When we die, we are only stories in the mind of others. - Jim Harrison, The Road Home
Unlike pop music stars such as David Bowie or country-western troubadours like Merle Haggard, when relatively well known writers die there is comparatively little fanfare. There are no award show musical salutes or moments of silence in sports arenas for writers who have recently passed. Usually it is just a few retrospective articles, a bump in sales on Amazon and that is about it. But I cannot let the recent death of the writer Jim Harrison at 78, go by unnoticed. When you have read at least ten books by the same author you cannot help feel somewhat connected to the guy. I never met him and I am not even sure if I had, I would have liked him, but that is one of the beauties of being a reader -- you can know a writer through his or her work and that is enough.
Jim Harrison Who?
At this point if you haven't heard of Jim Harrison, you've probably moved on, but in case you are still wondering who Harrison is, allow me to quickly explain. He is the author of the book that the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall was based upon. You know, the movie starring Brad Pitt (I pause here to allow my female friends to sigh) and Aidan Quinn. It's the film about two brothers who are in love with the same woman, and a father (the gnarly Anthony Hopkins, shown at the right, who bears a physical resemblance to Harrison), who didn't teach the boys to share. I watched the movie again recently and I appreciated the Montana scenery of the Edward Zwick film, which won the Oscar for best cinematography, but Pitt as the uber-macho and tormented, woman-magnet is a little much at times.
Like Hemingway - Nah!
Harrison is often inaccurately compared to Ernest Hemingway. They do look alike--except Harrison has a more untamed appearance--they both spent considerable time in Michigan, and they both utilize a simple sentence style with a confident, matter-of-fact tone, but Harrison's prose is deceptively rich. Another difference is that Hemingway is known for his "manly man" characters, whereas Harrison's men are equally tough but much better rounded. Yes, Harrison's middle-aged guys hunt, fish, and like dogs but they are not above pointing out their own foibles. Harrison males appreciate birds and animals (instead of always wanting to blast them) and like wine, food and strong women. (In 2001, Harrison has wrote a cookbook as well, The Raw and the Cooked.)
I've read that some that consider Harrison a misogynist (or at least some of his characters), but he has developed several strong, memorable female characters along the way. One is the resourceful twenty-one-year old Julip Durham in the three novella compilation Julip. (1994), who has to get her mentally ill brother Bobby out of a Florida jail and into an institution. Then there is Dalva, the main character of the 1988 novel of the same name, who is complex and free-spirited. She loves the natural world, "the sound of horses eating oats," "floating naked in the Niobrara [River] current on a hot afternoon in August," and the "strange looks of animals making love." Nevertheless, she struggles in her relationships with men throughout her life. In the novel, Dalva goes in search of the son she gave up for adoption when she became pregnant at age fifteen. In an interview shortly before his death, Harrison said, "With Dalva I got to establish my own universe. At the time in my 30's, I largely misunderstood women and it was time to catch up."
Dalva is also one of the main characters in The Road Home (1998), a novel that covers three generations of a Nebraska family. This book unflinchingly tackles life's major conflicts: whom we love, how we decide to live, the role family history plays in our personalities and how we face death. It is some comfort to me that Harrison died with his writing boots on-- publishing a book and appearing in the New York Times Book Review the month of his death.
Brown Dog
Harrison also created the orneriest cuss in modern literature, in the middle-aged Brown Dog, an indefatigable Native American who lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, drifting between menial jobs but smart enough, for example, to trade a female anthropologist information on ancestral burial grounds for a roll in the sack and a few hundred dollars (in Julip). Harrison sees Brown Dog's credo as "born not to cooperate with the world."
Brown Dog first appears in The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990) but Harrison brings him back several times, including in the novella Westward Ho in The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000), where Brown Dog is thrown out of his natural habitat into the phony world of Hollywood. He manages to adapt to the situation, and if that means breaking into the UCLA Botanical Garden so he camp out for the night, then so be it. Still, not tired of Brown Dog, Harrison makes him the protagonist of the title novella of The Summer He Didn't Die (2005). In this story Brown Dog trades sex with a female dentist ('she's shaped like ans egg") for a tooth extraction, and then rescues from permanent institutionalization a nature-loving child who suffers the after effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. Brown Dog is a great character and Grove Press evidently thought so too, as the publisher compiled all the novellas into one book (an added one new one) into a separate book called Brown Dog (2010).
Final Thoughts
The most important quality of the writer Jim Harrison is that as a reader you could count on any one of his books to pull out of a reading slump. You know what I am talking about -- those losing streaks where everything you read is borderline blah. Even his lesser books have vigor, style and wisdom and he has left plenty of books behind -- some which I plan on re-reading in the future.
Note: Parts of this posting appeared originally in my book, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009). Shockingly when I pulled the some of the text I found out that I had misidentified the character Brown Dog as Black Dog in the book. How could have I ever f**ked up like that ?!? And how could I ever apologize to Jim Harrison, which now of course, I cannot do. I could only imagine what the crusty, blunt writer probably would have responded to my lame apology. He' d probably borrow a line from the main character John Lundgren in Warlock (1982) whose patented response to whiners was: "Tell it to Anne Frank."
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