by Jim Harrison
The Ancient
Minstrel
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf: A False Memoir
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
The Farmer’s Daughter
The Great Leader
The River Swimmer
Brown Dog
The Big Seven
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981
The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Ikkyū and Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser
Saving Daylight
In Search of Small Gods
Songs of Unreason
Dead Man’s Float
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JIM HARRISON
The Ancient Minstrel
Novellas
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2456-2
eISBN 978-0-8021-9021-5
Grove Press
An imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Steve Sheppard
Contents
The Ancient Minstrel
Eggs
The Case of the Howling Buddhas
The Ancient Minstrel
Author’s Note
Some years ago when I was verging on sixty years and feeling poignantly the threat of death I actually said to myself, “Time to write a memoir.” So I did. Time told another story and over fifteen years later I’m still not dead, a fine surprise for a poet who presumed he’d die young in a pile on the house floor, or perhaps near the usual fountain in Rome, or withering to nothing in a garret in Paris torturously located above a bistro so I could smell food I couldn’t afford to buy. I choke on a fishbone I found in the garbage, and the violent coughing and hemorrhaging kill me by dawn, still sprawled in the alley after a night of chilly rain. The shivering likely kept me alive for the night. A lovely jogger in green shorts discovers me and stands above my head, leaning over and looking for life signs of which there are none except a flickering right eye. The left eye was blind since childhood. It occurrs to me that looking up at her winsome crotch I was born and am dying between a woman’s legs. How appropriate because this locale has drawn a fair amount of attention in my life.
I don’t regret waiting on illusions because that seems the fairness of living. In fact I spent a month trying to figure out whether I should call this novella “The Ancient Minstrel” or “The Ancient Mongrel.” Both are apt whether you are showing off for pay or doing your brilliant dog tricks for pay. Mongrels are especially similar to writers. The parentage of the arts is often lost to history, or the matter has evoked dishonesty. Who cares about your noble ancestry when all of the proof is on the page? I studied Dostoyevsky and Faulkner very hard but don’t see any evidence in my own work.
To be honest, which often I am not, when I began, my family insisted on being left out. My wife led the charge knowing altogether too well the fables of a writer. A friend, a successful novelist, had written a memoir that included information about his wife’s affairs, affairs which in fact didn’t exist but he included to absolve his own behavior. I admitted to myself that the same was not beyond me though I would veil it all as jest. My two married daughters were both at dinner and shouted in chorus, “Leave us out!” I felt near tears (from several drinks) and unfairly treated. I asked, “You don’t trust my taste?” to which I received a resounding “No.”
I decided to continue the memoir in the form of a novella. At this late date I couldn’t bear to lapse into any delusions of reality in nonfiction.
Chapter 1
He went in a door and out another one ten feet away. It had been an old railroad flat he had remodeled, tearing down walls and painting. He liked the two doors close together. It gave him a sense of choice otherwise missing in his aging life.
Others who had remodeled railroad flats had stupidly closed off the extra door pretending it had never existed. He drove his neighbor in a prim bungalow quite crazy when he had a whim and circled in and out of his two doors. The neighbor was a retired academic, a delightfully bright codger who loved to speak vulgarly after a lifetime of propriety. The neighbor would open a fine wine he could afford on his generous retirement and wave him over to share it. He always went, even after he joined AA to preserve his marriage. He found out that fine wine encouraged a taste for fine wine and never precipitated a binge. If you drank half a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou you wanted more of it and nothing else, certainly not the rawness of whiskey or bilious beer.
He was what they called an “award winning poet,” at least that was what his publisher called him on book jackets, though in fact he had never heard of any of the awards before he received them. So much for the immortality of poetry. He had even looked up the Pulitzer in the World Almanac at a doctor’s office and been quite startled to see how many twentieth-century names had been forgotten. Meanwhile over a good Bordeaux his academic geezer neighbor would say, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” as if it were an obesity joke over which he chortled deeply. He himself could remember saying it in a coffee house before he flunked out of graduate school. His failure was due to “arrogance,” the department chairman said. Young poets, even before they wrote a poem, tended to be prideful rather than properly self-effacing graduate students. Anyway, the department managed to grant him his master’s after he published his first book of poems with an honored New York publisher. No one from the department had ever done that before. They were proud of him but not to the point where they would allow him to enroll in their Ph.D. program. Years more of him strutting the halls was an idea none of these fustian gentlem
en could bear.
He and his wife weren’t divorced but she lived a dozen miles out in the country outside Livingston, Montana, on a small farm with a big house. It had been her idea to get a house in town for becoming older and she was tired of taking care of such a large farmhouse of 3,800 square feet. He had also slipped on drinking which he had been able to manage in his early sixties.
He would take a chance and drive out at least twice a week and play with the dogs, often a disappointing experience because it had been quite warm and he would get there and be met wildly by the dogs but after a few minutes of play they’d settle back to sleeping on the thick grass of the lawn. He wanted them to play like they did as pups. The fact of the matter was that they were no longer pups. At ten they were about the same age in dog years as his own seventy. He slept in his studio when he came out to the farm, in a small cabin where he did his writing on the property near the big house. It wasn’t elegant but simply workable.
He was taking a chance driving because he no longer had a driver’s license. He had thought many times that the end of his rational marriage had come when they took his driver’s license away. He was furious because it had been a mistake. He had stupidly admitted to the state cop that he had recently had spinal surgery. The cop asked if he was on narcotic pain medication and he clearly said, “No,” but wasn’t believed. As a matter of fact the first weeks after his surgery he had taken OxyContin but stopped despite the pain in his spine because the drug made his writing slurred and goofy. He couldn’t write that way, not even in his journal which was frequently goofy all by itself.
He had also suffered from shingles for nearly three years though when the big sores subsided it was called postherpetic neuralgia. Whatever it was called it was plainly a double whammy about which nothing could be done medically. He had learned that doctors ignored shingles as an unprofitable disease until they had it themselves. There were no big fund-raisers for shingles. At the Department of Motor Vehicles office he gave a bravura performance and they kept his license when he handed it over. “Give it back,” he yelled.
Anyway, he had sent the governor an imprudent letter saying that he had written Legends of the Fall, his best-known book, and he needed to drive and explore new places in order to write and make a living. He couldn’t very well sit home and write “Legends of the Yard.” The letter didn’t do any good although eventually he proved himself deserving and was able to drive again.
He had expected the trail into aging to be uneventful. On the contrary, who had ever heard of a white, Christian gentleman like himself losing his driver’s license and sitting under a pine tree rather than driving to a friendly bar in town? Which of course is what he didn’t need, a bar with old friends. He hated to think of the time and energy he had spent in a long life thinking about quitting smoking and drinking for the obvious health reasons. He had intermittently, briefly of course, been a health nut in his life. Once when they still lived in Michigan he lost twenty-five pounds in two months by walking four hours every morning, stopping for a rare cigarette, counting birds he liked, walking places in the Upper Peninsula where he had never walked before. The unknown always beckons. Early settlers always wondered what was over the next hill other than other hills. The vaunted reputation of Daniel Boone came from how thoroughly he had covered the landscape. He saved a village of starving people by going out and shooting a combination of ten deer and bears in one day, enough to feed everyone for a week.
When he was growing up in Michigan, his own father had been a good woodsman and had instructed him well. When you think you’re lost just sit and calm down. When you’re frantic you lose your energy. Notice how the trees tend to lean a bit to the southeast. That’s because of the prevailing winds and the immense storms from the northwest off Lake Superior. The day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down it had blown over ninety miles per hour for a couple of days. He had been at his remote cabin then and did not stray from the protection of its sturdy logs. He read and listened to trees crashing down in the landscape. “Widow makers,” they were called. He finally left the cabin for a much needed drink at the tavern. He drove down to the lakefront and watched as giant waves smothered the pier. Even in his car he shuddered in fear. The waves actually thundered.
By far the biggest jolt of aging was the disappearance, coming up on seventy, of his sexuality. The doctor improperly joked when he explained the problem. He was angry and the doctor said that it happens to everyone. In fact there was a bench in front of the town hall on which the same five old men sat every day called “the dead pecker bench.” There were medications available now, and there was a joke at the tavern that if you had an erection more than three hours just visit the Starlite Alleys on women’s bowling night and announce your problem. You’ll get plenty of exercise. But the idea of taking a pill to get a hard-on left a bad taste.
He couldn’t help trying it once the year before at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., a city he loathed for political reasons but tolerated when it was full of old writer friends. The target was a graduate student girl he had made love to years before when she was a sophomore. The price was that he had to write her a glowing recommendation to the Hunter College writing program in New York City. He readily agreed. She was a bit dumpy but used to have a nice body. They went to his room at the Mayflower after dinner and drank. She was in a hurry because she had to see an old boyfriend, also a writing professor. Unfortunately, the pill gave his gray room a deep green aura which irked him and then he came off in a minute. He apologized and then she quickly left to visit her friend without working up a sweat. To his surprise he noticed while watching CNN that he still had a hard-on, evidently a peculiarity of the pill. He went out in the street on the odds he might meet an acceptable pro, which he did a few blocks from the White House. They strolled along chatting amicably about music, which raised a warning flag in his head. A doctor friend had warned him never to sleep with a prostitute who also hung out with musicians as there was a higher incidence of AIDS in such women. Once again he apologized, gave her twenty bucks for the chat, and turned back to the hotel and the torpor of a thousand English professors at their evening meetings through which many dozed.
Years before when he was teaching at a university he had helped out the chairman who had hired him to do preliminary interviews with a half dozen creative writers applying for the vacancy. He had already tossed out about fifty résumés. The university was only a couple of hours from New York, a magic city, at least for writers. It was all in all very unpleasant, especially the air of pleading in their eyes, and interviewing the half dozen candidates was grueling. The most obnoxious and smug man, also the best dressed with probably a rich wife, had gone so far as to write a good review of his own first book of poems and presumed that it gave him an inside track. He could barely wait to get him out of the room and pretended to make a phone call saying, “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” though ten minutes was far too long. He ended up giving the highest recommendation to the writer with the most kids.
The whole economics of work depressed him. He made a good salary, doubtless more than he deserved, but the candidate with the most children admitted that the night before he had missed the last bus back to the area of Virginia where he was staying with a relative. He had mostly walked the streets until about 4:00 a.m. and then went back to the hotel and took the elevator to the fifth floor where he recalled that there was a sofa near the elevator entrance. He had barely gotten to sleep when a bellhop woke him and offered to help him to his room. He deftly said that his roommate was sleeping with a very noisy woman. The bellhop laughed and continued on his way. He was then awakened at 7:00 a.m. by the first room service cart.
The award-winning poet asked the man why his college wouldn’t pay for a room. He said it was because he had taken this last year off to write a comic novel. His wife and two daughters had all worked at McDonald’s and they made it through okay. But he was n
ot tenured and the department was replacing him with a young hotshot from Iowa. “That’s why I’m here. I haven’t sold the novel yet.” It turned out the candidate had been cutting Christmas trees for four bucks an hour which was admittedly “chilly” in Michigan. He told the man to go into the bedroom of his suite and gave him a shooter, a two-ounce bottle of Canadian whiskey. He had one himself and the man wobbled off to sleep.
It was a good story, he thought. They hired the man, whose novel was published and did well. He wanted to quit his new job and just write but his wife was fearful and told him she would shoot him if she ever had to go back to work at McDonald’s. The family was overwhelmingly pleasant. The award-winning poet reminded himself to keep his hands off the man’s two pretty teenage daughters.
He could date the moment desire had fled or when he had truly noticed it. It was a late August afternoon in 2013. It was warm and he sat at a table in the tavern. He was alone because he always arrived at 4:00 p.m. and his friends showed up at the more proper time of 5:00. There were two girls at the bar and one of them was in a very short summer skirt twirling on her bar stool. It was electrifying or would have been in the past. He felt nothing and pinched himself lightly to make sure he was actually alive. No, a curtain had dropped and he wondered if it was a recent bad cold. He certainly didn’t feel the iron bite of lust which should have been automatic. Not very far in the past, minutes to be exact, he would have been up at the bar buying the girls drinks, cajoling, letting drop a few credentials like “I was just in New York seeing my publisher,” looking down at the smooth legs of the twirler and imagining her resplendent pubis on his not so lonely pillow. Her friends came in and the girls left but not before the twirler winked at him. The display had been for his own frozen body. He couldn’t even manage to return the wink because his heart had abruptly darkened.
