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"FacebookPinterest\n\nA warbling, guttural baritone comes percolating through the phone, \"It's Jim Harrison,\" he says. That voice\u2014sticky with the tar of untold quantities of smoke and weathered by adventures high, low and Hollywood\u2014has told some of the great American stories of the past half century. It bubbles across the connection only faintly at times but when Harrison gets animated it springs forth full of vigor and a rich accent of the Great Outdoors. Get him talking about that \"monster\" Fellini or John Huston, both late friends whom he greatly admired, and the author of Legends of the Fall (and roughly a trillion other books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry including the astounding new collection of novellas, The Farmer's Daughter) sputters into an avuncular cackle as well worn as The Old Santa Fe Trail. Get him talking about food and you've got a proper geyser on your hands.\n\n\u2014Chris Wallace\n\n\"I've always been intemperate in my affection for food,\" he says, trying, and failing, to keep a straight face. This ribald, self- professed \"roving gourmand,\" whose The Raw and the Cooked may be the best food writing since ol' Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, has supped with men as mighty as the Olympians, eaten as widely and wildly as you can imagine, and lived to tell about it. To wit: After one particularly strenuous bout with caviar and foie gras in Paris Harrison's table-mates Huston and Orson Welles simultaneously feigned heart attacks to get out of paying the several thousand dollar check. And while that hey day of Hollywood bad boys may be over, Harrison still finds good company with whom to dine. Molto forchette Mario Batali ventures out to visit the writer at least once a year for a three-day smorgasbord, and even airmails some supplies in advance. \"All this stuff starts coming about a week ahead, you know,\" Harrison says, marveling. \"Oysters, and this and that. And then he comes carrying the white truffles. I mean! And when I come to New York I go running around with Mario having, say, one dish at seven different restaurants. One time it was really hot outside and Mario suggested we descend to the new wine cellar at Babbo where it was 58 degrees and just had food delivered on the dumbwaiter, you know, and crawled out six hours later.\" Again the cackle.\n\nAnthony Bourdain, host of the wildly popular food-venture series \"No Reservations,\" recently filmed an entire episode in Montana, where Harrison has a home and spends 60 days of the year fishing for brook trout, as a paean to Harrison's words and tastes. \"He wanted me to take him hunting,\" Harrison says of Bourdain, \"but I told him it was impossible. The Times tried to film it once and my bird dog went off and sat under a tree with her back turned. I don't blame her, she can't deal with cameramen.\"\n\nAt home just North of the Mexican border in Arizona, the 72 year old is always working\u2014sometimes too much. After composing the title novella in his most recent collection, The Farmer's Daughter, Harrison had written himself into a kind of mania. \"I had sort of a difficult time, mentally. I couldn't go to the mailbox without making up a paragraph about going to the mailbox. I had to enforce on myself three months off. But then I started a new novella the other day. People forget there's this old Graham Greene technique: if you write a page and a half a day at the end of the year you have a novel.\"\n\nLike much of his recent work, The Farmer's Daughter is made up of sentences that feel at once hand hewn and as polished as river stones. He ascribes this to a kind of grip-it-and-rip-it approach. \"I don't feel tentative when I start to write. I've usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go I just let 'er fling, you know. I actually wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days.\"\n\nAs a student of spirituality Harrison has a facility with the timeless maxims of characters as disparate as the eccentric Zen monk Dgen and the Taoist Chuang-Tzu and can serve them at any time\u2014like, right now. \"If a butcher is really good at his craft he never needs to sharpen his knife,\" he says. \"He hits all the joints in the right places and never hits a bone, you know. You presume that if you've written for\n\n 50 years you might've learned how.\"\n\nA determined luddite, Harrison composes all of his work longhand and submits it to his assistant of 30 years who types it up for him to make changes. \"I'm not a computer literate person,\" he says with understated distaste. \"I don't touch those fucking things.\" Indeed, his atmospheric naturalism seems carved in cliff faces rather than digitized in pils.\n\nHarrison's best work, including recent entries into the canon The English Major and Returning to Earth, as well as classics The Woman Lit by Fireflies and Dalva, feels almost mythic, the narration full of the sangfroid and sardonic humor of an immortal observing humans at play. He reminds me that Ezra Pound called myths, \"news that remains news,\" and cites, \"Raymond Chandler, of all people, who said that most good novels are about regeneration.\" Describing his own tonal palette and process he says, \"You get your character in an impossibly awkward situation, sometimes tragically so, and then you see if they can somehow survive. Or maybe not.\"\n\nAs a child Harrison's left eye was damaged in an accident with a young playmate, and he has been sightless on that side ever since. He lost his father and sister in a car accident when he was 21, so perhaps it is unsurprising that death and danger figure prominently in his work, that the thematic core of his oeuvre is that eternal cosmic dance, the struggle between menace and vulnerability, between danger and innocence. For Harrison that danger is without, external\u2014capital-N Nature, in the shape of a lustful man, a raging bear or a cruel canyon slide. But the innocence too\n\n is nature, be it a young girl (no matter how literate or badass, as in the case of Sarah, protagonist of The Farmer's Daughter), an unsuspecting elk or a pillaged eco-system.\n\n\"You can't help but accept the fact\u2014the Buddhist thing\u2014that life is full of suffering and impermanence,\" he says, explaining. \"Sometimes you give it manifold reality, like diseases, that start in the creature world\u2014that's the operating metaphor of (the last novella in The Farmer's Daughter) The Games of Night, though people haven't exactly picked up on it yet.\"\n\nWhen I ask how he has such a deft ability to write about sex he says, \"That's our behavior, isn't it?\"\n\nHarrison's parents were \"library people, always looking around for something to read,\" and when he discovered Keats at the age of 13 he knew he'd found his love, and, as it turns out, his life's path. \"I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And 'literary artist'\u2014poet and novelist\u2014is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.\" As soon as he'd been summoned, Harrison took a solemn vow, like a monk joining a holy order, to follow his path whether it led to him to poverty or Pleasantville.\n\n\"I've failed,\" he says. \"Of course! Over and over and over. I failed as a screenwriter\u2014I just wasn't very good at it. The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling. If you stray from your path you become miserable. If you don't stray from your path you've succeeded.\"\n\nAs it turns out failure is not among Harrison's fears. Rather, what he fears are \"grizzly bears in [his Montana] neighborhood, rattlesnakes in the yard\u2014I've shot a couple of dozen. In Arizona it's finding a dead migrant on a walk\u2014many are found. In both places, I fear the financial community.\"\n\nThere is a fresh coat of snow on the ground and Harrison is taking a break from hunting. \"I don't do mammals anymore (though I sure do eat 'em)\u2014just the dog work. I'm addicted to doves. I went out about 30 times this year to get enough of 'em to last a couple of months. I suppose as you get older you lose your taste to kill. You start sensing your own mortality and think, why rush somebody else?\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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