In this first part of two, American novelist and poet, Jim Harrison, talks in expansive and at times rambling terms with Ian Brown about writing his masterpiece, Legends of the Fall, in only nine days, and how his iconic character, Dalva, a complex and tragic female protagonist, came to him, as well as what he does to get over the sensation that he’s trapped in the lives of his characters.
Works by Jim Harrison
Works about Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison, the Art of Fiction, No. 104 (Paris Review article, summer 1988)
Jim Harrison, the Mozart of the Prairies (New Yorker article, March 2016)
Other Related Books or Materials
The Raw and the Cooked: Cooking Your Life by Jim Harrison (Esquire article, June 1991)
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
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Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
S1E5 Writers Off the Page: Jim Harrison - Part One: “You’ve Made Quite a Living From Your Fibs”
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA produced by the Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. Today's episode features the first of two parts with American writer and drinker and eater and lover and hunter Jim Harrison.
TEASER: There's this hideously misused word, "macho." Because I live down on the Mexican border, and actually, macho means somebody who'd stomp to death a puppy or throw a rattlesnake in a baby's cradle. It's really a pejorative thing, but as it made its way northward to New York, it came to be applied to all men, evidently, who had ever fished and hunted, which I did as a matter of course, growing up. But I was saying to someone, no one in the history of my family ever identified fishing and hunting with manliness. That would have been very... in bad taste to suggest such things were somehow connected to your winkie or something like that.
RANDY: The first time you hear a writer’s voice, especially a writer you’ve been reading and enjoying for a long time, it can be stressful. Either you hear that voice and think, as I did that November night I heard Marilynne Robinson read from her novel Gilead, “Yes, exactly! That’s exactly what I thought you would sound like!” Or you hear that voice and think, as I did, the first time I heard a recording of William Faulkner read his 1950 Nobel Prize address, “No, seriously? That’s what you sound like?” Robinson’s voice was strong, dignified, and sonorous, just like her prose. Faulkner’s voice was weak, airy, even squeaky, the very opposite of his prose.
As you’ll hear in a moment, Jim Harrison sounds just like you thought he would. His voice, like his writing and his storytelling, is big, rich, rangy and just a little raspy, less from age or disuse than from a life lived maybe a little too hard and a little too well: Not that he would think that was possible. After all, this is someone who once flew to France for a thirty-seven course lunch. Writing about it afterwards, he noted that he didn’t wear spandex and also that with that while strolling around after that particularly big meal, he felt “like an overly mature muskmelon.”
Harrison was at genial ease with himself and never more at ease than when he was enjoying life. That happened in notable ways while reading or eating or drinking or moving around in natural spaces, full of marvel at the beauty and devising plans to hunt some of it. What he wrote, based on those experiences, balanced lyric transport with deep learnedness and fast humour both broad and sharp that sustained well-plotted storytelling, too. Time how long it gets him, in this interview, to move from “Fascist Disneyland” to nicknames for penises, to Carl Jung, and from there to a beautifully-told boast about how he wrote his best-known work, Legends of the Fall. Like the audience and interviewer Ian Brown, you’ll be laughing at Harrison’s words, out of genuine surprise and shock and amusement, and also out of a little confusion, even disquiet.
For all the joking at his Rabelaisian own expense, there’s something serious, even at times dark, and mournful, in Jim Harrison’s work, just as in his life. He lost an eye at the age of seven when a little girl gouged him with a bottle. At twenty, his father and sister were killed in a car accident. His indecision about whether to go, he thought, saved his life but also delayed them enough to have a mortal encounter with a drunk driver. As an adult, he struggled with depression and suicide, and some of his most affecting work, including a poem that features the life-saving image of his little daughter’s bathrobe, turns on questions of deep regret and ordinary redemption, just as it explores self-defeating attempts to heal, to make amends, to move on, in a world shot through with natural beauty and animal vitality.
In discussing, among other things, his many-voiced novel The Road Home, Harrison reflects on how his characters, primarily his all-time favourite, the alpha female Dalva, make decisions about their lives and loves on the great plains of Nebraska, decisions that aren’t always for the best. Like Harrison, these characters make the best of it by telling us about it.
This was recorded live at the International Festival of Authors in October 1998, when Harrison came town upon the occasion of the publication of his novel, The Road Home.
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[START OF EPISODE FIVE]
Ian Brown: Were you aware that this was a non-smoking event?
Jim Harrison: No, I wasn't. But as I said to Ian earlier, when I go around doing signings, being an addict, addictive personality myself, if they have a long queue for books, I always say, "No smoky, no sign-y."
[laughter]
IB: I was looking through some clippings about you, and there was a Sunday Times of London clipping that said you had... You are a writer with immortality in your bones. And that's gotta... You gotta be worried about that sorta line.
JH: I wasn't too much, but then my agent said, "Does that mean you get to take out the garbage in a hundred years or what?"
[laughter]
JH: Like one of these vampire stories. Although I had said... I was being interviewed in Chicago a few years ago for a... The interviewer said, "How do you feel about President Nixon, who died yesterday?" And I said, "I believe it would be best if we go over there and drive a stake through the casket."
[laughter]
JH: "To make sure he doesn't come back." And that newspaper man said, "I can't quote that." I said, "Well, that's your business."
IB: What? He said, "I can't quote that"?
JH: Yeah, he wouldn't quote it.
IB: Really?
JH: Yeah, that's the fascist Disneyland tag.
IB: That your country is...
[overlapping conversation]
JH: Pre-censorship, you know. I thought it was sort of witty myself.
[laughter]
IB: Speaking of that. For years, you were criticized in some part of the press for being too macho, or you were a hunting, fishing, and eating guy, and then you came up with this character, Dalva, and she is a fantastic creation and everybody is suddenly starting to say, "Well, Harrison really can, he understands the female mind, he really gets women." Where did she come from?
JH: Well, that was a different situation. I think all that sort of a thing was a misunderstanding. There's this hideously misused word, "macho." Because I live down on the Mexican border, and actually, macho means somebody who'd stomp to death a puppy or throw a rattlesnake in a baby's cradle. It's really a pejorative thing, but as it made its way northward to New York, it came to be applied to all men, evidently, who had ever fished and hunted, which I did as a matter of course, growing up. But I was saying to someone, no one in the history of my family ever identified fishing and hunting with manliness. That would have been very... In bad taste to suggest such things were somehow connected to your winkie or something like that.
[laughter]
JH: But in the case of...
IB: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, your winkie?
JH: Yeah.
[laughter]
JH: I don't know what to call it, dickie bird, or anything. But Dalva herself, I was struck too by that Jung comment because I am actually sort of an intellectual, but I sold this when I was going broke, I had the complete papers of Carl Jung in all 14 volumes. And he had this comment, "What had we done with her twin sister? We have abandoned at birth." The culture forces you to abandon. And then I was thinking also... At the time we had seven or nine or eight female horses, three female cats, three female dogs, a wife and two daughters, and my mother had six sisters. So I do know something about this subject.
[laughter]
JH: So I dreamed Dalva actually as being on a porch, a patio in Santa Monica, looking at the Pacific Ocean and dreaming of home. So I don't think any artist should accept any limitations on his talent. If I wanna be a woman, that's my business.
IB: So after you dream Dalva, there she is, standing on the porch and she's looking out over the Pacific. So then what do you do?
JH: Well, it was the character... You wait 'til... I talked today about this, that you wait in Wallace Stevens' terms. Stevens said images tend to collect in pools...So I wait till my image well fills up. That took a number of years, around this character that I had imagined and I...
IB: Yeah, this was eight years worth of images we're talking about.
JH: Yeah, well, Dalva took about three years, then I waited another eight years to write this continuation of the novel, which I loath those words, sequel, prequel, all that crap, Hollywood crap, 'cause it's a weaving, it's an inner-merging of the two. The trouble with those words like sequel and prequel are from Foucault, in a sense, my objection, if you agree to the terms of discourse, you're already lost. So it's best to ignore them utterly.
IB: Really? I think those same rules should apply to this conversation in case we get into any difficult spots.
JH: No, of course.
[laughter]
IB: In this new book, The Road Home, you... Dalva's talking about some guy she has dinner with, and he reaches for her under the table and gets grease stains on her dress, and he's a complete moron, this guy, but she decides, at the end, there's this beautiful line and I don't think I can... Unlike you, you seem to be able to quote all kinds of things from memory, but she essentially says, "On principle, I would not have slept with this guy, but the moral, main moral driving thing at that time was curiosity." And so out of curiosity she slept with him. So there you are, you've got your image bank of Dalva, your well, and you're writing these things down. So how do you, when a line like that comes to you, does this come from your deep understanding of women and dogs and horses?
JH: I don't know, I don't know, because I have this trouble after I've written a novel and sometimes by the copy-editing stage, you wonder how you made that up. But in her case, in that particular case, you have to imagine a truly alpha-type female that assumes all the prerogatives that males have, and that's what kind of human being she is. And even Ian, you've done something experiential yourself, in the best light of things.
[laughter]
JH: We needn't cooperate with it.
[laughter]
IB: Is it true that it took you nine days to write Legends of the Fall? Or is that a myth?
JH: Yeah, but that's the image bank again. Some things... That's the only time it happened to me, and it's only 120 pages long, but I was... I used to think that that was a... I'm not spooky, particularly, that way, but when Faulkner talked about sometimes you get a little possessed by demons or something, and that was that kinda energy thrust, and it is a fable or a tale. I wanted to tell a tale that started, sort of, "Once upon a time," you know, "in Montana".
IB: It was like dictation.
JH: Yeah, it was taking dictation, but I did change one word, that was that.
IB: And that was?
JH: I don't recall, it was about...
[laughter]
JH: Midway through, it was an excision. But that's the only time it ever happened to me in my life, so I wished it were that way all the time.
JH: Life is essentially frightening and some people are... You know, the great gift that Dalva had as a character and a great gift anyone can have is an insatiable curiosity, and that is what flings you on through life. Your life becomes a trajectory. But without curiosity, people can lose years in a pathetic situation because they're not curious enough to... You know, we had that old concept, a railroad or a train is obligated to stay on a track, right, but the human being gets to turn left, swim across the lake and climb a tree and see what things look like. So we don't have to be trains, we don't have to be in these ruts until the earth... The rut gets so deep the earth covers us over and then we die like most of us do, by either dislocation or suffocation. Mental exhaustion. I once collected a series of unhappy photographs of seven people I'd known that had committed suicide, and I'd looked at those photographs to study them very carefully. And they were all pretty healthy people, but you would see just some kind of look of a total undecipherable exhaustion with life. But they were usually sort of stuck, as if by crazy glue, accurately enough, in one place.
IB: And that's suffocation...
JH: This novel, for instance, took me a full two years, and that isn't typical in my career. It was quite painful … I couldn't get out of the old man that begins the novel looking back at his entire life. I got to the end of it, I'm fine, and then three months later, I'm still within that character and I can't get rid of it. So that was sort of unpleasant.
IB: Yeah, trapped within.
JH: Yeah, trapped within a character that you've created.
IB: And you gotta write your way out of it.
JH: Yeah, well, I couldn't write my way out of it 'cause the character in the second section is 30. And you can't write a 30-year-old when you're walking around with your hands behind your back, stooped over, boring the hell out of your family.
[laughter]
IB: Yeah. Yeah.
JH: Oh, god, there he is.
[laughter]
JH: Could he maybe go away for awhile? That kinda thing.
IB: After I read it, and it's an incredible book.
JH: Thank you.
IB: And uncharacteristically, I found myself in... sobbing gently at the end of the book. But after that I actually thought, "What he's written here is the story of a writer's life." Perhaps not intentionally so, but that it is organized almost as the consciousness of a writer, and I'm sure that's not true.
JH: Well, the problem is, and I've seen so many people, and Northridge in the beginning, he wishes desperately to be a painter when he's young, 'cause he had seen at the exhibition in Lincoln, when he was young, 1903, there was the French woman there who smelled like lilac, talking about at the French Pavilion, talking about art. And there were all these reproductions and he thought, "God, if I became an artist, I could become... I would meet someone like this." The primary motive for art is probably is sexuality in that sense. But then he finds himself trapped in that peculiar position. I know many people like this, it's interesting, they're neither painters or writers. There's something in between for which there is no form. So they're trapped forever without being... not being able to find a form for their being. So there's no way they can create, say, consciously create an actual habitat for their soul. So that's the problem, thus in a sense is the violence of his character, I mean, the essential violence. And you notice he presents himself as a rather serene human being, and then the other characters...
IB: He's a complete bastard.
JH: Deconstruct him. Up to a point, kindly. Not all that bad. There used to be more of him now. Or he says, for instance, he was in New York trying to show his paintings to this gallery and that, and then he lost them in a bar. He walked down to the river in a heatwave on one of those piers, and he was attacked by two ruffians, which he was forced to pitch them in the river. And then his son, years later, checks the newspaper. Sure enough, the ruffians, as he called them, drowned. But that's of no importance to him. They attacked him. Sort of a 19th century human being.
IB: Do you ever get that 25 feeling anymore?
JH: No, no, I had trouble with the second character 'cause he was 30 and I forgot what makes one so gratuitously pissed off when you're 30, this free floating hormonal anger about everything. So I talked to some men about that age, and then I actually... This is what happens, I forgot. Oh, I wrote a novel then, why don't I re-read it and see what...
[laughter]
[OUTRO MUSIC FADES IN QUIETLY]
JH: So I re-read my first novel, which is called "Woof" and I was appalled by the anger of this, and I remembered then my mother's original complaint about the book. The bad behaviour, of course. But then again she's the one that said last year, "You've made quite a living out of your fibs."
[laughter]
***
RANDY: Jim Harrison was born in 1937, in Grayling, a town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He grew up working on the family farm, with a father who bought him Faulkner novels and a mother who demanded, out of her Swedish Lutheran background, that he do more than loaf about with his life. After completing studies in comparative literature at Michigan State, where he met his lifelong friend and fellow writer Thomas McGuane, Harrison taught briefly in the 1960s and otherwise made a living as a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, and literary journalism, including a food column for Esquire called “The Raw and the Cooked.” He lived and wrote in Montana and Arizona, and made frequent food and wine-minded trips to France. Harrison’s wife of 46 years, Linda King, with whom he had two daughters, died in 2015, and he died a year later, while at his desk, writing a poem.
Stay tuned for part two of this two-part series. Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Danielle McNally and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
This podcast series is part of a multi-year digital initiative from the Toronto Public Library, From the Archives, which presents curated and recently digitized audio, video and other content from the archives of some of Canada’s most important institutions and organizations.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 years of TIFA.