Ted Geltner - Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews

BLOOD, BONE, AND MARROW

A Biography of Harry Crews

TED GELTNER

This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies and by the generous support of Donna Scott Reed.

2016 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Melissa Bugbee Buchanan

Set in Franklin Gothic and Sabon

Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 C 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Geltner, Ted.

Blood, bone, and marrow : a biography of Harry Crews / Ted Geltner.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8203-4923-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8203-4924-4 (ebook : alk. paper)

1. Crews, Harry, 19352012. 2. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PS 3553. R 46 Z 64 2016

813'.54 dc23

[B]

2015032701

To Dorny and Maz, my teammates in one of the most memorable games of three-on-three of the twentieth century. We lost, 5012, but we had the momentum at the end. At least, thats how I remember it. How about you?

How joyous I am now that Ive learned that there is no such thing as happiness.

INSCRIPTION, BUDDHIST TEMPLE

It was all pie-in-the-sky, it was impossible to start with. There is nothing possible about this. So if youre going to ask for it, you might as well ask for all of it.

HARRY CREWS , 1977

Where do storytellers come from? In this book, Ted Geltner relates that Harry Crews likened the difficult task and craft of writing to looking for gold in a coal mine. But what brings the writer into that dark and suffocating space in the first place? Why go into the coal mine when there are places in the sun to be instead? Every writer is different. Every writer has a cauldronliteral or figurativefrom which the art boils to the surface. My own path is inextricably influenced and entwined with Harry Crews. It was Crews who lured me into the coal mine and the hunt for gold. For forty years I have been under the sway of a man I never really met.

Harry Crews was a uniquely gifted and haunted storyteller. Novel, journal, memoirhe made each form his own in a way like no one else before or since. The pages that follow in this absorbing biography detail this and reach into the guts of the experiences that formed him and gave him a voice that was sad, brutal, and funny. Harry said that when it came to writing the truth about himselfor anything for that matterhe was not as interested in facts as he was in memory and belief.

My memory and belief about Harry Crews begins in August 1974, when I stood as a freshman on the campus of the University of Florida. Three weeks earlier President Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace, and we were at the tail end of what the new president called our long national nightmare. Three weeks before that I had registered for what would be the last military draft of the Vietnam War.

It was my first day of classes. I knew no one and was hovering around the outside entrance of an auditorium where I was on the schedule to be taught English lit, a freshman requirement. I didnt want to go in, I didnt want to be there, I didnt want to take the class. I was only in college to appease parents and have a deferment edge against the draft.

I heard a mans loud voice, turned and saw the instructor, Harry Crews, walking toward the auditorium door. Walking is a bad description. He was hobbled, limping. His shoulder swung a bit to balance a bad leg as he moved. I wouldnt know the reasons until later, but Harry Crews was a captivating storyteller in just the way he walked.

I want to say that he was wearing a sleeveless denim shirt and was leanly muscled and tattooeda fresh hinge painted permanently on the crook of the elbow on his drinking arm. Thats what I believe in memory, at least. But when I look now at my collection of books authored by Crews I see photos of him crouched in a creek bed in sleeveless denim, his face chiseled by life, but no tattoos. Maybe what I remember and believe is wrong. Maybe its just the photo I believe.

I had never seen a real author before. Crews was pointed, opinionated, and profane when he lectured. He was larger than life and intimidating. In this book Ted Geltner describes professional journalists being intimidated by Crews, not wanting the assignment of interviewing him. Imagine how an auditorium full of college freshmen reacted when he posed a question about Flannery OConnor. Nobody would raise a hand to answer. And Crews didnt want them to anyway. Crews answered his own questions, didnt seem to care for other opinion.

I was transfixed. It would be the only class that quarterthey werent called semesters back thenthat I didnt regularly cut. I started disregarding assignments in my other classes to read the handful of novels Crews had published and was soon mesmerized. I would compare what I was reading in these novels to the man I saw in English lit. On occasion I would go to a bar in downtown Gainesville where Crews was known to hold court, sometimes from a barbers chair that functioned as his throne. I would go and watch and listen. I never introduced myself or spoke to him there. Not once. I was just a literary stalker, and there were others there like me.

In the course of the quarter I ran out of Crews books to read. I started over. A couple months after Christmas break I bought a Playboy magazine. Yes, for the articlesor I should say, articlea Crews story on the Alaskan oil boom called Going Down in Valdez. Oddly, or maybe ironically, the centerfold of that editionyes, I did take a lookwas named Laura Misch. She would years later become a writer and would compete with me daily on the crime beat in Fort Lauderdaleshe working for the Miami Herald, me working for the Fort Lauderdale News. It was a small world.

I didnt go the distance as a student. The Vietnam War was no longer a threat on my life, and hiding out in college was not necessary. I quit going to class in the spring and was eventually askedno, toldto leave. I spent most of the next two years as a dishwasher by day and a reader by night. I kept reading Crews novels and stories. I inhaled the work of other masters like Raymond Chandler, Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Kurt Vonnegut. Some of it was fiction, some journalism. It was all storytelling to me.

Somewhere in that time I decided I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to take a shot at it. I served my academic penance and went back to school. The first class I signed up for was creative writing with Harry Crews. I didnt care how intimidating it might be. I wanted to be inspired. I wanted to experiencethat larger than life personality and to hear about the cauldron from which true storytelling came. I wasnt sure I had what it would take and thought Crews would either convince or dissuade me.

He did neither. Harry didnt show up that semesteryes, now we were on semesters. About ten of us gathered in a small classroom that first day and a graduate assistant told us that Harry was late returning from an assignment for Playboy. He gave us our own writing assignments and said Crews would be back soon and would read and critique our work.