The Try-Works

Looks like there’s a new Harry Crews documentary out.  About fucking time.

And speaking of which, I’ve got some thoughts on Larry Brown upcoming.  For as much as I’ve been reading him, I ain’t been posting about the motherfucker nearly enough.

Joel was recently kind enough to inquire on an old post if I’d read any of Harry Crews’ non-fiction since talking to him in the comments. The answer is hell yes. Thanks to the wonders of our local library system, I finished Florida Frenzy a couple of days back and am about half-way through Blood and Grits, which is criminally out of print. He’s right, Harry Crews may be be a fine novelist, but he’s a fucking monster essayist. More to come.

I posted a clip from the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus awhile ago which wasn’t the clip I wanted. Following are the clips I wanted. They sum up kinda what makes Mr. Crews so fucking special.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

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The Georgia Review will be publishing an excerpt from Crews’ second, unpublished, autobiography in the Winter 2007 issue (due out in late December.)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.

That’s a question.  Why is Harry Crews almost entirely ignored by academia?  Another question.  Why doesn’t anyone read his books?

Was he killed by McSweeney’s?

By Oprah?

At the recommendation of the Florida Arts Council, the secretary of state recently named filmmaker Victor Nunez and sculptor Augusta Savage to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Nunez has made humane and luminous movies such as Gal Young ‘Un and Yulee’s Gold. Augusta Savage of Green Cove Springs spent the 1920s sculpting Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, and the 1930s fighting for the inclusion of African-American artists in WPA projects.

Nunez and Savage richly deserve this accolade. But, for some reason, Harry Crews, the great University of Florida novelist, memoirist, teacher and hellraiser, author of The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes and also nominated for the Hall of Fame, got turned down flat.

Full disclosure: I was among the people who wrote letters supporting Harry Crews’ nomination. It’s a no-brainer. He’s the heir of William Faulkner and the godfather of Cormac McCarthy. He’s Maileresque (if Mailer had been born on a tenant farm). He’s the poet of the low-down, the back roads, the broken heart of old Florida. His milieu is the green-shadowed swamps and tar-paper shacks tourists never see, and the hamlets promising not tropical paradise but deer processing, cheap beer and salvation at the Full Gospel Church.

So why was Crews not acceptable? It’s not as if the Hall of Fame pays out big money: the only material reward is your name on a wall in the Capitol. And it’s not overcrowded. The statute (265.2865, if you’d like to look it up) says the secretary of state can pick up to four people per year, as long as they have made “significant contributions to the arts in this state.” Singer Jimmy Buffet’s in; actor Burt Reynolds is in; and dancer Edward Villella. I like margaritas and cheeseburgers as much as the next person, but for 30 years Crews’ fiction has been telling us of the invisible, the poor, the outcast: people who try to survive in the face of deprivation.

I understand not wanting to get close, even in prose, to mules and madness and drunken rages and families so dysfunctional they make the Borgias look like the Waltons. I understand the state wanting to include in the Hall of Fame people who are amiable, school visit-friendly and generally sober. Dead people are good: there’s only so much they can do to embarrass us. Maybe Harry Crews is too scary; he’s not known for decorum and delicacy. Maybe a member of the Arts Council once had the bracing experience of encountering him in a Gainesville bar.

But being a nice guy should not be one of the state’s criteria for recognizing its literary treasures. Was Shakespeare a nice guy? Who knows? William Faulkner, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, was not a nice guy. He’d get liquored up, say outrageous (occasionally racist) things and hit on teenaged girls. Does it matter? These are artists, not Scout troop leaders or candidates for pastor of the First Baptist Church.

The rest.

I’m realizing you can split Harry Crews books into two categories: the ones that include a beautiful, buxom young lady who also happens to be a Karate expert, and the ones that don’t.  My favorites are definitely falling in the latter category.  I thoroughly enjoyed Car, the tale of a man who tries to eat an entire automobile (you just have to love it enough to take the pounding and suppress the gag reflex), which has a beautiful hooker for a love interest, but she’s got no karate experience.  Likewise, The Hawk is Dying has a sharp-witted college student who smells vaguely of urine for a love interest, and it’s my favorite so far.  Conversely, I’m having a hell of a time getting through The Mulching of America, and it includes, of course, a beautiful female Karate expert.  As does Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, which is paling rapidly as the weeks go by.

I remember reading somewhere (Harold Bloom?) that sexual jealousy is the ideal topic for the novel, in that to be sexually jealous is to implicitly imagine oneself in a life that is not one’s own; that sexual jealousy is the desire to live more than life, as it were, and that the great human tragedy is that we’re all trapped only in the one life we live.

I probably butchered that, but it’s always stuck with me, and I think it’s the reason I’m having a harder time with Harry Crews’ novels which foreground gorgeous Karate-kicking love interests.  It’s pretty obvious that’s Mr. Crews’ bag: beautiful women who can kick the shit out of most men.  And, as such, it seems like the novels that feature said women don’t have enough at stake.  They’re missing that fundamental desperation necessary to the novels I like.  It doesn’t mean they’re bad.  They’re often quite readable, and very funny.  But the novels penned by Mr. Crews which I like best ain’t about people who get to bag their dream fuck.

For some reason, I just read Salman Rushdie’s Fury, and spotted the same problem.  Sexual tension, sexual jealousy needn’t be foremost in a novel for it to resonate with me, but absolute sexual gratification flattens characters.  As Willie Nelson put it, “ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.”

Not one of my favorite documentaries.  But I watched the whole goddamned thing not too long ago for the glimpse of Harry Crews it provided.  So here you are.

Gotta jump left, gotta jump right, can’t stay where he is.

So there’s two things that I keep being struck by as I’m reading this pile of Harry Crews books.  The first is his extreme humanism, a notion he relates to Goethe in a recent documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.  Goethe believed that each human carries all the potentiality of humanity within them.  And, not, obviously, just the potentiality of the charity worker and the Samaritan, but that of the Jeffrey Dahmer and the Henry Kissinger as well.  That’s Harry Crews’s ground.

People make too much of the so-called freaks that populate his books.  It’s a way of dismissing him.  And it’s pretty obvious in his interviews that he doesn’t consider his characters freaks.  They’re people he’s known, people he’s very serious about, people he carries a considerable amount of sympathy for.  When you get into a Harry Crews book, you’re gonna have your knee-jerk moralities pushed, no matter where on the political spectrum you stand.  You’ll have no choice but to question your own snap judgments of others.  And to question others you have no choice but to question yourself, if you’ve got a fraction of intellectual honesty.

I ain’t sure I’m buying that that’s the great end of literature: the forcing of the reader into a radical revisioning of their own moral order.  But I don’t have to.  Harry Crews buys it, and his books are a convincing argument.

The second thing is Harry Crews’s belief in physical, or athletic, truths.  He talks about it in the interview I linked to here.  He digs athletic truth because it’s measurable.  You say you can bench 500 pounds?  Well, come on over here and lets hit the weights.  There’s no fucking around.  As Crews admits, it’s a paltry truth, but a truth nonetheless.  And he believes it’s possible to extrapolate it to greater truths.

All right, sure.  I hear what he’s saying, but I ain’t sure what the hell it means.  How exactly does one get from one to the other?  I like the idea, and I like the tangibility of his model, but I don’t see the process.

But, and a big but, I’m very interested in why authors, particularly American authors, are so entranced with physicality.  Why did Hemingway used to brag he fought the British heavyweight champion to a standstill?  Why did Mailer spend so much time in the boxing gym?  What the fuck is Crews doing driving his hands through wood planks?

The following is a short excerpt from Karate is a Thing of the Spirit.  See what you think.

“A demonstration of truth,” said Belt.  “It is called tameshiwari.”

He knelt with his eyes closed for a moment.  Then he opened his eyes and stared at the stack of tiles in front of him.  John Kaimon nervously counted the tiles.  Twenty.  A kyai exploded from Belt, and simultaneously with the jarring cry, Belt struck the stack of tiles with his head.  Tile flew across the room.  Bits of it struck John Kaiman in the face.  The twenty tiles split cleanly through the center.

John Kaimon knew that what he had seen was true.  And impossible.

Belt, still kneeling, calmly watched him.  “And,” he said, pointing his finger, “and Milon, the greatest of Greek wrestlers, once carried a bull around the Olympia Stadium, killed it with a single blow, and ate it all himself.  All—bone, skin, and guts—by himself.  And five centuries—that’s five-before Christ, another Greek, Theogenes, a boxing champion, knocked out two thousand, one hundred and two opponents, and eighteen hundred of them died.”

Belt stopped and watched him.  John Kaimon felt he had to say something
.
“That’s a long time ago.  Before Christ is a long time.”

“A man alaive today,” Belt patiently explained, hamming his forefinger into the cement floor to mean this very day, “the Grand Karate Master Masutatsu Oyama, in October of 1954, fought a bare-handed duel with a bull at Tateyama in Chiba Prefecture.”  Belt leaned forward on his brutal fingers and put his face next to John Kaimon’s as though he meant to kiss him.  Belt’s eyes were lighted with pleasure.  “He shaved that bull’s horns like hair.”  Belt made a knife-hand and held it up, red as raw meat and swelling, pulsing like a heart.  “And killed it with a single shuto to the head.”

John Kaimon would not be intimidated.  Hadn’t he shaved his head, and suffered himself to be violated by two men and a girl?  He had come too far to back off now.  He leaned toward Belt.  Their noses actually touched.  Neither of them blinked.

“They say Faulkner wrote over twenty books!”  His voice was a savage whisper.  That’s twenty.  Have you ever actually looked in a book?  I mean really looked?  All them little words in there.  All them letters.  Did you ever think what that might take out of a man?  Have you ever thought about sitting down with a pencil and copying a book?  Just word for word, writing it down on another piece of paper?”

Belt blinked.  “No,” said Belt.  “Never.”  Then they both blinked and pulled their noses back.

“I have,” said John Kaimon.  “I bought a tablet once and sat down with a pencil.  I copied the first twenty pages of a book called The Sound and the Fury and saw that it was impossible.  It was there in front of me so it was true, a fact, but impossible.”

“Impossible?” Said Beld.

“Impossible,” said John Kaimon.

The title is my favorite quote from this Harry Crews audio interview.

Following some quotes from Harry Crews, some of which I’ve probably already posted somewhere, sometime. I’m getting interested in Mr. Crews. I’ve finished the first two of the books checked out last week, This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven and Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, and have a couple of posts coming, for those four of you who care about the books portion of this blog. One about the literary fascination with physical competition, and the other about Harry Crews’s extreme humanism.

I’ve started Car, which is the great American gearhead novel. More coming on that, probably, but I also finally saw Quentin Tarantino’s gearhead flick, Death Proof, last weekend, which seems to run a similar motif. It’s been nagging at me all week, and I finally figured out why this evening: it was the adaptation of JG Ballard’s Crash which the purported adaptation wasn’t. Y’know, “the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology,” to crib from Amazon. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as disappointed in a flick as I was in Crash, and it was because it captured none of the vigor, violence, and psychosis of JG Ballard’s work. Death Proof did. To a lesser degree, but it did. I’d have had Kurt Russell win out in the end, but, hell, that’s me.

Anyway, Harry Crews in his own words, culled from around the Internet. I’ll post a link to a full audio interview later.

So, the dumbasses out there that are watching television until they are rotting in their souls, watching Walter Cronkite and Happy Days, who cannot read my fiction, and say that it’s gratuitous, I say they have no eyes, no ears, no heart, no mouth, no sympathy, no charity for the human predicament. And they think that the human predicament and situation is living over in suburbia with a high wall around yourself and worrying about your annuities and your tax-sheltered income.

. . .

You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That’s what I’ve discovered about writing. The world doesn’t want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read–if you wait for the time, you’ll never do it. Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

. . .

I never wanted to be well-rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

. . .

For many and complicated reasons, circumstances had collaborated to make me ashamed that I was a tenant farmer’s son. 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 of 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–and it was more than a thought, it was a dead-solid conviction–was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms that I’d dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the Grit I am and will always be. Once I realized that the way I saw the world and man’s 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.

. . .

I’ve never had any notion of shooting myself. You know how they put that [shapes hand like a gun and awkwardly points his finger against the roof of his mouth]–eat the gun. Put that son of a bitch in there and pull the trigger. Well, yeah, you put brains on the ceiling. But it also–the blow back–you got brains come out of your nose, out of your fucking ears. Out of your mouth. I mean, you’d think it would blow, but it’s like a blow back in a fire. And I just–nah. I don’t think so.

. . .

I’m old enough now . . . I thought, back 30 years ago when I started–well, I didn’t start 30 years ago, but that’s when The Gospel Singer came out, 30 years ago this year–and I thought I was gonna be better than I am. I mean, I’m all right, and I’m not whining, but I thought I was going to be better than I am. I was thinking about this–thinking about it a lot, more than I should–but two or three days ago, I thought to myself, ‘Well, y’know, I wouldn’t be surprised if the very best novelists don’t think that. At least sometimes.’ I always think of that thing Faulkner said–well, I think of a lot of things that Faulkner said–but he said, ‘We all start as poets, find that too difficult and go to short stories, find that too difficult and go to the easiest of all forms, the novel.’ It’s the easiest because it’ll tolerate more errors and false moves without the reader stopping and putting it down and making a sandwich and forgetting about it.

. . .

If you’ve heard one story about pissin’ in an ice box when you’re drunk, you’ve heard ‘em all.

. . .

How many marriages have you known that the man and the woman would come into parties, they were smiling to one another? They were holding hands, they were arriving in the same car. They, as they say, ‘maintained appearances.’ And then one day you hear from a friend, ‘Did you know that Pete and Sally’s gettin’ a divorce?’ And you think, ‘No man! Wait a minute. I didn’t know that. No, you gotta be wrong. Pete and Sally came to my house and they were all huggy-bear, kissy-mouth and that kind of bullshit thing.’ But no. Underneath, the worms were crawling. They’re eating eyeballs… All very sad. All very tragic. And all very ugly enough to make a man almost murderously angry. But that’s the nature of the world. I don’t know about you, but the only world I know is the one I see.

. . .

Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, ‘Hey, man, the ball game’s up’.

. . .

The reading public bothers me, though. They don’t want to read about the blood and bones and guts of an issue. They want to read about something they’re not going to have to think about, and if it does hurt them, as say Love Story does, it won’t last very long. What has happened in this country is a failure of the imagination.

. . .

I had possessions once. I mean, I had them up around my fucking neck. I thought and felt that I was not in control, that they owned me. After all, if you have a house and a car and nine jillion pieces of furniture, you’re not mobile. You’re not anything. You’re stuck. Some people will say it’s a great way to be stuck, and maybe it is for them, but the notion of having a bunch of shit that I have to stay around and take care of doesn’t wear well with me.

. . .

But in terms of the satisfaction you get from doing something or the way you feel about it, money ain’t shit. Money does not count. It just simply does not. If money meant anything, then you would never become a writer anyway.”

. . .

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a violent person. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill your fucking ass, and I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. I’ll kill your fucking ass and you can count on it; depend on it.

. . .

Faulkner’s rhetoric is the sea around us whose depth more than one of us has drowned. He is such an overwhelming talent that he has damaged a whole generation of writers, because they all come along and try to be Faulkner and to write about the stuff that to him was a blood-and-bone issue and to them only a kind of romantic nonsense. You see, you can’t fake any of this in art.

. . .

Being a fiction writer is a good way to go crazy, it’s a good way to be a nervous wreck, it’s a good way to become a drunk. You continually pick at yourself, the little sores that you have. They scab over and you pick them open again. Other people not only let them scab over, they let them scar over. They leave it alone. Writers don’t do that. They can’t keep their fingers out of the sore. They’ve got to keep it bleeding. And it’s off that blood that they make their stuff.

And, yeah, I know, I’ve used that picture before, but just so’s you know, I’m a man of my word. I checked six Harry Crews books out of the library. In chronological order:

This Thing Don’t Lead to Heaven
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit
Car
The Hawk is Dying
The Mulching of America
Celebration

I finished the first, was heartily amused, and am about a third of the way through the second. The thing I keep being struck by is, for all of the great grisly humor and grotesques that inhabit his books, Mr. Crews’ command of all the things that keep me reading novels. Y’know: metaphor, image, theme and old fashioned non-PoMo narrative. Sounds pretty banal, and it is, but maybe I’ll come up with something smarter as I move on. Right now, I’m spending most of my time wondering what the fuck it would take to actually drive one’s fingers through a plank of wood.

And if I have one more glass of Jim Beam, I just might try it. With, I’m guessing, unfortunate results.

Anyway, yeah, I’ve linked to this before too, probably in the same post where I previously posted the picture, but the Harry Crews website. From which comes one of my favorite quotes by one of my other favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor:

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”

—Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country”

But Harry Crews is the reason I get up in the morning.

Watching Mr. Crews do his thing brought me to a new resolution. That is: read fewer books about scalp-hunting, genocide, the overthrow of governments, etc.; read far more fucking good novels.

I’m gonna stand by that. Harry Crews and Larry Brown — just off the top of my head — are two gentlemen who I’ve read far too little of, but whom I thoroughly fucking enjoy every time I crack cover on one of their books. My new-September resolution is to start tracking more of their shit and getting to reading.