Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  The stone house on the farm or the high hill a few miles from the village of Lake Leelanau struck us as paradise. From the dining room table we could look off to the west at Lake Michigan and see the green Manitou Islands, and sometimes South Fox forty miles distant. The farm was mostly a cherry orchard with a wide hillside field in alfalfa, and other fruit trees near the house, apples, peaches, and pears, and a garden spot. We had found the place by running an ad in a local newspaper with the usual “writer on grant needs house” and we were a little dumbfounded by the results, which included nice carpeting, and staring at sunsets, and the passing iron-ore boats out in the Manitou passage.

  Leelanau County in the mid-sixties was short of the hordes of tourists who currently afflict it. The county is a hilly and verdant forty-five-mile-long peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan with general agriculture to the south and mostly cherry and apple orchards past the midpoint to the north. To the west along the coast the government had nearly completed a seventy-mile-long national lake-shore that gave the public access to a grand block of water and hilly forests. Our entry into this splendid world was a seventy-dollar-a-month rent and my help in hitching up farm machinery as the landlord had arthritic hands. I was also asked to help with the Mexican cherry-picking families who were coming soon after my arrival. Most of them were arriving from Texas as they had done on this farm for several decades. They lived in quarters out back and during harvest I was enthralled sitting on our porch and listening to the guitar playing and singing in the evening. When we first moved in seven-year-old Jamie sat me down and said she was tired of changing schools and could we please stay in this place? I said yes.

  The trouble in paradise was absurdly obvious but I was slow to recognize its ramifications. You finally open the cage for the animal and it’s not sure it wishes to leave. I had been churning along like a burly terrier with working and school since the age of fourteen. Only lately have I noted the limits of tenacity, the lack of subtlety in my direct approach. A year’s freedom was beyond my ken and then it had acquired all of the muted and questionable colors of an answered prayer. The deep maudlin streak I had inherited from my father mixed nicely with my notions of “terrible freedom” that I had adopted from my study of Camus. When I had read Milne to my daughter and come upon the character of the donkey Eeyore (“All I get is thistles”) my ears tingled with embarrassment.

  I fished. I ran our dog Missy who recaptured her essential English-pointer wildness in the country. When called back to the yard she often elected to jump over the hood of the car in the driveway. I fished again and again, traveling south toward Kingsley to the Boardman and Manistee rivers to fly-fish for trout. I hiked the coastal shoreline, lay in the sand pockets of the huge dunes, and wondered what came next and whether my scattered mind was capable of a novel. My proper sense of intimidation came from having read the best. When you have relentlessly fed yourself on Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Melville, Faulkner, Stendhal, and so on, you have climbed on a very tall horse that is difficult to dismount in order to find your own proper size. I was also mindful of Pound’s dictum that writers fail when they start from too narrow a base.

  An idle man can generate immense quantities of hubris in his daydreaming. I kept remembering Ungaretti’s line “voremmo una certezza” (give us a certainty) when I should have known that matter is better cast aside in favor of Keats’s “negative capability.” “Being right” is better left to lawyers and businessmen whose livelihoods depend on it. Ironies abound and proliferate much faster than answers. The questions grow even more immense while answers tend to diminish in power. Sinclair Lewis could write properly and correctly about the inhabitants of Main Street but it also makes the novel one that you didn’t care to reread, while you tend to return again and again to the mysteries of Faulkner. Being right in fiction also presupposes that you will inevitably be vindicated as a writer, in itself a farfetched proposition.

  So a glorious summer began to move along quickly and my mind was like a sparsely attended restaurant where the service is always slow or downright bad. The solution that arrived was one that a nitwit could have come up with: travel. When your mind is suffocating in its own sludge, move it. I returned to the Upper Peninsula with Pat Paton and this time we took along Dan Gerber. The trip was nearly a bust with especially rank weather but served to remind me that I had found a retreat that has lasted until this day. Gerber and I had been planning a literary magazine to be called Sumac, innocently unaware of the ghastly amount of work involved. Reading the submissions reminded me of the trunk full of student papers I had taken to the dump back when I taught English as a foreign language. We persisted through nine issues and twenty-one books including Duncan’s The Truth and Life of Myth. We published a number of fine poets including Robert Duncan, Charles Simic, Hayden Carruth, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Richard Hugo, Diane Wakoski, and James Welch but were finally worn out by the process and besides, I had to make a living, which required all my time. I had also become a little puzzled when publication in our little magazine was being used as a credential by poets working in college English departments.

  When we returned from our week’s trip to the Upper Peninsula Tom McGuane called from Montana offering a horseback trip with a rancher he knew into the Absaroka Mountain wilderness. All we had to do was help the rancher-guide check out his elk stake camps for the coming season. Ever foolhardy I agreed. McGuane and Gerber were experienced riders but I hadn’t been on a horse in a very long time. It was a splendid, occasionally frightening trip. Of the ten days out several were spent encamped in areas where Yellowstone Park dispatched their troublesome grizzlies. More unnerving to me were the skinny trails across the precipitous scree, knowing that if my horse, with the unlikely name of Brother-in-Law, tripped I would become an especially bruised form of mincemeat. Let’s just say that I was a brave man with a very purple ass from the riding in which I learned to stay saddled while Brother-in-Law took his pleasure by jumping over every log or deadfall he could locate. Halfway through the trip I ran out of cigarettes and whiskey, a form of suffering meaningless to the body-Nazis who now infest America. Naturally when we got back to Livingston we headed for a saloon and then to a cathouse run by a wonderful woman named Sally Dollarhide, and where I eventually met the governor of Montana. I’d feel much better about politicians if they spent less time counting their extortionary soft money and more time in whorehouses. The real value of the trip other than the purging effects of wilderness was the relentless talk about fiction with McGuane, continuing our marathon talks between Stony Brook and Palo Alto. Wanting to play from strength I was yet unwilling to admit I intended to write fiction for the reason that I was feeling cramped in poetry and writing from my own viewpoint. I was frankly withering waiting for the next poem to edge over the lip of my consciousness. I liked the idea of becoming many people by writing a novel, and when I wore out one set I could invent another.

  * * *

  In the spring of my first year of liberation, and with my National Endowment grant running toward its end, we traveled down to Summerland Key in the Florida Keys where Tom and Becky McGuane had a rental home. McGuane’s novel, The Sporting Club, had just come out to good reviews and I had wangled the chance to write about it for the Detroit Free Press. We thought we’d write the review together in the grand tradition of Walt Whitman writing his own best reviews. A certain modesty crept in and we were paralyzed. Richard Locke, Tom’s editor, thought it the muddiest notice the book received.

  Summerland began my lengthy love affair with the Florida Keys, which ended only in the early nineties when Key West became too crowded for my taste. It was mostly the splendor of flats fishing, polling the skiff in the shallow tidal flats surrounded by mangrove islets while looking for tarpon, bonefish, and permit. The bird life and marine life, the sweep and grandeur of the sea, seized your entire being to the extent that you thought of nothing else. The hundreds of variations of turquoise and beige on the flats and the deep blue tidal channels beca
me home for a month a year for twenty years.

  Key West in the seventies and eighties was a bit of a literary capital, so that you had the peculiar combinations of a first-rate sporting life in the closest proximity with a sprawling colony of writers and musicians. Many of the major writers like Tennessee Williams and Jimmy Merrill and dozens of others were gay but that gave the air an energetic sense of rebellion before the revolution that was to follow. I recall light and mutual teasing but nothing more. Once when seated next to Tennessee on a flight to New York, fueled by morning cocktails, we talked very loudly and behaved badly but then several others on the plane were complimentary over the entertainment we offered. I was impressed when two stewardesses sang a show tune with Tennessee to cover his braying questions of whether I thought cocaine was good for a writer’s work. Years later when Truman Capote made an extended trip to Key West and we spent time together he refused to fully explain his long-term quarrel with Tennessee saying only, “We’re all vile.” Since I have lived largely in remote areas I’ve often wondered if there is that easygoing companionship between straight and gay writers in big cities like there was in Key West. It was a wide-open arena for questionable behavior on anyone’s part. One evening someone had given me a garbage bag of Colombian buds, which I stored in the shrubbery before going into Howie’s to hear Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker, both in the early stages of their careers. It was on my second visit to McGuane in Key West that I met Guy de la Valdéne and Jimmy Buffett, both of whom became lifelong friends.

  We left Summerland with the creaky but familiar feeling that we were broke again. Linda took this more gracefully than her brooding husband. We flew to Lansing, picked up our car at my in-laws where there was the unworded question of what our next questionable move would be. We drove north in a nasty April snowstorm, stopping at the Lake Leelanau post office to pick up the mail. I remember looking at Jamie playing with her accumulation of Florida seashells in the backseat with piles of books beside her. Among the many letters in the backed-up mail was a critical one from the Guggenheim Foundation announcing I had been given a year’s grant, effective immediately if I wished. I had expected a rejection based on my assumption that I was unlikely to get grants two years in a row despite the fine critical reception I had gotten for my second book of poems, Locations. Naturally we were enthralled, not the least for my promise to Jamie that she could stay in the same school. How clearly adults I’ve met remember broken promises from childhood. If you tell your child you’re going to build a tree house, build it, or you’ll live forever in modest infamy.

  I had already begun my third book of poems, Outlyer, though it was going slowly as I kept being haunted by a Pasternak aphorism, “Despite all appearances it takes a lot of volume to fill a life.” We had a pleasant trip to England with the Gerbers, my first trip overseas, which gave me a taste for more. We had a nice walk on Hampstead Heath with M. L. Rosenthal who showed me some Keats haunts. Since Keats was the first germinal poet of my life my skin tingled somewhat childishly to identify the critical “place” of the poet. I felt nearly the same in the Lake Country with Wordsworth whose “The Prelude” I worshiped.

  I was, however, beginning to feel a little awkward with the professional poet’s life. Once during an impressive lunch (the guests, not the food) in New York City hosted by James Laughlin I had looked down the table at Barbara Guest, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and speculated idly on what everyone did all day every day. My own sidelines of fishing and bird hunting failed to answer Pasternak’s aphorism, but then perhaps the two grant years I was indulged in at least gave me the time to sort out what might be my life’s work. I’m mindful that few writers ever get that kind of freedom from immediate obligations. I had certainly found that the vaunted academic’s life had left me less freedom in terms of time and enervation than working as a book salesman or as a hod carrier. Both jobs and grants buy time but the latter more so, pure and simple. Years later when Congress was carping about the National Endowment, and especially individual grants to artists and writers, it occurred to me that government funds had initially sprung me into a life where I ended up paying millions of dollars in income tax, enough to cover hundreds of their paltry grants. Patronage of whatever kind is critical if we wish artists of all kinds to give us a life generally above the sump of ordinary greed and political chiseling.

  I must say I was never very good at the care and nurturing of a career. In New York City I seemed to favor saloons and restaurants over literary events and parties. That summer after England I made a mistake in judgment of sorts. Alfred Kazin was going to be in the Traverse City area visiting a friend and hoped I would have time to show him around the “landscape” of my work. If I had been more ambitious I would have hung in there for Alfred’s arrival but instead went off to Montana trout fishing with McGuane. Kazin was offended and I never heard from him again except for a tersely negative note on my second novel, A Good Day to Die, suggesting that such characters couldn’t exist (whacked-out Vietnam veterans had been arriving in Key West rather than entering academic life and I had written about one who tried to blow up a dam—this was in 1971).

  I have no admiration for myself when I write about such matters but America is scarcely a classless society. I grew up in a family not all that far from the edge of poverty that was definitely there in my Swedish grandparents, and pretty close in my father’s family. No one on either side of the family had been to college except my father whose original aim was to study cattle and raise them on his own farm, something he could never afford. When he died at age fifty-three I recall he was making a little more than nine grand a year, sparingly enough to raise five children. I have generally favored the company of so-called working people in the taverns of the places I have lived. I have a few comparatively rich friends who are all quite comfortable in the same taverns I habituate. Some of them are what a realtor friend calls “lucky sperm,” people who are rich from reasons of parentage. I’ve never known an actor, a truly famous person, more comfortable with ordinary people than Jack Nicholson, who comes from a lineage of railroad workers and beauticians. I occasionally find it ironic that I’ve developed a taste for fine food and wine. I have gladly paid a thousand-dollar check for a meal for friends but I wouldn’t go more than a few hundred bucks for a sport coat or suit. I don’t see the point of making much of one’s humble “roots” (maybe to win a boozy argument) because you’re no more responsible than someone with inherited wealth. It’s a little like people telling you all the bad habits they’ve given up It’s what you do, not what you don’t do.

  Lucky for me I fell off a cliff, or a near cliff, that autumn of my Guggenheim year while bird hunting with my dog Missy, really a high, steep bank of the Manistee River, the kind of bank where the clay looks dry but barely under the surface it’s slippery and wet. I took a tumble ending up with my legs in the cold late-October water. The pain in my lower back was immediate and it took over an hour to crawl and stumble to the car. I would have stopped at a store for a pint of whiskey but I couldn’t gamble on getting out of the car let alone back in.

  I spent a couple of days on our living room floor drinking whiskey out of a hospital straw and crawling to the toilet. With my very strong aversions to hospitals coming from lengthy stays at ages seven and eighteen I created an intuition that I could recover in a few days on the floor. Linda got sick of it and quite suddenly our old country doctor showed up, shot me full of Demerol, and I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital in Traverse City where I was suspended in traction for several weeks, came home, and then suffered a severe penicillin reaction from the treatment of an infection. All my joints were swollen up with rheumatoid arthritis, which further aggravated the torn muscle in my back. I lapsed into a semi-coma for several days in which I was sure Gary Snyder had visited for a soothing chat though he remained in California. Snyder and I had done a college reading together and had had a grand time. I ended up losing nearly forty pounds because, ever th
e nascent gourmand, I couldn’t bear hospital food. When I got out of the hospital for good it was suddenly winter and I definitely wasn’t mobile. I had to wear an involved corset that stretched from my breasts to my hips and was overwhelmingly unsexy throughout the two years I had to wear it.