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In this “sprawling, impressionistic memoir”, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Jim Harrison chronicles his coming-of-age, from a boy drunk with books to a young man making his way among fellow writers he deeply admires—including Peter Matthiessen, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg (The New York Times Book Review). Harrison discusses forthrightly the life-changing experience of becoming a father, and the minor cognitive dissonance that ensued when this boy from the heartland somehow ended up a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter. He gives free rein to his seven obsessions—alcohol, food, stripping, hunting and fishing (and the dogs who have accompanied him in both), religion, the road, and our place in the natural world—which he elucidates with earthy wisdom and an elegant sense of connectedness. Off to the Side is a work of great beauty and importance, a triumphant achievement that captures the writing life and brings all of us clues for living. A true masterpiece of memoir from an author whose “writing bears earthy whiffs of wild morels and morals and of booze and botany, as well as hints of William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Herman Melville, and Norman Maclean.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“This fine memoir is a worthy capstone to a fascinating career.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555846473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 495,020 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
EARLY LIFE
FAMILY
Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Michigan, on the banks of the Muskegon River. When young we children were somewhat embarrassed to hear the story of our parents' probably feverish collision on a summer evening early in the Great Depression. The river has to slide past until we ourselves are in love and bent on mating with the scant ability to lift our eyelids high enough to see that it happens to nearly everyone. Norma was a very strong and somewhat irascible character and remained that way until her death at eighty-five. Winfield was obsessively hardworking, playful but melancholy. He must have been troubled at the time because he had worked his way through Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1932, but the convulsed economy only allowed him a job driving a beer truck and he was lucky to get that. I think I was twelve and we were trout fishing when he told me that I had nearly missed existing. One hot summer day on a hangover he had taken an after-lunch nap in the shade underneath the beer truck. His employer had driven by with a friend, seen his abandoned truck with its valuable cargo, and driven the truck off, a back tire slightly grazing my father's head.
A close call with nonexistence, a vaguely stimulating idea until I think of the nonexistence of my brothers and sisters and my children. At the time, though, of first hearing the story while driving home from the Pine River, it seemed part of the carelessness of adults similar to my uncles drinking a case of beer while fishing and falling off the dock into the lake at the cabin in a semi-stupor. My father's younger brothers, Walter and Arthur, had had a long and tough time in the South Pacific during World War II and their general behavior was never up to my mother's high standards. My father's side of the family was verbally witty and Walt and Artie's talk was full of sexual badinage, some of which puzzled me at the time. Of course their wives, Audrey and Barbara, were young and you could imagine how much passion got saved up during four years in the armed services on ships with thousands of other men all mooning for home.
For a boy forced to attend church and Sunday school every week there is the fuzzy paradox of Bible lessons not jibing with what he hears and sees. One part of him feels slightly priggish about the behavior of adults. Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. And the other part of the boy is sunk in his growing knowledge of the natural world and farm life where the sexual lives of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows is an open book, not to speak of the tingly warmth he feels when there's a glance up a girl's skirt at school or when he sees by happenstance a lovely aunt's breast while she's squeezing in or out of a bathing suit at the cabin. I've always been a bit cynical about the existence of the Oedipus complex but having a number of attractive aunts can be tough and dreamy at the same time. Your sense of wrong and right is tenuous and you drift around in a goofy haze of instinctual curiosity with your hard little weenie an almost acceptable embarrassment. At the time I was amazed at my childhood friend David Kilmer, who would heroically pursue the quest. David was a doctor's son with an ample allowance and would bribe certain girls with a quarter for an inspection, or their somewhat retarded housemaid a couple of bucks for a peek. I recall he wasn't the least bit fixated, spending most of the time fishing, killing frogs and turtles, repairing an Evinrude outboard, riding his bike off a gangplank at the end of their long dock under the erroneous assumption that he would truly fly through the air. It was, however, my decision to quit looking at the photos of women in his father's medical books. A woman is included in the book only if something has gone "haywire," we agreed, and the photos weren't pretty.
There is a specific melancholy to hardship that accrues later as a collection of gestures, glances, and dire events. I don't remember anyone ever saying life is hard but it was hard to a child in other puzzling ways, say at Great-uncle Nelse's shack when we joined him in eating possum, beaver, and raccoon, and I asked my dad why Nelse ate such strange things and he said, "He came up short on beef." I do remember Nelse embracing the keg of herring we bought him for Christmas, the salt brine soaking through the slats enough so that the wood was grainy with crystals to the touch. Nelse had been unhappily in love, rejected in his twenties, and retreated to the woods forever.
It's not a matter of romanticizing farm life or distorting it for effect. It was merely the given, the donnée as the French would have it. Anyone's earliest memories tend to be sensuous so that when we lived with my grandparents in the Depression I was a child and what is left is remarkably vivid but spotty and nonlinear. When my dad finally got work he was more than happy to leave because my mother's father was a true Swede autocrat whose opinions on farming were at extreme odds with what my dad had learned in agricultural college.
Strange to say my sister Judith knew the most about my grandfather John but then she died at nineteen and took her knowledge with her. John had come from a fishing family in northern Sweden (my grandmother's people were from the Stockholm archipelago), emigrating at sixteen to the United States where he soon took the train west hoping to be a cowboy in Wyoming or South Dakota. This was 1890, the year of Wounded Knee, certainly a signal event of American history. Grandma Hulda had been raised in the Swedish colony of Davenport, Iowa. They were said to have met in Chicago. They married and with modest savings made a down payment on a small farm in northern Michigan. He went back south to buy a team of draft horses, riding with them on a freight train north to Big Rapids, then reining them home the twelve miles to the farm.
That's not much but as my mother said, "We were never hungry during the Great Depression," a pretty big item. When shortly before her death at ninety-seven Hulda said to me, "Don't ever go to Milwaukee. The streets are full of mud in Milwaukee," it was because the streets weren't paved when she was there. I do know that Hulda and John raised five daughters — Inez, Grace, Norma, Evelyn, and Marjorie — on a cash income that never reached a thousand dollars a year.
Maybe I had been ill, or maybe it was shortly after my left eye was blinded, but I can return at will to a summer dawn in an upstairs room where I was confined: in a corner were three old trunks from Sweden with stickers in that foreign language, and lined with pasted newspaper I think from Goteborg (Göthenburg). I hear the screen door of the pump shed slam and in the dim light I can see my grandfather heading to the barn with two pails of milk skimmed for the calves. The rooster won't stop crowing. There had been a little rain in the night and I can smell the damp garden, the strong winey smell of the grape arbor, the bacon grease from the kitchen below. My older brother, also named John, runs out the pump-shed door followed by my maiden great-aunt Anna carrying a pail of slop for the hogs. Both John and I loved to watch the pigs feeding at their trough. John swiped them a few pieces of ham once and proclaimed them "goddamned cannibals." Pigs eat with marvelously vivid energy. Anna turns now to the gathering chickens and John has retrieved ground-shell corn from the granary and he and Anna broadcast it out to the frantic chickens with Anna pausing to scratch her arms which are covered with psoriasis. Grandpa has finished milking and turned the cows and the two big draft horses out to pasture. He had never owned a tractor and pretends he doesn't want one. He carries the milk to the house and soon I hear the cream separator whirring. Sometimes I'm allowed to turn the crank and this whirling machine divides the cream and the skim milk fed to the calves and pigs. We eat the heavy thick cream on our cereal. In bad weather I'm allowed to fork down hay from the mow to the horses and cows. Across from the granary is an outside toilet called a privy. Later, when I'm in high school, I help my father install an indoor toilet for my grandparents. The family also collected money and bought them a television but old John put the television out in the pump shed saying it was too late to start something new. In the front yard there is a tire swing hanging from a maple branch near a grove of lilacs. If you swing high enough you look down at the flowers as if you were a bird. Sweet mint grows in the ditch near the section road.
What have I forgotten? Waking to the animal sounds that seem to comfort one, easing the soul into consciousness. There were no alarm clocks in the house. This ancient cycle was so embedded that no reminders were needed. The body's clock sufficed and through the screen window and the skein of a mosquito or fly's whine and buzz there was a sow's untroubled grunt, the muffled squeal of a piglet, the neighbor's dog, the milk truck two miles away, a cow lowing, a horse stomping a sleepy foot, and the long-awaited rooster's crow which, though it might still be dark, dispelled the inevitable night demons.
What else have I forgotten? My young aunt bathing in a tin tub in the kitchen. Old John telling me not to drop stones on the pigs from the granary roof. Pigs don't forget. A farm boy lost his errant kicking foot to a sow. Some evenings they all read in silence, or there was the stink of the aunts doing each other's hair with Toni Home Permanents. Or reading with a pillow on the floor next to the woodstove, or next to the kitchen range fueled by wood. On the floor when they played the card game pinochle for hours, smelling the spittoon, the raw cheap whiskey, Guckenheimer's, they poured into their coffee with sugar. In the herring crock I favored the tail pieces. I collected the little wood boxes the salt cod came in. They fried with lard and put butter on everything. Salt-pork gravy. Churning sweet butter. The heaviness of the rye bread eaten with herring. The sip of my father's beer, the wet straps of his undershirt when he plowed with horses wearing an old fedora for the sun. Old John's cabled arms when he harnessed the horses. The long country funerals. The gush of blood at pig butchering. You could hear it.
A poor farmer didn't really want five daughters but that's what John and Hulda got. It was sad for the daughters who felt his disappointment. They worked like men but that likely wasn't enough in his autocratic mind. The only son died as an infant during the flu epidemic around World War I. This flu epidemic was unimaginable in that it killed millions, the majority of them children and the aged. On one of my frequent visits to Nebraska to research Dalva and The Road Home my friend Ted Kooser, a Nebraska poet, took me to a country graveyard that was beautifully overgrown with lilacs and roses and wildflowers in a grove of pines. One family lost six children within a month, all of the children they had. What was left for the parents? Not much, I'd guess. Forty years later I can still hear the voices of my father and sister, Judith, who died together in an auto accident when I was twenty-five. I'm sure the parents of the six at night while looking up at the moon and stars could hear the voices, or in the morning so many empty chairs must have driven them quite mad. Kooser told me that in the middle of this extended plague people took to burying their dead in the night. A night funeral does seem more appropriate when you are dealing with small caskets.
My father's side of the family could be even more lachrymose than the Swedes, but also more immediate. Once when I was about ten and rowing the boat while old John fished it began to sprinkle, then rain pretty steadily. After an hour or so of fairly good fishing while it rained and we became fully drenched, John finally said, "It's raining, Yimmy." I was always Yimmy rather than Jimmy.
This kind of thing was out of the question in my father's family. "It's goddamned raining," they'd say and pop another bottle of A&P two-dollara-case beer. If it was raining hard you might get something as extreme as, "It's raining like a double-cunted cow pissing on a flat rock." Of the five children, Lena, Winfield, David, Walter, and Arthur, only David was completely even-tempered. The father, Arthur, know as Carty, was said to have gotten in his last fistfight well into his sixties. He had been a farmer, logger, cook for other loggers, a rural mailman. Their farm pretty much went bust and the family moved near the village of Paris, Michigan, numbering a hundred or so people, to the ample house on a high riverbank. My grandma Amanda, or Mandy, was a melancholy soul of unsound health, and this seemed to color their family life so that the moods could alternate between morose Sundays and wild semi-drunken card games the night before.
Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect. Most of us have perceived that there are specific classes in this country though there is admittedly more mobility than France and England. Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice. Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressmen and lobbyists. If you've just spent ten hours digging ditches on a hot summer day you don't enter the tavern and begin to talk about the virtues of hard work and thrift, the beauty of Calvinism as a moral system. You want several mugs of beer.
On both sides of the family no job was too lowly when connected to survival. My mother and her two older sisters worked as servant girls in the town of Big Rapids, a dozen miles from the farm, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to attend high school. My father camped out in a tent for two years, including winter, digging on a pipeline in order to go to college. It is easy for some to romanticize plowing with horses, or the ritual of autumn hog butchering, but with the latter I don't recall meeting anyone who actually enjoyed killing a pig. It was simply a necessity to get pork on the table. I'm unsure if it built my character in my early teens to dig a well pit for five bucks but I wanted the five bucks and it only took a long day's work. Early in high school I worked as a night janitor and rather than thinking it was demeaning I recall the quiet that allowed me to think of the books I had been reading, whether Erskine Caldwell or Sherwood Anderson or the very confusing Stendhal, The Red and the Black. With five children in our family and my father's relatively low-paying job as a government agriculturist it was readily assumed that you had to earn your own spending money.
Of course in the evolutionary curve we tend to remember the hard lessons more clearly than the pleasant experiences, a simple fact of life that allows you to learn survival. If it was unpleasant seeing a favorite pig get its throat cut, then gutted and scalded, it was wonderful when the whole extended family got together for the sausage and sauerkraut making. It was wonderful to fish in every spare moment and later to hunt. When older you come to understand that you were very lucky that your father began taking you fishing at the age of five, and at seven after you lost your left eye it was unthinkable ever to be left behind. I've said elsewhere that I had never heard any comment from my father or uncles in regard to fishing and hunting as "manly" sports. They were simply a part of life. The value judgments about "manly" preoccupations seemed to come later when the country became predominantly urban and semi-urban and people became quite remote from the sources of their food. However, I'll readily admit that a great deal of savage stupidity and rank behavior have attached themselves to hunting and fishing whether at game farms or tournament killing, the mechanization of hunting by all-terrain vehicles, or the sheer hoggery of fishing tourists returning from Mexico with hundreds of pounds of fillets. Man has an inexhaustible ability to beshit his environment, with politicians well in the lead.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Off to the Side"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Jim Harrison.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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