The death at 78 of writer Jim Harrison has revved up the outboard motor of Key-West-in-the-Seventies lore that substantial numbers of American men of a Walter Mitty bent have been yanking on for 40 years to Jimmy Buffett’s furniture music. Harrison and his more talented but more bourgeois friend, Tom McGuane, produced some very entertaining books when they were young and then a lot of self-parody after it became clear that deeper waters were not navigable. Quite a few old tropes about women and gays are now cringe relics of what used to pass through the best publishing houses like butter. Contrary to their reputations–all those professional portrait photos–they were not Sixties indigenes (too old by ten years, no politics whatsoever), but culturally closer to Steve McQueen with longer hair and babylonic binges, hound-dogging the sexual revolution. No one in their coterie was remotely a hippie (and that includes, by the time they knew him, Richard Brautigan). The women who supported them early on went unacknowledged as lifebuoys or even as legal mates, but what the hell. This, at least, they shared with Hemingway–you have to dig into the biographies to learn that Hadley Richardson had a trust fund and Pauline Pfeiffer’s uncle bought him that villa on Whitehead Street. The younger writers and editors who flocked to their cabin doors in Montana and other outbacks had nowhere else to go for heroes of art except MFA faculties, which largely comprise a national cold storage for housebroken literati. Harrison was way not that. He saw from the start that they would forgive him, even celebrate him, for acting like a prick as long as he could cite Rimbaud. As he got old and physically grotesque, resembling a Japanese cholera demon, wracked by maladies attributable to alcohol, nicotine, and his pie-eating-champion appetite, he became far more of a character than an author, a kind of Pirandello shipwreck spectacle, though those editors continued to publish him right up to the end. Knowing him was the closest they would ever get to self-immolation on the altar of Apollo, which remains a curious ideal. So here’s to Jim, subtropical Lune Pig, and here’s to Tom (still kicking!), the once southernmost captain of Cayo Hueso berserkos, and here’s to whoever else is left from Club Mandible. Time it was. But don’t try this at home, kids.
