The Jim Harrison Experience
Part I

After some weeks of reading for story and book review assignments, and otherwise reading for a specific purpose, I redressed the balance to emphasize reading for pleasure in a literary vein. So I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks in the literary company of Jim Harrison.

A brief map of that reading goes like this: I started with his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side. That led me to commit to a reading project I’d long wanted to accomplish—to re-read his 1988 novel, Dalva, and his 1998 novel, The Road Home, which both concern the same characters. And perhaps in between, the excerpts of “The Dalva Notebooks” in his prose collection, Just After Dark, which show that he intended to write this epic story in two parts.

Reading Harrison is always a pleasure, and reading his novels closely offer additional delights. In both fiction and non, and even in his interviews, I've admired the flow and music of his sentences. His vocabulary and style are oddly formal for this day and age, though also highly epigrammatic and often very funny. His paragraphs are a rush--sentences tumble from one subject to another, changing geographical location and sometimes centuries, linked by rhythms and their own particular logic--and as I found in closer reading, by subtle formal symmetries.

About that vocabulary. It's not especially abstract or ornate, but there are several words he habitually uses that few other writers ever do---and some of them drive me crazy because I have to look them up every time. I finally have assimiliated "captious"--I now not only know what it means, but I associate the meaning with the look of the word, always a key for me. But there's still "otiose." I'm sure I had to memorize it for some vocabulary test, but I still don't remember its meaning, and the contextual clues are generally unhelpful. For a writer this is humiliating, and tends to make me captious.

But there’s further pleasure as well as insights to be absorbed in reading back and forth in both the novels and the nonfiction that bears on the novels, though mostly in a general sense of how he thinks and relates to the world.

Literature involves relationship of the work to the world, through the author and his or her writing. And that’s just the beginning. The reader is involved in how the world the writer portrays relates to the world as the reader experiences it. That might mean how the writer and the reader experienced a certain street in Chicago or the ambience of Lincoln, Nebraska, or a certain year in their lives. Or it might mean how the writer’s art creates the experience of a valley the reader has never seen, or an event the reader has not lived through.

Active reading keeps making comparisons and connections—reader to writer, this book to another book of that author’s or another’s; it’s a series of illuminations that show where our experiences were similar or very different; where our reactions to similar experiences were opposite or pretty much the same; where something we share with the author or the character (a physical ability or disability, a common background or ambition or talent) is applied to a situation or a place or in a time very different from our lives, and what happens. And so on.

We can’t help this. It’s a large part of why we read, whether we are aware of it or not. We look for new experiences and perspectives, confirmations of our own experience; guides, warnings and reassurances. We come to literature with the same unspoken questions: How should I live? Am I the only one who felt this way when that happened? Or behaved that way? How does acting like that affect other people, or a life in the long run? We read ourselves into a family, a place, a time, a civilization, partly to lose ourselves, and partly to gain a perspective to see ourselves, and our family, place, time and civilization.

We also want the various emotions that story provides us, through character, incident, plot and language. But when we read real literature we are almost helplessly caught in the complexities of how we experience the world, and what we think about it, how we judge it and how we act. And how we observe others doing all that. Along the way we can develop perspectives--in fact the very idea of perspectives, and seeing things from different ones--as well as emotional and conceptual empathy, through identification, emotional response and understanding, points of likeness and difference, and admiration.

Readers often like to read about the lives of authors, to get some sense where all this "came from;" to compare events and emotions and perspectives in the books with those that authors experienced. Memoirs or autobiographies offer perhaps a less “objective” description of outward events (though biographers are not always to be trusted there either) but they also include the author’s thoughts and impressions that give events a perhaps more relevant meaning.

So my next installment is about reading the memoir. I'll end this one with a little more background on my own relationship to Harrison’s work.

I first read some of his poetry in the 1970s, and began reading his fiction and nonfiction prose in magazines in the 1980s, specifically a novella or two in Esquire ("Julip" is the one I specifically remember because I clipped and kept it), and his column in a short-lived magazine I liked a lot, called Smart. (One of his columns there introduced me to the Native author Gerald Vizenor.)

It wasn’t until the early 90s that I started reading him in book form, and I soon had read everything I could find (including what his memoir suggests is a rare book—the original hardback edition of Farmer, though mine is a library castoff.) In 1998, I reviewed his novel, The Road Home, for Orion magazine. I also read much of his collected poetry in the volume that came out at about that time, called The Shape of the Journey.

After that, I read his novel of 2000, The Beast God Forgot to Invent. I have yet to read two subsequent books, the novel True North (2004) and the book of novellas entitled The Summer He Didn’t Die (2005.) And I hadn’t yet read his memoir, until now.

In terms of that back-and-forth action of reading, there was an additional level in his memoir for me. There is much about our lives that is very different—our childhoods, the places where we grew up, our writing careers; even though Jim Harrison is only about 9 years older than me, those turn out to be crucial years in some ways in how we experienced our childhoods. But we do share some things, including a few places and a few people we each encountered. The differences in those experiences add certain resonances, some comical, some not so much.

More next time on the memoir, Jack Nicholson, and Legends of the Fall.