When the Wolf Howls : Please don’t confine Jim Harrison. One day he’ll take in the solitude of a rustic cabin, the next he’ll enjoy the swank digs of a big-time screenwriter for hire

By popular fiat, “serious” poets and novelists are supposed to while away their publish-or-perish years flogging Chaucer to boneheaded university freshmen or reveling in the pinched glory of appearing in the Sewanee River Review. They are not, generally speaking, expected to occupy a suite at the Westwood Marquis on the Columbia Pictures tab, take meetings with Mike Nichols or collapse in Jack Nicholson’s hot tub at day’s end.

Jim Harrison has done all of the above. Virtually alone among his contemporaries, the 56-year-old novelist and poet has maintained his formidable literary standing while pursuing a lucrative second career as a screenwriter, making him one of the most prosperous citizens of Lake Leelanau, the hamlet in northern Michigan where the native Midwesterner lives most of the year on a farm outside of town.

“I make up stories, or ‘fibs’ as my mother calls them,” Harrison says in his rasping Midwestern burr. “Now, Sony’s got about 100 million bucks into my fibs this year,” referring to three separate, front-burner projects.

The Harrison canon thus far includes six novels, three collections of novellas (including the just-published “Julip”), seven volumes of poetry and assorted journalism, most famously a riotously discursive “food” column for Esquire that was retired last year.

Harrison’s books sell especially well in Los Angeles (“a riverless city of redolent and banal sobs,” he wrote in a poem) and, to his bewilderment, in France, where he has met children named after the heroine of “Dalva,” his celebrated 1988 novel about a woman searching for the son she gave up as a teen-ager. Such is Harrison’s stature there that French documentary filmmakers voyaged to Lake Leelanau to capture the writer in his lair. “They told me it would take five days and it took nine teen ,” Harrison groans. “By which time I was ready to take out my .270 (shotgun) and blow them away.”

Harrison’s characters are often unsung folk with steely, contemplative constitutions--farmers, country doctors, schoolteachers, bridge-builders, Native Americans, a woman fleeing her husband at an interstate truck stop--their surroundings acutely observed, sometimes through the keen eyes of coyotes, wolves and raven. Harrison is “a writer with immortality in him,” declared the Sunday Times of London; “one of the few truly high-test males who’ve passed through the eye of the needle,” noted Ms.

Meanwhile, Hollywood keeps luring Harrison west, where his pungent storytelling is in steady demand, even if he characterizes these forays as “butting my head into the movie industry with the kind of non-directional energy that characterizes boobs from the Midwest.”

“I only seem to be able to write a book every 2 1/2 years,” Harrison says, “and when I get done I have a considerable amount of overflow energy that other people use in teaching, but I don’t teach. Usually, that’s when I do my good work.”

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On Friday, Columbia will release the Mike Nichols-directed “Wolf”--unrelated to Harrison’s first novel, “Wolf: A False Memoir”--from Harrison’s screenplay (co-written by Wesley Strick) about a man, played by Nicholson, who transforms into the film’s namesake.

Nicholson and Harrison (who is also credited as associate producer of the film), now close friends, were introduced in 1975 by novelist Thomas McGuane on the set of “The Missouri Breaks,” for which McGuane had written the screenplay. Nicholson, a fan of Harrison’s early books, staked the then-struggling novelist $50,000 to write “Legends of the Fall,” a suite of novellas published in 1979 that sold strongly and snagged Harrison a screenwriting contract with Warner Bros.

One story from that trilogy, “Revenge,” was released as a movie in 1990, starring Kevin Costner and Madeleine Stowe. The film adaptation of the title novella from “Legends of the Fall,” directed by Ed Zwick and starring Brad Pitt for TriStar, is shaping up as one of this autumn’s big movies. “Dalva” is in development, and yet another film project --which Harrison will only describe as “fresh, like a pink-assed baby”--has brought him to the suite at the Westwood Marquis and a round of script meetings, or, as he prefers, “three days in the dentist’s chair.”

With longtime agent and Michigan State classmate Bob Dattila at his side, Harrison steps off the elevator into the lobby, eager to tear into the hotel’s buffet luncheon. Although he is descended from Swedes and speaks with the upper Midwest’s strangled diphthongs, Harrison’s black cowboy boots, Pancho Villa mustache and swarthy complexion lend him the air of a Colombian coffee baron. Add to that a longshoreman’s physique and a glass left eye--the real one put out by a female playmate during a game of doctor when Harrison was 7--and it’s easy to understand why he is sometimes mistaken for Nicholson’s bodyguard.

In fact, Harrison is somewhat shy in the manner of a tamed bear, a creature, along with wolves and other free spirits, he holds in awe. “People keep misquoting Thoreau: ‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world,’ ” he says. “But it’s wildness--he never said wilderness. All of our reality is shaped to get us to work on time. Wolves aren’t involved in that.”

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A conversation with Harrison is inevitably punctuated by his wheezing, cackling laughter, especially when the subject takes a particularly absurd turn, such as Thomas Mann’s flirtation with screenwriting in the ‘30s. “Jim’s got a great sense of humor--he talks just like he writes,” says Norm Wheeler, a schoolteacher friend from Michigan. “He can go from a sailor joke to a line of poetry in the same sentence.”

Tucked behind a table with Dattila in the hotel dining room, Harrison broods over the news that his cherished buffet has been banished to Sundays. “We’re hungry as pigs,” he tells a waiter, scanning the menu disconsolately. Besides his meandering 10,000-mile car trips and the blissful solitude of his cabin near Grand Marais, on the Lake Superior shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Harrison’s most enduring distraction is food, so much so that he has contemplated rigging his fork, knife and spoon with tiny lights and having himself filmed eating in a darkened room. Invariably, the aromas of food and beverage waft from his reminiscences, from the fiery pasta puttanesca he shared with Federico Fellini to the sodden orgy of beluga, salmon, sweetbreads, leg of lamb and assorted wines, desserts, cheeses and ports that Orson Welles pressed upon him.

“The idea is to eat well and not die from it--for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating,” he once wrote in Esquire.

“What’s the thing that’s least likely to make me feel sleepy?” Harrison is asking Dattila, mindful of a 3:30 script meeting.

“Caesar salad,” the agent murmurs. “Chicken salad . . .”

“ARRRRGH,” groans Harrison, who settles on veal and “white wine, dry--maybe I can get away with one glass.”

One more glass will arrive before the end of lunch, a virtual bender by Hollywood’s current standards of mineral-water piety. When Harrison came to Hollywood, in the late ‘70s, meals with the film colony were liberally irrigated with spirits and garnished with blasts of cocaine.

Now, he says, “you can’t afford to drink too much out here because you have to keep alert. The texture of the town is such that I would never ordinarily have a glass of wine with lunch if I was having a meeting, and I love wine. You have to treat it like you’re in the woods and there actually are grizzlies. Because you don’t do well out here if you (expletive) up. It’s an extraordinarily unforgiving town.”

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Harrison readily acknowledges that Hollywood has, by most standards, been remarkably kind to him.

“You get a little leg up here, being a novelist,” he says. “They even invite you to their homes. What would not be nice is a novelist coming out here without being invited.”

Harrison’s entree was smoothed by Nicholson, McGuane (a friend from his Michigan State days) and Warner Bros. then-chief John Calley. “Oddly, a lot of the big talents in the business have found Jim,” agent Dattila says. “Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford--their people call up saying: ‘We read this guy. What’s he got?’ ”

“Studios are corporations, like publishers,” Harrison says. “Sometimes they treat you quite wonderfully. And sometimes they’re like a rich uncle with severe Alzheimer’s. And you don’t know in any given week which it’s going to be.

“It’s a directors’ medium. You’re crazy if you don’t comprehend that. Also, a writer has to get used to the fact this is a totally collaborative thing. If I write a novel, nobody gets to touch it. My older daughter edits it and we send it off and that’s it. John Huston said you’re lost in this business unless you can see the whole movie topographically. You’ve got to be able to do that or you’re going to fall apart, or depend on prayer. This isn’t the arena of prayer.”

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Despite having cast his line into Hollywood’s waters for 15 years now, Harrison still marvels that the bait can, in effect, tell the fisherman to go jump in the lake.

“Last year I lost 150 grand here, which I could have written a novel on, just because an actress didn’t show up for a meeting,” he says. “Three times in a row she didn’t show, and that blew it. Who’s stable enough to deal with that? Well, I am now, but I wasn’t for a while.”

That was in the early ‘80s, when, stunned by the success of “Legends” and his first Hollywood money, Harrison began a round of hard living. “I behaved badly,” he admits. “I like to think I was the Leon Spinks of American literature.” Says friend Norm Wheeler: “Suddenly he had big money and could fly around and indulge himself. Which he did.”

At one point, Harrison confesses, “my drug price got to be about the same as my script price.” With the help of his family and a therapist, he gradually righted himself, ditching cocaine completely and halving his drinking. He discovered that the long nights and feeble sunshine of northern Michigan’s winters had caused him to have bouts with depression, so he now winters in a casita on an Arizona horse farm near the Mexican border.

Between these measures, his lengthy daily walks and “constant, relentless discipline,” Harrison says he has been clear for seven years of the depression that once brought him to grief.

“I still believe most in Jung, who says depression comes from trying to live too high in the mind,” he says. “You get up there and you almost don’t have an exit, like a bird caught in a granary. He doesn’t know the way out is down.”

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“Oh, I can’t wait to take a little walk.” It’s midmorning on a Saturday, and Harrison is padding around the living room of his suite, where the dregs of his room-service breakfast molder on starched linen and a spyglass rests on the credenza. A view of the UCLA Botanical Gardens beckons through the open windows.

“That was too long a day yesterday,” Harrison says--an “incredibly intense” three-hour script session followed by a lengthy dinner at Dan Tana’s that ended “at 2 sharp. I think.”

Harrison is still digesting the news that his publisher, Seymour Lawrence, has died unexpectedly. “I hadn’t had a real hangover in two years, but old Sam,” he says with a sigh. “Sam was always thought to be the last gentleman in publishing. He was grand to me.”

Harrison was born in Grayling, Mich., in 1937. His father, a country agricultural agent with a taste for literature, inculcated in his son a deep regard both for nature and great writers. “My father was an inordinately bright country man, extremely widely read,” Harrison recalls. When, at 16, Harrison told him he wanted to be a writer, “my dad thought that was a fabulous thing to be. He bought a $15 typewriter for me, so I didn’t have that agonizing disapproval that some young writers get.”

Under the spell of James Joyce and Arthur Rimbaud, Harrison and a friend drove from Michigan to Greenwich Village “to be bohemians for three days. We bought a pint of cognac and stayed at this cheap little hotel. We told the bellhop, ‘We would like a prostitute.’ So we got one and she was very charming and understood the whole situation. She says, ‘Oh! Cognac. You boys must be very sophisticated.’ It was lovely. Then I had to go back and be a junior in high school.”

A reluctant student, Harrison eventually collected a bachelor’s in English and a master’s degree in comparative literature from Michigan State, and in 1960 he married classmate Linda King, whom he’d met when he was 16. His first book of poems, “Plain Song,” was published while he was still a student. After completing his master’s, he taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for a single grueling year before moving back to Michigan with his wife and daughter Jamie.

“I didn’t vaguely fit into an academic community,” Harrison says, now parked, ironically enough, on a bench on the UCLA campus. “There’s something attenuated about it. I can’t stand life when I know everything that’s going to happen to me--I can’t make endless aimless car trips or just do what I want. It’s grotesquely discouraging.”

Back in Michigan, Harrison supported his family with grant money, the meager earnings of his first poetry and occasional articles about fishing and hunting for Sports Illustrated. By 1975, he had published “Wolf: A False Memoir” and “A Good Day to Die” and had high hopes for “Farmer,” his third novel, about a Michigan high school teacher torn between the affections of his middle-aged girlfriend and a neurotic student.

“Farmer” received good notices but sold abysmally. One edition, improperly bound, literally fell apart in readers’ hands. The book’s disintegration, real and figurative, crushed Harrison. “I felt it was my best work,” he says. “I got one paperback offer of $1,200 and turned it down. What was the point?”

Harrison was heavily in debt-- with a second daughter, Anna, to support--and his future seemed unrelievedly grim. Four years later, with the help of Nicholson’s grant, he published “Legends of the Fall.” When the sales of film rights were added, the book pushed Harrison’s earnings from $12,000 to $650,000 in a single year. The sum was inconceivable to the son of a county agricultural agent.

“There’s no way, if you make hundreds of times more in a year than your father did, to rationalize that you are, at least in American terms, sort of successful,” Harrison says. “I was writing the same way as when I wrote ‘Farmer’ and I didn’t get anything. Then I write (“Legends”) and I get everything. Success, particularly in America, is deeply irrational that way. It’s a shuddering elevator.

“When somebody says to me that they think I’m successful,” Harrison adds, swiveling his head to and fro on the park bench in a who-me? pantomime, “I always look around.”

*

It’s a grippingly cold, damp spring night in Brentwood. Harrison, one hand clutching a microphone, stands before a lectern in the courtyard outside Dutton’s bookstore, reading from “The Beige Dolorosa,” one of his new novellas. For an hour, he signed books inside the store, a pint of V.O. stashed discreetly by his side, a cigarette bouncing in the corner of his mouth, as he scrawled his name over and over and growled charmingly, ‘Thank you, that’s very nice of you,” as the books and accolades were shoved his way.

Now, in this wind-swept courtyard, with the traffic on San Vicente threatening to drown out his voice, 100 or so of Harrison’s fans listen raptly as he reads his words about a college professor whose life is derailed by a P.C.-addled female undergrad. When Harrison arrived, a trill of recognition ran among them much the way they might have reacted had one of Harrison’s high-profile Hollywood cronies shown up at the reading. None of them did.

Here, then, is the flip side of Harrison’s all-expenses-paid screenwriter’s life: the artist, his thin blue blazer flapping in the wind, amid the faithful who unstintingly follow his career, anticipate the new books, care enough to stand in the cold and dark and watch him, flanked by a nervous bookstore employee who shines a flashlight over his shoulder, as he reads the writing that they love. Here, at this modest affair, in the heart of a town where writers earn more for a two-page film treatment than for a book but are treated as interchangeable cogs in an oily machine, Jim Harrison is, in the end, just another novelist.

Earlier, back at his hotel suite, Harrison had chuckled, saying: “Don’t you love the way novelists are portrayed in movies? They’ve got no visuals for writers. My endless divarications of prose aren’t possible in a screenplay. And you can’t film a guy sitting there thinking.”

Harrison had paused. “I mean, you can,” he added. “But it’s not a lot of fun to watch.”