{"id":30363,"date":"2012-04-25T11:57:19","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T15:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=30363"},"modified":"2012-04-26T11:54:57","modified_gmt":"2012-04-26T15:54:57","slug":"a-singular-southern-gentleman-goes-out-%e2%80%9cbiting%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/25\/a-singular-southern-gentleman-goes-out-%e2%80%9cbiting%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"A Singular Southern Gentleman Goes Out \u201cBiting\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite \u201chello\u201d or \u201cgood afternoon,\u201d but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: \u201cHarry Crews.\u201d And whenever I visited my friend Harry, the notorious American novelist and essayist who died (\u201cbit the big bagel,\u201d he\u2019d say) in March at the age of seventy-six, I knew what I\u2019d likely find: a great boulder of a man in a bathrobe sunk into a brown recliner chair in a living room filled with books, photographs, and, on one wall, the framed quilted image of a typewriter.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome on in, blood, grab a seat, how ya been?\u201d Harry would call to me as I stepped inside. He took pride in rarely locking his home\u2019s front door, just as he prided himself on keeping his number listed in the Gainesville white pages.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll\u2019s good,\u201d I\u2019d say, dropping into a chair that faced his. \u201cNew York\u2019s fine, how you been?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I\u2019m hurting<\/em>.\u201d

Squeezing his blue eyes shut or squinting at me hard, Harry would run down his latest aches and ailments. But eventually he\u2019d say, \u201cEnough complaining\u2014you don\u2019t want to hear about all that,\u201d and now the stories would start to pour forth in the distinctive Crews diction. Ribald stories they were, rollicking, sometimes touching, and always peculiar stories about himself and the people he\u2019d known or invented or something halfway between \u201cknown\u201d and \u201cinvented.\u201d Harry would stay seated as he spoke, but he\u2019d be moving nonstop, acting everything out as he read to me from his latest manuscript or just talking freestyle, gripping the recliner, opening his arms wide and speaking as fervently with his hands as he did with his mouth. Sometimes he answered questions I asked along the way; sometimes he answered questions I didn\u2019t ask; other times he ignored my questions and then, ten minutes later, at an impasse, he\u2019d say, \u201cWhat was that thing you were just asking me?\u201d It was a riveting show. And on the show went until he felt too weary or in too much pain to go further.<\/p>\n

For Harry, more than for many other storytellers, stories were the thing. Stories were the vehicle by which, with a crucial leap of faith-in-self, he had survived, had triumphed. And whatever else he did\u2014to steal a phrase he used about his greatest literary influence, Graham Greene\u2014Harry always told you a story.<\/p>\n

We first met at the start of 1992 in a Miami bookstore. Crews was giving a reading from his then-most-recent novel while my friend Sergio and I were browsing through the stacks. The first sight of Crews made everyone in the store gasp. That night he was sporting what he gleefully told the audience was his \u201cfreak the citizens\u201d look, which consisted of a newly minted \u201cdo and too.\u201d The \u201chair-do\u201d was a Mohawk with separate sideburns and the \u201ctat-too\u201d featured a skull with the e e cummings line \u201chow do you like your blue-eyed boy, mr. death?\u201d In the tattoo, cummings\u2019s words were wrongly capitalized, yet I wasn\u2019t about to correct him on it. With the \u201cdo\u201d and the \u201ctoo,\u201d as well with his sizeable height, bulging biceps, weirdly wrecked knees, and brow resembling the front of a metal helmet, Crews cut a sinister figure, not unlike how he described himself in the photos on his book jackets: \u201cHere comes crazy Johnny and his chainsaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sergio turned to me. \u201cHe\u2019s a writer?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYup.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, though I knew nothing of Crews\u2019s perch on a far-out branch of the Southern gothic tree, I had heard that he was a scoundrel of American letters, a drunk and disorderly hard man whose behavior made Charles Bukowski seem\u2014in terms of table manners, if not aesthetic chops\u2014like Henry James. \u201cI\u2019m like a goddamned hurt animal,\u201d he once described himself. \u201cLike a dog \u2026 And when I come out, I\u2019ll come out biting.\u201d Predictably, he didn\u2019t think much of \u201cwimps,\u201d who \u201csee a little blood and bone and pain, and they think the game is over. They think once you\u2019re hurt, you\u2019re hurt forever \u2026 Wimps don\u2019t know you can go out and get taped up real good and shoot up a little dope and get back in and hit somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take that, Hemingway and Norman Mailer!<\/p>\n

Even so, as I read Harry\u2019s many books and got to know the man personally, what I learned complicated and even contradicted his reputation. Behind that baroquely tough exterior and behind all the machismo, blood sports, and hard-bitten grotesque characters in his books lay a friendly, even courtly person. Lord knows he wasn\u2019t anyone\u2019s idea of a Southern gentleman, but Harry was certainly Southern, and he was never less than gentlemanly with me. In fact, he was downright generous with his time and his hospitality and his views on life and art\u2014views that were sensible, sensitive and wise.<\/p>\n

Not that I took Harry\u2019s friendliness for granted. During our talks, I sometimes mused to myself that if I\u2019d met the man at an earlier stage of his life, when his trouble with alcohol, women, and violence still besieged him, we probably would not have gotten along. He would have seen me, or so I figured, as a pampered Yankee dilettante and looked with scorn on my feeble attempts at fiction, my shaky commitment to writing, my physical wimpiness, my social timidity\u2014my whole damn self, in fact. I wouldn\u2019t have been serious enough for Harry, and seriousness is what mattered most, especially in writing, where his ethos was about \u201cgetting naked,\u201d being vulnerable at all costs, thoroughly authentic. I couldn\u2019t risk \u201cgetting naked\u201d then, in my life or my work, and to be honest, I usually still can\u2019t. Nevertheless, the man I met in \u201992 was a \u201clion in winter\u201d; the storms of youth and middle age had dwindled in their fury, leaving him less vigorous physically, calmer in spirit, and charitable enough to overlook a kid\u2019s faults and share some lessons with the kid and tell him those stories.<\/p>\n

(For a taste of Harry\u2019s conversation, go for the interviews collected by Erik Bledsoe in the volume entitled, yes, Getting Naked with Harry Crews<\/em><\/a>. Bledsoe\u2019s introduction, brief as it is, also serves as the best biography of Crews currently out there.)<\/p>\n

Our friendship consisted of monthly phone talks and visits I made each year to his home. (Harry didn\u2019t travel much in the past two decades.) The connection started at the book reading in Miami, when he invited me and Sergio to visit him, \u201cif you\u2019re ever passing through Gainesville,\u201d and it became more personal in 1999. That year my infant son, Gabriel, was diagnosed with hydrocephalus and needed emergency brain surgery, and, desperate for counsel and support, I remembered that Harry had decades earlier lost his elder child, a boy of four, to accidental drowning. \u201cWhen he drowned,\u201d Harry said once, \u201cI thought I would never get over it. I wish I could\u2019ve died at that moment.\u201d But \u201cit\u2019s not unrelieved suffering. There\u2019s awful good things, sweet things, wonderful things, moving things, uplifting things, things that make you whistle, sing, dance, hug your neighbor.\u201d Turning to Harry, hearing his compassionate pep talks, made quite a difference for me, just as I hope that my positive words to him when he felt down in recent times bucked up his own spirits.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeath will annoy me,\u201d Harry once quipped to a journalist. As it turned out, it was the illness of his last years that really annoyed him, with \u201cannoy\u201d being a major understatement. When death came, it came as a friend. I was with him at his home only days before his passing, and he seemed, as he phrased it then to his ex-wife and lifelong intimate, Sally, \u201cready to get off the train.\u201d During that final visit, I read to Harry from a Graham Greene novel, and I spoke of his literary mentor Andrew Lytle, and I presented him with a gift, an early twentieth-century edition of the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Everything appeared to please him, but he relished the catalogue the most. I\u2019m not surprised. In his masterful memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place<\/em><\/a>, Harry wrote of how Sears-Roebuck provided the only books in his Depression-era sharecropper home besides the Bible, and the catalogue\u2019s images fired his young imagination, prompting him to make up stories about the people in the drawings.<\/p>\n

Of course, I was pleased to see that Harry liked my gift. But his suffering was predominant, and I found myself bittersweetly recalling a weekend at his house the year before, when we watched the Super Bowl game together, laughed a lot with his devoted local friends Darlene and Henry, and naughtily dipped into his stash of Oxycontin. (Only one of us, I should point out, was legally authorized to ingest that heavenly pain relief.)<\/p>\n

During the Super Bowl weekend last year, I spoke proudly to Harry about my son, who\u2019d survived his health crisis in infancy and had just reached his teen years. Without hesitation, Harry grabbed one of his books from a shelf and scrawled in it a kick-ass message to my boy and then handed the book to me, saying, \u201cSee how he digs this.\u201d As usual, books were one of our favorite things to talk about. Over the years, Harry had turned me on to Greene and Flannery O\u2019Connor and I\u2019d turned him on to Borges and Knut Hamsun. In both those latter cases, he claimed, he\u2019d read through the paperbacks I gave him in one or two extended stints on his brown recliner. We discussed the latest output of his contemporaries, especially Thomas McGuane, Andre Dubus, and Jim Harrison.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood fiction is not there to prove anything,\u201d he once said. \u201cGood fiction is there to make you breathe with another human being, bleed with him, to suck you out of your skin for a little while and put you in somebody else\u2019s skin, to participate in another man\u2019s doing the best they can with what they got to do it with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Needless to say, we discussed his own contributions to what he called the \u201cHell\u2019s-a-Poppin\u2019 School of Literature.\u201d When I opined that The Gypsy\u2019s Curse<\/em><\/a>, a tour de force narrated by a handicapped deaf-mute bodybuilder, was his best novel, Harry told me that he preferred Naked in Garden Hills<\/a><\/em>, which I hadn\u2019t read. I didn\u2019t even own it, and just my luck\u2014Garden Hills<\/em> had been out of print for decades. (The Gypsy\u2019s Curse<\/em>, along with A Childhood<\/em> and another novel and four particularly fine essays can be found in the still-available volume Classic Crews<\/em>.) Fortunately, I was able to snag a copy of Garden Hills<\/em>, and devoured it just after Harry\u2019s death (regarding it as \u201cunfinished business\u201d), and damned if the old boy wasn\u2019t right: with its bravura formal construction and strangest-ever characters in the Crews canon, Garden Hills<\/em> easily achieves Harry\u2019s stated aim with his writing to \u201cknock your dick in the dirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harry\u2019s influence on me as a budding creative writer came not just from his insights about craft and his mandate to \u201cget naked\u201d with subject matter. Equally important, if not more, was the example he set in terms of drive and self-discipline. How can you not get revved-up when you hear assertions like, \u201cI can be hungry, homeless, wet, in debt, fucked up, but if I\u2019m writing, that\u2019s enough. It really does give me that kind of payback\u201d? Making sentences was like a religious calling for Harry: \u201cWhen I start writing,\u201d he told a journalist, \u201cI say to God, \u2018God, give me five hundred words. I don\u2019t want to be greedy, although I am at times a very greedy person. Give me five hundred words and I\u2019ll be satisfied. I don\u2019t want to know the rest of the book. All I want to know is the next five hundred words. Thank you. Amen.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, he said, \u201cIt takes a brand of courage and a tolerance, a very high tolerance, for failure, frustration, and self-doubt, for running up into something that looks like it\u2019s totally impossible, and instead of turning around and abandoning it, you sit to it and say, \u2018No, goddamn it, there\u2019s an answer in here somewhere, and I\u2019m going to find it or fuckin\u2019 die\u2019 \u2026 Most anyone can deal with that sort of thing for a day or two, maybe even a week or two, but try dealing with it for a year or two. You get up every morning and it\u2019s still there, right where you left it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Influence and exemplar that Harry was, I hesitate to call him my literary mentor. He didn\u2019t serve the role for me that Andrew Lytle served for him\u2014but this was because I didn\u2019t let him. Unlike the writing students Harry taught at the University of Florida since he published his first novel in 1968, I rarely showed him my own work or discussed it with him in any specific way. From time to time he\u2019d ask to see pages from me, but I made excuses, too cowardly to risk Harry\u2019s bad opinion of me. Still perceiving myself as that pampered Yankee dilettante, I didn\u2019t want to hear any confirmation of it, even one that was gently voiced. And by the time I did develop some backbone, the state of Harry\u2019s health had deteriorated too much for him to do any close readings.<\/p>\n

Now that the phone in the Gainesville home\u2019s been disconnected and the brown recliner is empty, I\u2019ve been cursing my inability to show Harry my writing, and I\u2019ve asked myself a question I never consciously asked before. Since he wasn\u2019t a full-fledged artistic mentor for me, what precise part besides \u201colder friend\u201d did Harry play in my life? More specifically, what part had I wanted him to play? Was I seeking not just a mentor but a hero to worship? A \u201cstar\u201d whose light would reflect on me, lending me (or so I hoped) a vicarious glow?<\/p>\n

Guilty as charged.<\/p>\n

Kim Gordon, the bass player for Sonic Youth, once quipped that fans go to rock concerts in order to watch performers publicly \u201cbelieve in themselves,\u201d and more than any of his other personal qualities, it was Harry\u2019s humble yet firm self-belief that I valorized. For a self-doubter like myself, hearing Harry say, \u201cI\u2019m gonna be exactly who I am, and people who don\u2019t like that, well, fuck \u2019em,\u201d was bracing, to say the least. In earlier times, though, Harry had suffered from crippling self-doubt, too, both as an author and as a person, and his jaundiced view of himself was a sort of photo-negative view of my own low self-perception. While I was feeling inadequate as a pampered Yankee dilettante\u2014and as far worse than that\u2014he\u2019d once felt inadequate as a \u201cGrit\u201d\u2014a white Southerner living below the poverty line. Despite laboring for fifteen years on novels (four went unpublished) and stories (a \u201croomful\u201d of unfinished ones), Harry believed that his Grit origins made him unworthy to cast a pebble into the sacred silver waters of Literature. Then, during one fraught writing session, came an epiphany\u2014a road-to-Damascus moment that changed everything. Such \u201cblood moments,\u201d as Harry would describe them, allow you \u201cto find out who the hell you are, what you really believe, what you\u2019re capable of \u2026 Are you a coward or are you able to control your fear and behave with what the world calls courage?\u201d<\/p>\n

In its obituary for Crew<\/a>s, the New York Times<\/em> printed a few lines from Harry\u2019s description of his epiphany, but it\u2019s worth quoting at greater length:<\/p>\n

\n

As weak and warped as it is, and as difficult as it is even now to admit it, I was so humiliated by the fact that I was from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia I could not bear to think ot it, and worse to believe it. Everything I had written had been out of a fear and loathing for what I was and who I was. It was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise. I believe to this day, and will always believe, that in that moment I literally saved my life, because the next thought\u2014and it was more than a thought, it was a dead-solid conviction\u2014was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms I\u2019d dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had me the Grit I am and will always be. Once I realized that the way I saw the world and man\u2019s condition in it would always be exactly and inevitably shaped by everything which up to that moment had only shamed me, once I realized that, I was home free.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps, as Harry liked to say, \u201csurvival is triumph enough.\u201d He lived through so much damage, self-inflicted and otherwise, that he did end up seeming triumphant. Yet Harry\u2019s greater triumph, one that made possible his artistic success, was in a battle for something more than mere survival\u2014the battle to own, to be, bravely, nakedly, purely himself. Few people, in my view, fight this battle in any sustained way, much less win it. But this singular Southern gentleman \u201ccame out biting\u201d as only he could, and for those of us who cared about Harry, who read his work and heard his stories and learned from him, that \u201cbite\u201d was an inspiration to behold.<\/p>\n

Crews never finished writing one of his books, as he once admitted, \u201cwhere I didn\u2019t say, \u2018Well, son, you blew it again\u2019 \u2026 But if you\u2019ve given every fuckin\u2019 thing you\u2019ve got \u2026 you ought to say to yourself, \u2018Well, old son, it ain\u2019t Shakespeare and it ain\u2019t Dostoevsky \u2026 but it ain\u2019t too bad for an old boy out of South Georgia.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Not bad at all, blood. Take it light. Catch you later.<\/p>\n

Gary Lippman is a lapsed lawyer and former Fodors travel writer whose play Paradox Lust appeared off-broadway, whose fiction has appeared in Open City, and whose heart is in the Highlands.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite \u201chello\u201d or \u201cgood afternoon,\u201d but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: \u201cHarry Crews.\u201d And whenever I visited my friend Harry, the notorious American novelist and essayist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[7257,1886,7253,7267,7255,7254,7259,7258,7256],"class_list":["post-30363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-andrew-lytle","tag-florida","tag-harry-crews","tag-longreads","tag-remembering","tag-southern-agrarians","tag-southern-gothic","tag-the-south","tag-tribute"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Singular Southern Gentleman Goes Out 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