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 Novelist,
Poet, & Essayist
5th Avenue Theatre
March 3, 1997
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Jim Harrison's quest to become a writer brings to mind the trials and
romantic aspirations of a Harrison protagonist. Born in Grayling, Michigan,
in 1937, he sewed his connections to the land through hunting and fishing
as a child. At age seven, a friend accidentally wounded him with a piece
of glass that left him blinded in his left eye. Afterward, he became increasingly
attentive to nature: "I'd turn for solace to rivers, rain, trees,
birds, lakes, animals," he explained.
In his mid-teens, Harrison determined to be a writer, and left home at
nineteen to live the artistic life: "Our family had no money—there
were five children—and I accumulated ninety dollars and my dad gave
me a ride out to the highway. I had my favorite books and the typewriter
he'd given me for my seventeenth birthday—one of those twenty-buck
used typewriters—and my clothes, all in a cardboard box tied with
a rope, and I was going off to life in 'Green-witch' Village. I was going
to be a Bohemian!"
Harrison resided in stints on the eastern seaboard and in Michigan, earning
bachelor's and master's degrees from Michigan State in 1960 and 1965.
Also in 1960, he married Linda King. Writing short stories and poems all
the while, he published his first volume of poetry, Plain Song,
in 1965. A year of teaching at Stony Brook in New York convinced him he
was "temperamentally unsuited" to the profession, as he has
put it. Harrison, his wife, and their baby daughter (they would later
have a second daughter) returned to Michigan in 1966, where Harrison scratched
together a living for the family through freelance journalism and hand
labor.
Harrison's poetry caught the attention of major reviewers, such as M.L.
Rosenthal, who declared, "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and
fighting over." He wrote his first novel, Wolf (1971), while
laid up from a fall off a cliff while hunting. A few years down the road,
distressed by the low sales of his lovely, lyrical third novel, Farmer
(1976), Harrison lapsed into a clinical depression. (In a 1990 essay,
"Midrange Road Kill," Harrison courageously recalls having had
five such "whoppers.") Commercial success came with his trilogy
Legends of the Fall (1979) and the sale of film rights to each
novella.
Just when one too many critics had pigeonholed Harrison for regional male
tough-mindedness, he proved his larger talent by expanding his range of
voices in Dalva (1988), a story of a woman of Sioux heritage searching
for the son she gave up for adoption. Harrison continued conjuring up
highly resonant female characters in his next two novella collections,
The Woman Lit By Fireflies (1990) and Julip (1994).
Michigan roots now deeply established, Harrison and his wife live on a
farm in Leelanau County in the northern part of the state. To write, he
often retreats to a remote cabin on the Upper Peninsula. Both Jim and
Linda Harrison share a passion for fine cooking, a subject he has written
about for publications such as Esquire. Of the link between his
art and cooking, Harrison explains: "I think it's all one piece.
When you bear down that hard on one thing—on your fiction or your
poetry—then you have to have something like cooking, bird hunting,
or fishing that offers a commensurate and restorative joy."
To date, Harrison's books include six novels, three novella collections,
nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of nonfiction essays. If his
work is sometimes dark, violent, and unsettling, it can also be subtle,
playful, and affirming. For every character unraveling in crisis, there
are those saved by their fortitude and resilience. Large themes and powerful
feelings remain his province, an impulse he sheds light on in the introductory
notes to After Ikkyu (1996), a collection of Zen-inspired poetry:
"I'm a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than
it appears rather than less."
Excerpt taken from Julip (1994)
Suddenly Julip remembered the bear and began weeping in earnest. It was
when she was four. The bear hung around their farm in Wisconsin and her
dad used to catch fish and put them out on a stump for the bear to eat.
They would watch from the porch of the farmhouse except for her mother.
The bear stopped by every evening just before dark for a snack, whether
it was a fish or a lesser meal. Her dad said the bear was young, maybe
a year and a half old, and probably only recently had left the company
of its mother. Julip's mother was sensibly angry about a bear so close
to the house, and her father said this summer was it, and they wouldn't
feed the bear the next year when it would be too big anyway. Her dad said
it was now about sixty pounds, the size of a fourth grader in school.
The best thing was when the bear came out of the alder swale and flounced
around the stump as if it were dancing. Then one July evening it was still
very hot and Bobby was on the couch because he had a fever. Her dad was
supposedly off looking for a lost setter but probably was at the tavern,
her mother said, and there was nothing on the stump for the bear. The
twilights are long that far north and it was after ten-thirty when Julip
heard a rifle shot out near the mailbox on the gravel road. She went to
the open window where she had dead June bugs lined up in a row in hopes
they'd fly off again. There were two more shots and she saw car lights
and a spotlight out on the road, then the car took off in a shatter of
gravel. There was just enough light for her to see the bear dragging itself
down the driveway, dragging itself quickly by the main strength of its
forelegs and making a howling sound, which trailed off in gurgles before
the howling would begin again. Julip ran downstairs and Bobby was screaming,
too, with their mother restraining him on the couch. She yelled, 'Don't
you dare,' but Julip grabbed the flashlight and went out on the porch,
shining the light on the bear's face. The light made the bear's eyes as
red as the blood coming out of its mouth. In the kennels in back the dogs
were all howling like wolves. The bear crawled under the porch and Julip
rushed down the porch steps and knelt shining the light on the bear, who
had crawled to the far corner, the dirt matting on its bloody hide.
Now her mother was at the door yelling for her so she went up the steps
and tried to calm Bobby down so her mother could call on the phone. Her
mother couldn't find her dad at three different bars so she called the
game warden, then she turned on the radio real loud so they wouldn't hear
the bear but they could still hear it over the symphony on the public
radio station. Then the bear stopped squalling and her mother turned down
the volume, and then the game warden came and dragged the bear out, and
Julip didn't get to watch that part though she saw him lift it into the
back of his pickup. He came into the house and washed up in the kitchen
and she heard him say to her mother, 'Poor little girl,' meaning the bear.
Julip somehow thought the bear was a boy. At dawn she looked out the window
and her dad was asleep in the car.
Selected
Works
Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)
Farmer (1976)
Legends of the Fall (1979)
Dalva (1988)
The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems (1989)
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (1991)
The Woman Lit By Fireflies (1990); Julip (1994)
After Ikkyu and Other Poems (1996)
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)
Web
Site Links
Salon.com interview
with Harrison
New York Times featured author
Harrison home page
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