SOURCE: "'A Good Day to Live', The Prose Works of Jim Harrison," in Great Lakes Review, Central Michigan University, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall, 1982, pp. 29-37.

[In the following excerpt, Roberson examines the themes and characters of Legends of the Fall.]

The basic theme in Harrison's prose is the individual's attempt to come to terms with, and to survive in, contemporary society. Modern life is depicted as shapeless. Society inevitably provides no stability or security for the individual. He must create his own sense of meaning and belonging by finding something to personally place his faith in, an event or belief that will give his life form. Harrison's characters are wanters and dreamers, existing on the edge of failure, their dreams perverted by the reality of contemporary society, but possessing an ability to survive. The support that is lacking in society, but is necessary for their survival, is often found in nature or natural or primitive activities—rituals. In the general sickness and confusion of modern life, stability and a joy of living are derived from physical pleasures and an immersion into the natural world. Central to the characters' attempt to live with purpose is their understanding that death offers nothing: "one first realizes one is alive and that like all other living creatures one has a beginning, a middle and a terribly certain end." Death in Harrison's work emphasizes life. Life is all there is, all that is offered; it should therefore be made meaningful and purposeful. . . .

"The Man Who Gave Up His Name," one of three novellas comprising Harrison's . . . Legends of the Fall (1979), is clearly a continuation of this theme [of the search for meaning in one's life] and of the Swanson-Lundgren protagonist [from Harrison's novels Wolf: A False Memory (1971) and Farmer (1976) respectively]. Nordstrom is "a man of forty-three years, a father, formerly a husband, magna cum laude University of Wisconsin 1958, and so on," who is experiencing a crisis of identity. At mid-life, recently divorced, his daughter graduating from college, Nordstrom questions his up-to-now successful pursuit of the American dream: "what if what I've been doing all my life has been totally wrong?"

Nordstrom realizes that although he has been successful by the standards of contemporary society, he has not followed his "heart's affections." He attempts to find the proper niche in life to satisfy himself. In his "pilgrimage away from an unsatisfactory life" he refines and elevates Swanson's earlier lament of wanting to live but not on earth, for Nordstrom has "either lost or given up everything on earth" and in so doing has found the peace within himself that is needed to survive.

Nordstrom does not want to escape from the world but into it. He resigns his position as a vice-president for a book wholesaler in Boston, begins to dance by himself and learns gourmet cooking (culinary activity is central to all of Harrison's characters, himself a gourmet cook, the ingestive appetite being the most primitive human need). He recognizes that "life is only what one does every day," and confronted by his father's death and the killing he is forced to commit as a result of a scam operation by a small-time hood, he perceives "how biologically flimsy we are. We go along for forty-three years then someone pokes a knife in us or a .38 slug and it's goodnight." Over. Finished. Again Harrison forces his character into life by confronting him with the absence of it: "most days I'm excited about living for no particular reason." . . .

The other two novellas in Legends of the Fall are, like "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," stories of obsession. Like Nordstrom, the protagonists are well-educated, well-off men in their forties, who are compelled to acts of violence in attempting to achieve some type of self-realization.

"Revenge," Harrison's only work that is not set, at least in part, in the Key West area of Florida or the northern Midwest, tells the story of Cochran, a retired air force pilot who is having an affair with Miryea, the wife of a Mexican friend and associate, Tibey, Spanish slang for "the shark." Ignoring hints and opportunities from Tibey to end the affair, the couple is surprised in a cabin by him and his men. Cochran is severely beaten and left for dead in the desert. Miryea is disfigured with a razor, addicted to heroin, terrorized by snakes, and placed in a whorehouse. Cochran survives his ordeal and seeks revenge on Tibey and tries to find Miryea. The story ends in embarrassing sentimentalism and triteness as Miryea dies in Cochran's arms after he and Tibey have reconciled.

"Revenge" is surely Harrison's most violent and stark piece of work. It lacks the touches of humor and selfdeprecation that marked his previous stories. The character of Miryea, who supposedly motivates the dual cycle of revenge, is one of Harrison's weakest and least developed portraits of a woman. Indeed, all the characters are sketched out rather than fully developed. They are merely props for the strongly cinematic sets Harrison creates.

"Legends of the Fall," the title piece and concluding story, is a similarly stark and violent tale with baroque pretensions. It is a dense and busy work, a novella of epic proportions. The story concerns Tristan Ludlow, one of three brothers from a Montana ranch, who in 1914 go to Calgary, Alberta to fight in the First World War. The work is essentially composed of three parts, each comprised of adventure, violence, romantic obsession, and death, all connected by angry and brooding figure of Tristan Ludlow.

Tristan is a marked man. His youngest brother, Samuel, is killed in the war and Tristan nearly goes insane. He escapes from a mental ward and becomes an adventurer and smuggler. He returns home and marries Samuel's intended wife, Susannah, leaves her to return to the sea and more adventures involving spying and smuggling. He returns home again and marries a sixteen-year old Indian girl, ranches and continues to smuggle. After six years of relative quiet his wife is killed in a freak accident. Meanwhile Susannah has married Albert, Tristan's older brother, who becomes a United States Senator. Susannah, however, is insane and becomes suicidal over what she believes to be Tristan's lack of love for her. Their subsequent tryst is discovered by Albert who eventually spends time in an asylum himself, and at the death of Susannah, sends her body to Tristan. The story fades to a close amidst more violence as Tristan, plagued by guilt over his betrayal of his brother, finally achieves some sense of peace in a solitary existence in Cuba and then Alberta.

"Revenge" and "Legends of the Fall" are among the best known of Harrison's work, both having been published in Esquire accompanied by much hyperbole and fanfare. Although both are impressive stylistic achievements and exemplary pieces of storytelling, in the final analysis they lack heart or substance. The characterizations are shallow and undeveloped. Harrison has allowed the violent and elemental nature of the works to dominate. He has moved away from the minds of his characters, the mental and emotional lives that his other works are centered around, and focused more upon action and physical activity. Although they are the most atypical of his work, "Revenge" and "Legends of the Fall" are also the basis for the critical charges that Harrison is simply a writer of "macho fiction."

Since Wolf reviewers have termed Harrison's work Hemingwayesque because of his understated plots and prose and use of simple declarative sentences as well as what is perceived to be his overstressed masculinity. To accuse him, as some critics do, of advocating "male power" and labelling his writing "macho fiction" is, however, a serious error.

One reviewer has defined macho fiction as

fiction women won't readily enjoy—not because it is pornographic (on the contrary, it is resolutely antierotic), but because it celebrates a fantasy of masculine self-sufficiency. It is above all solemn stuff.

To further explain the type of characters that populate this genre, a description from James Salter's novel Solo Faces is given:

There are men who seem destined to always go first, to lead the way. They are confident in life, they are first to go beyond it. Whatever there is to know, they learn before others. Their very existence gives strength and drives one onward.

This clearly does not relate to the majority of Harrison's characters. Although his stories may be crowded with what some may narrowly perceive to be male-oriented elements: drinking, fishing, hunting, and sex, Harrison deflates the extravagantly male animal by making him in a term he uses more than once, "goofy."

With the exception of Cochran and Tristan, Harrison's male protagonists do not exhibit characteristic macho tendencies. Both Swanson and the narrator of A Good Day To Die are self-serving, self-pitying, weak individuals. Harrison himself has described Swanson as a "not very heroic hero" and an "essentially . . . comic figure." In A Good Day To Die the narrator is helpless to prevent another man's slow suicide before his own eyes and questions his own worthiness of a woman's love. These two characters do not represent the epitome of manliness and virtue. They are not leaders, they are lost. They are weak and self-indulgent, ineffective and helpless. They cannot achieve a break with societal reality. They remain defined and sustained by society, unable for all their protestations and scoldings to preserve and attain a life of purpose. They are unable to commit themselves successfully to women or families, and this is portrayed not as a strength but as a failure of the characters, a point Harrison makes clear in the relationships that evolve in his other works.

None of Harrison's work celebrates a masculine self-sufficiency. The male characters are not confident in life. On the contrary, they are all deficient in one aspect or another. The protagonists of Farmer, "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and Warlock particularly, are sensitive, fallible characters with questions of self-doubt and concern, who experience fear and anxiety. A central theme in Harrison's work is man's quest to acquire that intangible element that will bring stability and completeness to his life. In at least two of his works, Farmer and Warlock a woman eventually satisfies a major portion of that need, no small irony if masculine self-sufficiency is Harrison's intent.

Although both Cochran and Tristan may certainly be viewed as possessing machismo, there is no sense of fulfillment or strength at the conclusion of "Revenge" or "Legends of the Fall." There is an emptiness and exhaustion, a sense of pity and loss. Indeed, even though all of his prose work, at one time or another, suffers from the threat of sentimentality and romanticization it is in these two works, with the strongest elements of "male power," that Harrison comes closest to succumbing to that threat. . .

Harrison's works have something more to offer than the simplistic motto that one reviewer of Legends of the Fall credited it with: "live with gusto, die with dignity." He is relentlessly examining the place and purpose of man in the twentieth century. His characters are in a struggle to control the effects of the twentieth century upon their lives, a struggle between the reality of self and the reality of society. They are in search for a truth about themselves, striving for personal affirmation or achievement within the human limitations of the present age.

Harrison's novels are sparsely populated because the focus is upon the individual in a crisis situation, the individual who endures under difficulties. This effort to survive and establish an identity and purpose causes them to be self-occupied, they must depend upon themselves because society offers them no support: "you were either obsessive and totally in control or you were nothing," They are not heroic or brave, but they are survivors. There is almost a total absence of God or religion in these novels. The individual must assume religion's role in society, the responsibility for the salvation of the emotional and spiritual self. The physical self is maintained by nature in the process of primitive activities and the following of rules and rituals.

In a brief autobiographical essay commenting upon his family's move from northern Michigan to a more urban southern Michigan when he was thirteen, Harrison states that it took him "two decades to comprehend the unhappiness of this move from a basically agrarian culture into the twentieth century." In his prose work Harrison attempts to articulate the problems inherent in America's progress from a rural to an urban society into the twentieth century and its impact upon individual lives. Formerly the basis for a person's life and well-being was found in the land. Nature was a touchstone with the past. It offered continuity and consistency and, therefore, stability. Modern urbanized and industrialized America has moved away from this agrarian tradition and Harrison's work explores the effect of uncertainty caused by a fast-moving, fast-evolving society on the individual. As Lundgren observes, "civilization certainly hasn't panned out."

Harrison's characters are reaching out for something to hold on to, searching for answers to their questions. He suggests that that something, that answer, is within themselves. That the questions, however, are ultimately unanswerable, and that Harrison's solutions are not totally successful, do not diminish his achievement in so honestly, sensitively, and stylishly documenting the problem of contemporary American ways and needs.