Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  In my own nickel-plated Zen self-training I have often wondered whether when you search for your own “true character” you might come up with something less than admirable. It is easy to number physical shortcomings from my blind left eye to the time when I was in my mid-fifties and my mother said to me, “We were sorry when you were a child and we couldn’t afford to have your leg fixed.” This was a fine comic moment in that I had never noted anything wrong with my leg except that when I tracked myself in the woods my left foot turned inward. She died without telling me what was wrong with the leg and I remained without particular curiosity. My face got smashed playing football without a face guard but this merely resulted in the uncomfortable redrilling of sinuses. Teeth were eventually lost to various impacts. High blood pressure was caused by the garden-variety vices of drinking too much, eating too much, and smoking too much. All of these are perhaps less viable than a very wide stupid streak, a tendency for lackadaisical drifting with an edge of pouting over the long periods of my life that were sorry indeed.

  These character deficiencies started early in life with a slowness to get up in the morning, a difficulty in dressing that still persists. O Christ the same bloody thing: underpants, socks, pants, shoes, trying to pull on socks over wet feet you forgot to dry after a shower. Falling back on the bed and reading something with the sock half on. The banality of belts and buttons. I was encouraged reading Graham Robb’s biography that my early hero Rimbaud hated buttoning his clothes so much that in Ethiopia he designed buttonless clothing for himself. Tying shoes is still a difficult chore. Of course it’s only the torpor of the ordinary that smart people adjust to. Last year in L.A. my longtime agent (over thirty years) and friend, Bob Dattila, showed me a methodical and easy way to dry after a shower but I quickly forgot the steps. It is impossible to see these problems in other but ludicrous light.

  When you add to all of these deficiencies a certain dog-in-the-manger quality of sitting back, preferably in one of hundreds of thickets, and waiting impatiently for something wonderful, however undeserved, to happen, you get close to the core of this lugubrious masochism. I, along with my family, would have been quite adrift if it weren’t for the essential Calvinism of background that made it unthinkable to be late for work, miss a plane, fail to finish an assignment, fail to pay a debt or be late for an appointment. I still remember painfully twenty-five years ago during a time of tunnel-vision depression that I failed to write a review of the poet David Wagoner for a magazine called Parnassus, also take my family to a picnic I had agreed to attend. We were driving through Sutton’s Bay and I could see only the road and none of the buildings on either side of the street, but then I don’t remember many other incidents other than the extreme pleasure of not doing assignments when I quit college for the fifth or sixth time.

  This benighted Calvinism can also make you hard on others who don’t have your devotion to the relentless clock. I asked my secretary to come at 9 A.M. and she’s now three minutes late! Dinner isn’t ready at six and I’m doing the cooking! If I consider myself as lazy as the ball of suet hanging from the bird feeder and have written twenty-some books, a hundred or so essays and reviews, many versions of twenty screenplays, then beware others and their excuses for doing even less. This is admittedly a bit crazy and there’s a smiling, miniature, whispering gryphon back in my brain hissing, “Who gives a fuck, go fishing.” The tombstone inscription “He Got His Work Done” is essentially sad and at the same time laughable.

  Anyone who has lived a reasonably full life and is not an outright fool must say, “It always could have been otherwise.” This is a good cautionary note for the kind of arrogance that is a permanent resident in the artist’s mind. For instance, my eye injury cost me my savings I had accumulated up through the middle of my senior year in high school. I had visited an eye surgeon who was as cold as a pump handle and he had assured me rather slickly that there was a good chance he could restore an appreciable amount of vision to my blind eye. Twenty years later I was told by a top surgeon in New York that this prognosis was absolute venal nonsense and that nothing was possible for this eye, which remained true until recently. Anyway, I spent the twelve hundred bucks I had accumulated at the rate of a dollar and a half an hour. I later appreciated the regret my parents felt over having no money to help out in that there were now five children in the small house what with Mary and David having come along.

  The operation was the most miserable failure conceivable and I spent two weeks in the hospital, the first of them totally blinded to keep my eyes still. The idea was to design an early version of a contact lens but this proved thickish and painful to install and wear and more important I couldn’t see a thing except a vague perception of the color green. I threw this plastic gizmo into the swamp out back of our house and quite naturally entered another depression, this one more dangerous as it had the tinge of the suicidal. I had spent the money that was going to get me to Paris via New York City where in a few weeks I would learn enough of the French language to get by at my final destination.

  This is a rather Dickensian story and it has occurred to me a number of times that on a strictly biographical basis three-quarters of the world might be tempted by suicide. I’m a little nervous about the Heraclitus notion that “a man’s character is his fate” which, though suitably wise, ignores the alternative of what fate does to people irrespective of their character. I have mentioned some disarmingly muddy aspects of my character but I scarcely wielded the bottle that gored out my eye, or designed the genes that determined my imperfect leg. In fancy Los Angeles hotel rooms there is always an uncomfortable number of mirrors that remind us why we are not movie stars. There is even the designed presumption that we are all narcissistic enough to wish to watch ourselves on the toilet as if this is as close as any of us will get to sitting on a throne. Every morning my beloved English setter, Rose, heads for the myrtle bed with its violet-colored flowers, and while she does her necessary function she gazes off to the songbirds fluttering in the young cottonwoods, the mesquite and hackberry trees.

  I have no area of expertise outside of my imagination but that has to be enough because that’s what I have. Once during a dark time my father and I were fishing for a mess of lowly but delicious blue-gills. This was in the early summer a few months after my unsuccessful operation. We were up north to put in their first indoor toilet for my aged grandparents, and had taken a break from our work to catch fish for dinner, a favorite item for the old Swedes. My father was concerned about the time length of my melancholy state and while we fished I was asking him about the odors in the air from the flora along the shore where clouds of redwing blackbirds were noisily floating over the cattails. He had an uncanny ability to identify weeds, flowers, bushes by smell, and he suddenly said that curiosity will get you through hard times when nothing else will. Your curiosity had to be strong enough to lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.

  I hadn’t specifically thought about curiosity in this manner but knew from experience what he said was true. A month or so after the operation when there seemed to be a hot nail in my eyeball I was sitting out on a log in a woodlot for several hours. It was a warm, late April afternoon heavy with the scent of dogwood buds. I was thinking about my first love who had recently abandoned me because I was unwilling to marry right after high school. Such girls wouldn’t sleep with you in those days, being of a religious nature, but were certainly eager to be in a state where sex was permissible and that could only mean marriage. You would neck, paw, and grind until your dick was an abraded, skinless hot dog but the results were inconclusive.

  After a long time sitting on a log, perhaps an hour, my mind emptied out into the landscape and my preoccupations with the girl and other problems leaked away. In the stillness garter snakes emerged to feed on flies that buzzed close to the ground among dead leaves and burgeoning greenery. Bird
s came very close because I had been so still in my sumpish reveries I had ceased to exist to the birds, and gradually to myself. I had become nature, and the brain that fueled my various torments had decided to take a rest by leaving my body and existing playfully in the landscape. The air became warmer and moister, so much so that it seemed densely palpable, swollen enough to touch. It did not so much begin to rain as the air quite suddenly became full of water. Given the circumstances the rain could not help but be a baptism. The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.

  When you’ve been involved in only the low- to mid-range arena of human suffering you become puzzled by what those at the top have developed in the sense of the compensatory in order to endure. In my own limited experience I have noted that physical pain is more endurable than mental. You retreat into your animal body when part of you hurts badly and this remnant of an ancient life seems to help you distance yourself a bit from the pain. When I was seven and the postoperative “discomfort” (a medical term) was severe I could swim, walk as far as possible in the woods, or simply lie down and curl up beneath fern level, or if it came at night, I could be swept away by the wind, or more especially the blessed sound of rain on the cabin roof only a few feet from my head because I slept in the loft.

  I have clocked seven depressions in my life that might qualify as “clinical” beginning at the age of fourteen. There is the obvious conclusion that in each case I was behaving in a way I shouldn’t preceding the depression, living an outward life my inward being couldn’t accept, reaching a level of raw perception that my current life couldn’t accommodate. I’m certainly not saying that I understand this phenomenon in a larger sense, only in my own peculiar life. The most consistent feeling is suffocation, lack of oxygen, an atrophication of the strange breathing apparatus of the soul life. I quite realize that all of this is ordinarily treated by drugs, chemicals, but then as a writer my life depends on my perceptions and I’ve never felt that drugs were an operable alternative. I tried Valium in my thirties but there was the persistent visual image that I had become dead meat wrapped in plastic in a supermarket. I couldn’t write any language that retained its music, raise a good memory, or truly admire anything I read.

  I admit that I never had thought very deeply about the idea of family until a recent Sunday morning, with the vague circadian remnants of all of the early Sunday mornings of my life. Even with church no longer in the prospect it is still somehow there, also the special Sunday-morning sweet rolls, well frosted, that my mother would bake and then sometimes split and fry in butter. My father liked to make buckwheat pancakes and our house in Reed City had enough maple trees to tap that we would make our own maple syrup. My father also liked to fry up pans of salt pork and side pork but when we moved south one hundred fifty miles from Reed City to near Haslett these items began disappearing from our diet, as did the Saturday-night glories of herring and beans.

  But that Sunday morning I skipped work and thoughts of church and we took our dogs south a dozen miles to the grand San Raphael Valley that borders Mexico. Our small casita near Patagonia, Arizona, is in the mountains on a creek, surrounded by a huge dude ranch, the Circle Z, on which we have walking privileges. There’s no reason to go anyplace else except for reasons of curiosity and the rare late fall rains, and intermittent winter rains, have germinated and produced a bounty and variety of wildflowers we hadn’t seen in our dozen winters here.

  The vast San Raphael Valley was utterly empty this Sunday morning—we didn’t see a single soul—and my English setter, Rose, ran off to satisfy her own curiosity which is what she does when quail season is finished and I’m not carrying a shotgun. My wife strolled away with her English cocker, Mary, and I walked along looking at the ground and certain barely emerging minuscule flowers I had never seen before. I thought of my mother and her obsession with birds and wildflowers and then I looked upward and south across the pale green valley into Mexico, reflecting on the very apparent gift the Mexicans have for family life. I’ve been down there a fair amount and Patagonia itself is about half Chicano. Mexicans have a closeness and intensity of family life that seems to make us northerners cold fish indeed. It also occurred to me that nearly everything you hear about Mexicans in the great north is utterly untrue.

  When they were available in the gully near our home in Reed City or at our cabin I always picked wildflowers for my mother when she was irritated with me which was frequently in the years immediately after my eye injury. Perhaps I had been a bit spoiled by the attention my eye injury had brought me but then this somewhat erratic behavior had continued under the truly questionable self-righteousness of the strongly willed.

  We all got along fairly well and what is called “sibling rivalry” was nonexistent. The house in Haslett was smallish compared to that in Reed City but it was the size my parents could afford. I’ve often wondered if my parents wanted five children because that was the number in the families they grew up in. With seven people in a small house with one bathroom you have to maintain a specific etiquette. I’m foolish enough to have always had seven as a lucky number even though I know very well there are no magic numbers. Magic is in the whole life and is not detachable. If I repeat a prayer seven times on an airplane it’s because I’m always a little surprised when I survive an airplane trip. At age ten I flew with my friend David Kilmer and his brother and father, a well-heeled doctor, from the airport in Big Rapids, which was twelve miles from Reed City, down to Meigs Field in Chicago because Dr. Kilmer wanted us to see a train exhibition and to visit the Field Museum. Dr. Kilmer flew a Stinson Voyager and was reputed to be a little impulsive, having wrecked a plane in Canada the year before while moose hunting. We came into Meigs Field, which is an island, broadside to a big wind and the plane started wobbling severely. The Stinson didn’t seem to have enough power to pull us out of the wind gusts, and we touched down and began turning cartwheels, which ripped off the wings of the plane. We then skidded upside down to the water’s edge of this island airport. We were hanging upside down in our seat belts and I noticed that my lace-up shoes had somehow come off. A fire truck came and covered the Stinson with foam. The only injury was a slight cut to the doctor’s head and we managed to visit both the train exhibition and the Field Museum. It was truly wonderful when we got our picture in the Chicago Tribune. The whole experience was exciting rather than traumatic to a ten-year-old.

  Through the passage of time you pull well away and look at the family almost anthropologically. The house becomes a den where seven primates happened to live. There was no television until well after I left home so the family played cards, games like Scrabble, or read, both good literature and bad. My father liked the historical novels of Hervey Allen and Walter Edmonds though I also remember him reading Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson. My mother loved Willa Cather but this did not prevent her from stooping to Edna Ferber and Taylor Caldwell, then rising again to John O’Hara. There’s a great deal of nonsense now about how our children can’t read but then how could they in their terms of imitative behavior if their parents don’t read and there are no books in the house? If books aren’t treated as beloved objects like the sports page or the television why would a child wish to read? You wonder how disgustingly low-paid teachers must spend their lives trying to overcome parental stupidity, but then in our money culture everything is considered merry and bright if the parents show up for their often dismal jobs on time.

  I suspect that nothing is idyllic except in retrospect. (The ugly phrase “nuclear family” shows the paucity of imagination among sociologists.) You are tardily thankful that you grew up in a close and loving family only when it becomes apparent that so many haven’t had the same luck. All of us kissed each parent good night. When I was sixteen and finally admitted to my father I intended to be a writer he promptly went out and bought me a twenty-buck used typewriter rather than giving the usual parental lecture on practicality and the doom and shame in the liv
es of artists. He wasn’t particularly upset when I quit college for a while after my freshman year because he told me that he knew my heroes Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner had backed away from college. To tease me he added Hemingway, knowing I didn’t care for this author who seemed to me a kind of woodstove that didn’t give off much heat. He told me about trout fishing with a relative of Hemingway’s who was worried that cousin Ernest was off wasting his life in Europe. That statement made me more curious and sympathetic about Hemingway because I wanted to run off to Europe and waste my life, doubtless ending up in a garret with one of those long-necked Modigliani models as the thought of them tended to give me a hard-on even when I was out hoeing the garden or digging a new garbage pit. When I first lived in New York at nineteen I admit my eyes brimmed when I finally saw an original Modigliani in a museum.