Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  I say “lucky” in regard to this injury since I have doubts that without it I would have settled down enough to write novels. During the first week of my extended convalescence I spoke with McGuane on the phone and he suggested that it was time to write a novel since I could no longer do anything to avoid it. I already had been writing longer poems in the musical form of “suites” so I began by sketching a wordless, rhythmical diagram of the planned novel to be called Wolf, with the subtitle “A False Memoir” intended to throw off the obvious scent that the novel was helplessly autobiographical. Later on I read of the alarming surprise for the poet when he discovers that it’s his own story that is true, though I mentally added that this story was something you had to get out of the way so you could proceed to more interesting venues, which meant other people.

  Off I went typing with two forefingers on the old Remington my father had given me years before, and on which I had been reasonably adept before my work as a hod carrier had done something injurious to the tendons in my hands. Say the construction site is muddy, thus you have to wheelbarrow twelve hundred concrete blocks to the excavation site. That particular day you ended up handling thirty tons twice which is quite an aid to the appetite, also an inspiration to go back to the university, but your hands have become quite a mess and it is quite clear you’ll never be a watchmaker or surgeon. This lack of typing ability made the process laborious because I first diddled with the sentences longhand and there was the poet’s urge to make sure they had internal music. I was curiously without expectations for the novel so I felt a great deal of the pleasure of freedom which gave me additional energy.

  When I finished the novel my grant was exhausted and we had no money to have a copy made, a dollar a page at the time. I sent it to my brother in New Haven on the eve of a mail strike so that the manuscript was lost for several weeks. Thankfully my brother John had an authoritative presence, to put it mildly, and the mail officials allowed him to dig through the mountainous bins at the New Haven post office and he found it, copied the manuscript, and forwarded it to Alex Nelson at Simon & Schuster and the novel was quickly accepted. I didn’t have an agent and certainly learned how necessary one is. From then on I depended on Bob Dattila and learned there were advantages to having a Sicilian agent for reasons of tenacity and the ability to break ordinary rules in our favor.

  There is an implicit deceit in events that from the outside seems to smother the interior origin of the event. You can listen carefully to what people are saying but you’re missing a great deal unless you are speculating with concentration on why they are saying it. There is a wonderful “brainlessness” to novel writing. I mean that you are using so much of your mind you forget that it exists. You’re balancing a construct that daily grows longer, almost unconsciously keeping track of a thousand pieces and gestures with no real eye on the last page because your immersion in the process is total. Beginnings and endings are the most artificial parts of the process. The expectations about publishing the results become far from the point because you are filled and fueled by memories, images, dreams, modest visions, the emotional content of your most passionate reading, all of which sweeps you away more deeply into your invention. When it is the first novel, and assuming you are not witless, you know very well that the odds of your work being published are ten thousand to one against, and even when it is published the reactions from friends and relatives are often puzzled and evasive. The hero of Wolf is not an altogether pleasant character. Full to the brim with social and emotional rage he camps out in the Upper Peninsula while looking for a remnant wolf (they were only rumored back in the sixties before numbers of them migrated from the west through Wisconsin from Minnesota, and across the ice in the east from Canada). My hero, Swanson, recounts his questionable life, which caused nervous unrest in many readers. After a couple of my novels were published my Swede mother asked me, “Why can’t your characters have normal sex?” but then a few years ago before she died she said, “You’ve made quite a living out of your fibs.” Norse compliments can be a bit thin and coolish.

  The novel, however, did fairly well, going into two printings and offering me a smallish territory in the map of contemporary fiction writing where “poet novels” are rarely welcomed or seriously considered. Fiction writers tend to view themselves as made of rougher stuff, wry and cynical, striated with ironies, perhaps more manly and less capable of the ebullience poets can show in their life and work. I have found, though, that many fiction writers begin with poetry, or at least commit a few poems to paper, and this long list includes Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, and Matthiessen. Younger fiction writers fret that the genre is already overfull without the incursion of poets stealing the scant review space. There’s a certain kind of writer who tends to think that anyone else’s good review detracts from the future prospects of theirs. The territorialism of the creature world, say a pack of cow dogs, is equally present. I have noticed it moving back and forth between the genres of poetry and fiction, sporting and nature journalism, screenplays, children’s books, and food writing. There’s a specific resistance into letting you into the different clubs that is sometimes amusing, sometimes not. Sniffs, growls, barks. Like the new kid at school, the new dog is not always welcome.

  Our stone-house paradise on the hill came to an end. Our landlord’s daughter and son-in-law were returning to the area and we had to give up our home on relatively short notice. We were desperate, but Dan Gerber stepped in with an offer to loan us a down payment on a farm. We were mindful of our promise to Jamie that we would stay in the same school district. During the search we lived in our friends the Patons’ garage down in Kingsley where our second daughter, Anna, was conceived. We finally located a small farm, really the only thing for sale in our price range. This house was more than a bit rickety, but there was a fine bam and a granary that I made into a studio. The monthly payments were ninety-nine dollars and forty cents, an amount that was occasionally hard to muster. All in all, though, we were quite happy in our first home. Linda had grown up fairly stylishly but her hope had always been to live on a farm with dogs, cats, horses, and chickens. The down payment was eight thousand five hundred dollars. It is melancholy to think how far afield young writers must go now to live cheaply, though there’s always Mexico, which, notwithstanding its problems, I think of as a glorious destination and culture quite without the backspin of living within the empire.

  We were thrilled indeed when Anna was born. Under the assumption that we would eventually afford to have another child we had waited ten years and when the money seemed unlikely we went ahead anyway. I’ve always become quite irked when asked if I hadn’t wanted a son, partly because it was hard on my mother and her four sisters to know that their own father had wished for a son to help on the farm. The birth of a new child is an incalculable mystery that has nothing to do with gender. His or her character becomes immediately permanent and you love him or her with your entire being. You simply don’t even think of him or her being someone else. I suppose the anger surrounding this singular stupid question is similar to that of a childless couple who wish no children or can’t have them and are frequently asked, “Where’s the baby?” It is especially heartless when you think of the unwanted children in the world, born to be waifs, perhaps a billion of them.

  Jamie at age ten was helpful as I had had to be with two younger sisters and a younger brother. Anna was extremely willful. We had to hold her down on the floor to give her medicine. She would eat or not eat her meals as she wished and there was nothing we could do about it. Her first words were to growl like our two Airedales, Hud and Jessie. She liked to go to the tavern with me where the owner, Dick Plamondon, would show her magic tricks. Once when she was about three we had dressed her in her Sunday best for a visit from the in-laws. She became naughty so I took her for a ride down to the beach. She wanted to swim and I explained, “Maybe in the afternoon” and she suddenly walked into the water up to her neck, turned back to me, and glared. Since it was any
way too late I thought, “Why not?” Both of our daughters, probably due to a strong mother and an indulgent father, have been feminists since birth, a charming but rather firm “don’t push me, asshole” implicit in their attitude toward men, culture, and authority. With Anna this nonironical clarity of purpose gave her complete control over our dogs, something we were unable to manage. A terrier can behave beautifully at obedience school but bringing it back home to the property it believes it owns is another matter. That’s when you need a girl with the character of a terrier and not a trace of the wishy-washy to take over the problem. Much later in life I thought of doing a piece called “Writers and their Bird Dogs.” While we were hunting in Montana I had watched with amusement Richard Ford trying to catch his young Brittany but then a month later in Michigan I had broken my foot trying to catch my Lab. Neither Carl Lewis nor Michael Johnson can catch a bird dog. With a writer it’s “Please come here, Rusty, I’m having a hard time today what with a dozen inconclusive faxes and e-mails plus a nasty call from New York. Rusty, today I was thinking of that Aldous Huxley character who had a soul like a ‘tenuous membrane.’ Maybe that’s me but it’s a bit self-serving. Rusty, I beg you!”

  Thus at thirty I was finally launched in poetry and the novel with the firm but thoroughly unproven conviction that I could have an old-fashioned career as a full-time literary writer who didn’t have to stray from his calling to make a living. It was a meaninglessly untried ideal drawn from literary history where you read of the victorious, not of the thousands who failed and disappeared. In admitting it there’s a trace of a story my dad told me once while we were fishing about a yokel neighbor who had gotten up in a church meeting and had confessed with profuse sobs that he had burned down the school outhouse as a teenager thirty years ago before. After twenty-five books, a hundred or so essays, and numerous versions of fifteen screenplays, a profession I quit some years ago, I finally can make a good living as a poet and novelist just a year short of the normal retirement age of sixty-five. I don’t offer any personal deference to my productivity because, having refused to do anything else, what was I to do with my time? Now it’s a Newtonian principle where you can’t stop the object in motion that wishes to stay in motion until it meets an immovable force like the grave, becomes a “dirt napper,” an Arkansas idiom for the dead. I feel lucky after watching what happens to so many retirees. They become jumpy, anxiety-ridden, perplexed, apprehensive, flat bored until they find something new to do, much like a writer who finishes a grand work and reenters ordinary reality in the halting steps of a zombie facing imminent sunrise.

  The years came and went as is their habit. It’s hard to see a succession of yesterdays when it’s clearly a continuum broken by nights of sleep. The fact that we spent nearly a decade more than a few steps beneath the median income no longer seems extraordinary when it is stretched out to more than a half a lifetime totally within a free-market economy. Right-wingers make a big deal about this but I haven’t been able to isolate any pure virtue in doing what you want as opposed to doing what the culture thinks you should do. If the country is going to slide seven billion dollars a year to farmers why the relentless carping about one percent of that amount for the arts?

  Living on the edge required more attention than I had left over from my writing. I had begun to write a few outdoor essays or columns for the back pages of Sports Illustrated, the intent being to earn free time for novels and poetry, but like any other family at our earning level we had deadly extra items like antibiotic prescriptions, flute payments for Jamie and eventually for Anna, a fender bender when the insurance had lapsed, vet bills for the dogs, cats, and our budget horses. I also noticed the time it took to research and write an essay required nearly all the money you got paid. This is the usual story I read about the American family below the median who are perpetually one paycheck away from disaster. I at least didn’t have the temptation of credit cards because I wasn’t eligible. Grocery shopping was a careful project but then this had the good effect of sharpening our cooking skills. Linda also kept a very large vegetable garden which I spaded in the spring. Mindless manual labor can be very soothing if some attention is required. You have to watch what you’re doing when you hoe. And when you cultivate com from the distance of a tractor seat a sex fantasy can tear out a whole row. The slightest good news would promote a celebration with friends, a paycheck, a good review, a few hundred bucks for a book of poems, and most of all an advance on a novel of a couple grand. When I did my first column on horse-pulling contests for Sports Illustrated, which was easy since I had watched them since childhood, the twelve-hundred-dollar payment seemed lavish. We packed the car and drove to Montana to fish and visit the McGuanes’ small ranch.

  Sports Illustrated also financed a number of my spring fishing trips to Key West. Guy de la Valdéne owned a skiff and had rented a house and we would fish all day thirty days in a row, often joined by the painter Russell Chatham from Montana who had become a friend. At the time McGuane had had some movie-business success and was directing a film from his own novel 92 in the Shade so had to temporarily give up fishing. Key West had also helped Gerber, McGuane, and de la Valdéne to develop marital problems at the time. It was an island totally devoid of rules of behavior, a tropical island fueled by sunlight, dope, and booze, as far from Kansas as you could get in America. Later I noted that the movie business never quite equaled Key West for questionable behavior. McGuane wrote the liner notes for an early Buffett album that said Jimmy was “one of the last of the sucking chest wound singers to sleep on the yellow line.” No one quite figured out what that meant but it seemed appropriate. We had a “social club” called the Club Mandible with about thirty members, which spearheaded our efforts toward unconsciousness, or a rather punishing form of consciousness. Drugs were virtually free because so many local friends were in the import business which was rather brazen in the Key West of the seventies and early eighties. Key West then was very much a seafaring town and a sailboat or shrimp boat run to Colombia or Mexico wasn’t any big navigational feat. I remember a group of men testing a bale out of the back of a pickup on Simonton Street in broad daylight. They’d put a handful in a small paper bag, light the bottom of the bag, take a deep drag, toss the burning bag into the street, become contemplative for a few minutes, then make a judgment.

  At that time it was nearly all a marijuana trade, a drug I’ve never cared for though I see it as far less injurious than alcohol. I remember the disappointment when a sailboat at Mallory Pier was busted with millions of Quaaludes, a pill very popular with young women. Naturally this open activity finally caught the attention of state and federal officials, partly due to a Miami Herald exposé, and the activity was partially suppressed, more by a vigilant Coast Guard than anything else. A number of local officials seemed to be involved but then Key West had always been a smugglers’ haven and there wasn’t any social onus to being caught. The end of the decades-long wide-open party arrived with the cocaine trade when things got real serious, including murder. The Colombians tended to scare the local “businesses” away. Several acquaintances were found limbless and headless, or torn to pieces by bullets. It all made writing as a profession quite appealing. People made millions of dollars but I don’t recall anyone holding on to the money. Twenty years later it has the aspect of a lurid dream. You were pretty safe fishing for tarpon, permit, and bonefish though near one remote mangrove island in the backcountry we took polite rifle fire well in front of our skiff bow. Best to fish elsewhere. The other big item that subdued the party atmosphere was the widespread arrival of AIDS. Chatham and I picked up sandwiches for fishing one morning and there was suddenly that purple streak of Kaposi’s sarcoma on a friend’s face and a wordless yes in response to our wordless shock.

  The obsessive nature of our fishing took place because saltwater fly-fishing could ascend to the magnum emotional level that we gave our work. You’re essentially using the same tackle, only bigger, that you use for trout fishing, but the tar
pon you cast to so lucidly visible on the shallow flats or channel edges might weigh more than a hundred pounds. To do it well you have to evolve a fairly high level of skill and when successful you release the fish. Nothing in my life has been quite so electric as a close-to-the-boat jump of a tarpon, or a marlin for that matter, the latter fished off the coasts of Ecuador and Costa Rica. Unlike the heavy-tackle deep-sea fishing that Hemingway favored it is a sport of finesse.

  Fishing was mostly coming up for air after long periods of work, something to clear your mind for the next project, a sport that could wipe the slate quite clean. Guy de la Valdéne would also come to northern Michigan to hunt grouse and woodcock in October, and Chatham came for a few seasons, but Guy has missed only two years in thirty. Bird hunting can also lift you out of your humdrum work life but perhaps not as completely as fishing. How well the bird dogs work and how well you’ve all been cooking adds immeasurably. Jamie used to keep a food and wine diary of our Octobers before she left home and on reading it I was struck by how natural it was that I developed gout. When I made a good deal of money the food and wine obsession got further out of hand. You probably shouldn’t eat grouse and woodcock, venison, a quail and dove pâté, abalone and oysters, caviar, calf sweetbreads, kidneys, liver, and ducks all during the same week with several cases of wine. That’s a health tip. Finally, I couldn’t imagine life without fishing. As Thoreau said, “The wildness and adventures that are in fishing still recommend it to me.”

  Just yesterday it occurred to me that I may have made too much in my own mind of the financial difficulty of these years between thirty and forty, an elaborate mythos of near poverty. Not that there weren’t grim periods but then the success that followed may have made me overemphasize the years of failure. This is scarcely original in terms of motive with a little “success guilt” thrown in, wherein the man with the full wallet gets wretchedly sentimental about the voyage up from the depths.