The Ballad of Jim Harrison

Le Regard Libre N° 27 - Léa Farine

«Most of the time, nothing in particular bothers me, at least nothing that can't be rectified immediately, nothing other than the need to take a step sideways away from my life for a day or two and walk in unknown country. Shortly after dawn, equipped with a map of the region, I wander through deserted fields, canyons, woods, but preferably near a stream or river, because ever since childhood I've loved the sound of them. White water is forever in the present tense, a state we avoid painfully enough.» (Jim Harisson, En Marge)

Present time - this is perhaps what best characterizes the work of Jim Harrison. This American writer and poet, who was born in Michigan in 1937 and died in 2016, uses language as a raw, almost physical material that makes us see and feel, without ever lapsing into an overly artificial aestheticism.

His colleague Yann Queffelec writes in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1981: «The style alone is a masterpiece, a lesson for French authors more adept at sodomizing punctuation flies and sacralizing argumentation than delivering urgent inspiration.» Whether the author is describing the great American plains and forests, his solitary hunting trips, the great drinking parties he loves, or the existence and dreams of his characters, it's always with flesh, with blood, with sounds and smells - it's alive.

Jim Harrison is considered one of the most illustrious contemporary representatives of the American genre of «nature writing», which finds its genetic foundation in the transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau. In short, this movement considers ecosystems, from a philosophical or literary perspective, as an integral part of human experience. Man is not man alone - he is always man in and with nature. If Jim Harrison's great novels such as Wolf or Dalva, the collection of short stories Autumn legends, Harrison's stories, autobiographical narratives and poems are distinguished by their humanist component: a humanism revealed by nature, and which reveals it. In Jim Harrison's work, human beings eat, drink, make love, roam the woods with their dogs and horses, all the while questioning themselves and their origins. Just like the author, moreover, who is intellectual, immensely cultured and passionate about healthy earthly nourishment.

A good example of this idea of a return to nature, stripped of romantic nostalgia and overly normative considerations, is the place given to native Americans in the work. Jim Harrison writes in En Marge :

«William Blake: «How do we know that every bird that cleaves the air is an immense world of delights closed to our five senses?»

Whether you're reading E. O Wilson or Jean-Henri Fabre, you're drawn among the innumerable delights of the smallest creatures. It occurred to me then that Native Americans devoted their life's attention to the natural world in order to survive. The fact that they are no longer obliged to do so raises a series of enormous questions. The poet Wallace Steven is the author of the disturbing statement, «We were all Indians once.» (DNA analysis proves that even longer ago we were all black). It seems technically true, and I drew the uncomfortable conclusion that, because of my familiarity with the natural world, I strongly identified with those who, until recently, had based their existence on such familiarity. Besides, I had long known that my most intense pleasures lay in activities such as hunting, fishing and the study of the wilderness, all of which were identical to those of any Pleistocene biped. The essential differences between me and the Native Americans were that my people had never suffered their atrocious fate. My people never went from ten million to around three hundred thousand between 1500 and 1900.»

We'll never go back to being hunter-gatherers. But what Jim Harrison makes us feel is that man's bond with nature, even more than vital, is atavistic. A matter of wholeness. Only those who recognize themselves both as spiritual and rational beings and as part of a natural system to which they owe their survival, and even their happiness, are whole and entirely human:

«To remember that you're alive, visit your father's graveyard, at noon, after you've made love, still all wrapped up in the mammalian smell you're forced to cherish. Beneath every gravestone lies someone's inevitable surprise, the unexpected death of a biological body that fought so hard, as hard as it had to.

Now, on your way home, without looking back, enough is enough. Buy the best wine you can afford and a dozen brooms. Take a few sips of wine, throw the furniture out the window and start sweeping. Sweep the walls until they're bare of paint, and sweep at your feet until the floor disappears. Finish the wine, in this airy space, return in the evening to the cemetery and dance across the tombstones a slow dance of your name, visible only to the birds.» («Broom», poem, my translation).

Write to the author : lea.farine@gmail.com

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