The Try-Works

One Ms. Mindy Wilson of the University of Georgia was kind enough to leave the following in the comments:

The Georgia Review will be publishing an excerpt from Crews’ second, unpublished, autobiography in the Winter 2007 issue (due out in late December.) The issue also includes an essay about Crews by fiction writer Larry Baker, a selection of letters from Crews to various editors, and a handful of photographs.

I’ll be tracking down a copy through the Denver Public Library. I’ve also, thanks to the kind recommendation of another commenter, Joel, ordered A Childhood, Blood and Grits and Florida Frenzy through Denver’s interlibrary loan system.  I seem to have tapped out the main branch . . .

I’d meant to move on to Larry Brown and Jim Harrison by now, but I’m looking forward to reading the non-fiction stuff.  It was catching video clips of Mr. Crews doing his shtick that got me interested in him in the first place.  I’d heard the name for years, been recommended him, but always resisted for some reason I’ve never been put my finger on.  But then, watching him do his thing on Dennis Miller, I got blown away.  It was like watching the best of the barroom bullshitters I grew up with spin their tales.  Lively, grotesque and not without cruelty, but always funny, and with something primeval lurking just beneath the surface.

Before trying my hand at college, I worked for a while in manufacturing (among many other shitty jobs).  There was this guy on the line next to me who I always think about when I try to think about why I like the kind of literature I like.  He was a drifter and something of a scam artist.  Running up credit cards, passing bad checks, that sort of thing.  He’d been in prison a couple of times.  He wasn’t a very imposing figure.  Not a hard ass or anything, and not real interested in being one.  Nor did he seem that interested in people.  No romantic partner as far as I could tell, and no deep friendships, no family around that he seemed to give a shit for.  He drank some, had a thing for Scotch, but he did it alone.

What he was interested in were books.  The motherfucker read all the time, grinding his way through everything from the classics on up.  And he fucking hated all the Edith Wharton, Henry James type shit, and could rip the upper-crust NY Times bestsellers like Hitch taking on Bill Clinton.  The stories he was interested in had to have stakes.  Not semi-polite comedies of manners — who the fuck lives in that world anyway?  who the fuck wants to? — but stories about the rest of us, who either get pounded out of fucking existence by the day-to-day, or annihilated by our attempts to screw out from under the piledriver, who are one stupid mistake away from absolute ruin.

He’s my sole test market when I pick up a book.  He’s the only motherfucker worth writing for, in my opinion.  And I’m sure he’s already read Harry Crews, but if he ain’t, he’d sure as fuck like him.