Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The River Swimmer
    The River Swimmer
    The River Swimmer
    Ebook183 pages3 hours

    The River Swimmer

    By Jim Harrison

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Two outstanding late novellas from one of America’s most beloved and critically acclaimed authors.
     
    A brilliant rendering of two men striving to find their way in the world, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity, The River Swimmer is Jim Harrison at his most memorable.
     
    In The Land of Unlikeness, sixty-year-old art history academic Clive a failed artist, divorced and grappling with the vagaries of his declining years reluctantly returns to his family’s Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. The return to familiar territory triggers a jolt of renewal—of ardor for his high school love, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In Water Baby, Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to the water as an escape, and sees otherworldly creatures there. Faced with the injustice and pressure of coming of age, he takes to the river and follows its siren song all the way across Lake Michigan.
     
    The River Swimmer is a striking portrait of two richly-drawn, profoundly human characters, and an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison remains one of America’s most cherished and important writers, on a par with such literary greats as Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Robert Stone, Russell Banks, and Ann Beattie.
     
    “Trenchant and visionary . . . Harrison is a writer of the body, which he celebrates as the ordinary, essential and wondrous instrument by which we measure the world. Without it, there is no philosophy. And with it, of course, philosophy can be a rocky test. . . . I could feel Jim Harrison grinning . . . in his glorious novella The River Swimmer.” —The New York Times Book Review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 8, 2013
    ISBN9780802193803
    The River Swimmer
    Author

    Jim Harrison

    Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.

    Read more from Jim Harrison

    Related to The River Swimmer

    Related ebooks

    Coming of Age Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Reservation Dogs

      May 10, 2019

      Reservation Dogs
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Poet of Kyrgyzstan

      Dec 1, 2020

      The Poet of Kyrgyzstan
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Enemy In The Machine

      Jan 10, 2017

      The Enemy In The Machine
      20 min read

    • Article

      Alone On The Range

      Oct 1, 2023

      Alone On The Range
      24 min read

    • Article

      Baseball's Latest Dirty Secret Is A Sticky Subject For Some Pitchers

      May 27, 2021

      After St. Louis Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos was ordered to change his cap Wednesday because umpires disapproved of the sunscreen on the bill, Cardinals manager Mike Shildt broached the taboo topic of pitchers' widespread use of foreign subst

      2 min read

    • Article

      For Further Reading

      Dec 15, 2020

      Here are some moments of clarity that … Are strong but unspoken: From “CHOP SUEY” by IRA SUKRUNGRUANG My mother grabbed my hand and took one step toward the man. In that instant, I saw in her face the same resolve she had when she spanked, the same r

      2 min read

    • Article

      Return Fire

      Nov 1, 2022

      Return Fire
      4 min read

    • Article

      Lincoln’s Plan for Peace

      Nov 1, 2020

      Lincoln’s Plan for Peace
      3 min read

    • Article

      Zero

      May 10, 2019

      Zero
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hiking Into The Past

      Mar 1, 2022

      Hiking Into The Past
      10 min read

    • Article

      I Met Fear on the Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primord

      32 min read

    • Article

      Seas of Change

      Mar 5, 2018

      Seas of Change
      10 min read

    • Article

      How We Drink Now

      May 29, 2020

      How We Drink Now
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Chicago Seven Put Their Fate In Her Hands. One Juror's Rarely Seen Trial Journals Reveal How That Changed Her Forever

      Aug 19, 2018

      CHICAGO - In a brown spiral notebook, in neat cursive penmanship, Mrs. Jean Fritz begins chronicling her time as a juror in the trial that will change her life. She writes down the date, the room, the address, the judge, and then: "Case of 8 defendan

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Bomb Next Door

      Jun 1, 2022

      The Bomb Next Door
      20 min read

    • Article

      Top 5 Books By George Orwell That Aren’t 1984 Or Animal Farm

      Jan 25, 2021

      Orwell’s funniest novel is a spiky, semi-autobiographical satire of the London literary scene and thwarted ambition. Gordon Comstock, an unsuccessful poet terrified of sliding into bourgeois conformity, is a hilarious misanthrope and forerunner of th

      1 min read

    • Article

      Whodunnit?

      Dec 17, 2022

      Whodunnit?
      14 min read

    • Article

      Jonah Goldberg: Biden’s Spending Spree Isn’t A New New Deal

      May 5, 2021

      We don’t know what the Biden years will ultimately look like, but one thing is pretty obvious, at least to me: It won’t be a new New Deal, nor will this be the beginning of a new Progressive Era. First, a bit of history. The New Deal, particularly in

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The River Swimmer

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The River Swimmer - Jim Harrison

      9780802193803-riverswimmer.jpg

      The River

      Swimmer

      Also by Jim Harrison

      FICTION

      Wolf: A False Memoir

      A Good Day to Die

      Farmer

      Legends of the Fall

      Warlock

      Sundog

      Dalva

      The Woman Lit by Fireflies

      Julip

      The Road Home

      The Beast God Forgot to Invent

      True North

      The Summer He Didn’t Die

      Returning to Earth

      The English Major

      The Farmer’s Daughter

      The Great Leader

      CHILDREN’S LITURATURE

      The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

      POETRY

      Plain Song

      Locations

      Outlyer and Ghazals

      Letters to Yesenin Returning to Earth

      Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981

      The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems

      After Ikkyū & Other Poems

      The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

      Braided Creek: A conversation in Poetry with Ted Kooser

      Saving Daylight

      In Search of Small Gods

      Sons of Unreason

      ESSAYS

      Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

      The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

      MEMOIR

      Off to the Side

      JIM HARRISON

      The River Swimmer

      Novellas

      V-1.tif

      Grove Press

      New York

      Copyright © 2013 by Jim Harrison

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or ­anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

      Published simultaneously in Canada

      Printed in the United States of America

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9380-3

      Grove Press

      An imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

      841 Broadway

      New York, NY 10003

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      www.groveatlantic.com

      To Andrew and Anna

      Contents

      The Land of Unlikeness

      The River Swimmer

      The Land of Unlikeness

      PART I

      Chapter 1

      Clive awoke before dawn in a motel in Ypsilanti, Michigan, thinking that it was altogether possible that every woman in the world was married to the wrong man. He was sixty and hadn’t been married in twenty years but his divorce was still the starkest rupture in his life. Afterward his fire was doused, or so he thought, and he had quit being a painter and had become an art history professor, an emissary, appraiser, and cultural handyman. In actuality he had allowed time to slur reality and the break was far from clean. The year before the divorce his final show at a New York gallery had been declared by a Times critic to be absurdly decorative, the kiss of death for an abstract painter and also a kiss good-bye with a gallery that had only sold two of the thirty paintings and those heavily discounted to one of Clive’s few collectors.

      Ypsilanti wasn’t a destination, to be sure, but a stop on his way to northern Michigan to look after his semiblind eighty-five-year-old mother while his sister made her first trip to Europe. His sister had chided him on the phone that he had admitted to more than thirty trips to Europe while she hadn’t been once. This wouldn’t have been possible but he had been put on a three-month leave of absence by his Ivy League university for an unfortunate incident that had involved minimal but disastrous self-defense. During the annual public lecture that was part of his obligation for his endowed chair in the humanities a dozen members of a group called the Art Tarts had rushed up on the stage and their leader, a thin young woman of Amazonian height, had thrown a canister of yellow paint on his favorite suit (Savile Row) and then began rapping on his chest with a sharp knuckle while screaming Sexist cocksucker! He pushed her away and she tumbled backward off the podium, gave her head a nasty crack, and broke her collarbone. Fortunately for Clive the lecture had been videotaped, though the dean dissuaded him from pursuing an assault charge. She pursued one, but her contingency lawyer had seen the video­tape and told her that he couldn’t win her a dime.

      Above all else, including a list of neurotic disorders, marital and academic difficulties, Clive was a man of surpassing good humor and amazing memory. He remembered everyone’s name across the board from society people to grocery clerks to janitors and cleaning women. As a child he had been fascinated by names and had kept a name journal throughout his life. In his side work appraising art—nineteenth-century American art was his specialty—for estate, insurance, or divorce purposes, he knew the names of a dozen doormen on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Always a liberal he insisted on being called by his first name so he was greeted by them as Mister Clive.

      After a twelve-hour drive and a bitterly stupid late meal in Ypsilanti he was susceptible to his only two current anger items. First was his ruined favorite suit which literally made him see yellow. It was irreplaceable mostly because he had lost nearly 70 percent of the value of his modest portfolio in the economic plunge. This was due to receiving stock tips from a hedge fund stalwart who himself had lost a couple of billion. The man had been apoplectic for a year because he had bought many paintings at exorbitant prices and now had to pay his long-term wife half their value in their divorce settlement.

      The night of modest indigestion led him to question why an ordinary mom-and-pop restaurant would put a big amount of rosemary, currently America’s most overused herb, in their meat loaf. This led to his prime source of anger which he tended to keep private except with a few friends. It was greed. Unmitigated cupidity. Despite having quit painting twenty years before, Clive was a romantic idealist about art. He had noted beginning in the past two and a half decades the growing percentage of people who when they talked about art were only talking about the art market and its confetti of price tags. Some days it was up to 100 percent. He had long ago given up making pointed remarks about the fact that art and the art market were two entirely different things. Clive was not widely read in the field of socioeconomics or the problem would have been clearer. Such academic prose was utterly without aesthetic merit and this quality was demanded in something as simple as this money obsession. It was a brutish crime indeed and far from the ideals of a boy of ten, who had been dropped off at the Big Rapids Public Library to study art books with goose bumps while his parents shopped at the grocery and hardware store and picked up feed at the grain elevator. The final blasphemous straw, though it wasn’t a painting, was a bid of twenty-eight million dollars for a single chair at the Yves Saint Laurent belongings auction in Paris. Curiously, his many French and Italian friends and acquaintances rarely spoke of money. They didn’t necessarily have better taste but open discussions about money were apparently in bad form.

      It was only 5 a.m. and he didn’t want to wait two hours for Zingerman’s to open in the neighboring city of Ann Arbor in order to buy intriguing food supplies. He would call in and do a FedEx order, which would irritate his penurious mother. He had wanted to dine at Zingerman’s Roadhouse the evening before but was absolutely sure he would run into someone he knew. He had begun his teaching career at the University of Michigan and even though that was more than fifteen years before, the idea of explaining his recent mudbath to an old colleague was unacceptable. The Internet and pestilential e-mail ensured that the gossip would have made its way around. The New York Times had run a very small item but the Post had run a photo of him staring down cross-eyed at the paint on his suit.

      All of these annoyances passed with the pressure of leaving early enough to miss the rush hour and the more than overwhelming glories of burgeoning spring. Since childhood he had favored May above all other months and driving north a couple of hundred miles to what was left of the old farm was curiously enlivening in its variations of diminishing spring, much stronger in the south, but still there farther north with budding hardwoods and a distinct emerging green in pastures with loitering black and white Holsteins, all of which began to purge his mind of the enervations of his livelihood. When he turned east on a gravel road between Big Rapids and Reed City he stopped beside a marsh with the car windows rolled down and listened to the trilling cacophony of hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, and on the other side of the road the more dulcet calls of meadowlarks. He recalled with immoderate reverence his burgeoning love at age ten for looking at paintings and listening to classical music, the lack of mind in his pleasure. How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

      Chapter 2

      For reasons of clarity Clive liked to dice his life into paragraphs in his journal, kept since his teens. All of this writing, not to speak of his obsessive reading of the best in literature, had the benefit of teaching him to write well. One of the rawest paragraphs, however, came about after the collapse of his painting life when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. A professor had loved an essay Clive had written about Blumenschein, a painter of the Taos school, and had said, It’s a good thing you quit! You write too well for a painter. Painters don’t write well.

      What about Robert Motherwell? Clive had asked, always irked at such didactic statements.

      Motherwell is passé, the professor said, fiddling with his meerschaum, then beginning one of his geometric doodles. Many of his graduate students referred to him as Mister Doodles.

      Clive had merely nodded and left the office with a smile. After all, he had received high and prophetic praise for his Blumenschein essay. Despite an eighty-year slump, Blumenschein prices eventually rose to as much as a million, obviously a matter of no consequence to the long dead artist. On his way to have a cup of coffee after the enervating meeting with the professor, Clive had stopped to make a few notes in his pocket notebook, which would later be transferred to his journal in the form of a terse paragraph.

      I’ve been told that Motherwell is passé. Just the other day at the coffee shop I told a PhD candidate in music how much I enjoyed reading Steinbeck. He snorted and chortled as if he had caught me masturbating while picking my nose. No one takes Steinbeck seriously, he hissed. This young man is writing his dissertation on a composer named Harold Arlen with whom I’m not familiar. In big cities and in university centers in the hinterlands the air guitarists are forever making decisions on who has become passé. They remind me of certain patrons of my favorite NYC jazz clubs like the Five Spot or Slugs, ultrahip guys who appear to believe that the music of the performers depends on their presence.

      He missed the turn to his mother’s driveway, perhaps on purpose. He wasn’t ready yet and never would be, he thought. What is this? he said aloud in the car. It had been three years since he had been back home and seen the twenty-acre thicket his mother had planted forty years before after his father’s death. In the three years of overaverage rainfall the thicket had grown exponentially, with a riot of small pale green leaves flipping the undersides in the stiff late morning wind. The thicket was her retreat from the peopled world, which she found unsavory in nearly all respects. In the interim his mother had visited him with his sister Margaret twice in New York City which had meant a couple of days of dreary plodding after her in the Museum of Natural History. They would stay with him in his modest apartment on West End Avenue which he could no longer afford, the rent having risen 500 percent in seventeen years. To his complaints the rental agent had thrown up his hands and said Tough titty. His mother’s failing vision had limited her somewhat to pressing her nose against the glass cases of seemingly thousands of dead, stuffed birds and saying, My goodness. Margaret had warned him on the phone that after leading her out at dawn to one of her bird-watching sites he would have to keep alert for when she blew the dog whistle so that he could fetch her when the time came. This had come from a phone call only days before and in his current despondency he rather liked the idea of being beckoned by a dog whistle.

      He drove another mile past his mother’s house down the gravel road, refusing the weight of sentiment in his boyhood landscape. He was distracted again by the thought of the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling in the huge hall of the Field Museum in Chicago. It was normally a personal taboo to think of painting anything but he couldn’t help himself when it came to the whale. He would lead his mother to a bench, perhaps in a room full of unattractive stuffed snakes, tell her to stay there, and then go out for a cigarette. On coming back in he would stop and stare upward at the whale pondering a holographic painting of the immense ribs from a point of view inside the capacious rib cage. He had mildly fantasized finding a room somewhere and doing the painting despite his twenty-year avowal never to paint again.

      He turned around in the driveway of his high school girlfriend Laurette. The present owner had done, to his eye, a wretched job of gentrifying the farmhouse with flouncy dormers and copper flashing on the roof edges. The natural redwood siding looked out of place so far from California and the lawn now was absurdly manicured with geometrical perennial beds. Gone were the lilac groves and the ancient tire swing where Laurette would sing the Disney song

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1