Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  I suspect that at its best your education’s main motive is to fuel your curiosity and teach you how to find out things for yourself. This is adequately simpleminded to cover the situation. Nothing much is remembered without the emotion of curiosity. Even your dogs and cats are full of it. You are unlikely to feel emotion for material unless your teacher has it. The educationists seem to think in terms of methodical steps but a teacher brimming with passion for the subject is what actually works.

  After the age of sixteen it seems I had no defense against the world and my own preposterous oafishness than language, my own written word and what I read, which I used as armor. At eighteen my heroes were Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Rimbaud, Henry Miller, and James Joyce. I read Finnegans Wake over and over as a college freshman trusting that its music was a substitute for wisdom. I was a peacock, an aesthete, an asshole, to be frank, and with my few friends I discovered that talking and drinking could construct in themselves an acceptable reality no matter that this reality had disappeared by the next morning and the process had to be repeated.

  Meanwhile my studies suffered, as it were. I remember the day when I had the highest score in three sections, one hundred twenty students, in a humanities examination, only to score the lowest in the same number of students in an exam in natural science. The science professor thought I had chosen wrong answers on purpose as it seemed “statistically improbable” I could go that far astray. If there were a hundred samples of fifteen different types of rocks in a jumble how could I identify only three correctly?

  I also couldn’t tie a necktie. In the four times I quit college as an undergraduate my father would pre-tie me a dollar tie or two in case my trip to New York City offered up more than a menial job. There were two stays in New York, one in Boston, and one in San Francisco, all reached by hitchhiking with a cardboard box bound with rope inside of which were my typewriter, volumes of Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, a few clothes, my mother’s cookies, a tin of Argentine beef. I usually had at least fifty dollars split between my wallet and my sock to prevent theft, which caused a slight limp in order not to grind my grubstake into powder.

  In New York I worked in Marboro Books, a discount house on Forty-second Street and at Brentano’s up on Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center. I had a windowless room on Grove Street, and once for a few months a room and a half with a stove on MacDougal near Houston. My landlord and an Italian woman across the street taught me how to make marinara sauce with garlic and herbs. The woman across the street, perhaps in her mid-forties, would undress in front of the window and I’d return the favor, though when we met on the street we never mentioned our secret vice. I knew almost no one except other bookstore clerks, and a Jewish girl whom I met at a Washington Square concert. We loved each other but her mother wept lavishly when she met my shabby beatnik self. This girl was only eighteen but way ahead of me intellectually, headed for Barnard from Music and Arts High School. She read Apollinaire and Valéry to me in French, a boggling act to a midwesterner. We shared the refuge of the Museum of Modern Art and when the crowds were sparse we could neck right in front of Monet’s Water Lilies, or Picasso’s Guernica, our hormones overcoming the suffering in the latter painting, a wayward eye catching the howling bull.

  Curiously at the time I was an ineffective left-winger, active in civil rights demonstrations, including picketing Woolworth’s in East Lansing. I was speechlessly impressed when I heard Martin Luther King Jr. in person though much of my thrill seemed to dwell on his mastery of the rhythms of language. At the time my close friends would listen only to jazz and rhythm and blues, the latter available from a black radio station in Inkster which was part of Detroit. The Inkster station also played the marvelous sermons, half sung, of Reverend C. L. Franklin, who was the father of the great Aretha Franklin. And around this period when I was in New York I attended meetings of the Young Progressive Socialists (free donuts, radical ladies) where I attempted passionately to sign up to fight with Fidel and Che in Oriente Province. I was rejected as an obviously daft poet, which I gave as my occupation even though I assured them I was handy with a rifle and stalking from years of deer hunting. My feelings were hurt for several days though I definitely wasn’t interested in dying for a cause, however noble, except for my calling of poetry. Perhaps the singular reason young poets are attracted to writing programs is out of loneliness, the need to be in the company of their own strange kind.

  Unlike my mother, my father looked on my wanderings, with tolerance and a little envy. He was a bit to the left with a populist background himself, referring to the wealth of the Fords and Rockefellers as “unpaid wages.” He, however, was quite aware that there was a fine line between looking for a source of meaning for one’s life and becoming an utter fool, and hoped that I wouldn’t “disappear up my own asshole,” in his country idiom. He had made the leap from rural life to a profession, from bib overalls and hard labor to a suit and office, no matter that his profession was agriculture. There was a similarity here in my father and my best literature professors who had survived the Great Depression and were grateful and enthused to be teaching, the central passion of their lives. My college professor Herbert Weisinger had told me that his friend the anthropologist Loren Eiseley had been on the bum a number of years and I’ve thought that this fact extended the grand range of Eiseley’s writing. Years later at a literary dinner I spoke with W. H. Auden about this matter and he was untypically effusive, being a fan of Eiseley’s. He said that “scraping by” had always been good for his work.

  I was lucky that John Wilson, the director of such matters at Michigan State, always gave me back my tuition scholarships when I returned from my trips. Wilson was curious to hear of my adventures and as a former Rhodes scholar he liked the idea that I intended to “make” literature. This was in the late fifties when literary hubris was in short supply in the Midwest. Wilson once mentioned that I was less gaunt after my Boston stay than in New York, but then in Boston I was a busboy at a Prince Spaghetti House and meals came with the job. The cooks were a little puzzled when I brought to work a book by the contemporary Italian poet Ungaretti. I was embarrassed by my presumption when it dawned on me that though the cooks spoke Italian to one another they were largely illiterate, though very kind to me, cooking me simple Neapolitan specialties and occasionally sending me home to my miserable cold room on St. Botolph’s Street with meatball sandwiches. I had moved to Boston because I had read that it was the “St. Petersburg of the United States,” and since I was an addict of Dostoyevsky that made Boston irresistible. This was well before urban renewal and St. Botolph’s was suitably murky, squalid, and cold during the winter. In my rooming house there was a hare-lipped merchant: sailor who kept telling me that “drinking doesn’t pay dividends,’ an Irish bachelor named Frank whose room was walled with books and who would walk every day to his mother’s house in Dorchester for a free lunch. Many years later I figured out with the novelist Tom McGuane that Frank was likely one of McGuane’s cousins. Another roomer was a young writer aspirant named Pete Snyder with whom I later hitchhiked to New York (back to short rations). We were fortunate enough to spend two evenings at the Five Spot with Jack Kerouac whose On the Road had recently been published. Kerouac was celebrating in a way that would eventually kill him in his forties, but then drinking has always been the writer’s black-lung disease as Tom McGuane said.

  Later when I talked to Gary Snyder, John Clellon Holmes, and Allen Ginsberg, separately, about these years there was a sense of puzzlement about Kerouac’s slow form of suicide by alcohol. For unclear reasons some of us draw up short and others can’t. Having had a number of periods when I didn’t care if I lived still doesn’t explain it to me.

  There is the Rilkean quandary of the exposed heart being richest in feeling and the point at which the exposed heart cannot recover. The idea that it is self-inflicted is neither here nor there. The half-dozen suicides I’ve known seemed to have nothing compensatory to balance the life of the mind.
I mean writer suicides. With my good friend Richard Brautigan there was the chicken-and-the-egg question of whether he was a writer who became a suicide, or a suicide who became a writer. We actually discussed the matter while trout fishing in Montana and he said he would never commit suicide as long as he could still write and his lovely daughter Ianthe depended on him. The news was terrifying but somewhat expected.

  Oddly, the grace note of my own early life was manual labor. Michigan State started as an agricultural college and the campus is still splendidly landscaped. Whenever I returned from my wanderings I could get my job back at the college horticultural farm where I did everything from prune grape plants, hoe, and dig trenches to set up large irrigation fields with forty-foot sections of pipe. One day I lost two fingernails in the pipe clamps which even then I knew was easier on the system than mental suffering. Of course the knack or skill at physical labor is an accident of birth as is the submersion in the natural world that comes so easily from early exposure. When broke and hungry in San Francisco I could always take the labor bus, sometimes an open flat rack truck out of Market Street, for a day or two of bean picking which would then afford me five days of reading, writing, and walking. Of course when you’re nineteen or twenty what you eat and where you sleep are small items indeed compared to the pleasure of walking from North Beach all the way out and through Golden Gate Park to see the Pacific Ocean, which was my announced intention to my father when I left home. We were talking a lot that March while hand-digging a sloping hole twelve by fourteen feet for a basement extension below the new bedroom, a lot of digging but a fine way to decompress from the office and college. The fact was I needed to see the Pacific Ocean very badly and had impulsively thrown the textbooks I was carrying off a campus bridge into the Red Cedar River. My brother John, freshly home from the navy and back in college, reminded me that three of the five textbooks were his.

  To a young rural flatlander cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco are impenetrably immense, incomprehensible. You don’t understand why they are there any more than why you’re there except they are exciting, especially contrasted to manual labor and the torpor of college. And in these cities invisible novelists and poets were writing books so it was logical to go there and invisibly write a book. I had a journal I had filled with gists, piths, quotes, apothegms, quotes of brutally inclusive wisdom. (Whitman said poets must “move wild laughter in the throat of death.” How?) There’s nothing quite like reading great literature on a daily basis to freeze the writing hand. You had convinced yourself, your parents, and a few friends that you were a poet and now all that remained to do was write some poems. You had pumped up your ego, your hubris, to an unconscionable degree simply to mentally survive but the evidence of any real talent was lacking. Every single day and into the evening you drew in what Ginsberg called “incredible music of the streets.” I even got Babe, the bartender at the Kettle of Fish, to read me Ungaretti and Gaspara Stampa aloud in Italian though he appeared to be somewhat embarrassed. Louis, a waiter from Positano, was very touched and I got a free serving of chicken cacciatore before closing. The discovery of garlic seemed an important aspect of my development as an artist, equal to that of figuring out that red wine was better for the imagination than beer. One afternoon Babe introduced me to the renowned politician Carmine DeSapio who asked me what I did and I said that I was a poet. He said, “Why not?” One night I was attacked by a burly guy in the toilet and managed to demolish him. I was utterly shocked when Babe told me that the guy liked to be beaten up. This was a subtlety of behavior I hadn’t encountered in the Midwest.

  New York and living in the Village made me think I was part of something larger even though I definitely wasn’t. I wrote my mother letters when I spotted Marian Anderson and Richard Tucker in person as she was a fan of the voices of both. I followed Aldous Huxley for several blocks at a polite distance. He was guided by a lovely young woman because of his bad eyesight. I had read all of his novels and craved to trade elegant aperçus with his characters. I think my wages at both Marboro Books and Brentano’s came to about forty bucks a week which made for short rations after paying for my room, subway fare, beer or wine. Sometimes hunger would get sharp and I’d spend my last money on the usual Italian sausage on a roll with onions and peppers, which meant I’d have to get up an hour earlier to walk fifty blocks or so lacking subway fare. In one three-month period I had only one full meal and that was when a bookstore clerk friend, Bruce Kellner, who later became a scholar of American literature, cooked me the first curry of my life, a delicious chicken. curry with a whole chicken, Bruce wasn’t a dim-witted Midwesterner and cued me toward inexpensive musical events and I saw both André Eglevsky and Erik Bruhn dance at Lewisohn Stadium, also sat near the piano when George Shearing played in Central Park. I had begun reading Hart Crane, Rilke, Lorca, and W. C. Williams, all of whom tugged at one another for my fidelity, though my journals became less strewn with faux Schopenhauer and Nietzsche musings and more full of physical images drawn from my life.

  What did I have in mind? A scantily drawn self-portrait of that time brings on a little squirming, a shudder or two. In this rendition I wanted to avoid the sense of pumping out the basement because in our evolutionary curve we are most frequently “educated” by memorable experiences that involve pain. A dozen girls danced with you in Key West but you remember the one who hissed “no” in your face, right down to the Listerine on her breath, the wart on the palm of her hand. The great blue herons in the white pine, the loon circling a reed bed towing her young, a young bear peering down from a popple tree are lovely images drawn up from the past, but not quite so sharp in definition as the water snake that bit your ankle, the hornets you couldn’t outrun, your only quarter lost at the county fair, Grandpa dying in the oxygen tent, thinking that down the stairwell you heard your parents say that you would be fed garbage. The dark basement pantry where the canned vegetables and preserves were kept can be flawlessly recaptured because you were sent there for behaving badly.

  What did I have in mind setting myself aside that young? You try mightily to create a way of being that can’t go wrong in your path to being a poet, a mode of survival not altogether unlike the manner in a primitive society in which a young man becomes a hunter and gatherer. Rather than elders you have books. Your father and teachers may have taught you the ways of the world but this giving over your life to the making of literature is a solitary effort. The religious sense of a calling tries to totally ignore the biblical puzzle of “Many are called but few are chosen,” though this dictum settles itself in the back of the mind and is easily retrieved in the melancholy of self-doubt.

  And the sense of the comic never totally dismisses itself. The room I rented on Grove Street was a real bargain because it was interior and the only opening was a window on an air vent at the bottom of which rats could be seen at work and play. Even the snazzier room on MacDougal had a rat hole in the comer over which I put a stove grate, and then with empathy I would drop in bits of bread for them to eat. On the wall I had taped a photo of Rimbaud from the Gallimard leather edition, also a drawn portrait of Dostoyevsky, two suitable heroes for a young peacock who was all display and no performance. The daily effort was to build a sustainable ego, an exhausting process that left little energy for writing anything. I was quite drunk with language and the playfulness of my own consciousness, and any wisdom I came across to help me order my language seemed beside the point. It was already apparent that you had to utterly give your life over to language with minimal chance of success though that was far from a deterrent at the time. The indomitable mixture of hormones and the daily budget of a quart of beer carried you along. The bartender at the White Horse Tavern who was said to have served Dylan Thomas his fatal nineteen double shots of whiskey advised me water was the best writing aid but the advice didn’t take.

  THE REAL WORLD

  I had fallen in love with a girl back home, which brought me back from the San Francisco trip earlier tha
n I had expected. Doubtless there are trillions of pages that have been written about love, and billions of people of all cultures who have experienced it, but the specifics of the feelings of love seem no clearer than they were in the times of Homer and Sappho. I’m sure at some point a brain physiologist will exactly locate the emotions but I have doubts that anyone will truly illuminate it. Perhaps the text that comes closest is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and perhaps throw in Knut Hamsun’s magnificent Victoria. It takes a full resonance of poetry or fiction, or cinema in its highest forms, to come close to the sheer amplitude, the curious emotional weight of the experience.

  Naturally I was still a lunatic when I hitched home though I had had the calming event of being stuck by a roadside in Nevada for a dozen hours when the temperature was over a hundred and my lips blackened. This served to make me more than ordinarily homesick, a set of emotions not unlike romantic love where the breast actually swells with longing, the throat constricts, and the brain whirls with visions of green fields and cool azure lakes. The homesickness was further propelled by a tussle, a euphemism, with a crazy bum beneath an underpass the evening before when. I was trying to catch some sleep. He announced he was going to rob me and put a hand in his jacket pocket as if he held a weapon. All I had was a jackknife but then I didn’t really want to hurt anyone, or be hurt myself, so I punched rather too hard, missing his chin but hitting his Adam’s apple. He rolled around choking and I walked off quickly. A few hundred yards away in the twilight I looked back and he was still lying beside the road but then his hands fluttered upward so I guessed he’d live.