JIM HARRISON PARAGRAPH

The New York Times Book Review that reached me today has Jim Harrison on the cover and a review of “Returning to Earth,” a meditation on dying.

In the column about “best sellers,” the columnist recovers a paragraph from a review Harrison did in 1972, which the columnist considers brilliant, “a strange masterpiece, practically a prose poem.” (The review is of Barry Hannah’s first novel, “Geronimo Rex,” which the columnist considers a “wild man on wild man pairing.” Harrison loved the Hannah novel.)

“You might look at the world of the first novel as a gunny-sack race in the gathering twilight at a county fair, a festival that is on the verge of obsolescence anyhow. It is very hot and dusty even in the lengthening shadows of the grandstand (capacity 300). One can smell the lime in the toilets underneath and hear the bawling of the cattle in the stock barns. A mixed group of 50 have entered the race this year. The prize is a warm watermelon that someone has deftly entered with a razor blade and filled with a coral snake wrapped around an eyeball and a tumor. This is all plainly not as healthy as summer camp or the 4-H.”

Surrealism, eh? A poisonous gothic next-to-last image and then the sarcasm about summer camp and the 4-H, as if to say, “I suppose all you middle western fair-goers thought that was the world. Well, what do you think of a garish desert snake? What do you think of staring at everything honestly -- even cancer? (Which was systematically denied for many years when “proper people” didn’t discuss cancer anymore than they discussed sex -- particularly when they themselves had either.) Summer camp and 4-H are part of the same world as the county fair -- innocent sack races, pit toilets carefully limed, cows.

What about that “entered” and then “entered?” Should someone have edited that? Was it a mistake? Two kinds/meanings of entered? (A sexual overtone there, maybe? Snakes as the male euphemism. I suppose even “warm watermelons” -- sometimes violated by snaky males -- full of danger.)

I don’t know the novel, so there’s no way to say whether the review is doing it justice, but it’s interesting to see what the columnist thinks is “a strange masterpiece, practically a prose poem.” These days reviewers seem to put a high value on shock, surprise, the breaking open of kinder-gentler worlds.

You might look at the world of the first novel as a gunny-sack race in the gathering twilight at a county fair, a festival that is on the verge of obsolescence anyhow.

Direct address to the reader: you might do this thing: “look.” Then a string of prepositional phrases:
at the world
of the first novel
as a gunny-sack race
in the gathering twilight
at a county fair

now an appositive with a subordinate phrase full of more prepositional phrases:
on the verge
of obsolescence
and the adverb “anyhow.”

It is very hot and dusty even in the lengthening shadows of the grandstand (capacity 300).
Specifying the capacity instead of saying this is a small event in a small place.

One can smell the lime in the toilets underneath and hear the bawling of the cattle in the stock barns.
Basic sensory information that establishes this is in the past (pit toilets, well-limed which means attended to) and rural.

A mixed group of 50 have entered the race this year.
People? Horses? Lot of entries for a race, which are usually sorted, not mixed. Sounds more like a melee than a proper race.

The prize is a warm watermelon that someone has deftly entered with a razor blade and filled with a coral snake wrapped around an eyeball and a tumor. This is all plainly not as healthy as summer camp or the 4-H.

Shock, surrealism, and sarcasm.

I don’t think a person often writes this kind of paragraph by consciously planning, “Oh, I’ll list a lot of images, then throw in some ambiguity and at the end shock everyone. But that might be a sort of pattern that develops if a person writes a lot. It would be interesting to look for just this sequence in more of Harrison’s writing. And in Hannah’s, too, of course.

But it doesn’t strike me as “wild man.” That columnist must lead a sheltered life.