NEWSLETTER

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INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON
PORTRAIT BY TARA SINN, WITH A PHOTO BY JOHN ZEULI PHOTOGRAPHY


Harry Crews is one of the most original and important living American novelists there is. He was born the son of sharecroppers in Georgia in 1935. He served as a marine during the Korean War and since then he’s had just about every job a man might have to take in his lifetime—from working in a cigar factory all the way up (or maybe down) to teaching creative writing.

His books are bitterly funny and expertly observed shots of fiction taken straight out of his own life. He can outfight, outfuck, outwrite, and outthink anyone from the entire generation of little boys that came after him, and he’s still kicking today. Harry is down there right now in his secret hideout in Florida as you read this, and he’s working away on a new novel. He says it might be his last because he’s sick. But we don’t know. There might never have been a human being who combines smart and tough as perfectly as Harry Crews does, and we wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still cranking out his amazing books when we’re all old and gray too.

Vice: Hey Harry. Is this still a good time to talk?

Harry Crews: We’re supposed to do this now?

I think we said that I would just give you a try on the phone today and see what happened.

Morphine will fuck up whatever memory you may have left. I take it every four hours around the goddamned clock. So I know we said Friday afternoon but I thought we said one or two and, hell, it’s after three now. It doesn’t matter except, I don’t know if I told you or not, but I’m trying to finish one last novel. If God will give me this one, I’ll quit. But I didn’t leave it alone. I started working very early today and—listen, are you sure this is worth your fucking time?

Definitely. I just don’t want to climb up your ass.

You aren’t climbing up my ass, man. If you were bothering me I’d tell you. Last time we talked you said something like, “If I were where you are, last thing in the world I’d be worrying about was whether or not to give a fucking interview.”

Right.

Well, I am worried about it and the reason I am is because I told you I would. You’ll find this out—when you get as old as I am, about the only goddamned thing you’ll have left is your word. If I tell somebody I’m gonna do something, by God I do it if I possibly can. And I don’t mind doing it. Truth is, I’ve probably given more fuckin’ interviews than I should have. Do you know a book called Getting Naked With Harry Crews?

I’ve looked at it. That’s the compilation of interviews with you, right?

What some dipshit college professor did was call me and ask me if it would be all right for him to find all the interviews I’d given and publish them. I said, “I don’t give a shit, man. Do it if you want to.” It’s a hardback book and it’s about four inches thick or something.

And it’s every interview you’d ever given up to that point.

Yeah, and some of them aren’t too shabby. I didn’t read the book but I looked in it. And then some of them I was drunk as a skunk or fucked up on dope or otherwise non-copacetic. And they aren’t worth a damn and they certainly shouldn’t be in a book—but they are.

But I don’t know, I like to talk about writing and I like to talk about books and I like to talk about all that stuff. I mean, such as it’s been, it’s been my life.

Your enthusiasm for all that hasn’t diminished as you’ve gotten older?

No. Hell no. I’m so fucking in love with it. I thank God I got this book to work on. That, and a girl named Melissa who not long ago was a gymnast at Auburn University in Alabama. She is an Alabama girl. And, well, you know what a gymnast looks like. Goddamn, she is just extravagantly beautiful with a body that will stop your fucking heart.

And she’s hanging out with you down there?

Oh, she’ll be here in about an hour and a half and spend the weekend with me.

That’s good news.

You’re telling me? It’s wonderful. And she’s gonna cook lobster tonight and it’s gonna be a good thing. She’s a great lady, man. Like I say, she’s real nice to look at. And she’s enthusiastic about all things good. I dig her a lot.

Did she know your books before she met you?

Yeah, she knew, but it was kind of strange how we got hooked up. After I’d been around her for like four or five hours, she looked at me and said, “You’re not the guy that writes the books, are you?” I said, “Well, yes, I’ve written some shit.” As soon as she put it together, she read some of my stuff. But thank God that ain’t why she likes me.

You probably have some scary fans.

My phone number is in the book but my address is not in there because strange assholes show up at your door. A lot of them are young people who don’t quite know what they’re looking for, but they want to talk. Most of them want to talk to me or see me for all the wrong reasons. They think if they rub against me or something they’ll be able to write.

And you taught writing for some time, right?

Well, thank God the University of Florida gave me this deal that every writer needs. I worked with 10 or 12 graduate students a year. They were just young people who thought they wanted to be fiction writers. By and large, they fell in love with the idea of being a fiction writer and then they were introduced to the slave labor of it and they pretty soon decided, “No, I don’t want to do this.”

It takes a lot of time, doesn’t it?

If you’re going to write a book, you don’t know what you’re looking at. You have to disabuse them of all these ideas they have that they are sure are right but which are almost exclusively, always, all of them, wrong. It’s all very boring. But I love my students—the few that turned out to be writers. There’s a boy named Jay Atkinson in Massachusetts. He’s now written four books. My students are all around the country. All that shit that’s on the, whatever you call it, the internet or something? Google or something? I don’t have it on my computer.

That’s probably a blessing.

Well, I do have it, but I just don’t pull it up. But there’s a ton of shit about me on there. There’s a boy named Damon Sauve in San Francisco. He’s a fine writer. He put all that shit on, I guess it’s called a website? I know very little about computers. I just do the best I can and leave all that shit alone. I write in longhand, I write on a typewriter, I write on a computer, I’d write with charcoal if it would make me write better. I don’t care what it is as long as it gets the words down. I only want about 500 words a day. Five hundred words a day is just wonderful if you can get that many, but you usually can’t—not that you can keep anyway.

Do you write for a certain amount of hours every day?

I don’t do the hour thing. I’ve got a time when I start and I try to get 500 words. That’s only two manuscript pages, double spaced. If I can get two pages that’ll do it. You’d be surprised what that will turn out if you do it every day of your life.

What can you tell me about the book that you’re working on now?

It’s called The Wrong Affair. I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to finish this before I die. And that’ll be just wonderful. It will cap off the work I’ve done nicely. I like the book an awful lot. But it’s out of my life of course.

You mean it’s based on real experiences.

Everything I’ve ever written is. I got a book called Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit. I studied karate for 27 years or so. A long, long time. I got a book called The Hawk Is Dying. I trapped, trained, and flew hawks. If I haven’t done it, I can’t write about it. If I haven’t been involved in it, smelled it, tasted it, floundered around in it—the subject, that is—I can’t write about it. I know there are some guys that can, and do it well. But I’m not one of them.

The memoir you wrote of your childhood was amazing.

I come from a tenant farm in southern Georgia. If the crop failed—tobacco was the money crop—you just about couldn’t farm the next year either.

Tenant farming is a sickening system.

Yeah, it means you farm on someone else’s land—you’re a sharecropper. Then we had to move down to Jacksonville, Florida. My daddy died when I was 21 months old. He died of a heart attack—I never knew him. Ma raised us. She worked at the King Edward Cigar factory. Largest cigar factory under one roof in the world. Huge fuckin’ thing. Before I went in the marine corps I worked there for one summer. What a brutal fuckin’ job. How my dear old ma stood that all those years I’ll never know. She did it because she had to do it. That’s why she did it.

Anyway, man, look here. Can you stand the notion of us trying to start this at another time?

Sure, I’ve got a little time. But we’re kind of already doing the interview now.

Hey, I’ve got a little time too. I’m always here. We’ve got to work it out so that I haven’t just taken the fuckin’ dope or I haven’t been working all day or some fuckin’ thing.

Is there a time of day that’s better than another?

I hate to act like it’s something special. It’s not. It’s just a matter of the way my life runs and the things I have to do. I went to the damn doctor yesterday. He’s a good guy and I like him but when we got through I said, “This has been a waste of my time and a waste of your time and I’ll not be back again, but I love you and wish you well, so take care of yourself.” Then I left because, you know, I don’t know what he wanted. I guess he wanted to make sure I don’t do myself in. He wanted to talk about suicide and shit. I said, “Well, we can talk about suicide if you want to.”


CONTINUED
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