An Interview with Jim Harrison

AN INTERVIEW WITH JIM HARRISON Jim Harrison Photo by Bob Wargo Jim Harrison has published books of both poetry and fiction. His most recent novel is SunDog. This interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti, Director of the American Audio Prose Library. The Prose Library offers tapes of American authors reading and discussing their work. For information about the series, contact AAPL, PO Box 842, Columbia, MO 65205. An Interview with Jim Harrison / Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Could you tell us about your publishing history? You published a whole book of poems without ever having a single poem published. Harrison: I'd heard Denise Levertov read and I never published anything in my life. So I sent her poems and she wrote back that she'd just become the consulting editor at Norton and if I had more poems like this she would publish a book. After I got the book contract, I sent some poems off and they came out about the same time as the book, but that was true. It was an accident. Interviewer: What happened with Wolf? How come you moved from three volumes of poetry to the novel? Harrison: I fell off a cliff. I was in the hospital for a month and went into a coma and almost died. I sort of woke up and I couldn't do anything. I had to wear a body corset because I'd torn the muscles away from my lower spine. So Tom McGuane called me up and says, "Now that you're laid up, why don't you write a novel?" I said, "Jeez, I don't want to think about writing a novel." "Write a sort of autobiographical novel," he said and I said, "Okay, goodbye." Then I started writing the novel. I wrote Wolf in six weeks or a month. I sent it off the day before the mail strike, years ago, and the only copy of it was lost for a full month. I didn't even think it was important, because I didn't think of myself as a novelist. I wasn't very attached to it. I'd sent it to my brother to make a copy because we were real broke. So he finally went into the New Haven post office and dug it out of the pile of mail there. I don't know how he managed that, but he's authoritative. Then the publisher got it and took it. Interviewer: You also wrote some novellas. . . Harrison: I always loved the work of Isak Dinesen, and Knut Hampson, who wrote three or four short novels, so I thought I would have a try at it. I called the first one Revenge—my Sicilian agent gave me a little motto that struck me: "Revenge is a dish better served cold." The second of the novellas is called The Man Who Gave Up His Name. I wrote it in a time of The Missouri Review · 65 "I/ you're ethical you can't just disappear." extreme mental duress. I envisioned a man getting out of the life he had created with the same intricate carefulness that he'd got into it in the first place. I suppose I was pointing out that if you're ethical you can't just disappear. Interviewer: You've described yourself as a sensual Calvinist. Harrison: Maybe that's true. I wrote a poem in which I said John Calvin's down there under the floorboards telling me I don't get a glass of wine till four o'clock. Not 3:57, but 4:00. I was talking to Kurt Ludkey last night about how if you're a total workaholic and you also drink too much you tend to control it, but that doesn't make you less of an alcoholic. It's just that you never, never have more drinks than you can remember. Interviewer: Can you really drink like that? Harrison: I have done that for years. I had a little trouble in my early thirties with it and then I began tightly controlling it. I went down to a Mexican fat farm in January because I was so exhausted from my novel. And...