A World of Falling Skies

Since I started posting reviews of books on the climate crisis, there have been significant additions--so many I won't even attempt to get to all of them.  However, there are a few I've written about elsewhere that I want to add to the collection on this site. Apocalyptic Planet, published in 2012, in some ways remains definitive for me, so the collection here would be incomplete without it.

For me, reading Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth by Craig Childs felt like the end of a sequence of books I've read (and often written about) over the past decade or so--books specifically about the climate crisis.

The pre-history of this sequence begins in the late 1980s, when several very hot summers in the eastern US coincided with the first extended revelations of what were then called the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming.  Bill McKibben claims to have written the first book on the subject in The End of Nature, but there were others at about that time, as well as After the Warming, James Burke's excellent television treatment (which included describing history that had been determined by climate, then a novel idea but now much more accepted.)  Science writer Jonathan Weiner devoted several chapters of his 1990 book The Next One Hundred Years to global heating research to that point, and its likely dramatic effect on the future.

After writing Earth in the Balance in 1992, then running for President without much mentioning these issues in 2000, Al Gore gave the climate crisis its highest profile to that point in 2006 with his film and book, An Inconvenient Truth.  Unfortunately, those needing political cover to oppose efforts to address the climate crisis so as to please fossil fuel billionaire donors, found it in a former Democratic presidential candidate--especially hated since they all knew he'd actually been elected.

 But for my purposes here, I note An Inconvenient Truth as representing other books and articles of the period, in that they made the substantial case for global heating caused by carbon pollution, and warned of future consequences.  Gore in particular talked about how there was still time to "solve" the climate crisis.  How do you solve a crisis?  You don't--you address a crisis, you solve a problem--but it did convey the idea that action now could mean there would be no climate crisis.

Other works generally followed this line.  Then came Forecast by Stephan Faris, in which the author reported on consequences already happening.  The bigger ones were far away (Darfur, where climate caused scarcity that fed warfare), South Asia, South America and the good news for some/bad news for others of Arctic warming.  More subtle effects felt in the US included changes in the California wine industry as the best climate for grapes was moving northward.

 Faris' book was largely ignored, however.  The idea of present consequences didn't follow either the rabid right line (move along, nothing will ever happen here) or the left line (we still have time to pass cap & trade or a carbon tax and solve this.)

  The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James Lovelock (2009) was not the first to say it is basically too late, but Lovelock (co-originator of the Gaia theory) was both revered and considered a bit radical by environmentalists.  Bill McKibben gave this book a respectful review but found fault with main conclusions.  Lovelock wrote that perhaps only 200 million people on the entire planet would survive the climate crisis and related phenomena, all living in polar regions. There wasn't sufficient evidence for that, McKibben said.

But then something happened.  Scientific observations--particularly of polar melting--were showing consequences not predicted to happen for decades under worst case scenarios for global heating.  The change in tone was immediate.  For me the first and still most powerful was David Orr in Down to the Wire (2009.)  The evidence that global heating was causing grave consequences--and due to lag times in effects, would continue into the near future--became a guardedly accepted premise, it seemed almost overnight.

  As Orr wrote, "The news about climate, oceans, species, and all of the collateral human consequences will get a great deal worse for a long time before it gets better.  The reasons for authentic hope are on a farther horizon, centuries ahead...The change in our perspective from the nearer to the longer term is, I think, the most difficult challenge we will face."

So no longer were we going to solve the climate crisis.  We were going to have to deal with its effects, while at the same time attacking its causes, not to save ourselves or even our grandchildren, but the ultimate future of human civilization and perhaps the human race. (Al Gore eventually joined in this view.)

 This presented two basic problems that are both intellectual and emotional.  One is: how do you work up the hope and resolve to attack and try to solve these problems when you'll never see the better outcome, but you will see things get worse?  The other--and perhaps emotionally the first--how do you deal with what's to come, that (somewhat depending on where you are) may look a lot like apocalypse?

Both of these became the grim and delicate subjects of such books as Bill McKibben's Eaarth (2010), the title indicating that the planet has already changed and won't change back, and the best we can do is "manage our descent."

Paul Gilding's The Great Disruption (2010), while suggesting that the climate crisis will mean "we'll tragically lose a few billion people," maintained that humanity will rise to the occasion and save itself from extinction, thus providing this book's rep as "optimistic."  In his third book on the climate crisis and related matters, James Gustave Speth mixed the same dire assumptions and hope with a plan in  America the Possible (2013.)

Mark Hertsgaard, who got onto the time lag consequences early, wrote clearly on the two time frames and what they mean in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011.) Since then, the news of effects has been--as Orr predicted--increasingly bad.  Though the far future looks a little better, with the rise of clean energy and new carbon regulations (both fostered by the Obama administration), and with hopes for a meaningful global treaty later this year, we still must deal with those two basic problems, conceptually and emotionally.

That all leads to Apocalyptic Planet (published in hardcover in 2012, and in paperback in 2013.)  Dealing emotionally with the apocalyptic possibilities is an ongoing process, with lots of changes in perspective and feeling.

 What Craig Childs did was to visit places where apocalypse is visible in various ways: where climate crisis consequences are visible and tangible and ongoing, and to extreme places where apocalypse already happened, perhaps a very long time ago, and in a sense is still happening.  Although I discovered this book late, it also took me a long time to read it all.  I could only handle so much apocalypse at a time.

Childs begins in the desert and moves on to the glaciers.  It's clear from these first two chapters that his writing is vivid, economical and eloquent.  He describes his own single set of experiences and those of companions in these extreme landscapes.

 The combination of beauty and fear in these places produces a complex awe.  As his party of documentary filmmakers finds one astonishingly fast-melting glacier after another, several couples find crevices in the ice where they have sex.

 These places are indicators of apocalypse. The extreme and alien landscape of the Mexican desert is inexorably expanding into Arizona, as drought deepens and consolidates.  Scientists in his party are astounded by the speed with which the glaciers they observe can melt and drain away--feelings echoed more recently in statements about melting in Antarctica.

 He goes to Alaska with his intrepid mother to look at consequences of sea level rise. He returns to his birthplace of Arizona to explore the rise and fall of civilizations, where he talks with an archeologist.  "As dark came on, Wright and I talked about how civilizations tend to fall, common themes you see throughout time: environmental decay, failure of top-heavy infrastructure, resource depletion, loss of social egalitarianism, disease, conflict." He asked Wright what such an apocalypse would look like.  It would start out looking like Phoenix today, with decay beginning at the edges.  Apocalypse can be a slow process in human time.

 Childs grapples with the twin sense that apocalypse simply happens over and over, and every civilization that has risen so far has fallen, but that once anticipated some of these fates may be avoidable. Or apocalypse can happen relatively quickly.  In Greenland he discusses with a climate scientist the possibilities of rapid climate change.  It's happened before, without human help--and this is one of this book's contributions: it deals in different time frames, including a multi-billion year perspective.

A major figure in this long Greenland chapter is Koni Steffans, an European climate expert whose research camp Childs is visiting.  From time to time, government officials and others visit the camp for updates.  "What he tells people who visit is not that the sky is falling but that we live in a world of falling skies and it is best not only to know your options but to make moves ensuring the worst does not happen." [p.176]

 Childs does not limit his explorations to consequences of the climate crisis.  He looks at tectonics in Tibet, volcanoes in Hawaii (a monster volcano eruption is probably the best candidate for near-instant, near-total apocalypse.) The Tibet chapter includes a daring ride down an uncharted river, a surprising release from the book's main tensions.

 But for me the scariest landscape he describes is a corn field in Iowa--genetically modified corn to resist predators is combined with chemical killers of all non-modified life.  The crops themselves are depleting the soil without regenerating it: they are killing the future they are feeding. This environment of deliberate industrialized death is the occasion for discussion of species extinction (the specific subject of Elizabeth Colbert's 2014 book The Sixth Extinction.)

 This somehow is the most emotionally powerful aspect of apocalypse, perhaps because there is nothing of awe and terror in it.  It is indirect but conscious destruction, invisible and hollow.  A scientist points out that individual animals of species about to disappear are mostly not ill or weak.  Their environment, their breeding grounds, makes following generations smaller and then impossible.  So one day they are just not there anymore.

 Childs and his companion spend days and nights in these corn fields, searching for any life at all--insects, birds, grass.  They find little, but the little they do find is a source of some hope.

 Time scales and the constituents of apocalypse, including the climate crisis, come together in the final chapter, as Childs searches out the limits of life in the severest desert he could find, in South America.  He looks beyond what we define as the living to find the life of the planet.  "The earth is a seed planting itself over and over."

 There is no easy solace, or easy despair.  This book expands the usual view of the Earth, in time and space, in levels and variety.  It becomes a little like contemplating the realities we suppress, of what happens over time in our own lives, in the inevitability of death and the mysteries of life changing and continuing.

 This book helps to provide a different perspective for thinking and feeling through future prospects as shaped by global heating.  But it doesn't simplify those thoughts and feelings into a philosophical complacency. Its strongest message is to experience fully what we are privileged to be part of in our own brief time on Earth, in all its dimensions.  It also supports hope as an operating principle, as a kind of responsibility that comes with being alive.  The responsibility is to contribute to a better future--even if that means a less awful future that it might otherwise be-- together with our responsibilities to people and communities and places in our present.  

Legacy of the Carnegie Libraries

The centennial celebration in 2004 of the Carnegie Library in Eureka, CA, transformed into the Morris Graves Museum of Art a few years earlier, was the occasion of these reflections on Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie libraries.  It wasn't published in this form, so here it is now, with a few more additions. 

 "There was such a passion in people's memories of that building," recalls Debbie Goodwin, who as Executive Director of the Humboldt Arts Council from 1997 to 2002, supervised the transformation of Eureka's Carnegie library on F Street into the Morris Graves Museum of Art. "Everyone just loved that building," Goodwin remembers. "That emotional tie was the common denominator."

 Such memories (including those concerning Ralph, the library ghost) are sure to be shared in the coming weeks, as the Humboldt Arts Council kicks off a Centennial Celebration for the Carnegie building, erected in 1904. Music by Gil Cline's trumpet quartet (including a trumpet fanfare composed for the event) and the Midnight Jazztet, plus birthday cake from Ramone's Bakery will highlight the Arts Alive! party at the Morris Graves on Saturday, October 2. Other events include docent-led tours of the Carnegie building, and an exhibit of Peter Palmquist's historical photographs.

 The Eureka library was one of 1,681 across America (with nearly 900 more in the British Isles and around the world) built with $56 million donated by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, mostly between the years 1889 to 1923. Carnegie generally paid only for construction, insisting that local communities pledge financial support to staff and maintain its library, and fill it with books. The libraries had to be open to the public free of charge.

 These two conditions helped spur the spread of free public libraries, which were relatively rare in the late nineteenth century. The idea that government should support such institutions was so new that many states had no laws enabling their towns and cities to fund their libraries. Pennsylvania, where Carnegie made his fortune, hastily passed such a law only when Pittsburgh found it couldn't meet Carnegie's conditions for the libraries he promised the city.

 Eureka was the first city in California to finance a library under this state's enabling legislation, passed in 1878. Carnegie provided $20,000.

 After the first few years, Carnegie delegated decision-making powers over the many applications to his secretary, James Bertram. A Scotsman like Carnegie, Bertram became known for his scrupulous attention to detail, and his sometimes scathing letters to petitioners. When the Eureka library asked for funds to expand, Bertram refused, citing the wasted space of a large rotunda, and the extravagance of the glass dome. (Now the rotunda is highly valued as a unique feature, and as a performance space.) Shortly after Eureka's was built, Carnegie and Bertram began insisting on more uniform design for subsequent libraries, which stressed functional spaces within a sober shell, a style that became known as Carnegie Classical. 

 Several other communities in the region received Carnegie libraries, and their current disposition reflects the various fates of these buildings across the country, as the library needs of many towns outgrew these facilities, or they became otherwise unsuitable. Built the same year as Eureka's, the Redding library was demolished in 1962. Ferndale's building, opened in 1910, remained a public library. The Carnegie in Ukiah (1914) became a private office. In Willitis (1915) it houses a cable TV office, and the Yreka building (1915) hosts the police department.

  Horatio Carnegie

So who was Andrew Carnegie, and why did he become the Johnny Appleseed of American public libraries? From modest though not dire circumstances in Scotland, Carnegie's family emigrated to America in 1848, when Andrew was 13 years old. 

His life became a living Horatio Alger story: in fact it could have been the template for those tales of a clever boy who with luck and pluck seizes a sudden opportunity to catch the favorable attention of a powerful elder. His virtues recognized and his talents nurtured, he begins his rapid rise to success, eventually leaving his mentor in the dust. Rich and famous, he marries the girl he admires, and rewards his mother's devotion with wealth and the adulation of her former neighbors, when they return in triumph to the place where they were poor.

 Andrew Carnegie did all that, and more. Proponents of such models usually fail to mention that such fortune necessarily falls on few. Carnegie's case is even more singular: as perspicacious and capable as he was, Carnegie was in exactly the right place at the right time to ride and guide the tide of American industrial expansion, eventually becoming by some measures the richest man in the world.

 He was even from the momentarily right ethnic group, favored by fellow Scotsmen in higher places.His first mentor, who took him to Washington to run the railroads for President Lincoln in the Civil War, was even named Scott. Young Andrew's first break was delivering telegrams to the important businessmen of Pittsburgh, then a frontier town rapidly becoming the financial gateway to the West. (Carnegie, who even as a young adult weighed less than 100 pounds, fancied himself a westerner. According to his autobiography, in his twenties he favored "great heavy boots, loose collar, and general roughness of attire [which]were then peculiar to the West, and in our circle considered manly.")

 From the telegraph office in nearby Greensburg, PA, he watched the railroad being built, and he found his immediate future in its expansion. (It's not known however whether he made the acquaintance of an employee of that office: Mrs. Stephen Foster. Her husband sometimes picked her up there after work.)

The railroad made rapid industrial growth practical, and almost everything Carnegie needed to build his empire, first in iron and then in steel---especially the coal, coke, and immigrant workforce-was available within fifty miles of his first home in America. He was a multimillionaire before the age of 30 and climaxed his business career at 66 by selling the assets that became the United States Steel Corporation.

 An industrial pioneer who succeeded by insisting on quality, investing in technology, tightly controlling all aspects of his business and keeping labor costs down, Carnegie then became the proponent of "scientific philanthropy." While believing that progress depends on the unfettered freedom of innovators to pursue riches, he also insisted that they had the responsibility to judiciously devote their wealth to the public good. The same principles and wisdom that guided the accumulation of their wealth should be applied to giving it away.

Carnegie Library in Schenley Plaza Pittsburgh. BK photo 2007

 But in practice, Carnegie's choices of beneficiaries can also be traced to revelatory experiences in his early life. In exchange for free telegraph service, delivery boys got free admission to the fledgling Pittsburgh Theatre, where young Andrew thrilled to performances of Shakespeare and became attracted to classical music and art. Hence, New York's Carnegie Hall, and the premiere arts institution in Pittsburgh, now known simply as The Carnegie (which in Pittsburgh as in Scotland is pronounced "CarNEGie,"), which also includes a natural history museum and a Carnegie Library, all situated a brisk walk from Carnegie Mellon University.  (It should  be explained that in those days as perhaps not in ours, aspiration to success meant not only attaining wealth but access to knowledge and the cultivation of taste and discernment.)

 Carnegie's passion for libraries can be traced to two events he notes in his autobiography: the importance to his self-education of books from the collection of a Pittsburgh gentleman who allowed local boys to borrow a book a week, and his first view of another prominent man's private library in Greensburg, which caused him to pledge: "Someday, I'll have a library." (Greensburg however never got a Carnegie library.  The beautiful Carnegie Library in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh is revered and used: among the many who haunted its stacks over the years were a number of consequential writers, including the great American playwright August Wilson.) 

 Seldom mentioned in chronicles of Carnegie's giving are the men and women who labored twelve-hour shifts in his mills and mines, the sources of his fortune. Their names adorn no bricks in a Carnegie library, but their descendants have often made use of the libraries their labor paid for, where their hopes could be nourished, their worlds expanded, and cherished childhood memories made. 

Paul Shepard: The Ecology of Maturity

Paul Shepard. photo courtesy of Florence Shepard.

Paul Shepard, a visionary pioneer of ecology, died in 1996.  We exchanged letters in the last year or so of his life.  Casey Walker, editor of the Wild Duck Review, put together a special issue on Shepard in 1997.   Shepard's widow, Florence Rose Krall Shepard, suggested I might contribute an article.  (In addition to editing Paul's last manscripts, she is the author of two books, Ecotone and more recently Sometimes Creek: A Wyoming Memoir.)

On a visit to Arcata, Casey and Jack Turner, author of the excellent book The Abstract Wild, had coffee with me at Los Bagels.  Casey then invited me to write the article I described.  Titled "The Ecology of Maturity" it appeared in the Wild Duck Review special issue along with contributions by Florence Shepard, Stephen Kellert, C.L. Rawlins, Barbara Ras, Barbara Dean, Dolores LaChapelle, Steve Chase and Joseph Meeker, and Gary Snyder. 

 Several of these articles, plus biographical information appear on the Paul Shepard site that Casey set up.  With Florence Shepard, I set up an earlier site that no longer exists, although I will probably build a new one.  I'm also beginning a series of Shepard quotes at my Dreaming Up Daily blog.

Shepard's ideas only become more relevant as time goes on.  There were online and magazine articles in late 2017 about a new book that dared to suggest that the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture in human history might not have been the unalloyed triumph it is assumed to have been--that for example, hunter-gatherers were healthier.  Shepard wrote this, and made a sophisticated case for it, at least 30 years before.  

Similarly, Edward O. Wilson's 2016 book Half-Earth proposes setting aside half the planet to nature in order to stave off mass extinctions and preserve biodiversity.  Shepard made a similar proposal--showing how humanity could cluster comfortably on coastlines, leaving interiors wild--for basically the same reasons, in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game in 1973.   

Several books in the past decade or so have asserted the crucial role of nature in child development.  Shepard showed how profoundly true this is, 30 years ago in Nature And Madness.  Yet he is seldom credited.  

Shepard combined a breathtaking synthesis backing strong and profound analysis.  He essentially created the field of human ecology, and his work defines it.  Apparently few have been able to match both his breadth and depth, so he remains unique.  All the more reason to keep his works alive. 

In the years immediately following his death, Florence edited his final manuscripts for publication by Island Press. Around that time the University of Georgia Press also published new editions of several of his landmark books which had fallen out of print.



What follows is my original (and longer) version of "The Ecology of Maturity."

The Ecology of Maturity

“Most of my teachers I never met, nor am I sure, given my thesis, that they would assent heartily to my apprenticeship.” 
Paul Shepard, Preface to Nature and Madness.

Paul Shepard in the 1970s

 I missed the chance to be a student of Paul Shepard by less than a year. He left Knox College in the spring of 1964 after teaching there for a decade; I entered as a fresh-faced freshman the following fall. I’ve wondered what difference this lost opportunity made in my life, and thinking back on that year, it’s likely that the impact of his absence was immediate.

 Orientation week included a series of presentations and discussions on the theme of “Two Cultures” as defined by C.P. Snow and engaged further by literary critic F.R. Levis. One culture was science, the other humanities. We had been sent books on the subject and were expected to have read them before arriving.

 The idea of such a colloquium was a wonderful introduction to the liberal arts ideal--Knox was and is a small liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois. But separating science and humanities into two camps, with faculty members defending their side, had unfortunate consequences. The humanities side was championed by (among others) a fiery literature professor (I suspect he was the “friend” that Paul Shepard debates in his introduction to his first book Man in the Landscape, who says that nature is out of date) railing against technocracy and reductionism, and defending beauty, ambiguity and humane values.

Science was represented by colorless men in short-sleeved shirts who were technically precise but seemed mildly patronizing (Snow’s most incendiary sentence said that scientists “have the future in their bones”) as well as narrow, feckless and clueless regarding the larger questions and implications.

That was my impression anyway, so there was no question which culture won. In any case I hadn’t intended to major in a science; arriving on a writing scholarship I became a literature and composition major, with several courses in philosophy and “political science.” But I had some residual romanticism attached to science and an abiding interest in many aspects including method, subject matter, and the public and profound issues raised. Most of all I was hungry to know what the sciences could contribute to a fuller understanding of the world.

But as a result of these presentations, I didn’t think I’d find any answers, or even any sympathy, in science courses or faculty. Of course, as Man in the Landscape (which had also been the title of a course Shepard taught at Knox) abundantly demonstrated when it was published three years later, Paul Shepard united both cultures in his adventurous vision.

 That book specifically embraced art, religion, philosophy, history and literature. Later his work would go deeply into areas of anthropology, comparative religion, psychology, education, and a dozen different sciences; throughout his work he refers to paintings and quotes poets, playwrights and novelists, all in a lifelong inquiry into Big Questions and a persistent search for meaning. He was a living liberal arts ideal.

So at Knox I learned how to read a poem, but not how to read the trees; I could identify a sestina, but not a Ponderosa pine. While my intellectual life blossomed, I felt an emptiness that I learned to identify as inherent in our existential dilemma. Shepard would see at least part of this as a measure of our unnecessary alienation from nature and the wild, especially in childhood. I felt it, and could almost identify it at times--as when my senses would sharpen and my muscles quicken in the flickering dark of the woods, to an extent that embarrassed me with friends because this was so “out of character.”

 Somehow I did not connect the feelings in poetry or in Thoreau and Emerson, with what my body felt as I loped up a wooded hillside, nimble, alert and silent. Yet I wonder how much of my resistance Shepard could have overcome then.

I was told by older students that he was a charismatic teacher, almost a saintly figure, and that would have helped. I probably would have been impressed and changed by how he physically related to the wild, which I hadn’t observed in anyone else.  Paul Faulstich remembers (in his contribution to The Company of Others: Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard) how Shepard walked “across the landscape as if it is something not entirely separate from himself” and taught him “how to kill and eat a rattlesnake as though it were a sacred being...”

I would have been very sympathetic to Shepard’s opposition to some of the prevailing ideas of the times. In the 1960s, science was predominately mechanistic, reductionist and often in unholy alliance with the military-industrial complex. Especially in America, the popular idea of evolution was more social Darwinism than Darwin: survival of the fittest, which meant progress, the shedding of useless characteristics in the process of continuous improvement. The social evolution resulting in science and technology meant we fixed nature to work for us, and if we broke something along the way, well, we could fix that, too, and probably make money doing it.

 As for evolution in nature itself, the implication was similar to that expressed recently by a Humboldt State University athletic coach during a brief debate on changing the school’s mascot, who referred to the marbled murrelet as “a loser species.” The message of natural selection was: adapt or die out. The most vivid example I learned in my junior year course in Evolution was of a species of white moth that suddenly found itself easy prey when lighting on trees blackened by industrial soot in the north of England. The white moths disappeared, while a black moth mutation prospered.  (The science of this has since been questioned but the metaphor was not lost on me, especially when I failed the course.)

Shepard’s view of evolution is very different, emphasizing what it includes rather than excludes. And I certainly would have agreed that “environmental quality is inseparable not only from the protection of wildlife but also from war, poverty and social justice...” (as he wrote in his preface to the Environ/Mental anthology.)

But his championing of the hunter-gatherer as essential to human life as it did evolve might not have appealed to me then. Thanks to the spectre of nuclear war, Vietnam, the draft, and the kind of people who promoted them, I wasn’t sympathetic to man the hunter. Hunting was warfare on animals, the beginning of the technology that had evolved into the warfare state, the carnivorous competition of capitalism, leading to the grinning mechanical intolerance of social Darwinism itself.

 In fact, Evolution was the only course I flunked in college, and despite my first place in departmental comprehensives, I wasn’t graduated because I’d needed that course for a distribution requirement. I was passing until the final, when I couldn’t identify sketched bones of extinct animals, and wouldn’t try. The night before, I’d observed fellow students in the student union desperately cramming information they would gratefully forget two minutes after the exam. They were doing it essentially without a thought, because that was the course of evolution. For me it was a sham I couldn’t force myself through one last time, not with the winds of Vietnam and the draft howling just on the other side of graduation’s door, no matter what I did.

 So the following spring I spent my class’s graduation day watching Bobby Kennedy’s funeral on the student union TV. Although I eventually fought my way out of the draft, I had essentially been selected out of academia and the mainstream, and generally felt like “a white moth/pressed against/a blackened tree,” lines I had already published in the college magazine, in a poem called “Evolution.”

This 1969 collection with Shepard's essay
"Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint"
became a foundation text for ecology

 Yet sometime between the Two Cultures colloquium and the Evolution final, something happened at Knox that would turn out to be another key opening to Shepard’s books, among other things. It was something a visiting speaker said--I don’t remember who he was or his main topic, but as a kind of aside or example, he mentioned that some aboriginal peoples give thanks to the spirit of the animal they have just killed. I was so moved by this that I left the room.

 The idea of this ceremony was a crucial link. I had a feel for ritual from my Catholic schooling, yet I’d begun questioning dogma (and getting into enormous trouble for it) in high school, and had finally renounced membership one winter Sunday of my college freshman year, because of the contrast between the impatient congregation that kept their coats on during Mass, and the coats piled gently on each other on the floor outside the dining room where my fellow students congregated.

 Thanks in part to campus readings by poets like Gary Synder (who read for several hours, three days running), Robert Bly and Denise Levertov, I saw new possibilities for ritual and relationships to the natural world. But here in the imagined figure of that hunter I saw a true sacrament, a sense of the sacred I instinctively felt was not only right, but the key to everything.

1. In the Context of Otherness 

 That's a long-winded short version of my journey to Paul Shepard’s books, and what I value in them. I admired Man in the Landscape so passionately that I talked the editor of Harper’s Bookletter into letting me write a review of it in 1974, even though by then it was out of print. I got the Shepard and McKinley anthologies in the ‘70s, but lost track of Paul Shepard’s work until I came across Nature and Madness in a Seattle used bookstore in the late 80s. That bundle of thunder sent me to the library to catch up on The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game and Thinking Animals, which together prompted me to write another review of Paul Shepard’s once again out-of-print books.

 In some respects, conventional wisdom caught up with Shepard. Ecology and environment are common concepts, even inspiring contending bureaucracies. There is some sense that evolution is not the same as progress, that diversity might be part of the point after all. Some would even agree that the culture is crazy, though not in the same profound sense or for the same reasons Shepard posits.

 But in even more striking ways, Shepard remains stubbornly beyond the fashions of the acceptable dissents. While others yearned for a return to the land, he insisted that farming had itself sown the seeds of doom. When others cried, it all started going wrong with the automobile, he said, no, actually, it was the horse.

 As I understand it, Shepard’s vision does not differ from the conventional in a few picturesque, cantankerous details. He challenges basic assumptions about how we see ourselves and the world.

For centuries the reigning metaphors for how things worked were mechanical. The Cartesian universe was like a giant clock, the body a machine. The model was refined: for instance in the 1930s, the brain was a kind of telephone switchboard (promulgated in my grade school days by those Bell Telephone science film strips.) Lately the metaphors for mind and body have been computerized. We process, we interface, our leisure or illness constitutes down-time; we’re hardwired, we’re software, we download and uplink,we’re overloaded.

 Instead Shepard revives and elaborates a more ancient but by now revolutionary model: we’re animals. We bleed, taste, touch and sleep. We’re not silicon and plastic inventions; our fleshy hands come from our forebears in the trees, our eyes from the sea, and our minds from the forage and the hunt. We learn who we are and who we aren’t by observing and living in conscious intimacy with animals and their given world, which is also ours.

Another popular assumption supposedly gleaned from science is the history of the human, as pictured in school texts and most minds. It begins with the “prehistoric” cave-man: bent over, dull-eyed, holding a crude club, his stupid jaw darkly unshaven. Then we progress meticulously through the brief ages--the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans,etc.-- until we come to the upright figure of modern man, striding forward with confident grin, fresh from a shave and a shoe shine.

 Shepard’s very different picture is shocking for the implication of its accurate time-scale. There in the last fraction of the continuum--a mere ten thousand years-- is all of what we call history. The first few million years is “prehistoric man,” climaxing with the long and happy habitation of the hunter-gatherers, when the human body and mind were formed, when our evolution essentially stopped, because there's not been enough time since for it to have adapted significantly.  That's when human nature was formed.

 Unfortunately we’ve constructed societies since then largely inimical to our natures, not to mention nature as a whole. These two basic insights, about animals and human time, are involved in a different message of evolution.  The message is that in crucial ways we are the animals and they are us, and that what we are as humans is mostly what we were for the longest time.

 But evolution doesn’t principally mean that the inefficient gets left behind; it also means that nothing is lost. And sometimes--like our color vision--what was apparently lost can be regained.

 In The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Shepard describes the hunter-gatherer life: living in small groups, with neither sex subservient, and largely without war or greed; intelligently attendant to the natural world and totally involved in it; makers of intricate tools, with abundant leisure and forms of what we call art that combine functionality, religious inquiry and expression, science, and fun.

Interacting with animals, plants and habitat, hunting and gathering built and formed human intelligence, and the soul of the species. He goes on in that book and those that followed to elaborate on this picture and to explore its enormous implications.

 Poets and ancestral or existing primal cultures bring us similar perspectives, but what is especially important is that Shepard comes to them by way of what we understand as science. Yet he comes to the same profound place, the mystery at the heart of the human encounter with the world as symbolized by the hunter praying over prey.“Broadly understood, the hunt refers to the larger quest for the way, the pursuit of meaning and contact with a sentient part of the environment, and the intuition that nature is a language.”

 Shepard is unique in the organization of his argument and the blend of knowledge linking science with the spiritual in an ecology of the mind and millennia. In this afflicted existential, postmodern culture roiling around in what George W.S. Trow calls “the context of no context,” he presents our crucial alternative, “the context of otherness.”

He does as a matter of course what "the Two Cultures" won’t allow, but which permits Shepard the scientist to know the past in his bones, and therefore the present, and therefore the future: he sweeps his scholarly eye, and tunes his omnivorous ear, to evidence from the dissecting table, the archaeological dig, the naturalist’s perch, the anthropologist’s tape recorder, the shaman’s chants, the poet’s dreams.

the current Georgia Press edition

“The dream and song are ecological factors,” he writes in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. “ As in the development of myth, their basic images have been shaped by the same evolutionary forces that shape the physical traits of species.”

 But he does not just make the point: Shepard richly populates it, and to experience this requires reading his books. At the same time, he opposes misplaced mysticism and challenges the the sentimental errors of animal rights advocates, the arrested adolescence of ideologues, the ethical myopia of self-righteous vegetarians (...the zucchini-killers and drinkers of the dark blood of innocent soybeans”); any smugness that might tempt wilderness protectors, and even the kindness of pet lovers, all of which I’m sure frustrates some who would like to tabulate another easily absorbed New Age prophet.

 Even for environmentalists he must have sometimes been the gadfly in the ointment. But in the end--and all along the way--he tightly braids the physical with what it implies, with what it radiates, and what rationalist science denies: the spiritual that comes from the physical directly, the essential living mysteries, the sacred embedded in the encounters, the corresponding wilds.

 In doing so he always examines the individual as well as the species and culture, as he links the intensely specific physical world with its religious and ethical implications. In a late essay (“On Animal Friends”) he calls for an “ecology of maturity”, to be realized in “ a sense of gratitude more than mastery,” and “participation in a rich community of organisms, a true biophilia or polytheism.”

 Here in the offhand linking of those last two terms, “biophilia or polytheism”, is the boldness of the vision he contributes. In “A Posthistoric Primitivism,” another of his essential late essays collected in Traces of An Omnivore, he writes: “As born antihistorians, our secret desire is to explicate the inexplicable, to recover what is said to be denied.” Yet to be an antihistorian is perhaps not to be anti-evolutionary.

2.Writer on the Landscape 

Doug Wilson with Paul Shepard

  I finally exchanged letters with Paul Shepard, brokered by Douglas Wilson, his colleague and my teacher at Knox, but Shepard was already in the last year of his life. So I never met him, and my contact with him has all been in words on pages.

But I admired those words and pages; I admire his writing as writing, where we get at substance only through style.

 It was clear to me from the first pages of Man in the Landscape that he was, among other things, a natural born writer, who also worked at the writing craft, to produce these elegant, clear sentences. It seems he knew this and was suspicious of it.

 In his introduction to The Others (1996), Shepard writes about writing about nature.  He sees why poets are attracted to animals: “The meaning of animals is implicit in what they do...Like amusing, wise, terrible, curved mirrors, animals prefigure human society...the bird is spirit and the snake is the earth of our most elemental self, our mundane world, and our imagination.” Then he stops: “But I am leery of my own enthusiasm for writing. Is our relationship to animals essentially a branch of nature writing?”

 After trashing Thoreau as a boring coiner of aphorisms, “Nature writing nourishes the view of nature as esthetic abstraction--something like the sphinx on the library steps, the denizens of a bestiary whose charming irrelevance teases us out of the burdens of urban life and its stewpot of political and social drama where intellectuals have their true home.” “But that is an aside,” he says, and numbers among the ways humans emerged in relation to the animals, along with observing, eating and being eaten by them, “communicating their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating and thinking them.”

 He praises Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring as not only a warning against pesticides “but against a deafened self, against emptiness.” But then he backs off again--”If art--writing--is to be a mere substitute, seeking to replace animals with an alternative reality, then let us seek instead an antiwriting against the seductive illusions of the ‘beauty’ of nature.”

 In addition to his misgivings about nature writing, Shepard, among others, suggest that the invention of writing itself was yet another mechanism that distances humans from their ancient deep involvement with nature and each other. Still, Shepard did not restrict his tellings to gatherings around winter fires, or even classrooms. Nor did he work primarily in the laboratory or the field to produce data, medicines or tools; in addition to informal observation and experience, his essential roles were reader and writer. Despite the technical terms that sometimes seem efficient, and sometimes like secret passwords, he wrote many a dancing sentence--by the evidence, he couldn’t help himself.

Shepard’s enthusiasm for writing is evident in his overflows of imagery, as well as alliterations, assonance, slant rhymes and rhythms, and rhetoric. See how he does not stop at one adjective or two, but bashes together a startling, multidimensional image, of the poetic function of animals as “amusing, wise, terrible, curved mirrors...” 

He plays with words and meaning, sometimes a slant-punster ( Of paintings of the inner eye he says “To me these retinas look like impressionist landscapes. In an evolutionary sense, the habitat has impressed its form upon the neural tissue...”) sometimes an environmentalist Shakespeare: “If we were all alike as eggs,” he begins, then counters “...but we hatch into a world where everything we do can help make or unmake the possibilities for our future growth.”

 Then a dig at “Intellectual or eggheads” who “like to think that we live in a world of ideas we invent...” Then the metaphor changes: “But in some part of our skulls there is a wilderness. We call it the unconscious because we cannot cultivate it the way you would a field of grain or a field of thought.” Several more metaphors tumble over one another, repeat and refer back, before the paragraph ends. To my ear it suggests an Elizabethan ecology of words and meaning.

 He creates ambiguities of larger resonance, as in the various applications of hunting as “the sacred game”: deadly serious play with inherent rules that mimic those that define all existence, and the contending yet partnered players who are each other’s game animal, game to play because the game is major to their meaning. And more.

 Sometimes his own playing is most unexpectedly musical: “Although they joined the exclusive club of the open-country carnivores and prey, they did not lose their floral affiliations.” Sometimes the music makes startling image, as “this cleavage between the pallid and prismatic..”, and sometimes the music makes meaning: the crispness of “The larger carnivores display a prudence about killing,” followed by the satirical lope of “in contrast to our fantasy of the rampaging beast...”

 He wrote about the human experience of nature as encoded and celebrated in language. Animals animate words, and in The Sacred Claw, Shepard shepherds some that derive from human encounters with bears, such as “berserk”, “brightness” and maybe even “dance.”

 Rhythmic music and dance are essential to Paleolithic cultures and their sacramental relationship with nature, Shepard writes, and Gary Snyder intimates that animals love our music. Writing has its own music and incorporates its own dance. The music may come from a less conscious level, but when it’s good music, it adds to meaning on all levels. “Words in themselves do not convey meaning...the sound of them does,” said Robert Frost.

 I tend to view the death of music in writing, or the failure to perceive and value it, in the same spirit as Gabriel Garcia Marquez regards the death of the novel. “Some say the novel is dead,” he says,” but it is not the novel. It is they who are dead.” But the music lives on, for those who can hear it.

Perhaps Paul Shepard finally justifies his writing as the journey all hunters and gatherers make. “The human mind came into existence tracking, which for us creates a land of named places and fosters narration, the tale of adventure.”

The Road Home

Among the creative people who influenced my life and who died in 2016 was Jim Harrison.  Preparing to write a brief remembrance in this final month of that year, I found reviews of his books I'd written over the years.  I thought I'd add them to this online archive of my published and unpublished work.

I'll do them in separate posts, beginning with the earliest review I could find.  I've left in the inevitable repetitions so each review can stand alone.

Looking them over, I wonder if I didn't miss a major point about Harrison's work.  He dealt with primal themes and dangerous relationships.  In his most famous story, "Legends of the Fall," three brothers are in love with the same woman.  In Dalva/The Road Home, there's a marriage between half-siblings; two brothers and perhaps their father bedding the same woman, several marriages and affairs with siblings of spouses (though a widower marrying the sister of his dead wife is said to be a Lakota tradition.)

This is a version of my first published review of Harrison's work (in Orion Magazine.)  This novel remains my favorite--I consider it one of the best American novels of my time.

THE ROAD HOME, A Novel by Jim Harrison.
 Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.
 464 pages.

"Nebraska reminds me of what America was supposed to look like before it became something else," Jim Harrison comments in "From the Dalva Notebooks," published in his book of non-fiction, Just Before Dark. 

Through swirls of events and thickets of passions, obsessions and relationships it takes two novels and some 800 pages to describe, the road home leads to the timeless Nebraska landscape, where as a kind of analogue to other natural cycles, members of the Northridge family walk and hunt with beloved dogs, eat and drink gloriously, make love, ride horses, read and treasure books as well as painting and music, watch birds, observe and take care of the land and each other, ponder, puzzle, reflect, regret and remember, as they had for over a hundred years.

 But from the opening sentence of THE ROAD HOME, the capacious and deeply satisfying companion novel to the stunning "Dalva" of a decade ago, the themes of mortality and time are also present. Lives are distorted notably by wars (World War I, Korea, Vietnam), while the land and Native peoples are insistently and inexorably destroyed by rapacious agents of greed and deadly beliefs. There are several deaths (the final home where the road leads) rendered with grace and ceremony and the elegiac rhythms of a writer with some years on his meter.

 But the road is also a way, a journey that demands consciousness, clarity and truthful statement, which Harrison produces in an abundance of cogent, witty, memorable, epigrammatic prose. This for me is the foremost achievement of this novel, and at minimum contributes mightily to the pleasure of reading every page. Harrison's years of meditation show clearly in this exactness, as does his reading of classic Zen poets who can be as least as ribald, tortured and funny as any American Beat.

 THE ROAD HOME takes the narrative of "Dalva" forward a little in time, but basically it adds more breadth and depth to the same events, concentrating on the perspectives of Dalva and her family: her grandfather ("a prairie Lear" as Harrison describes him in the Dalva Notebooks), the son she first meets as a young man ( who roams the western landscape as a deliberate contemporary nomad, trying "to understand the world, especially the natural world as I seemed to draw up short on human beings"),her uncle (and surrogate father), and her mother.

This pair of novels offers unusual possibilities--reading and re-reading each in relation to the other, reading parts of one that match up with the same time or event in the other, finding the symmetries that might be fate or beauty or both, and otherwise discovering the literary rendering of the hypertext of life.

 Harrison is rightly praised for his vivid evocation of the natural landscape and the values embedded in it, but what makes him one of the few novelists of non-urban subjects to win wide readership and establishment praise (even if the New York Times Book Review containing his rave review nevertheless put Tom Wolfe on the cover) is the unique landscape of his writing.

 His sentences are rhythmic and perfectly formed, his prose is often formal(he is the only contemporary writer I know who habitually uses the words "captious" and "otiose")but his paragraphs are as wild as river rapids. Sentences tumble from one subject to another, changing geographical locations and sometimes centuries, linked by rhythm and their own particular logic. Although almost everything in this book is presented as having been written down in journals and letters, Harrison's prose has the sound of speech, yet no one actually speaks this way, except maybe Jim Harrison, at least in interviews.

 I think of Harrison's work also as a bridge, for example, linking urban readers ushered by literary quality to the urgency of attending to the natural world, or by linking nature and culture as only someone with his credentials in both can do. Harrison is profligate and generous in naming the work of specific writers, and their importance in his characters' lives may encourage his readers to seek them out. For me, reading "Dalva" and its accounts of contemporary mixed bloods and the 19th century Lakota was a specific bridge to fiction that is by as well as about Native Americans. (In fact, I found my paperback of "Dalva" on a shelf marked "Miscellaneous" in a small town used bookstore in the central Pennsylvania mountains, along with Peter Matthiessen's "Indian Country," a book of contemporary Native short stories, and novels by Native author Thomas King. I bought and read them all, but started with "Dalva.")

The interplay of present and recollections or rediscoveries of the past form the basic movement of most of Harrison's fiction, and this rises to artful and powerful meaning in THE ROAD HOME. There is a sense here not of an ending but of a kind of completion, as well as in the coincident publication of Harrison's new and collected poems, THE SHAPE OF THE JOURNEY(Copper Canyon Press). "To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime," Harrison asserts in his preface to a series of Zen inspired poems, included in this substantial and revelatory volume. THE ROAD HOME is the work of a lifetime, in that sense and more.

 "With all our self-consciousness," writes Ursula LeGuin," we have very little sense of where we live, where we are right here or right now. If we did, we wouldn't muck it up the way we do." Jim Harrison's timely and timeless work has that kind of honesty, urgency and density. His achievement is to do so well what he observes in music of birds, as he writes in the last line of the last poem in THE SHAPE OF THE JOURNEY: "They sing what and where they are."



Here are some additional notes on this novel taken from a longer essay on four books by Harrison, Paul Shepard, Richard Powers and Linda Hogan.  It includes some repetitions from the Orion review but I've tried to keep them to a minimum.

JIM HARRISON's literary voice has always been unique and entertaining, and this aspect of his craft reaches something of an apotheosis in The Road Home. Partly it is the off-center language, a combination of the contemporary and antique (to my knowledge he is the only well-known novelist to regularly employ the words "otiose" and "captious", which to me are so arcane that I still have to look them up whenever I read him.) Partly it is the construction and cadences: while his sentences are logical and perfectly formed, his paragraphs are as wild as river rapids.

Within them sentences tumble from one subject to another, changing geographical locations and sometimes centuries, linked by rhythm and their own particular logic. Harrison typically builds his stories with an ongoing narration that links recollections of the main action, often as written in journals or letters. In this book, almost everything is presented as having been previously written down by the characters. Still, Harrison's prose always has the sound of speech, even if no one actually speaks that way, except maybe Harrison, at least in interviews.

This voice is heard most clearly in the many cogent, witty and epigrammatic observations and asides his characters make. All of these elements coalese somewhere near perfection in this novel, making every page a pleasure to read (especially after the first 100, which seem a bit awkward compared to the 350 that follow.)

Perhaps Harrison's years of meditation inform this exactness, along with his reading of classic Zen poets who can be as least as ribald, tortured and funny as any American Beat. Harrison's subjects and the elements of contemporary life are also odd, when compared to the dominant urban-centered and Zeitgeist-minded fiction.

In Dalva, his unhinged heroine came home to the family homestead, a sprawling ranch in Nebraska, established by the progenitor John Northridge in the mid 19th century. Dalva is a Northridge, a multigenerational family of Euro-Americans with several points of alliance and intermarriage with the Lakota Sioux of these plains.

The Road Home is a kind of sequel, moving the narrative forward a little in time, but basically adding more breadth and depth to the same events, concentrating on the perspectives of Dalva and her family: her grandfather ("a prairie Lear" as Harrison describes him elsewhere), the son she put up for adoption and first meets as a young man ,her uncle (and surrogate father), and her mother.

 There is a remarkable sense of continuity in these four generations, and it is predicated on the land. Life on the Northridge ranch is simple and yet highly cultivated. Here the Northridge generations hike, ride and hunt, eat and drink gloriously, read books and talk and write about them, keep journals and read past journals of others, so the past is a considered part of their present.

 Of course it wouldn't be a Harrison narrative without swales, dogs and garlic, so these too are part of his most integrated vision of home. 

There is one self-conscious wanderer in this book, whose journey to find a lost home is actual. Dalva's son Nelse, who as a young man read a magazine article about nomads (likely an excerpt of Bruce Chatwin's book, The Songlines) and set out to be a deliberate nomad, traveling the west with no fixed address, trying "to understand the world, especially the natural world as I seemed to draw up short on human beings."

 But Nelse was adopted and he doesn't know his mother's identity. His wandering takes on another purpose when he seeks and finds Dalva and his ancestral home, repeating Dalva's own journey in the previous novel, the last section of which was called "Coming Home."

This is another function of home in this novel: as a place where journeys begin and end, and where lives can be recollected in tranquility in between. The characters are torn from home by their own passions and obsessions (principally love and art); and their lives, particularly those of the men, are permanently distorted by war (from the Indian wars through World War I, Korea and Vietnam.) The road home is everyone's life's journey.

And so this novel--this two-volume saga--presents the births, dreams, marriages, sex, misunderstandings, regrets, brawls, tantrums, brushes with the law, even some gun-play of characters that live over a century of American history. The real-time events in the novel are mostly the rhythmic activities of daily life, and the big events are mostly remembered. Because of this considered, precisely expressed observation and thought, each event has texture and density.

In turn, memories and the thoughts and emotions they evoke give more weight and dimension to the simple acts of living, which become rituals of affirmation and grief. Harrison is rightly praised for his vivid evocation of the natural landscape and the values embedded in it, although here the landscape is also cultivated. This isn't wilderness or the Pleistocene--it is the Midwest formed from the frontier by stubborn Scandinavians, who provide Harrison with some piquant and McMurtryesque minor characters.

 Still, everything about this family refers ultimately and deeply to the land, including their name. Home is a place of grounding, and therefore it is vital that it be a home that sits in nature, that partakes of timelessness in the modern age. Like the homes of the foragers, it's a place to go away from and come back to, yet unlike the Pleistocene foragers, the contemporary forager is never quite sure where he is or what she's looking for, or why they wander.

 Dogs and horses are as individual and perhaps as important as people in this novel, and contact with the land is the lifeblood of these characters. It's when people can no longer ride or hunt that they know it's time to die.

The deaths, both violent and natural, are prominent, and several are described at length, giving this book an elegiac tone as well as an epic scope. The Road Home also leads to death, the home where the journey ends. The sense of elegy extends also to the land, which the characters often fret about, whether it is on the ranch or on the backroads. When one is faced with imminent loss, the only creative act is careful remembering. Memory is another home.

Off to the Side by Jim Harrison

As far as I can recall, this is an unpublished, personal response (though it might be on a blog somewhere) to Jim Harrison's 2002 memoir, Off to the Side.

Off to the Side is not your typical memoir of the current publishing Zeitgeist. There’s no straight through-line of bad boy goes through hell---a constant Survivor show from childhood on---to revelation, reform and what psychologist and author Dan McAdams calls the most characteristic American theme: redemption.

 Or even the celebrity memoir variation of the rise, the fall and the resurrection. So you’re unlikely to see him on Oprah, at least until she wisely chooses one of his books of fiction for her book club.

 That’s not to say there aren’t all those elements in there, although far more modestly than any best-selling memoir would dare. His concern is the texture and the truth of experience, not fulfilling a simplistic pattern, or even enacting an archetypal tale.

 The book is full of the same keen observations, wit and peculiarly artful sentences as his fiction, and even his interviews. Some of the subjects are familiar from those other sources, but he does cover some areas of his life unreported elsewhere, with consideration and candor. But like his characters, he tends to mix memories and times with general observations, staying true to his character’s experiences, and in this case his own writing the memoir. In this connection he chose a very apt epigraph for the book, from Rilke: “Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking, too.” 

 His childhood in Michigan during World War II was immersed in farm life and the natural world, and then by hunting, fishing and the wildlife near his family’s cabin on a lake. There is a quality of his attention then, and therefore later as a writer, that probably owes a lot to the fact that this was a pre-television childhood.

 It was one of the last ones, too. I was among the first generation of children to grow up with TV in the home, beginning when I was 4 or 5. There were advantages to having such wonders as enacted stories in your living room, but also disadvantages. My outdoor longings and experiences lacked informed attention, coherence, confidence or patience. But they were important nevertheless. Then again, though I lived with patches of woods and open fields nearby, I didn’t live on a farm, and my father knew little and cared less about the natural world.

Harrison writes of fishing with his father when he (young Jim) was in the grip of a melancholy time: “He had an uncanny ability to identify weeds, flowers, bushes by smell, and he suddenly said that curiosity will get you through hard times when nothing else.”

 Still, my small town childhood made some moments Harrison recounts familiar and emotionally resonant, as his “tearful pleasure” on a trip to New York, hearing live classical music for the first time in Washington Square, and when again in New York at the age of nineteen, he saw his first actual painting by a great artist (Modigliani), “my eyes brimmed.”

 He was a 4-H boy, and had an adolescent period of extreme Christianity, which involved memorizing large chunks of the King James Bible for contests, a possible key to his prose style. But the major event of his childhood was an accident that left him blind in one eye.

 A sensory disability tends to make the sensitive even more inward, but I believe there are some other little understood effects. I’ve only recently begun to realize how important my own one-ear deafness has been in my relationship to the world. For instance, the natural assumption is that a disability in one of the senses shifts emphasis to the others, as in the cliché of the blind person with extraordinary hearing. But I’ve come to believe a more accurate way to put it is that one focuses all the other senses on the work of the less able one. In my own case, I realize that I don’t “see better” because I’m half-deaf; it’s more that I hear partly with my eyes. And I don’t mean lip-reading, but a more generalized function of pouring visual information into making sense of the world in sound.

Also the quality of attention in the sense in question can become more acute, partly because there’s a subconscious process of filling in the gaps to make sense of the sense data. In my own case I can illustrate the concept with this example: I play a game of identifying the voices of actors in situations where they aren’t seen, mostly in “voice-overs” for TV commercials and documentaries. I am very good at this, even with relatively obscure actors, provided I have seen them as well as heard them in some earlier movies or TV shows. And when I remember who they are, it’s because in my mind I see their faces, and only then recall their names (if I can remember their names at all---a flaw in my ability to prove this.)

 So to me, that Harrison excels at visual description is not paradoxical. I’m sure his hearing and other senses (perhaps he too can identify weeds by smell) contribute to what he sees. It may also be why he has such visually rich dreams and “visions,” as some amazing ones he describes in this book. Not only is his brain assembling visual information from all his senses, but it works hard in doing so. That might also contribute to a feedback of visual imagery in dreams and visions.

 An event that haunted his life occurred when he was 25: his father and beloved sister waited around for him to decide whether he would go with them. He stayed home. A drunken driver hit their car, and killed them both. In this book he touches upon some of the ways this continued to affect him, and it likely adds a certain seriousness, skepticism, melancholy and sense of tragedy to his work. In any case, it is one of those companions that is always there, and often noticed.

 But by then he was happily married, and wondrously it was a marriage that lasted, even through periods of his obliquely described bad behavior. It grounded him in many ways. So his life as a writer, while it included Hollywood and wild times in Key West, also included home and children, usually in modest circumstances.

 My response to this life, as to his success as a novelist, which was one of my most persistent unrealized dream for my life, is the same mixture I feel when I see such a story in a movie, or even on something as vulgar as an awards show: a certain envy, but also a gratitude that at least it happened to somebody, and I can share in it for a moment vicariously. And as I stubbornly if possibly erroneously maintain, a vicarious joy is better than no joy at all.

 Harrison’s life took him to several cities and to academe. In particular he spent some time in Cambridge, Mass., where I had lived, and even though we knew some of the same places, it was at different times. I think I just missed the clubby poetry scene at Grolier’s bookstore, though maybe it was my own diffidence and impatience. Harrison knew the poet Denise Levertov, and had the same high opinion of her as a person that I did, having met her when she spent several days at my college. Later I discovered that when she was living in the Boston area she was good friends with a young poet, who had been among the last group of previous tenants of my apartment in unfashionable East Cambridge. She had been there often, as she confirmed in a postcard, our last communication as it turned out.

 Our respective experiences with other people we knew in common tells more about our respective writing careers. My only memory of the justifiably revered publisher Sam Lawrence (who published Kurt Vonnegut, among others) was a very brief meeting. I don’t even remember sitting down—just the sight of this tall, impressive, kind man, standing and smiling, a roaring fire in his fireplace behind him.

 Sam Lawrence (then at Delacorte) published Harrison’s first collection of novellas, that other publishers wouldn’t touch because nobody would buy it. It was titled Legends of the Fall, and contained that novella, which soon made Harrison famous and rich. The agent who did that deal was Bob Datilla. I met Bob once as well, a somewhat longer meeting. I had a list of ideas for magazine stories, and he suggested magazines to try with each of them, except one, which he said would not sell. I think we talked about book possibilities, but in any event he essentially agreed to represent me.

 Some time later he called me, and said he’d changed his mind. The idea he said wouldn’t work was about the malling of America, which became an article that took up nearly an entire issue of a magazine, and then my first (and so far only) book. Years later, I sent him a letter and a book proposal. He never answered the letter, and sent the proposal back with a huge NO in black defacing it. Needless to say, Bob Datilla is not my favorite agent, even though that’s currently a null set in any case. But he has been Harrison’s agent and a close friend for his entire career.

 The part of this book that’s newest in terms of what Harrison has written in earlier nonfiction and talked about in interviews is his recounting of his experiences in Hollywood. As elsewhere, there’s funny stuff here, and the image of Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Sean Connery with Harrison’s barbecue sauce dripping on their white suits is wondrous and hilarious cinema of the mind.

 Harrison worked in Hollywood (without being a resident) writing screenplays. He no longer does that, so even when he describes the venality of the movie business, he does so from a distance, taking into consideration his own self-dramatization and ego.

 Hollywood is just the template for what happens in publishing and related fields these days. So for those who aren’t acquainted with the extreme changes of fortune of an ego-ridden and whim-based industry, some of what happened to Harrison will seem exceptional. Of course, it’s extreme when it happens to you, and for those of us who’ve had similar experiences, there is a certain awe at the magnitude, but a feeling of recognition and solidarity.

 Because at one point, Harrison’s “Legends of the Fall” was slated to be directed by one of the cinema’s all time legendary directors, David Lean, and his novella “Revenge” was scheduled to be directed by another such legend, John Huston. Both movies were to be made by Warners, until the head of the studio retired, and the new regime axed both projects.

 Though he made a lot of money there, few of Harrison’s projects became movies. Still, he got to visit many Indian reservations to research a script on photographer Edward Curtis for director Taylor Hackford, and a sense-boggling trip to Rio for a Lou Adler project. Even a script that he came up with that did get made was a less than happy experience, and a less than good movie: “Wolf” with Jack Nicholson.

 He basically liked the movie version of Legends of the Fall, though he despised the TV movie made from his novel Dalva. He wonders why a movie should be so awful, since “It often seems quite inscrutable because it takes essentially the same energy to make a bad film as a good one,” paraphrasing, perhaps unconsciously, director Francois Truffaut.

 Harrison’s involvement with Hollywood figures began before he’d written his first screenplay. His only long-time novelist friend, Tom McGuane, was first to get tapped by Hollywood, and it was by visiting McGuane on a shoot that Harrison met Jack Nicholson, who then read some of his work, and eventually financed a year of Harrison’s writing when he was in dire financial straits, for a small consideration on any film that might ensue. The project was, of course, “Legends of the Fall,” not only Harrison’s most famous work, but his most talismanic.

 I felt reassured in my own judgments from a distance (or from brief encounters as an interviewer or observer) by Harrison’s generous assessment of some big name Hollywood actors and directors. He got beyond the idol worship and the cynicism to the intelligence and humanity of complex and talented people.

 These personal asides are meant to indicate the kind of interaction between my experience and what I was reading that is part of the experience of every reader. Others would notice and pick out different parts of this book.

 As for direct comment on his work, Harrison is conflicted and sparse. He does say that his novel Warlock is “the only book I’ve ever written that I loathe,” though he doesn’t say why. He refers to moments (when he finished The Road Home) and circumstances, but there is little about how he came to choose a subject (with one exception) or his approach, or methods, etc.

 That one exception is Legends of the Fall, but only that it arose from reading journals of the real William Ludlow (the father, played in the movie by Anthony Hopkins), who was his wife’s grandmother’s father. But there is other information in this memoir that links aspects of his life and thought to his fiction, in content and style. Readers may find it adds interest and texture to reading the fiction, perhaps occasionally illuminating something they find otherwise puzzling.