Letters to Jim Harrison
In 2008, at a particularly disorienting time in my life, I set out West in order to see a part of America that had obsessed me since I had read Jim Harrison’s novella Legends of the Fall in 1994. Jim’s writing had obsessed me equally, and the trip turned into a pilgrimage–driving through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where Jim had had a writing cabin for many years, I happened to stay with some people who knew him, and Jim was kind enough to answer the phone when I called. (Jim was renowned for his writing and epicurean living, but it’s less known what a gracious, generous spirit he was.) We spent parts of two days talking in his new hometown of Livingston, Montana. I confessed all my anxieties about the work I felt called to and kept dodging. He sent me off with lines from a poem: “Be true / to your strange kind.”


In 2008, at a particularly disorienting time in my life, I set out West in order to see a part of America that had obsessed me since I had read Jim Harrison’s novella Legends of the Fall in 1994. Jim’s writing had obsessed me equally, and the trip turned into a pilgrimage–driving through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where Jim had had a writing cabin for many years, I happened to stay with some people who knew him, and Jim was kind enough to answer the phone when I called. (Jim was renowned for his writing and epicurean living, but it’s less known what a gracious, generous spirit he was.) We spent parts of two days talking in his new hometown of Livingston, Montana. I confessed all my anxieties about the work I felt called to and kept dodging. He sent me off with lines from a poem: “Be true / to your strange kind.”
I had meant to, and failed to, write about that experience ever since–my memory of it was powerful, but episodic, as I hadn’t taken notes. And then Jim died–last week, at 78. That night, I opened again a collection of his poems called Letters to Yesenin, written in 1973. Sergei Yesenin, the great Russian poet of the early 20th century, committed suicide in 1925 at 30, and Letters to Yesenin is Jim–who was then living on a farm in northern Michigan with a wife and two young daughters, trying to scratch out a living as a poet–working out how to step back from the same edge. He wrote it at more or less my age (I’m 37, he was 36), and through it somehow got himself living again. (“My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”) I had looked at that slim book a dozen times, but it was only that evening that it occurred to me how my recollections of Jim could be enough. I’m not a poet, but I think Jim would forgive me.
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Two novels yielded
Then you died.
In my first novel, the hero’s grandmother dies