Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend
I’VE BEEN READING Harry Crews for so long that I can’t really remember when I first discovered his work. It was probably way back in some dim year close to the time when I started writing, and that was in 1980. I remember that my friend and cousin, Paul Hipp, came over one afternoon when my wife and children and I were living in the house with my mother-in-law. He had in his hand a paperback copy of A Feast of Snakes, and he loaned it to me. I can remember sitting on the front porch in the swing, reading it. My children were small then, Billy Ray only three or four, Shane just a baby, LeAnne not even born yet. I remember how that book moved me, shook me, riveted me. I’d never read anything like it and didn’t know that such things could be done in a book. I didn’t know that a man could invent characters like Joe Lon Mackey, or his sister, Beeder, or Buddy Matlow, the peg-legged sheriff. It was a combination of hilarity and stark reality and beauty and sadness. Since then I’ve read it many times, and like all great books, it only gets better with each reading.
I’d already seen some of his essays in places like Playboy and Esquire, and somewhere along in there I went to Richard Howorth’s fledgling bookstore in Oxford and bought a book of essays called Florida Frenzy. From the library I checked out a book called Blood and Grits, and another one called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I was awed by his writing, by the stories of his life, his childhood, his struggles to become a writer, the places he had been and the things he had done. His novels were harder to find. The public library had a couple of them, The Gypsy’s Curse and The Hawk Is Dying. I read both of those and loved them, but I couldn’t find any more of his fiction. I knew it was out there somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where.
I don’t know how long a period of time this reading covered, but I was trying to write by then. I was in the process of trying to find mentors, writers whose work I could look up to and gain inspiration from. I wanted to read the rest of those books, novels that were listed in the front pages of his other books, novels with names like Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, Naked in Garden Hills, This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven, Car, The Gospel Singer.
I went in search of a larger library, and found it out at Ole Miss. I learned all over again how to use the card catalog, and then, armed with a piece of paper I had scribbled letters and numbers on, I began to prowl the stacks. And I began to find the books. Most of them were there, minus their dust jackets, and I checked them out and took them home and read them. Car was released in paperback and I bought it, and when The Gospel Singer was finally released again in 1988, I bought it. As the newer books have come out, things like The Knockout Artist and All We Need of Hell and Body and Scar Lover and The Mulching of America, I’ve bought them. I’ve read or bought everything by him that I’ve been able to get my hands on, and I’m grateful that a writer like him walks this earth.
BY 1985 I HAD written five unpublished novels and almost one hundred short stories that had, for the most part, gone begging also. I’d sold one story to Easyriders, one to Fiction International, and one to a now-defunct magazine in New York called Twilight Zone. I had learned by then that the price of success for a writer came high, that there were years of a thing called the apprenticeship period, and that nobody could tell you when you’d come to the end of it. You just had to keep writing with blind faith, and hope, and trust in yourself that you would eventually find your way, that the world would one day accept your work.
Whenever I fell into a black period of depression, which was fairly often, I could get one of Harry’s books of essays and read again about what he had gone through, how he had worked for years with no success. It was comforting somehow to know that a man of his great talent had not been born to it, but had learned it, and had possessed the perseverance or stubbornness or internal character or whatever it was that he possessed that allowed him to keep on writing in the face of rejection. I read about how much he had lost: his family, one of his boys. He never once complained about how tough it had been. He never said how hard it was to put the words down. What he said was that you had to keep your ass in the chair. Even if he couldn’t write anything one day, if it wouldn’t come at that particular sitting, he would make himself sit in the chair for three hours anyway. I knew that back in those days when he was unpublished, he must have wanted success as badly as I did then. And I was tremendously heartened to read these things. It meant that I was not the only person who had ever gone through what I was enduring, that it was probably a universal experience, this apprenticeship period, this time when you wrote things that were not good only to throw them away or have them rejected in order to write enough to eventually learn how.
I burned one of my novels in the backyard. I collected my rejection slips and kept them in a worn manila envelope. I kept writing, and hoping, and trying to do better. I pulled a twenty-four-hour shift at the fire department in Oxford ten days a month, and on the other days I drove nails or sacked groceries or cleaned carpets, whatever it took to make a few extra dollars to feed my growing family, heat the house, pay the bills that everybody has. On the weekends or for a few hours at night I would go into the kitchen and try to write something that made some sense. I was still writing stories, and I had started another novel.
That year I wrote a story about a man and a woman sitting in their bedroom and watching Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. It was a turning point for me, that story. All the things I had written and thrown away over the years had been leading up to the writing of that story, one that was called “Facing the Music.” By then I had found some other mentors, a few other role models: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Bukowski. Along with Harry Crews they were the writers I admired most, and still do.
Two years later I was offered a contract for ten stories, and I sent them, and the book was accepted, and my apprenticeship period was finally over, after seven years. Harry’s had been ten, and it wasn’t lost on me. When my publisher asked me to suggest some writers they might send galleys to for blurbs, I named my Mississippi friends Barry Hannah, Ellen Douglas, Jack Butler, and Willie Morris. And I asked them to send a galley to Harry Crews.
Some time passed, the galleys went out, and the blurbs began to come in. My editor sent them to me as they came, and we were glad to have them. And then one day she mailed a postcard to me, a postcard that had come to her from Harry Crews, and he had responded kindly and favorably as well. I was grateful to my friends, and grateful to him. But I never thought of trying to write to him and thank him. I figured he was a busy man, and I didn’t want to bother him. I held him in such high esteem, and respected him and his work so much, that I thought it would be best to be just grateful from a distance, and not try to intrude on his life.
I kept writing and so did Harry. I kept buying his books as they came out. I published my first novel, and kept writing stories, and in 1990 Algonquin published my second collection. In was in October of that year when I read a review of Big Bad Love that Harry Crews had written in the Los Angeles Times. The review was good, and I was very happy to see it, but what surprised me was what he said about the first book, that in twenty-five years of writing it was the first time he’d picked up the phone and tried to call the author. He hadn’t been able to get ahold of me, but I decided that I would write him, and thank him for the things he’d done for me, and try to tell him how much I’d admired his work through the years and how much it had meant to me in my struggles to become a writer. I got his address from my editor and wrote the letter and sent it, and then sometime later on a Saturday afternoon when I was sitting out in my room working, the phone rang, and it was him. I think we talked for about an hour and a half, and then we began to write back and forth. We talked about our lives, about dogs, about drinking, about women, about everything. Once in a while I would call him up and he would do the same. Eventually he arranged a reading at the University of Florida and offered to let me stay with him for a couple of days, and I quickly a
ccepted.
He was leaning up against a wall when I walked off the plane in Gainesville, wearing a pair of jeans and running shoes and an Oakland Raiders sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off. The sides of his head were shaved. He came off the wall easily when he saw me and offered his hand and we shook. He was taller than I’d imagined, a really big man. There was a tattoo of a death’s head on his shoulder, and underneath it the legend:
How do you like
Your blue-eyed boy
now,
Mr. Death?
He got me into his black pickup and we started talking and didn’t stop for several days. He drove me over to his house and I unloaded my suitcase and he put me into a spare bedroom he had. He’d called earlier to ask me what kind of beer and whiskey I liked, and he had laid in a supply of both for me. We sat and talked in the living room for a while, and out in the backyard where his deck overlooked a wild piece of land. His living room was sunken from the rest of the house and I met his old dog, Heidi, and then he took me out for something to eat. I gave a reading that night and don’t remember what I read, but the place was packed and he introduced me. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Later that night we sat in the living room and read to each other pieces from the books we were working on. The next day I went to his class with him, and that night he gave a party at his house in my honor. He treated me like a favorite uncle would, and told me that if there was anything I needed and didn’t see it, to just ask for it. The time with him passed by too soon, but just to get to hang out with him for a while was a great gift that I’ve never forgotten. We’ve continued to stay in touch over the years, and I know that he’s still working, that he hasn’t finished his writing, that he probably never will. I’m glad for that.
It is important to have people to look up to at the beginning of your career. You have to find people who have found their own way of saying the things that you yourself want to say. It never comes easy, and I believe now that it may even get harder the older you get and the more you write. The apprentice approaches the pinnacle slowly, with much stumbling and cursing, constantly going down one-way streets and taking off on tangents that go nowhere. The incredible amount of things that have to be written and then thrown away is probably what daunts a lot of young writers. I don’t think he ever thought of quitting. I know I certainly did, but something kept me going. To a large degree it was Harry Crews. Knowing about those hard early years made me see that it was possible to succeed at what I was trying to do, and it pulled the blinders off my eyes about what was required. In the beginning I thought I’d write a novel and mail it off to New York City and they’d mail me a check back for a million dollars, and it took a couple of years for me to find out that it doesn’t work that way. A fluke does happen once in a while, but the person who starts out to write literature has already fixed himself with a hard row to hoe. By its very nature, literature is the hardest thing to write, because the standards are so high, and sometimes the rewards are low. It’s probably nearly impossible to make a living solely from it, unless you get lucky. Most of the literary writers I know teach somewhere, and write their books in between classes and working on students’ stories. Harry did that for a long time, and I’ve done some of it myself, even though I’m uneducated in the formal sense and barely got out of high school.
I heard a while back that he had finally retired, but I haven’t talked to him in a while. The last time I saw him was a few years ago, when he came over to Oxford to read at the bookstore from his latest book, The Mulching of America. My friend Mark and I watched him get off the plane at Memphis, and were waiting on him when he got to the top of the stairs. He grabbed me in a bear hug and gave me a smile, and shook hands with Mark and told him how much he’d enjoyed his book, and then we drove him down to Oxford in Mark’s old Caddy. I got a little drunk on him that night, and felt bad about it afterward, but he told me later in a letter to forget about it, that it went with the turf. I knew he meant it, and I stopped worrying about it. I was just glad to get to spend some more time with him.
Once when I was in Washington, D.C., rehearsing a stage adaptation from one of my novels, we had a bad day. Nothing went right and the lines were wrong and everybody kept missing their cues and it got so bad that the director sent everybody home early. Opening night was not far away, and I went down a snowy street to a liquor store and got a fifth of Wild Turkey and went back to my hotel room and tried to crawl inside it. Sometime later I dug Harry’s number out of my briefcase and tried to call him, but his answering machine was on and all I could do was leave a message. I wanted to tell him how badly things were going, and ask him what it was that I needed to do. He didn’t call back that night, but he did call the next morning, full of good humor and reassurance. He told me of rehearsing his own play in Louisville, and of how terribly things sometimes went, but how it all came together before opening night, and he let me know that the same thing would happen for us. And he was right. We fixed the lines, and the actors pulled things up out of themselves that we had never seen coming, and the play fit together like the pieces of a finely mitered box. He knew what he was talking about.
If not for having written a few books I would not know Harry Crews, or be able to count him as a friend. In a business that involves staying by yourself most of the time, and working uncertainly and sometimes fearfully toward an uncertain goal, the rewards can be few and far between and the very nature of the thing you are doing can cause a man to question the sanity of it. But other writers understand what you do and what is required of you to do it. And nothing matters but the finished book. It doesn’t matter how much pain it costs you. You can’t bitch and whine about it, you just have to do it. I think that’s probably the most valuable lesson I’ve learned from Harry: Do the best work you can, whatever it takes to do it, whatever the price is that you have to pay.
Chattanooga Nights
IN THE SPRING of 1989, when I was still in my thirties, I was invited up to Chattanooga to take part in a literary conference, which was a pretty new thing for me. A lot of writers were going to be there, people I had admired from afar for a long time, people whose books I had read and treasured while I was trying to learn how to write.
I was pretty excited about going. I was also intimidated by the whole thing because I was still pretty green about the situation a young writer finds himself in if people like his books, the travel and the speaking engagements and the readings and the bookstores. There were some big names at the conference, and I had almost no name at all, having published only one collection of short stories. But it had been reviewed well, and I had an essay that I’d worked long and hard over, one that talked about the influences in my life that had turned me to writing. I also had a small piece from my first accepted novel picked out to read.
It had been almost nine years since I’d decided I wanted to write, and in all that time I’d been working steadily, week after week. I’d thrown out almost a hundred stories and five novels, and I’d come to realize finally that every writer had an apprenticeship period to go through, where there were years and years of hard work that had to be done, even if it wasn’t good enough to publish. I’d come to know that the writer had to just keep on writing, and ignore the rejections, and work toward the day when the work would be good. I felt like I’d finally reached that day, and I wanted to talk a little bit about what that process had been like for me. I figured there would be some young writers in the audience, some people like me. The conference was the first well-paying gig I ever had, and the money they were giving me was a lot more than a whole month’s salary at the fire department. What was even better was that I was going to get to hang around some other writers for three days. I would have gone for nothing just to have been able to do that.
There were a few people I knew at the conference: my friend Clyde Edgerton, and Arlie Herron, from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, who had come down to Oxford the year before and heard me read at the Faulkner Conference, and my
publisher, Louis Rubin. Mary Annie and I checked into the hotel, the big old Radisson downtown, one that was occupied by Union troops during the Civil War, and coming from our country home we were mighty impressed. The tall ceilings in the lobby were trimmed out with intricate wood carvings and there was marble on the floor, columns made from it, too. It was the nicest place either one of us had ever been in. We couldn’t believe our luck, and if this was what success meant, we wanted lots more of it.
When we got to our room, there was a basket of fruit and cheese and a bottle of wine on the table, along with a note from the people hosting the conference, welcoming us. We hung up our clothes and broke out the wine and poured a glass apiece, and the phone rang. It was Clyde.
He said, “Hey. You know that cheese that’s in the basket over there?”
I said, “Yeah?”
He said, “Well don’t try to eat that stuff it’s wrapped up in. That’s wax.”
I said, “Okay. Y’all doing all right down there?”
He said, “Yeah, but we’ve already done several country bumpkin things. Set the fire alarm off first thing.”
We talked for a while and agreed to meet later to hang out. M.A. and I relaxed in the room some more, turned on the television to see how many channels it got, marveled at all the towels we had. I think M.A. took a long hot bath while I snacked some and drank some wine and watched some television. Then we got ready and went downstairs to meet everybody for dinner.
Some of us walked a couple of blocks down the sidewalk in a loose group, and it was pretty stunning to me to see Ernest Gaines and Louis going down the street just talking about baseball like regular people. My eyes got big seeing William Styron and Andrew Lytle and Horton Foote in the flesh.
The dinner was great, the company was wonderful, and after it was over we went back to the hotel and settled in the bar. It was there that I met a nice man named Madison Jones. He said he lived in Auburn, Alabama, and we sat at a long table and talked for quite a while. He was kind to me and he had a wonderfully refined, deeply Southern voice, and a great dignity about him. I guess what I liked best about him was that he took the time to talk to me and treated me as if I were an equal. He made me feel welcome in Chattanooga, like I belonged there with all of them. I remember his kindness, and his great voice. And back then I had no idea that he was such a terrific writer. But when I picked up one of his novels and started reading it, I knew again that I was in good hands.