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‘Devouring Time’ details Jim Harrison’s ravenous life Posted on October 30, 2025 at 11:35:47 AM by rkm
This is the first installment of a three-part story on Todd Goddard’s biography of Jim Harrison, leading up to Goddard’s appearance at 7 p.m. Nov. 13 at the Library of Michigan. The event is free, and books will be available for purchase. Goddard will be interviewed by Leslie McRoberts, head of Michigan State University’s Special Collections.
Jim Harrison grew up in Reed City and rural Haslett, graduated from MSU after flunking out several times, swam in the Great Lakes, dipped a line in countless Michigan streams and rivers, had homes in three different states and wrote 21 works of fiction and 14 books of poetry, which he drafted on legal pads. He led a life of excess by any measure: sex, food, fishing, hunting, friendships and ribald humor.
You could say Harrison led a ravenous life, so it’s fitting that Todd Goddard’s biography of the writer, “Devouring Time,” begins with a retelling of the 37-course lunch he consumed with friends and other gourmands in Burgundy, France, in 2003. Harrison wrote about the lunch in a notorious New Yorker article, “A Really Big Lunch,” which shocked many readers. Goddard writes in his book, “Jim remained thoroughly unrepentant.”
In a conversation with Goddard from Utah Valley University, where he teaches literary studies, he said it seemed fitting to start the book with that story “since the through line of the book is about Harrison ‘devouring time.’”
Goddard’s book delivers a factual, no-nonsense account of the life and career of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, who first and foremost called himself a “P-O-E-T,” according to his good friend and fellow traveler John “Bud” Schulz of St. Johns. Harrison’s first book, published in 1965, was the poetry collection “Plain Song.”
The first third of the book is about Harrison’s childhood, teen years and the zig-zag path he took to graduate from Michigan State University.
If you’re a fan of Harrison, who died in 2016 at age 78 while writing (some friends say), you’ll recognize the stories of his early years. It’s still painful to read about him getting his eye poked out by a girl while playing doctor. Later, he fictionalized the loss in a children’s book and embraced his ocular deficiency by frequently signing his books with an oddly gimlet-eyed caricature of himself. He once told an Esquire journalist he wouldn’t have become a poet if he hadn’t lost his eye.
In the biography’s early chapters, we learn about Harrison’s restlessness as a teen, hitchhiking across the country to the West Coast and to Boston and New York City, where he lost his virginity once or twice. Goddard pulls no punches as he retells Jim’s cringeworthy visits with prostitutes.
Goddard also covers Harrison’s battle with depression, which covered him like a wet blanket his entire life, and his early romancing of Linda, a Natalie Wood lookalike who would become his spouse.
In the first third of the book, Goddard takes readers right up to Harrison’s explosion in the literary world with the publication of “Legends of the Fall” in 1979, which would become an exclamation mark on his career when it was made into a movie in 1994.
When I talked with Goddard, my first question was, “How did an obscure college professor come to write the biography of one of the nation’s most famous contemporary writers?” In a gutsy move, Goddard reached out to Harrison’s family.
“I made a cold call to Jamie Harrison, Jim’s oldest daughter,” he said. “I shot her an email, and she got right back to me and said something like, ‘I’ll talk to the family.’” Later, she gave him a tentative go-ahead, on the condition that he “move slowly.”
Goddard dug right in, paying many visits to Grand Valley State University, where Harrison’s papers are archived.
On one of his early visits, he serendipitously ran into Joyce Bahle, who served as Harrison’s administrative assistant and effective gatekeeper for 37 years. It’s fair to say no one knows more about Harrison’s writing career and personal life than Bahle. She said, “Let’s have lunch.”
The pair clicked, and from there, the seven-year writing project moved forward.
Goddard spent months researching at Grand Valley, often spending entire summers there. He said it took an additional six months to read and annotate Harrison’s voluminous correspondence, contained in 72 boxes.
A breakthrough occurred when Goddard gained access to the 60 years of letters between Harrison and his friend Tom McGuane. The two of them had met in college, but their friendship developed after graduation, when both were on the way to becoming major writers. Their candid letters to each other had been sealed, reposing at MSU’s Archives until Goddard sent a cold e-mail to McGuane asking for permission to read them and for an interview.
Goddard said McGuane’s initial reactions to his requests were “no and no.” However, he was persistent, and McGuane eventually consented to opening the treasure trove of a lifetime. The book is peppered with information from those letters. McGuane also ended up sitting for hours of interviews.