The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 802: The Life And Death of Jim Harrison

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with author Todd Goddard. Topics discussed: The first literary biography of Jim Harrison, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer's Life; a brilliant writer and a person full of flaws; blinded as a kid in one eye; a fly fishing snob who hated snobs; how writing poetry would lift Jim out of depression; respecting nature and not hunting or fishing more than you need; Legends Of The Fall, Wolf, True North, and more of Jim's books; contradictory and complicated; a brilliant food essay; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're joined today. by uh with no headphones on I've been pushing fill on it I'm in full support the headphones just for the audience at home this is a conversation we've had on my or off mic a lot but the headphones help guess especially ones who aren't used to talking into microphones it helps them hear their own voice and stay close to the

microphone or else I'll have to yell at them from across the room it makes you like I always said it makes feel like God's talking to you so it's going to be different now without these headphones on join a day by Todd Goddard, who just published a new book about a biography of Jim Harrison. So any hunting and fishing type person who likes to read a lot, is that, of course, familiar with Jim Harrison. If you go, if you're curious, like, who the hell's Jim Harrison? The greatest point of contact would be, what was that? Why did you make a 10 signal?

Facing the book toward that camera. People, if you're trying to go like, you know, I can Jim Harrison, you go, you know, legends of the fall. And people like, oh, yeah. But that's even, that's just barely scratching the surface. I'm partial to the old stuff. So like wolf, brown dog. He's got a book of, he's got a phenomenal book of essays called Just Before Dark, which is some of the most beautiful, brilliant hunting and fishing writing

combined with some of the most obnoxious and arrogant food writing. What are the other? Oh, and then literature essays. So just before Dark is like a complex. Like, Jimaharrison was writing about hunting and fishing and sports illustrated back in the 70s, and it, like, collects all that. It's just really brilliant stuff on hunting and fishing. He also has all these characters that hunt and fish, and he has characters that are filled with, like, environmental rage.

Wolf, one of my favorites is a false memoir. It's like a guy who is wandering around in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Huron Mountains trying to catch a glimpse of a wolf. Later in life, he started doing these more complex. complex uh i don't want to call them like less angry more complex works like dalva the road home um god he's got a million how many books is he have dod she has 12 novels nine collections of novellas something like 18 books of poetry a couple book collections of essays like uh just before dark uh children's book called the boy who ran into the woods yeah so just an outrageously uh an outrageous amount of output yeah yeah like everything ranging from like outdoor stuff much of it's tinged with like

kind of a little bit of an infantile kind of uh male fantasy kind of stuff is tied in there but like like an absolutely brilliant writer like like a technically brilliant writer um one of the one of the great writers who's colored by the outdoors, the worlds of hunting and fishing, very complex, kind of frustrating person full of flaws, which we'll get into, but again,

a brilliant writer. And Todd, our guest, this is his first book and he's a literary professor at Utah Valley University and born in Philadelphia. And like, what age did you start reading, or not McGuane?

We'll talk about McGuane. Yeah, we can. Right. What age did you start reading Harrison, man? Like, how did you get on to Harrison? Yeah, I probably started reading Harrison back in my early 20s, honestly. And I think it began, like it begins with lots of people with Legends of the Fall. I think I had a friend of mine turned me on to Legends when I began college in New York.

And just immediately gravitated right to him. I mean, he hoped me from the start. And from there, you know, I just went back and did a deep dive in Harrison. And I remember, you know, I was trying to get hold of every book Jim was writing back to Wolf to Warlock to farmer or farmer to warlock to, you know, all the way up until what Jim had written in the mid-90s or so. Yeah, yeah. And then really tried to catch up with anything new that was coming out with him, you know, ever after. And I think I went from his fiction, then to his poetry and then to his essays, right? and just got completely hooked to by his food and wine writing, by his outdoors, essays, his hunting and fishing essays, and sort of was off and running.

And then got a few chances to teach him in graduate school, taught him a few times at Utah Valley University. Okay. And tried to incorporate him whenever I could into a class. And then, you know, just kept rereading him over the years until I finally sort of got into position to write this book. Yeah, man. Like one thing I haven't gotten into his is short of, uh, outside of like Robert service I'm not a like I'm not a poem guy cremation of Sam McGee is like like ingenious you know but I'm not a poem guy like I never got into his stuff

like his I never read his books of poems but um I started out like we were all when we were young like in college from Michigan we were all way into wolf like way into wolf and then way into brown dog and other stuff like the Michigan stuff you know like pissed off dudes at hunting and fished a lot um that was our deal right now like big time and then later i kind of like discovered the essays and then i got really i got for a long time i was real interested in food and i liked all this food stuff but for me it was like he yeah his his hunting and fishing stuff um and his environmental awareness is what drew us in it was weird though because like you mentioned that he uh he wasn't a big game hunter man

like he would write a lot about eating venison he didn't write about eating roadkill stuff but he didn't like any kind of he talked about he saw a bear skinned out one time and it looked too much like a dude hanging there you know he was like pretty particular about what he participated in yeah it's fine he loved to eat big game but he wasn't a big game hunter i mean he hunted deer when he was younger you know um and occasionally hunted deer even even into his 30s and early 40s but he uh You know, it's a great story of Jim was out hunting with a friend of his from Livingston, Montana, and Jim had settled outside of Livingston, Montana later around 2000, living in the Paradise Valley, and he went out to hunting. Yeah, we should hit that route. Can you get real quick? Yeah. Hit like where he was born, where he spent time, and then where he died.

Oh, yeah, definitely. So Jim was born in Grayling, Michigan. grew up in Reed City and grew up in Haslett outside of Lansing. and then settled with his family in Lake Lulanaugh, in Michigan, Lake Lulinaw, Peninsula. And then really lived there for most of his life until around 2000. So he's born in 1937, around 2000, he moves, relocates out to Montana where his daughters were living at the time, settles in the Paradise Valley outside of Livingston, Montana, and ended up buying a small cassida down in Patagonia, Arizona.

And so the family would, you know, spend half the year in Montana and spend the winter in Patagonia, Arizona. And that's sort of the general, you know, those are Jim's main places. Yeah. And you hunt a lot of quail down there in Patagonia. A ton of Merns quail down in Patagonia. And of course, famously, he had a cabin up in the Upper Peninsula, which he, in Grand Moray, just outside of Grand Moray, Michigan.

And so those are like his big spots, right? So when Jim moves out to Livingston around 2000, you know, he, he would go out, he would go out bird hunting for hunts and different things like that, Hungarian partridge. But occasionally he'd go for big game, but there's a story of Jim going out one time with a friend of his from Livingston, a guy named Dan Laren, and he, they were hunting antelope and, or pronghorn. And they get finally into a position where Jim can take a shot. He, uh, he, he, he passes the gun to Dan and says, uh, you, you take the shot. Mm.

Right. And, and, and, and, of course, he, he, he, he would want to eat the meat. He'd want, he'd want, he'd won the animal, but he couldn't actually pull the trip and execute. And I think it comes back to the, you know, the reason you were suggesting partly is he couldn't, he couldn't handle killing animals that were mammals, frankly. Yeah. And he thought they looked too much like their insides, their parts look too much like humans.

And I think he, among other. reasons but I think that was definitely one of them yeah yeah he was something of a fly fishing snob he wrote a great piece about ice fishing one time but was definitely like a fly snob you know but he hated snobs yeah hated snobs but was a little bit of a fly fishing snob one of his many contradictions I think that's right yeah I think that's right yeah he was a little bit of a fly fishing snob but man he hated arrogance you know outside of his own you know what I mean yeah he for for an arrogant guy right one of his many contradictions

right for an arrogant guy he couldn't stand arrogance and other people right but he was yeah he was a little bit snobby about fly fishing but you know that came later I think he grew up bait fishing and stuff like that and and fly fishing too but really later in life he really

I think McGuane was very instrumental and introducing him to fly fishing and really Jim was already doing it but really showed him the ropes well you know we were talking about his hangout zones we kind of miss like he also like he's one of these dudes if you look at like Aldo Leopold

Right Eldo Leopold is embraced by Wisconsin And Eldo Leopold is embraced by New Mexico Yeah Okay

These are like And there's other places Embrace them Because Aldo Leopold was Like Elio Port taught Out in Madison And kind of wrote about Wisconsin Spend a bunch of time in New Mexico

So these guys that has These guys have a bunch of homes You know Or multiple homes Right Harrison also for a big part of the country, Harrison was also like a Key West guy, right? Right?

Because he was, when dudes were figuring out down there, like catching permit and catching bonefish on flies and stuff in the 70s, when that was kind of coming into a thing and tarpurn and stuff, like he was there. So it's just yet another place around the country, Northern Michigan, Arizona, absolutely Montana, Key West. all these places that sort of hold a little bit of a like they kind of hold the harrison mystique you know yeah i mean he's like he's like leopold but he's also like hemingway in that regard right hemingway has his places right yeah michigan is his place key west is definitely one of his

places cuba's his place cuba's his place france is his place spain is his place is his place yeah yeah he's claimed by all these different geographical apostles and settled in idaho eventually right and and harrison's very much the same way right he's got these very strong sort of local identifications right uh patagonia montana definitely first and foremost michigan but also key west one of the things that grabbed like when i say us i'm talking about it's like me and my like circle people and we just grew up like you know i'm like defy didn't like grew up like not well off okay and it grew up kind of not we grew up not real clear on how the whole like college world work like most of my buddies were definitely like first time people and their

families and went to college you know my dad didn't finish high school right so it was like we didn't understand the guys that grew up around we didn't like understand that world of like education we didn't understand the world that you'd become a writer we didn't know about writers do you know I mean it was like oh yeah everybody was like oh I'm gonna be a game warden and you know you just didn't know even though we were definitely afraid of game words people thought Oh, I'll be a game warden when I grew up. But all of a sudden, like, here's this dude who grew up, like, north of us. And the thing in Michigan is, no matter where you are, the real rednecks are just north of you.

Do you know what I'm saying? Right, yeah. So I've talked about this before. Like, if you lived in, like, where I grew up in Twin Lake, the real rednecks were in Holton, just north. But if you talk to a dude in Holton, the real rednecks are just north in Hyperia. And it, like, advances up the state. And so here's this guy, like,

two or three clicks north the people in france are buying his books and it's kind of like how does that happen do i mean like how is this dude like known and celebrated in france from some redneck ass town north of us do i mean like how like how did he how did that click you know his dad was what his dad was an extension agent yeah he was an agricultural agent you're right i mean jim is uh an anomaly right He's extremely unusual in that regard. I mean, his, the one thing I'd say is that is he came from family of readers. So his dad was an agricultural agent, you know, went to farm school at MSU. Okay.

He stole agricultural, you know, primarily an agricultural university. Was that the first generation in his family to go to college or would have been his old man? It was just, it was his dad. Yeah. His dad was driven, I think, from an, you know, from an early age. I think he was extremely motivated by sort of agricultural research and saw himself as something like an agricultural missionary coming out of sort of the dust bull era where farms were you know had certain practices that led to environmental sort of devastation of

their farms and dust dust bowls got it so that he had that he grew up around that land ethic yeah so he grew up around that land ethic he was a big Steinbeck fan right and and and he came from a family of primarily non-readers and so where jim's dad and his dad's name was Winfield, you know, got this sort of motivation. What was his dad's name? Winfield. Oh, yeah. I've got that. Yeah, Winfield.

And where he got this sort of motivation to educate himself and read is not entirely clear. He didn't necessarily get it from his family, but he was driven. And I think he was driven largely by wanting to learn as much as he could about agriculture. But he also read Steinbeck and he read literature and he was really interested in reading. And Jim's mother, too, was an avid reader. And I think they instilled that in all of their children. But the thing is, they didn't know any writers either, right? They, they didn't know, Jim's brother, David Harrison once told me, he said, we didn't know writers, we didn't know writers, we didn't know anyone who knew any writers, not let alone us, right?

Their stage is removed. Yeah, their stage is removed. So, you know, being a writer as an occupation, as a living, as a calling as it was for Jim was just unheard of to his parents, you know. Got it. And so when Jim came home at age 16 and said, I want to be a poet, they. They just had no idea what to do with him, right? But how does a guy like Jim go, you know, from that background to being sort of read broadly and celebrated in Paris? I mean, that's, that's a difficult question, right?

How does he? That's kind of, you know, I remember doing a book one time, you know, someone asked a question, you know, and it was kind of like the whole question was the whole point of the book. Yeah. And you'd be like, well, I mean, I just spent, I mean, it's, I just spent 250 pages explaining that. Right, yeah, right, yeah, exactly. I mean, the short- I can't just tell you. I mean, the short answer is he was incredibly motivated and worked.

You know, I love this description by McGuane. McGuane called, and I'm talking about Tom McGuane, who is one of Jim's really close friends. He's been, I don't know, he's been on the show a million years ago. Yeah, like six years ago. Dude, he was old then, and he's got a new book out now. Yeah. He's still writing.

What was the name in the McGuane episode? Do you remember? If you want to refer back. We're going to mention McGuane a number of times. McGuane was like a contemporary of, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well. Crinnell dig that up. Tom McGuane on the beauty of not knowing.

Okay. What a gentleman's awesome. Yeah, I mean, great guy and, you know, we can talk about how they're connected and stuff like that. But McGuane once called Jimmy said he's a country boy who was touched. Oh. That's how he described Jim. And I mean, I think that's a really good description. Touched by genius, that is, right?

Yeah, yeah. And Jim worked extremely. extremely hard at his writing and got himself into a position, I mean, where he really worked his way into, you know, literary culture in America. But I think, I think his, his sort of rustic identity, right, his, what did you say up north? What do you say? He's above north, right? He's way up there, right? He's part of his appeal in France. So I'd say, you know, not only did he earn that through his writing, but I also think the appeal is partly where he comes from. Like they recognized him as a country bumpkin.

They recognize not a bumpkin, but they recognize him as like a man of the like someone of the land in a way, you know, yeah. Definitely. I think I think the French associate Jim with wilderness, right, the American wilderness, the American, you know, great North Woods, someone who's writing about the sort of land and landscape and history of northern Michigan and of northern America, right? And I think that's part of his appeal. So his sort of rusticity is part of his appeal in France. yeah because he never got there's a thing that happens it didn't happen to him but like I remember when I was going away to writing school I remember like I always read about like trappers and hunters and explorers and shit that's all I wanted to read about when I was a kid when I was going away to writing school after I got out of regular college I remember being like man I should probably I remember I went and tried to read James Joyce's Dubliners because I was like I should probably figure out what people actually write about do you know I mean yeah yeah and then could you like gave up on that. He never got, he never fell for that trap. Like his early work was about the people he knew like his early work was about the people he knew.

You know, he didn't try to be something he wasn't, but he wrote about it with like the skill set of someone who is not that. I think that's right. I mean, he was so well read. And so I think, you know, he's coming to his even his early works with this immense body of sort of learning and reading behind him, right? Um, but he was smart enough not to fall. into that trap of sort of trying to too closely or carefully emulate, right, some of the, some of the writers that he so admired. I mean, I think he really claimed that maybe if he used and borrowed some of the style

and was influenced by writers, he really made it his own, right? And he was going to anchor his books in the people he knew, the world that he grew up in, right, the local details and characteristics of his own specific upbringing, right? In Michigan and, you know, and he carries that around. the country with him and wolf what's his deal what's this deal with like his love hate kind of like like he's haunted by Hemingway mm-hmm haunted by Hemingway like what is that all about did you ever come to understand that like you never tell if he likes the guy or hates the guy yeah I think he was conflicted I think he wanted

to distance himself from Hemingway because he had so much in common with Hemingway because people would point out the same yeah right hanging out the same place but Hemingway is from Illinois dude well like outside of Chicago You're right. Yeah, but he spent his summers all the time in Northern Michigan. Yeah, big difference, man. Big, no, I agree. I'm not, Chris. I won't claim otherwise. Yeah, Hemingway grew up in Oak Park or something, right? Yeah, you're right. So his dad's a doctor. He comes from a very different background, grows up in Oak Park, Illinois. Comes from a religious family. His mother was very religious and Jim's mother was very religious. But, you know, Hemingway. But Hemingway also, you know, his early books are associated. They're set in Michigan.

Yeah, up in Michigan. Same rivers he fished. man yeah i know exactly uh the big two hearted and other rivers and so uh you know and he's what hemingway's uh writes about fishing and hunting uh lived in paris right fished in key west and is associated with key west um was a man of big appetites like harrison was and so there's lots of parallels between harrison and hemingway they like to pull a cork yeah you like to pull a cork from time to time to put it mildly uh but i think so i think on one level right A whole generation of writers coming after Hemingway felt like they had the distance themselves from him.

To do exactly what you suggested earlier, right, was to avoid being sort of pulled into his universe, right, become a satellite instead of their own system. Got it. Right. And Hemingway had that allure, putting it, right? He had that appeal and that power. And so I think writers went out of their way to distance themselves from him after him, right? Yeah, to not be like, you know, guys like Hemingway, like, whenever I'm talking about Harrison and someone says something about Hemingway, I just, I just, I just kind of roll my eyes like it's not the same no it ain't the same thing no it's not the same thing and he writes extremely very differently than Hemingway um and so I think you know there's a love hate thing there I think he tried to distance himself from Hemingway and did so successfully but I think he also admired Hemingway but maybe didn't want to you know was reluctant maybe to celebrate Hemingway as much as he might have otherwise yeah coming out of his that you know uh as everyone

did you know growing up in Hemingway's shadow so to speak And so, yeah, did I ever get to the bottom of that? I mean, he likes Hemingway, right? He admires his writing, and he says it plenty of times. But he also says, you know, ah, he dismisses him simultaneously. And so I think there's a conflict at his court. Yeah. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart.

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Tell everybody about Like you look at Harrison Like here he is You know Yeah On the car I'm holding up the book Cover the book

This is when he's older Just closer to Way closer to death I guess A big thing that comes up In his work Comes up I mean the guy can't

He can't write I don't know I was going to saw it a number of pages i can't do it that way harrison man he was disfigured as child and it permeates like it's it's every it's in everything it's baked into everything he's got he's got a googly eye that's his his word not mine right his word not mine um it haunted him dude like it's like it became him you know like explain that the folks like how that happened and in the way that just was kind of like you know it was his uh what's that famous uh you know

the the the arson wells deal like the the fucking uh rosebud yeah it was his rosebud moment you know it's his rosebud moment i think that's really a good way of saying it uh so you know it was spring day in nineteen forty five i think is that what it was is four okay nice Yeah, he was seven years old. And he was, you know, living in Reed City, Michigan, went down the street and he was playing with a young girl. And they were in a lot behind a hospital. And what exactly was- Behind a hospital in Reed City.

Yeah, they were behind a home. People were going to get the wrong picture when they hear behind a hospital. Well, it was just an empty lot, right? Just down the street from his house. You know what kids playing and back lots and there was, you know, some woods behind them. very old little small little town with small town small hospital yeah rustic uh and he's out back and what exactly was going on it has never been made entirely clear but i think they were experimenting uh playing around maybe playing doctor right jim would say this himself right that they

were experimenting and something happened something clicked the girl panicked or you know got scared or defensive and she grabbed a piece of glass broken from a beaker that was next to them on a trash pile and jabbed it at Jim and caught him in the eye and wolf that what happens to the character who's very much like him but not him it's like a broken beer bottle or something but yeah a beaker glass yeah it was like a beaker glass caught him in the eye and immediately you know the sort of left side of his face you know went blind left you know his left his left eye and um so the girl took off and he went he went across the street to his neighbor's house and the mother was a nurse and she recognized the severity of what had happened immediately and is you know everybody freaked out he ended up in grand rapids in the hospital uh for a couple weeks with bandages on both his eyes and at one point they tied him to the bed because he was panicking and and they wanted to keep him still and this was an incredibly traumatic experience for him, right? And he recall, it's, it's an experience, like you said,

it's his rosebud. It's something he would never forget for the rest of his life. And all he could really see out of that eye was just sort of like maybe light and shadow a little bit, right? So he could remember seeing a bit of sort of the blur, the vague blur of the moon. But for all intents and purposes, that I was blinded. He'd never get his vision back. And it was incredibly traumatic for him. Um, you know, uh, literally the left side of his, his, his vision was completely cut off of the rest of his life. Yeah. Changed how the brother looked, man.

Like in, and changed how he looked. He felt, uh, you know, sort of freakish. He had a googly eye, right? His, he says his eye jogged in its socket like a milky sparrow, you know, um, it was, uh, and, and he, you know, he thought, he thought he had buck teeth. He thought he had this swarthy complexion. He had this googly eye. That's learning that comes up a lot as he's like, um, um, it was like, um, um,

just constantly mentioning that the people would think he was people would think he was Hispanic or and he's got this crazy eye and they didn't believe that he's from where he's from and definitely yeah I mean he was he did have a kind of swarthier complexion part of that was just from being outside part of that was just maybe the pigmentation in skin he just had a little darker complexion and you know and he really felt like an outsider he felt sort of alienated from those around them and I think If you wanted to sort of draw this back his early to, you know, that period in his life, he sort of retreated into the woods. And Jim already liked the woods a lot, but this was a moment, I think, when he really developed attachments to the natural non-human world because there he wasn't judged, right?

He could go out into the woods, you know, observe creatures, walk in the woods, things like that. And there became sort of this really stark division between the societal and the judgment that he experienced there with his eye and his disfigurements. that I think in his mind was sort of blown out of proportion and amplified. Oh, you get the sense that, yeah, I always had the sense that he thought when he looked in the mirror. Yeah. He saw something a lot worse than what was there. Right. You look at Jim at 30 and you know, you see something skew with his eye, but it's not probably what he imagi, probably, you know, the way he, I think in some days he thought it was like a monster. Yeah, I think he looked. I think he felt like he looked like a monster. And, you know, the children's book that he wrote, um, the boy who ran to

the woods is really about exactly about this experience and it becomes sort of like an origin story for Harrison where he says you know sort of this started you know sort of um you know uh it was the origin of my sort of interest in and fascination and love and devotion to the natural world on the one hand but also to uh his uh giving himself sort of an artistic perspective right yeah he wasn't in it now he was off to the side right and that's something he would later name his memoir off to the side yeah right and because of his disfigurement he felt he he was sort of always off to the side now seeing things differently literally figuratively right um and sort of not part of the crowd but observing part of the crowd and so you know it becomes this sort of beginning sort of this mythology

right this this origin story of Harrison but you know know, and that all may very well be true. And I think in many ways it is, but he would still carry this trauma with him for the rest of his life. That, you know, had real consequences for him. There's a story about him walking through the woods one time fishing in northern Michigan. And he's with this guy named Mike Ballard, a guy he used to fish with in, in the Upper Peninsula. And it was getting dark. And Mike's urging Jim to hurry up. And he says, I can't, you know, I can't go any faster if I get a, a branch in my other eye. I'm done.

I'm done. Yeah. And when you stop and think about that, you're like, oh. Yeah. I get it. Like, it's like living in one kidney, man. He's got to really be careful with that one eye, right? Because that's all he's got left, right?

In terms of vision. One of the fun, not one of the fun here. He's like, he was also, we haven't touched on this also at times a very funny writer. But in one of his bird hunting essays, I think he talks about the moment it occurred to him that instead of carrying around binoculars you could buy a monocular that's great yeah yeah so it came with a stroke of genius it was to realize you didn't need two things it came with real practical consequences right and then another big one with being a kid as uh and i kind of know the way it comes up in his i kind of know the way it like comes up in his writing and things but he also like

his father and his sister or killed in a car accident and that also just lives like it just plays out over decades of writing you know it's just

it's it becomes baked into his everything you know and it's probably kind of like I just said he's funny he's funny also it's his stuff is sad yeah I mean I

keep talking about wolves is it remains my it remains my favorite work of his not just because of it like not because of the work I mean the work for sure but it remains a favorite of mine because of what it meant

to grow like what it meant to grow up in those areas and to hang out in the UP a lot and then here's this guy that like wrote about that in that way it also remains a favorite of mine because like when I discover it I was at that age kind of like at that age of where the of where the narrator is um I remember I saw my first wolf track in the UP you know I mean it's like so I hold it out as my favorite not because it's his best work but it's this is most meaningful thing right right you know yeah and it has I don't want to blow up for anybody it has one of the most abrupt sad catatonic

like endings to a book he goes to see his grandma mm-hmm like stops in at his grandma's and like nothing happens he just says a couple things about leaving his grandma's house and it leaves you just gutted

so he's like funny but it's sad right and like that sadness like his losing his dad and his sister's big for him you know I mean yeah that's one of the most remarkable things about Jim that I found writing this book is is his ability you know he's went through incredibly deep depressions throughout his life yeah right um like how bad would that get for him I would it make it that he couldn't work ever you know I mean he's so prolific

you know later in life really after the death of his father and sister he would work through the deepest of depressions and somehow his poetry would help to sort of lift him out of it right um but before he really really started writing before his his before the deaths um of his loved ones um he he wouldn't necessarily write and he would fall he would fall into the deepest of depressions even as a young man right like while he was in the years that take place in the novel wolf um and he would come close to sort of nervous crackups really serious tell tell the story of how of the of the car crash yeah i don't even know the i don't even know the the the win or where i don't i don't know that so jim was uh in his in his in his 20s i think it happened in 1962 okay and um

it was thanksgiving week weekend um and uh jim was uh married uh to his wife linda and they were visiting um with his parents they were in haslet and um jim's father winfield and his sister judy were going to go on a hunting trip deer hunting trip as they did annually and judy would go along she was a hunter too and and jim was sort of wavering on whether to go with them right that day and he was sort of hanging around the house he'd just gotten home from a trip with his wife and um sort of decided at the last minute that he wasn't going to go and judy and winfield took off and uh for their trip uh jim went over to linda's parents house right down the street not too far in lansing uh and later that evening um norma called the king's

house which was linda's parents name and uh bill king picked up the phone and um sort of had a stricken look on his face and um pulled jim aside and told jim that there'd been a car accident and that uh his his father and his sister were killed so unbelievable right um incomprehensible sort of information being conveyed to jim uh it turns out that what happened was that they had headed up you know, north and on their way, uh, they were coming down a two lane road. A car was backing out onto the highway and a car that was coming the other direction, swerved to miss the car that was backing out and hit them head on.

And they were both killed instantly. Oh. Um, and as you can imagine, I mean, the trauma of that is unimaginable, uh, learning of the sort sudden deaths of two loved ones. And Jim was so close to his father and even closer to his sister, arguably, I mean, Judy and Jim were like twins in their connection. And so it absolutely devastated Jim. And on top of that, compounding things was the fact that Jim felt somehow responsible

because he had sort of delayed their departure by thinking whether or not maybe I'll go, maybe I won't. And so he was tormented by the fact that if he had decided a few seconds earlier, a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, they would still be alive. And so he really blamed himself for the timing of that. And, you know, that was an event. Really, that's another sort of, if you want to call it that, I mean, as horrible as it is, it's also a kind of origin story for Jim's writing.

And I think that was absolutely, definitively, the catalyst that Jim needed as dark as it was. He just absolutely devoted himself to his writing after that. He was already interested in writing before that, but he was really having trouble getting pen to page and actually having some kind of productive output. but after that i think jim's world changed i think he thought if this can happen and death is that close and so sudden and unpredictable that there's absolutely nothing left to do but to do what you absolutely want to do uh no plan b for jim right there was not going to be a plan b um he there was plan a he was going to be the writer that he wanted to be he was going to be a prolific writer and he

was not going to look back and that was it and he started writing after that he says at one point he says I found a new voice. He says the truth is always new wine, right? Um, he had, he'd, he'd somehow been gifted, he found, he thought with, uh, sort of the gift of speech, right? And all of a sudden he could begin writing. And he really never looked back from that, but I think you're absolutely right. That story permeates everything he wrote after that.

Mm-hmm. And defined the rest of his life. Um, yeah. Hmm. What was, how did it come to be? like when did he start becoming friends with all these with with like these other writers let's let's just I guess we'll focus on instead of saying these other writers we'll focus on what we'll talk about McGuane because here's this other great writer another Michigan guy another guy like obsessed with hunting obsessed with fishing transcended that world neither of these guys no one would call Harrison or McGuane an outdoor writer no one would call him a hunting and fishing writer but they're writers that hunters and anglers love but they they weigh they overshot any kind of definition like that they became like literary figures right you know yeah how like like how at

what point did he start to be that he was going to be with writers and associate with writers and join the kind of like literati you know yeah i mean so you know jim like like we were saying i mean Jim didn't grow up knowing writers. It wasn't really until he got into college and he began, like, you know, getting to know professors and things like that. He really didn't get to know some professional writers until, you know, I think he ran into Jack Kerouac

once at a bar in New York and said that was like the first writer I'd ever met. Jack Kerouac was at a jazz bar in a village and he was apparently really drunk. And Harrison says he met him and sort of got to know him. And he says, well, that was the first writer I ever really got, I met. But, you know, he really became, he really got to know and sort of become part of the literary scene.

At one point, he was invited by a professor at Michigan State University to go out to Stony Brook University on Long Island. And there, Jim got to know a lot of poets. Okay. Right. He was partly in charge of inviting writers to the department to get to, you know, for talks and readings and things like that. And sort of met the whole literary world there, at least in the world of poetry at that time, right? and I think so that got him to know a lot of writers and then you know McGuane who he'd gone to school with at Michigan State University reached out to him you know around this time and they didn't know each other that well at MSU but

McGuain reached out to him and they began this sort of decades-long correspondence and deep friendship that would develop and it turns out McGuane was you know incredibly invested in writing too and was very active in writing and publishing and so all of a sudden Jim started to have a literary community, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and it was McGuane in many ways introduced Jim to lots of his good friends, who would later become good friends like, he became friends with Boff, Jimmy Buffett and Jimmy Buffett, uh, Guy Delavadden, right, who was a French count, uh, who he met fishing in Key West.

That's one dude I'll never understand. What did that dude do? Well, he's always like, they're always bringing them up. They just like him because he's a French count. Well, he was a, he was a, he was an avid fisher. alive. He's dead now. Yeah. I did get to speak with him. Yeah, they're always talking about that guy. I never got it. Yeah, Guy.

I mean, Guy was... The hell's his name again? Guy. Guy. Guy. I think I met his great, his not grandson or, uh, yeah, we hunted in Scotland together. Oh, really? And I heard all about Guy. Yeah. Yeah, I don't mean

any, like, disrespect to the dead, but whenever those dudes, like, either of them just talking about that guy, I'm like, this guy again? Who is this guy? Yeah, he was important. of them though you know yeah that's why i never got it because he had like he could afford the good wine definitely part of it um but they paid for everything or something yeah he he had money i think they genuinely really liked him he was he was he was an excellent fisherman uh right he was one of the people the mcgwayne met down fishing in key west yeah and was one of the only people i mean very

few people on the island who understood tarp and fishing he did the french dude he did oh yeah he's extremely serious fishermen and bird hunter right and so they had that in common and then maybe i'm just jealous and then he was who wouldn't be right yeah who doesn't want to be a french count uh he had he grew up with a moat i mean you know uh who can say that never understood like he like just like having a googly eye and having your mom your dad and sister dying a crash like there's like those things that you go like what else permeates harrison's work you'd be like the french count right Exactly, right. What a life.

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This is eligible for U.S. customers only. Canadians, I don't know what to tell you. You're out of luck. It runs from December 9 to December 22. See you in town. How would you put, like, there's a songwriter I like a lot, Evan Falker from Turnpike Trubedores, and we were talking about he, he, he, He puts hunting and fishing in his music, but he does in the way that you know it's legit.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Like, you can from a mile away smell when someone is just inserting stuff they don't understand well. Mm-hmm. It's like, his references are very good. Mm-hmm. Like, you know it's legit.

Mm-hmm. And he said, well, I don't, I only think of it, like, it's not, it's not what the story's about. I just need them to have a thing to do. Mm-hmm. Like, they're going to, the characters. in the songs, they're going to interact and say the things they need to say. Or the story is that.

But then, well, what are they doing? Why are they there? And he goes, in my head, I'm paraphrasing. When I think of like, where do I put them? That just tends to be where I put them. But it's not what it's about. It's just where I stick them. I mean, like, I'm doing a horrible job

of putting it, but that's like, he's not trying to write like a song with like a hunting reference. He just doesn't know what to have him doing. or whatever, so oftentimes they're doing stuff with horses or they're doing stuff with guns or, you know, whatever. Yeah. So, like, how, after doing all this work

and spending all these years on this, um, and I'm saying it says a guy like, I wouldn't, if he wasn't into hunting and fishing, I wouldn't have discovered them and I wouldn't read them. But like, how do you think of the role? Do you mean, like, if you look at like all these poems and all these books and novellas and essays,

how would how do you describe what those things meant to him you know yeah i mean uh you know i i think it's it you did describe it nicely i mean this idea that you might be writing about death or mortality or you know consciousness or these other things but but what the characters are doing are hunting and fishing right it's and that's what jim knew right i mean he grew up with hunters and fishers and his family you know what that means to him i mean it meant everything to him it's it was how he grew up. It's what his family did. It's, it's what he truly enjoyed to do, doing, right? Um, and so, you know, uh, and I'm not talking just about hunting and fishing, but I'm talking about being out in the natural world, right, in the nonhuman world,

whether it's floating a river and, and, and fly fishing or, uh, bird hunting, which Jim genuinely love to do, uh, walking fields. He would just love to walk through the woods, right? And so, He's a great observer, a very astute observer of nature. And one of his frustrations with a lot of hook and bullet guys and one of his big frustrations with like a lot of outdoor writers is they were only interested in animals insofar as like how best to kill them. Yeah. And it like it infuriated him.

Like it comes up references again and again. Like they weren't students of nature. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think Jim was an incredible student in nature, right? he uh and hunting and fishing was part of that to him but it was not the only thing to him right he was incredibly observant as you said he's like he's like he probably i don't know if he called himself that but he's definitely like a birder yeah oh yeah and not just a bird hunter but a birder he loved to just you know like his mother he loved to go out and and bird watch right and he you know

would go you know he he knew a huge range of birds you know we could talk about them fluently but you know Jim was famous for just going out and sitting on a log right in the middle of the woods and he would just sit there and he would sort of meld sort of melt into the into the into the stump he was sitting on as the sort of natural world around him came alive around him because he no longer posed a threat he was this sort of you know inanimate sort of object or animate object that had become one with his surroundings and he would just observe and I think I mean that meant everything to him. It was his spirituality. It was a very deeply spiritual practice for him. And he would connect with that, you know, in a classic sort of romantic way. Even though I don't

think Jim ever romanticized nature, he knew, I think he knew what the wild was. Yeah. But I think in a spiritual sense, I think he found sort of spiritual sustenance there. I mean, it was, you know, not to use a cliche, it was like his church, right? He would go into, he would go into the wild, into nature, just on even just sort of small walks. But that's where he got his ideas for literature. That's where he'd do his thinking. And that's where he'd do is sort of meditating. And so, you know, it was such a large part of his life that, what else would he write about?

Right. I mean, a large part of his work has to deal with that huge factor in the middle of his life. Yeah. I don't think he ever had like a main character that didn't respect nature. It was like a prerequisite. To be a character of his, you like, you had to respect nature else you're not allowed in. Yeah, you're certainly not a good guy, right, in his work, right? They're bad, bad characters, right?

Who are, you know, exploitive. And that was Jim's one thing, right? He, he really could not stand people who hunted to excess or fish to excess, um, almost in a sort of greedy sort of way, uh, with, you know, taking much more than they would eat or kill or any reasonable person could possibly want to take out of, you know, take out of the wilderness. um and and and or you know sort of malpractice in fishing and hunting snagging fish and other things jim had zero patience with that as i'm sure you know right and just incredibly you know dislike that to his core um yeah what uh how did he cope with or you know somewhat like like a lot of his work is like angry about um like wealth angry about people like just getting things without working for them you know i mean like he's got

like there's he like prides people with work ethics like the the the his good characters work hard um but then all of a sudden like later he kind of becomes like like early he's sort of looking into the fish bowl do you know i mean and in the fish bowl is like wealth and wealth and and privilege and elitism. But then later he's kind of in the bowl. Right. Like, what was that like? What do you think that was like for that guy?

It was a conflict and a struggle for him. You know, he grew up, his parents, his dad and his parents. So he was, you know, we're sort of, you know, they respected labor leaders, right, to come from real working class, we call her Democratic families, sort of like a Butte Democrat, B Montana Democrats who were, you know, very invested in the labor movement. And Jim grew up in that setting. He grew up around people who worked hard outdoor labor, hard work. Yeah.

Right. And, and his dad wasn't, you know, his dad was always going out farms and Jim was always meeting farmers. And so he deeply respected, you know, people who, you know, weren't, weren't, didn't have easy wealth, right? That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Right.

And then later, you know, but I think Jim also, I think this is why he's a contradictory and complicated person. I think Jim liked nice things. He liked the things that he could get with his buddy the French count, right? And Jim seemed to sort of gather around him people of means throughout his life. And then once he published Legends of the Fall, which was a really big hit and then started getting movie deals, he started making a ton of money. And I think he enjoyed the money. You like the wine, certainly, right? He liked some of the other fruits of his money, wealth, good food, certainly, and even some, some, some cocaine from time to time.

Or maybe more than from time to time. And I think, I think he enjoyed that, but I always think he became deeply conflicted about that. On the one hand, he feared that he had lost track of who he once was. was to some extent, right? And he laments this fact in his poetry and his fiction, I think, um, you know, he, he has an image in one of his poems of like feeding at the bourgeois trough. Yeah. Right. And he's like leaning into it and just, and he knows that this is highly problematic. And it's problematic for him because it's distancing him from, I don't know, a certain kind of consciousness that he thought was necessary to be a writer and a poet. Right. And it also

distanced him from the sort of values and things things that he valued and the people who he valued um and i also think it was a conflict for him because what he had to do to make that money repeatedly took him away from his first love which was poetry right and so no one was going to get rich writing poetry but poetry was sort of in his core right and every time he was he describes himself as that all time it's funny because i never read a lick of that stuff yeah that's funny yeah uh You know, he says it was the true bones of his life. It was poetry, right? And every time he had to go out to Hollywood to work on a screenplay

or go to New York to meet with film producers or do all the things that, you know, or go on tour for even a novel, all of that was constantly taking him away from what he's viewed as his calling, right? Which was, I won't say fiction wasn't a calling of his, but his poetry was his core and that was always taking him away, right? So sort of that conflict was twofold, right? it contrasted with the values he'd grown up with yeah uh of sort of just rural simplicity right and simple pleasures um and it conflicted because it took him away from his art yeah i think you know

i've hit you with a bunch of like things that i regard as uh i don't know man like like themes of his work and and and things that i pull from it in your book like what are some of the the things you pull that outside of what I've asked you about like what are some of the you know the through lines or or or the discoveries you found that help kind of explain him as a as a writer yeah that's a good question I mean you hit on a lot of the key themes I think that I do explore in the book um as a writer I mean as a human friendship was one of the sort of through lines in this book um he was a good friend he was a good friend I think he was it could be a difficult friend as he seemed to have friends he had friends for long times man which i respect me too i mean

you know you hear so much about sort of the crisis of of male friendship and and loneliness in in in the u.s today and jim in some ways i mean modeled a sort of life that was very different from that here's like masculine guys outdoor guys who um you know we're not solitary people they were communal people they love to be around other male friends and and jim cultivated not just male friends, female friends too. Jim really worked at building friendships. Yeah. And sustaining them over decades. I mean, Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison wrote for, what, five decades to each other, two letters a week. I mean, that alone is insane. It's so foreign. Like, I know, I'm still buddies with guys I knew growing up. Yeah. There's some guys that I grew up with I'm still buddies

with, but like, there is no way in the world. I'm going to pen them a letter. It's just not going to happen. Right. The letters of Stephen Rinella. It's just not. I'll shoot him a quick text. Somebody someday is going to want to publish your collected letters. You have to, uh, or your collection change.

Where you at? Over that way. Okay. No, the text should be published into like a coffee book because they're so funny. The random text you get from Steve. That's funny. Yeah. And Jim, you know, you could collect his emails to friends too.

But I mean, he would handwrite letters to. to McGuane for decades and decades, you know? But he would... Were they doing it, like, knowing it would be collected? Yeah, I think Tom and Jim were. Yeah. Like, they were, like, writing out so that someday there'd be a record of themselves.

I suspect that someday they suspect that someone like me would be spending, like, six months in an archive somewhere, reading every letter they ever wrote so I could write a biography of one of them. I do think that's true. And I think at first it was aspirational. They were like, we're going to be famous, right? We're going to be great writers. We're going to be famous writers.

And then at a certain point, they were like, wow, we're pretty famous writers, right? And this came true, and we're doing this for posterity. And so, you know, there's a level of sort of performativity in the letters, right? I think they know, definitely. I think there's an eye. They know people are going to be reading these letters. But in spite of themselves, they're always lapsing into real periods. of honesty and being incredibly supportive of each other in their correspondence.

Early on, Tom and Jim saw each other a lot. They'd see each other in Montana all the time, yearly for sometimes weeks and months at a time. They go fishing together in Key West all the time. So they did spend a lot of time together physically in the same place. Later, that became more correspondence. But no matter how busy Jim was, and he was extremely busy, he would always carve out time for friends, you know, for Geh, until all done, right?

for Russell Chatham, for, you know, Buffett, for, and a lot of Jim's professional relationships became friendships. He would hang out with his psychiatrist, you know. They would write letters to each other and spend time together when they were in New York, right? You know, his publishers and his editors and his producer friends, they would all become friends. And so Jim, yeah, really went out of his way to cultivate friendships.

And, you know, Guy and those other guys would come up. to Lake Lelandau and they'd hunt every fall. Good. They'd come up to Montana every year for bird hunting season, right? Uh, they'd all congregate and meet at, at, at McGuane's Ranch in Paradise Valley. And they would all hunt together and then they would create, they would cook these big feasts of everything they caught, right? The fish and the birds at this shot and they'd create these elaborate meals.

And that was very much part of their life, you know. That's one of the through lines of this book that, and it's one of the big surprises for me, uh, just how dedicated Jim was. to cultivating and sustaining friendships one of his bodies so for years um i'm explaining this to listeners not you is uh if you go buy harrison's books the covers are russell chatham paintings if you want to watch a great movie go watch rivers of a lost coast it's a very obscure film about the steelhead runs of northern california kind of about the death of the steelhead runs of northern california but like the steelhead heyday of northern california and chatham

this painter chatham kind of carries this documentary but also does these beautiful landscapes and harrison always used them did that just stay true all the way to the end no i guess some of his covers weren't chatham paintings but you know i mean like all those covers were those like very moody, dark landscapes by Russell Chatham. Oh, yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I mean, Chatham, uh, Chatham was a fisherman, right? And I've never seen that movie. He's from the Bay Area.

Yeah. Oh, dude, it's an unbelievable movie. Rivers of a Lost Coast. I can't wait to see it. It's got a cool classic, man. Like, no one knows about that movie. Yeah, I'm totally going to watch that. Um, yeah, I mean, Chatham, it's funny.

I was, I was talking to Chatham's daughter, um, you know, I don't know. Did he pass away? he did yeah yeah because he started that restaurant kind of like that went a little tits up and then like yeah i mean he was cool restaurant yeah he started all sorts of ventures a publishing house uh clark city press in livingston and then open livingston bar and grill yeah we used to go there a bit man yeah um but i mean that was long time i was back in like around two thousand or something yeah that was a long time ago even today lea chatham uh russe's daughter says that if you ask someone in town in Livingston, Montana, who Russ Chatham is.

The guy from the restaurant. Half of them will say, oh, he's that famous fisherman. And half of them will say he's an artist, which really speaks volumes, right? Well, I thought they'd say like, the guy with the restaurant? Some of them would probably definitely say that too. But, I mean, I think he holds, he held the record for the largest striped bass caught on a fly for a long time, if not still. So, okay, so I'm losing track of where I was, but so Jim and Chatham became close friends

beginning from Key West Fishing days. That's how they met. Okay. They met in Key West. Got it. And they just hit it off. Because he was into that fishing scene down there. Yeah. And Chatham had also a bad eye. Oh, he did? Yeah. I don't know that. He had no depth perception. He's an artist. A landscape artist with no depth perception. Apparently he went of Tarpet fisherman, which

is a depth perception game. Yeah. So somehow Russ managed to like, not only like fish Tarpin and spot him and cast to him, but also to paint. And he was apparently a really good pool player to boot. So I don't know how he pulled this off. Overcame his, uh, yeah, deficiencies. And he had the same eye injuries, Jim, not dut in this, you know, for the same reasons,

but he had a bad eye and it happened around the same age as Jim, maybe the exact same age as Jim. So they were like, they saw each other down in Key West and they were just like, oh, we need to be friends, right? And they just hit it off from the start, right? And, uh, I can't remember exactly when it began, but, uh, Chatham, Jim's start. started using her chatham's paintings on the covers of his books and really that would that would and then eventually you know chatham would go back and create covers for his like sort of back list of books and so now pretty much if you go into any bookstore uh and pick up a jim harrison book you're going to see a russell chatham painting on the cover um and i you know and they're beautiful covers a lot of people have told me that they picked up a harrison book because of the cover for the first time sure right because it's such a striking cover And they became sort of inextricably linked, right?

Complementing each other, right? Larger than they would be individually, right? And so, yeah, they really... You know, there's a documentary, I don't know, it's not even really fair to call it a documentary. It's more like a compilation of clips of that 70s era of fly fishing and Key West with those guys all in it. I can't remember, it's not chasing silver.

No. Well, the original documentary that Ghee made, right, of fly fishing, of those guys, fly fishing in Key West was called Tarpin. Okay. And that is a, if you haven't seen that. No, and I have that. Yeah, I have that on DVD. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, great document.

Which is impossible to play, but I own it. Yeah, exactly. And then someone recently made a documentary of that documentary. Is that what you're talking about? No, no, I'm talking about tarpon. You're talking about tarpon specifically. Okay. That's in my DVD pile, but that's not it.

Rivers of Velocke. coast and tarpon and tarpon yeah and that documentary tarpon um i mean just really sort of tried to capture sort of you know the wonder and amazement of of uh you know pulling a skiff around the flats off of key west right um and casting you know site casting to tarpun and then with amazing sort of photography right they capture these tarpun you know coming up out of the water under the water you know, being caught in the sort of electric experience of catching these tarpins. Yeah. And then it brushed, you know, to a decent amount.

I also explore sort of the nightlife that those guys explored in the U.S., but maybe a lot less. So I think it's a lot more about the fishing. Yeah. You get to send to the nightlife aspect. Yeah. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate.

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They're going to pick their family, and they're going to come out. This is eligible for U.S. customers only. Canadians, I don't know what to tell you. You're out of luck. It runs from December 9 to December 9 to December. December 22, see you in town. You know, another guy, another outdoorsman writer that definitely transcended the world is Richard Brodagan.

So Richard Brodigan wrote trout fishing in America, which is not about people fishing it, but it's not about trout fishing in America, but it has one of the greatest fishing lines ever Brodigan's talking about fishing a stream that was so narrow and so brushy and hard to fish. She said you had to be a plumber to fish that creek, which is the greatest thing. But like, Brodagan kind of like, and Brodigan later shoots himself. Yeah. Do you know, is it true? Like, Russell Chatham kind of wrote this thing, and it was kind of from hanging out with Brodigan and Harrison and all that?

Is it true that Brodigan, like, maybe killed some kid with a 22 when he was young? Are you familiar with that? I don't know that story. No. It's possible. Because it meant, like, like, he's talking about they would get together to hunt birds. Yeah. And Chatham wouldn't hunt or sorry, Brodigan wouldn't hunt, wouldn't go hunting.

But talk about one time he shot it a hole through a TV with a shotgun. Yeah. And he talks about, I understand why you would shoot Xenus. but not pheasants it was kind of about like broad against torments you know but like killed himself right he did yeah and you know he had a thing um you know he had a thing with guns um sort of shooting them off indoors yeah um he had uh you know he did lots of stories of broadigan uh who and brodigan eventually bought a sort of small farm in Paradise Valley, Montana, too, right? Not, not, not, I didn't know that.

Yeah. In that same 70s there off of East River Road in the same area. Yeah, same era, right, um, when McGuane and all them were there and Brodigan sort of and whoopi Goldberg for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody, right, in LA who was like setting, yeah, it was the new place to be. Um, Brodigan lived there for a while.

Yeah. And he would hang out with all these guys and, and, and, in Paradise Valley, but there are lots of stories of sort of, you know, unfortunate, sort of drunken late nights with, uh, you know, 44 magnum that, that Brodigan would carry around and he would, there's a story of him, uh, shooting out a clock, like, that was on the wall and he shot around the clock in a circle, you know, until they could push the clock out of the wall. Oh, there's another one of him shooting up through the ceiling and then him going to bed and waking up in the morning and coming downstairs and having splinters and stuff all in his back because the bullets had gone through the roof

into the bed through the bed in his mattress and had shot splinters up into the mattress into his own bed and came down with splinters in him um so yeah yeah i never heard that story about him having shot somebody man i could feel like i maybe i should i should have brought i should have checked in that for i brought it up but uh you know i know he loved the fish and he would efficient with those guys all the time yeah and he would he didn't cook but those guys would go over brodagan's house and they cook big elaborate meals at his house and they would host big parties over broadigans and there are some funny stories in the book about jim and brought again and their funny relationship together yeah uh jim taught his daughter to fly fish uh broughtigan's daughter to fly

fish and yeah and brodigan was very much part of the community and brodigan's in tarpon what state did he kill himself in california does it ever surprise you it wouldn't like had i read the harrison and killed himself at some point, I would not have been surprised. Doesn't it seem like he would have been a dude who would have killed himself, maybe? He came really close, I mean, because of his depressions, you know, in his 30s, he had a depression of all depressions, basically. And, you know, and contemplated suicide very seriously. His daughter, I mean, said repeatedly that they were just, she was reading his poetry a lot at the time, but everywhere she looked, she saw thoughts and ideas of suicide. And Jim came extremely close.

He was writing a collection of poetry called Letters to Usenon. It was Sergei Usenna was a Russian poet. And Jim was called the collection letters to, you know, letters to Yusinan. He was literally writing letters to this dead Russian poet, right? But he credits that book with really sort of pulling him out of that deep depression, right? And sort of poetry helped him sort of gain his footing and recover himself, right, in writing to this poet. And it turns out Sergey Yusenon had committed suicide, hung himself. wrote his last letter out in his own blood or a poem and then you really gruesome stuff and jim recovered

you know some sort of recovered himself uh through through the writing of poetry but i mean something we never got at earlier which we were talking about was it you know despite all of the other big through line through this book and what always amazes me is that despite these epic depressions that jim would go through he had these unbelievable store of humor and you know it would be a mistake to paint him as this really dark troubled figure, which he was, but he was also this guy with this just endless sense of humor and sort of exuberance for life and Jewe de Vieve, right, that he never seemed to lose.

Yeah. You know, he'd have been flow, but he would always recover himself. Even in his darkest times, he'd make jokes. You know, we were talking about the Hemingway deal? Yeah. He, Harrison, I can't remember where he was writing it, but Harrison had talked about, you know, that ritualistic suicide, like, is it hard?

cari yeah yeah we fall on your sword kind of death before well like you disembow yourself right yeah yeah reason one of the reasons i always picture that he might that you'd be that that would have been how he would have died is he he seemed to struggle with this like um like death before dishonor but dishonor would have been senescence yeah do i mean like would you really let yourself get old and senile would it be better to like go out on your own terms and that's kind of he seemed to that's like a reference he seemed to make a fair bit and that was like the Hemingway deal because I think that when Hemingway shot himself like Hemingway was supposed to be contributing like a sentence to a Kennedy memorial and my understanding is maybe this is like a little bit of a you know maybe it's like

an apocryphal story but but like he couldn't come up with a sentence for Kennedy's memorial or something and felt that it was like he was tapped out and you know maybe that's what kept kept Jim Jim in this world is he never ran out of words and fact I think the closer he came to death than dying he wrote more and more and you know language you know he felt sometimes trapped in language you know ironically maybe I think he felt that he had been a slave to language this whole life and he started to feel that later in life, but it was language that really never abandoned him. He would sometimes lament that he had no mechanical capabilities.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, his physical capabilities, is that what you mean, like physical capability? No, I mean, like, um, wasn't like he wasn't like, like, fixing stuff and all that, like mechanical stuff. Yeah. He would make jokes about, that he was, you know, like not, not in some capacities handy at like vehicle repair or whatever. Like, he was a man of words, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, I don't doubt that at all. Yeah, I don't think Jim ever, like, he wasn't the kind of guy who was going to crawl under, you know, a hood and, you know, get greasy. Although, you know, maybe when he was younger a little bit, but he wasn't, yeah, mechanically inclined. Yeah. He wasn't that guy. But language never abandoned him, you know, and he died writing a poem.

He was writing a poem the day he died. And so until his very last breath, I mean, he was sitting at his desk with the poem in front of him and a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray when he died in 2016. Yeah, he smoked so up to the end, dude. Yeah, he had a big. pile of cigarettes on his desk and one was smoldering or i mean the the day he died and he basically fell over after writing his last poem so you know maybe who knows maybe if language had abandoned him he might you know where would he have been what he later talked about that you take a lot of naps yeah but he said he didn't count it as a nap unless he took his socks off

which i thought was a funny line and a classic harrison right yeah the one caveat that hangs over this and like the one reason and I hate it like I wish it wasn't true because the one reason I can't be like that I love him you know and like I said man he did me a good turn like he blurbed a couple of my books and right help me out but like a thing that keeps me for being like I love the guy is is like I don't understand how he could how he would just like humiliate his wife like that. Do you know, me like,

I'm, like, I've been married for 17 years. Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. There's just no way. There's no way I'm going to humiliate my wife.

Mm-hmm. Do you follow me? Mm-hmm. But he would so freely humiliate his wife. Like, what is all that about? You mean by, um, carrying on with other women.

Carrying on with other women. Fantasized about women. Caring on with other women. Like, how could you like do that to somebody like habitually, dude? And then not only that, but then like, go home and then,

and face them. Do you know what I mean? Like I don't talk like if like I can't be like one way to get like majorly like OTC'd out of my circle. Uh huh would be to like like dudes that humiliate their wives are just like out of the club. Do you follow me? Yeah. So like makes it that I can't like I want to be like, oh, he was great. But I'm always like, yeah. Like what was that about?

Yeah. I mean, that's. that's tough um what is that about uh i think i think jim and his wife i mean i so there's no excuse for humiliation i think i think jim loved his wife very much i don't have any doubt about that and i think she loved him very much um i think jim became so difficult to live with for other reasons later in life because of his alcoholism and his, you know, the sort of things that had happened is his ability to sort of comprehend the consequences of his actions. And I'm not talking about affairs now. I'm talking about

smoking cigarettes around his wife when she was suffering from asthma and lung problems later in life. And he could be incredibly self-centered and self-focused in a way that seemed incredibly frustrating to people around them because they knew that his smoking was hurting his wife and such and I think that eventually sort of his wife became increasingly intolerant of him

I think earlier when Jim was having affairs and you know you can't really make excuses for him you're right it was a humiliation I think it's one that Linda realized what she was getting herself into very early on Yeah, well, he wasn't even bashful about it. He wasn't bashful about it.

And she was smart, his wife. She was incredibly smart, incredibly perceptive. I think she knew very, I know for a fact that she knew very early on how Jim was going to conduct his life. And I think Linda was an adult. And I think she chose to stay in that relationship for, you know, reasons of all sorts of complex reasons, right? Because she valued that relationship. she valued Jim she accepted explicitly if tacitly if not explicitly the terms of that relationship right um from a very from from from a young age um McGuane once wrote to a friend and I write about

this in the book and he said you know there's only really two paths with marriage and he says one is um at least this was his perception and he was speaking about Jim's infidelity specifically. And he said, you know, there's one where, you know, you conduct your business in private, you go and have illicit affairs, you hire sex workers, you do this or that, all like in closed private spaces behind your wife's back. And the alternative is sort of having an open relationship, right? And he says, now, I don't know. He says, and at the time, McGuane said, well, and we know Jim, you know, McGuane himself had gone through a series of relationships with their own sort of levels of complexity and one of them was a relatively high profile even relatively open

relationship but he said you know the the trick to that and maybe maybe it's doomed to failure open relationships to begin with by definition maybe they're non-sustainable oh it's like just as a side note yeah people to act like that's going to fly yeah it doesn't yeah and it's like such a joke when people like oh no we have an understanding i'm like you don't yeah you might think you do yeah you don't Yeah. And it's not a two-way understanding. Right.

You have understanding with your desires, but that's about the, that's the limit right there, you know. Yeah. And McGuane recognized that. And he said, you know, but the trick to doing that, and maybe it's impossible anyway, the trick to doing it is to extend the privileges to both people fully, right? Right. You can't have one side. It has to extend it to. And Jim, you know, there was no, there's no evidence that they had that sort of agreement.

Yeah, but she wasn't a big swinging dick writer either. You're right. You're right. But she was also very attractive, though. she was a beautiful woman and she was intelligent she was beautiful but i mean you know i don't know mcgwayne went through several relationships eventually settled in what it's is a very happy marriage now to jimmy buffett's sister but jim you know jim and linda stayed married when a lot of other their friends got divorced throughout the years and man they were they were together up until

the end yeah and you know how it's something i'll never understand man and i think for someone who wrote poetry for someone who was so sensitive so someone who was a student of consciousness and looking at the world honestly, to be able to still do what he did is a contradiction. Yeah. And it's a complexity. Yeah.

Yeah. I wouldn't talk about speaking ill of the dead. Like if he was alive, I would be uncomfortable bringing it up. Yeah. And I didn't. Yeah. You know, like, because we had mutual associates and mutual friends and stuff. And like, I just always, I was.

was always like why you know you know what I mean it's like like who's who's that culture that used to make um who's a culture that make rugs and they'd put it imperfection in the rug because because it was hubris to to to make it perfect like in the eyes of god you'd intentionally make it imperfect mm-hmm right yeah and it was like he had this like glaring imperfection that you always bugged me man he did have a glaring imperfection more than one we all do I mean we all dude his was like celebrated yeah you know what i mean like like when i was young it didn't occur to me to be it didn't occur to me to look at it from two sides yeah only later did i be like man like you know yeah like i have somewhat of a you know like i have some of a public

profile like i have somewhat of a way to go out and meet people and have adventures that like isn't like readily available to my wife. Taking care of the kids that we had together. Right. You become aware of the like there's just a baked in, dude, I don't want to call it an imbalance, but there's like a baked in something that you can take,

that you can exploit. And then later when I became aware of that that, there is a thing to exploit, when I became aware of it, it may be very judgmental about someone that takes the bait. I think it was baked. Yeah, it was definitely baked in for Jim too, you know, where he grew up, the people he grew up around and with,

from a very young age, I think a lot of that, you know, that way of thinking about, you know, male, female relationships and marriages was baked into him from a young age. And I think it was, it just, it always just remained as sort of like Fisher in his identity, right? this this uh this contradiction right that uh he could be as sensitive as he was to people's suffering he could write novels in women's voices in ways that's the thing dude like so sympathetic man so sympathetic and dolva and women lived by fireflies like in a way you wouldn't be able to do now like you couldn't he would if he'd have written if he'd have written a novel from the perspective of a female native american in 2020 dude they would have murdered him yeah it's true they would have hung him from a tree

do you know what I mean yeah he's like I got an idea I'm like an old white guy I'm gonna write a book where I'm a Native American woman yeah I know he might have gotten away with the woman but not the Native American woman right now you got away with it in France so he would have gotten away with it but I'm not saying he shouldn't have done it like that's not my perspective I don't think that I don't I don't look at it like I don't think that you can own I don't believe in in I understand the arguments for it it but I don't believe in people being like that you can make it that other people can't think about certain things you know i mean i don't i'm not i don't i don't like that i understand

the argument but i don't i don't like live by it i completely agree with that and it's funny you know i just read teaching you know and i just read three books in a row where the man um wrote a book from a woman's perspective and then the two women wrote two books from men's perspectives and these are all in the past five years so i'm like okay well yeah yeah we haven't you know fully you know people are still experimenting with you and i completely agree with you should be able to write from whatever experience they have we live in a little bit of freer time right now you know you know the writer larry brown uh yeah a little bit big bad love yeah yeah yeah he died young he had a heart attack he was from mississippi he was a fireman oh yeah he wrote seven books he wrote seven novels for he had a novel

published wow um he uh he uh he became like a very like he sold some of his stuff to he did have stuff had in movies like the cullen brothers bought one of his things he became a big pretty big writer he was the first guy this is the last thing i'll say about this thing with marriage and stuff is uh when i was in writing school larry came and did uh he like came for a semester or something up from mississippi um dude never went to college enough man he taught himself to write like between calls at a fire barn but became a very celebrated novelist you know uh i mentioned him he he knew harrison hung out just in the literary circles and he was the first guy that like said to me i brought him up

and he said something about like like i roll because he was a very faithful loyal family person he had like an eye roll about like oh him and his starlets do i mean it was the first time i heard someone like do like a condemnation and it was like dismissive you know man it wasn't even that long after that larry brown died of a heart attack wow yeah um what was uh like when harrison died what was sort of going on with him you know like where was he at right with his and he had like a lot he didn't he have hard to have like bad health problems and things yeah i mean he was sort of ravaged physically right he was he still sharp though uh he was he still sharp um i he still had the capacity to write and write poems and uh i think fiction had become

difficult for him okay uh he just couldn't sort of sustain the attention to detail that was required for fiction right i think he was at that point in his life right before he died he began a new novella called the woman who loved trees i think and it was about his wife uh about linda and uh so the important thing to know is linda died about five months prior to jim yeah um and so when jim died he was extremely lonely right he was uh sort of living in montana but then when he died he died in patagonia arizona and he was just didn't know what to do with himself, right, because he'd been married since 1959 to Linda, right? And all of a sudden he was without her. And so there was this huge gaping, you know, hole in his life. But in the sort

of waning months of his life, I mean, he could write poems still. There was still that sort of compression and smallness of it that he could get his mind around. Yeah, that's good way to put in it. Yeah. And he, you know, he was sharp enough to write. I think his mind was very sort of, um, uh, uh, clouded by sort of, uh, all the alcohol that he was drinking, right, from years and years and years of alcoholism. And I think it had taken a real toll on him mentally, uh, intellectually. Um, uh, but you know, he's, he had his humor. He had, um, he had it still like a decent life going on, so his friends and things like that. But I think in the absence of Linda, it seems he, he really could. Got it started to fade. It's not an exaggeration to say that he faded, you know,

in the absence of his wife you know died from a broken heart in some ways right from the loss of linda he couldn't go on after that but he was still writing i mean up until he died he wrote he uh there was a collection of poems published right before he died called um dead man's float and um and actually the soft cover came out after he died and includes the last poem he was writing when he died oh yeah yeah dude when you look at him like especially on the cover here and you listen to it like clips him talking uh-huh you'd form sort of an impression and then you go read something of the sentences he wrote and you're like how could that sentence like how do those sentences come out of that guy yeah just like so unbelievably talented and smart man yeah it's so talented

as Gary Snyder right the poet from california beat poet nature poet um was walking across the campus one time in california uh with his wife and saw jim harrison was coming across the campus and she turned to Gary and says, I cannot believe that's the man who wrote Dolva. So similar, similar idea, right? You look at Jim on the cover of this and, yeah, he doesn't scream sensitive poet, right? No.

Like some greasy sweatshirt and stuff. You know, I mean, it's just like, yeah. Eight cigarettes hanging out of his mouth, but then just so brilliant, man. Lived a long, hard life. Yeah. Yeah, and it shows on his face. So you took you, you spent five, six years on the book and talked to how many people

do you interview? I mean, well over a hundred different interviews for the book, sort of all over the place from Montana and Michigan to New York and L.A. to France, you know, Florida, obviously, Arizona. Took a solid six years, but from like the first phone call I made to publication date, probably seven years total. So it's been a long journey. And no, um, and you beat everybody to it.

No one's done a, no one's done like a full biography of Jim Harrison. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I mean, that was worried while you were working on that someone else is going to kick one out? I was. You'd have caught wind of it. I didn't think they'd get it done before me necessarily, but I was, I, I, I, yeah, when I first started, when I first sort of zeroed it on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, I was shocked that no one was already doing it. I had some dudes calling me that were kicking around making a documentary about his life. Yeah.

I don't know if you were involved in that or not no no I'm not there's yeah there's been a number of sort of people circling the documentary of Harrison and I think there should definitely be one they had asked whoever well I don't even remember I don't even know if I'd be able to even find anything but we spoke on the phone and they're asking me about if I would do like a little talking head bit in it but I don't know what came of it yeah um yeah people people have been circling a documentary but uh and I sort of thought someone would start and not start one while I was writing it sure I don't think anyone did. Not that I heard of. Yeah, when they were asked me there to say it was like, not as someone that knew them, but just someone was influenced by the work. Right, right. Writers that were influenced by the word. Yeah, for sure.

And then I was kind of, I didn't get, you know, I definitely didn't get the sense that it was a done deal on being in it. I was like, sure, whatever. Yeah. But I kept kind of, I still kind of keep my eyes out expecting the movie to come out. Yeah, I think it would be great. But the fact that you managed to get like a big ass book done before they could get a documentary done is impressive.

I appreciate that. Thank you. What year did he die? 2016, March. Okay, so you didn't get crank until he was dead. Yeah, I didn't, right, yeah. Would you have felt funny doing it while he's alive? I don't think so. No, I don't think I would have done it.

Yeah, yeah, I think I would have. I think there's, you know, I would have loved to have interviewed him for the book. But at the same time, you know, there's, it's also sort of liberating. to do it when they're not alive too yeah because when they're alive i'm not i've written a biography but well i've written like biographical sketches but i think when they're alive um it just becomes different yeah because their own their own mythology is right someone's own mythology is part like in an interview as you're getting the mythological version do you know i mean totally unless they're just done yeah and the guards down you're gonna get like

here's how I'd like, you know what it is? Yeah, here's how I'd like to be remembered. Totally, yeah, and you would have to really filter for that, right? You'd have to, like, take everything they said with a grain of salt. But, I mean, there were enough, like, friends and family members still alive and are still live now around Jim's, in Jim's world that, you know, I don't know if I would have written it differently than they've been alive because I've still writing, you know, with the idea that it's still very much living story, right?

And so you have to keep that in mind. think when you're writing biography well congratulations on it man thank you um i'm excited to i'm excited to dig in and read i just i mean i just took possession of my hardcover right now wonderful that's great i'm glad it's in your hands yeah i'd like to have you sign it for me i would love to um again the title is devouring time jim harrison a writer's life by todd goddard so if you're a fan of harrison's work And I know there are many out there. Um, more than any out, like, of the people, of the writers that sort of touch on and swerve in and out of the worlds of hunting and fishing in nature, like, I think that he's the most celebrated. I don't think anybody comes close.

I agree entirely. Yeah. I don't think anybody comes close. Um, in their manner, there's something for everybody. There's something for everybody. Even novellas. Yeah. Which is if you're like a little too ADHD for a novel,

yeah, try a novella. Yeah. And Jim, Jim, it's a short novel. And Jim was a, Jim had mastered that form. I mean, he's known for that. Yeah. Yeah. If you're like, dude, I don't got time for a novel.

Yeah. The novella is for you. Do it take a novella, right? What's that term for a really long essay of, uh, not a man, not a memo. Like a monograph. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Well, it's been a real honor to be invited on here. So thank you so much. I love it. And again, man you can tell that i'm like i'm a harrison fan i'm haunted by harrison um i get mad thinking about him i love his work yeah i reread his books dude he's like he's like uh you know i guess he's to me what hammingway was to him yeah yeah yeah right right contradictory and like he's just like a like a not a dark cloud like but a cloud and the sun you know i mean yeah he's he's just

there right yeah i turn and i turn back to him for nourishment in some way right i don't know jim said this great thing in tarpon actually he says you know you go fly fishing you're tarpins fishing he says because catching a tarpon gives you a jolt of electricity that freshenes the feeling of being alive

and i think harrison does that yeah i mean go pick up a food essay one of sports essays right and you know you'll be freshened you know your feeling of life will be freshen and harrison's so good at doing that um you know i can't turn back to him enough and not not feel that the thing we didn't touch on and i'll just

mention it is um he was a lifelong unapologetic environmentalist definitely unapologetic yeah he didn't care if that shit was in fashion or out of fashion that dude was an environmentalist yeah you know and he probably would have said that he maybe he didn't use that word but yeah he was like he was a clean air clean water wildlife guy through and through yeah definitely no one had ever wonder what he thought about the habitat and you know and degradation and the kind of people that degrade yeah yeah and he never lost sight of like you know um you know the people who work in that world you know he never had an unrealistic view of of the fact that humans go into the natural world and have an impact on it right he was never one of those people who was going to say you know

everything needs to be preserved in a pristine state where you know people can't go in and work in those environments, but he had a strong environmental Congress. No, he knew it's an occupied landscape that has be taken care of. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. But he cared about it, right? He knew we had to take care of it. Well, thanks for coming on, Todd. Thank you. Again, devouring time.

Jim Harrison, a writer's life. Fascinating guy. I can't wait to read the book. Thank you. Thank you so much, Steve. If a Lenovo gaming computer is on your holiday list, don't shop around, just go directly to the source, Lenovo.com. It's your last chance to score exclusive deals on the gaming PCs you want, like the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 gaming desktop and Lenovo Locke gaming laptop.

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