Devouring Jim Harrison: National Writers Series features biographer
From staff reports
Jim Harrison returns to northern Michigan on Dec. 8. The longtime Leelanau County resident, who was widely considered one of the finest literary voices of his generation, died in 2016 after penning 21 books of fiction and 14 books of poetry, which influenced a generation of writers. Harrison helped to shape the course of contemporary American literature, revitalizing in particular the novella form, of which he was a recognized master.
Todd Goddard’s biography of Harrison, titled Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life, published on Nov. 4. He will appear at the National Writers Series at the Traverse City Opera House on Dec. 8 (Click here for information and tickets). The Glen Arbor Sun interviewed Goddard in late October about researching and writing the book.
Watch a video of the interview below.
Read stories in our archives of Northern Michigan writers remembering Jim Harrison and Joyce Bahle’s mission to keep Harrison’s writing alive.
Glen Arbor Sun: Why did you write this book? What fascinated you about Jim Harrison?
A: So many things, right? For a lot of the same reasons that people are so enamored with him here and all around the world. Someone turned me on to Legends of the Fall when I first began college and I was just hooked. I went back to Jim’s early works and started reading his novels, then his poetry, and then his essays. His food and wine writing I found an absolute delight.
I studied under biographers at NYU, and when I finally thought I could write one and had the time, I noticed that Jim Harrison’s papers had been collected and placed at Grand Valley State University, and I just knew that Jim Harrison is the perfect subject. It’s sort of a funny, organic process, where I feel a connection to an author, as I did to Jim. There were facets of his life that I could connect with and understand, and there were personal connections. It was a process, too, of just knowing that Jim was a person who people would enjoy learning more about, and who’s work speaks to our time, and his voice is needed. At first I thought somebody must be working on it. I was surprised and also really excited when no one was, so I dove right in.
Sun: What were the personal connections you alluded to? Kind of the ways in which some of his writing, his characters, touched you?
Goddard: I love Jim’s exuberance for life. Jim once said in a documentary called Tarpon, about fishing off the Florida Keys. He said that when you hook tarpon and you’re out fishing on the flats, that it’s like an electrical shock, and it freshens your feeling of being alive. And Harrison does that for me, from his poetry reminds me of the everyday beauty in the world. It reenchants the world for me and I would argue that’s a large part of his appeal. I think his exuberance is infectious. And I think Harrison freshens people’s feelings of being alive. That’s one way of saying it. I also just love his writing. I think he’s a powerful writer. I think he’s a very astute and careful student of consciousness. I think he’s an incredibly observant writer. I love how he writes about the natural world. I love fishing, and I love walking in the woods, and I love hiking, and I love how observant Jim always was. For those reasons and more, I thought a connection to him that drew me to him as a subject.
Sun: How did the tragedies that happened early in Jim’s life affect him: the injury to his eye when he was 7; losing his father and sister in a car accident when Jim was 24? How did they impact his decision to become a writer?
Goddard: I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of his eye injury and the loss of his father and sister when he was in his 20s. If there’s a thesis to the book, that’s it. The eye injury when at age 7 he was playing with a friend and had his eye poked with a broken glass beaker that took out the left side of his vision pretty much entirely, that changed Jim in so many ways. He realized that there’s something about the fragility of our bodies and of life, and that was compounded 1,000-fold when he lost his father and sister. They went on a hunting trip and Jim was going to go with them, but he waited until the last minute to decide. His father Winfield and sister Judy left without Jim and were hit by a drunk driver. A car backed out onto a two-lane road, the drunk driver swerved to miss the car that had backed out, and he hit Winfield and Judy head on, killing them both instantly.
Jim, at that point, had wanted to be a writer. He was already very interested in art, music and literature. Since the age of 16 he’d really wanted to be a writer, but he had never really been able to commit himself 100% and put words to page in a meaningful way.
The deaths of his father and sister catalyzed his determination. That accident changed him 100%. He dedicated himself to writing after that. He even speaks of finding a new voice after their deaths. It’s an origin story. And Jim talks about this. It’s a bit of self-mythologizing, but it’s true. He started putting pen to page for the first time in his life and creating real poems. He thought of himself as having found a new voice, and he never looked back. He says, at one point in an interview, if you can lose people like that, and life is that fragile, there’s nothing to do but to get down to work and do what it is that you’re meant to do here. And for Jim, that meant writing.
Sun: In the course of researching this book, what did you learn about Jim that you didn’t already know? How did you see him differently?
First, after the loss of his family members, he really never stopped writing intensely for the rest of his life. He might not have written every single day, but it was such a structured part of his life that he was going to get his work done. He even suggested that in jest as an epitaph one day for his own grave: “he got his work done”.
He always sought out new people, new relationships. He cultivated friendships with people in the publishing industry, people in the movie industry, and he really carved out time for them. He went hunting with them. He went fishing with them. He cooked for them. They visited together. He wrote to some of his friends like Tom McGuane for decades, and the importance he placed on friendship never ceased to amaze me. The other thing too is that for someone who was prone to depression, as Jim was, I could only marvel at his unbelievable stores of humor. In the deepest, darkest moments of Jim’s life, he could muster a joke, a humorous angle, some levity. Even in the darkest times of writing the book, when I was emotionally drawn in writing it, I would find myself chuckling at something he wrote and laughing to myself, because it seemed to never end, his ability to muster humor.
Sun: What about Jim’s writing, or characters, or places resonated with so many Americans?
Goddard: Tom McGuane once described Jim as a nativist writer, and by that he meant someone who really focused on local details and local experiences, indigenous ideas and peoples. He lived in Michigan, he lived in Arizona, he lived in Montana, he spent a lot of time in Florida, and he wrote about all those places. He had a sort of knack for capturing the local essences of places.
But I also come back to what I said earlier. It’s Jim’s exuberance. There’s something about his writing that reanimates the world for people, brings a sense of joy, even amidst despair at times, that freshens people’s feeling of being alive. I challenge anyone not to pick up one of Jim’s collections of food and wine writing and not feel freshened and enlivened by reading. You look at simple pleasures differently: Books, dogs, taking walks, floating a river. Jim reenchants that experience for people.
Sun: What about Jim’s writing resonates with the French?
Goddard: I think Jim brings people in through his writing to these locales that he captures and pays such attention to, like the Upper Peninsula and northern Michigan. I’m just guessing, and I’m generalizing here, because it’s really hard to know what makes Jim popular in an entire country? But my gut instinct is that the French associate Jim a lot with the northern wilderness, and I think the west. Michigan was once the old northwest. I think in the French minds, Jim embodies these mythologies, these western mythologies of the U.S. I think they’re very attracted to that aspect of him. If you look at like old French documentaries and things about Jim, they really emphasize Jim becomes this sort of Paul Bunyan-esque character of the northern woods. You add to that his love of simple pleasures like food and wine and sex and other things that he writes about, I think that resonates with the French. I think he writes a lot about indigenous cultures here and Native American history here. And I think that’s also very attractive.
Sun: What was the Leelanau County and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that you met while researching and writing this book?
Goddard: I spent some time in Michigan before writing this. But I spent months and months in Lake Leelanau, and a great deal of time in Grand Marais in the U.P., and also just driving around Michigan, getting to know Jim’s Michigan as best I could.
That meant everything, from getting a beer at Dick’s Pour House [in Lake Leelanau], to walking the Michigan shoreline where Jim used to walk, to driving and walking through the Kingston plains in the Upper Peninsula.
My understanding for Michigan deepened through writing this book. It’s the people, it’s smells, it’s feeling, it’s sights, and just absorbing everything I could so that I could better understand Jim’s work.
Sun: Speaking of Lake Leelanau and the region, I chatted with (Jim’s longtime publicist) Joyce Bahle this morning. She adores you. I noticed the publication date for the book was Nov. 4, which was Joyce’s birthday, right? What role did she play for you in the research for this book?
Goddard: That would be hard to overstate. Joyce was kind enough to put me up in her wonderful birdhouse that is attached to her house. I lived there for months. A lot of it was during COVID, so we were all shacked up there at the house. I would make forays out into the surrounding area. I had daily casual conversations with Joyce, and formal interviews on occasion, but it was the casual interviews that helped to give me a better sense of Jim and Joyce’s working relationship and personal relationship, and what that meant to both of them. We would go hiking and walking together, and spend time walking with her dogs every day. Part of the process of getting to know Jim’s Michigan was spending so much time with Joyce, and becoming friends with her, which has been a wonderful experience.
Sun: I understand that there was an experience with your partner Natalie and hornets?
Goddard: There was, and this was the first time we visited Joyce’s house. Hardly knew her. We had communicated a bit by that point. I was at the archive in Grand Valley doing research and ran into Joyce there. We went out to lunch, and she invited us up to her house. We’d spent the night, and the next day Joyce asked if we could help her move a table from under her deck. We, of course, agreed. The next day we’re digging through there, and I went to pull a tarp off of some furniture. Apparently there was a hornet’s nest under there, and they just went after Natalie specifically. I guess they do that. They target one individual. Natalie is getting stung right and left, and is running across Joyce’s yard, and Joyce says, ‘Take your shirt off!’ They’d gotten under her shirt. So she runs into the house, and Joyce had enough presence of mind to contact one of her nurse friends. We ended up making a poultice of tobacco.
As it turns out, it came from a pack of Jim’s old cigarettes! The takeaway from all this is that we’re left with an image of Natalie in disarray and half dressed, stretched out in Joyce’s living room, with tobacco all over these stings on her—Jim’s tobacco [American Spirits]. And that was our first introduction to being at Joyce’s house. Quite a moment.
Sun: Jim’s American spirits made a return.
Goddard: Yeah, it’s an event fit for a Harrison book. It’s a baptismal story about a baptism through pain and tobacco. Quite a memory.
Sun: Did you ever meet Jim Harrison in the living? You must feel like you know him. What’s it like to write about someone like Jim after they move on?
Goddard: It’s one of the really odd things of biographies generally. On the one hand, most biographers don’t meet their subjects, right? Most people writing biographies of Thomas Jefferson or Walt Whitman don’t know their subjects personally. But it’s such an odd journey because, in one way, I know Jim Harrison better than anyone on paper, right? I’m like the institutional reservoir of Jim’s history and what he did at given points in time. But I don’t have the personal experience of having known him. Maybe that’s a curse and a blessing. I’d say it’s probably more of a blessing for a biographer, because you don’t have the relationship that can sometimes skew objectivity for your subject. I would have loved to have met him. I would give that up in a moment, to have hung out with him and gotten to know him on that level. But I don’t think it was necessarily an impediment for writing it. It might have been beneficial.
Sun: Why the title “Devouring Time”?
Goddard: Jim used to like the quote that comes from a Shakespearean sonnet that begins “Devouring time, blunt thou thy lion’s pause.” Jim used to like to quote that. He’d said, “Some people say, ‘you’re getting old’.” And he says, “Oh, but Shakespeare says, ‘Blunt thou thy Lion’s paws,’ and Jim would say, “That’s really something, right? That’s writing.”
I liked that Jim used to quote it from time to time. The poem itself speaks to the ravages of time and the damage that time can do.
But Shakespeare ends the poem: “Time, do your worst.” He pleads with time not to do it. And then eventually he says, well, be that as it may, do your worst if you need to. And he says, because my love will always live on in my poetry. The youth, the young, the beauty will always live on in my poetry. I thought that spoke really well to Jim.
I think devouring time just fit Jim. He devoured the world in his own words. He had grand appetites for life. If anyone ever devoured time, I think it was Jim.
Sun: You alluded earlier in our conversation to how his stories, his writing, resonates. There’s a timelessness to it, and yet we’re a changing society, year by year, even since he passed nine years ago. The #MeToo movement comes to mind, and we take a different look at some of the male characters in his works, the way they were portrayed. How will Jim’s writing be seen tomorrow, 10 years from now? 100 years from now?
Goddard: That’s a great question, a really difficult one, one I’ve pondered many times, and it’s part of the reason I wrote this biography. I wanted to reintroduce readers to him and to his work, and to encourage people to revisit his work.
I’d like to say that Jim will be remembered as a central, canonical American author. But I’m not 100% sure that’s the fact, partly because Jim didn’t spend a lot of time making inroads into the academy, into the universities, and so he’s not often taught the way that maybe many other writers post World War II are. But Jim has a very deep, committed readership, and those readers are going to pass along Jim to a new generation of readers.
Jim’s going to live on in that way. At the end of the day, the argument goes that canonical writers survive by other writers, not by scholars. And I suspect Jim has, and I know Jim has, a lot of very committed writers who are writing today, younger writers who love Jim’s work. And I suspect Jim’s going to stay pretty well alive through his committed readership and through other writers.
I don’t know that he’d love the idea, but I think he’s going to be remembered as a writer who wrote about nature-themed works. I think Jim’s got a pretty secure spot in a Western writing, nature writing category. Jim didn’t like categories, and he wouldn’t have liked the name nature writer. And yet, because he wrote so extensively about the natural world, he’s going to be in that group of writers for a long time to come.
Sun: Todd, what will it mean for you to visit Traverse City and share the book with an audience in a place pretty central to Jim?
Goddard: I can’t wait. That’s going to be an incredibly unique crowd. A crowd of devoted readers. I’m sure there are going to be people in there who don’t know Jim that well, but I’m going to bet that many of them know Jim, many of them personally, and it’s going to be super exciting to be in that crowd and to be able to discuss Jim Harrison and his legacy. It’s just going to be exciting to be back in Traverse City. It’s a city I love. I can’t wait to pop into Horizon Books and go back out on the peninsula and see Joyce and walk the Michigan shoreline. It’s going to be great.
