Tristan Couldn't Wait

“Every warrior hopes a good death will find him. But Tristan couldn't wait. He went looking for his.” - Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

After I read the article in the Globe about Mark yesterday I kept thinking about how he would feel about his medical condition being so publicly flaunted. Mark was very private about many things and medical issues was high on the list of things he didn't talk about very often. I still have mixed feelings about that article. There was good in it but the comments --- especially about him dropping dead --- still disgust me. In some ways the article seems cruel to me. The picture that accompanies it was one I took to send out with press releases about his call from Jason Cahill and the interest from Hollywood. We sent out hundreds of those press releases with that picture. Very few of them yielded any attention for his book. But now, because he is dead, the picture and the story are printed. The bitter irony in that is hard to ignore.

But Mark was his own person and one thing I have learned about rugged, passionate, independent, slightly crazy men who are facing death is that they choose their own terms. When my beautiful, rugged, highly independent brother Jack (left) was in the last months of his life and people would ask how he was doing, he would always say, “Great --- except for this damn cancer.” The last time I visited him I found him in the kitchen of his house on the edge of the woods cooking venison sausages. I couldn't believe how good he looked for as sick as he was. “Yeah,” he laughed, “not bad for a dead man.”

When Mark and I were first getting to know each other we often met out at the end of Pirates Lane in the evening. His boat, F/V Black Sheep, was moored in Smith's Cove there and he wrote most of his book sitting in the cab of his truck while watching the sun go down behind Gloucester's City Hall where the names of the lost fishermen are written on the walls --- the lost fishermen to whom he dedicated his book. It's no secret that, though I had met Mark when he hired me to edit his book, I was falling under the spell of his personality and the hours we spent together talking and watching that same sun go down over and over were becoming increasingly precious to me.

One night we were talking about constructing characters for stories. Mark believed in character-driven story and that, if you had compelling characters, the story would carry itself for that reason. We were talking about characters from books and movies and I said, “You remind me of Tristan Ludlow --- only with lobsters instead of horses.” Mark stared at me with his mouth open and said, “I can't believe you said that.” “Why?” I asked --- I figured he didn't know who Tristan Ludlow was. Mark shook his head as he often did, as though to clear his thoughts. “He's my favorite character of all,” he said. “I've seen that movie a hundred times.”

I'm a big fan of Jim Harrison (below) and I've read most of his books. As I began working on Mark's manuscripts, I often thought of Harrison's writing and I told him that. Mark said he was flattered --- Harrison was one of his literary heroes. Like Harrison, Mark's writing was rugged and passionate and violent but yet there was always that underscore of the poet. At his wake one of his friends was talking to me about the way Mark described Good Harbor Beach in the rain. “It brought tears to my eyes,” the man said, “his writing was beautiful. I never would have known that side of him if I hadn't read his book.”

Yes....

When Tristan Ludlow was a boy he went looking for a bear --- the bear that finally killed him in the end. He cut off one of the bear's claws and he wore it as a talisman. Mark faced death on the ocean every day but it was his heart that was his bear and, strangely, that comes as no surprise. Once, when we were talking about it, he said, “There's something wrong with my heart.” “Yes,” I said, “it's too vulnerable.” He wore it like a talisman --- and it got him in the end.

Thanks for reading.