Jim Harrison, Two Collections

Jim Harrison’s The Summer He Didn’t Die (pub. 2005) and The Beast God Forgot to Invent (pub 2000)

Each of these collections of (three) novellas contains a novella spotlighting Brown Dog; for that and another reason it’s worth while to consider (and read) them together.

I’m taking off with “Tracks,” the autobiographical novella and last placed in The Summer He Didn’t Die, because it is chock full of clues to the Harrison oeuvre, and most especially to these collections.

As a woman and wife I have “issues” with the life, written in the third person, that Harrison describes in “Tracks.” More than once, he emphasizes that as his father’s son he feels a deep, sharp obligation to support his wife and children, but, at least as described, they seem tangential to his life and feelings. He reminds me of the traditional Iroquois who maintained separate villages for men, largely engaged in hunting and warfare, and women, involved as they were with child care and horticulture; the two groups came together for ceremonial occasions and, presumably, mating.

In real life Harrison may actually have clocked more time with his wife and daughter than elsewhere, but his third person narrator’s account focuses on career, money struggles, travel, eating and drinking accounts, and, for solace, not his wife, not his daughters but hiking, fishing, and camping alone in the woods. In “Tracks” he names his dog before he names his daughter; previously she is mentioned only in birth announcement and by role designation, “daughter,” and briefly at that. Toward its end the novella displays a slight increase of focus on his wife, from which I learned she had built her life around the children, raising horses, and growing a garden. From scant mention, his daughters appear to have matured to acquire lives of their own; but Harrison gives no account of any child training or comforting or affection.

The question I continue to ponder: Is this a reflection of the real life Harrison’s actual interests? Or is this myth building with a career-oriented PR subtext?

The conflict of human biological hunting and gathering instincts with the urban civilization that dominates our lives underlies in all of Harrison’s fiction—part of the reason I find it emotionally satisfying.

The novella itself is a glorious romp through woods-craft lore, food and drink, and literature, including philosophy with a whisper of science, all well peppered by jabs at the academic world, bureaucracy, and city life. Anyone with an interest in any of these topics should do themselves the kindness of reading “Tracks.”

The title novella of the collection, “The Summer He Didn’t Die,” resolved my uncertainty of the difference between plot and story line. Its plot is the same as Harrison’s magnificent novel Returning to Earth but its story line doesn’t in the slightest resemble any of the novel’s storylines.

Brown Dog, the novella’s protagonist first harbors then champions a child warped by fetal alcohol syndrome, (thereby quickening my allegiance and the hope that Brown Dog is a doppelganger of a part, at least, of Harrison’s own personality).

Brown Dog continually wars with bureaucracy, and often wins, while entwined himself with food, drink, women, and dearth of money, often winning there too.

A thoroughly delightful man; rebels will love him.

“Republican Wives” allowed Harrison to exercise, but not exorcise, his class prejudice.

It’s my prejudice, too, but he portrays his three Republican wives with such scathing rancor and contempt, I became uncomfortable and found myself defending them.

The novella has the same structure—three first-person narratives telling the story and progressively moving the central storyline forward--as Returning to Earth, published in ’07. Its aesthetic success may have prompted his treatment of the novel.

In “Tracks” Harrison mentions his restlessness, which can be seen in his switching narrative styles from third person to first, and his experiments with structure—one of his many delights as a writer.

The Beast God Forgot to Invent places the third-person Brown Dog novella, “Westward Ho,” in its middle, well sandwiched between two first person narratives

It opens with Brown Dog musing about a cloud he recognized, wondering how the cloud came to be so far from its Michigan Upper Peninsula home. But BD, himself, doesn’t know where he is or why. Eventually his head clears to the point of realizing he has been sleeping under a bush in UCLA’s botanical garden, adjacent to Westwood Village. When two garden workers walk over to tell him he can’t sleep there, with impeccable logic he replies, “But I already have.”

Brown Dog himself is so far from home because he’s on the run from the consequences of a series of peccadilloes, Harrison nicely describes. But now he’s on a hunt for the stolen, near-sacred bearskin his grandfather left him.

BD is picked up by a “Hollywood” type we all know from excursions in print and film.

After reading “Tracks" from The Summer He Didn’t Die it’s easy to conclude Harrison wrote this novella after a fling at screen writing in California’s film industry and has dumped his resultant ire into these pages. Of course Harrison was there for the Big Bucks, and his dramatized contempt is a little like a prostitute bad-mouthing her johns.

But Brown Bear wasn’t after Big Bucks; he wanted that bear skin. And his adventures and misadventures in the hunt and in surviving while on the hunt make up this yarn, another version of country cousin goes to the big city.

I found the title novella from The Beast God Forgot to Invent less tantalizing than its title.

But once I abandoned my expectations, the story emerged as a good, solid, low-key read. The narrator, Norman Arnz is a sixty-seven-year-old semi-retired rare book dealer, who supposedly is writing a statement in reply to a request from the coroner in Munzing, Michigan, of the events surrounding and leading to Joseph Lacort’s death.

The joke is Arnz’s wild discursiveness (the “statement” is 98 pages long). But its rambling discourse on the habits and habitat of those involved is worth the time you’ll spend reading it.

As the title sugests, “I Forgot to Go to Spain” is something of a shaggy dog novella. Its narrator has three dozen 100-page “bioprobes, including dispositions on Marilyn Monroe, Linus Pauling, and Fidel Castro, to his credit, which support him, his sister—his acerbic researcher and conscience—and his younger brother—the accountant-thief.

After the discursive meandering through his family of origin and a nine-day first marriage, the narrator takes the reader into the novella’s food-, alcohol-and women-filled now. Unquestionably Harrison is a bottom man; myself—I’m turned on my backs and noses but have been studying bottoms recently with Harrison’s enthusiasm in mind and find them neither as enticing as Harrison suggests or as off-putting as some cartons and jokes would have it. We need to establish a Harrison’s bottom blog to quantify the various reactions to his favorite portion of human anatomy.

The novella is enriched by Harrison’s, via his narrator, musing. My favorite: “Is there a chain of fibs that encircles and binds us?”

The narrator’s wanderings, as discursive as his gloss, take his readers hither and yon, back to and away from his family and love/sexual life. The result had me wondering whether sophisticate can truly be distinct from cynic.

Nevertheless Harrison’s wilderness of words always is worth exploring.