Memoir is author’s hideaway

“My life could have been otherwise but it wasn’t,” Jim Harrison writes in his disjointed memoir of an author’s life, “Off to the Side,” employing the trademark take-it-or-leave-it manner he used in “The Road Home” and “Legends of the Fall” and declining to draw specific conclusions about the paths he traveled.

Harrison writes of his days as an emerging writer living a hardscrabble life, then coming into his own as an iconic American heartland novelist and poet; later, he writes of his erratic years as a Hollywood screenwriter hanging out with Jack Nicholson and other entertainment bigwigs, feasting with Orson Welles and making deals with studios; and finally, of the wisdom of his later days, his ability to see the natural world mystically, his claim of shape-shifting into a wolf one night and the fundamental peace he taps via rural settings.

In the midst of this autobiographical arc, he arranges a cluster of essays on his seven favorite obsessions -- alcohol, going to strip clubs, hunting and fishing, his own private religion, France, taking road trips and our place in the natural world -- topics on which he waxes poetic.

Sentence by sentence, the writing is stunning, though the disparate topics and details of his life story are not addressed in a clear chronological or thematic way but appear somewhat randomly, as if Harrison didn’t wish to impose anything as constricting as order on them. The result, unfortunately, is an uneven narrative that, even with his dazzling metaphors and gorgeously layered sentences, adds up to less than the sum of it parts.

Harrison named the book as he did because he believes “a writer is always a stowaway. Hidden, and well off to the side.” Such, he tells us, is the “designated and comfortable position for a writer.” Yet here he shows no shyness in taking center stage, going on about his views on every little thing.

True, a memoir must concern itself with the life lived, and Harrison has much to offer in the many existences he’s crammed into one: poet, contractor, gourmand, fisherman, hunter, professor, busboy, bohemian, elbow-rubber of the Hollywood elite, drug user, drunkard, novelist, husband and father.

In reporting those lives, however, he explores the intangible concepts of life but maintains an arm’s-length distance from the details that have made up his existence.

For instance, Harrison writes of his propensity for melancholy and refers to seeing the same therapist over many decades: “I have clocked seven depressions in my life that might qualify as ‘clinical’ beginning at the age of 14. There is the obvious conclusion that in each case I was behaving in a way I shouldn’t preceding the depression, living an outward life my inward being couldn’t accept, reaching a level of raw perception that my current life couldn’t accommodate.” How did those depressions manifest themselves and affect the writing? In what way had he been behaving preceding them that would allow him to draw such conclusions? The specifics he offers to answer such questions are scant. Rather than creating vivid scenes and opening the door for readers to enter, Harrison mostly reports to us: I did this, then I did that, next I did the following and this is what I think about it all. Writing of the natural world, he’s eloquent; detailing Hollywood roguishness, he’s explicit; but on the inner life of his own existence, he’s vague. Even when the actions of the story are commanding, the narrative remains an intellectual exercise rather than a visceral evocation.

The blinding of Harrison’s left eye, for example, a traumatic event that occurred when he was 7, is told in two concise sentences, but fully 60 pages are devoted to his screenwriting bad-boy antics and the name-brand stars he drank and partied with. (Though he refers to the blinding and its consequences on and off throughout the narrative, there’s no greater depth to those references than in the initial two sentences.)

Were Harrison a less talented writer, less would be asked of him. He can sweep a reader off her feet with his wordplay, even if he is just describing the weather: “It did not so much begin to rain as the air quite suddenly became full of water. Given the circumstances the rain could not help but be a baptism.”

In writing about himself, Harrison has managed to keep his inner self so “off to the side” that the main character remains ultimately illusive. Characterizing objects of devotion he’s culled from the natural world, he writes, “I’m emotionally not far from the broken-hearted little old lady fingering her rosary beads, though my liturgical words are those of a rarer bird.” Such sentences whet the reader’s appetite, create a longing for a more detailed map of the writer’s interior world. The hunger he inspires with his poetic narration, though, is never fully sated.

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Off to the Side

A Memoir

Jim Harrison

Atlantic Monthly Press: 288 pages, $25