Well, Jim Harrison died last weekend. It’s the sort of news where you hear it and your first thought is something like Goddamn and your second is Goddamn, surprised it took this long. He was 78, but he crammed at least double that in. You can get a taste of his exuberance in this profile we ran of him ten years ago.
In the office here, I sit next to a poet, who reminded me on Monday when we were talking about Harrison’s death that Harrison was a poet, which he was, but he was also, more importantly, a crazy-faced, bug-eyed genius lunatic whose whole existence, it seemed, was some kind of sloppy running, flying, bellyflop into a vat of caviar and foie gras, a giant spoon in one hand and a damaged volume of Rimbaud in the other. He was famous, of course, for his appetites: there was nothing he wouldn’t eat or drink or (probably) shoot and then cook, or maybe just eat raw.
Somewhere between shooting and eating a lot of grouse and other game meat, he wrote some brilliant novels, and a lot of stories and novellas, a form he excelled at. Burly narratives, super disciplined and yet shaggy and rangy, drenched in experience and rarely without with some compressed rhapsodizing about nature. He always left you full but wanting more.
And so it was his 2006 novel, Returning to Earth, that creeped into mind first: it’s an excellent, crushing, arguably underrated novel about a 45-year-old guy dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s tremendously, tremendously sad. Which is kind of the anti-Harrison, who was all about life, and living, and underlining it and shooting stuff.
But this week I went back to The Raw and the Cooked, a collection of his writings about food and eating and drinking and over-indulging in food and drink. A great piece in there is his essay about gout, which you’ll not be surprised to hear he suffered from. Comprised as it is of mostly pieces that appeared in magazines, you can dip in and out of the book with a ten-minute commitment here and there. It’s great. Read it and then do as Harrison would have done if he had a job-job: sneak out of the office for two-martini-plus-a-bottle-of-Bordeaux lunch, somewhere French. And let me know where you’re going: I’ll meet you there.
