Living large Jim Harrison’s wide open spaces BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	True North By Jim Harrison. Grove Press, 400 pages, $24.

In his memoir Off to the Side, which came out two years ago, Jim Harrison wrote about leaving his native Michigan for Montana. Although True North is a novel, it is also an elegy for the Michigan country in which Harrison spent more than 60 years and thus a continuation of his memoir by other means. Readers who know and value Harrison’s work and considerable achievement over 40 years will understand True North as a deeply personal book. He has named its narrator, David Burkett, after his younger brother and given Burkett his own youthful religious ardor. Burkett shares the history Harrison wrote about in his early poem "Sketch for a Job Application Blank:"

In ’51 during a revival I was saved:

I prayed on a cold register for hours

and woke up lame. I was baptized

by immersion in the tank at Williamston —

True North is an old-fashioned family chronicle, the sort of story Americans love to be told. Harrison’s career in its outline is also old-fashioned — or perhaps he has cared nothing for fashion. He began as a poet, wrote novels to support himself, and then screenplays, until he became a novelist and screenwriter while keeping his private accounts as a poet. (His hefty collected poems, published in 1998, are titled The Shape of the Journey.) Along the way, he became something of a celebrity, though more so in France — where he has been called the "Mozart of the Plains" — than in America. More about this later.

Harrison is a masculine writer, unabashedly so in his appetites and enthusiasms, but never macho. If he is at times adoring of and sentimental about his women characters, their edge is not dulled by sweetness. David’s sister Cynthia is a pistol, and Harrison’s love of women and sex, like his love of food, wine, and the natural world, is the love of a sensualist. "Now self is the first sacrament," he declared in "Sketch for a Job Application Blank," "who loves not the misery and taint/of the present tense is lost."

As True North unfolds toward its brutal climax, which will not be given away by me, we see the work of "misery and taint." This leaves Harrison’s characters not less but more human, one with their actions. David Burkett, who is the fourth David Burkett, descends from a line of American men who destroyed all they could of Michigan’s forest for their own gain. It’s a pure and simple story of American rapacity at the moral center of our manifest destiny. But not pure and simple for Burkett, youthful prig and volatile adult, who knowing the sins of his father makes it his business to uncover the sins of his father’s father and back. If the outcome of his quest feels inevitable, it does not feel morally right. It is another instance of William Carlos Williams’s "The pure products of America/go crazy," but Harrison implies that there is no true justice for the sort of crimes Burkett takes it on himself to avenge. Out of violence and the determined annihilation of nature and the human spirit only violence can come. American as Malcolm X pointing out after JFK’s assassination that the chickens had come home to roost.

Although True North gains momentum as it moves through the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s, it is not as direct as a compass needle. Like Harrison’s earlier The Road Home (1998) and Dalva (1988), this novel is ruminative if relentless, an agitated back-and-forth book, digressive, crammed with incident and reflection, replete. Yet it reminds me most of perhaps Harrison’s best-known fiction, Legends of the Fall (1979), a tale of epic adventure compressed into a novella. The similarity between the books is in their driven young heroes and a powerful sense of a world lost. Not an Eden, not imagined, but a living world of fields, streams, and woods and a way of being in them gone.

Harrison’s reading tour for True North began auspiciously in Hailey, Idaho, the smallest American town with a significant American literary history. Hailey is where Ezra Pound was born and where Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Harrison descends from both writers. The clear images and Chinese terseness of his early poems show Pound’s influence. Although Harrison is often linked with Hemingway in book reviews, the relationship is both close and distant. Their roots in northern Michigan connect them, but if they share a love for the outdoors, blood sports, and food and drink, this is not something Harrison had to learn from Hemingway. Their attitude toward these pleasures, especially their refusal to deny them, is one American response to the "Work for the night is coming!" ethic the Puritans bequeathed us. In True North, David Burkett says in passing, "I didn’t care much for Hemingway. . . . I preferred Willa Cather and Faulkner." This sounds like Harrison speaking for himself. He has always refused Hemingway’s fine style. If his style can be as clean and clear as Cather’s, he writes with Faulkner’s voluble, untidy spilling forth. He has readers not because his prose is stylish but because it has personality and a compelling storyteller’s voice.

Forty years ago, over 25-cent draft beers at the old Harvard Gardens in Harvard Square, Harrison and I laughed at a critic’s description of a now forgotten book as "a great sprawling bitch of an American novel." In those days, I much admired Harrison, only five years my senior, for his poetry. He had direct access to his experience; he knew more about poetry than I did and wrote with a supple grace that was beyond me. He was also funny as hell, with the outsize character that still comes across in interviews. I didn’t imagine for a minute that he’d have the sort of career he has had, but I’m not surprised that he’s identified with his work. Hemingway was too, and Mailer and Mary McCarthy and, to fewer readers, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. In his way, Harrison has been a public man, and celebrity has followed. Although he has many political opinions, celebrity has not come through his public statements or, vivid as he is, through outrageous behavior reported in the media. Why then is he so known?

The answer, or the beginnings of one, may be found in his two books of essays, Just Before Dark (1991) and The Raw and the Cooked (2003). In his poetry and novels, there is a person behind the words, not an æsthetic or a strategy, but when I want to enjoy the company of the man I know, I go to his essays. Food is at their center, and as a food writer, Harrison is A.J. Liebling’s equal, only funnier. But the answer is not in Harrison’s subject; it is in his ongoing embrace throughout his work, his unembarrassed embrace, of what he cares about. The past 25 years has been a timid time in American writing, pinched and cramped by ideology and theory, a time of rules and warnings. Harrison abides by none of these, and he is not afraid to have readers. Indeed, he courts them. Readers may like his work because he honors their interest without lecturing or pandering to them. It also must be that, as the French note, he writes about huge American spaces in an intimate way.

True North implicitly, if indirectly, acknowledges Harrison’s personal motives for moving from Michigan while dramatizing a conflict at the heart of America’s character. We are caught between the self, fearful of giving up our individuality, and some larger purpose that we think of as ours by some historical demand. We have large appetites, great fears, and temperaments prone to wildness. David Burkett’s forebears despoiled the wilderness that surrounded them, and David Burkett is bewildered. In an early poem, Harrison says, "Form is the woods." As I read True North, I could not get those words out of my mind.

Jim Harrison reads next Thursday, May 20, at 7:30 p.m. in the Newtonville Books series at the Attic, in the Union Street Bar, 107 Union Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.