seemed to me like the closest thing we have to a tribal elder. If writers ever needed permission to raid another tribe and steal its corn, we would need to ask Harrison. He would listen carefully and judge prudently. We would never doubt his judgment, even when we saw him playing in the stream an hour later.
Harrison lives close to his mind. You sense this more and more the longer you stay with him, especially if, like me, you sometimes have to swim across an electro-plastic sea of junk to reach your own mind. You want to know or touch that unmediated part of Harrison, to tell him things. I was not the only one. At one point in Livingston, during our drive-around, we ran into a young friend of his, who immediately launched into a story about how he and his now-ex-girlfriend had recently decided to abort their child. But the younger man danced around mentioning this explicitly, forcing Harrison to say, “You mean you killed it?” His younger friend swallowed with a big-eyed blanch, and so did I. Later still, we met an aspiring screenwriter, who asked Harrison if he would have a look at one of his screenplays. “I couldn’t read a screenplay without puking,” Harrison said. Sometimes politeness was just a way to escape what needed to be said.
Before I left him, Harrison wanted to take me for a quick, gorgeous drive down the road, toward the foothills of the Rockies. There was a question I had been wanting to ask but was slightly afraid to. Since we only had an hour or so left together, I let it fly: “What did you think when you heard that one of John Bissell’s sons had become a writer?”
He looked on toward the road. “I thought, boy, isn’t this odd? I’d heard rumors, right along. And the main thing that always gets to me is just worry. I’m capable of worrying about anything and anyone. And I thought, oh God, what will happen to him? Why has he chosen this bloody voyage? That’s McGuane’s term for being a writer: a bloody voyage. But I was so pleased with your early successes.”
“What are these hills here?” I asked, motioning out the window.
“What do you mean?”
“What are they called?”
“They don’t call ’em anything.”
How about those bushes? “Juniper,” he said, and pointed up along the hills’ escarpment. “See those rock formations? Full of rodentia. And rattlers.” We circled back to his house and saw, in quick succession, a western tanager and a yellow-rumped warbler, Harrison’s first of the season. A deer ran alongside the truck, and I asked Harrison why the deer in Montana looked different from the deer in Michigan. Montana deer are mule deer, he said. Dumber, slower, mangier, grayer than Michigan’s whitetails. We passed the big pink tree that grew next to his driveway’s entrance. What’s that called? “Ornamental crab apple,” he said.
We came back to the house and Harrison wanted to know if I was going to continue teaching, which, I had told him the day before, was increasingly cannibalizing my writing time. Over the years, Harrison said, he had been offered several “really cushy jobs” by various creative writing departments. “And I said, ‘Why me?’ And they said, ‘We need some kind of name.’ However minimal.” He always said no. “I turned one down for $75,000 in a year that we made $9,000.”
“How were you able to do that?”
Harrison told me what he told them: “ ‘Somebody’s got to stay outside,’ ” he said. “And I still think that’s true. Somebody’s got to stay outside.”
Before leaving Montana, I decided to drive through Yellowstone Park. Once more I was listening to conservative talk radio, and the voices were shrill and formless in my little rental, beneath the mountain cathedrals. While Sean Hannity spent an hour rhetorically decapitating President Obama, I looked at the landscape, feeling the pressure between Americans and America, between body and being, between reality and aspiration. I wound up at Old Faithful, which Harrison said had been weakened in recent years; it might not even blow, he warned me. I wanted to see it blow. Maybe it would relieve the pressure. After an hour, it had not blown, and I had to catch a plane home. I knew by then I would be quitting my teaching job. It felt too good to be outside.
—2011