DEVOURING TIME

A biography of Jim Harrison, the writer’s writer.

“It’s a long road from a childhood in rural Michigan to being the sort of man who gets invited to a thirty-seven-course lunch.” So wrote Jim Harrison, who, late in a long and not always successful career, talked his way into an assignment—his first—with the New Yorker about that storied meal, one that cost more than a midsize sedan. Harrison was a fireplug with the strength of a linebacker, a man of the country who came to enjoy the blandishments of the metropolis without ever wanting to live there. Goddard, his first biographer, proceeds along a predictable path: youth, the garret days, the halcyon days, the long decline. However conventional the structure, Goddard does a good job of connecting long-standing themes in Harrison’s life and work with his earliest years. Perhaps best known to magazine readers in the 1980s as a trencherman, for example, Harrison, by Goddard’s account, grew up in a family that appreciated good food, and the fresher and wilder the better. Harrison committed to being a poet when he was a junior in high school, and he lived up to it; his last act in life was to write a poem, and Goddard notes at the outset that Harrison was definitively “a hard-living, hard-drinking outdoorsman who crafted exquisite poetry.” There are plenty of not-suitable-for-work episodes here, mostly when Harrison had enough money for a diet of cocaine and Canadian Club, but Goddard is also nicely sensitive to Harrison’s many virtues as a thoughtful, even sophisticated writer. Readers will better appreciate many aspects of Harrison’s work after reading Goddard’s sturdy biography, as well as Harrison’s constant devotion to his craft—or, as he told Anthony Bourdain, to being “completely tenacious and write in disregard for every outside circumstance that there is.”

Without the spark of Harrison’s own autobiographical pieces, but a reasonably complete portrait of a complex man.