Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

Not surprisingly he entered a depression. His girlfriend abandoned him because she wanted to get married right after high school graduation. He was an ace debater but couldn’t talk her into sex without marriage. The loss of this girl and France at the same time prolonged the depression. In fact on his senior trip by train from Michigan to New York City they had stopped in Niagara Falls and on a very high bridge across the river for the first time he thought deeply of suicide. What prevented him from the fatal act is that he didn’t want to upset his parents or brothers and sisters who apparently loved him as he did them.

He never quite escaped this darkness but it was a small problem that his poetic thoughts about death were often disturbed by the fact that he was hungry. Maybe he should eat something first and then commit suicide. He had always kept this a secret only and inevitably thinking of it when he had a minstrel dream. The only good thing about the minstrel dreams is that they detoxified the suicidal mind-set by inspiring such hatred. The other and more long-ranging effect of the minstrel nightmare was of course that he forever quit doing poetry readings. He didn’t unlike so many others see the connection between performance and poetry. Some poets seemed to take to it quite naturally, grinning and chuckling over their own dark witticisms. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” What a scandal that would be, America’s best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.

Raising the pigs had given him the courage to plan an extensive trip to France. He had by now been there several times but always for overplanned trips for his French publisher Christian Bourgois. They were full to the hilt with interviews and bookstore signings with very little time for the general wandering around that he valued so highly. He later reflected that these were exactly like American book tours except the food was wonderful and Paris itself was more fascinating than any American city. For reasons completely unclear to him the French had taken kindly to his work and soon his French sales exceeded those in the United States which had never been all that good. He was reviewed widely and well but that had never translated directly to the cash register. It had always amused him that publishers like movie companies would never know sales in advance.

He wanted to be aimless in France. A month might do it and he would stay longer if he wished. He wanted to go to Toulouse and eat as much as he could of the bean stew cassoulet, which would be a lot, and to the seaport Marseille, and to Arles which he knew of by having read about the lives of van Gogh and Gauguin. Of course they had lived together but it hadn’t worked out because van Gogh’s instability exceeded Gauguin’s. He cut off his own ear which made some biographers sympathetic saying that he did it for love, in itself incomprehensible. No one cuts off his nose for love.

Thinking over his short trip to Paris he mostly recalled lunches and dinners and getting over them. He would rise early, usually because of jet lag, and walk for an hour or so until a café opened where he could get an omelet with lardons (pork morsels) after which he would rest, then walk another hour to stimulate his appetite for lunch, then a long nap, and another longish walk and a couple of glasses of red wine. Hard liquor was too expensive. He had been hungry the afternoon before and had stopped at the Ritz for a fifty-dollar chunk of foie gras and two forty-dollar glasses of burgundy. It was just what he needed after crossing the bridge and walking in the Tuileries. The tab was a hundred and thirty dollars to which he added a twenty-dollar tip. While walking back across the river he thought it over and once again decided that he had no meaningful comprehension of money. He had stayed in the Ritz once for several days in the early 1990s. It was the anniversary of Le Nouvel Observateur and everything was billed to the magazine. Allen Ginsberg was also a guest and called one morning to complain that two eggs were forty dollars on the room service breakfast menu. He told Allen that it was on the house and Allen had said, “I don’t like the idea,” and he agreed. “Me neither. Back home farm eggs are two bucks a dozen. I could be eating twenty dozen eggs at this price.” You simply ate the hotel eggs and regretted it in the name of the poor.

He was brought up in modest circumstances but his wife’s parents were well off if not wealthy. His wife kept a sharp eye on their budget. She said she didn’t “connect” with his newfound wealth when the screenplay money started rolling in. She continued on in her usual modest way though he paid fifteen grand for a horse she had been wanting that reminded her of Black Beauty . He had no particular interest in horses but this one was gorgeous and would follow him and the dog as they walked in the pasture. Now he often walked Marjorie, the only piglet left. She was slow because she sniffed at everything like a bird dog. One day she flushed a covey of Hungarian grouse and he liked the idea that Marjorie would work as a bird dog.

His wife kept warning him that his newfound prosperity couldn’t last forever and that he should save more of it. He ignored her. In truth spending a lot of money put him off balance though it didn’t quite sound an alarm. He was transparently a financial nitwit. He spent way more than sensible redecorating the house, spent lavishly on meals in New York and LA, spent on cars, hotels, pointless travel, fishing in Mexico and Costa Rica. When the air cleared, though it was still fuzzy, he figured he had loaned out more than $250,000 and had got only the two thousand back from the Indians. This only served to make him sensitive to the fact that he was stupider than he thought.

The real hurt, though, came when he understood that he was overlooking his true work, poems and novels, to make more money writing screenplays. This happened only twice after he quit teaching for good, and he immediately wrote harder, ten hours a day, seven days a week. Naturally he got tired and the only thing that saved him was taking his bird dog and some groceries up to a reasonably remote cabin he had bought on his splurge near the harbor town of Grand Marais in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The cabin drew him back to his youth when he was seven and his father and two uncles built a cabin on a lake for a thousand dollars in used lumber, a wonderful cabin only twenty miles from Reed City where his father worked as a county agricultural agent. His family lived there all summer long. Sometimes he rode to work with his father in order to make a little money weeding gardens, mowing lawns, washing cars. On a good day he could make two or three dollars. He would come home and swim, eat some dinner, and go fishing for bass in the evening. On good days when he didn’t work in town he would catch a pile of bluegills his family loved to eat. This was how he was slowly led to his life as a passionate fly fisherman. It’s not just catching fish but the delicacy and grace with which you catch them. Not big hooks, hurtful to the fish, but tiny flies with tiny hooks.

He wondered now if there was a short course on money. The economics course he’d taken in college was now a burned-out lightbulb and all that he could recall was the course made actual money seem abstract. It wasn’t. It was either in your pocket or not in your pocket. Years ago when he first started getting bigger money he got some local accountants and lawyers involved in his problems including taxes. They were very smart men but overly admired his earning power. This was comic. He traveled frequently to LA and New York to work on screenplays and stayed in high-rent hotels. In the mornings outside his door there were always copies of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal . The latter was new to him and could have been in Latin. He kept at it and memorized enough financial gibberish that the hometown accountants presumed he was money smart not understanding that there was no background of knowledge to what he said or noting that the balance sheet made it clear he was guilty of slippery malfeasance. For instance, he hadn’t filed a tax return for a decade and when they got him out of that one the fines were several thousand dollars. He went merrily on trying to ignore his leaden heart and feet. He could now afford all of the cocaine and best booze extant, a surefire combination for causing depression. The depressions were horrid indeed and the only way he could handle them was poetry and walking them off in the uninhabited paths of the Upper Peninsula. He could walk days on end without seeing a single person until he returned to Grand Marais and the saloon. His bird dogs Sand, Tess, and Rose loved it and so did he except for the exhaustion.