How Reading Jim Harrison Could Save Your Life

Or at least lift it a little in the near-term, yes? Perhaps we ought not ask for the world at the moment ...

I promised my friend Paul on the way back from walking the boys to school that I wouldn't dawdle around worrying about world events or how much laundry there was to do still, that I wouldn't fret over burned out lightbulbs and leaves that need raking, plants that need to get brought in before it freezes tomorrow night, that I wouldn't stare at Bloomberg or diddle away my precious time on my devices and that, rather, I would sit down As Soon As I Got Home and get to work on tailoring what everyone who has read them agrees are inspired revisions to the middle of the novel that I have been working on since the waning days of the Clinton presidency, and get the goddamned thing done, once and for all.

But here I am, feeling the need to say a word about Jim Harrison before I really buckle down and get going, before I have to get to karate at noon ...

Now, one must admit we live in a time where to manage the fear and trembling over what we're as yet still reluctant to accept is an intractable state of affairs, brought on (more than we're still willing to admit, of course) by our trusting the capitalists too much, while at the same time being greedy little pigs ourselves, we have sunk to taking comfort in platitudes, in low-fat foods and promising lotions, in headlines celebrating, for instance, the second win of the season by our local professional football team, its ranks not too long ago decimated in a way no less thoroughly than a five-year-old wielding a Harry Potter wand might have, by a hooded, high-strung, thirty-something-year-old hired in equivocal times—though hardly desperate times; desperate happened after—to replace the man who won two Super Bowls and is now the current coach of the Washington Redskins, by an owner who very soon thereafter had to admit that he'd made a big mistake, the kind for which in the old days, in more noble cultures where a person was expected to do more than say something fatuous like they "took full responsibility" to manage the magnitude of the wrong, and the shame, and the embarrassment, a person might have literally fallen on his sword. Instead, we got a new high-strung, relatively short Christian quarterback who is now, after much ballyhoo, our number one man behind center not to mention our only hope left, and our team—check it out—came out of yesterday's pitched and much-viewed battle with a spectacular three-point overtime win over a team that has so far, unless I'm mistaken, not won a game this season. To add even more significance to the day, Our Man Tim—his name is Tim, lest you're completely shut out of the world we live in now—won this game against the Dolphins, in Miami, which is fairly close to if not on the same field where he played in college. "Tim-tastic!" read today's headlines—not on the sports page, but on the Front Page of the whole fucking paper! Such are the times, even here, where they are still pretty good compared to, say, Florida, especially in Louisville ...

But I digress. The point I was going to make was that, in times like these, I'd expect that roughly 80% of my readers—a good five to ten people at least, distracted with all that they are—are asking themselves about now: "Who the fuck is Jim Harrison?"

Well, I suppose you can hardly be blamed. Although the Seattle Times referred to him as "A force of nature in American letters," who the fuck reads the Seattle Times, right? Moreover, who has time to bother with American Letters, whatever the fuck those are in late September of 2011, when a person can just fiddle with his or her devices, or go for a run, or do some much needed work in the yard before it gets cold?

Nonetheless, I'm telling you that many of you would feel a whole lot better if you picked up one of his books and shoved your devices and stuff to the side and told everyone and everything in your face at the moment to fuck off and just sat someplace quiet and read for a while. That's all I'm saying. That, and that you could do worse than start with Jim Harrison, with, I'd say, the collection of novellas, Legends of the Fall, the worst of the three being the title story, in my opinion, the one they made the relatively shitty movie out of, with Brad Pitt, who has since been in better stuff, notably Moneyball, which you should go see rather than waiting to download it one day on your device, but ... whatever ... if you read "Revenge," or, especially, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and think, What was that? or, I think I'll just stick with my devices, well then, I'll leave you to your fate. Perhaps your well-diversified 401K and a shitload of Apps and skinny lattes on the fly is all you'll need for future happiness—let's hope you're right. But if you're starting to seriously wonder, and you like the novellas previously mentioned above, go down to your favorite bookstore—there still are some out there that aren't listed on the NYSE, or going broke themselves; for instance, in Louisville, there is the estimable Barbara's Book Cellar, which really isn't in a cellar, not anymore, it's right on Main Street in clear view of anyone who isn't looking down, staring at a device while heading down the street—and tell them that you want something by Jim Harrison; tell them you'll take anything they have, even his new one, The Great Leader, which you'll want in a 1st Edition, or the one before that ...

The English Major ... I'm reading it now, and I can tell you, without equivocation, that it has been a helpful tonic to my soul. It wasn't a big hit. It got okay reviews when it came out. He's not your all over NPR and Terri Gross and Charlie Rose kind of guy, though he's not Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski either. More like an aging Henry Miller who likes to fish. Who has a better way with words, and is probably wiser. Reviewers, especially the really esteemed ones who go nuts over stuff that oftentimes, when you read it, feels like someone added just the tiniest touch of drama along with some jacked syntax to a collection of thrown-together Wikipedia facts, that puts you to sleep in a way that your devices or a good book with vampires or zombies or thoughtful dogs, or even something by Shel Silverstein, never would—anyway, those people feel like they have to be careful and not too effusive about Jim Harrison, in the same way that one should be careful with certain thoughts that come to mind and not just blurt out, for instance, how someone's seventeen-year-old daughter is fucking beautiful. All to say, it's best if you're a reviewer, and want to stay esteemed, to be a little circumspect when reviewing a book by Harrison, who, himself, is not circumspect in any way that I've been able to detect, especially when it comes to the driftings of the human mind, and to human appetites generally, even the lingering ones of a sixty-year-old, who, himself, the hero of The English Major, finding that his libido has left certain parts of his anatomy raw and itching, says he has "endured rather than prevailed."

Here are the lines that follow that one: "My senior students had yawned when I tried to teach them the glories of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech. A chunky little cheerleader named Debbie who would later grow into a human bowling ball squeaked, 'I don't get it.'"

See what I mean?

Here's another one (and I'm only to about page fifty): "My AD (alcoholic doctor) friend had said at a poker game that there was a certain kind of monkey that will give up lunch to see photos of female monkey butts. AD tends to say odd things when he's trying to pull a bluff during a poker game in order to throw the rest of us off."

This meditation comes in the context of our hero, who has gone traveling around the United States in his Taurus with 250 thousand miles on it, in the wake of his beloved dog dying, and his less than beloved wife having left him—the first line of the book, the laconic and oddly affecting, "It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn't."—and him running into a student from twenty-five years earlier, who is forty-three now, in a terrible marriage, thinks she might be bipolar, and finds that the state of Nebraska brings out a kind of randiness in her that our hero at first finds exciting, yet, by turns, even with a stash of Viagra and Levitra given to him by AD, is growing weary of—he's sixty, after all. The sort of guy his dad had said would end up "high-minded and low-waged" from reading to much Emerson. His girl for the moment, Marybelle, has by contrast only slowed down due to a sunburn she got along a Nebraska river, and is now wearing only one of his T-shirts as they travel onward. "A gas station attendant in Chadron was treated to a sleeping beaver shot when he washed our windshield. He smirked and blushed highlighting his troubled skin."

It isn't so much that his heroes are dirty old men as they are caught off guard by things, by images, like those seen by our gas station attendant, that can't be easily disposed of. That one can no easier avoid thinking about having seen it than, say—as Harrison does, through another character in his new book—a person can stop thinking about having seen a white horse.

Anyway, lest I keep on ... I've got to get to my novel before I have to get to karate (too late!), and then go pick up the kids before I get Ian off to hockey, and then to the karate I missed earlier, and to the homework, and eat and clean up before I get to sleep at a decent hour so I'm not tired in the morning and can write again tomorrow.

You know how it is.

And all I'm saying is, if you get tired of worrying, of thinking if you just go a little faster and stay positive that the economy and jobs and the stock market and even the Greeks and the prospects for print and literary fiction in particular will break out of it's current obdurate range, and that property will take off again and we'll all be rich if we're just patient and pray and are hopeful every day no matter what and don't raise taxes here in this difficult economy at what is surely a very brief if difficult moment brought on by trusting the wrong people and behaving like fools ourselves for many, many years ... when you finally come to terms with the fact that it's been a long, long night of partying and more kegs and whiskey and weed and all the rest at five in the morning isn't going to amount to much for very many, that we're looking at a long hangover and a big mess to clean up and possibly even a few lawsuits here and there before we get that skip back in our step again, think about picking up some Jim Harrison and doing a little correcting yourself. You just might be glad you did.