Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  I don’t want to make too much of this experience but it is the writer’s first book in which are encapsulated the aggregate of his dreams from the entire life he has lived to this point. Thus far, in my case, I had not a printed word to offer up. I had had certain experiences that confirmed my grandmother Harrison’s often repeated notion that “life is a vale of woe.” I still give biscuits to stray dogs to placate the gods, identifying absurdly with stray dogs and wishing them to feel better. Ultimately we want a measure of vindication for all of the passionate energy we have given our art, a dangerous state of mind in that the craving for vindication leads to a blinding self-importance, the flip side being the self-pity that occurs when the vindication is never commensurate to the effort. I have often told young writers that if they depend on the collective media for reassurance they will be lost in the long periods when the media totally ignores them. I keep remembering a strange experience I had with my father about which I had written a short story in college in a faux Flannery O’Connor-Eudora Welty style. It was a very hot summer morning with the air looking yellow and an impending but as yet invisible storm, which often followed extreme heat. We visited a young farm family, a couple with a child who was severely impaired. We sat at a table in an airless room with worn linoleum and the child sat on the floor with its strangely shaped head pressed against the cool chromium skirt of a potbellied stove. The mother told us proudly the child was smart enough to keep its face cool. This was “the dark and troubled side of life” mentioned in a song we sang at school with a refrain of “keep on the sunny side.” This vision of the child has always been an inscrutable parable for me, a verbless image of reality forming a solid holographic picture.

  Meanwhile, I waited with my wife not all that long, and then the unquestionably good news came on W.W. Norton stationery. So there I was thrust into “success,” which is what getting a New York publisher is considered by poets. I couldn’t help but feel giddy and uncomfortable, the latter emphasized when I entered Grolier to spread my good news and sensed that I was no longer the same member of our group. We all became even better friends but I was no longer allowed the easy camaraderie of the woebegone. I did not fully understand this until later in my life when I suddenly made a bunch of money from Hollywood and I was no longer “Jim” who drove an ancient station wagon with mouse nests in the back. A new deference entered the air and I uncomfortably became “Mr. Harrison” to many.

  Despite the artistic light at the end of the tunnel (I liked it a few years ago when James Hillman said the idea that there is light at the end of the tunnel has been mostly a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers), after a year in Boston we were getting homesick for the country and a more familiar way of life that would, of course, exclude the academic. I drove all week long but still tried to summon the desire to get Linda out of our congested apartment neighborhood one day of the weekend. Our favorite route was west where we’d eat splendid fresh fried clams in Hopkinton, and then drive east from Holliston toward Dover. Several times we attended horse shows, as Linda had owned horses since she was seven right up to the still questionable moment when she married me. The horse shows, English style, were very fancy compared to the midwestern variety. We even attended a polo match up in Beverly, a sport that is unrecognized in terms of its superb athleticism. The gentry were quite friendly compared to what I thought one might expect. Of course this was 1963, before the over crowding in the Boston area made everyone more reticent and wary. I must say that I don’t recall any snobbism around Harvard to an outlander poet. Years later at a reading and dinner there I was seated next to its president, Derek Bok, who asked me if I might like to come there for a year but though it was tempting to be around so many brilliant people I was doing too well in Hollywood at the time and also depended on my hunting and fishing. After a couple of years at Harvard’s Widener Library my brother John moved on to become the science librarian at Yale and when visiting and doing a reading at Yale I found the aura to be much more abrasively snobbish than at Harvard. Further down the economic food chain Boston could be amusing. I’ve always been inclined toward the Irish and Italians and once when driving around a hellish Dorchester rotary a cabdriver started yelling and screaming at me. I pinned the cab to a curb with my car but when I walked up to his window my anger was disarmed. “Where you from anyway? You’re not supposed to get out of the car when you’re pissed off.” The local bar in Allston had a line of half a dozen pay phones and when I asked the bartender why he said, “Where you from anyway? You stupid? The phones are for the fucking bookies.” He was ceaselessly amused by my Michigan farmer’s slow speech, an accent he compared to that of the comedian Herb Shriner.

  Our favorite outing, usually overnight, was to Halibut Point, where J.D. Reed and his wife Carol, a fine painter, had moved from Concord. The summer of ‘64 in Boston seemed brutally hot and Halibut Point, a promontory into the Atlantic, was deliciously cool with its ocean breezes. I remember stooping with my daughter Jamie to gaze into a tidal pool and being struck by the profligate fertility of salt water compared to fresh, the tiny creatures with bizarre shapes crisscrossing the trapped water between tides. In Gloucester you could also buy a submarine sandwich stuffed with fresh lobster. J.D. had gotten to know Charles Olson and it was electrifying to spend time with this great man, one of the most fascinating poets in our literature. J.D. was a very large man, about six-four and three hundred pounds, but Charles quite literally dwarfed him. Both J.D. and Charles had been banned from a number of Gloucester bars for bad behavior so we always settled for a Portuguese bar whose single food item was “pussy stew two bucks,” a wonderful fish and shellfish stew. Charles was a hypnotic talker who urged me to read dozens of books, including Robert Duncan who later became a friend and mentor though I was totally unlike him as a poet. Eventually Robert was beside Charles in a deathbed vigil and wrote me a long diary-letter surrounding that sad event.

  The Boston area was lively with poetry in those days and I suppose it still is. I remember the exotic and brilliant Garett Lansing, the waif John Wieners, James Tate, Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and many others. Denise Levertov was in temporary residency at Radcliffe and introduced me to Adrienne Rich. I’ve often thought that these two fabulous women never got their due, say compared to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, who became famous for basically sociological reasons quite beyond their own control. I saw the same thing happen to Kerouac, also my friend Richard Brautigan (who loaned me enough money later to write my novel Farmer), and more recently to Jay Mclnerney. The media at large seizes these people to exhaustion and it is difficult to survive the misunderstanding of the actual work. The attention always seems anterior to the art in the case of Robert Lowell or Allen Ginsberg.

  Things were going well but we were getting fatigued with city life and had the sure understanding that we didn’t belong there. I had a number of poems accepted by The Nation and Poetry, the first appearances of my work. I was chosen for the YMHA Discovery Series, which was my first public reading and for which I took the train with Bill Corbett and J.D. to New York City. Corbett was a dapper Connecticut boy and was quite critical when I wore a black shirt to make a courtesy visit to George Brockway, then the president of Norton and a very imposing gentleman.

  By spring we were simply sick of urban life and I turned in my resignation. To this day I’m not sure what we had in mind other than the disastrously uncertain future of moving to northern Michigan where a college friend of mine, Lisle Earl, lived. I had a painful lunch at Lockeober’s with the owner of Campbell and Hall, Bushrod Campbell, an old New Englander out of Bowdoin who thought it was incomprehensible for me to leave with my “bright” future in the business. As a fibber since childhood I went to cowardly and unnecessary lengths saying my wife was having mental problems. A few months later when we were living in a junky thirty-five-dollar-a-month house in Kingsley and I was doing menial labor for two and a half dollars an hour I received a letter from National Shawmut Bank in Boston offer
ing to fly me out to interview for a position as a trust officer because one of their clients, Bushrod Campbell, had assured them that I was the man for the job. I was troubled rather than tempted. While mixing cement on a freezing dawn I wondered how I had managed to give this evidently convincing impression of competence. Of course many poets are “shape changers,” to use a Native American term. Wallace Stevens is an obvious example as is Ted Kooser, one of my favorite American poets, who was a vice president of an insurance company in Lincoln, Nebraska. And I’ve often thought that many of the poets I’ve known who are so brilliantly voluble would have made very good criminal-defense lawyers. Nonetheless, while trying to convince many that I was a poet, I had convinced the book wholesaler’s owner that I was a whiz at business.

  We loved the Kingsley area where we had towed the usual U-Haul trailer but not the macaroni-type diet that befell us. Kingsley is now mostly a suburb of sprawling Traverse City but in the mid-sixties it was a totally rural village surrounded by forests and not very prosperous farms, and two very good trout rivers, the fabled Boardman and the Manistee. The heart swelled with the beautiful landscape that would appear nondescript and scrubby to those who favor the cordillera of the Rockies but to me it was homeground, similar to the terrain around Reed City where I had grown up. Unfortunately the heart that swelled easily contracted at the prospect of making enough money for food and shelter. I was taken under the rumpled wing of Pat Paton, a part-time brick and block layer and builder who also worked the night shift at a factory in Traverse City, some twenty miles distant. In the morning we’d do everything from trimming Christmas trees to putting in foundations of houses and other cement work to roughing in and roofing houses. This didn’t quite add up to a living even with our cheap and drafty rental. The main trouble was in covering the monster fuel bill and still having something left over for groceries. I also wrecked our car so we were left on foot. Once in the middle of winter it was below zero and we ran out of fuel oil with no money to buy more and our savior Pat Paton hot-wired a fuel truck and gave us a free tank full.

  Another fool’s paradise was the twelve weeks that I collected fifty bucks for unemployment. Still, we were happy to be out of the city, though even with my writer’s efflorescing ego I could clearly spot doom on the horizon. The high point was in November when my first book, Plain Song, arrived. I smelled it for its new-book smell. I pressed it to my bare chest and had a drink. Pat had given us some venison and we celebrated with a half gallon of Gallo burgundy, a mainstay in those days.

  Our marginal lifestyle wasn’t frowned on locally because so many people in the community were equally poor. A friend, Jon Jackson, who later was to become a successful mystery writer, was trying to subsist on cabbage and potatoes. He stopped by on winter mornings with the newspaper hoping for a fried egg or two. Jamie was quite happy in kindergarten with plenty of friends so it would have been quite idyllic with the paycheck that I couldn’t muster. Tom McGuane, visited with his wife Becky to fish and we had a splendid time. They were fresh out of a year in Malaga in Spain and headed for Wallace Stegner’s esteemed writing program at Stanford. We began a mostly literary correspondence that continues to this day, in addition to becoming close friends. Sad to say the poverty that year in Kingsley became what is called “grinding.”

  If you think very deeply about your past you are back against Dostoyevsky’s wall in reverse, the wall as thick as your life has been long. Your duty to dash your head against this wall is neither here nor there because that is what you end up doing anyway. There is no more disarming absurdity than asking, “What if I had …” because it invariably deals with key events that affected every single day, however slightly, in the life that followed. Each day, let alone hours and minutes, owns its fatality and this is no more grim or not grim than any other natural biological fact. We don’t need clocks to tell us that. The old Zen man who said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes” knew his own phenology and the sun’s descensions draw us surely on with our increasingly melancholy birthdays. I can’t mentally withdraw that day I made an abysmally stupid decision because how it affected the rest of my life is clear to me, and the life I have lived since carries the weight of that inevitably forgivable stupidity. That’s life, we wisely say.

  I brought us from Boston to Kingsley out of that fated Portuguese notion of saudade, the place or person that draws out of us our most extreme and improbable yearning, no matter that it is a homesickness for a home that never quite existed, a longing for a prelapsarian, Adamic existence that the mind creates out of filaments of idealized memories, as if by finding a similar landscape I could return myself to a state before everyone started dying.

  In short, I am no less a fool for recognizing how foolish I was. When it was twenty below in Kingsley I could run a finger along a crack of the shabby wooden wall beside the bed and feel the nature of the outside. I would time the starts and stops of the decrepit furnace which could barely bring the house to sixty degrees. I could envision the nine dollars in my wallet. I would listen to the breathing of Linda and envy her acceptance of things as they were. I didn’t recognize it at the time but I was lucky that my upbringing cautioned strongly against self-importance which is the flip side of self-pity. I brooded with amazing competence and it had already occurred to me this might be due to the fact that I was half Swede. Of course I had read all of the fabled Strindberg, Sigrid Undset, Tomas Tranströmer the doomed Stig Dagerman whose suicide was incomprehensible because he had been living with the beautiful actress Harriet Anderson. I easily dismissed this genetic fancy as I viewed myself as a totally free man though studying Camus so strenuously in college had taught me that personal freedom could be problematic. I knew that in Kingsley we were living as well as my mother had lived with her sisters and parents. As a child I had carried my hot flat stone wrapped in a towel up the stairs to the unheated room that still held the steam trunks of the passage from Sweden. It is scarcely privation to feel the delicious warmth of a rock in a cold bed. We weren’t living as well as my father had provided for us but we weren’t all that far off the mark. I was understandably embarrassed when we visited my rather elegant in-laws in East Lansing, but when we got in the car to drive back north Linda was quite happy to return to the threadbare life I had unwittingly chosen for us. Love doesn’t conquer all but it conquers a lot. Romantic love has suffered a great deal of ridicule in recent decades but however illusive or illusionary it maintains the vigor of marriage. The fact that holding your wife’s hand after forty or so years of marriage sometimes sets your heart thumping suggests that together you may have done something right.

  In Kingsley I was often referred to as “Shakespeare” though not derisively. What else were they to think in this humble village with a New York-published poet in their midst, no matter that he was a construction worker who liked to hang out in the tavern with his friends. My boss and friend Pat Paton called me “Jim Indian” because my dark complexion became very dark with outside work. Occasionally in college I’d say I was part black to catch reactions. In recent years some actresses and other well-intentioned nitwits have taken to claiming they are part Cherokee but I’ve supposed that this is because Cherokee is the only tribal name they likely know. Actresses and others are much less likely to say that they are part black. Americans in particular regions are so often of mixed blood, partly because of the limited talent pool for their affections. When I saw Dorothy Dandridge in the movie Carmen Jones I was immediately in love.

  Sad to say, widely parodied aspects of the poet’s character seem as soundly based as the “mad scientist,” or the crazy painter, but then single-minded, obsessed people are susceptible to parody. If alcohol is the writer’s black lung disease, this seems particularly true of poets. When you add alcohol to other eccentricities such as logorrhea, womanizing, often more than a touch of manic depression, you easily come up with a wildly colored dodo bird who might benefit by being hosed down with lithium every morning. I’ve become a bit reclusive over t
he years and no longer travel in poets’ circles so I can’t say if this behavior still persists but it was certainly true in the sixties and seventies when so many poets were bent on following the fatal example of Dylan Thomas. Years later while doing readings in the Minneapolis area in the winter I was shown the site of John Berryman’s suicide and told that in his not very birdlike leap from the bridge he had managed to miss the water and hit the shelf ice. I’d like to make an exception for myself but I can’t. I was an “excitable boy,” worse than most but not quite as bad as some. You can’t make much that is less than comic out of men who when traveling are perpetually at their first night of the convention. Point the way to the good times and they’ll be there first no matter that at dawn they’re bleating and eating the rug. While writing this and straining to come up with exceptions I think of Robert Duncan who came closest to the term “naturally high,” or Gary Snyder who had a unilateral stability despite any amount of drink, while Charles Olson, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, and James Wright seemed set on some predestined self-destruction. James Wright appeared to suffer from a unique demon that he subdued well before his death.

  Trout fishing and grouse hunting maintained my often slumping spirits when nothing else would work except possibly my daughter Jamie and an English pointer puppy we had gotten from the dog pound. Though I’ve never cared for deer hunting, it was painful to miss an easy shot in Kingsley because of the lost meat involved. My cold evenings in a study I had set up in our attic were problematic in that I had begun to study fiction in the same kind of long process required in the writing of my poetry. I had stacks of “vignettes” but not much more, just as with poetry I had subsisted for years in the scraps of lines. When you are reading only the best the openings seem quite limited. What could I learn from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? Nothing that would work for me.