Jim Harrison: Part Two: “Don’t Make Me Dirty, Darling” In this second and final part of an interview with American novelist and poet, Jim Harrison, the conversation circles around Harrison’s complicated view of teaching writing students, the writers that he reads and admires, and his long friendship with writer Thomas McGuane.
Works by Jim Harrison
Other Related Books or Materials
“Alfresco” a poem by Merrill Gilfillan (Poetry Foundation)
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories by Thomas McGuane
Gallatin Canyon: Stories by Thomas McGuane
Driving on the Rim: a Novel by Thomas McGuane
Thomas McGuane remembers his friend, Jim Harrison (LitHub article from Aug 2017)
Ranier Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet
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.
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.
S1E6 Writers Off the Page: Jim Harrison - Part Two: “Don't Make Me Dirty, Darling”
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: So I'd say I take it individually, there are some good products of the school. But it seems to me as a way to make the arts part of the civil service or something, it's just so utterly restrained, so it seems to me, crushing. Let's try to legitimatize the profession. It's like Richard Howard, who was the poetry editor of the New Yorker, came out with this vituperative and wonderful little essay against the whole idea of poetry month. As if we're going to also institutionalize this on a national level, and that always produces bilge.
RANDY: “Barbeque machine.” “Fictioneer.” “Aristocracy of consciousness.” The kind of person who uses phrases like that with matter-of-fact ease is the kind of person born to do something meaningful with words. Within that category, this is also the kind of person who’s going to do something a little unorthodox and grandiose. Jim Harrison tells Ian Brown he felt called to the life of a writer, at the age of sixteen, while living on a farm in small-town Michigan. Understanding your chosen profession as a vocation — as a plan to do something worthy of your life and talents in the time and place where you find yourself — has more to do with Harrison’s Swedish Lutheran upbringing and lifelong love of the King James Bible than it has to do with the New York literary circuit and the MFA industry. Throughout his career, Harrison was well-known for steering clear of those places, and in this interview, he as much to say about why. He’s not especially kind to some of his students or to the rank-and-file literati, though he doesn’t spare himself from tough words, either.
His best friend in the literary world was Thomas McGuane, another nature-loving outsider figure in contemporary American fiction. In place of east coast book parties and campus workshops, Harrison exchanged weekly letters with McGuane for thirty-five years. He did so from his homes in Montana and Arizona, which featured salty-worded signs warning bird-watchers to keep out. As for himself, he liked looking at birds too, and also, eating them.
Protective of his space for living and writing, it’s no big surprise he was convinced that his calling as a writer meant he couldn’t draw a pay-check as a “creative” writer. That was a line of work he regarded as a taming and professionalization of something that for him was wild and meant to be in close contact with deep woods and great plains and plainspoken people who think and talk about their troubles as much as any urbanite, but also have to get up early and work a long day in the field. That said, a man’s gotta eat, and drink, and Harrison was very much a man in this regard, and he had no trouble at all taking big money from Hollywood for the screen rights to his stories while he clearly enjoyed writing high-profile columns and stories about the eating and drinking life for Esquire and other magazines. That kind of moneymaking kept him free to work on his fiction and poetry, which was what mattered more than money for a Michigan farm-boy Lutheran who discerned a vocation to be a writer and eventually became a Zen Buddhist gourmand committed to revealing, in his work, what he called “the grace of the divine ordinary.”
I know, I know, all of those things seem very distant from each other, about as different, say, as a bar of soap is from a Van Gogh painting. But wait. If you think those things couldn’t possibly have anything in common, listen to Jim Harrison tell you a couple of stories.
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.
***
[START OF EPISODE SIX]
Ian Brown: You're a big reader. Who do you read now?
Jim Harrison: Oh, I'm really reading a lot of relatively unknown people. There's an incredible fictionaire poet naturalist, named Merrill Gilfillan, who wrote Magpie Rising, and a couple books about the great plague. Then he had a little book, Burnt House to Paw Paw, it's called, and I bought 25 copies, and no one I've ever known has ever met him, he's very reclusive. But he's the bearer of a very immense brain. And I sent one to McGuane and McGuane wrote me back and says, "If there's a better non-fiction prose writer in America, I just don't know who it is," but as far as I know still, no one has ever met him, and perhaps he's fictional.
IB: Now, you and McGuane, you're still writing letters back and forth?
JH: Yeah, for 35 years.
IB: Every week?
JH: Yeah, just about.
IB: By hand?
JH: But we get along better in letters than we do in person.
[laughter]
JH: Novelists are quite frequently abrasive and ambitious. So I had a wonderful experience at my cabin a decade go, 'cause I was seeing that people were being utterly defeated by literary ambition. So I said it mentally pushed mine out on a trip into an estuary, and I saw a lot of other ones out there, so I assume other people do that too.
[laughter]
JH: You know, literary ambition is a mood, and try putting your frigging moods in a shoe box and weighing them. They weigh nothing. It's worthless. It's the illusion of control, as if anyone had any control over their reputation anyway. If you wanted a better reputation, I suppose you'd go live in New York, but that's an improbable sentence, isn't it?
[laughter]
IB: I was gonna say.
IB: I read somewhere that you were 16 when you decided to become a writer.
JH: I think it's a calling. I think it's a calling that you think of, like I almost scorn the idea of discipline because if it's not your entire life, why bother. That Rilke advice to the young poet, must to write [unint.], if not, please don't. We do have those 28,000 MFAs.
IB: The Master of Fine Arts? The people who are now...
[overlapping conversation]
JH: Yes, they're churning out, just...
IB: My impression is you don't think much of their work.
JH: No, I'm not saying... So I'd say I take it individually, there are some good products of the school. But it seems to me as a way to make the arts part of the civil service or something, it's just so utterly restrained, so it seems to me, crushing. Let's try to legitimatize the profession. It's like Richard Howard, who was the poetry editor of the New Yorker, came out with this vituperative and wonderful little essay against the whole idea of poetry month. As if we're going to also institutionalize this on a national level, and that always produces bilge.
IB: And most writers, they say they're scorned for the screenwriting profession, but you seem to...
JH: It's neither here nor there, if you can't make a living as a literary novelist, why turn down $500,000 to do a screenplay? Something like that.
IB: Excellent point.
JH: No, I don't want it, don't make me dirty, darling.
IB: So that's the reason why, I mean rather than teaching or something.
JH: Well yeah, I could teach, I was... I tried to teach, but I was temperamentally not... I taught with enormous passion. And by the end of one semester I taught my last class flat on the floor, stretched out with my face to the wall.
JH: I advised them, I said, "My reading list is the 112 main books of the Modernist movement in poetry." I perceived that they weren't reading them all, which was the minimal obligation. And I realized that those people... That they're just passionless little dweebs, except a couple of them. One went on, oddly enough, to become Octavio Paz's translator, translated all of Octavio Paz and so on. So that was the one that's really extraordinary. But then when I saw him later and I was talking... I introduced him to my daughter as an example and... 'Cause she had quit four or five colleges by then. And then this great student of mine, he says, "Well you know, I never really enrolled at the university. I'd heard about you in New York, and I just came out and sat in your class." And I says, "Oh you mean you didn't graduate?" He said, "No, I never even really took a course for credit anywhere." He had that old Ficino idea of education, he just drifted around the country, walked in the classroom of whoever he liked and sat there, and nobody ever said, "You can't be here." 'Cause nobody really keeps track of anyone but their selves at a university.
IB: And barely that.
JH: Yeah, and barely that.
[laughter]
JH: So I lost, I lost that day. But I was charmed by the idea. That's what an education should be.
IB: But you got a big sign outside your house, don't you?
JH: Yeah, it just says, "Keep the fuck outta here."
IB: Does it work?
JH: Yeah, I had one but it was stolen. I'm getting a new one made in Patagonia because it was maddening. I just though, "Beware, American champion pitbull, Black Savage, AK number, American 777777. That's my number." But people believed it, 'cause what happened down there, I had a bird show up. It's on the border along this creek that had never been seen in America, the Mexican blue mockingbird. Well, I got on the Audubon hotline, so suddenly I have 200 people along my fence.
IB: 200 birders.
JH: Birders. Focusing expensive optics in my back yard. And I became irritable, I drove them away, I tried everything. A friend Doug Peacock, who wrote the Grizzly Years, fired off his .357, that didn't do nothing. He mooned them. But what finally drove them away is that I got a boom box over in Nogales and played Norteño music, you know those Mexican songs of love and death, and the... But I don't know, I like... I look at birds, I also eat them, of course, but... I'm a birdwatcher myself, but if that's bird watching, it's coup-counting. Like I heard one woman say, "I've only got a day and a half and then I've gotta get over to Texas for such and such a bird," and there's... I could see a very wealthy Connecticut couple, said to me when I was coming out of my gate, "How much would you charge us to come in?" 'Cause this bird was hanging out on my barbecue machine, or the boom box that I was playing. And it was a male calling out for a female, which never arrived, which often happens. But anyway, I said to the Connecticut couple, "$5 million." That stopped them.
IB: I know they were birders, so they're motivated by very different and strange impulses.
JH: Sometimes the wrong... In this novel, I have a Pawnee say to Nelse, "I don't care what your white folks call birds. I want to know what birds call themselves," which is much more interesting to me.
IB: Why do you think people are interested in writers, though?
JH: Some of us crave to stay alive and books keep us alive. Where our governments don't necessarily do a good job at it. But books, it's a continuation of a perception. All we have... In some final sense, the only aristocracy is that of consciousness. How expansive is your sense of conscious? You know properly, properly, we read for power. Power within our own lives in the sense of the supposed majesty of perception, I would think.
JH: Power in our lives, I mean, I mean the ultimate range of consciousness. I was walking out in the mountains with this, actually he's a Hasidic scholar and an asthmatic, so he lives down there, he lives in Tucson. And he said to me one morning a couple of years ago, he said, "Don't you think, really, that reality is the accretion of perceptions of all creatures? Not just us?" Well that's power, that perception, the ultimate enlargement of consciousness.
IB: In a way, consciousness is a kind of pleasure. And you have always been a big fan of pleasure, whether it is the pleasure of being in the outdoors, which you write about, a pleasure of eating, which you have written about, the pleasure of sex and drinking, and all these things, all of which you've written about. But people are afraid of pleasure. Why...
JH: Yes. Well, that's our tradition in Canada as much as in the States […] Yeah, there's a certain timidity that's forced into us by the system, and you certainly see that in America more and more. All of that, the whole notion of the fascist Disneyland, and the idea that everything in Detroit... In New York must be destroyed that isn't convenient for shoppers, you know that kind?
[laughter]
JH: Any part of the culture. But that happens. But I don't think people... I think people crave, crave to get out of where they're stuck, which is, of course, the function of books.
JH: A couple of years ago, I had an almost unfortunate experience. I knew the curator at the Chicago... Museum in Chicago that had that entire Gauguin show, you know the big one. And they let me in the museum at 6:00 in the morning so I could walk around alone for a couple of hours. Well, it was literally too much to deal with, you know I sort of delaminated. It was too overpowering to deal with.
JH: There is a guy here...So this isn't meaning I'm schizoid. There's a wonderful man who loved birds, that escaped from an insane asylum in Kentucky a few years ago, quite strong, like many schizophrenics are. Let himself down by tied-together sheets, and he was drawing birds on the side of the building with a bar of soap. And he said in his journal, "Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass." That's a real perception, isn't it? Listen to me, that will lift your nose out of the newspaper.
[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.
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 and Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
This podcast series is a 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.