SOURCE: “A Conversation with Jim Harrison” in Northwest Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1995, pp. 106-18.

[In the following interview, Harrison and Bednarik discuss topics such as Harrison's poetry, his love of nature, and his philosophical outlook on life.]

Depending on whom you ask, Jim Harrison is a poet writing novels, a novelist writing screenplays, a gourmand writing passionate articles about red wine and garlic, or an amateur naturalist practicing Zen.

In late April, 1994, Harrison set foot in San Francisco as part of a reading tour for Julip, his latest trilogy of novellas. The morning after his “fandango” (as he called it) we were due to meet in his hotel room. A privacy please sign was hanging from the doorknob, but since we had an appointment I knocked. Harrison opened to a room accented by American Spirit cigarette smoke, a tray of dirty breakfast dishes, and the metallic rumble of trolley cars. “The trolley's a little noisy but I got to like the trolley.”

When we talked earlier that week, I suggested he visit the San Francisco Public Library to see the permanent murals painted by Gottardo Piazzoni, the grandfather of Russell Chatham—the landscape painter who provides the cover art for all of Harrison's books.

[Bednarik:] Did you get a chance to see the Piazzoni murals?

[Harrison:] No I didn't. I visited with Barry Gifford and he took me out to the track. He's a racetrack tout. He knows everybody there so we went way up on the roof on this sunny afternoon. He's good friends with the official timer for California racetracks so we sat in the timer's shack. It was just beautiful. The whole bay, the whole world is out there. We stayed for five races. It's what I used to think of as a “Brautigan afternoon.” You know, you wake up with a hang-over and Richard says, “We must start today with a meatloaf.” So we go to a cafeteria and have meatloaf. Well Barry is such a track sophisticate he says stuff like “Jesus, I'm going to baseball this bet.” It's all that racetrack slang. And I of course just sit there listening to it because I like the sound of it, but I hadn't the foggiest fucking notion what was going on. But people traditionally have always been that way about horses. I know several people whose lives were literally saved by horses. McGuane, for example, raising and training cutting horses. He does it all himself. It's very moving to watch—like I train bird dogs.

Is that where the dog training information for Julip comes?

Yes. I didn't really mean that when I wrote it, not consciously. It seems Julip survives these men and survives everything because she has this very specific skill in relationship with animals. It's a tremendous focus for her life, like in our darkest times we always have our poetry.

The line in Julip that stands out is that the three rounders, as you called them, were “still flipping books of poems open at random, hoping for secrets.”

I had to speak at Sam Lawrence's memorial service in New York and I was flipping through books again. Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Duino Elegies. At the end there are what show business calls “out takes,” intended lines that Rilke didn't use. I said one at the memorial service: “Beware, oh wanderer, the road is walking too.”

Last night at the reading you mentioned that you were writing poetry again.

Yes, I wrote two long poems this winter. One I had started earlier, and then one called “Sonoran Radio.” Where I live part of the year in the southwest there's no contact, you can't get television. We don't have anything there except a VCR to watch movies. The only radio I can get to play at night is from Mexico. I don't really know Spanish but I was amalgamating all of my feelings about Mexico. It's a long suite. I am getting closer to having another book but I'm going slow. Also, I just feel tremendously overexposed now and I don't want to publish any more books for a while. It's flattering in an odd way because I never expected to have the range of audience I do.

Do you have a sense that there's an audience interested in your poetry, and another in your fiction, and more readers who discovered you through your Esquire food column?

Or the movie business. Although it was odd in Mississippi—where for some reason I have a lot of readers—and they really are readers in Mississippi. But down there they usually have the poems and the novels and they never ask about the movie business. It's a living, certainly, but it's a relief not to have to deal with the torpidity that comes with being in the business. Because Hollywood was just an option instead of teaching, which I simply couldn't do temperamentally. All your energy being sucked out. You're a walking blood bank for students, which you understand and respect, but for writing you have to save up for yourself and silence until the right time to release it.

Torpidity aside, you've been noted as saying that you desperately want to write a good screenplay.

I do because I love movies.

Do you feel that you've done it?

I had a good start on Wolf before I was interfered with, but that's the luck of the draw in showbiz. For a while when I was writing that screenplay—this is how we don't know what's really going on—I had a hard time because naturally I was re-living the experience that I had of lycanthropy and then my hair—my eyebrows—kept growing faster and faster and I was having to clip my nails every day, if you can believe this. I thought: “I can't deal with this craziness that I have anymore.” And there were dreams I'd be sitting with the producer and director in New York and suddenly the hair started growing through my shirt and I'd throw them out the window. I thought: “Slow down boy.”

Did you write the screenplay for Legends of the Fall?

I wrote the first couple versions, but I didn't claim credit on that one. The man who did the real work was Bill Wittliff. He's a marvelous Western writer and his screenplay was so much better than mine it was humiliating. I said that to him. “God, how long did you take? I spent a whole month on mine.” He had spent a year on his, naturally. I was trying to rip them off for some quick bucks to buy cocaine at the time. Pack up my nose, you know. Should've stayed back on the farm like Bob Frost.

When you were back on the farm you helped co-edit Sumac with Dan Gerber. Did you enjoy the work?

Well, Dan worked harder on it. When you start an appreciable literary magazine you're absolutely deluged with manuscripts. We didn't realize it at the time but the problems in those magazines is that every MFA in the United States is trying to get credits, and they keep track. Of course the nightmare in editing Just Before Dark was I never kept track of anything. I just simply forgot about a lot of the stuff. That's when I began to think that maybe I was writing too much.

In “The Seven-Ounce Man,” Brown Dog has his “best nature day” when he finds a bear's blow hole. That's a beautiful image.

He says: “What luck.” It's a miniaturization of the Delphic oracle. That's a god sleeping down there and you smell the breath and hear the snoring.

In your TriCycle piece, “Sitting Around,” you called bears your “dharma gate.”

I never associated that at the time. Everything can be a dharma gate but there's this enormous specificity in bears. And you know, one's animal changes. When I finally got to see a wolf where I lived, that meant an enormous amount to me. To hear her three nights and to see her. And then there are bears up there and bears are mostly nocturnal but to see them occasionally, to follow them and to sense them—I wrote a poem about one—he fed on the sweet pea and the wild strawberries. He was a huge, gaunt male. I watched him for about an hour. Probably too close. They can get a little irritable in the spring when they're hungry.

I was interested to hear that black bears actually attacked more humans than grizzlies, and grizzlies have the bad reputation.

Well, of course there are more of them. We've had a couple deaths up in the Porcupine Mountains. But generally you just have to exercise the same caution you do in New York and Los Angeles.

Maybe less so, actually. In terms of your writing do you consider anything out of bounds?

What's out of bounds for me is somebody else's religious rituals. The most disgusting thing you see now is the “new age” appropriation of what's Native American. That just terrifies me. How could they do that? Just like that old Chippewa shaman seeing his first picture of a white man who shot a deer with his foot on the deer—Oh, God—you don't fool with that. Oddly enough, that's just like if a Catholic went into a teepee and saw all these priest vestments hanging there as wall decoration. I mean there's something tremendously inappropriate about one writer fooling with another person's secret religion or public religion, or using it for his own purposes. That would be the only bar, nothing else. You know, Terry Tempest Williams said something very odd the other day. She and her husband went down to Mexico and went to about 10,000 feet in this forest, where all the Monarch butterflies in North America go. As she said, “I don't know how they count them.” There were twenty-five million. She could hear the twenty-five million. You can't typify the sound but she says: “It was just like being in God's brain.” And I says, “That's it!”

What an unforgettable sound that must be. When I first heard Terry Tempest Williams read aloud I was utterly intoxicated by her voice.

There's a woman with a lot of mojo. She's dealing in an area now that's quite scary, or strange—calls it the “panerotics of nature,” We're lucky that there are wonders.

And that the natural world is teeming with sound.

I had in this one part of a poem: “The cat drinking water was insufferably loud.” [Harrison rummages for, then reads from a typescript]:

At first the sound
of the cat drinking water
was unendurable,
then it was broken by a fly
heading north,
a curve-billed thrasher
swallowing a red berry,
a dead sycamore leaf
suspended on its way to earth
by a breeze so slight
it went otherwise unnoticed.

If you want to read this one you can take it and send it back to me. I don't know if I have another copy. [Harrison hands over a six-page suite.]

I'm sure we can get it copied here in the hotel.

It doesn't matter, just send it to me.

Thanks. I look forward to reading this. In regards to some of your earlier work George Quasha, in Stony Brook, wrote about your second book, Locations. He claimed there was a story afoot about the poem “After the Anonymous Swedish”: That you woke from a dream having been a pond and recited the poem in Swedish, a language you don't speak, then translated it to your wife at 3 A.M. Is that bullshit?

That's bullshit. I was so envious at the time that I didn't know any languages, so I wanted to translate a poem too. So I just made one up. It sounds like a Swedish poem. I've been thinking about writing more of them. Drummond Hadley, who's an extraordinary poet and an old friend of Gary Snyder's, is a cowboy poet. He lives on this vast, strange fiefdom out in the southwest. We were walking down the road and he quoted the entirety of the “Tenth Duino Elegy” in German. Then he told me a funny story. He's from a wealthy family and he'd run off to be a cowboy down in the Sierra Madres. He wanted to be a Mexican cowboy, so he camped for months with this group of Mexican cowboys. Locating cattle is hard work, but they always told stories at night. And he didn't have any stories. He does have this gifted memory, and he loves Lorca, so he thought “Well …” So he stands by the fireside and recites a poem: “La luna, la luna, la luna,” about the moon spilling like milk over the mountain onto this young girl in her torment. So every night: “Drum, we want to hear the luna poem,” and they'd sit there and listen to it. They couldn't read, any of them. The beauty of that.

Do you memorize any of your own poems?

Never. Sometimes I surprise myself, I remember whole parts of them. I remember other people's lines. That is odd, I never have—I suppose I don't want any knots between the next one.

Do certain parts of your suites emerge at different times and in different places?

Oh, absolutely. The suite form I like is when all these little wedges are intended to suggest; then, finally, a whole—almost topographically. It's a map, the sacred, though they were written before I read that book by Bruce Chatwin, Songlines. That's a monster of a book because he determined—which was known only by anthropologists for a long while—that the Aborigines navigate by singing, knowing the songs of an area. So this guy's walking twenty-two hundred miles to see this girl he had dreamed about. Twenty-two hundred miles, and he's trotting along with his stick and he's singing the songs of the area that tell him how to go, where to go. It's just an unbelievable, utterly transcendent idea.

In your essay “Going Places” you talk about your seduction with maps. The first map being wooden puzzle pieces shaped like the states in different colors—

Iowa is yellow. It's the corn, you know.

—and the last map, to a remote, secret place, is drawn on thin buckskin which is slowly cut up for stew.

Eating your map. It seems certain things are ineffable and that's the barrier, back to writing what you can't quite reach. I was thinking that the whole notion of zazen is to be able to speak the language you spoke before you were born and the language you speak after you die, that's part of it. Writing is a lifetime pursuit. You never come up with anything.

Well, there's the old stories of the Zen poets writing on leaves and tossing the poems into the river.

Well, that's old Li Po. The river, in you go. Do you read Stephen Mitchell's translations?

I've read his Tao Te Ching.

The Gospel According to Jesus is a tremendous book because he's reduced the entirety of the whole thing to what Jesus actually said, separated from church history and all the gloss and accumulation, so the actual text is quite slender. It's very similar to what both Gandhi and Thomas Jefferson did with the New Testament.

In “Sitting Around” you wrote that you were creating your own religion called Bobo. Are there any holy books in Bobo?

Snyder's The Practice of the Wild probably comes closest. It's an incredible book. But Bobo. “Bobo knows all modernity is just a flaky paint job.” That kind of thing. It goes on and on from there.

From Bobo back to the silver screen: Have any of your books ever been made into a foreign film?

No, although the French have owned A Good Day to Die for years now and the guy claims he's going to make it. I was ignoring him and then I was appalled—I saw this film I love, I've watched it three or four times now called The Hairdresser's Husband. Just a transcendent film about this little French boy. He likes to dance to Egyptian music. And he likes to get his hair cut by this sexy sort of woman, so he's always waiting for his to grow. His dad asks him at dinner what he wants to do when he grows up and he says “I want to get my hair cut.” So his dad of course slugs him. He meets this beautiful hairdresser, gets his hair cut, and keeps coming back. Then they get married and he just sits around in the barber shop, talking, as other people get hair cuts. It's just a beautiful film. So then I found out the people that own A Good Day to Die are the ones that did this. And then I feel stupid. Because I couldn't see how they would make A Good Day to Die. Or why, but then I thought this is the kind of thing the French are interested in—and the Spanish. The Spanish liked the book too, for obvious reasons: a good day to die.

Do you think A Good Day to Die sealed your fate in the feminist world?

Oh, everyone forgets everything. Nobody reads very much. That did at the time, but I don't care. I mean, nobody knows how to locate anybody, and then I published Dalva and The Woman Lit By Fireflies.

Was there an equal and opposite reaction?

Oh, tremendously, to both those books. It was very overwhelming to me, in the pleasant sense. I must've received a couple hundred letters from women on Dalva and only one didn't like it, or was upset at my temerity. But we can't have abridgments of our freedom. I mean I don't even accept the abridgments that I mentioned to you, other than implicitly, it's just that I would fear to fool with somebody else's medicine. I know people do, and then the Native Americans justly get pissed off. There's some wonderful poems in Elizabeth Woody. She's an Indian poet up in Washington. Her book's coming out with University of Arizona Press. Some of her first poems are quite formal and not too interesting to me and then she hits some kind of really strange, powerful stride in a long poem about her sister. Crazy. It's like Louise Erdrich's poem to her sister who got beaten up by a drunk white guy. Overpowering poem. Elizabeth told this story when we all met in Wyoming. Matthiessen and Lopez and everybody was there—writers and nature. It was intriguing because I never met Lopez though we corresponded. We never met in what we call “real life.” I like that, don't you? Anyway, Elizabeth got up—everybody's making very elaborate speeches, except Sam Hamill who's just sitting back there as Sam Hamill, which is quite wonderful—and she says: “I come out of the store.” She lived way up in the reservation at the time. “I get in my car and then these two ravens come down that like to fool around, and they sit on the hood of my car and they grab my windshield wipers and snap them, looking at me,” and so there we get the relation of writers and nature. It doesn't need many big adjectives.

Have you read Gerald Vizenor's Dead Voices?

I just ordered it. He's just a marvelous author. Nicholson's a great fan of his. I gave him Griever: An American Monkey King in China and The Trickster of Liberty because he's a real coyote figure.

In the magazine Caliban you dedicated the poem “Counting Birds” to Vizenor.

Because of that line in there about all those swallow holes. I was thinking that these are the eyes of the Anasazi bringing me the Manitou, because they look at the Manitou Islands. Sometimes when you look the Manitou are sleeping bears. I wrote the introduction, a couple years ago, for the local Ottawa-Chippewa tribal history and went to the dedication of their new motel and casino. It was wonderful. They had a drum group and the smoking of the pipe. It was just gorgeous. I went to the ghost supper with all these very loud and very old Chippewa, and the one turns to me and says: “We were really something once, weren't we.” [Harrison excuses himself and finishes packing.] I used to get terrified of missing planes, but then oddly enough I would think that everything will be OK if I get home. In recent years, I suppose because of my practice and what I've been doing, it doesn't come out anymore. It's Dogen's whole idea: Practice is finding yourself where you already are. So consequently sometimes when I'm in airports now I think maybe I'll go someplace else. You look at the tote boards and think—

“Well, there's a four o'clock flight to Rio.”

Yeah. Or there are all these different Fayettevilles and Charlottevilles in the southeast, so you think “maybe I'll just check 'em all out.” I think it first happened when I was writing “Brown Dog,” the illusion that there is a home if you're not at home everywhere. I forgot that I could only write at home so then in this motel in Livingston, Montana, I started writing “Brown Dog.” I just completely forgot that I could only write at home, which is like some sort of idiot savant bullshit.

There's the argument to be made, though, that Brown Dog's voice is very familiar, much easier to access for you than Dalva.

Oh, infinitely. He's sort of my survival mechanism. In an odd sense he's a true Zennist while I'm only a student.

Right. He's the one who's there.

Always. He says: “This gravy is not pork gravy.” She says: “Of course not, it's generic. You wanna make something of it?” “I was just saying it isn't pork gravy.” And he says: “She was beautiful. Her one leg was too short but it looked just like the other leg only shorter.” You know, that kind of thing. It was just his immediate contact with life. And he can always get out of being cornered. “You don't have a social security card? How do you pay your taxes?” He only gets one letter every couple years and that's to renew his driver's license. He has no other official contact with anything. And he's always lived in unoccupied deer cabins. Well, Brown Dog's the emotional equivalent of what keeps me alive. In France I think I did thirteen interviews and nine photo ops, two lectures, three book signings, a couple talk shows in five days. I get a little walk in the Luxembourg Gardens and for some reason there's a lovely girl in a pink rabbit suit flouncing around in some promotion of some product. And the Luxembourg Gardens are overwhelming because I know Rilke walked through them. Every day, starting the next day, on French TV there's going to be this film about me on Cinéma 3, and they repeat it every day in the afternoon. I says: “I gotta get out of this fucking place before they blow my cover.” I think: “Ah, pink rabbit suit.” Weird. And then walking up: “Where's the zipper?” You know, reverting to Brown Dog emotions.

You didn't pack your green janitor's suit from The Theory & Practice of Rivers?

No, although that's from the same lineage, the green janitor's suit. I think that's partly the spirit of my father who was immediate like that. He said to me when I went off to New York: “Well James, maybe you should just stay there 'til the pissants carry you out through the keyhole.” This is wonderful and I'm lucky I don't spend my adult life fighting against my dead father, because he was very pleased that I wanted to be a writer. I wasn't even sure I should bother that much with college because Hemingway and Faulkner didn't bother with it, and Sherwood Anderson. All these people he liked. That's not where you learn how to write. His roots were real Brown Dogian. He went to college to study agriculture. He and his brother worked for two years digging pipeline and living in tents in Michigan during the winter.

To pay for school?

Yeah. Living in tents during the winter in Michigan and hand digging up pipeline. Well, give me a break. Now everybody wants a fucking grant before they read a book.

Was Clare in “The Woman Lit by Fireflies” named after John Clare?

I wondered about that later. Maybe a little subconsciously. I was always obsessed with Clare and Christopher Smart. Like Clare I've had periods of mental instability, as it were, and one always fears being locked up because there's no food. I couldn't deal with institutional food.

One final question with an eye toward the future. Dalva was originally going to be the story of Dalva's grandfather. What's the status of Northridge's novel?

That's what I'm working on now. How I originally planned the book was to write about her grandfather, her son, and her. But then Dalva just completely took over the whole thing. So I have nine cartons of unused notes and I can't afford to let them just go away. They're in the attic of my granary if they haven't been chewed by mice. I found three galleys of Dalva the other day, but they'd been chewed up by mice. That kind of thing really disturbs my librarian brother.