Jim Harrison - The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

The Search for the Genuin e

Also by Jim Harrison

FICTION

Wolf: A False Memoir

A Good Day to Die

Farmer

Legends of the Fall

Warlock

Sundog

Dalva

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

Julip

The Road Home

The Beast God Forgot to Invent

True North

The Summer He Didnt Die

Returning to Earth

The English Major

The Farmers Daughter

The Great Leader

The River Swimmer

Brown Dog

The Big Seven

The Ancient Minstrel

CHILDRENS LITERATURE

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

POETRY

Plain Song

Locations

Outlyer and Ghazals

Letters to Yesenin

Returning to Earth

Selected & New Poems: 19611981

The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems

After Ikky and Other Poems

The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser

Saving Daylight

In Search of Small Gods

Songs of Unreason

Dead Mans Float

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems

Collected Ghazals

Complete Poems

ESSAYS

Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life

MEMOIR

Off to the Side

JIM HARRISON

The Search for the Genuin e

Nonfiction, 1970 2015

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by the James T. Harrison Trust

Introduction copyright 2022 by Luis Alberto Urrea

Jacket photograph by Dennis Gripentrog

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

Printed simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

This book was set in 12-pt. Goudy Oldstyle by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN: 978-0-8021-5721-8

e ISBN: 978-0-8021-5723-2

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

Contents

Notes on Jim Harrisons Nonfiction

On Love, Spirit, and Literature

On Hunting

On Good Friends and Foul Weather

On Fishing, and on the Water

Immense River:

Notes on Jim Harrisons Nonfiction

By Luis Alberto Urrea

Each morning I walk four blocks

to this immense river,

surprised that its still there,

that it wont simply disappear

into the ground like the rest of us.

Livingston Suite

Limberlost Press, 2005.

I first found Jim Harrison in a box under a stairway in the Woolworths on Broadway in San Diego.

I was still shuffling along through bad luck and bad jobs, taking buses and trolleys for hours to hand out language tapes to Mexican students trying to learn English. Minimum wage or below. When I wasnt doing that, my Jesus complex took me into Tijuana on my free days to feed orphans. I was dreaming of literary salvation, not knowing that to get someone to read about my topics, Id have to first have the patience to teach them the words to care about them. Basically, I was wrenched from side to side by the eruptions of my enthusiasms and obsessions. On reflection, it doesnt seem that far in its sad comedy from Harrisons belletristic expeditions.

I was low on pocket money for new books. But on the layover downtown, between the Tijuana Trolley and the northbound bus, I wandered into Woolworths to look at the cheap parakeets and goldfish. This small pet ghetto was off to the west side of the store, and there I beheld a white bin piled with unwanted hardcovers. Very cheap. Cheaper than a paperback. A. R. Ammonspoetry; Jim Harrisonprose and poetry. Forgive me, Jim, but I might have bought Ammonss books first. I was fancying myself a Great American Chicano Polyglot Poet in those days.

I was back the next week, haunted by the memory of those classic white Harrison hardcovers adorned with Russell Chatham art. And the one-dollar-per-book price tag. For first editions. What a score: Farmer , Wolf , Legends of the Fall , A Good Day to Die , Sundog , and Selected & New Poems . I was a McGuaniac in those days, and the Harrison books kept whispering from their shadowy stall that Tom McGuane knew all about this work. Of course, they were friends. Turned out everybody was Jim Harrisons friend.

I worried that some literary pirate would beat me to the book box and Id be left with my limp ten-dollar bill dangling from my fist. But the Typing God relented and spared my books for me. I dragged them home in a paper bag that started tearing immediately from their weight.

After being bulldozed by Harrisons writing, I found out somehow where to write to him. I probably wrote to him via his publisher. Isnt that what we did before the internet? I told him I started to cry on the second page of Farmer and cried for most of it. How do you do that? I asked. To my utter shock, some months later, he wrote back. Offered to look at my work and to introduce me to his agent. This was my first impression of the man, and it never abated.

I thanked him and did not send any work. You dont send the Buddha a basket of unripe plums. Shortly after this correspondence, I packed a duffel with clothes and books and a couple of records, grabbed my used electric typewriter, and headed out into shadowy America to find out what surprises it held in its pockets. All along the long road, Harrison books. Sometimes, a letter, or messages from mutual acquaintances at parties or readings or chilaquiles breakfasts in Tucson. I think Harrison accepted my timidity, but he didnt share it. He was the ambassador of Ikkyu, the Crazy Cloud of Zen poetsthe shuffling madman and alleged drunkard, the mad lover and the raging heart, the man of wild waysand I dont think he had the time or the constitution to be timid. A fine mentor who reached out from fifteenth-century Japan to Harrisons various hideouts and riverbanks. Ikkyu said: Learn to read the love letters sent by the wind and the rain, the snow and the moon. And, in a thousand ways, so did Jim Harrison.

He extended welcomes and invitations until I felt ready, and that was when Charles Bowden died.

In 2015, I was invited by Chucks family to partake in a memorial event in his honor at the Tucson Festival of Books. They told me that Id be sitting on the stage beside Jim. If this wasnt the right moment to sit with him, there would be no right time. I recall there was a slight trepidation about what Rabelaisian outburst might escape from his mouth. As if, it was implied, I could keep the damage under control. What was more devastating than any mad quote from Jim was the way he delivered poetry and koans in his freestyle eulogy.