A Literary Voice in the Wilderness : Jim Harrison, a Novelist and Outdoorsman, Writes From Woman’s Point of View in ‘Dalva’

LAKE LEELANAU, Mich. —  For years Jim Harrison has led an eccentric life, hunting, fishing, drifting across North America in an automobile and holing up in various isolated spots to write the poems and novels that have gained him a fierce following.

Now, standing in the kitchen on his northern Michigan farm, he contemplates what his latest book may do to his way of life.

There are two grocery bags of mail to answer; National Public Radio is on the phone wanting an interview; his agent says he may have to go to a few cocktail parties in New York.

He Can Handle It

“Oh, I guess I can handle it,” Harrison says, reaching down to rough up the hunting dogs swirling about his legs.

He and a buddy have just driven in from a Georgia quail-hunting jaunt. Each night they sneaked the dogs into their motel rooms and ordered them bedtime snacks from room service--a revelation that brings a smirk from Jim’s wife, Linda.

Harrison stoops to scare the dogs with his “googly” left eye, which was blinded by a playmate when he was 5 and is now so forbidding it often misleads strangers who meet this gentle man with the broad shoulders and big belly.

Letting out a raspy giggle as the conversation turns back to work, the 50-year-old writer acknowledges that the critics still do not know what to make of him even though they have decided, at long last, that he is one of the country’s most original voices.

This conclusion has come with the publication of “Dalva,” Harrison’s new novel about a woman who quits her comfortable life in Santa Monica to return to the family home-place in rural Nebraska and to begin a search for the son who was taken away from her at birth.

As the story moves back and forth between the present and the 1880s, it lays out what Harrison calls “a soul history of our country,” linking the systematic extermination of the Indians a century ago with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and its current obsession with Nicaragua.

“Dalva” has been called “nearly flawless storytelling” by one major critic, and another said its protagonist “is a character the reader would dearly love to meet.”

Some reviewers have praised Harrison for the risk of writing in the voice of a woman after being best known for his hard-drinking, womanizing characters in previous books.

In that sense, “Dalva” is just another experiment for Harrison, who has defied easy labels in his more than 20 years of writing.

The son of a county farm agent who gave him William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson to read as a boy, he was hailed as one of the country’s best young poets by the time he was 30.

Many of his poems are about nature--its beauty and its cruelty--but always there is an experimentation and a relentless philosophical questioning that attracts serious criticism.

When he was 33, Harrison fell into a ravine on a quail hunt. While lying in traction he wrote his first novel on a dare from his friend, writer Thomas McGuane, whom he met when both were students at Michigan State.

The novel was called “Wolf” and it showed the promise of Harrison’s ability to use startling poetic images in prose.

Four more novels followed--”A Good Day to Die,” “Farmer,” “Warlock” and “Sundog.” Three novellas were published in 1979 under the title “Legends of the Fall.”

Vivid Characterizations

Some of Harrison’s characters are so vivid that his fans often debate how much of them is based on real people.

In “Dalva,” one of the most memorable characters is Northridge, the protagonist’s great-grandfather, a botanist who moved West after the Civil War to help--futilely, as it turned out--the Sioux learn agriculture so that they could survive the slaughter of the buffalo and the taking of their lands by white settlers.

Sprinkled throughout the book are entries from Northridge’s journals, and they have such a ring of authenticity Harrison is asked often these days if Northridge and his journals were real,

“No, I make everything up,” Harrison says, lighting another cigarette as he sits in the shack behind his house where he writes.

On the wall over his desk is a photograph of Faulkner, and hanging from a rafter is a strange contraption that looks like something that would interest an Indian shaman.

Held together with string are a wing from a blue heron, bones from a coyote and a sea lion, grizzly bear feces and a pine cone from the forest in Spain where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca--a major Harrison influence--was killed by Franco’s forces.

A baby’s shoe dangles from the bottom of the heron wing.

“I was down in Palm Beach one day some years ago,” Harrison says, touching the shoe, “and a little boat with some Haitians landed. They had a small boy with them.

“The police were waiting from them and these poor people immediately thought they were going to be shot. They got out of the boat, put their hands behind their heads and got down on their knees. But the police simply took them away for processing.

“I looked in the boat after they were gone and there was the little boy’s shoe. It is my reminder of the real world, or one of the real worlds.”

Books From Brother

Stacked on his desk are some books sent to him by his brother, John, librarian at the University of Arkansas.

Most of them are about Indian ritual and U.S. agricultural practices in the 19th Century--both lifelong interests of Harrison’s that are evident in several of his novels, particularly in “Dalva.”

Asked how “Dalva” came about, Harrison picks up another book. It is Northridge’s journal--but the entries are in Harrison’s hand.

“This sounds kind of goofy, I guess,” Harrison says, “but before I began to write ‘Dalva,’ I was sitting out here one night and I sort of entered the character of Northridge. I began to write the journal. And out of that came the novel.”

He then explains the Santa Monica connection in the book.

For years, Harrison has written screenplays--none of them produced yet--and has occasionally spent brief periods in Hollywood at the behest of such producers as Ray Stark.

“There is this thing about Santa Monica,” Harrison says. “People from the Midwest used to go there and they planted all these exotic trees. You know Edward Curtis, the great photographer of the Indians, died there. So one day I thought what if he had had a granddaughter who grew up there, and that was beginning of the Dalva character. But of course she became the great-granddaughter of Northridge.”

To get the authenticity of the book’s passages on Nebraska, the Dakotas, Arizona and Mexico, Harrison simply drove around those areas for months. He drives thousands of miles a year.

“You ride down the road and look at things,” he says. “All of this stuff enters my mind as images, rather than as knowledge.”

“You know, Wallace Stevens wrote that images collect in pools. So I collect all these images and then it’s like Faulkner said, the demons get unbearable and you have to let it go. Then you compose.”

He writes in longhand on legal pads.

Thinks Then Writes

“I think about the sentence a long time and then I write it. I don’t revise it once it’s set down.”

It is a painful process, and it once drove Harrison to drink excessively and to plunge into depression.

After the commercial failure of “Farmer,” an exquisitely lyrical novel published in 1976, Harrison went into a major funk and had trouble feeding his wife and two daughters on his earnings.

But the actor Jack Nicholson had read some of his novels and offered to bankroll Harrison for a year. Out of that period came “Legends of the Fall,” which was widely praised and earned enough for Harrison to pay Nicholson back.

“Revenge,” the first of the novellas in “Legends,” is scheduled to be filmed this summer in Mexico with Kevin Costner in the lead role. Harrison wrote one of the screenplay versions.

Harrison, who sneaks off to fish or hunt at any opportunity, is not happy unless he is out in the woods--or ordering a piece of meat and a bottle of good wine in New York or London.

“I like extremes,” he says. “I like where the wolves are, up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, (where he has a cabin), or if I can’t be there I’d just as soon be in the Hotel Carlyle in New York. But nothing in between. If I can’t be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

Harrison says he has reformed a bit in recent years, rarely indulging now in the bacchanals that showed up occasionally as scenes in his novels.

But, as he soaks up the late evening sun in his kitchen, it is clear he has some doubts about his new ways:

“You know, Yeats said the hearth is more dangerous to poets than alcohol.”