Parody, however inept, may be a form of high compliment.

If Jim Harrison, novelist and poet, was writing a review of his own trilogy of novellas, it might go something like this:

You see me here, but you don’t see me. How could you? This is the question that haunted Dehnore Farris throughout his writings, rising like a trout in his comparative study of Hollywood actors and night crawlers, which he composed one summer in his backwoods cabin in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, alternatively writing, eating massive quantities of chicken primavera, and coupling with his Haitian mistress. I also live and write in Upper Michigan. I recently read Farris while eating deer steaks and glazed fruit cooked by a Chippewa woman half my age. I had chased the deer down on foot, despite the fact that I am past mid-century and an equal number of pounds overweight, and after I had written five poems and walked 47 miles to use the library in the village, the woman and I rode together like bandits in the saddle of love. Then she fell asleep, and I stared out the window at the woods and at my reflection in the glass, pondering the sad decay of middle age. My literary success depresses me, and I seek out mistresses and exotic foods to turn myself from despair. While eating a midnight snack of oxtails in garlic, the thought suddenly came to me to write another trilogy of stories. My last attempt - Legends of the Fall - had made me a kind of legend, and so I decided to revisit those old hunting grounds.

After flying to Mexico City to embrace a Panamanian drug addict whose kisses met my lips like burnt roses, and after a brief side trip to Paris for some culinary delights involving oysters, I returned to my cabin ready to write my novellas. My mistress had abandoned me, leaving a scribbled note that doesn’t bear repeating in a family newspaper, and so I knew that with the oysters, the memories, and the loneliness, I could write a good book. Papa Hemingway might pat me on the head if he were alive, though he wouldn’t approve of the central characters in my current stories, aging and doubt-racked men whose interior life somehow brings to mind PeeWee Herman with chest hair. My heroes in The Beast God Forgot to Invent eat oysters, wild turkey, and bollito misto, a rather involved Tuscan multiple-meat dish, and they swear a lot, and drink expensive wine, sweat, and gloomily make love to women less than half their age, and every once in a while they make another half million dollars, or hit someone, or ponder the meaning of meaning.

Take the hero of my last story of the book, the story called “I Forgot To Go To Spain.” He’s earning megabucks writing biographies to be sold in airports, he’s got a mistress stashed in Paris, he tries to hook up with his first wife (they were married nine days), and he is suffering a bigger case of angst than the entire intellectual community of the Left Bank in the 1950s. He winds up in Paris, in fact, eating a meal of leeks and Bismarck herring before going into a jazz club on the Rue St. Jacques. He thinks: Modern jazz is lonely and strident, perfect for a middle-aged white male who has cut the tethers with which he has tied himself

My other two novellas also feature untethered men of varying ages and in varying stages of insanity. In The Beast God Forgot To Invent, Norman Arnz is a semi-retired commercial real estate broker and rare-book dealer whom I compare to Joe, a sort of crazed nature boy who drowns one day in Lake Superior. In Westward Ho, Brown Dog is a Native American who goes from Michigan to Los Angeles to track after a friend who stole his bearskin. He eats exotic foods, drives flashy cars, and tumbles beautiful women but is happiest when he returns home to eat spam sandwiches and to slap trees in the forest.

When I finish the novellas, I am naturally disgusted with myself and my verbal cowpies. I open the door, blink at the sunlight, then drain another case of beer. After crushing the last can, I leave the cabin and hike out into the woods toward the village to see if I can find a mistress who has a doctorate in 20th century Latin literature, who can cook a calf’s head roasted with garlic, who can swear affectionately, and who doesn’t mind the ambling ruminations of smelly older men.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News