Harry Crews

Q sent me a link to a Harry Crews interview.  Crews was talking about the frequency with which "freaks" appear in his works. He was trying to justify it in some way.  Crews was the roommate of one of my college professors when they both were English majors at the University of Florida.  My prof was a magnificent failure of a man.  He had a greatness in him that he could not get out in any profitable way.  But he was practically all the students in the English program thought and talked about even though he did not mix with them on a familiar level.  He was intimately aloof and a great and wonderful mystery.  He would tell stories about living with Harry sometimes talking about the difference between them.

"Harry," he would say, "let's go get a drink."

"No, man," Harry would shoot back, "I've got to write."

"And that was the difference between Harry and me.  He wanted to write.  I just wanted to write so I could get laid."

I doubted much of what he reported as much as I wanted to believe, as I am romantically skeptical of all apocryphal tales.  But years later, I came across an interview in which Crews talked about his college roommate.  The fellow almost did him in, he said.  All he wanted to do was drink and chase after women.  Crews pictured him as a crazed beast in the interview, something that really needed to be caged and chained.

Look what Harry became.

I dated a girl whose last name was Screws for a while.  Her family was from Georgia just like Harry's.  I found out that the Crews clan were once The Screws, but they had dropped the "S" from their name somewhere along the line.  I was certain that my girl and Harry were related but she never bothered to find out.

All of this came back to me as I watched the interview this morning.  I could tell you about meeting Harry, but everyone has that tale to tell.  If you ever met him, you must wonder how he did it.  He is testament, I think, to the old saw that writing is 90% sweat.  It is work.

Writing novels. . . that's a whole other thing.

The Screws girl turned out all right, too.