Jim Harrison has published more than a dozen collections of poetry. He also has a reputation as a fiction writer, publishing numerous novels and collections. His book Legends of the Fall (1979), received considerable critical acclaim and was made into a 1995 feature film. Harrison has written several screenplays for Warner Bros. and other studios.
Jim Harrison: I was in Santa Fe in ’68 and ’71 and I’ve noticed that it’s changed. Want me to tell you how to improve that town? You ready? You need more stray dogs, more Mexicans, more Indians … ready? … fewer streets lights. You need bars with dancing girls where people can smoke. You can get rid of all the non-native jewelry stores. There. Now you know. Though I will say there has been one improvement. Have you ever gone to Pasquals?
Lindsay Ahl: Yes. Isn’t it great?
Harrison: I love that place. There’s a correlation with New York here, you know what it is? The arts and literature, they aren’t exciting anymore, but the food is.
Lindsay: I’m curious, because I interviewed Ted Kooser, he seems to be vastly and radically different than you and kind of on the opposite polar end in terms of an aesthetic and yet you’re good friends.
Harrison: Well, it’s always more likely that you’ll be friends with temperamental opposites. Quite often that’s true, anyway. I think that’s true in marriages too. Marriages in which the people are quite different tend to last. Marriages when they’re the same or have the same profession — I’ve known painters and writers that have been married and one thing that often broke them up is that one becomes more successful than another. It’s harder if it’s the woman who becomes more successful, you know, for cultural reasons.
Lindsay: Hey, this is a strange idea I’m pushing off from and probably radically corrupting, but the Jewish idea about the Golem is that if, you as the creator of a text, made the wrong decision, forced the text to be something else, it could destroy you or harm you in some way … have you ever thought that?
Harrison: Well, I don’t know. I’ve never been much for any form of demonology. I do remember Golem from when I read Isaac Singer, whom I love. Faulkner talks about that daemon kind of thing that gets into you. But I think the spirit that concedes you with the book generally makes sure you don’t go in the wrong direction. You have to totally follow your heart, thumbing your nose at everything else but where your heart leads you in your fiction, you know.
Lindsay: So if you’re working in Hollywood do you feel like you have to compromise that or …
Harrison: No. It’s a totally different genre. I never had any bad feelings when I was writing a screenplay. When I was writing screenplays I was writing screenplays. I mean, I’m 8 years away from it now. Certainly, it was difficult and sometimes I would have to quit a novel and go write a screenplay in order to support the novel. You see? But everybody does that. I mean, all in all, I don’t think my Hollywood experience, as it recedes in the past, was as difficult as say, professors who teach creative writing and literature. I think that would be harder because in Hollywood you’re up against not a very friendly situation so you’re always pretty much in focus. I mean I can remember, and I put it up on my bulletin board in my studio, when a studio head screamed at me, “You’re just a writer”. You see what I mean? That’s important. Whereas in collage, in the universities, they pretend they are friendly to the idea of the creative act, which they aren’t really, they just pretend. Because the people who really know about it are the people who do it. Ted the other day quoted me something wonderful somebody had told him, this in Des Moines, Iowa, which is an unlikely place. They had said, Ralph said, (Ralph Crandon was a driver in New York), “They know the map but they can’t drive the bus.” You see what I mean? That’s what you run into in the universities. I mean I’ve watched these people have to devour themselves at meetings. And now at many universities they have to be accessible to the students by e-mail, which is even more hysterical and abusive. So at least in Hollywood, I knew I was just a writer. They used to say that writers were schmucks that drove old Corollas, you know, that kind of thing. So it’s full of many illusions. Like the illusion of the happy creative writing professor. In the year and a half I taught, all I could think of was that these parasites were sucking the blood out of me. That was out at Stony Brook and it was a bit of a hot place, at the time, you know in the 60’s … Philip Roth was there, Alfred Kazin …
Lindsay: Speaking of the 60’s, do you feel like there was a lot of passion and energy going on back then and that now that’s not happening?
Harrison: Well, it was a time of great social foment, cultural foment, though I don’t know if it necessarily led to anything. But this is of course, a very different time. Cultures go through their cycles. For instance, we’ve been in a sort of 15-year cycle of insane greed in America. When I was growing up people didn’t talk about money, it was thought to be impolite. Now both the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine tend to be mouthpieces for this greed. That kind of thing, without knowing it, with a gradual takeover that they’ve grown into. But that thing you observed about Ted and I, that I’m more Dionysian … for instance, I don’t even like paths, you know when I walk, it’s like a friend said, “It’s not the beer cans I mind, it’s the road,” you know? I tend to be more a free radical. Our culture is swinging too…
Lindsay: … as though in waves from Dionysian to Apollonian …
Harrison: Well, I read, it was a few weeks ago, where a female teacher got put in jail for making love to a sixteen year old boy … right? Well, that would have been every boy’s dream when I was growing up (laughter). But now she gets slammed in jail for it. This is, of course, nonsense. This is the corrosive aspect of Puritanism rising up in our culture again. It keeps reemerging.
Lindsay: That’s a kind of gateway into this question: you talk openly about strip bars and lusting after women but you also seem to be a happily married man. Is that about a kind of revolt against Puritanism?
Harrison: No. It’s just biology. I know that women are much more choosy about who they feel affection for. But once they feel the affection, they’re very likely to go ahead with it. That’s just a statistical thing. Whereas the reason the species continues to exist is that certain biological wanton aspect of men that they share with male dogs, you know what I’m saying? But I don’t think it’s neither here or there, because part of the social contract, in a marriage or any other place, is that you can be feeling as crazy as you want inside your brain but you follow a certain code of conduct toward the marriage or it will disintegrate. But a woman is crazy if she worries about her husband going to a strip club. I think it’s so funny … I read on the internet where you can see all these men working in an office, and they’re all taking peeks … and for instance there’s a certain species of monkey, this was in the New York Times Science page … are you ready? There’s a certain species of monkey that will give up lunch in order to look at pictures of female monkey butts. So what are you going to do?
Lindsay: That’s very funny.
Harrison: As someone said, We’re all chimps with car keys.
Lindsay: You know in your memoir, you have the Rilke quote: There is a point at which the exposed heart never recovers … did that ever happen to you?
Harrison: Oh sure. My father and sister were killed in a car wreck and I’m still dealing with them 40 years later. You know, that kind of thing.
Lindsay: I was reading that, and you mention it throughout your memoir here and there, and then there’s this one paragraph where you bring it all home, lightly, easily, but with a few details: the drunk guy going 80 down the wrong side of the road, and I sat there, I was up at the ski lodge, watching over my kids, and I just had to stop reading, stare at the cement wall and plastic round table top while I broke out in goosebumps and started trembling, and I felt it, I felt it for like a week … really disrupting … and I was going to ask you … one of my big problems is being too empathic, when I read, when I talk to my friends ….
Harrison: I don’t think you can be too empathic. It’s how we get enlarged as human beings in a Buddhist sense, absolute empathy.
Lindsay: But do you ever have a problem separating yourself from the events around you?
Harrison: Oh Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know it gets difficult. I think I was with some people, and we were eating dinner, and I broke into tears because I heard about that gay boy in Wyoming that got beaten to death. That kind of thing. No you can’t. Because if you’re a writer, you have the optimum of imagination, you don’t see the event in the newspaper prose of how it’s presented to you, you completely visualize the event.
Lindsay: And feel it.
Harrison: Yes, exactly. What did Goethe say? “Such a price the Gods exact for song,” — we become what we write. You know, we become what we write. That’s the whole thing. But there’s all this nonsense in our culture now where they talk about healing before the blood is dry on the pavement. All that Opera nonsense. All these phony books about redemption. I mean I’ve seen occasional cases of redemption but not all that many.
Lindsay: What’s cool about what you’re implying is that you’re kind of standing there and you just end up feeling all of it.
Harrison: Well, that’s true. But that’s your calling, you know. Lorca, one of my favorite poets of all time, said, “I’m neither all man nor all poet, but only the pulse of a wound that probes to the opposite side.” That’s a tough one, isn’t it? (laughter) So that’s just your calling and you knew when that happened, that that’s the life you were called to. So it does become unpleasant and sometimes the vessel cracks, as it were. I remember when I was in my teens I read all of Dostoevsky and I barely recovered (laughter). I’m not sure I ever did.
Lindsay: You talk a bit about American Indians and you have them as characters in your books. I love that quote by that schoidphrenic, “Bird are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” It’s totally true, in a way, if you shift the perspective. How much dealings with the American Indians have you had?
Harrison: Well, we lived for 35 years within 30 miles of a reservation. My father was an agriculturist and we knew the natives. And I had a cabin in the UP. So many people up there are mixed bloods because it was a big logging and mining area. I don’t deal with Indian religion ever, cause that’s not for me to handle. I very rarely have ever dealt with any pure bloods. But these were just the people I knew. And I don’t want to write about white people who drive white cars and eat white bread and drink white wine …
Lindsay: So what’s the deal with the reading public these days? I feel like they have no clue. They all, like Kierkegaard said, “are lacking passion.”
Harrison: Well, people in general, you can’t talk about. I mean Kierkegaard was a big passion of mine at one time, and the fact of the matter, the true fraudulence I see in these MFA programs is how poorly read both the teachers and the students are. I mean it’s all just unimaginable. These MFA programs are like the Ford Motor plants. The production in the country of literature is 99.9 percent not very valuable. But that’s always been true. And now our literature has this hygienic mentality about it, kind of post-Victorian. I don’t have to take it seriously because it’s not serious. They just think it is. I want art, I don’t want sincerity. You get sincerity from the modern loving pages of newspapers.
Lindsay: The theme of this issue is God or noumena or spirit. Did you take or keep anything from your Christian experience and how would you define God today?
Harrison: I kept an enormous amount because it happened when I was very young. Just like I’ve kept a lot from my nominal practices over the years. It becomes embedded in your spirit. I think I said in my memoir, when I was a kid I read about this girl riding a polar bear cub through the snow, and there was a silver harness … and I always somewhat believed that was true. So I don’t know, I think I have a more monstrous sense of God now, partly in response to science, whether it was the Hubble photos … the human genome … I mean if the flea has 22,000 indicators in each cell of what he is, I don’t have any problem, you know? I mean I don’t think it’s proper for the schools to teach God but I certainty know a great number of scientists who believe very much in a pattern. But it seems like the Bush administration would realize that putting God in schools sort-of resembles what caused the problems in the Middle East. We’re not intelligent people. In fact, I thought of starting a comic lawsuit. You ready for this one? To sue Yale for graduating him. I’d even throw in John Kerry. The idea that they graduated either one of those bozos blows my mind.
Lindsay: I’ve been thinking about how people talk about music in a linear way, as though just because it begins and ends it’s linear. But in music, so many things are happening at once, it feels layered to me, it’s really about a layering of time. You talk like you think about this – “It’s like seeing time herself,” or “Only today, I heard the river within the river,” for example – Talk a little about your sense of time.
Harrison: Well, you know the problem is, that I don’t see time in a liner sense. On any given day you might be 10 years ago or 4 years ahead, you see? That infantile sense of time as strictly linear never worked with me. I could try to believe it but I don’t think it really exists. But I don’t see why, other than living within a fatal organism why I should think too much about it.
Lindsay: (laughter) Maybe that’s the catch there.
Harrison: Yeah. but that’s neither here nor there, as no one’s ever gotten out of here alive. As far as I know, you know? Although Apollinaire, the French poet, said this … “Jesus holds the high-altitude record.” Isn’t that great?
Lindsay: Yeah. What about fishing? You write a lot about fishing. A lot of men I know write a lot about fishing.
Harrison: It’s the only way I can erase everything. I used to be able to do it with bird hunting too, but not for years. But fishing on a river, I think it’s a Taoist thing. A river has such an acceptance of mortality, and it’s such an aesthetically overwhelming thing that you don’t think about anything else, and I know any number of writers who fish I think because they’re stopping time. It erases everything impossible in your life. For instance, the morning of 9-11, I watched the television for an hour and then I went fishing. That was the only solution. After watching the plane run into the building five times, I said, I’m outta here.
Older Love
His wife has asthma
so he only smokes outdoors
or late at night with head
and shoulders well into
the fireplace, the mesquite and oak
heat bright against his face.
Does it replace the heat
that has wandered from love
back into the natural world?
But then the shadow passion casts
is much longer than passion,
stretching with effort from year to year.
Outside tonight hard wind and sleet
from three bald mountains,
and on the hearth before his face
the ashes we’ll all become,
soft as the back of a woman’s knee.
Older Love from Jim Harrison’s Saving Daylight (2006), is reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.