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A L S O+.T O D A Y

The Salon Interview: Andrea Barrett
By Peter Kurth
A conversation with Andrea Barrett, author of the National Book Award-winning "Ship Fever and Other Stories"

The Salon Interview:
Ken Follett
By David Bowman
The thriller-master talks about Bob Dylan, working with Ross Perot and why he prefers the creature comforts of a luxury hotel to the perilous terrain of his heroes
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Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host: The Autobiography of Larry Sanders
Reviewed by Joyce Millman
This pseudomemoir, like the long-running HBO show it derives from, delivers a fun house-mirror reflection of the late-night talk show wars

T A B L E+T A L K
What books will you be giving as gifts this year? Discuss your list in the Books area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Andrew Sullivan
By Carol Lloyd
(11/30/98)
Lorrie Moore
By Dwight Garner
(10/27/98)
Grace Paley
By A.M. Homes
(10/26/98)
Stephen King
By Andrew O'Hehir
(09/24/98)
Richard Powers
By Laura Miller
(07/23/98)
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THE SALON INTERVIEW: JIM HARRISON | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Do you find that in literature as well?
Some of Richard Ford's stuff I've liked enormously, but in some of his fiction it's all cold and bleak and I don't quite get it. It doesn't touch me at all. Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former. I suppose it's because I was so addicted to Faulkner and Dostoevsky when I was young -- that's probably the root of some of that. Take Shatov or Stavrogin, these monstrous characters [in Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"] or Alyosha in "The Brother's Karamazov," or the 14-year-old boy who delivers this fucking 28-page monologue on the life of the spirit and how he forgives somebody for dragging his father down the street by his beard.
Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen [in "Absalom, Absalom!"] seems to fit in that crowd as well.
Or Quentin Compson, or Caddy -- who is still, by the way, the most erotic woman in literature to date.
Faulkner once said that "The Sound and the Fury" arose from his inability to divest himself of the image of Caddy Compson with her dirty drawers, standing by the water. Did this novel arise from a similar inability to divest yourself of "Dalva"?
I didn't have her -- she had me. I actually dreamed her. She was on the porch in Santa Monica, longing for home. I even saw her naked in a dream, and it was quite overpowering. [Laughs.] There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.
Yet you've also written about the sort of Jungian idea of "Dalva" being your own twin sister separated from you at birth.
There is a bit of that, too. The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature. So there might be some connection there, too. It occurred to me when I wrote "Legends of the Fall": Isn't your metaphor here that he's trying to save someone who is already dead?
You've said before that your dream life is very important to you.
It's not been vivid for years, because I'm not having a nervous breakdown. That's when you get these really vivid electric dreams that are probably in their own way your subconscious trying to save your sorry ass. If only we paid as close attention to our dreams since the Pleistocene period as we have the global economy for the last 20 years. But the global economy is supposed to be relevant, right? Well, fuck the global economy. Why should we discard a third of our lives? I remember I was quite upset once because I had this dream that people were murdering me in New York. They were pushing me off of this enormous waterfall and at the last moment I flew away, but of course it's very difficult to fly. I landed in a tree and looked down and I was a bird with a bear's body, a bear with a vast wingspan. The bear and the bird is what helped me survive. Of course I live in close contiguity to so many bears at my cabin. We even have some down in Patagonia [Arizona] that come from way over the Oachuca and Patagonia Mountains and down around Sonoita Creek. I like that kind of contiguity. One night I couldn't go to the bar where I go because two bear cubs were playing with my garbage cans and the mother was leaning up against the pump house looking at me, like, "Let my kids play, asshole." [Laughs]
Animals play a major part in your work, and you often note the similarities between the desires of humans and animals. In a very fundamental sense they're not all that different for you, are they?
They aren't. Of course, I grew up rural, around animals. I had my eye put out when I was a kid and ran to the woods, and I'm not totally sure I've emerged. [Laughs] This strange Hasidic scholar I know named Neal Claremont, a brilliant young man, said to me one day: "Don't you really think that reality is the accretion of the perceptions of all creatures?" I said, Jesus Christ, that's a monster statement. But of course it's true, and what a marvelous thing to say. I don't think I'm any more important than a dog or a cat. It's become alien to my nature -- that sort of self-importance that is so egregious in this fucking pop stand. I could do my imitation of an important novelist entering Elaine's, but why? There's no bigger trip than self-importance -- to blind you, to decrease the energy of your art. So the animals come in there -- whether horses, dogs, cats, bears, birds -- to help keep you ordinary. You know, in terms of the history of language, the first Chinese ideograms were really imitations of animal tracks. I like that. I like to hike after a good rain because every track is fresh and I always have Olaus Murie's "Field Guide to Animal Tracks" with me. The tracks speak their own language. They reveal everything that happened -- what crossed here, what went that way. But we don't know about that any more. We've become more dislocated and urban. Most people who eat beef and pork and chicken now have never known a cow or pig. They've never held a pig in their arms or chased a rooster. That's one thing I enjoyed about [Charles Frazier's novel] "Cold Mountain." And, too, its revivification of language.
Greil Marcus has a tirade against Frazier's use of language in the current Esquire.
Oh, fuck him. Maybe I'll buy it and respond to it. There was all this controversy when Frazier won the National Book Award instead of Don DeLillo. But who gives a fuck? That's children's play. It's not even children's play -- it's neurotic play.
Prizes and accolades have never mattered to you, have they?
I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would never complain about anything as long as my books were in print, and they've stayed in print. You can't cut your suit of clothes to fit anybody else. But I'll let someone else defend Charles [Frazier]. I can't get any more irritated than I have been with all this Clinton mess. Before I went to Paris I did an old traditional ritual. I went up to my cabin and vomited up the world for five days. No contact with newspapers, radio, nothing but running my dog. I think even Jesus said you have to step aside in the wilderness and rest awhile, an interesting view. You have to avoid suffocating in lint. We're not choo-choo trains on a track. Nothing tells us we can't swim across a lake and climb a tree. We're human beings. Some of us are still Pleistocene bipeds, no matter that we like James Joyce and Heidegger. It's that idea that Nelse [a character in "The Road Home"] talks about, and Shakespeare said it first: We're nature, too. It's that schizophrenia that you often see in the environmental movement -- on the dweebish side of the environmental movement -- that wants to save something. Well, save yourself too, asshole, on the way, or you won't have anything to save anyway.
The idea seems to be to preserve nature the way you preserve a museum piece.
True. Trying to create an outdoor museum isn't the point. There's a great book on that called "The Abstract Wild," by Jack Turner, published by the University of Arizona Press, that has been savagely attacked by the so-called deep ecologists. As the kids would say, "Get a life."
N E X T+P A G E+| Why a screenplay will never break your heart

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	Click here for books by Jim Harrison A L S O+.T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Andrea Barrett By Peter Kurth A conversation with Andrea Barrett, author of the National Book Award-winning "Ship Fever and Other Stories" The Salon Interview: Ken Follett By David Bowman The thriller-master talks about Bob Dylan, working with Ross Perot and why he prefers the creature comforts of a luxury hotel to the perilous terrain of his heroes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Confessions of a Late Night Talk Show Host: The Autobiography of Larry Sanders Reviewed by Joyce Millman This pseudomemoir, like the long-running HBO show it derives from, delivers a fun house-mirror reflection of the late-night talk show wars T A B L E+T A L K What books will you be giving as gifts this year? Discuss your list in the Books area of Table Talk B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Andrew Sullivan By Carol Lloyd (11/30/98) Lorrie Moore By Dwight Garner (10/27/98) Grace Paley By A.M. Homes (10/26/98) Stephen King By Andrew O'Hehir (09/24/98) Richard Powers By Laura Miller (07/23/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		THE SALON INTERVIEW: JIM HARRISON \| PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - Do you find that in literature as well? Some of Richard Ford's stuff I've liked enormously, but in some of his fiction it's all cold and bleak and I don't quite get it. It doesn't touch me at all. Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former. I suppose it's because I was so addicted to Faulkner and Dostoevsky when I was young -- that's probably the root of some of that. Take Shatov or Stavrogin, these monstrous characters [in Dostoevsky's "The Possessed"] or Alyosha in "The Brother's Karamazov," or the 14-year-old boy who delivers this fucking 28-page monologue on the life of the spirit and how he forgives somebody for dragging his father down the street by his beard. Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen [in "Absalom, Absalom!"] seems to fit in that crowd as well. Or Quentin Compson, or Caddy -- who is still, by the way, the most erotic woman in literature to date. Faulkner once said that "The Sound and the Fury" arose from his inability to divest himself of the image of Caddy Compson with her dirty drawers, standing by the water. Did this novel arise from a similar inability to divest yourself of "Dalva"? I didn't have her -- she had me. I actually dreamed her. She was on the porch in Santa Monica, longing for home. I even saw her naked in a dream, and it was quite overpowering. [Laughs.] There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart. Yet you've also written about the sort of Jungian idea of "Dalva" being your own twin sister separated from you at birth. There is a bit of that, too. The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature. So there might be some connection there, too. It occurred to me when I wrote "Legends of the Fall": Isn't your metaphor here that he's trying to save someone who is already dead? You've said before that your dream life is very important to you. It's not been vivid for years, because I'm not having a nervous breakdown. That's when you get these really vivid electric dreams that are probably in their own way your subconscious trying to save your sorry ass. If only we paid as close attention to our dreams since the Pleistocene period as we have the global economy for the last 20 years. But the global economy is supposed to be relevant, right? Well, fuck the global economy. Why should we discard a third of our lives? I remember I was quite upset once because I had this dream that people were murdering me in New York. They were pushing me off of this enormous waterfall and at the last moment I flew away, but of course it's very difficult to fly. I landed in a tree and looked down and I was a bird with a bear's body, a bear with a vast wingspan. The bear and the bird is what helped me survive. Of course I live in close contiguity to so many bears at my cabin. We even have some down in Patagonia [Arizona] that come from way over the Oachuca and Patagonia Mountains and down around Sonoita Creek. I like that kind of contiguity. One night I couldn't go to the bar where I go because two bear cubs were playing with my garbage cans and the mother was leaning up against the pump house looking at me, like, "Let my kids play, asshole." [Laughs] Animals play a major part in your work, and you often note the similarities between the desires of humans and animals. In a very fundamental sense they're not all that different for you, are they? They aren't. Of course, I grew up rural, around animals. I had my eye put out when I was a kid and ran to the woods, and I'm not totally sure I've emerged. [Laughs] This strange Hasidic scholar I know named Neal Claremont, a brilliant young man, said to me one day: "Don't you really think that reality is the accretion of the perceptions of all creatures?" I said, Jesus Christ, that's a monster statement. But of course it's true, and what a marvelous thing to say. I don't think I'm any more important than a dog or a cat. It's become alien to my nature -- that sort of self-importance that is so egregious in this fucking pop stand. I could do my imitation of an important novelist entering Elaine's, but why? There's no bigger trip than self-importance -- to blind you, to decrease the energy of your art. So the animals come in there -- whether horses, dogs, cats, bears, birds -- to help keep you ordinary. You know, in terms of the history of language, the first Chinese ideograms were really imitations of animal tracks. I like that. I like to hike after a good rain because every track is fresh and I always have Olaus Murie's "Field Guide to Animal Tracks" with me. The tracks speak their own language. They reveal everything that happened -- what crossed here, what went that way. But we don't know about that any more. We've become more dislocated and urban. Most people who eat beef and pork and chicken now have never known a cow or pig. They've never held a pig in their arms or chased a rooster. That's one thing I enjoyed about [Charles Frazier's novel] "Cold Mountain." And, too, its revivification of language. Greil Marcus has a tirade against Frazier's use of language in the current Esquire. Oh, fuck him. Maybe I'll buy it and respond to it. There was all this controversy when Frazier won the National Book Award instead of Don DeLillo. But who gives a fuck? That's children's play. It's not even children's play -- it's neurotic play. Prizes and accolades have never mattered to you, have they? I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would never complain about anything as long as my books were in print, and they've stayed in print. You can't cut your suit of clothes to fit anybody else. But I'll let someone else defend Charles [Frazier]. I can't get any more irritated than I have been with all this Clinton mess. Before I went to Paris I did an old traditional ritual. I went up to my cabin and vomited up the world for five days. No contact with newspapers, radio, nothing but running my dog. I think even Jesus said you have to step aside in the wilderness and rest awhile, an interesting view. You have to avoid suffocating in lint. We're not choo-choo trains on a track. Nothing tells us we can't swim across a lake and climb a tree. We're human beings. Some of us are still Pleistocene bipeds, no matter that we like James Joyce and Heidegger. It's that idea that Nelse [a character in "The Road Home"] talks about, and Shakespeare said it first: We're nature, too. It's that schizophrenia that you often see in the environmental movement -- on the dweebish side of the environmental movement -- that wants to save something. Well, save yourself too, asshole, on the way, or you won't have anything to save anyway. The idea seems to be to preserve nature the way you preserve a museum piece. True. Trying to create an outdoor museum isn't the point. There's a great book on that called "The Abstract Wild," by Jack Turner, published by the University of Arizona Press, that has been savagely attacked by the so-called deep ecologists. As the kids would say, "Get a life." N E X T+P A G E+\| Why a screenplay will never break your heart - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.