The Summer He Didn’t Die, a trilogy of novellas by Jim Harrison

By Allen M. Jones, 8-30-05

"To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say."
Jim Harrison
The Shape of the Journey

If indeed a writer's books arise from his life, if fiction is a product of experience, then Jim Harrison’s career should be held up as some sort of paradigm. Here's how you write great books: You eat and cook fine meals, you catch fish from a series of leaking boats, you flush grouse, train bird dogs, drink hard, love well. To read through Harrison's fiction, poetry and essays is to stand witness both to the building of a good life and the coincidental unfurling of an intellect. From his first novel, Wolf, to the now-famous Legends of the Fall, from the brilliant Dalva to his masterpiece, The Road Home (this book’s character John Wesley Northridge, in his mix of frailty and strength, regret and hubris, is surely on the shortlist of America’s greatest literary creations) most of Harrison's work tends to finally be about the author himself. This ain't a bad thing. Given the variety of Harrison's cultural referents, his wide-ranging curiosity (Kierkegaard to Keats), the subject makes for a complex and important edifice of art. His newest trilogy of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, slips comfortably into this impressive body of work.

The title novella is a continuation of the story of Brown Dog, an Ojibwa orphan from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A lover of hefty women and cold weather, a guy suspicious of modern institutions and pretensions, it’s perhaps not unfair to say that BD is Harrison’s fictional counterpart, a cranky alter ego, a one-eyed glimpse back at a fragmented mirror. In previous installments, we’ve seen BD dredge up an Indian chief from the bottom of Lake Superior; we’ve watched as, out of his element, he’s chased through LA after a stolen bearskin. And now, plagued by toothaches and an inconsistently oversexed dentist, we see him try to defend his fetal-alcohol afflicted stepdaughter from the heartless machinery of the state. When he has the time, he diverts himself by skirt-chasing after a social worker friend whose sexual orientation makes her unavailable. BD is a puzzled innocent, doing his best to follow his "weenie" through a modern world that has largely forgotten the ancient and essential virtues of kindness, kinship and compassion. Throw in some digressions into cooking, a few odes to garlic, some brook trout for the frying pan, and you’ve got a character that feels like an old friend. Brown Dog could spend a hundred pages flipping through magazines in a waiting room, I’d still want to read about it.

The second novella, Republican Wives (especially when read immediately after BD), is a harder dose to take. Brown Dog, no matter that he’s ruled by his considerable appetites, regardless of his weaknesses, never fails to be kind; he is never inconsiderate to anyone deserving of consideration. To read the Wives, however, is to spend time with a horse of a dramatically different color. Thematically preoccupied with class structure and greed, jealousy and social climbing, Republican Wives seems as much as anything else to be a study in bad behavior. Three college friends on the cusp of middle age (the wives ) each narrate, in turn, their seductions and subsequent betrayals by an egocentric poet, a “pervert, con man, thief, sadist, wicked little boy, Svengali, Rasputin, what Buckminster Fuller called ‘a high-energy construct,’ a cad, a gigolo, and according to some critics, a supremely talented writer." The plot, in a nutshell, revolves around the attempted murder of this “high-energy construct" by one of the wives, the immediate, unconditional support from the other two, and the unwinding of various snarls based on their mutual histories. It’s a meditation on the virtues of revenge (some people really do deserve what they get), and the supporting value of friendship (when that revenge comes back to bite you in the ass). Apart from the nearly unredemptive villain, Daryl, the only other male characters are the husbands, who are all rather monochromatic. They are the staid and unimaginative breadwinners, foils to their wives’ ruminations on the world. But these ruminations are each in their own way delightful, and provide the final value of the story.

Safe to say, the strongest piece in The Summer He Didn’t Die is the final novella, Tracking. An autobiographical fiction, a kind of addendum to Harrison’s memoir (in an opaque afterword, Harrison explains, “after it [Off to the Side] was published I began to question how much of the true texture of life it contained."), Tracking is a succinct, third-person, eighty-seven page compression of the author's life. As a character study, it’s mightily compelling. As a piece of fiction, it’s vaguely suspicious (coming after two novellas, what after all can we believe). As a literary exercise, it’s start-to-finish fascinating. Harrison is his own “he," the huffy Henry and Mr. Bones, the relentless observer to the unspooling of his own life. Such a compelling question, how would you describe yourself to an interested reader? In Harrison’s case, he ends up dwelling on the endless push and pull between his libido and intellect, between his “lifelong effort to ‘culture’" himself with the “best of world literature and art..." and the distant agriculturally-grounded provinces of his childhood. He writes:

“When you helped clean a shot deer the placement of the organs reminded you of the mannequin with movable parts in biology class. There was a deep sense of inferiority built into coming from such a background. Byron and Shelley were high-class by birth but he favored the work of humble Keats...The outside-inside dialect was natural if uncomfortable. You could read your Keats or Kierkegaard, then Friday night after the football game, bone weary and exhausted, you could have a hamburger, chocolate malted, and French fries with your cheerleader girlfriend and then neck until your dick was sore and red and your testicles were a toothache."

In Tracking, Harrison has become his own character. An admirable, snake-eating-tail move of semantics and solipsism, symbol and symbolizer -- subtle enough to make his heroes (Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Keats) stand up and be proud. “He went out on the slenderest limb, and for his use only, deciding these places were simply the soul’s best habitat, whatever the soul might be beyond a neural concentration of all the vaguely spiritual events of a life." From prairie to podium, here’s a self-portrait painted with strokes as fine as he’s painted anywhere.

And so, to the pantheon of canonical characters that have arisen from Harrison’s pen – Ludlow and Tristan, Dalva and Northridge, Brown Dog and Cochran – we can now place “Jim Harrison" himself. The life gives rise to the work, and the work, in reciprocation, gives narrative shape to the life.



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