"Life is too short," Jim Harrison writes in Just Before Dark, "for me to approach a meal with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute." Having read his collection of nonfiction three times now, I'm pretty sure he means it. I said I'm pretty sure, but then I'm a Christian Humanist Isolationist Redneck Swine living just outside the shadow of the Talladega Super Speedway, not a Poet Zombie Chef and self-confessed "Food Bully" traversing the republic in a red Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, this ranks me just below a "hanging chad" in importance as a book reviewer, but I never cared for Florida's Atlantic coast anyhow. Give me the mullet toss at the Flora-Bama any day of the week...

But the book. It's a collection of nonfiction essays written over a period of at least twenty years. Divided into three sections--the first on Food, the second on Travel and Sport (mostly hunting and fishing), and the third on Literary Matters--it makes for a good weekender. I typically breeze through the first two, but get bogged down in section three. For that I need Sunday. In short, I like them all but the section on food and cooking is by far his best. His descriptions of brook trout sizzling over hot coals had me reaching for the fly rod...no small feat considering I was sitting at home near the Coosa River at the time, swatting mosquitos the size of pteradons, hundreds of miles from the nearest trout stream, much less a brookie. Likewise his descriptions of woodcock, chicken thighs, rabbit, and duck. If you can get past the name-dropping, you'll smell them too, right off the page. But there is a lot of name-dropping, my one complaint.

Harrison's books, novels, poems, and screenplays/movies are possibly what Kurtz would have written had he made it back, put the past behind him, gave it the ol' college try, and settled down to a bourgeoise life as a haberdasher in partnership with Marlowe, who gives up the sea and becomes a simple cobbler, his livelihood tied to dry land and walking distances. No more adventures for him, thanks, and that goes for reading about it, too. Take your Ahab and shove it.

Such an extreme back and forth between the harshest objectivity in fiction and poetry and movie scripts, and most subjective, participatory journalism in his essays and articles, Harrison's twisted but just sane enough that he could either be Hunter S. Thompson's saner older brother, or one of George Romero's gruesome (but oddly loveable!) cannibals. And be honest...sitting there in the dark with the tv glowing, you're rooting for the walking dead. You root for Harrison, too, but you're also pretty sure you don't want to run into him in a dark galley...kitchen, that is.

Harrison in the kitchen or sitting at table does recall the Dead trilogy, or maybe NASCAR: you don't look for cooking or eating tips from Harrison for the same reason you don't emulate Dale Jr. on the interstate...it would kill you, or someone else. If you're looking at things properly (of course you are!) you would not be surprised to see him in a George Romero flick, trying to hoist a huge roasted leg of something dripping grease to his teeth with one hand while fending off the walking dead with the other. The tendency is to gawk, recoil, laugh, be amused, in that order. As a self-labeled "food bully," his tales of eating with Orson Welles or driving his daughter to tears by the sheer volume of labor intensive goodies he cooks up (and demands she consume) for a simple wedding party will shock and delight. I just dare you not to hear, "They're coming to get you, Barbara," in the back of your mind. How much "heavily truffled woodcock" is too much? Doesn't matter. With essays entitled, "A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven" and "Log of the Earthtoy Drifthumper" beckoning, you'll turn the page anyway, if only in anticipation of witnessing him fighting his way through a zombie cook-off at Republican HQ with nothing but a cracked wooden spoon and some gazpacho. Reading Harrison changes you in annoying ways, and before long you find that you wouldn't think less of him, even if you saw him fighting with Jeff Gordon and hordes of flesh eating zombies over a bottle of barbecue sauce in the infield at Talladega.

Like true horror or auto racing, you know it ain't pretty, but you can't look away.

Posted by Bob Benz at April 10, 2003 2:49 PM

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