In Off to the Side, Jim Harrison remembers me as " a dapper Connecticut boy. " And so I was 38 years ago when for eight months Jim and I saw each other or talked on the telephone most every day. We hung out at the Grolier Bookshop, the old Grolier run for the love of poetry and poets by the big-hearted, crusty Scotsman from Canada, Gordon Cairnie. Cairnie ran the store like a club - a men’s club, though some women did brave it - where young poets gathered to talk poetry, drink ale, talk dirty, smoke up a cloud, and learn from their elders. This was before book signings and bookstore-sponsored readings, so that friendships developed or didn’t without the myriad obligations that get in the way today.

Harrison is five years my senior, and it was my good fortune to know him when I had just begun to think I might be a poet. He had already written real poems, some with a thrilling, Chinese-like clarity. But his poems were less important to me than his manner, his rough, good-humored vulgarity, his appetite for food, drink, and talk (all three amply served in this book), and his commitment to poetry as an art broad enough to encompass the work of Theodore Roethke and Charles Olson. Harrison did not have an academic bone in his body, and I learned from his example how to follow my nose and trust my own enthusiasms. And as Off to the Side reminds me, he was great fun to be around.

His book is loose and baggy. He starts off remembering his parents, to whom the work is dedicated, and his growing up poor in rural Michigan. These pages on family, and the rivers he fished and the woods through which he rambled, are replete with a tenderness that has deepened over time, but not to the point of sentimentality. " Early Life " ends with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, a talismanic poet for Harrison, but part two of this book does not pick up Harrison’s story. Instead he offers " Seven Obsessions " that cover subjects we might expect, like " Nature and Natives, " as well as surprises, like " A Short Tour of France. " Here as elsewhere Harrison’s prose has an earthy physicality. He is a writer for whom the natural world is not an abstraction but a reality, the facts from which his imagination proceeds. Some of the best writing in this book puts you solidly in the world of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Arizona desert, Nebraska sandhills, and Montana trout rivers.

Those who know Harrison’s poetry and his seven novels will be familiar with these worlds, but Off to the Side is not a rehash. Harrison’s Zen side prompts him to remember where he is and to accept that place and his place in it as a first principle. It’s not lost on him that a writer whom the French call " the Mozart of the Plains " needs to remind his readers that there is a huge expanse of American life between the coasts. He does so tartly but matter-of-factly. Not only is this book off to the side in the sense that it is secondary, a complement, to his poetry and fiction, but he now feels off to the side in that he is " only " a writer. This is not false, " aw, shucks " modesty - it’s more a lesson life has taught him.

I also find impressive, and I think readers unacquainted with Jim will too, his account of his years as a Hollywood screenwriter, his capacity for friendship and the prodigious, to me, number of people who recognized his talent and watered it with the support that kept him going. Harrison has written more than 20 screenplays, but he does not brag about the volumes of paper and sweat these demanded. Instead, he tells us that greed kept him at the work until he could no longer stomach it, at which point he put behind him both the movie business and the piggy desires he was discovering in himself. This is an antidote to the notion that Harrison and I grew up with — and that still lingers - of Hollywood as a temptress to which writers capitulate, hopelessly in thrall. You have to have something in you to heed the siren’s call, and Harrison accepts responsibility for what was in him.

There are many bright pages here about friendship, and there’s an honor roll of those who recognized Jim’s talent and were, in effect, patrons. Denise Levertov, Jack Nicholson (I hope Harrison some day profiles him in depth), the legendary Hollywood producer Ray Stark, and Richard Brautigan are part of a long list that testifies to Jim’s prowess as a writer and his lovable nature. He is here, but not in a confessional way, as the human being I have known and admired for years, a raunchy, bold, outsize character big enough to admit his night fears and how much the workaday world intimidates him. Harrison satisfies Orwell’s injunction to autobiographers that if they are to write the truth, they must write about their embarrassments.