THE BEAST GOD FORGOT TO INVENT

 

by Jim Harrison

 

Atlantic Monthly Press

ISBN 0-87113-821-2

 

 

Brown Dog is back. When last seen, he d fled west across Canada after lobbing firecrackers at archaeologists to scare them off an Indian Mound in Michigan's Upper Peninsula──the "UP" as it is known locally. We rejoin him on the lam in Los Angeles, where he has been abandoned by the fraudulent Native American activist Lone Marten from whom Brown Dog seeks to recover his stolen bear skin, taking wrong turns at each corner in what, for Harrison, is a fairly linear plot. But nothing Harrison has ever written is truly linear. There's a drunken screenwriter, a faux French actress who hustles men for money for the greencard she doesn't need, a powerful Hollywood director who bought the bear skin but won't give it up, and Delmore from back home who cooks up a possible deal to keep Brown Dog out of jail.

All of this moves in a series of tangential circles, interconnected, moving back and forth like the misfiring thoughts of the human brain. You can trace this technique to Harrison's ghazals nearly 30 years ago──his take on a form of poetry from India where each line of verse jumps off on a connected but new line of thought. He did it to perfection in Wolf, his "false memoir," a book that linear-plot types won't be able to finish, but for true Harrison fans is the prime example of his style.

The excellence of Wolf the book should not be confused with the dismal movie of the same name, starring Jack Nicholson, or Revenge, another fine Harrison novella which also made a less than average movie. Only Legends of the Fall successfully made the difficult transition from page to screen, which is more a statement why Harrison's work is for certain readers, not all readers. His experience in Hollywood probably gave free license to lampoon the LA scene in Westward Ho, the Brown Dog sequel in his latest collection, in which Bob the screenwriter drinks too much, eats too much, fibs too much, and falls for easy sex at the first opportunity. But what Harrison protagonist does not?

If his male leads behave badly, they also pay for it dearly, usually in a kind of mental free fall that freezes them as if suspended in mid-air. That's exactly where we find a retired book dealer in The Beast God Forgot To Invent. His wife left him for the common complaint: "I'm not really here, am I?" He seeks redemption of sorts in assisting a local woodsman in the Upper Peninsula as the guardian of Joe, a once wealthy businessman who crushed his brains in a closed-head injury when his motorcycle collided with a tree. Joe becomes a canvas for Harrison to paint the wrongs of modern life. The narrator can't escape his consciousness, his dithering, his near-fatal attraction to food and drink and women, his self-pitied frenzies. Joe simply has no memory left and experiences anew the wonder of a sunrise each day. He sleeps in a hammock slung between two white pines, 50 feet up in the air. He sees a beast that can be either a bear or a raven. Like Enkidu (from the Summerian Epic of Gilgamesh), Joe can walk with the wild animals, including bears.

 

The injury, and the massive medical portfolio that attests to this, altered his sense of time, or destroyed the sense of time necessary to conduct the business of a culture, a "civilization," as it were. Joe's sense of time has become hopelessly round while ours is linear. His time is the duration, immediate, of what his senses feed him. Thus a bird's song is time, so is the wind, the slow passing of a particular cloud, trees giving way to other trees, growing hunger or thirst. It is not a clock. His individual universe is totally holographic, so that he moves dimensionally within time's enclosure but quite unrelated to it. In his natural world death is child's play.

 

Robert Bly, in Iron John, could have included Joe as one of his prototypical wild men. Harrison goes further. Joe is a wild man because he has lost that part of his brain that allowed him to function in civilization. The tormented narrator can only guess what it's like. But Brown Dog, invisible in his janitor suit in the money culture of Los Angeles, uneducated except in the way of the woods, comes closer to the truth:

 

There was an owl with an unfamiliar call directly above him and moments later the first stirring of dawn birds which always brought on an hour or so of the deepest sleep the outdoor sleeper can have, maybe a genetic remnant from time when the predatory enemy was always nocturnal and first light meant the sweet dream of security.

 

Harrison once wrote about mapping the phrenology of the heart. In The Beast God Forgot to Invent, he maps the phrenology of the mind. But he returns to the heart in I Forgot To Go To Spain in which a 55 year old author of superficial Bioprobes remembers when he was a graduate student poet with lavender bellbottoms and long hair in the 60's. Married once, for nine short days, he calls up his once-young bride who now, a handsome 50, saves the world's flowers from extinction, a none too subtle contrast with the fact he sold out for big bucks. The brief reunion results in a typical Harrison pratfall. When the biographer confides to his sister, she gives him a verbal kick in the balls his father warned would actually be physical:

 

You should give up pronto the idea that your situation is anything out of the ordinary. I'd bet half the people in this f ----- up country snare themselves in a life's work that they know isn't right for them. The trouble is there aren't enough right things to do. I just made it less of my life than you did. You simply lacked the character to follow through on what you dreamed you should do. I'm surrounded by people who followed through and probably shouldn't have. There's nothing new in this, is there?

 

This is a classic win-by-losing tale. There's a nice parallel to one of Harrison's first novellas, the little known The Man Who Gave Up His Name. There a successful businessman gave up his marriage and career and retreated to a shack on a Florida beach with three simple things: a job as a chef with a love for food, a Boston Whaler for fishing, and a radio for music so he could dance on the beach by himself at night.

If you're into Joseph Campbell's myth deconstruction (The Hero With A Thousand Faces), Harrison includes a wonderful "cave of knowledge" scene:

 

I'm not sure what I expected from my own room which I hadn't slept in since I was thirty-five and so arrogant that, to reverse Henry James, I was one on whom everything is lost. A man in his mid-thirties on a full-tilt-success boogie is as self-referential as the pancreas which is doomed never to know it is a pancreas. My room was absolutely chock-full of the comedy of youthful expectation and, as opposed to science fiction, maybe the only true time machine is when we revisit the signal locations of our far past that resonate so deeply we are drawn out of our shoes back to the emotional content that still resides there.

 

Of course it's what the narrator does with this knowledge that s important. So, too, for us. And in all three novellas in this collection, Harrison points us to Gary Snyder's admonition that dreams and visions are more important than real life. Kurt Vonnegut once said the Tattered Cover Book Store is a national treasure. The same is true of Harrison.

 

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