Feast for the soul: Jim Harrison on food and poetry

‘Hidden Figures’ author Shetterly receives literary prize

By Ann Levin

Really Big Lunch’

(Grove), by Jim

In 2004, Jim Harrison wrote an article for The New Yorker about a 37-course lunch he ate in France “that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon”. Fully expecting to be criticized, he offered a defense at the outset. “My response ... is that none of us 12 disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately 11 hours we saved money by not having to buy dinner”.

Absurd? Yes, but also funny and true and typical of Harrison, whose dry wit and mordant insight are on glorious display in this new collection of essays published a year after his death. Harrison, a prolific poet and novelist best known for “Legends of the Fall”, died of a heart attack at age 78. The book cover of ‘A Really Big Lunch’ by

Jim Harrison.

While nominally about food — his friend Mario Batali wrote the introduction — what distinguishes the essays are Harrison’s poetic sensibility, metaphysical musings and moral outrage at the state of our nation. Several were written around the invasion of Iraq, which left him seething.

“Maybe the rage comes from the fact that our body politic ... has been fed by Chef Bush a fresh skunk hacked up with an ax ...” he writes in 2003’s “Eat or Die”. Later that year, in “Paris Rebellion”, he wonders, “Has my country become a pack of wild dogs bent on eating the world?”

Faced with such dispiriting questions, Harrison inevitably turns to food and poetry — and also hunting, fishing, dogs, birds and the great outdoors.

Nearly every piece, except perhaps the recipe for bear posole, first published in “The Montana Writers’ Cookbook”, has a saying wise enough to carry in your wallet. Some will flat out break your heart.

Consider this: “A several-hour walk in the forest heals more wounds than any doctor of my experience”. “Many people think a Ferrari is beautiful but it isn’t if you compare it to a horse”. “We all need to eat well in order to dig the graves of stockbrokers”.

And just in case you wondered, he has no regrets about that 37-course meal.

“No question looms larger on a daily basis for many of us than ‘What’s for lunch?’ and, when that has been resolved, ‘What’s for dinner?’ There have been mutterings that the whole food thing has gone too far in America, but I think not. Good food is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live”.

CLEVELAND:

Also:

An author whose book was the basis for the Oscar-nominated movie “Hidden Figures” has won an award for writing literature that promotes diversity and confronts racism.

Margot Lee Shetterly’s book and the namesake movie are about the contributions of a team of black women mathematicians to the NASA space program.

Best-selling novelist Isabel Allende has received a lifetime achievement award. Allende’s novels include “The House of the Spirits”.

Shetterly and Allende were among five winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards announced Thursday. Also cited were Tyehimba Jess for his poetry collection “Olio”, Peter Ho Davies for his novel “The Fortunes” and Katan Mahajan for his novel “The Association of Small Bombs”, a National Book Award finalist last fall.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were established in 1935 and are presented by the Cleveland Foundation. (AP)