A Really Big Lunch: Meditations on Food and Life From the Roving Gourmand

by Jim Harrison

  That’s just a starter in a list that includes using atomic cannons to fire tens of thousands of condoms into poor neighborhoods from a distance of thirty miles. Keep that population down by every means.

  I’m also in favor of a high tax on poets for their poetry. We abound in the mediocre and somebody has to do something about it, though it might deliver us into the hands of rich poets.

  Stop women from denying dates by saying, “I have to wash my hair and do my nails this evening.” Any idiot can do this in ten minutes. It hurts bad to take second place to grooming.

  Of late I’ve been rereading John Keats. He is where I started at age fourteen when I first contracted the disease of writing. I read “The poetry of earth is never dead” and was utterly won over. I’ve never stopped writing poems since then, though early on I worried how I was going to make a living. My first volume, Plain Song, came out in 1965, just short of fifty years ago. Recent to that date I had been flunked out of graduate school for what a professor called “arrogance.” Imagine that! Anyway they changed when I got a book published by a New York publisher, W.W. Norton, which had never happened to one of their students before. I got a job at a university on Long Island on the basis of this slender book of verse. This was a mixed blessing indeed as I did not thrive in an academic atmosphere. It made me drink too much. Again, imagine that. Sadly I could not thrive in that atmosphere which was too fustian and pimpy with its craving for tenure. By the grace of two years of grants we moved to a small farm back in northern Michigan and stuck it out. For a period of ten years I never quite made ten grand a year, short rations with two kids. We had a huge garden and ate a lot of venison and fish that I caught. I wrote a novel, Wolf, which did so-so, and one called Farmer, which failed, but then struck pay dirt with a novella, Legends of the Fall. Unfortunately I got mixed up in Hollywood with which I didn’t deal well. Now as an old man I have published thirty-six books and I’m tired indeed. I wish I could afford a fishing sabbatical. Philip Roth quit everything and I was a bit jealous but then he’s real famous and could afford it, which I can’t. However it’s gross to complain when I’ve done fairly well as a writer, and any writer who makes close to a livelihood is fortunate indeed.

  Was it that nitwit Edna St. Vincent Millay who said, “Life must go on I forget just why”? Try to remember, kiddo, the reason for life is simply life.

  The part that is barely endurable is that I was an epic walker in my life but two years after spinal surgery I’m now what you must call a “shuffler.” There are worse things. Before surgery I couldn’t walk at all so I was quite grateful when I learned to walk again. So was my dog who was terribly melancholy in my inoperable stages. Now I take her down to our creek early every morning where she flounders with delight. The other emotional mainstay on the Mexican border where we live in the winter is the virtual flood of birds that migrate through our property on the creek, beginning in late February through March and April. The profusion of these songbirds is consoling.

  I was so sorry to miss my trip to Paris. My behavior there seems a bit peculiar to some of my local friends. I get up very early and walk three or four hours, often having an omelet full of lardons to fuel my effort. I usually walk through the Luxembourg Gardens, first stopping to look at le jardin fruitier, a small fenced garden of fruit trees that was begun in the seventeenth century. For reasons of energy and hydration I stop at cafés for a verre de rouge. Any fool knows that red wine is the best energy drink if you keep it within two bottles. A light lunch and a nap and I’m ready for my ceaseless interviews in which I extravagantly fib about the past. Each evening I have an elegant dinner with my publisher or the usual lust-crazed actress. French actresses invariably ask me, “Can you help me off with my undies,” and I always say, “Not today, I am doing my hair.” They weep, of course, but I maintain my impeccable standards in foreign countries. I nearly got thrown out of Russia for lying on my visa but I begged them to let me stay until I saw the tomb of Dostoevsky.

  The peculiar thing about Paris for me is that I always keep the same schedule as in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, that depleted and over-timbered wilderness. Up very early, walk my bird dog for several hours, back to the cabin for breakfast, a little nap, then work inventing a new universe.

  Luckily my books do very well in France. The surge came at a time when I had just quit screenwriting. It was a time of financial insecurity as I had to make enough to feed my savagely hungry daughters. The French saved my little family for which I’ll always be grateful. I had many bestsellers over there but never in America.

  I didn’t want to drop dead in the middle of Hollywood and have producers rape and rob my body. I got a couple of productions off the muddy floor out there but nothing of the quality to write Mom about. She was convinced the place was immoral and that I was daffy. She was right on both counts. So much alcohol, drugs, money, and beautiful women. I told Mom that showbiz wasn’t built as a cathedral. I was relentless and never got a dime from the profits of Legends of the Fall. I have recovered by fishing, hiking, and watching birds, and writing poetry, taking countless naps, and talking to my dog. Maybe I could write a bestseller about naps, then move to Montreal and eat.

  Real Old Food

  I have spent a great deal of time in the past six months researching the archaeology of food, sometimes in later dates lapsing into the more known history of food. The purpose of this work is a book I am doing with the chef Mario Batali to be called On the Track of the Genuine. To ensure our freedom in the writing we have not presold this book, though a worldwide auction is coming in the future, perhaps in coordination with the Keeneland horse sales in Kentucky in the spring. I have been lucky enough to never have learned the computer so I escape the loneliness of the writer by having twelve satellite researchers, all attractive young women. By never touching a computer I saved thousands of hours of precious time. Do we really need to read a long article on how Russian prostitutes are shipped to Spain in blue oil barrels?

  I come from generations of backwoods people adept at fishing and hunting. This was never thought of as manly, an invention of some later feminists in attempt to ridicule people who betimes go outside. In fact, my mother was an excellent angler, though I had to row the boat, an arduous task as it was brutally heavy holding six passengers in the humble craft made of water-soaked pine. A farmer had made it for my dad for thirty-five dollars, oars extra. I had to bait my mother’s hook as she couldn’t stand big, squirming night crawlers, possibly a Freudian glitch. Let us readily admit that the preponderance of outdoorsmen are jerk-offs, pure and simple. Canadians must ban the New Brunswick habit of breasting woodcock that you’ve shot. It’s a criminal waste. Roasted, the legs and thighs that are thrown away are the finest thing God allows you to put in your mouth. Pluck them. It only takes minutes. I suspect these non-pluckers go in the bathroom after the hunt and look at their dicks in the mirror or do the John Wayne strut around the cabin to get ready for the bar. Sad to say these people are generally pathetic cooks. I have heard dozens of times in my sporting life, in both Canada and America, how they’ll skin several grouse, put them in the Crock-Pot with three cans of Campbell’s mushroom soup, and cook for hours. This is ghastly treatment of a creature. It’s too bad you can’t train grouse to shoot hunters. Canada should ship these people to that island where they can be clubbed to death with seals and their bodies ground into sausage and sent to China.

  In the mythology of north central Africa, the savanna from which we all emerged, there was a heroine known in story and song as Irma Warmgut. She could chop into a dead elephant faster than any man and secure the hundreds of pounds of kidney fat for her family. The fat was useful in preserving other meats just as it is in contemporary French-made confit to preserve ducks and add flavor. My grandparents on my mother’s side were very poor farmers but rich in big stone crocks. You could fry up fifteen pounds of sausage patties, put them in the crock, and pour over them ten pounds of melted lar
d. The sausage would still be good for several months.

  We hear much these days about the war against fat. To the eye it is not yet successful. I know several blimpish people, men and women, who average ten bottles of Pepsi a day while eating their chocolate cookies. All sugar pure and simple, despite the strict diets they say they try. Not liking sugar or pop myself, I don’t get it. I collect huge paunches at our local grocery stores and supermarkets. Some real big ones, in both Michigan and Montana. I don’t have a camera, but all I have to do is stare and blink my eyes a few times and the record paunch is indelible. I did this with game animals in Africa forty years ago and still have hundreds of mind photos on record. You use the same method if you have the luck to look up a pretty girl’s dress. You blink and are home free. You blink and now you have a permanent record of what makes life valuable. Naturally I also do this with food. Some of us remember the food in that wonderful, edible movie Tom Jones. I can still see a wild piglet in France roasted and stuffed with truffles and a lamb I cooked over coals after my daughter had inserted sixty cloves of garlic. No California wine was allowed on the property.

  Three famed physiologists at Harvard did spadework on the universal problem of odors. All fat people, even myself when I occasionally get overweight, have crevasses in the manner of glaciers in their fat, out of which emerge unpleasant odors. The physiologists point out that the problem can’t be attacked without the military and a well-organized gestapo. This is a fearsome choice, but a solid democracy can make a wise decision. If you doubt me, take a Fat Boy’s Steam Bath. This chain is in every city and you can find it by odor.

  I am in the middle of a crushing experience that almost, but not quite, affects my appetite. It is the publication of my new novel, The Big Seven. America novelist William H. Gass pointed out that there is no more sodden time for a writer than publication. No one asked me but I agree. In fact, many fellow writers tell me that I’m on easy street. Here I am making a living as a writer and I’m only seventy-seven years old. Obviously, it could have been otherwise. It looked grim when I quit writing screenplays so as to avoid dying in Los Angeles. This preemptive decision cut my income by more than half. Luckily the French stepped in and decided they liked my stories. Who knows why? I do know now that dozens of trips to France have given me the opportunity for enough to eat. I can be a little hard on chefs. One evening in the Camargue, a chef insisted on cooking me all the local seafood, plus roasting a small lamb in the fireplace, plus a dozen bottles of wine. Midnight found us both sleeping on the stone floor, having traded shirts in new friendship. As Mom would have said, “It was a learning experience.” No, it wasn’t. Too much wine steals my judgment that was never very good in cold sobriety.

  The hardest thing lately has been the deaths of two good writer friends, Peter Matthiessen and Charles Bowden, plus the death of the insane book collector Beef Torrey. With Matthiessen it was the grandeur of this bird of passage disappearing. I had known him well for more than forty years and he and the poet Gary Snyder were models of behavior for me. Neither did the vanity jitterbug in New York City. I always advise humility to young writers because no one has the ability to invent the destiny of their ambition. If any, in spades. Both Matthiessen and Snyder were and are naturalists of some repute, amateur, often the best kind, rather than professional. This helps. A several-hour walk in the forest heals more wounds than any doctor of my experience.

  I’m not allowed to say “Woe is me” minutes after I was faxed a review saying I was a hero of American literature. I wonder what one actually is. Luckily it doesn’t involve throwing yourself on a grenade to save your friends. The death of a friend is the strongest pointer possible to the clarity of your future. In a world in which Anne Frank dies, it is easier for me to lose interest in the inevitability of my own.

  In times of extreme stress like book publication I crave herring. It is much more comforting than the drugs and alcohol favored by so many. When heart and brain feel like a jackhammer at play, I turn to herring, the food of my people on my mother’s side, the Swedes. Since where I live my several lives is somewhat inaccessible, I depend on others. This time Mario Batali sent eight containers of different herring from Russ & Daughters, the herring capital on East Houston in New York City. Since you don’t drink good wine with herring I poured a simple eight-ounce glass of vodka. As I dabbled in the containers, waves of glorious warmth suffused my body as if I were sleeping with Venus, fresh from the sea.

  I sang a simple hosanna, knowing that if I write novels, it’s my business. Just buy the book, chumps. Button your gobs to criticism.

  With the right things to drink and eat you can have a nice life. It behooves you to find out what they are. You can obviously eat better in France than in Michigan or Montana or Arizona or ever the fabled Ottawa in Canada, though Calgary is a better choice. You, as a writer, must mix your essential gluttony and writing carefully. Despite your complaints you have lots of time to do so. Good food is so much more important than the mediocre writing that pervades the earth.

  Everyday Life:

  The Question of Zen

  I often think that because I am quite remote up here in northern Michigan from others who practice, and am intensely stubborn, I learn so slowly that I will be dead before I understand very much.

  But “Who dies?” is a koan I posed for myself several years ago. To know the self, of course, is hopefully to forget the self. The especially banal wine of illusion is to hold on tightly to all the resonances of what we see in the mirror, inside and out. In our practice the self is not pushed away, it drifts away. When you are a poet there is a residual fear that if you lose the self you will lose your art. Gradually, however (for me it took fifteen years!), you discover that what you thought was the self had little to do with your own true nature. Or your art, for that matter.

  When I learned this I began to understand that the period of zazen that lays the foundation of the day is meant to grow until it swallows both the day and the night. Time viewed as periods of practice and nonpractice is as fanciful a duality as the notion that Zen is Oriental. The kapok in the zafu beneath your ass is without nationality. The Bodhidharma and Dogen saw each other across an ocean river that is without sex, color, time, or form. What is between Arcturus and Aldebaran?

  I was wondering the other day about this body that wakes up to a cold rain from an instructive dream, takes its coffee out to the granary to sit on a red cushion. The body sees the totems of consolation hanging around the room: animal skins, a heron wing, malformed antlers, crow and peregrine feathers, a Sioux-painted coyote skull, a grizzly turd, a sea lion’s caudal bone, a wild-turkey foot, favored stones, a brass Bureau of Indian Affairs body tag from the Wyoming Territory, a bear claw, a prehistoric grizzly tooth. These are familiar, beloved objects of the earth, but the day is not familiar because it is a new one. The bird that passes across the window is a reminder of the shortness of life, but it is mostly a bird flying past the window.

  “The days are stacked against what we think we are,” I wrote in a poem. The point here, albeit blunt, is that when you forget what you are, you truly “see” the day. The man who howls in anger on the phone an hour later because he has been crossed is a comic-figure dog paddling in a sump of pride. He wasn’t conscious enough at the moment to realize that there is evil afloat in the land, within and without. This condition can be called “self-sunken.” A little later, when he takes a walk on the shores of a lake, he does himself a favor by becoming nothing. He forgets being “right” and “wrong,” which enables him to watch time herself flickering across the water. This is a delightful illusion.

  The hardest thing for me to accept was that my life was what it was every day. This seemed to negate notions of grandeur necessary for an interest in survival. The turnaround came when an interviewer asked me about the discipline that I used to be productive. It occurred to me at that moment that discipline was what you are every day, how conscious you are will
ing to be. In the Tao te Ching (in the splendid new Stephen Mitchell translation) it says, “Act without doing; work without effort.” So you write to express your true nature, part of which is an aesthetic sense that reflects the intricacies of life, rather than the short circuits devised by the ego. Assuming the technique of the art has been learned, it can then arrive out of silence rather than by the self-administered cattle prod to the temples that is postmodernism.

  After this body eats a tad too much for lunch it returns to the granary, stokes the fire, and takes a nap with its beloved dog, who, at eleven, is in the winter of her life. A distinct lump of sorrow forms, which, on being observed, reminds the body of the Protestant hymn “Fly, Fly Away,” and we are returned to the fragility of birds. The sense of transience is then embraced. When the dead sister reappears in dreams she is always a bird.

  On the body’s waking with a start, because it is the dog’s nature to bark on occasion at nothing in particular, the body resumes the work. There has been an exhausting effort in recent years through the form of poetry and novels to understand native cultures. The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much that you have perceived and assumed was reality. At first this is disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart. I find that I have to spend a great deal of time alone in the natural world to be of use to anyone else. Above my desk there is a wonderfully comic reproduction of Hokusai’s blind men leading each other across a stream.

  Whatever I have learned I owe largely to others. It was back in 1967 that I met Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love, then Gary Snyder, though in both cases I had read the work. But in these formative stages of practice the sangha is especially important. George Quasha introduced me to the work of Chogyam Trungpa—Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is an improbably vital book. Shortly thereafter I met Bob Watkins, a true Zen man, who had studied with Suzuki Roshi and Kobun Chino Sensei. The work of Lucien Stryk has been critical to me, though I have never met him. Then, through Dan Gerber, I met Kobun himself, who has revived me a number of times. Through all of this I had the steadying companionship of Dan Gerber, who is currently my teacher. Without this succession (or modest lineage!) I’d be dead as a doornail, as I have been a man, at times, of intemperate habits. I’m still amazed how the world, with my cooperation, can knock me off Achala’s log back into the fire. There is something here of the child who, upon waking, thinks he can fly, even though he failed badly the day before.