Yooper Heaven: Tom Bissell on Jim Harrison

It's only fitting that at the end of a day of researching Michigan literature I would come across a profile of one of the great old men of Michigan lit by someone who makes as good a claim as anyone to be the great young man of same: Tom Bissell's piece on Jim Harrison in the October issue of Outside. As Mittenlit, where I found the link, said, Harrison is such a compelling character that a profile "almost writes itself," but I thought Bissell made as much of this gift as you might hope, with a half-dozen lines worth stopping and writing down. (Here's one: "His head looks as though it belongs on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate.") That Harrison's an old Upper Peninsula hunting friend of his father's also gives Bissell's impulse to look to him as a mentor an authentic background. And, toughest to pull off, there's a nicely underplayed moment late in the piece where he puts to work the lesson he had learned from Harrison earlier, about not claiming to know anything you don't:

The assumption of false authority is a ­use­ful writing trick, one I have used again and again, but maybe it’s also insidious. ­After all, it actually means something to know what things are called. You cannot share anything worth knowing unless you make it clear what you do not know. Harrison refuses to hide his research. If he reads a book to learn about something, the characters in his novels will invariably read the same book. It makes the stuff Harrison does know that much more striking.

By the end of the piece, Bissell spends a whole long paragraph just laying open his ignorance, asking Harrison about the trees, the bushes, the deer around his Montana home the way a four-year-old might and the way most grownups would be too prideful to do.

It's the sort of lesson someone, like me, embarking on a project to tell people about the best books to read about parts of the country he's never been to, e.g. the Upper Peninsula, would do well to keep in mind.

Comments

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Harrison's best UP novel is SUNDOG.

[Tom Nissley]

Have I already asked you that question, or did you read my mind? Thank you: that is the question of the week. (Other question of the week: which is the better auto-factory proletarian novel from the 30s: FOB Detroit or Conveyor?)

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Can't answer that, but on the Detroit front don't forget current poet laureate P. Levine; the best love song to the city I know, Middlesex; or No Big Deal by Mark Fidrych and Tom Clark. And on the UP: Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula by Richard Dorson. And Hemingway's great short stories. I'll stop now. For now.

[Tom Nissley]

The Bird! Great call. Never read that one, but I remember well his teammate's One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story.

Levine was on my radar, but What Work Is is all I know of him. Is that the way to go?

[LA NOR]

If you are still seeking definitive Detroit stuff, don't be shy about asking our friend Ned Blackhawk, who is as boosterish about his hometown as he is his SW Native Americans...