Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  Once while doing readings in Minnesota I idly stopped by an ice arena in Minneapolis and watched a group of young men and women practicing speed skating. I was fascinated by the swiftness, the synchronized birdlike waving of arms on the straightaways, the tuck of the inside arm on curves. The technique seemed monochromatic but accomplished and the speed generated quite stunning. At the time I was a woebegone poet drinking too much and struggling with a crack-up. I was lucky that a local New Directions poet, Carl Rakosi, who was also an analyst, had the time and inclination to spend an evening talking over my stalled trajectory. The problems slowly disappeared but the image of the speed skaters stayed with me.

  Well before the first year was over I perceived I was by temperament well out of my element at Stony Brook despite the engaging life of the mind. By nature I’m a semi-recluse, a tad melancholy as a balance between frightening extremes with an avowed intent of not sticking my neck out which, conversely, always happens. Just the other day the writer Charles Bowden told me that if you move a local black-tipped rattler over two miles it dies. Within two miles, however, it lifts its snaky head, observes the landscape, and makes its way home.

  The metaphor of speed skating is enviable partly because I am a poor skater and it was utterly out of my realm of capability. When we played hockey I was the goalie. A public job such as I had at Stony Brook was continuous tripping and learning how to fall without dire injury. One day a professor specializing in Alexander Pope stopped by my office to tell me that I was “certainly an interesting regional poet,” a matter I had already noted in my journal, to wit, everything written outside the confines of New York City is “regional,” even William Carlos Williams in New Jersey. Another emotional pratfall came at Christmas when Linda and Jamie went home to Michigan and I had been asked to do the preliminary interviewing at the Modern Language Association in New York City, the annual national Christmas vacation cattle call for candidates for jobs in English departments. I had wide experience in being unemployed and it was painful talking to thirty or so male and female recent Ph.D.’s who desperately wanted to join Stony Brook faculty for reasons of high pay and closeness to Gotham, the nearly pathetic silliness of Stony Brook having become a “hot” place to teach. This was hard to perceive as I had observed that all but a few students were surly and muttonish for reasons of temperament and hormones. The high point of MLA was walking over to Schine’s, where my college friend Bob Dattila had told me his father worked. This very large and imposing Sicilian made me the thickest rare roast beef sandwich of my life, which, with a couple of ample whiskeys, allowed me to proceed with the maudlin interviewing. Later that winter we even turned down Stephen Spender. Everyone wanted to teach at Stony Brook but no one wanted to live there. The closeness of New York City was not an unreasonable goal.

  I didn’t skate, I began drinking too much, the only one in my larger family to do so except my uncles Walter and Artie who had World War II to blame. Naturally I didn’t think I was drinking too much because my cronies, J. D. Reed, Gerry Nelson, and Jack Thompson, were drinking more. On the White estate Bobby would shoot an arrow straight up and then all of us drunks including Bobby would run for cover to avoid being killed by the arrow, a sensible and artistic form of Russian roulette.

  One of our biggest family expenses at Stony Brook were the phone bills generated by my talking to Tom McGuane out at the Stegner program. George Brockway at Norton had suggested I think of writing a novel and I had no idea where to begin save with a pencil and tablet as advised by Faulkner in his interview in the Paris Review. I certainly wasn’t going to write about my current experiences. I was supposedly writing a television play for NBC about a man whose favorite moment in life (it’s still up there) was giving dogs fresh bones. I gave a reading at the Guggenheim Museum in New York or maybe that was later. I gave a reading for the Academy of American Poets but maybe that was later. I hosted seemingly countless readings for poets like Robert Lowell who definitely didn’t seem to care for me when we had lunch with Jack Ludwig. After a James Dickey visit my wife Linda said “that man” wasn’t going to enter her house again. James Wright was totally wonderful but by then he had quit drinking. We kept the atmosphere subdued because of Wright’s nervous condition. My mother who was visiting at the time was thrilled by the courtly way Wright quoted her so many poems from memory. A few months later I was seated between Wright and W. H. Auden at a dinner at Drue Heinz’s palace on the East River. I kindly enough changed seats with Wright who wanted very much to be next to Auden to talk about Edward Thomas and other English poets. Wright had seemed upset that I was talking to Auden about his gay poem “Platonic Blow,” which had nearly gotten him arrested before Mayor John Lindsay had called off the blue dogs. Auden, however, didn’t have a filament of the bourgeois in his system and his pecan face further cracked with laughter.

  The finest experience with a visiting poet was the appearance of Robert Duncan whom I’d never met and now is having a resurgence long after his death. Duncan was a bona fide genius without so much as a simple B.A., and though from San Francisco he had no particular interest other than icy wit in the Beat-academic controversy. During Duncan’s visit I took him into a graduate Joyce class and he promptly without notes filled three blackboards with speculations on the structure of Finnegans Wake. Herbert Weisinger whispered in my ear, “Double his fee.” Both of them had known the great medieval historian Kantvoritz. John Cage was visiting the music department at the time and it was a pleasure to see these two geniuses together at a party at our house. Robert was fretful about missing his vitamins and Cage took Linda aside and said that a couple of aspirin would work. A few years later when 1 visited San Francisco and stayed with Duncan and his long-term partner Jess I was struck by what was certainly the finest private library I had ever seen.

  Maybe I was trying to skate in my bare feet. My truce with the real world was my family, and the ambience of my job was beginning to draw off all of my energy though I had finished a second book of poems, Locations, that was soon due for publication. My fantasy life surrounded a fishing trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that I had taken with my Kingsley friend Pat Paton the summer before when we had spent time in the truly wild Huron Mountains and seen no one else for days. But meanwhile my mind was also enlivened by a friendship with an instructor, George Quasha, who had a marvelously fertile mind and still does. The second year at Stony Brook I taught a course called “Modern Poetics,” which had an assigned reading list of one hundred and twenty books that served to get rid of an overflow of students. I also spent a lot of time with my prized student, Eliot Weinberger, whom I later learned wasn’t even enrolled. Aside from his own work Eliot later translated the work of Octavio Paz and many other Spanish-speaking poets of note. Another bright student was Geoffrey O’Brien who currently edits the Library of America. An additional boon occurred late in my first year when Herbert and I decided we needed a reputable poet and hired Louis Simpson away from Berkeley. Simpson was widely thought to be “academic” but it was impossible to think so if you knew the work or the poet. He was wry, laconic, quite playful, and imminently knowledgeable, part Caribbean by birth. Once I had lunch with Louis and Derek Walcott at a German restaurant up near Eighty-second Street and Walcott told me—we were all in our cups—that as opposed to Simpson nothing would come of either of us. A few years ago I was seated next to Walcott and Rose Styron at the head table of my only PEN dinner and I reminded him of this. He said he didn’t remember, though it was possible, then teased me into lighting a forbidden cigarette with the effective prod that I was “bourgeois” if I didn’t. I did so whereupon hundreds of others took my cue. Future historians studying the media record of our age will come to the unavoidable conclusion that tobacco is the largest issue of our time.

  My frequent trips to New York City would leave me exhausted but satisfied. It has dawned on me that my next thirty years spent as a home cook in the hinterlands were largely spent trying to re-create the food that is readily availab
le to New Yorkers every single day, from French to Italian to Chinese to German to soul food and so on. The only item unavailable is first-rate BBQ, especially Texas-style beef brisket, a singular gift of that state that is currently haunting us with sword rattling and grotesque malfeasance.

  I did a number of haughty reviews for The New York Times Book Review, so pompous that they embarrass me to this day. I attended meetings of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, and one of the first Associated Writing Programs meetings wherein R. V. Cassill was impassioned about getting poor poets and writers jobs at universities. Now, of course, the effort has flowered into something resembling a Ponzi scheme as such programs are producing many more writers than there are literary readers or jobs for that matter. Once book jackets would advertise that the writer, say Marvin Schmidt, had been a “hod carrier, waiter, cabdriver, septic-tank pumper, lifeguard, toe freak, and private detective,” and now the items have been reduced to “MFA, Southwest Missouri State University.” I haven’t yet come to any relevant conclusions on the matter though when I met Ann Beattie years ago and complimented her on her first book she said she was still waitressing.

  Now my skater’s feet had grown tiny and raw, and the only carrot left was the poet Dan Gerber offering us a house on his property back in Michigan. He had visited us in Stony Brook in his own plane and on the way home made a foolhardy attempt at bypassing a thunderstorm, which caused him to give up private flying. The dim light at the end of my own confused tunnel seemed to be more than a few drinks at the end of the workday. I couldn’t get the hang of local saltwater fishing. I didn’t have the time or money to hire a boat though one lucky evening on an inlet I caught a shad and a small striped bass, both of which were delicious. Quite suddenly two good things happened. Tom McGuane, who was exhausted by failure, had sent me the manuscript of his first novel, The Sporting Club. I gave it to Alex Nelson, married to my instructor friend Jerry, who worked at Simon & Schuster as a junior editor. She in turn gave it to Richard Locke who was farther up the ladder and within a week Tom had his acceptance, plus the agent Candida Donadio. I must say that shepherding a manuscript never worked that well again in my life but this single success was utterly thrilling on behalf of a close friend.

  The other wonderful event came with a call from Elizabeth Kray who ran the Academy of American Poets and wanted me to have lunch in New York with her and Carolyn Kizer. I did so and Carolyn told me that it would be announced in a month or so that I was getting a National Endowment grant, which in those days, before congressional interference, was enough to take a full year off. After lunch I called Linda from a pay phone, then broke into a dreamy trance on the train back to Stony Brook, imagining a whole year back in northern Michigan where I fully intended to fish every day and hopefully see a wolf in the Upper Peninsula.

  I think this was in March and I entered a definitive manic phase that would last until we left the village of Stony Brook in June. Simpson and I had unwisely secured partial funding from the National Endowment to host an “international poetry festival.” I was questioning the wisdom of this one day when Professor Wang, who won the Nobel for parity physics in his twenties, entered my office for novelreading suggestions. He did this occasionally and I was reminded how frequently scientific geniuses are interested in the humanities as compared to the reverse. Louis Simpson followed Dr. Wang and wondered idly how we hoped to handle a hundred American poets and twelve foreign all at one time. Good question. We looked at the wall separating my office from the departmental secretaries, Cecilia Grimm and Lilian Silkworth, hoping that they would pick up the ample slack though they had no authority to do so. I had long been convinced that women should take over all offices of government and there would be far less bleating, farting, bragging, and bluster. This could be thought of as a simpleminded solution to world problems but I’m still convinced it’s true.

  Of course 1966 and 1967 were radical years politically. Even to faculty members demonstrating is more interesting than the day-to-day torpor of university life. Louis Simpson, J. D. Reed, and I flew down to Washington on a La Guardia shuttle for a writer’s march on the State Department against the Vietnam War. My student Eliot Weinberger had already been beaten black and blue in one demonstration so we felt both timid and obligated. Solidarity is a rare feeling for writers but we marched along led by Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. J.D. and I were at the tail end sipping from a flask of whiskey talking about Bachelard whom Quasha had introduced us to when a group of American Nazis began shouting anti-Semitic epithets. We were joined by Robert Bly and charged the Nazis who fled because we were larger. We were then collared by our parade marshals who said we would be asked to leave the protest if we couldn’t behave. This was one area where I favored the tactics of Malcolm X over those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi. I’m still not sure who is right but I had never heard such violence in ugly language, even in the moments preceding a bar fight.

  We had student strikes at Stony Brook and in imitation of Columbia the administration building was seized. John Toll, the president of the university, called our house and my self-possessed wife told him I was taking a nap before my sacred poetry evening. This didn’t work so I drove over because I had been told that my students were some of those involved. I met with the president and two deans and suggested, since it was a cold night, they have the power plant turn off the heat to the administration building, and also the phones and electricity. This worked by dawn but I ever after felt like a turncoat with these pragmatic midwestern gestures.

  The International Poetry Festival with its dozen international poets and its hundred American poets is safely tucked away in hopefully unrecorded history. Many were inspired. Many mostly drank and threw unknown objects out of windows. Naturally I handled the food and wine and liquor of which there were enormous quantities. There were assignations in the bushes, also I tripped over a coupling couple in a midnight parking lot. Poetry can evoke the basics. After I escaped the area I was informed I had overdrawn the budget by thirty grand or so. Navy blue shame filled my noggin and I retreated even deeper into the woods. Often in my life I’ve reminded myself of one of those dreamy midwestern dolts who slide through the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather and who, standing on the tracks, discover that the approaching object and loud noise is actually a train. Despite my sorry departure I was soon informed that I had been promoted to an assistant professor from my position as a mere assistant. The department meeting in which this was decided was supposedly confidential. Many were evidently against me but Alfred Kazin overwhelmed them and won the day by dint of authority and eloquence. Despite this kindness I knew it was unlikely. Linda and Jamie had happily flown ahead by a couple of weeks. Linda had begun to feel trapped by the fact that Long Island was an island, and had been having nightmares of burning sheep in burning boxcars rolling slowly on tracks in the night, with apocalyptic escape available only through congested New York City. My own departure in our old Ford with a dog and an irascible cat for company was more literary with my trying to remember a Duncan poem, something about Roethke breaking down, falling to pieces within the deceitful coils of an institution, ending with the line “What is hisses like a serpent and writhes to shed its skin.” Self-serving but appropriate.

  NORTHERN MICHIGAN

  Nothing is less interesting, except to his future scholars, than a writer in the midst of a productive period. “He or she wrote.” There you have it. I’m sure it was embarrassing to any writer who watched The Way We Were to see Robert Redford sitting there before an old Remington, partially typing a page, then ripping it from the carriage, wadding it up, and tossing it toward the wastebasket. Such scenes are mercifully short. Now that the computer has replaced the typewriter the scenes will be even more banal. A few years ago a friend from the Chicago Tribune, Bob Cross, stopped at a public campground to type up notes on his old Olivetti and several curious children dropped by to watch. None had ever seen a typewriter.

  I call this memoi
r Off to the Side because that is a designated and comfortable position for a writer. In situations where you are inevitably the center of attention there is a feeling of restless discomfort, maybe even inappropriate behavior. When someone wishes to “give a dinner” for me I invariably turn it down. I like to go to dinners if I am off to the side where I belong. How can you observe the vagaries of human behavior if you’re the target? This constitutes the inevitable and profound unpleasantness of book tours. It’s the school carnival all over again and you’re the man with his head stuck through the canvas hole. Others are throwing objects either softly or hard. This is not a plea for sympathy but a statement of the obvious, at least for those in the trade. Except with friends you make people a little nervous. If you’re curious, which I almost always am, they have a trace of the feeling that they have become a work in progress. The bold ones in the upper Midwest say, “I’ll tell you my story and we’ll go halves on the money,” or an approximation thereof. I’ve been teased with sentences such as “I knew he was dead because the snow had stopped melting on his face,” or even “There were three of them sitting on the couch, all naked and pretty darn big, but those ladies were a feast for a logger’s sore eyes.” In Hollywood you’re even further off to the side because the Powerful Ones seem never quite capable of believing that they have to depend on a guy who drives an older brown Camry to create a movie idea and a script for them. A man who makes over twenty million a year stares at you with bleak cynicism because it is you who has a “stable of gold” in your lips, as Rimbaud not Rambo said. We could go further, or perhaps closer, afield by imagining what it is like to fly a single-engine plane across the Matto Grosso at night, but it is still the sedentary tablet, typewriter, or computer that is the undramatic center of the writer’s life. As a child when I was trying to learn how to milk, my Swede grandfather offered me a dime if I could fill a big pail. I sat there on the milk stool pulling the teats until my arms and hands were numb and hot with pain. He steadied the cow so she wouldn’t kick me but allowed her to swat me with her tail. That’s a bad day at the tablet.