On the 'Perimeters of Relationships': Jim Harrison's Last Interview

Peter Nowogrodzki visited poet and fiction writer Jim Harrison a few months before his death, in this Los Angeles Review of Books interview, possibly Harrison's last.

Introduction

JIM HARRISON, a writer who, according to the London Sunday Times, had “immortality in him,” died at the age of 79 on March 26, 2016.

Two months earlier, on Valentine’s Day, just about spring in Southern Arizona, I pulled into the poet’s driveway outside the tiny border town of Patagonia. The cholla cacti were showing their spikes, bare of those pretty red and yellow blooms that pop out in April and stay through the summer months. At night, temperatures ducked down to near freezing, and just off old State Route 82, drops of early morning dew hung from a concrete historical marker in honor of Camp Crittenden — established in 1867, the fort was abandoned shy of five years later, after its commander was killed in a skirmish with Cochise’s Apache. Things come and go. By the time of Harrison’s death, the grasslands beyond the sign would be dotted with migratory birds, up from Mexico: rare gray hawks gliding about, colorful warblers in the oak canopies, vermillion flycatchers on branches.

The below interview is, I think, Harrison’s last. He had recently published his 14th volume of poetry, Dead Man’s Float, and his 21st book of fiction, The Ancient Minstrel, adding to an already prodigious and celebrated literary career, which had, over the years, earned him comparisons to Faulkner and Hemingway. His first book of poems, Plain Song, published in 1965, when Harrison was 28; his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, debuted six years later. But his greatest commercial success came in 1979, with a trilogy of novellas collectively called Legends of the Fall — which was further popularized 15 years later, in 1994, by Edward Zwick’s Hollywood rendition, starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. The movie helped to make Harrison’s a household name, and the screenplay made him rich.

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