In his fiction, poetry and essays, Jim Harrison, who has died aged 78 after a heart attack, displayed a unique voice, drawn from the hardness born of isolation within the vast perplexity of the US, especially its outdoors. One reviewer said he had “few equals as a writer on outdoor life, the traditional heritage and proving ground of the American male”. Harrison is best known for Legends of the Fall (1979), a collection of three connected novellas whose title story became the 1994 film with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.
Because his work seemed anchored in American masculinity, many critics either praised or dismissed him in terms of Ernest Hemingway. The comparison was easy. Harrison looked the part: a burly, bearded one-eyed man with a husky voice ravaged by drinking and smoking. His work, like Hemingway’s early stories, was often set outdoors in northern Michigan, where he lived much of his life. When he first moved from poetry to prose, Harrison’s writing had some of Hemingway’s tautness, but he wrote in a freer, Beat-like prose with more relaxed humour.
Harrison hated the comparison; he felt closer to William Faulkner, an admiration inherited from his father. For Harrison, Hemingway was “a marvellous writer, but a bully, and bullies tend to be lonely souls”. Gertrude Stein once said Hemingway was “tough” because “he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was”. Harrison never feared sensitivity, though sometimes he hid it well. Like him, his characters were physically strong men driven by, and often eager to indulge, strong desires.
Harrison flew to France for the day to eat a 37-course lunch for his food column in Esquire (“they pay $6,000 for less than a day’s writing”). He once ate 144 oysters just to prove he could, like Cool Hand Luke’s 100 boiled eggs. Harrison’s men pursue and succumb to women, but they also butt heads with strong women who more than hold their own, particularly verbally. His circle included the writers Tom McGuane and Philip Caputo, the singer Jimmy Buffett and the actor Jack Nicholson; they caroused in Montana, Hollywood and Key West. But amid the drink, drugs and women, Harrison also produced more than 20 books of fiction and more than a dozen of poetry, plus essays, journalism and screenplays. And he always returned to his native northern Michigan.
Jim was born in Grayling, Michigan, where his father, Winfield, was an agricultural engineer with a love of the outdoors and books, a passion shared with Jim’s mother Norma (nee Walgren). Like Hemingway, accidents loomed large in Harrison’s life. When he was seven he lost his left eye when a girl thrust a broken bottle at it during an argument. Harrison decided to write one night on a rooftop, “absorbing the poetry” of stars.
After finishing high school, he packed some books and a typewriter his father had given him and hitched to Boston and New York “to become a bohemian”, and actually drank with Jack Kerouac. But he returned home and enrolled at Michigan State University, where he met McGuane, who became his closest friend. He earned his BA in 1960 but, having married Linda King the previous October and already starting a family, he was less committed to graduate work.
Then, in the summer of 1962, his father and younger sister went on a hunting trip and were killed by a drunk driver in a car crash. Harrison had delayed their departure, dithering over whether to go with them; he blamed himself for not being there and for not letting them leave earlier. He also realised he needed to commit to his calling. “There couldn’t be any higher obligation on earth. Because if people you love die, what are you going to do?”
He received his master’s degree in 1964. His brother, John, was a librarian at Harvard, and through connections got his poems to a publisher. The collection Plain Song (1965) landed him a professor’s job at Stony Brook University, New York. He quit after a year, and moved back to Michigan, producing two more poetry collections and co-editing the literary magazine Sumac while he lived on a series of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, followed by a Guggenheim fellowship.
Harrison could be scathing about academia. “I’m always being lectured on integrity by professors who’ve spent a lifetime at the public trough.” Just as the grants ended, Harrison injured himself severely by falling off a cliff-like river bank. McGuane suggested the invalid try writing prose, since he had nothing better to do. The novel Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) was the result; the only copy of the manuscript was accepted by a publisher after having been lost for months in a postal strike.
Although Wolf did reasonably well, the difficulty of making a living brought on suicidal thoughts that Harrison expressed in the poems of Letters for Yesenin (1973). His next novels, A Good Day to Die (also 1973), which prefigured the eco-activism of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Farmer (1976), did not earn much money. He was broke when he was not paid for a screenplay he had written, but Nicholson, whom he had met on the set of The Missouri Breaks, written by McGuane, lent him money to keep him going.
Legends of the Fall changed that. Based on the journals of his wife’s great-grandfather, a mining engineer, the book was grander in scale than his previous ones, but the three-novella format kept the prose focus sharp. The first of the three, Revenge, was actually made into a film four years before Legends of the Fall; Harrison co-wrote its screenplay.
He was now in demand. He wrote on the outdoors for Sports Illustrated and on food for Esquire, those columns collected in The Raw and the Cooked (1992). The 1980s saw one of his best collections of poetry, The Theory and Practice of Rivers (1989), and three novels including Dalva (1988), which confounded critics by having as its protagonist a woman searching for a child she gave up at birth. It was made into a 1996 television movie starring Farrah Fawcett.
By then his screenwriting had seen results: Cold Feet (1989) was an original script co-written with McGuane; he also co-wrote the screenplays for Wolf (1994) and Carried Away (1996), based on Farmer. With The Woman Lit By Fireflies (1990) he returned to the three-novella format and introduced Brown Dog, a recurring character who reminded many of Harrison himself. Another three-novella collection, Julip, a sequel to Dalva was published the following year.
Although he would publish another four three-novella collections, in 2004 his novel True North, a sprawling family saga reminiscent of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, became his biggest selling book; it was as if he had written in all the connections between what would have been cleaner as a series of separate stories, and readers loved it.
Harrison was prodigiously well-read; in interviews her referred to dozens of writers. His later poetry included After Ikkyu (1996), a homage to the 15th-century Japanese poet of zen. When asked for his secret as a writer, Harrison said “just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch”.
He lived in a farm house in Leelanau County, northern Michigan, and kept a cabin near Grand Marais, on the Lake Superior shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His indulgences were followed by ill health – gout, diabetes and shingles. In 2002 he and Linda relocated to Montana, near to McGuane, spending winters in Patagonia, Arizona. Linda died last year; Harrison told an interviewer just before her death that: “My difficulty would be figuring out if I want to live without her.”
He is survived by his daughters Jamie and Anna. He once said: “In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply, you move along because life itself moves and you can’t stop it.”
James Thomas Harrison, writer, born 11 December 1937; died 26 March 2016
