The Death of Jim Loney, page 1
THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY
JAMES WELCH (1940–2003) was the author of five novels, including Fools Crow, which won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Prize; one work of nonfiction, Killing Custer; and one work of poetry, Riding the Earthboy 40. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana, and studied writing at the University of Montana under the legendary writing teacher Richard Hugo.
JIM HARRISON has written five volumes of novellas, nine novels, most recently Returning to Earth, eight collections of poetry, and three works of nonfiction. The winner of an NEA Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship, his work has been published in twenty-seven languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He divides his time between Montana and Arizona.
Also by James Welch
The Heartsong of Charging Elk
Killing Custer
The Indian Lawyer
Fools Crow
Winter in the Blood
Riding the Earthboy 40
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1979
Published in Penguin Books 1987
This edition with an introduction by Jim Harrison published 2008
Copyright © James Welch, 1979
Introduction copyright © Jim Harrison, 2008
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook ISBN: 9780525507338
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Welch, James, 1940–
The death of Jim Loney / James Welch ; introduction by Jim Harrison.
p. cm.
ISBN 9780143105183 (paperback)
I. Title.
PS3573.E44D44 2008
813’54—dc22 2007039992
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Version_1
Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded men by life itself?
—Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Also by James Welch
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction by JIM HARRISON
PART 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
PART 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Introduction
Recently while rereading The Death of Jim Loney I wanted to write or call Jim Welch in Missoula and talk about his novel but he’s dead. History has swept him away though he has left behind his wonderful novels and poems. I actually wrote him a letter that arrived the day after he died. We lived too far apart, Montana and Michigan, to become close friends but saw each other now and then since 1970. When I hugged him in a bar three weeks before he died he said of his fatal illness, “These things happen to people,” a favorite sentence of mine up there with Merrill Gilfillan’s, “I dreamed about that old black dog one night.”
Jim Welch made a very strong impression with his first two books, Riding the Earthboy 40 and Winter in the Blood. At one point in the early seventies (I ignore the banality of dates) I was in Montana trout fishing with Tom McGuane and we decided to take a drive in his Porsche which wouldn’t start unless you pushed it, an ambiguous fruit of his recent success. We were drinking fellows, roaring boys at the time and I’m still surprised we have survived to this date. We intended to describe a road mandala around Montana and perhaps our main destination along with looking at rivers to fish was to see the landscape from which Jim Welch had emerged. He was an exciting writer to us then and has remained so. When we finally arrived at Bill Kittredge’s house in Missoula and met the Missoula literary gang Welch with his laconic twinkle was impressed indeed that we had managed to get kicked out of two Indian bars in Browning, a difficult feat.
Thirty-five years later everything is, of course, the same but it looks different. I regard The Death of Jim Loney as an especially painful koan. Novels are designed to stretch the mind not to answer literary questions. You don’t understand the forest by cutting down all of the trees, the usual academic habit. You look at the forest topographically and when, after a long time has passed, certain clues come to mind in terms of what Welch had in mind, you sense specifically what he created in the terrain of this novel.
Sometimes when you are writing a novel it is hard to fully inhabit your characters, which is necessary to creating good work. In The Death of Jim Loney I believe Welch was imagining his life if he hadn’t escaped the heavy fatality of the reservation life, or existence in the vicinity of a reservation. The fact is that historically we put Indians in these prisons without walls and for a nascent writer it is vitally important to escape. This is as true for Sherman Alexie, M. L. Smoker, and Louise Erdrich as it was for Jim Welch. Even the renowned Indian killer General Philip Sheridan said that a reservation is generally a worthless piece of land surrounded by scoundrels.
It is hard to imagine a character in a novel so shorn of props, so deprived of our little collections of reassurances, as Jim Loney. Even his dog dies early in the novel. His sister’s visit from her successful career in Washington, D.C., is remote and metallic. His father is a cranky old fool in a battered house trailer, the connection between the two purely genetic rather than emotional. His sometime lover is a schoolteacher as shallow as a mud puddle and eager to get out of northern Montana, a beautiful and austere place but no more reassuring than barbed wire. Jim Loney’s only friend is alcohol and he dies with a bottle in his hand. Without the bottle he is an immaculate cipher, the kind of social mutant that our culture is producing in growing numbers. As with blacks we started very early with Indians and made fly specks of them on our collective national map. Their resurgence in the past few decades shows us that our colonialism wasn’t quite as successful as we hoped.
Curiously I see the roots of The Death of Jim Loney in The Stranger by Albert Camus. You don’t directly see the signs of Welch’s extreme literacy in his work but his Missoula, Montana, milieu was intensely well-read if not intellectual. I can rattle off the names of a noninclusive number of his friends—Bill Kittredge and Annick Smith, Jim Tate, Jim Crumley, Tom McGuane, Jon Jackson, Francis Geffard in France, the late J. D. Reed and Richard Hugo—and these are intensely knowledgeable people, not to speak of his wife Lois, a full professor of English with grand intellectual capacities. The style is different out West but it was always easier to find a conversation involved in the literature of our time in Missoula than in our urban centers. I clearly recall speaking of Camus with Welch back in the seventies. The sense of alienation, a word that has lost its punch from misuse, in The Death of Jim Loney achieves preposte rous dimensions. The grandeur of the landscape is imbued with the coldest malice and malevolent ghosts. The barely mentioned character of Loney’s mother becomes immense in her minimalism.
A couple of decades ago in Key West I won a private detective’s license in a poker game and thought of myself as an operative for a few weeks until I became frightened when I learned the malefactors I was investigating carried guns, at which I determined that I should limit my daring to my imagination. Nonetheless, my mind for a while dwelt with the larger metaphor of the criminal aspects of human behavior. When I tried to manage an overview of Welch’s career I began to think of the general lack of appreciation of his work as unjust and then I finally considered his literary reception as a profound literary crime.
It is arguable that we don’t have a national literature but the work of specific regions unrelated to tradition. Of course I’m nearly forty years away from the academy and don’t make a living inventing connections between writers. It is well established that taste is xenophobic. It is interesting to look into the relatively new social science known as Human Geography which, vulgarly reduced, can be understood as “why we are where we are.” Any region becomes predominant, at least in its own mind. Consequently the writers of the Southwest may ignore New York and may receive the same in kind, but then since New York is the center of the business of publishing it’s rather natural that it presumes to carry the biggest stick in the literary sense. New York views itself as the center of the literary in the same manner of Paris and London, but then those cities are the axis for the radiating spokes in France and England in a way that is geographically impossible in the United States.
I’ve worked these matters out in my mind well enough to talk about them without bile or afflatus. In Jim Welch’s case why should I expect parity for a possibly major American writer when the Supreme Court has never managed parity for our lowlier citizens, the blacks and Chicanos and Indians, or the poor whites for that matter?
Added to the problem of Welch in remote Montana and the fact that it is difficult for readers in urban centers to extrapolate the matter, the mise-en-scène of his work, is the simple fact of the Indian. Both D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams described the Indian as the monster in our national closet that our collective conscience has never dealt with. I recall a sobbing woman at a lecture I gave saying, “I can’t accept what you say about our Indians as true.” This is because our grotesquely sodden educational system has never taught the historical truth. Conversely Welch became extremely popular in France because they didn’t have to deal with his ghosts. They have their own with Algeria and other former colonial outposts.
The fact of the matter is that writers are very minor characters in our national movie, always searching in vain for their names in the credits. And a character such as Jim Loney runs decidedly counter to culture where the pursuit of money for its own sake is presumably the most admirable. Like those other millions in the bottom quarter of our society Loney is virtually a social mutant, as invisible to the more prosperous above him as a man in a green janitor’s suit. In Welch’s case there is a step further into the anonymous void because Loney is an Indian with a hundred stripes against him at birth.
Welch was a genius of isolation. A few years ago I was in Marseille recovering from a frenetic week in Paris in a lovely hotel called Le Petite Nice. I lay back in bed with a clear view of the Mediterranean reading Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk, which is set in Marseille and deals with a warrior with tuberculosis who was left behind by the Buffalo Bill Show in the early 1900s. You actually wince at the isolation as you do with Jim Loney. This is as far as you can get from our silly popular notions of “empowerment,” a word as daffy as “closure” or “healing.” Charging Elk prevails after a fashion. Jim Loney doesn’t. The Death of Jim Loney is an early, angrier novel though the anger is subsumed in the cold quietude of the novel’s vision. The Heartsong of Charging Elk is autumnal, a blessed adjustment of Welch’s vision to the ordinary realities of a life of isolation.
Jim Welch in person defied the notion of the writer that has carried over from the romantic movement and European models: proud, isolate, a man of silence, exile, and cunning. Welch served on a Montana parole board for a decade and there is no better way to rub your nose in the lives of the bottom dogs of our culture and to occasionally come in contact with pure evil. Sometimes when we spoke I thought his obsessions were too ordinary but then his work was so artful that the ordinary could become luminescent, sidereal. Once in the seventies we joked about Rimbaud’s dictum, “Everything we are taught is false.” My laughter was nervous and a bit Calvinist. Welch’s laughter was full as if the sentence was as obvious as the sun rising. We agreed that Rimbaud’s statement was a good place for a novelist or poet to start.
At the end of Welch’s funeral—held at a theater in Missoula to accommodate the large audience—a Blackfoot brave stood up and made a succession of diminishing calls of a disappearing owl. This was to signify Jim’s spirit flying away. On the long drive home I recalled a poem of Jim’s I had quoted in an essay called “Poetry as Survival,” the poem the essence of Jim Loney.
The Man from Washington
The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far corner of a flat world,
we didn’t expect much more
than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down,
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone—
man, woman and child—would be inoculated
against a world in which we had no part,
a world of money, promise and disease.
PART 1
Loney watched the muddy boys bang against each other and he thought of a passage from the Bible: “Turn away from man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he?” The boys stood up, some walking back to the huddle, others standing with hands on hips and heads bent. The rain fell, but more lightly now. Beyond the arc lights the world was black. The shiny helmets lined up against each other and crashed again, this time a little farther downfield. A couple of car horns honked. Loney could remember no other passages and he was surprised that he had remembered that one.
It had been a good game until the rain came, somewhere in the third quarter. It was the second rain of the day and it had wiped out the tender autumn field.
“That boy can run,” said the man next to him. “He’s a regular horse, that one!”
“No lie!” said another. “Who is that?”
“I can’t tell his number.”
“It’s Eckland,” said the first man.
Loney stepped forward and squinted through the pale light. The men were not talking to him but that was all right. The rain was not cold.
“How many time-outs we got left?”
A wispy little man pulled a note pad out of his pocket. “We’re out. They’ve got two left.”
“Goddamn it, Carl, what did you have to tell me that for?”
“We’re shit out of luck. What can you do in forty seconds?”
“That’s a lot of time, Harve. You’d be surprised.”
Loney looked at the scoreboard: 13–6. A touchdown and extra point would tie it up. It looked like Harlem would get the touchdown. They were near the goal line. Then they were in and the car horns sounded and the clock stopped. Across the field the cheerleaders, holding a long piece of plastic over their heads, kicked and danced. A tall thin player raced out onto the field holding a kicking tee. He wore one black shoe and one white shoe. His uniform was spotless.
“Oh, my dying ass. They’re going to kick the goddamn thing.”
“You’d be surprised, Harve. I smell a fish in the barrel.”
“Can it, pint-size. I know what I see.”
“Who is that?”
“Young Cutler.”
“Oh, shit—oh, dear.”
But it was a fake kick. The holder scooped the ball off the ground and started to circle right. The kicker followed him, dancing behind him like a thin bird. The Chinook players fell back from the line to cover the end zone. Suddenly the holder stopped and cocked his arm and the thin player ran into him. The ball seemed to hang in the air as both players fell to the muddy field; then it, too, fell, landing on the thin player’s back. He rolled over, pulled the ball into his midsection and lay there without moving.
