Off to the Side: A Memoir by Jim Harrison
I bought Linda a thirty-dollar wedding band and went through a painful cycle of improving my behavior. Our life together, which began under difficult conditions, continues until today. Only the most outlandish romantic love could sustain us and that is what we managed. Our implicit coda was to avoid psychodramas and maintain ordinary etiquette and we’ve mostly succeeded. She is also the least defenseless woman I have ever known.
I discovered rather early in life that a bottle of beer made me feel better, not a promising sign if carried to a built-in, specious conclusion. What saved us was poverty. Growing up the way I did gave supporting a family precedence over any and all personal desires. After rent and food and gas for the car, the spare dollar would afford one five-ounce draft beer, or a bottle of Gallo burgundy, which was just under a buck in 1961. All of those who have been involved know the potential soddenness of student and graduate student marriages. The late Raymond Carver was the absolute master of this subgenre, the search for balance in an environment of near squalor. I had to finish nearly two years of college in one, plus work forty hours a week to get a B.A. After that an eminent scholar, Russell Nye, a friend of my in-laws, wangled me a graduate assistantship, which paid a little over two hundred a month, enough for rent and groceries but not much else.
The birth of our daughter, Jamie, somewhat healed the rift with my in-laws. Few can resist the glory of a first grandchild. I immediately became less of a monster. I still regret that my pride kept me from accepting any money from them, which I now see as false pride, a meaningless arrogance, what we used to call simple “asshole” behavior. While much nonsense is made of America as a classless society my real difficulty with my in-laws was that they came from well up the ladder, above my own parents and relatives. Linda’s father, William Ludlow King, had gone to Dartmouth and briefly Harvard, and came from a family of Cornish copper-mine owners in the Upper Peninsula. It was in my father-in-law’s ancestral home that my wife found the nineteenth-century journals of William Ludlow, which gave me the base for Legends of the Fall. He was a kindly man, a nearly antique gentleman, and I had no experience dealing with someone like him. Linda’s mother, however, was clearly daffy, very intelligent but emotionally mercurial, partly from losing a baby who had gone nearly full term. It was from her that I heard on many late evenings some of the curious aspects of her husband’s family, including the tale of a cousin who had donated a chair at the University of Chicago but lived in Paris with her lesbian lover. This kind of information thrilled me as it was so exotic compared to anything in my own family’s past. My wife’s grandfather once came to dinner refusing to acknowledge me as Linda’s husband, sitting there drinking whiskey in an English tailored suit and wearing a seven-carat diamond Masonic ring, a problematical man who had squandered much of his wife’s money, some of which had come from Mexican silver mines in the nineteenth century.
It is difficult at certain times to see your life in the comic terms it so amply displays. Graduate students are in a peculiar area, essentially noncitizens. It will be the only time in life when the pecking order is totally based on how vividly the intelligence is enacted, who controls the discussion at the table during thousands of cups of coffee, group budget meals, beers that are stretched as long as possible. In married-student housing, ours was called Spartan Village, there’s an air of exhaustion, the parking lots full of unwashed used cars. In the students in the humanities the life of the mind has overwhelmed all other considerations. The wives tend to envy the wives of the science graduate students who live more orderly lives and have larger stipends. The wives of graduate students in English and American and comparative literature are fatigued with their babbling husbands, the after-midnight calls where it is asserted that Henry James might very well have been masturbating when he wrote Portrait of a Lady, or that Edmund Wilson isn’t nearly as bright as he thinks he is, or that when read closely William Dean Howells is fascinating.
Friday night was a dangerous time of frayed nerves, the spending of the carefully saved beer budget, the spaghetti or pizza dinner, balcony vomiting, inconclusive fistfights, smarmy flirtations, and excitement over nothing in particular. It was a musical comedy with very loud Charlie Parker and ubiquitous rhythm and blues on the Inkster radio station out of Detroit. At night we tended a tiny marijuana plot hidden in a field near the apartments and were horrified during one night’s party to see squad cars of the university police roaring across the field. Pot wasn’t taken very seriously by police this early in the sixties but we could still envision the end of our non-careers. The squad cars, however, were ineptly chasing an escaped bull from the ag department’s dairy bam, and one car hit a bank and ditch, became airborne, and pancaked, utterly destroying itself. We cheered the bull’s escape.
At the time I was a terrible mishmash of divergent obsessions, from left-wing labor and civil rights politics to an aesthete’s fascination with ballet, opera, the nether comers of art history in which I had temporarily majored, French Symbolist poetry, Rilke, and my dominant hero, James Joyce, not to speak of Dostoyevsky’s diaries which were a daily missal. All of this didn’t build a pleasant person. Added to this was the sliver of the faux Indian who ordered one hundred peyote buttons from the Smith Cactus Ranch in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a legal purchase at the time. I organized a hokum ceremony for my friends and gobbled a dozen or so of the buttons. I remember that this visionary experience was inconveniently concurrent with the Cuban missile crisis which by itself was cramping my toes and didn’t need hallucinogenic fuel.
But I did at the time. I ate peyote twice and it reconfirmed my faith in my calling. It also scared the hell out of me in that you sensed specific dimensions in your mind that you were less than sure you wanted to be there. Years later when I read R. D. Laing’s statement “The mind of which we are unaware is aware of us,” my memory immediately revived the peyote experience. Of course peyote is a foreign substance and its mind-altering capacities are in themselves a kind of poisoning but then so are alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, not to speak of marijuana, cocaine, and tranquilizers.
I pulled way back from this experience out of a vaguely commendable fear that I might fail as a husband and father. Always a theoretic nitwit, I decided I must abase myself before the ordinary aspects of life, a gimcrack theology drawn from Dostoyevsky and my new obsession with Kierkegaard. I might have paid attention to the fact that I was gradually flunking out of graduate school where I did well in what interested me but was childishly unable to fake interest in such subjects as linguistics or Edmund Spenser.
On Saturday mornings I’d take our daughter, Jamie, about two at the time, on visits to the farms run by the agricultural department of the university. Together we studied pigs, cows, chickens, and horses. Of all farm animals horses have the best natural odor. It was pleasant, albeit melancholy, to see these animals anew through a child’s eyes and fantasize about living on a small, remote farm where I’d make a simple living and study my Rimbaud in peace. Never at the time could I admit my unlikely candidacy for marriage, the statistically pathetic chances for success when a young man just shy of twenty-one marries a girl two days short of nineteen. At the time our main instruments of survival were a profound sexual happiness and the fascination of caring for the child. There was also the growing interest in something good for dinner every evening, keeping in mind the minimal budget which in itself promotes good cooking. Over the years I’ve noted how rarely divorce occurs when a couple happily cooks together, which also promotes a free sensuality in the bedroom, or wherever for that matter. Making love in a car, a pine grove, or a pasture did wonders for what they insist on calling “mental health.”
* * *
Once when I was working for a book wholesaler in Boston I was asked by the management to look at a “flowchart” they had devised. To me this reflected something mysterious in the manner of Alan Watts and the other material in Tao that I had read, whereas what the company was looking for was an easier way to get the books from the second flo
The study of Eastern literature, where flow rather than whirl is king, is wonderful if you’re not obligated to function in the West other than nominally. In my college years I was apparently willing to accept any advice if it was well written. My coda was found in the great English prose stylist Sir Thomas Browne, “Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and act but one man.” Since I thought of myself as a poet and nothing else I was obligated to behave as a poet though I had no firm idea what this was. At nineteen in New York City I was obedient to Rimbaud’s notion of the “dérèglement de tous les senses’ (the purposeful derangement of the senses) to break down and through conditioned perceptions. The tool at hand seemed to be alcohol but then I could afford only a few beers a day and anything more than that tended to make life sodden. In a Boston rooming house I shared a bottle of gin with a poet friend now dead, Peter Snyder, and we both managed to get the dry heaves. My first marijuana came in San Francisco in the winter of 1958 but this drug seemed mostly a soporific and also made one uncontrollably hungry. A few afternoon tokes with other beatniks in North Beach and then we’d line up at the back door of St. Anthony’s mission for the monks’ after-dinner food handout. This embarrassed me though I still remember a Swiss steak sandwich with gravy in a loaf of French bread. The other options were a fifty-cent bowl of noodles with pork and vegetables in Chinatown, or the thirty-five-cent plate of macaroni salad at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. The anthems at the time were Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Bob Kaufman’s “Abominist Manifesto.” The graceful and delightful hangout was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore City Lights, which still survives.
Back in married housing I’d read Pat the Bunny to my infant daughter, and then read Sufi literature or Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Yesenin, Apollinaire, and Faulkner, none of which made me an acceptable graduate student but which promoted the kind of arrogance that irritated all of my professors except my mentor Herbert Weisinger, who could disarm me in a moment with his sharp Brooklyn wit, his soaring knowledge of all world literature, art, and history.
I was sympathetic a year or so ago when reading why the Yale graduate assistants had gone on strike. In my first year of graduate school my assistantship required four hours a day of research into foundations giving to the liberal arts during which I kept remembering my father’s populist idea that foundations represented unpaid wages. My own wage for the supposed honor of being a graduate assistant was only a little over two bucks an hour. This did not compare favorably with the five an hour I had made as a shovel man on construction sites. The second year was even more problematic. I taught English as a foreign language using an improbably inept text program of simple repetition. My one class of twenty included students who spoke seventeen different languages, including a German with a dueling scar who had spent two years at Oxford and spoke better English than I did. Regulations forced all foreign students to take the course despite their proficiency. He already had moved from a dormitory to an expensive hotel suite. The real problem, though, was that I could barely understand any of the students, who would faithfully bray back the inane sentences I read aloud. I threw all of their test papers in the dump saying that they were being saved for research. I was a vocally nasty twerp to the professor who directed the department. Later when I needed a recommendation for a job he gave me one but I held it to the light and saw the word “arrogant” so I threw it away.
As a college senior I had finally heard my first poetry reading, with Galway Kinnell reading “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” from his recently published book. I was overwhelmed but my own capabilities were so far from his astutely lyrical cityscape that there was nothing more to imitate. I heard the Mexican painter David Siqueiros speak and regretted again that I had no talent as a painter. I talked a number of times in a smoke and coffee shop with Abe Rattner, an abstract expressionist, about his car trip with Henry Miller. After an hour Rattner asked, “Why do you stay here in Michigan? There’s nothing for you here.” I said I had a wife and child and he only nodded.
All my friends read Henry Miller in the manner of getting a blood transfusion. We were not all interested in academic poetry but we certainly read Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, though I much preferred Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.
When I think of my friends at the time I am struck by the mortality rate of young poets. There were three eventual suicides: Steven Gronner, Larry Baril, and later, John Thompson. There was also the mortality of people who didn’t quite persist after promising early work, like J. D. Reed who published Expressways with Simon & Schuster, and David Kelly who published with Wesleyan. I also knew Tom McGuane slightly but he was in another group primarily interested in fiction and their own more advanced misbehavior, which included, to our envy, a bevy of Lansing secretaries. Richard Ford would appear in another two years. I also met Dan Gerber who would become a lifelong friend and publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. McGuane’s neighbor, Bob Dattila, whom we viewed as a mysterious Sicilian from Queens, would become the only agent I’ve had in my long career.
Meanwhile I was flunking out during my second year of graduate school and obviously having a total nervous crack-up. I hitchhiked to New York City and stayed one day and night with my old friend the painter and art critic Gregory Battcock, who was gay. He was a pal, as was the young sculptor Italo Scanga. At Battcock’s, while he was out to dinner, I was quite amazed looking at hundreds of photos of nude young men who were Gregory’s sexual conquests. When I awoke in the morning on a mattress on the kitchen floor I was looking up a slip at the nude bottom of a lovely English girl who lived with Gregory. Gregory was later murdered in Puerto Rico on a balcony where it was said that a sea breeze made a rose of his blood on a stucco wall.
I returned home in a state of teary penance. My father’s unexpected reaction was that since my heroes such as Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson hadn’t graduated from anything maybe I’d be better off with a job. I was so disgusted with myself I threw away a bunch of Jackson Pollock’s clothing had been given to me years before by his brother Charles who taught art at Michigan State. I meant to become absolutely normal. Unfortunately I couldn’t have offered up a fair description of normal that wouldn’t have yielded projectile vomiting.
It was spring and I was wandering the campus aimlessly looking at the stunning gardens that had been organized by the horticultural and grounds departments. There was a particularly lovely garden behind the library that abutted the Red Cedar River where I first read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in my freshman year, and where I also had read Lorca, Jimenez, Hernandez, and Neruda, whom I discovered through Robert Bly’s The Fifties magazine, which later became The Sixties. In this garden I also was drawn to the poems of Sergei Yesenin. My latest discovery during this morose graduate student period was the work of Rene Char, including “To a Tensed Serenity” (“A une sérénité crispée”) in the latest Botteghe Oscure, Marguerite Caetani’s magazine, which was published in Rome. Both Yesenin and Char gave me hope as both came from rather humble beginnings out in the country. I was busy filling sketch notebooks with images and observations but was still well short of my first poem.
That June I convincingly flunked out of graduate school but we were able to keep our apartment. I had now managed to organize an absolute loathing for academic life though I dimly understood that I was temperamentally unsuited, which was scarcely the university’s fault. There was the question of whether I was suited for anything except the manual labor I continued to enjoy on the horticultural farm.
I entered a paralyzing depression, with “paralyzing” being a euphemism. My memory, which normally is irrelevantly acute, fails me now though I recall that bureaucracy moves slowly and we were able to keep our married-student housing apartment until that fall. It always has struck me that summer depressions are worse because the weather isn’t cooperative. Cold, wet snow and dense clouds are rather
My gentlemanly unobtrusive father-in-law sent me off on two expeditions to find work as a technical writer, a possible job category for me that he had researched with friends. The first trip was to Detroit and an interview at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal. I felt congested and my eyes teared when I looked out across a huge hall where five hundred men were writing specifications for armaments in waist-high steamed-glass cubicles. The interview went well but on the way home I pulled into a rest stop between Detroit and East Lansing and disposed of the sheaf of application papers in a trash barrel. I doubted anyway due to my radical political activities that I could pass the minimal security clearance. I still envisioned myself as a member of the Young Progressive Socialists, whom I had signed up with in New York City when I was nineteen. At a civil rights picket in front of Woolworth’s I had been amazed when our campus police busied themselves taking our photos for their subversive files. I was offended many years later when under the Freedom of Information Act my state police file revealed that I was considered to be a harmless poet.
Washington was discouraging in a different way. One of my father-in-law’s Dartmouth classmates was a hotshot in a big company. Our interview was a lovely lunch at the Mayflower Hotel but the upshot of our chat was that I was emotionally unsuited to be a corporate employee. I didn’t show up for three other interviews but spent two entire days in the National Gallery, the splendor of which only recalled my freedom in New York City when I had spent dozens of days at the Met and the Museum of Modern Art, which back then was sparsely attended. Several years ago Anjelica Huston told me that a month or two before her father died she had pushed him through MoMA in his wheelchair when it was closed to the public so he could see the paintings he loved for the last time.