Blood, Bone, and Marrow

March 15, 2016
Alcohol, rage, and determination mark a writer's life. In 1979, Harry Crews (1935-2012) stumbled drunkenly through a reading at the University of South Florida. "What did it take to be a real novelist?" an audience member shouted out. Defiantly, Crews shouted back: "Blood!...Bone!...Marrow!" He might well have added: sweat, tears, and alcohol. Geltner (Journalism/Valdosta State Univ.; Last King of the Sport Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray, 2012) draws on interviews with Crews, his colleagues, students, drinking buddies, and ex-wife and on Crews' fiction, memoirs, and nonfiction to produce a candid, sympathetic life of a wounded, self-destructive man. Born in rural Georgia to a family struck hard by the Great Depression, Crews' childhood was "filled with violence and pain and hideously damaged people" and "replete with disease and alienation and indescribable suffering." At 5, he contracted polio. Although doctors said he would never walk again, he ended up with only a limp. A few months later, he fell into a pot of scalding water, resulting in burns over two-thirds of his body. "At least in terms of physical agony," Geltner observes, "Harry's life had bottomed out early." Crews later escaped by joining the Marines; he married, had two sons, earned a college degree, and took a teaching job at the University of Florida, all the while determined to be a writer. His first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), won critical praise for its "nice wild flavor," and some compared him to Faulkner and Hemingway. Prestigious houses vied for his work, and he published eight novels in eight years, got assignments from top-level magazines (Playboy, Esquire), and won a string of awards. But demons overcame him: Geltner calls him a functioning alcoholic, except when he was not. One year, he had 16 stays in rehab clinics. His classes--when he was sober enough to appear--were "tension- and testosterone-filled environments." An absorbing but sad chronicle of a tormented writer.

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Starred review from March 7, 2016
Geltner brilliantly renders the life of the late writer Harry Crews (1935–2012) in this well-researched and vivid biography. It captures the wild spirit of an unflinching American writer from his early years in impoverished Bacon County, Ga. (which Crews devastatingly captured in his most beloved book, A Childhood), to his years as an esteemed but volatile faculty member in the University of Florida’s creative writing program. In just two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Crews went from working as a junior college composition teacher to being a friend of Madonna and featured writer for Playboy. Geltner traces much of the inner pain in Crews’s life back to his tense relationship with his brother, Hoyett; the suspicion that his father was not his biological parent; and the shocking death by drowning of his young son. Geltner deftly examines each of Crews’s books and, without glossing over his alcoholism, shows that the hard living for which Crews was known did not break his ability to write. His discipline and respect for the art were reflected in the motto displayed above his desk: “Get Your Ass on the Chair.” Geltner proves that Crews was not just a great “Southern Gothic” writer, but a great American one, too.