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The Harry Crews I remember

Harry Crews died yesterday. He was 76, dissipated by a lifetime of hard living, too many drugs, too much alcohol and an uncounted number of fists to the face. I couldn’t recognize the man in the obituary picture, the man described as a little-known but larger-than-life cult novelist, a writer of “dark fiction” filled with Southern grotesques and wild violence. The Harry Crews I remember was fixed in a thin slice of spacetime, a stretch of six months or so in Gainesville, Florida 40 years ago. He was in his short-lived “speed freak phase.” He’d given up drinking, at least temporarily, but he was definitely on something that turned up the wattage. He was running a lot, zero body fat, a Mr. Clean gleam, both on his shaved skull and in his eye.

Somehow I managed to get into one of his University of Florida creative writing seminars as a sophomore undergraduate. I don’t remember if I had to show a writing sample, but I imagine I must have. Crews was a writing God in 1972 Gainesville. Little-known he may be in terms of a New York Times Arts section obit in 2012, but then and there he was the most famous man in town, a swashbuckling Hemingway figure who made flesh the cliche of living legend – at least to an 18-year-old with dreams of literary fame and fortune. I do remember a one-on-one interview in which he studied me the way a hawk must study a chipmunk. He accepted maybe a dozen students that semester, a three-hour marathon one night a week which was less of a class than a performance. I have no idea why I was among them, but I have been forever grateful for that fluke of luck.

Crews spoke in great roiling torrents, extolling us like a revivalist doing his unlevel best to save a particularly sorry bunch of sinners. His gospel was the nakedness of truth, the necessity for a writer to peel away all ego, to abandon caution and conceit, and care only for revealing his inner world in all it’s sick and twisted glory. Crews, who made it quite clear he had no use for convention in life or literature, was the embodiment of Bob Dylan’s creed, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”

There were periods in Crews’s pedagogic career when he was not the most attentive teacher. He’d show up late and half-baked to stumble and mumble around. Or fully baked, not show up at all. But in the brief moment of time when  I sat at the old-fashioned wooden writing desks in an antiquated second floor classroom, a heavy scent of  jasmine drifting in the open windows, he was an exemplar. Sometimes he read something he’d been working on, raw passages only ripped from his typewriter hours earlier. It was thrilling, terrifying, and disconcertingly intimate. It could have been embarrassing, but he read it with such fierce energy and conviction we were all swept up and carried away in the flood of prose, each and every one of us forever embedded with the desire to write as if we were dancing around a ring,  trying to deliver a knockout punch.

That was the downside of his charisma. We weren’t so much students as disciples, and to this day, his manic rhythms throb in some recess of my brain whenever I sit at a keyboard.

Here’s the upside: One night he walked into class with an onionskin manuscript in his hands and announced that he was going to read a student piece. He set to it with the same drama and passion he’d delivered for his own work. His reading was so riveting, it wasn’t until several sentences in that I realized that he was reading my story, the story I’d suffered and strained over, and had grown to hate each and every word of.

I’m sure it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t all that good, either. But as Crews read it, standing and pacing before us, flailing his free arm and belting out my words as if they were fists of fury, I could see my classmates leaning forward in their seats, rapt. And for the first time, I truly believed I could become a writer.

Denis and Rafa at 2009 French Open

I wrote an article a couple months shy of three years ago about a couple of DC-area teenagers who were trying to make it on the junior tennis circuit, and had dreams of making it in the pros. In the article, titled Net Gain, I made it clear that even though they were among the top juniors in the world, their chances of actually succeeding as pros, defined roughly as a handful of years among the top-100 players in the world, were exceedingly small.

The other night, I had the thrill of watching one of the two, Denis Kudla, play Roger Federer in front of thousands packing a stadium in the second round of the prestigious Indian Wells CA tournament. Kudla, now 19, was facing off against possibly the greatest player in the game’s history at one of his hottest moments in years. Federer would go on to win the tournament, and Kudla had never been past the first round in a tournament of this magnitude, had never faced a top-10 player, and had never played before so many fans on international television. He looked appropriately nervous, like a man who suddenly was aware of every nerve signal and muscle twitch it took to simply stand up and walk to his end of the court, much less return a 130 mph snaking serve that dips on the line as if it had telemetry.

Yet, incredibly, despite a very tight-armed double-fault, Kudla held his first serve, and even aced Fed down the T.

He went on to lose of course, 6-4, 6-1, but not before breaking Federer once in the first set, and having a break chance in the second. His second-round finish was enough to move him up further in his steady climb through the rankings. He’s now at 175 in the world, and he’s in the top 10 of all American pros.

The other star of my article, a kid I watched grow up at my racket club in Fairfax VA, was Mitchell Frank. Frank parted ways with Kudla at the end of his junior career and, instead of trying to go pro, accepted a scholarship to the University of Virginia, where he instantly became the No 1 ranked college player in the country. It used to be fair to say that players who went the college route, and stayed there for the full four-years, rarely amounted to anything in the pros.

But a guy named John Isner, who went to the University of Georgia and graduated there, is now the No 10 player in the world. It was Isner who faced Federer in the finals of the Indian Wells tournament. He lost, too. But still.

Great blog in the Times today about Lincoln’s storytelling prowess:

“Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish exile who worked in the State Department, observed, ‘In the midst of the most stirring and exciting — nay, death-giving — news, Mr. Lincoln has always a story to tell.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson found it delightful:’When he has made his remark, he looks up at you with a great satisfaction, & shows all his white teeth, & laughs.’”

So charming, especially knowing the sanctimonious, brittle character of so many presidents to follow, who made a show of teeth mainly as a prelude to personal attack. Predictably, not everyone was charmed. One big-shot politician of the time summed up the general objection:

“He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post.”

The critic’s name was Richard Henry Dana. Know it? Thought not. He’s another grandee lost in the depths of history, where the sediment of ponderous rhetoric and polemicism falls and turns to muck. Lincoln understood as well as any of our great writers that story telling connected with human beings in a way abstract pronouncements, however rational and finely parsed, never can. Far from frivolous, stories are the core currency of consciousness, the only way the world makes any sense at all.