TRUE NORTH

 

by

 

Jim Harrison

 

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

 

Hardcover, 388 pages, $24

ISBN 0-8021-1773-2

 

 

Some who win the birth lottery also win a ticket to a lifelong dance of guilt arising from what their ancestors did to accumulate the wealth off which the descendants now live. Such is the turmoil of David Burkett, heir to a dwindling fortune made in the 19^th century from the timber and minerals of Michigan s Upper Peninsula, his prodigal father not without the predatory heart necessary to steal from his own children. This, of course, is Jim Harrison country, and the novel begins with David, now a grown man, in a rowboat with his father in the stern, the old man s hands cut off, stumps of his arms duct-taped, and the shore south of Veracruz, Mexico, rising with the dawn.

My father woke from his latest faint. His face was too bruised for clear speech and now rather than wailing he bleated. His eyes made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk. I would study the stinking fish scales and bits of dried viscera on the boat s bottom and then look up and he would still be there floating in the current. And then finally I was pleased to see him sink. What a strange way to say good-bye to your father.

 

How Burkett and his father get from Michigan to Veracruz is what makes this story tick. Harrison takes us back in time, when Burkett was a boy with the growing awareness of living in a house of privilege but also depravity. He embarks on a search for the truth of what his family has done, not only to the land, but also to the working folks who made his family s wealth possible. If this is a search for truth, as reflected in the book s title, one unforgivable truth is his father s rape of his Mexican assistant s daughter, a quite accurate symbol of the prior lives of Burkett s predecessors. If you connect the dots, then the old man s end, revealed in the opening scene, hardly seems unfortunate. But the truth of True North is more in the slow education of Burkett while he moves through life, as in his inability to shake off a childhood story about how we all have an animal living inside us something dictating bad behavior, and growing large enough to devour us.

Sitting there on the beach in the motherly moonlight I realized that I had never reached a point where I actually disbelieved in the existence of this animal. It was probably still there wrapped around my spine.

 

Burkett marries, but the sound of his marriage becomes his subdued whine, driving his sweet wife away as surely as if I had wielded a club. In short, he tries so hard not to be his father that he has no idea who he is. And there lies the heart of the problem a guilty father, with the son believing he, as the son, must make things right. To do so, he assumes a self-inflicted guilt for something he didn't do and suffers generational purgatory. But he can't undo what his ancestors did, his guilt accomplishes little other than a hyena-like gnawing at his own guts, and it takes years to learn that he cannot obtain forgiveness for what a prior generation did. He can only live his life as best he can and not repeat old mistakes. Frequently he is verbally slapped up side the head with this painful fact but can t accept the truth in the pain of each slap, as in this outburst by Vernice, a poetess with whom he is smitten:

You can t spend your life writing a family history when there s no one who will want to read it. You can t spend your life in reaction to your family, mostly your father, because that means you re still his wounded little boy. You say you re essentially Christian but you re hanging out in the Old Testament when you should be in the New. He rose up and slew his father with the jawbone of the ass, that sort of shit. What a stupid way to lead your life. Do you think you ll have a number of lives or what?

 

For Burkett, his father closed the windows to the world, and Burkett comes to realize that he has spent his life struggling to open them. The problem of forgiveness isn t excusing the offender but unburdening yourself of the tyranny of the offender by seeing him in a full human perspective. This becomes nearly impossible as his father sees himself as the victim, unfairly excommunicated from the family for his foibles. As his father says:

You can t forgive what I did. Don t even try. You could forgive me for being a bad father. It couldn t have been otherwise.

 

In the end, the light that shines brightest for Burkett is the Gnostic Gospels, the idea that God can be found within yourself, and this quote attributed to Jesus:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

 

Burkett s struggle is no less than this. Like many who came of age in the 1960 s and its long shadow afterward, he suffers self-flagellation for what his ancestors did, not what he did. When he travels to Mexico for forgiveness from the now grown woman whom his father raped, he finally learns she can t forgive him for what his father did. Applied to a wider spectrum, Harrison s idea may prove unpopular, but the fact remains we can t change what our ancestors did; we can only change what we do. Guilt for what we haven t done, Harrison seems to say, is a loss of precious life only somewhat less sure than the old man, hands chopped off, dumped over the transom of the small boat to sink below the surface of the sea.

 

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