The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  After a couple of months he collapsed in mind and body, partly from spending too much time at the Five Spot where for a fifty-cent beer at the bar you could listen to jazz until late. He talked to the dissolute Jack Kerouac several times just after On the Road came out. Kerouac said, “Keep it up,” a rather cryptic message. He hitchhiked home and worked on the university horticulture farm for five months and recovered his health. He fell in love with two girls at once which was emotionally punishing but suitably daffy to his character. He completed two quarters of school which was difficult after the freedom of the road. By spring he couldn’t figure out what to do about the two girls he loved so he hitchhiked to San Francisco for a couple of months which he thought of as a beautiful Mediterranean City but in San Francisco his behavior further disintegrated. He walked out to the Pacific Ocean through Golden Gate Park several times. It never occurred to him to ride on a bus other than the labor bus he took off Market Street at dawn for the fields where he could make ten bucks a day picking beans. He drank too much cheap wine, discovered marijuana in North Beach but preferred alcohol. He hung out with a pimp who bought him drinks and dinner for his listening abilities. His wallet was stolen from his room on Gough Street during a drunken sleep. Now he had no identification but if you could hold on to a twenty-dollar bill the police wouldn’t arrest you for vagrancy. After a few months he became very skinny and hitchhiked home.

  He went back to the soothing farmwork of setting up irrigation pipes in fields of experimental vegetable crops. Much of this work was solitary but hard enough to take him outside of himself so he could freely think of what he had been reading mixed with snippets of travel memories with the mind weaving in pieces of memorized music as if it were a score for the episodic documentary. He stopped thinking of the tiresome notion “If I had it to do over again” because no one has a minute to do over. A humor that was almost a muted joy slid into him when he wondered how a nineteen- or twenty-year-old with no particular talent, or money for that matter, could have made his way in those great cities. A comic spirit began to come fully to life again. He figured out why he had become so impatient with Thomas Wolfe and the early work of Hemingway. They were all about versions of the self, a matter that should have been rendered and then abandoned as Joyce had done with Portrait of the Artist. Faulkner and Dostoyevsky dealt with others and the immensity of the life around them. There was a silly longing for the material of painters and musicians who didn’t, like whores, unpack their hearts with words (Shakespeare was wonderful to read when unattached to a class on Shakespeare). And there was the unreachable metaphor of when the thousands of feet of pipe were laid and connected, the mammoth diesel pump started, the wheel turned, and hundreds of gallons a minute would cover the field like a dense rainstorm.

  He saw his girlfriend every evening. They’d mostly sit on the bank of a river and talk. When she was curious about New York City or Boston or San Francisco he found that he could describe the city and anecdotes much more clearly than he remembered them. The act of telling revivified the scenes almost as if one had found a long-lost photograph. It was the Faulknerian notion of if the past were really past, or a poignant movie he had seen from Christopher Isherwood’s work called I Am a Camera. His single usable eye was a camera and pictures developed themselves that he didn’t recall taking. He suspected that his brain had been overloaded with thinking and consciously neglected the senses that when welcomed could willy-nilly return. One warm early Sunday morning a barge passed the pier where he was sitting on the East River. A brindle-colored dog barked at him from the barge when he waved. From the tugboat pushing the barge came loud blues music. Behind him two girls in Sunday skirts were tanning their legs and speaking a foreign language. One of them had lovely legs and he felt the heat of a blush in his face. There was a primacy to the visual that seemed to tow the other senses so that once you saw a memory you could smell and taste the air around it, feel the cold touch of the girders in the subway, the human grease and flaky paint, and hear the barely perceptible late-night train coming. It became apparent that while language, the sounds people agreed upon, might not be the central fact of human experience this commonest act was where his abilities, if any, might lie.

  In the fall soon after his lover went back to her distant college she called to say she was pregnant. They got married to the painful disapproval of her parents. His parents were unsure. His father voiced the idea that since he had proven he couldn’t take care of himself maybe he would quickly learn to do so by taking care of a wife and child. This proved to be so. He worked hard at fairly menial jobs and completed two years of studies in one year at the university. They loved each other and their baby girl was wonderful indeed. They had many friends in the same impoverished condition. They loved each other in many ways that neither of them could define and stayed married forever in the manner of his relatives despite awkward periods. Ultimately, though, to be at a university was to be held at an undisclosed location. Men and boys in the upper Midwest, usually of limited abilities, when against whatever wall have a way of saying, “There’s only so much a man can take,” an admission of abject failure at what they’re doing.

  Part II

  What the Man Saw

  WHEN A YOUNG MAN LATE IN THE NIGHT LOOKS UP FROM HIS desk in a married-students’ apartment and smiles at “nothing happening out the dark window” it might be that he’s doing well, or perhaps he’s convinced yet again of the comic uselessness of what he’s doing. To him there had always been an improbable air of fragility in the art of literature and sitting there night after night studying criticism and scholarship reminded him of Sherman tanks attacking a corps de ballet on a picnic. He struggled to say something of meaning about Melville’s nightmarish Billy Budd but came up shy, feeling not a little bit like Billy Budd himself adrift in the mire of the orderly world and soon to be executed for the good of society. His ears strained to hear his one-year-old daughter waking in the night so that he could retrieve her from her crib, give her a warm bottle, and maybe look with her at a sensible book like Pat the Bunny. It was the same feeling as holding a puppy you loved only deeper. He remembered holding a runtish piglet out behind the granary and dropping pinches of corn into its eager mouth until sated the piglet feel asleep in his rocking arms. Perhaps all men had some mother in them. He had spent a great deal of time taking care of Judith, Mary, and David when his mother did the washing or an errand. It was like entertaining friendly little dogs who looked at you with an expression: “What are you going to do for us next?”

  He had become a fabulously unsuccessful graduate student, arrogant and contentious, but with a few friends among the professors, three of whom were sympathetic. There was a grand year-long seminar on French Symbolist poets, another on the literature of the 1920s and ’30s, but best of all a course on mythography so that it became plain where literature had begun in the human need to explain what had happened to them in terms of stories whether in Homer or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  He had the relentlessly nagging feeling that he had predestined his failure as a graduate student by his two years of wandering, and also, perhaps, by his failure as an artist which made the nonvisual and didactic language of scholarship seem so stillborn. Unlike the works of literature at hand there was no aesthetic beauty in the language of criticism and scholarship which made it, at least for him, less true. He knew that there was great value in this tradition of learning, but he was indisposed to it for reasons of temperament. His ambition, kept secret from his friends but not his wife, was to be involved however humbly in the primary, and to leave the secondary for those gifted in that direction. Apollinaire’s wonderful hoax describing the funeral of Walt Whitman was far more interesting and wildly colorful then all the scholarly papers on the poet.

  The second fall of graduate school his life disintegrated like a clay pot dropped on a cement floor. His father, age fifty-three, and his sister Judith, who was nine teen, died in an auto accident, hit by a drunk driver going ninety on th
e wrong side of the road. In the ensuing and natural depression, he flunked out of graduate school and they were evicted from their married-housing apartment. They moved in with his widowed mother and sister Mary and brother David. The depression had paralyzed him and he couldn’t find work. It was decided that he should move off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stay with his brother John and his wife, Rebecca. He took the bus and was physically ill for a month on their couch, almost a relief from his somewhat distorted mind. The question was, if those you loved could die this way what could life possibly hold for the survivors? He wandered Cambridge and Boston for a couple of spring months pretending he was looking for work understanding clearly that a B.A. in English was an unnegotiable degree. By accident he stopped in the Grolier Poetry Book Shop on Plympton Street in Cambridge one Saturday morning. He met a half dozen poets and found a home other than the stacks of the Widener Library which his brother’s job entitled him to visit. His morale rose with his returning to the bookstore each Saturday morning and often other days in between his fruitless job interviews. At night he wrote his own first poems and notes for stories and novels that might arrive in the future. Finally in late May he found a job traveling to libraries, schools, and bookstores for a big wholesale company. He flew home, his first time on a plane at age twenty-three, to retrieve his wife and daughter. His in-laws thought his salary inadequate but they took off for Boston in their old car anyway, and stayed with his brother until they found an apartment. Suddenly, he thought, we are living in the real world.

  The Boston area seemed so fertile in the early sixties and from the sixth-floor walk-up roof of their apartment up near the Brookline-Allston line you could see the entire city to the east and rather dimly the smog of the Atlantic Ocean. They made enough friends to be reasonably social what with brother John and sister-in-law Becky, his poet friends from Cambridge, and a good friend who had moved out from Michigan. There was a lovely perhaps illusory sense of ferment and prolonged arguments about the so-called Beat poets versus the academic in which he, from the heartland, felt in the middle, insisting on reading all of the contemporaries from Frank O’Hara to Robert Duncan, Robert Bly to Gary Snyder. Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg were equally palatable. Despite his bluster he was shy when it came to his own burgeoning work and kept it secret. There was also the wonderful sidetrack of reading the Sufis, Daisetz Suzuki on the unheard-of discipline of Zen Buddhism, Robert Payne’s anthology of Chinese poetry, and Kenneth Rexroth’s translations from the Japanese and Chinese.

  Something was held back from this literary adventurism. The opening up as a human came from his day-to-day driving throughout eastern Massachusetts and sometimes Rhode Island. It was the grace of movement after the temporary capture of the university, the escape from the beige academic prison. He had only seen Cambridge and Boston on foot and now he ranged from Newport to Fitchburg to the New Hampshire border, not all that far in midwestern or western terms but the congestion gave every mini-area its liveliness. And home life was good despite the limited budget. There was the vivid sexuality of young couples plus, unlike the Midwest, end less possibilities for cooking dinner with Boston’s ethnic mix and grocery stores. They visited friends in Concord who then moved to the Gloucester area on Halibut Point where tidal pools were certainly as enchanting as the forest. The liberation of his job was in its nonabstractness. He chatted, took orders from the schools, libraries, and bookstores, then hauled the books to them, or if the order was too large shipped them in a company truck. He also had the uncomfortable feeling in the company warehouse of seeing how the books he loved most often sold poorly. For a while at least, perhaps a year, driving consumed a restlessness that he tried to think of as stupid, the desire to jump ahead, to move on from wherever, to burn up totally in the process of whatever he was doing, then instantly move on to something else, but still trying not to pore over a world atlas at lunch hour. Pleasant little games were possible in Massachusetts that were out of the question in the Midwest. If a route took him toward Concord he could dwell on Emerson and Thoreau; north along the coast it was Hawthorne, but south and more sympathetically was New Bedford which retained more than a trace of Melville along the waterfront. Absurdly, a Greek diner in Plymouth made him dwell on Kazantzakis, and when he was taking a walk down a beach near Hingham and errantly thinking of his old dour friend Kierkegaard, a girl in a green bathing suit switched the subject to Henry Miller.

  He often marveled at the peasant stodginess that hid in his interior. He never failed to arrive at work early. His father joked that all work resembled that of a coal miner. You went down in the mine, came back up when the workday was over. All the world expected was that you got to work on time. Hard work and thrift were the floorboards beneath his taught reality. And should he become a writer he had a niggling suspicion that this ethic was also the base of that profession. It was a little inspiration but mostly sweat Faulkner insisted. Modesty, humility, might protect you from the angry gods but it certainly wasn’t a sure thing. Who told him that he could be an artist? No one. What are the credentials for this calling other than the absolute puzzlement that Boston could exist and he and his wife and daughter within it, with him leading the way by earning rent and food? He could function unloading heavy cartons of books while he fantasized about the rivers of northern Ontario, the street life of Brazil, or living happily in Paris writing a whole novel start to finish, not that the novel hit pay dirt but that he was working within a tradition that he wished to belong to desperately. Since no one on either side of his family had ever made any money there had never been a space in his fantasy quotient for money. He had once dreamt of buying his parents a new car because their used ones would break down but no one seemed particularly disturbed about it. Every country gas station had a mechanical whiz who could fix any car while the family waited outside petting strange dogs, drinking pop, or his mother wandered down the road looking for birds. Seeing a towhee or sapsucker could make a day.

  At the end of the first year in Boston the unthinkable happened and his poetry manuscript was accepted by W. W. Norton through the efforts of Denise Levertov. He was secretly appalled because a poem of his had never seen print though soon enough some appeared in the Nation in New York and in Poetry, a magazine in Chicago of noble lineage. The experience stayed dumbfounding for weeks and he came to what he thought was a logical conclusion: move back to northern Michigan and do nothing but write.

  And so they did, arriving in Kingsley, Michigan, in late spring with soaring hearts over the fields, rivers, and forests. They rented a house for thirty-five dollars a month and he trout-fished and walked every day for a long time, and then a bitter lesson came to him. He was truly his parents’ Calvinist child and his mind couldn’t function as a writer unless he supported his family. He trimmed Christmas trees with a machete and helped a man lay blocks but never for more than two dollars an hour. The book coming in November began to mean less. It’s hard to be a man of letters while mixing cement. There was the feeling of coming to full consciousness of the life he had made for them, the preposterously wrong decisions that so perfectly fit the parodic nature of a young poet. It was thrilling to get the book in the mail, to smell and touch it, but less so when you had to get a loan from your mother to buy heating oil for a house that would barely reach the mid-fifties in a Michigan winter. How could he be such a fool? It was easy. You had a few drinks on a Boston evening, your future seems mistily assured, and you decided to move back to where you belonged. The first day of trout season in late April was less pleasurable when you were trying to catch a fish to go with the macaroni dinner.

  Fortunately he still corresponded with his mentor, Herbert Weisinger, at the university. It was rare indeed for one of their students to have a book published. Weisinger was powerful and if a thesis could be written about how he wrote the book of poems a master’s degree could be awarded and he would go to Stony Brook in the fall where Weisinger was taking over the English department. Once again he was saved by someo
ne else. When this news arrived he sat with his wife at the kitchen table with the worn Rand McNally road atlas before them. Stony Brook was near the water and there had to be fishing at hand. And across Long Island Sound was New Haven where his brother John had taken a job at Yale. They didn’t want to leave northern Michigan but the other teaching offer that had come through from Northern Michigan College in Marquette seemed chancy in Weisinger’s terms. If you were to be a writer, and you were still young, it was better by far to go to a place where people could help you make your way.

  He couldn’t help but think he was being pulled away as he had been from Reed City when young. In his last days of fishing he pondered what he had come to think of the geographical fascism in the arts. You simply had to spend your apprenticeship on one of America’s two dream coasts or you would possibly limit the final dimensions of your talent. In Weisinger’s terms each art had its guild of sorts and it was good to be exposed to other members for a while with “how long” left floating in the claustrophobic air. He had come to recognize that claustrophobia was his true disease, likely predicated by a childhood in the empty fields and woods. The natural world was a comfortable habitat, and other people always the possible danger, the probable enemies. The childishness of his own primitive thinking boggled him. He knew that the base of hermetic artists tended to shrink and they became obdurate and cranky old men with absurdly private theories, embattled even when they were ignored. Pasternak had spoken of garrulity as the refuge of mediocrities but he had seemed to be in the thick of things until in his forties.