Meeting Harry Crews

In September 2016, Harry Crews reentered my life for the third time through Ted Geltner's fine biography Blood, Bone, and Marrow, a Biography of Harry Crews (2016). I am grateful for and moved by this third encounter that reveals Harry with the empathy, appreciation, and admiration that he deserves. Reading his life slowly, ten or fifteen pages at a time, a day or two intervening between sittings and, after forty years, I have finally given him the time he deserved thanks to this personally rewarding biography. When thinking my life with Harry Crews, I remind myself that I "met" Proust as a Master's candidate at Arizona, I met him again in Chapel Hill, and I met him most recently when I finally taught him to undergraduates. The third time is the charm.

I will tell you about Harry and me (Harry didn't know there was a "Harry and Dennis" but bear with me) and how he dropped into and out of my life over the years. I had no idea that his story would resonate so much for me at this stage of my life, which is as a 66-year-old cyclist, former French professor, dean, provost (retired from all three of the preceding, still an old cyclist), baker of bread, and lover of words that communicate. From the biography, I will also tease out some episodes in his life that opened doors for me into Harry, his writing and into myself as well. Someone else's biography can be a fine teacher.

In the spring of 1975 my friend Joe introduced me to Harry for the first time through Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit and Car. Joe was then and remains a son of the South, possessed of a keen sense of place and history. He knew that I was a far-traveling Army brat from Arizona and he may have given me these books to provide some unusual insights into the region but at that time I was submerged in the importance of courses in Literary Criticism, Old French, and Bibliography. For me at the time, Harry's paperbacks were easy, fast, entertaining reads telling stories of the soft, dark underbelly of a kind of life in the South. Who could not be intrigued by the Florida beach-town beauty contest circuit or a guy who eats a car in the lobby of a hotel? I liked the stories and left them behind, I thought, having failed to meet Harry or feel his place.

At Wofford College in the spring of 1983 I met poet, naturalist, and novelist John Lane, another son of the South who is firmly grounded in the Piedmont of South Carolina. John knew that I had read some Crews and he filed that away until the early spring of 1992 when Harry, all blood, bone, and marrow of him dropped into my life for the second time.

Harry had been invited to speak in our college's visiting writers series and I asked to deliver the introduction for Harry's talk. To facilitate the introduction, John invited me to join him and Harry for dinner before the reading. Things went badly from the start. It was a cold, wet, dark evening in early February. In leaving Gainesville, Harry had locked his travel bag in the trunk of his car and so was in Spartanburg for two days with no change of clothes and only his shaving kit. John recalls that Harry wore hospital scrubs, a sleeveless sweatshirt and sported his "do and too" look—a Mohawk hairdo and showing off his tattoo that read: "What do you think of your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?" on his bicep. His shaving kit must have contained a huge bottle of Aqua Velva because he reeked of it when John picked him up at the motel for dinner. John said that he smelled like his farmer uncles from North Carolina on Saturday night.

I was in a coat and tie. Full of myself as a very young department chair, I had prepared a long, erudite academic introduction. At...