‘Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life’
By Todd Goddard
Blackstone Publishing, 350 Pages

The hard work of literary biography proceeds apace even as editors at the major trade book houses declare it dead and are wary of offending literary estates and the very subjects of the biographies they publish. Read the  flowery, sometimes disingenuous acknowledgments of biographers and you may imagine they are beholden to everyone. The price of access can be a form of sycophancy, reminiscent of an age when letters of inquiry and blandishment were signed, “Your obedient servant.”

Into this swamp of collusion a new biographer enters, and he is doing it the right way. Todd Goddard has conducted more than a hundred interviews, traveling to the places and interviewing people that were part of Jim Harrison’s life, studying archives that are the necessary but not the sufficient foundation for an honest, self-governing biography beholden to no one. He thanks all his helpers in measured language. It would be ungrateful and ungracious and misleading to do otherwise. 

Within a few sentences of this biography we get the gist of where Mr. Goddard is headed with a subject who stays married, happily, and yet is incorrigibly unfaithful with his wife’s implicit consent, made easier by staying home and not trying to compete in the heady world her husband relished, eating sumptuous meals in France when he was not shooting birds and other wild game with an appetite harkening back to Hemingway’s, and with a work ethic that surpassed most of his contemporaries.

Harrison was admirable in many respects, having an independent streak that steered him clear of literary politicking, which may have cost him, Mr. Goddard suggests, recognition as a fine poet even as fellow writers trashed him for his successful journalism and his deigning to write so much prose, including one of his masterpieces, Harrison’s first commercial success, “Legends of the Fall,” a novella partly based on what turned out to be a family legend set in Montana and World War I.

Harrison considered himself a poet first, breaking out of the pattern of established literary forms to write what he believed was organic work, but his disdain of literary coteries estranged him from a generation of poets who apparently returned the favor by ignoring him. It didn’t help his cause with them when he turned Hollywood screenwriter and hung out with the likes of Jack Nicholson, proving to some writers that he was a sellout. 

Harrison’s other work, writing about sports and food, receives significant treatment as integral to his writerly sensibility, not a sideshow just to make money. He did spend extravagantly and flamboyantly — at one point hosting a 37-course meal in France — and fueled his writing jags with cocaine and cigarettes, yet his dedication to his art remains palpable in Mr. Goddard’s empathetic, if still critical, account. 

What drove Harrison so mercilessly not only to produce great literature but to entertain lavishly seems an outgrowth of harrowing experiences, including losing both his father and sister in a car accident, though Mr. Goddard is careful not to provide a diagnosis of his subject or label his mental condition, or even his chronic drinking, as alcoholism. 

Despite loosh behavior, Harrison never abandoned a religious sensibility that kept him fearful about the state of his soul. Unlike many writers who worried that psychotherapy might expose and attenuate the sources of creativity, Harrison sought out and even befriended psychiatric professionals, realizing that whatever the risk in consulting them, he needed their help not to save himself exactly but to understand the ramifications of his self-destructive behavior.

Harrison, with a daunting array of ailments that took him to the Mayo Clinic for a rehabilitation that proved as fruitless as Hemingway’s, nonetheless never stopped writing — even in despair over his wife’s death — and passed away, it seems, in the very act of composing his last poem, chain-smoking to the end, a writer never at rest. 

What distinguishes this literary biography is its perfect poise, telling us what we need to know about the man and his art, without pretending to explain more than a biographer can possibly know.

Mr. Rollyson has authored literary biographies of Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag. Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner and a work in progress, “Herman Melville Anew.”