Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

The toughest thing about his pig adventures coming mostly to an end was that he felt more obligated to be strictly a writer again. He searched through his messy desk ceaselessly looking for some notes for the presold novel. He was usually uncanny at remembering details but his idea had come along strangely in a troublesome dream at three thirty in the morning and retained a dreamy elusiveness. He had awoken with a jolt, had a drink from a pint on his desk, coughed convulsively, then dreamed of three cantankerous families that were neighbors down an imagined but very vivid gravel road. Their parked cars and pickups in the landscape were muddy and junky with evidence of many minor collisions. There was one very large barn between them and across the road a very large hay crop recently baled. In the dream all the people in the three narrow houses had a passing resemblance which indicated to him that the families were all related. The dream came with the conviction that they were all evil people except the children who continued being children in the malevolent atmosphere. All of them, especially the men, were profound boozeheads fueled by endless gallons of cheap vodka.

He liked the idea of evil rural families because the whole rural literary tradition in America had become buried in honeysuckle and lilacs, hardworking and noble yokels. He had lived all of his life in the country and knew that this was hopeless bullshit. It wasn’t even fair to the rural people because it denied them their humanity making them comic book cutouts. It was the clear interface of ideology with fiction. Anyway, the whole idea had now dissipated.

He could always call his editor and ask for a copy of his original proposal but the idea was far too embarrassing because he had lied in his sales pitch and claimed to have written “a hundred pages” of notes for this new idea. The trouble with lying was how frequently you had to cover up for it. Sometimes you had to live the lie to prevent discovery that you had told it in the first place. What saved him was late that night he had yet another brief minstrel nightmare. His parents were holding him tightly because he was ill and shivering, but he had a miniature gun in his coat and was carefully shooting all the performers who would howl and drop to their knees with this acute form of a bee sting in the face. This image saved him because he dimly recalled his three farm families were severely alcoholic gun nuts imperiling his hero who lived downriver from them in his trout fishing cabin. Eureka! With guns and booze how could he fail? He had pretty much canceled the idea of France so harsh was the idea of writing the novel after having lost the story, so he was thrilled when his dream success revived it. The idea of him going to France to write had been much talked about for decades. He couldn’t recall who had done the talking but the idea was that looking back at America from France you would see the home place much more lucidly. He could put it off no longer and booked the tickets. Of course the girl who brought him coffee every morning in his inexpensive hotel would be seduced by him within a day or two. How could she resist? A bold American artist getting older but still in the arena.

In the past if he suffered a literary slight he reminded himself that Melville had been forgotten for more than thirty years. Writing like nature was full of unfairness. Hail killed the baby warblers in their nest. Wars were obviously part of nature and killed millions. What struck him about reading Anne Frank was not what everyone knew, that she had died like millions of her relatives, but that she was obviously destined to become a grand writer. The mortality of songbirds hitting windows drove him crazy. You had a lovely life ahead of you and then you struck a window and it was over. The death of his sister at nineteen in an auto crash with his father was still unacceptable fifty years later. It had created its own nodule of permanent rage at the roots of his consciousness. It was ultimately the cause of his becoming a writer. If this can happen to those you love you may as well follow your heart’s wishes in your time on earth. He found it quite comic when he realized that he had never won an award that he had ever heard of before winning it. “Here today, gone tomorrow,” as people said. Ambition grated while humility soothed. This was quite different from ambition for the work itself. All he would allow himself was the wish that his books stay in print. The aim was that when he was walking Mary and Marjorie in the morning he was simply walking a dog and a pig on a lovely morning not brooding about what a reviewer in New York had done to him. Once when he was washing popcorn butter off his hands in a movie theater bathroom there was a dapper young man next to him who was combing his complicated hair with amazing wrist flicks. He had dozens of waves and curls and smiled at himself in the mirror as he did it. He remembered thinking at the time that the guy was fucked for life. He might have a girlfriend who liked or loved his hair but not as much as he himself did. After the movie he saw the guy with a rather homely girl which made sense in that he wouldn’t want to suffer by comparison.

His month in France was a joy to the point that he later wondered why he came home. In every respect it was a feast for his senses and his naturally quizzical impulses. He had had a year of the French language but remembered next to nothing though a little seeped in from the past. It didn’t seem to matter because all the French, at least in Paris, seemed to have enough English to bail him out of his minimal difficulties. An artist friend had told him about a wonderful room in a little hotel on Rue Vaneau which was near Rue de Sèvres and Rue de Babylone and only a couple of blocks from the Invalides, a handy landmark. There were small city maps free at the hotel desk and he was never without one. He got it out so frequently that it only lasted a few days before it would turn into soft pulp. He got into navigational trouble one day when he forgot his reading glasses and the map became a blur. He finally asked an old lady in a small park who gave him directions in clear English. They spoke a few moments and out came that she had been married to a soldier from Chicago. She lived with him there until the 1960s when he died and she moved home. She said she was tough because her parents were Basques. He didn’t know what that meant but asked around and later found out. She took his shoulders and aimed him north toward the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper on Montparnasse. From then on he would use the building as a beacon when he was confused. It was easy to take the proper right turn well before he reached the skyscraper.

Paris seemed to agree with his notion of glimpses. He walked hundreds of streets in the first two weeks until he got bad shin splints from walking on cement which his legs were unused to. He had to take a few days off, mostly made up of hot baths. He bought a pair of thick soft-soled shoes at Bon Marché and consequently discovered the immense food court on that floor. That helped. He skipped restaurants for a while. In the morning he’d buy the Tribune, have coffee, and then go into the food court, buy bread, a few cheeses out of the hundred they had, some pâté, salmon, and several kinds of herring. He vowed he would someday live nearby and cook in his own apartment out of this marvelous and expensive store. They had a big wine department but he preferred the small wine store across the street where he had gotten to know a friendly clerk. One day he bought on impulse a large double magnum of Mouton Rothschild but couldn’t figure out what to do with such a large bottle so he took it to a dinner at his publisher’s home who doubtless thought “Crazy American” and hid it from his current guests with glee. “A wine for the proper occasion,” he said.