A Feast of Words
“’Some people eat to live, others live to eat.’ Both could be said of novelist, poet, screenwriter, and essayist Jim Harrison. (He) has a genuine passion for food, for people who love food, love to eat it, love to prepare it, love to talk about it, read about it and write about it. He is not alone. The penchant of Harrison and his friends to seek out and gulp down the finest in both food and drink is legendary and the upcoming release of Harrison’s newest collection of non-fiction, The Raw and the Cooked, Adventures of a Roving Gourmand will have his throng of fans salivating. The book, a feast of words, is sure to gratify gourmands, gastronomes and readers of every ilk!” - excerpt from a review by Beef Torrey
Here is an online bibliography of Harrison's books at BooklistOnline.com
Here is the Jim Harrison tribute page at LitHub.
Advertisments
Feature
On Becoming A Big Deal
Jim Harrison and the Zen of Success and Self-Importance
Jim Harrison has arrived. After hovering on the cusp of 
mainstream recognition for 30 years, the poet-novelist-screenwriter has achieved critical mass with a barrage of new works by and about him: his fourth book of novellas; an autobiographical children's book; a collection of food essays; a series of Men's Journal articles. And now, a memoir, Off to the Side (Grove/Atlantic 2002), a soul-baring treatise on living a life devoted to the art of writing. Long ignored by the academic community, Jim Harrison's extensive body of work has finally prodded the academy from its prolonged siesta. Two recent university press releases effectively underscore Harrison's productivity and output, and are welcomed and deeply satisfying reads for fervent Harrison fans. The True Bones of My Life: Essays on the Fiction of Jim Harrison, by Patrick Smith (Michigan State University Press, 2002) and Conversations with Jim Harrison, brilliantly edited by the country's foremost Steinbeck Scholar, Bob DeMott (University Press of Mississippi, 2002).
These books are a boon for Harrison fans who can now revel among the inner workings of one of today's most intriguing literary minds. Off to the Side is also a brilliant discourse on dealing with fame, while maintaining a balanced perspective on life and an enduring sense of place: of home, family, and nature.
Making it Big
"For an artist to think he is the consensus of the media opinion about himself is absolute nonsense... I don't want to know. It's too early. I don't want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I'm a big deal, because it doesn't help you do your work... I mean you can get more relaxation out of losing your self-importance than by any other way, and then you just get more work done. It's not a very interesting idea to be a so-called big deal."
These were Jim Harrison's words, nearly twenty years ago -- a man now much more wizened, and finally, per chance, at peace with himself and his lifework. He passed through the flames and is still grinning...
Surprise! Jim Harrison, Michigan native and recent Montana transplant, avid sportsman, Zen practitioner and gourmand has become rich and famous! He's a big deal, a really big deal-- not to be soon forgotten or never remembered -- a maverick literary pentathlete, whose craft spans the publication continuum. An anything but ordinary man who writes words on paper, filled with vim and vigor, as well as piss, spit and (Balsamic) vinegar.
From Off to the Side: "What would one write about growing up the way I did? I can't pretend I didn't grow up hunting and fishing. I write about what I know...I know about loons and coyotes and crows...I know about men and women, too."
Harrison's breakthrough novella Legends of the Fall, which first appeared in it's entirety in Esquire, brought Harrison critical acclaim, commercial success, and aided him in securing lucrative screenwriting contracts. Harrison was stunned that he made more money in his first Hollywood deal than his own father made in his entire lifetime. However, such celebrity created new problems, which Harrison explains frankly: "It was a real mess for awhile because I had been poor for about forty years, you know, then I got really not poor. That was confusing for about two and a half years until I started spending a lot of time with my family. Then the confusion went away and I became sane again."
Life turns out the way it turns out! At the age of 45, he was hailed by many as one of the greatest fiction writers of the century. Harrison stands alone among American writers, with the ethereal hand of a poet and the earnest devotion and stamina of a novelist.
In a 1998 interview, Harrison was provocatively queried, "Is there a sense of having made it?" To which he responded, "I don't think one ever feels the difference. I used to think it's at least two percent better than being broke... The biggest barrier to writing well and doing anything well is self-importance; it's blinding. Self-importance blinds people to life. It was very awkward when I first became so-called successful... I didn't want to deal with it... but then I thought, I don't have to change my life that much."
"You feel real naked when they begin making movies you have written, much more so than when you publish a book. In a book, you cease to worry whether your readers see the material the way you do because you'll never know, though you're tipped off in bad reviews that your efforts may have lacked universality. Movies, however, are a thoroughly collaborative art and you will clearly see how the director, wardrobe people, soundman, actors and actresses have understood
your story...The bottom line is that you're not even hoping for something great, fine or even real good. What you are hoping for is something well short of bad. Through the half-dozen movies I've been connected with, my first impression, minute by minute, were that the films didn't look like they did in my head when I wrote them. Of course not. Nothing does...Five years away from Hollywood, I see all of my mistakes with painful clarity. Since it's essentially a director's medium, I should have tied myself to a series of directors sympathetic to my writing. I went large when I should have gone independent and smaller..."
Harrison is noted for his blunt, brave panache. Yet despite his success he has remained a literary outsider who prefers rural life to a metropolitan existence. "You can't be a writer unless you are willing to face up to every unpleasant aspect of the human experience. It's a matter of not withholding evidence... Of telling the truth."
Harrison is one who both sees and exclaims, "The emperor has no clothes." He's one who embraced excessive excess and the shortcomings of male camaraderie; he's encircled ambiguity and lived anything but a cloistered existence.
Looking back on a career
Harrison's obsession with writing has paid off: the author turns sixty-five this
month, and his life has assumed the veneer of stability which most of his characters seek. "Still, despite his immense talent, increasing critical support, and a growing popular audience, Harrison remains elusively in the margins of American letters," writes Patrick Smith. "Jim Harrison's fiction is diverse in its genres, protagonists, and settings: from novel to novella; from the comically macho picaro to the psychically scarred female; from the wilderness to city."
month, and his life has assumed the veneer of stability which most of his characters seek. "Still, despite his immense talent, increasing critical support, and a growing popular audience, Harrison remains elusively in the margins of American letters," writes Patrick Smith. "Jim Harrison's fiction is diverse in its genres, protagonists, and settings: from novel to novella; from the comically macho picaro to the psychically scarred female; from the wilderness to city." Since his first book of poems Plain Song was published in 1965, Jim Harrison has had a multi-faceted and remarkably productive writing career. In 1999 Copper Canyon Press released his collected poems, The Shape of the Journey, and that volume alone would make a life's work for most. Additionally, Harrison has published numerous novels (Wolf, A Good Day to Day, Farmer, Warlock, Sundog, Dalva and The Road Home), four collections of novellas, (Legends of the Fall, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Julip and The Beast God Forgot to Invent), a children's book (The Boy Who Ran to the Woods), and two collections of non-fiction (Just Before Dark and The Raw and the Cooked) - 23 acclaimed works in all.
Although admired as a novelist, Harrison clarifies "itis poetry that means the most to me." His collection After Ikkyu (1996) personifies the "uncontainable, startling, undomesticated voice of the fox-crazy monk," the 15th Century Zen Master-poet, Ikkyu Sojun (per chance Harrison's own alter ego).
Author and subject
Jim Harrison the man is a burly, barrel-chested, unflappable scalawag with a Pancho Villa mustache, an ebullient verbosity, a copious imagination and an inexhaustible desire to create. He is a one-eyed, dynamo bandito, a sexagenarian sparkplug with a bubbling overstocked cerebella who plays and socializes as hard as he works.
Thomas McGuane's novel Panama (1978), dedicated to his long-standing crony, remains the best narrative of the frenzied craziness of those years by the former hell-raisers. It's the story of the aftermath of fame and fortune -- love among the ruins of Key West. A love story "with the correct mix of hope and desperation."
"Unlike booze, good wine resonates so broadly it draws in the world that surrounds us. The effects of it are slow enough so that you can check yourself, an absolutely vital talent if you drink. As a Zen dictum says, you must find yourself where you already are and the effects of booze make this unlikely. Good wine increases the best aspects of camaraderie and sweetens the tongue for conversation. It softens the world's sharp edges in contrast to the blunting power of booze. In short, you don't become dumb at a blinding pace, and your mood swings from gentle to gentler."
Harrison is an expansive presence, full of chutzpah, with an amazing zest for life. He knows the difference between seeing and looking, living and existing, riches and wealth, entertainment and art, books and literature. He is a gregarious, shabbily dressed vicar, telling raucous jokes with irresistible brashness. But even in a suit at a formal party, the unwary might be inclined to hand him their empty cocktail glasses and ask for a refill.
Now, with Off To The Side, you the reader have the opportunity to witness his improbable metamorphosis and trajectory first hand, from the engaging master raconteur himself. A larger than life character in his own life story, Harrison is a rascal with a Big Wild Heart and a Big Wild Mind. As he says, "My Inner Child is my Outer Child."
You may find Harrison to be a charming cad (in the very best sense of the word), who is brazenly disarming, captivatingly cantankerous, profoundly profane -- in all, an authentically original voice that reveals a life well lived. For even his critics are forced to concede that his words are "rarely unmoving" and cannot deny his "strong, luminous even numinous -- talent."
Patrick Smith: "Despite his wish to the contrary, Harrison will never be anonymous again after a thirty-year roller-coaster ride through the American literary landscape, though that hardly implies that his is a household name in American letters. Most people recognize Harrison's name only in the context of the film version of Legends of the Fall. The author's first appearance on the best-seller list was in France, where The Road Home (1998) rose to the number two spot..."
"At lunch that day with twenty writers at the Cafe de Deux Garcons I was nearly asleep in my chair when a waiter asked me to sign the guest book. Everyone seemed to be watching as I leafed through the pages, not getting the point. I noted signatures like Balzac and Camus and the sweat of Midwestern embarrassment popped out on my forehead. I signed without a flourish wishing to hide under the chicken thighs (with lemon and garlic) and drank a glass of wine in a single long gulp, staring at the ceiling and wondering about future messages from the French gods, a country where living well is the only revenge."
Jim continues stubbornly and admirably to make his own way. He is no longer the poor, fat, one-eyed poet, but a canny warrior with quixotic ambition. He is a sage who knows words are both his curse and cure. He lives his life with fire in his belly.
"I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior... Irony is always scratching your tired ass, whatever way you look at it. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass."
A Strong Sense of Place
With a sense of place, ones identity is defined, and -- to a significant extent -- by the natural features of the place where you live. It is his "spirit of place" (or places) that Harrison so brilliantly evokes throughout his work. From the prairie grasslands of the Great Plains, to the subtropical evergreen forests of the Florida Keys, to the desert of Southern Arizona, to the taiga or Boreal forest of the Upper Peninsula wilderness of his native Michigan, Harrison knows each of these intimately -- it's watershed, soils, climate, plants, animals and history. Harrison's work cover the entire breath, with the skills of a seasoned naturalist and a keen observer of the natural world.
Per chance it is only fitting, if not symbolic, that Harrison's friend, the multiple-
hyphenated landscape artist Russell Chatham's works grace the bulk of the cover jackets of Harrison's books. Harrison explains that Chatham's art and his words compliment each other; "Chatham's not, in any distinct sense a literalist, and neither am I. He aims for the spirit of the landscape rather the landscape."
hyphenated landscape artist Russell Chatham's works grace the bulk of the cover jackets of Harrison's books. Harrison explains that Chatham's art and his words compliment each other; "Chatham's not, in any distinct sense a literalist, and neither am I. He aims for the spirit of the landscape rather the landscape." "In actual thickets there is ideally a stump to sit on and enough brambles so that you may frame the surrounding landscape in the apertures formed by branches. If you sit there long enough the natural world that surrounds you resumes its activities, either forgetting that you are there or accepting the idea that you are harmless because you are behaving harmlessly. Best of all you can see out and no one else can see in."
I too would be remiss if I didn't end with his poem entitled "Looking Forward to Age," from The Theory and Practice of Rivers, as Patrick Smith did: "(The poem) summarizes Harrison's artistic vision and his life in a few scant lines that might take a future biographer several hundred pages to articulate."
I will walk down to a marina
on a hot day and not go out to sea.
I will go to bed and get up early,
and carry too much cash in my wallet.
On Memorial Day I will visit the graves
of all those who died in my novels.
If I become famous I'll wear a green
janitor's suit and row a wooden boat.
* * * * * *
About the author: Gregory Kent "Beef" Torrey (1958-2013) was a liberally educated, obsessive reader, with a commendable publication history in scholarly and professional journals. He edited or co-edited volumes of interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas McGuane and Tom Robbins and co-edited a comprehensive bibliography of Jim Harrison's work. "He liked to hunt, play Candyland, jump to false conclusions and exercise poor judgement. He was wrong once, but later discovered he was mistaken."