Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  There was also the irony of travel. How could you complain at the tavern about being dead broke when the Gerbers had recently taken you to Africa? You also had flown home via Rome and Paris, and at the Excelsior in Rome you had stood there with your wife amused at midnight staring at your first bidet, after which you ordered up a bottle of wine and pasta to start making up for the bad food in Africa.

  Sports Illustrated helped on my trip to Russia a few months later. The idea was that I’d try to do a piece on the suppressed sport of horse racing. Dan had a better grip on travel than I did, especially in Russia, where I fell easily into the local vodka habits. We especially liked St. Petersburg, Leningrad at the time, where we stayed at the Hotel Europa. We were given grand quarters because Dan’s father had sent over a lot of food-processing equipment during the famine after World War II and the Russians remembered the name. This made me a little nervous because we were traveling on phony “farmer” passports, having been denied writer visas. There was not a trace of a thaw in the early seventies and I had stupidly tried to call Voznesensky whom I had met in New York. Our private guide has also told me not to try to call Joseph Brodsky who was on the verge of exile. It was a case of “Innocents Abroad” and it later seemed obvious that the fancy women in gowns, rubies, and diamonds we took to dinner were KGB. Whatever, we were harmless poets visiting the spirit of places that produced my heroes Dostoyevksy, Turgenev, Yesenin, Mayakovsky. When you met educated Russians capable in English it was wonderful to see their great enthusiasm for their poetry, their ability, over drinks of course, to quote extended passages with great passion, something you definitely didn’t see at the time in America.

  After writing Wolf I published a book of poems with Simon & Schuster called Outlyer, and after that experience I chose to publish my poetry with small presses that would keep the books in print. With some notable exceptions like Knopf a poet is better off with a university press, or a small press like my current poetry publisher Copper Canyon, where there is an attention to details and the nature of poetry that doesn’t yield up to the marketing methods of modern publishing.

  After A Good Day to Die, a dour attempt at a thoroughly “noir” novel in an American setting, I wrote Farmer, somewhat based on my mother’s family, imagining that her only brother who died in the 1919 flu epidemic had lived and I was simply writing his life. It was fairly well reviewed but the bindings were faulty and Viking withdrew the book, not to surface again for years because I turned down the one-thousand-dollar paperback offer. Fifteen years later Farmer had a fair resurgence in paperback, and a tasteful movie was made of it by the Brazilian director Bruno Baretto, starring Dennis Hopper and Amy Irving. This quiet movie was retitled Carried Away and drowned without notice. Inexplicably, the novel did well in France.

  EARLY HOLLYWOOD

  Our life seemed to be coming to an unpleasant head, the minor encouragement being a budget screenplay of A Good Day to Die, the first that I had written, for the documentarian Fred Wiseman who promptly got a stomach ulcer after visiting Hollywood. I also wrote a screenplay for Warren Oates whom I had met on the set of McGuane’s 92 in the Shade in Key West. Both screenplays paid me five grand, which was the same amount I was getting for a full novel but the screenplays took far less time. I confess that neither of them were any good. A good screenplay takes a sizable measure of talent and I hadn’t yet studied the genre. Later on at Warners when I read a half dozen of William Faulkner’s screenplays I was appalled and amused by how terrible they were.

  Rock bottom was arrived at in 1977. I hadn’t even filed an incometax form for seven years, which was a felony, and we had no prospects whatever. I was owed money by Eliot Kastner for a screenplay I had done with McGuane but I never received the check. Jamie was a teenager by then and kept walking up to the empty mailbox for weeks. Guy de la Valdéne’s mother, Diana, sent us a check which allowed us to scrape by. I had met her in France on my return from Russia when I stopped in Normandy to do a Sports Illustrated essay on stag hunting. Guy picked me up in Paris and we drove to the country up near the Rambouillet forest near Dreux. It was startling to arrive at his mother’s home and discover that it was a grand château surrounded by a thoroughbred horse farm. Richard III had stayed there during his own Normandy invasion and a German general had installed central heating during World War II. In the breakfast room of the château there were many unframed paintings by Diana’s cousin, Winston Churchill. Guy’s beautiful sister Lorraine was there with her eventual husband, Christian, who arrived by motorcycle from Paris with a big package of foie gras. There were even very large pike in the moat that encircled the château and we fished for them without success. Everyone at the château was bilingual except me and the servants. I remember eating a baby wild pig called a “marcasin” liberally stuffed with truffles, and drinking some 1923 Margaux and some Armagnac from the 1890s. It was simply the most interesting food I had ever eaten. I had never remotely been exposed to very old money and noted that it seemed nonbourgeois as there was no TV, no one read newspapers, and when people argued the language was raw and frank. A year later when I returned to France to help Guy edit a tarpon film he had directed I slowly began to understand French foibles. We worked on the film, for which Jimmy Buffett supplied the music, at a studio in the Antegor district of Paris. The proprietress of a local bistro desperately wanted a flowery cowboy shirt I was wearing and Guy arranged a trade for a meal of têtes de veau for four, the brains, neck, and cheek meat of a calf. I have never been able to hold back from the basic food that many consider exotic.

  Meanwhile back in Michigan I became quite paranoid about my tax situation and our financial distress. My impractical solution in 1977 was to begin writing a sequence of novellas, beginning with one called Legends of the Fall. No one was writing novellas at the time but I had enjoyed reading the novellas, or the very long short stories of about a hundred pages, of Katherine Anne Porter, Isak Dinesen, and the German writer Hugo von Hofmannstha.

  Legends of the Fall had a peculiar origin. I had been brooding about it for quite some time. My wife had been up in the Keweenaw Peninsula helping go through her deceased grandparents’ home, a very large place with fourteen bedrooms and fireplaces. In an old trunk Linda had found the journals of her grandmother’s father, William Ludlow, and on reading them I was amazed how a young mining engineer from Cornwall had traveled widely after the Civil War. He had been around the Horn to San Francisco, down in Mexico where his older brother owned silver mines, in Montana and Wyoming where he did surveys for the U.S. government. The trump card was delivered by my brother John when he found at the Library of Congress Colonel William Ludlow’s report to Congress on the Custer expedition into the Black Hills in 1873. Colonel Ludlow had led the scientific part of the expedition and been accompanied by George Bird Grinnell. In his report to Congress Ludlow strongly recommended that the Black Hills be left the “sole province of the Sioux” but soon after the usual land grab and greed for gold followed.

  I used only a small part of this recorded “reality” for my novella but the material was fabulously suggestive. Ludlow’s intelligence was both literary and scientific. He and his men had lassoed a grizzly bear and inspected it, then “released the beast with some difficulty.” They observed grasshopper plagues, and under the guidance of their Cheyenne guide One Stab had avoided Sioux war parties.

  I spun my tale in nine days as if I were taking dictation from the past. Soon after I began writing another novella called The Man Who Gave Up His Name. We were now absolutely depleted financially and I fell into a clinical depression with the side effect of tunnel vision. The year before, I had met Jack Nicholson on the set of McGuane’s movie Missouri Breaks. He had borrowed my motel room to take a quick shower before watching dailies and I think I gave him Wolf and A Good Day to Die. Later I got a postcard saying if I ever had any ideas for him to send them along but I never had any ideas, which he found peculiar. Meanwhile Toby Rafelson, whom I had met socially in L.A., informed Nicholson I w
as broke and he told her to have me come down to Durango where Toby was the art director on his movie Goin’ South, which he was directing. Other than a few hours in Montana I had spent an interesting evening at the movies with Jack and Anjelica Huston the day after he received the Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It gave me pause at the theater in Westwood to see a crowd’s reaction to “celebrity,” which is at the same time apprehensive and eager. Nicholson, ever in his dark glasses, handled it with grace and was proud that both the entrance to the theater and the popcorn were free. Meanwhile I was so numb at the time of Toby’s call I don’t quite remember how I got the ticket, perhaps through Guy or my father-in-law, but through the efforts of my wife’s cousin in Miami I ended up stopping in Cozumel for a few days to write a small piece for Esquire.

  I flew on to Durango through Mexico City where I was picked up by Annie Marshall, Jack’s secretary and friend, whom I had also met on the set of Missouri Breaks along with Anjelica, Jack, and their crony Sue Barton. We waited for a while at the Durango airport for Annie’s cat Pinky, who had been shipped down from Los Angeles. Annie kept hissing at the baggage people, “Donde está my fucking gato vivo,” a splendid introduction to the movie business.

  I hung around the movie set and, of course, drank with the cast and crew, which included Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, Ed Begley, Jr., Christopher Lloyd, John Belushi, and Jack’s preposterous uncle Shorty, a railroad worker from New Jersey. The movie company had enlisted an officer of the Federales to guide me around, as I had had for several years the germ of a novella to be called Revenge and it immediately occurred to me that Durango was a perfect setting with its almost medieval social structure. It would certainly not be a healthy move to have an affair with a young wife of a rich and powerful local.

  After about a week in Durango I was getting mildly nervous about what I was doing there, but then Nicholson drew me aside to address the problem. I was staying at his rental and every evening we had spoken about literature and movies until late, but now we were talking about money, which for me had always been a ghastly issue. I was put at ease when he merely asked about my debts and what I needed to come up with for a year of writing. When I got home two days later the check was already there. We had spoken about his having some share of the film rights of what I wrote but I did not realize at the time that this was usually a meaningless gesture. Our deal, however, turned out to be a substantial exception, but when the money fairly rolled in he would accept only the amount of the original loan. Many people can afford to behave this way but very few actually do.

  * * *

  Back home I spent a few days stunned and then the numbness of my depression began to lift. I finished The Man Who Gave Up His Name, and then rather quickly wrote Revenge, a story almost as wrathfully insistent as what I had experienced with Legends of the Fall. I’ve always been deeply cynical about any experiences that purport to be affected by ghosts or suchlike, but certain poems, novellas, and novels have resembled a seizure in composition, a somewhat demonic thrall where one’s entire being is carried away in the writing and there is no alternative to working in three shifts a day, morning, afternoon, and often deep into the night. It is an experience that is both longed for and unpleasant.

  When I turned in the manuscript to Dattila he thought it might be difficult to sell because “no one has ever heard of novellas.” The initial response wasn’t encouraging. Simon & Schuster turned it down unless I was willing to expand the title novella into four hundred pages or so, in which case it would be a sure-thing best-seller, an offer I rejected outright. Shortly afterward Sam Lawrence picked up the book for Delacorte Press, and then things began to move very fast, too much so for my composure. Clay Felker printed the entirety of Legends in Esquire and Rust Hills edited Revenge for the same magazine. The most startling event soon followed. It was still before publication and Linda and I had stopped in Palm Beach for a few days to visit Guy and Terese de la Valdéne on our way to Key West for the annual fishing vacation. I was already in an unnerved state because our daughter Jamie had won a National Merit Scholarship and we couldn’t accept it because of my nonexistent tax forms. We weren’t off the plane in Palm Beach for more than a couple of hours when John Calley, who was the president of Warner Brothers, called and made an offer of a hundred and fifty thousand a year for three years as an option on what I might write, not a purchase price but an option, sort of an allowance. Given inflation, and this was 1978, the offer would equal about two hundred and fifty now. I remember there was company around so I took the call in the backyard on a very warm night that somehow wasn’t comforting. In any event Bob Dattila and I would go out there for a few days and talk it over. We ended up making a much better deal involving the novellas Revenge and Legends of the Fall with Warner Brothers, but Calley had definitely caught our attention.

  I have often thought that if I had accepted the original offer of a munificent three-year grant and stayed away from Hollywood I may have been better off, a meaningless but interesting speculation. I was just short of forty years old and had spent a rather close-to-the-bone lifetime dodging disasters and acquiring a somewhat tenuous literary reputation with eight books of fiction and poetry. I had fallen short of a viable income to support a wife and two daughters, and though our mortgage payment was a scrap less than a hundred a month, it was sometimes difficult to squeeze it out from the average of ten grand a year. Nicholson’s help had been pleasant relief indeed and now a scant six months later the antique idea of “the sky’s the limit” was appropriate. There was certainly no one to ask for advice which anyway I wouldn’t have taken unless it included “go for it.”

  Having been through all of it I have never been sympathetic to the woes of the American novelist in Hollywood. If your temperament is not suitable to teaching what gets you out there initially is a wish to make a solid living. A good break, a big one at that, and you are simply as susceptible to greed as a realtor, lawyer, stockbroker, doctor, or anyone else. In your lifelong study of world literature you have read dozens of tales of greed, not to speak of philosophical treatises and religious texts warning of the evil therein. No one in the history of either side of your family had ever made any “real money” and they all seemed to have become quite philosophical, if not serene, over the idea that they would never be rich and that “getting by” would have to be enough. And now the one-eyed goofy, the black-sheep poet emerging from this gene pool, has inadvertently struck it rich. After the first full year of this experience I was sitting on the porch of our recently remodeled farmhouse, triple the estimated time and expense and a thoroughly enervating and obnoxious process, reading the Detroit Free Press and noting that I had made more money in the last year than the president of General Motors, Harlow Curtis. I idly hoped he was happy in his work.

  * * *

  Now that I have the easy lucidity of distance I have begun to comprehend my illusions. First of all, literary writers aren’t meant to make an ample living and if they do it is usually episodic, what my friend Caputo refers to as the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Literary novelists can have a number of good years and then the air goes out of the tire with a perceptible hiss and squeal. You can hear it down the block. The recent Ken Bums documentary on Mark Twain was chastening, so much so that late at night I was talking back to the video, “Don’t do it!”

  Nothing is so murky as the issue of money except perhaps sex. When you throw Hollywood into the career it becomes even more problematic. Hemingway was inappropriately self-congratulatory about avoiding screenplay writing what with solid novel and short-story property payments, but most of all, he had his wife Pauline’s allowance. Faulkner, for all the mythological smoke screen he established, was making as much as ten thousand a week in modern terms in the middle of the Great Depression, but then he was supporting a dozen people who all seemed eager to put Billy back on the train from Mississippi to Hollywood. Ray Stark told me that as a young agent one of his jobs was to try to get Raymond Chandle
r off the floor of his apartment where he occasionally slept fully dressed in a drying pool of his own vomit. I’m not sure if this is true but it sounds right. John Steinbeck went to Hollywood and fell in love, reasonably enough, with a torch singer. It is interesting to read that when Scott Fitzgerald went to the gold mine in the west he purportedly quit drinking but on further reading you see that he was drinking a case of beer a day, the same as a bottle of whiskey. When I read that Dylan Thomas wrote nineteen screenplays for the English film industry, I couldn’t believe it, though half that number would tell a story. Closer at hand, my good friend Tom McGuane had done very well but his home life had dissipated. All of this is not to say that I identify with, or even mistake myself as belonging to, this grand tribe of writers, only that if I had cared to closely observe the readily available evidence I may have acted otherwise. Maybe, but probably not. Who doesn’t at times feel like an exception to all general rules?

  At first it’s lots of fun to make money though “fun” itself isn’t a laudable category. It was fun rather than pleasurable which is a word you might use to refer to a long hike in unknown territory, catching a marlin on fly rod, staring at a Caravaggio for an hour, a morning in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, an evening of making love to someone you love. The fact that acquiring a bunch of money doesn’t mean nearly as much as you thought it would is moot. You thought it would and it did very briefly, you spent most of it, and it was a little mysterious how quickly it could go away. I have watched with a specific awe certain friends and acquaintances who have either made a lot of money or inherited it and have been able to hold on to it. They seem to have a gene or a level of attention that is missing in me though in some cases it is what Nicholson used to call “dead money,” a larger overflow that you have neither the time nor the inclination to spend. This is of course a level that only a few writers like Stephen King or John Grisham ever reach. I can’t think of any literary writers who hold on to their money, though frequently their heirs do well.