by Jim Harrison
Comically enough he wasn’t a very effective successful person. The first new car he bought in his life was a lowly Subaru four-wheel drive, a good vehicle for getting to far-flung places to fish. He recalled that many years ago in Gloucester, Robert Greeley had told him that right after a grant had come through he and his wife, Bobbie, had eaten steak three days in a row and then were at a loss.
His reaction to bad luck was to run to the woods and his reaction to good fortune was the same. Geography would save him at least occasionally, or so he hoped. It did. Retreat is a wonderful concept. His was a log cabin on a river, fairly remote, in a forest with deer, bear, coyotes, and few resident wolves. On arrival a sophisticated visitor had asked, “Where’s Hansel and Gretel?” The cabin was indeed slightly mythological, at least folkloric, but maybe more than that, but the true grace note was in the ordinary. You kept your fire going most of the time in summer that close to frigid Lake Superior, so cold that she did not yield up drowned bodies which stayed in a better place than cemeteries.
He’d retreat to the cabin at the smallest sign of professional problems with Sand, a Labrador, for company. There were thousands of miles of log trails to walk sometimes interrupted by Sand’s acute fear of bears. Smelling one she’d run back to the car. At the cabin he was comfortable within his skin and could write without interruption and fish fifty feet from the door. His livelihood could trouble his brain, especially at night, but a single raven or warbler could dismiss the turmoil, and a loon kept it at a distance for hours. Unfortunately because of winter the cabin was habitable and reachable only six months a year.
He went to London twice one year to work on a project. He knew he was a mere dabbler for a livelihood when he worked for a couple of days with the great director John Huston who was kind enough to say, “Right now I want a writer not a screenwriter. I can get one of those later.” He had also read enough screenplays by the first-rate and knew he’d never make the grade. It had to be a full-time obsession like novels and poetry. You had to be able to see like a movie camera and then make the camera see like you. Since he had once tried to be a painter he was fairly visual but to even try to be an excellent screenwriter he’d have to become schizophrenic and he already had enough mental infirmities. In London, however, being around Huston, Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrick he finally had a true insider’s look at how the magic was made. Since childhood he had had a fan’s ardor for movies but thought of them naively as a book-in-pictures.
London promoted drinking as do all cities, at least in his not-very-special case. Nicholson’s famous visitors tended to act rather ordinary but then no one seemed to want to be famous day and night. They liked to joke, talk about their children or business, watch the taped L.A. Lakers basketball games sent from the States. It was pleasant, albeit diffuse. The London walking and art museums were fine but he felt a peculiar homesickness for a hot, humid August he had spent in Paris and Normandy helping to edit a documentary about tarpon fishing directed by a French friend, Guy de la Valdéne. Guy introduced him to Paris but there seemed no time to go there between making money and retreating to the cabin, and increasingly brief fishing trips to Key West and Montana each year. In between the narrow spaces he continued writing his novels and poems, a clumsily manic obsession in part because the original calling had been religious in nature. Ezra Pound had aptly said, “Myths are news that remain news.”
Naturally as his temporary star dimmed he had to work much harder and became exhausted. On impulse he went to Costa Rica for a short week and once again discovered that the tropics were a flawless escape for a northern fool who couldn’t see beyond the empty page in front of him. What struck him most strongly coming down from northern Michigan when it was easy to believe that spring might forget to come this year was that everywhere in Costa Rica there was a profusion of flowers, whole mountain walls covered with jacarandas, and slumlike alleys with little houses covered with flowering vines, and evening music came from the houses. He couldn’t quite digest the idea that Costa Rica had no armed services. Having been politically engaged since his youth in civil rights and antiwar activity he had noted how his own government had become more distant and both the presidency and Congress were surrounded by an apparently impenetrable shield of lobbyists and special-interest groups. Half of all eligible voters no longer bothered and talking to such people in bars, grocery stores, and gas stations he found them not so much actively disenchanted as totally remote from the government’s concern.
His ear was close to the ground, certainly more so than anyone he was familiar with in the media, because during the six months a year the cabin was unusable he had been taking car trips, somewhat nondirectional and far and wide. He might drive the nearly two days to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to look at the Mississippi in a late-March flood and still do his work in a motel, or ride to Duluth in midwinter to check out frozen Lake Superior, or, more frequently, drive around Nebraska, a state he had found haunting as a sixteen-year-old hitchhiker. Like the Dakotas, Nebraska was a state almost totally unknown to those on either of our densely populated dream coasts. He found that the vast Sandhills owned a modulated but preposterous beauty. An advantage of reading so much about American Indians since childhood is that it added a great deal to the landscape to know who lived where first and what happened to the tribes during the mortal colonist thrust. He avoided keeping a regular journal except of the most nominal kind. Why turn everything immediately into language? Why not let it rest there among a trillion neurons and see what might wish to arise. To his own taste the world was largely undescribed but he was only capable of dealing with a few corners. Artistic hubris can be more exhausting than work. When you stood on the hillock at Wounded Knee or the location of Crazy Horse’s murder at Camp Robinson, assuming you’d done your homework, history virtually smoldered around you and you smelled blood, leather, the earth, and horses.
On one trip he had left the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and driven east toward Mississippi brooding about the fate of the Seris in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century when the Mexican government had butchered nine-tenths of their population in a prolonged Wounded Knee. There is ample time in the day-and-a-half drive across Texas to carefully rehearse your entire life, then discard it as if throwing a beer can out the window in favor of the sweep of history. There was temporary relief in stopping at his brother John’s home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, regarding his enormous collection of rare books, and listening to bits of a dozen recently collected operas among his library of thousands. John had been at Yale for twenty years but had taken over the library at the University of Arkansas, mostly to escape the location of his fourteen-year-old daughter’s death in Guilford, Connecticut.
Mississippi returned the sense of anguish of the American Indians, and the Seris and the Yaquis. He had once said that you could stretch an imaginary sheet over North America and see just where the blood soaked through. He had never been one for the glories of war, partly because when he was ten his father had described how a contingent of thousands from Battle Creek had gone off to the Civil War and less than ten percent had eventually returned. This reminded him of the devoutly-prayed-for return of his uncles from World War II, a roomful of relatives embracing the boys, suddenly old and gaunt-looking in their blue sailor suits. People shook their heads and wept, saying, “They’re home.”
Despite Mississippi’s fabled literacy in which he had been well immersed he could not help but think that every black person he saw had had ancestors that had not wished to board the ship. And the Civil War itself sung in thousands of book-length songs seemed no more than one of history’s grandest suspect nightmares. In high school he had read Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, both the kind of books that men who start wars couldn’t have possibly read.
In the middle of this series of almost irrational car trips that lasted over a decade he began to notice a curious mental phenomenon that he called “th
e missing America,” nearly a moving comic strip of what was in his mind approaching areas as opposed to what was surely there. The mind is rarely truly present in the present so that when an unvisited area came closer his brain fueled by the imagination would generate and summon up all the images created since childhood by his reading and the movies. It was hard to accept reality in the present tense in Iowa when the mind’s eye also saw the Black Hawk War, twenty-horse teams pulling giant combines, or Edward Hopper’s often dismal small-town visual vignettes which shivered the soul. And in Kansas there were the lank female bodies from Thomas Hart Benton or the lissome Jeanne Crane feeding the pigs in State Fair. However absurd this process it wasn’t preventable. Farther west it became sillier because of his early reading of Zane Grey, Owen Wister, and Will James, but more so the movies because Hollywood had never appeared to be seriously interested in the nature and true history of the West. Perhaps this was the curious xenophobia where people in one area held peculiar and unfounded beliefs about other areas or, more often, lacked any substantial curiosity about other parts of America, their history and literature. This was particularly true of big cities like Los Angeles and New York which seemed so intact and active that they squashed out real interest in anywhere else. Way back in Stony Brook the prominent critic Alfred Kazin had told him that Faulkner’s characters were products of his “fevered” imagination which might be believable unless you had spent any time traveling through rural Mississippi. In Faulkner’s time these characters existed a stone’s throw from his home, surely a depressing place before it had been remodeled into a form more suitable to a literary tourist’s taste.
He had come to realize that these nomadic habits had begun to raise more questions than they resolved. When you write a screenplay you don’t want to for the wages, it is well-paid punishment. It was easier if all the multiple meetings were in New York City because there were five art museums within easy walking distance from his hotel and if a day off was fair he might walk all the way from the East Eighties down to the Village. Walking the Brooklyn Bridge was also a good tonic to claustrophobia. But the mentally foreboding idea was that he was a hack abusing his talents by writing what he shouldn’t be writing, that is, purely for the money however much needed. His nomadic habits freed him from this foreboding. There was pure oxygen in the road, a trip with routes never before taken. It was exhilarating in Nebraska’s Sandhills to put the car on cruise control on side roads, open the sun roof, and stand on the seat steering with your knees, or a dropped hand in emergencies, and truly see the countryside. Certain religious feelings would return on these trips, both Christian and Zen Buddhist, far from the convenient venality of his livelihood. He vaguely recalled in his reading and from college anthropology that nomads were freer in their religious impulses, more broadly based in civility and generosity, more connected to the nature of the earth they passed through on their journeys, while the religion of long-settled areas leaned toward the prescriptive, very strict rules and elaborate threats and punitive regulations, property rights, and a priestly class that was authoritarian. Accumulation and greed were transformed into virtues. On the road in a thousand uniquely beautiful places he began to think of the natural world as the predominant expression of the Holy Spirit and that these places must be protected from greed, mindful that he was also culpable. The road led one into an expansive state of mind and his sense of nature and interests ran from the kestrel’s vision and the raven’s cranial structure to the unfathomable nature of ninety billion galaxies to the curious subject of why humans can’t stop killing one another. “We are nature, too,” said Shakespeare, and perhaps his darkest times were during perceptions of human cruelty. It was childish not to believe in evil, a modern decision as infantile as a beach ball.
Abruptly he was asked to go to Brazil and dream up a screenplay that could be shot there to take advantage of substantial funds stuck in that country for reasons inscrutable to him. This was no more meaningful than a thousand other abortive projects that aimed high and either disappeared or landed low. He wasn’t particularly cynical about moviemaking any more than he was about what had become of American publishing. He recalled his father’s maudlin metaphor of the similarity of any job and coal mining but then you couldn’t very well be morose when talking to friends about having to go to Brazil in the middle of a northern Michigan winter.
In Brazil it finally struck him very hard that we live and die without a firm clue. He had prided himself on the fact that he had always known this but it was a rather bookish knowledge where in Brazil it seeped into your being like a combination of tear and nerve gas. Seeing the profligate and vivid life of this country amid its multifoliate miseries he wondered how privileged intellectuals including himself ever dared begrudge the poor their faith. This didn’t remove his contempt for the priestly class, including prominent American evangelists who took advantage of the faith of the poor to gain money, power, and sometimes sex. Somehow the grace of the Gospels had disappeared except in the faith of the poor which when he went to a mass in Bahia he discovered could be a jubilantly musical faith. He wondered if we’re wrong or they are? Neither, it’s a matter of different worlds, but he was nevertheless swallowed for a month by a people who don’t differentiate music and prayer. When the Bible said, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” the writer must have been prophesying a Brazil, which despite its often wretched society and government managed to avoid the tone of the permanent opportunistic dirge found in Washington.
At the very period he became quite successful again he permanently lost interest. It took a couple of years to totally squeeze out the enthusiasm during which three movies he had been involved in were made and did reasonably well with all three starting out at the top of the box office, a thrill he likened to a good review that was also stupid. Ironically at this point he also began to enjoy Los Angeles, especially the aspects not associated with show business: the Pacific Ocean, the weather, the cuisine that came from the broad ethnic mix, the flora he studied on the streets of Santa Monica, the thousands of beautiful women who weren’t very democratic in their affections. He could finally understand how such literary people as Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isher-wood loved the place. It was the strong but not very deep hint of the Mediterranean. It was a set for a movie too large and confusing to get made.
It was at this stage that after thirty-five years of marriage he had gradually become aware that his wife was more eccentric than he was. He was a pure American product while she had stepped aside. She loved her garden, her grown daughters, with whom she remained close, dogs, cats, horses, cooking, and watching birds. She liked to travel but not when it was purely business which she considered the source of their unhappiness and was best to ignore. She was never interested in social position despite her impeccable background, or in shopping or in acquiring a stock portfolio. She was pleased when he quit at the top of the game financially. They were happier with far less money though there was an obvious period of adjustment. They went to Key West a number of times but truly enjoyed their annual fall trip to Montana where their eldest daughter now lived.
He liked the feeling that he had come back to his senses. He began to fish even more, especially in Michigan, Montana, Costa Rica, and Mexico. He came to the conclusion that it was less the fishing than the day-to-day presence of water, the nature of which to him was still as indefinably mysterious as it had been in his childhood when the passion had begun with the cool pellucid lakes or gently moving rivers of the northern Michigan forests.
The modest satoris that come with the road were often inscrutable and unpleasant. On a premature spring trip in late March he was caught in a snowstorm in southern Minnesota, and having spun out and landed in a ditch he felt the edges of his consciousness widen into areas he didn’t really want to visit. His aim had been simple enough: to see the hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes coming into southern Nebraska and then to drive north into the Sandhills and see the first faint spring greens and
the arrival north of the migrating meadowlarks whose song gave him a flood of sensations similar to those evoked by Mozart. These weren’t earned sensations but a gift of greatness by a man and a bird.
He managed to spin his way out of the ditch in his four-wheel drive, feeling a little stupid and inattentive, and made his way to a rest stop, sitting on a picnic table in the thick but gently falling snow, and watching the crosscountry semis move slowly through the slush, drinking the thin and mediocre midwestern coffee, really the only way for people who drink a dozen social cups a day. He sat there wondering if he would become paralyzed if he understood life any better than he already did. Ultimately we don’t know all that much and we don’t know that we don’t know that much. At nineteen he had become enamored of Rimbaud’s statement “Everything we are taught is false.” At that time, though, he was deep in the costume drama of becoming a poet so that the statement was only another stance to adopt high on a hilltop overlooking a city with contempt, with a loose scarf around the poet’s neck blowing in the wind. Now sitting on the picnic table accumulating snow on his body he wondered how the human race had fallen so brutishly short of the mark. If there are five million hungry children in America the simple solution is to feed them. If the government has chosen not to do so it only means they don’t want to. These are people who have never missed a meal and you could tell by their level of discourse that none of them had the wit to imagine hunger let alone the stink of a battlefield.
When he quit Hollywood certain friends advised, “Don’t burn your bridges,” which summoned to his mind the image of a burning bridge with wooden timbers hissing as they fell into the river. The fact that once again he preferred garden-variety stupid bravado to reality puzzled him. A hero of his youth, Joe Louis, had ended up a greeter at the front doors of a Las Vegas casino. The vision of Joe Louis troubled him when an accountant blithely asked, “Why didn’t you save more in your heyday?” He now would have to train and write as hard as a racehorse to make a living as a novelist, and whatever else could be added on in place of soul-depleting screenplays. He lacked a shred of sympathy for himself because he knew the answer to the classic “Who did this to me?” His mentor Weisinger had been intensely cynical about the slender philosophical foundations of the British and European Romantic movements, a sea change that was still the basic fuel for poets and some novelists toward the end of the twentieth century. Weisinger was a European-style intellectual leftist and had grave questions about the solo, basically self-referential aspects of the writer as faux outlaw on any society’s nether edges. Shelley’s “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” made one think, “Of course you do, dummy.”
