Jim Harrison, Dalva

Washington Square Books/Pocket Books 1988 by Anna Productions

My hunch is Dalva began with Jim Harrison’s desire to tell the Sioux nation’s story. His mode of commercial communication is fiction. So he spun this glorious novel to hold the story, which he told, in snatches, largely through the journals of John Wesley Northridge. Northridge and his journals are fictitious; the Sioux and Harrison’s accounts of their history are not.

Two thirds of the novel are narrated by the title character, Dalva, a woman’s whose stance and emotional bearings are congruent with the latest incarnation of the Women’s Movement just aborning as this novel was published; bluntly honest she reports:

One of the main sadnesses of my life at that time , and on occasion since, is that I matured early and was thought by others to be overly attractive. It isn’t the usual thing to be complained about but it unfairly, I thought, set me aside and brought notice when none was desired. It made me shy, and I tended to withdraw at the first mention of what I looked like. It wasn’t so bad in country school where Naomi was the sole teacher and there were only four of us in the seventh grade, but for eighth grade I had to take the school bus to the nearest town of any size which, certain reasons, will be unnamed. There was the constant attention from the older town boys and I was at a loss what to do. I was thirteen and refused all dates, saying my mother wouldn’t let me go out. I also refused an invitation to become a cheerleader because I wanted to take the school bus home to be with my horses. I trusted one senior boy because he was the son of our doctor and seemed quite pleasant. He gave me a ride home in his convertible one late April day, full of himself because he had been accepted by far-off Dartmouth. He tried very hard to rape me, but I was quite strong from taking care of horses and actually broke one of his fingers, though not before he forced my face close to his penis which erupted all over me. I was so shocked I laughed.

Dalva’s story could stand on is own without the solid ballast and tragic dignity of the Sioux’s story. She is a woman whom most of her readers would enjoy as a friend. I certainly would, though in places I would make different choices than she, certainly about the quantities of alcohol she ingested. But who wants their friends to be mirror images? And the view of Dalva is awesome.

She’s a scion of a remarkable family. John Wesley Northridge was her great grandfather whose marriage to a Sioux gave Dalva her smidgen of Sioux genes. And it is from John Wesley that Dalva comes by her money, which she handles with the nonchalance and generosity that Harrison so admires. For he is the victim of a familiar conflict. He likes nice things—art, fine architecture, fine wines, fine food--but he despises money grubbing and money grubbers. The only comfortable solution is inherited money. Ah, but the rub is he despises the way so many heirs of wealth live their lives; see his novella Republican Wives for details. So inherited money treated with modesty and generosity; you can find it in Cynthia’s children in Returning to Earth, and nineteen years earlier, already fully formed in Dalva.

Dalva’s story certainly provides another demonstration that money cannot protect one from tragedy, but character responds to tragedy with new growth. I shan’t explain because Harrison tells her story far better than I could.

The other third of this novel is narrated by Michael, the historian who lusts and pleads, actually flat out begs, for access to John Wesley Northridge’s journal, legally possessed by Dalva. Lust is the operant word for Michael: he lusts for the journals, he lusts for women--most any who bear the necessary sexual characteristics--he lusts for wine, he lusts for food, and will do what’s needed to get what he lusts for, even when they’re illegally underage girls:

If she wasn’t a beauty I would have sent her packing. As a long-term teacher I have developed a subtle bedside manner. I answered all the questions with just a sliver of British accent, affecting a Noel Coward weariness but an actor’s intensity. I acted worldly, troubled, morose, so sophisticated that my answers tended to streak off into airy tangents. My bedside manner slowly rose to the surface as I began turning the tables by asking her questions about her hopes and fears. She adjusted her skirt, flattered and nonplussed that I cared. With a millisecond glimpse of thigh my worm turned. I got up and poured us each an ample glass of cold white wine, not so much as a trick but to break the ice. I said the wine must be confidential since I wasn’t sure she was of drinking age. She blushed again and said they had a dilly of a graduation party the week before, and a lot of kids drank so much they “blew lunch,” a puzzling new euphemism, it seems, for puking. Now that I had tilted her off balance a little, I had to finish the job. I stared at her long and hard without speaking—actually I was thinking about lunch. When she was sufficiently nervous I began to speak to her in the tone used on horses.

Harrison has Dalva find extenuating charm in Michael, perhaps because he spouts intelligent conversation, perhaps because she is a lusty woman.

Delightful, idiosyncratic characters and a couple of endearing animals sweeten Dalva and Michael’s narratives, both balancing the pain of Sioux history. This history I had vowed never to punish myself with reading again, but this rousing novel seduced me, and, I don’t regret and won’t forget the reading.