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Overview
The Mark Twain Award–winning author of Legends of the Fall delivers three novellas that highlight his phenomenal range as a writer, shot through with his trademark wit and keen insight into the human condition.
Harrison has fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who weathers the slings and arrows of literary success and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follows soon after. In Eggs, a Montana woman reminisces about collecting eggs at her grandparents’ country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas, retired Detective Sunderson—a recurring character from Harrison’s New York Times bestseller The Great Leader and The Big Seven—is hired to investigate a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo.
“Still independent, fierce and feral,” The Ancient Minstrel confirms Jim Harrison as one of the most cherished and important writers in modern America (David Gates, The New York Times).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190215 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 475,588 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
He went in a door and out another one ten feet away. It had been an old railroad flat he had remodeled, tearing down walls and painting. He liked the two doors close together. It gave him a sense of choice otherwise missing in his aging life.
Others who had remodeled railroad flats had stupidly closed off the extra door pretending it had never existed. He drove his neighbor in a prim bungalow quite crazy when he had a whim and circled in and out of his two doors. The neighbor was a retired academic, a delightfully bright codger who loved to speak vulgarly after a lifetime of propriety. The neighbor would open a fine wine he could afford on his generous retirement and wave him over to share it. He always went, even after he joined AA to preserve his marriage. He found out that fine wine encouraged a taste for fine wine and never precipitated a binge. If you drank half a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou you wanted more of it and nothing else, certainly not the rawness of whiskey or bilious beer.
He was what they called an "award winning poet," at least that was what his publisher called him on book jackets, though in fact he had never heard of any of the awards before he received them. So much for the immortality of poetry. He had even looked up the Pulitzer in the World Almanac at a doctor's office and been quite startled to see how many twentieth-century names had been forgotten. Meanwhile over a good Bordeaux his academic geezer neighbor would say, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as if it were an obesity joke over which he chortled deeply. He himself could remember saying it in a coffee house before he flunked out of graduate school. His failure was due to "arrogance," the department chairman said. Young poets, even before they wrote a poem, tended to be prideful rather than properly self-effacing graduate students. Anyway, the department managed to grant him his master's after he published his first book of poems with an honored New York publisher. No one from the department had ever done that before. They were proud of him but not to the point where they would allow him to enroll in their Ph.D. program. Years more of him strutting the halls was an idea none of these fustian gentlemen could bear.
He and his wife weren't divorced but she lived a dozen miles out in the country outside Livingston, Montana, on a small farm with a big house. It had been her idea to get a house in town for becoming older and she was tired of taking care of such a large farmhouse of 3,800 square feet. He had also slipped on drinking which he had been able to manage in his early sixties.
He would take a chance and drive out at least twice a week and play with the dogs, often a disappointing experience because it had been quite warm and he would get there and be met wildly by the dogs but after a few minutes of play they'd settle back to sleeping on the thick grass of the lawn. He wanted them to play like they did as pups. The fact of the matter was that they were no longer pups. At ten they were about the same age in dog years as his own seventy. He slept in his studio when he came out to the farm, in a small cabin where he did his writing on the property near the big house. It wasn't elegant but simply workable.
He was taking a chance driving because he no longer had a driver's license. He had thought many times that the end of his rational marriage had come when they took his driver's license away. He was furious because it had been a mistake. He had stupidly admitted to the state cop that he had recently had spinal surgery. The cop asked if he was on narcotic pain medication and he clearly said, "No," but wasn't believed. As a matter of fact the first weeks after his surgery he had taken OxyContin but stopped despite the pain in his spine because the drug made his writing slurred and goofy. He couldn't write that way, not even in his journal which was frequently goofy all by itself.
He had also suffered from shingles for nearly three years though when the big sores subsided it was called postherpetic neuralgia. Whatever it was called it was plainly a double whammy about which nothing could be done medically. He had learned that doctors ignored shingles as an unprofitable disease until they had it themselves. There were no big fund-raisers for shingles. At the Department of Motor Vehicles office he gave a bravura performance and they kept his license when he handed it over. "Give it back," he yelled.
Anyway, he had sent the governor an imprudent letter saying that he had written Legends of the Fall, his best-known book, and he needed to drive and explore new places in order to write and make a living. He couldn't very well sit home and write "Legends of the Yard." The letter didn't do any good although eventually he proved himself deserving and was able to drive again.
He had expected the trail into aging to be uneventful. On the contrary, who had ever heard of a white, Christian gentleman like himself losing his driver's license and sitting under a pine tree rather than driving to a friendly bar in town? Which of course is what he didn't need, a bar with old friends. He hated to think of the time and energy he had spent in a long life thinking about quitting smoking and drinking for the obvious health reasons. He had intermittently, briefly of course, been a health nut in his life. Once when they still lived in Michigan he lost twenty-five pounds in two months by walking four hours every morning, stopping for a rare cigarette, counting birds he liked, walking places in the Upper Peninsula where he had never walked before. The unknown always beckons. Early settlers always wondered what was over the next hill other than other hills. The vaunted reputation of Daniel Boone came from how thoroughly he had covered the landscape. He saved a village of starving people by going out and shooting a combination of ten deer and bears in one day, enough to feed everyone for a week.
When he was growing up in Michigan, his own father had been a good woodsman and had instructed him well. When you think you're lost just sit and calm down. When you're frantic you lose your energy. Notice how the trees tend to lean a bit to the southeast. That's because of the prevailing winds and the immense storms from the northwest off Lake Superior. The day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down it had blown over ninety miles per hour for a couple of days. He had been at his remote cabin then and did not stray from the protection of its sturdy logs. He read and listened to trees crashing down in the landscape. "Widow makers," they were called. He finally left the cabin for a much needed drink at the tavern. He drove down to the lakefront and watched as giant waves smothered the pier. Even in his car he shuddered in fear. The waves actually thundered.
By far the biggest jolt of aging was the disappearance, coming up on seventy, of his sexuality. The doctor improperly joked when he explained the problem. He was angry and the doctor said that it happens to everyone. In fact there was a bench in front of the town hall on which the same five old men sat every day called "the dead pecker bench." There were medications available now, and there was a joke at the tavern that if you had an erection more than three hours just visit the Starlite Alleys on women's bowling night and announce your problem. You'll get plenty of exercise. But the idea of taking a pill to get a hard-on left a bad taste.
He couldn't help trying it once the year before at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., a city he loathed for political reasons but tolerated when it was full of old writer friends. The target was a graduate student girl he had made love to years before when she was a sophomore. The price was that he had to write her a glowing recommendation to the Hunter College writing program in New York City. He readily agreed. She was a bit dumpy but used to have a nice body. They went to his room at the Mayflower after dinner and drank. She was in a hurry because she had to see an old boyfriend, also a writing professor. Unfortunately, the pill gave his gray room a deep green aura which irked him and then he came off in a minute. He apologized and then she quickly left to visit her friend without working up a sweat. To his surprise he noticed while watching CNN that he still had a hard-on, evidently a peculiarity of the pill. He went out in the street on the odds he might meet an acceptable pro, which he did a few blocks from the White House. They strolled along chatting amicably about music, which raised a warning flag in his head. A doctor friend had warned him never to sleep with a prostitute who also hung out with musicians as there was a higher incidence of AIDS in such women. Once again he apologized, gave her twenty bucks for the chat, and turned back to the hotel and the torpor of a thousand English professors at their evening meetings through which many dozed.
Years before when he was teaching at a university he had helped out the chairman who had hired him to do preliminary interviews with a half dozen creative writers applying for the vacancy. He had already tossed out about fifty résumés. The university was only a couple of hours from New York, a magic city, at least for writers. It was all in all very unpleasant, especially the air of pleading in their eyes, and interviewing the half dozen candidates was grueling. The most obnoxious and smug man, also the best dressed with probably a rich wife, had gone so far as to write a good review of his own first book of poems and presumed that it gave him an inside track. He could barely wait to get him out of the room and pretended to make a phone call saying, "I'll be there in ten minutes," though ten minutes was far too long. He ended up giving the highest recommendation to the writer with the most kids.
The whole economics of work depressed him. He made a good salary, doubtless more than he deserved, but the candidate with the most children admitted that the night before he had missed the last bus back to the area of Virginia where he was staying with a relative. He had mostly walked the streets until about 4:00 a.m. and then went back to the hotel and took the elevator to the fifth floor where he recalled that there was a sofa near the elevator entrance. He had barely gotten to sleep when a bellhop woke him and offered to help him to his room. He deftly said that his roommate was sleeping with a very noisy woman. The bellhop laughed and continued on his way. He was then awakened at 7:00 a.m. by the first room service cart.
The award-winning poet asked the man why his college wouldn't pay for a room. He said it was because he had taken this last year off to write a comic novel. His wife and two daughters had all worked at McDonald's and they made it through okay. But he was not tenured and the department was replacing him with a young hotshot from Iowa. "That's why I'm here. I haven't sold the novel yet." It turned out the candidate had been cutting Christmas trees for four bucks an hour which was admittedly "chilly" in Michigan. He told the man to go into the bedroom of his suite and gave him a shooter, a two-ounce bottle of Canadian whiskey. He had one himself and the man wobbled off to sleep.
It was a good story, he thought. They hired the man, whose novel was published and did well. He wanted to quit his new job and just write but his wife was fearful and told him she would shoot him if she ever had to go back to work at McDonald's. The family was overwhelmingly pleasant. The award-winning poet reminded himself to keep his hands off the man's two pretty teenage daughters.
He could date the moment desire had fled or when he had truly noticed it. It was a late August afternoon in 2013. It was warm and he sat at a table in the tavern. He was alone because he always arrived at 4:00 p.m. and his friends showed up at the more proper time of 5:00. There were two girls at the bar and one of them was in a very short summer skirt twirling on her bar stool. It was electrifying or would have been in the past. He felt nothing and pinched himself lightly to make sure he was actually alive. No, a curtain had dropped and he wondered if it was a recent bad cold. He certainly didn't feel the iron bite of lust which should have been automatic. Not very far in the past, minutes to be exact, he would have been up at the bar buying the girls drinks, cajoling, letting drop a few credentials like "I was just in New York seeing my publisher," looking down at the smooth legs of the twirler and imagining her resplendent pubis on his not so lonely pillow. Her friends came in and the girls left but not before the twirler winked at him. The display had been for his own frozen body. He couldn't even manage to return the wink because his heart had abruptly darkened.
He had been distressed a long time by this nominal experience which wasn't nominal to him. It was more like a resounding crack of doom. So much of his life since youth had been consumed thinking about women.
One late afternoon when he and his neighbor John had sipped two bottles of good wine rather than one he had impulsively confessed that sex had "fled" his life.
"Sic semper tyrannis," the man said.
"I forgot what that means."
"It means your tyrant is dead. Sex is the most powerful bully in our lives. Last year I saw an extraordinary number of young women going in and coming out of your place. They rarely lasted more than an hour. It all was an amusing diversion while I was cooking dinner. I certainly questioned your timing."
"I had to get at those before I got drunk which would render me unworkable. The minute they left I was free to have a big drink of whiskey or whatever."
"I assumed you were feeding them also."
"Not so, except some good cheese and Spanish olives I get Fed Exed from New York. It's my only food habit."
"You might not have figured out that I'm gay though I have a daughter from an early unfortunate marriage I made to please my parents. They had figured out that I was gay so I married to show them otherwise. You met my daughter two years ago."
"Yes, a lovely woman."
"It was mannerly of you not to make a run at her."
"When you had gone inside and I said something flirtatious to her she said she preferred boys from the car wash to academic men."
He had made a great deal when his novellas sold to Warner Bros. He wanted to quit teaching but his wife wanted him to hold on. She had her own money but was a maniac on the subject of saving for retirement. He had noted that she got this from her father who had saved a fair amount but then promptly died within a year of retiring. Her mother also had her own money but with the death of her husband she speedily went off to live in a nunnery for older women in Kentucky, an escape she had long planned. Since retirement was at least twenty years away he could not quite imagine that condition.
A dour confusion took hold of him. It slowly became apparent that it was caused by the quadri-schizoid nature of writing his own poems and novels, teaching, and now writing screenplays for what to him was lots of money. Starting out he received, he learned, the minimum fee of $50,000, which exceeded his academic salary for the entire year. Early the next year his agent got him $150,000 for a screenplay that was needed right away. He wrote it in three weeks. They said they "loved" it but never made the movie. Contrary to what he expected success had made him angry and unhappy. The reasons were elusive except that he had been thoroughly out of balance. He loaned a lot of money to friends and never got paid back except a thousand dollars apiece from two Native American couples who lived near his cabin and needed to pay off trapping fines. Both couples visited in the following years with their debt contained in a cigar box and counted it out slowly. He didn't learn anything from being stiffed but kept stupidly waiting for people to repay. It occurred to him that times had changed. His father had taught him that a personal loan was like a gambling debt, a first priority.
The first signs of his wife wanting them to separate into different residences were at a time when he was drinking a great deal. Her point was well taken. He was no longer the man she had married who was calm, intelligent, mannerly, and slender. She used to love his body but his total weight gain since their marriage was seventy pounds. In his periods of walking mania he'd sometimes drop twenty-five pounds, and one year by dint of pure will he knocked off forty but wrote poorly. His very best work had come during a period when he was utterly indulgent at the table. How could he write well if he was thinking about food all the time? It didn't work to try to write about sex, doom, death, time, and the cosmos when you were thinking about a massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Of course all the extra weight had a bad effect on their sex life. He was too heavy for the orthodox missionary position plus his breath was bad from his gorging. She could only make love to him with her back turned. Also he was chronically fatigued. There was little left of him after a full day of writing. All that he wanted at the completion of the workday was a big drink, at least a triple. The tavern named a drink after him which was a quintuple tequila with a dash of Rose's lime juice. He quit drinking it when the price of his favorite tequila, Herradura, skyrocketed due to an agave disease in Mexico and the fact that fine tequila had become fashionable in Japan. He could afford it but resented it like the poor boy he once was. He had become a free spender with his habitual table always full with friends and acquaintances, some of the latter hanging in there for free drinks.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Ancient Minstrel"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jim Harrison.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
The Ancient Minstrel,
Eggs,
The Case of the Howling Buddhas,
