‘Only two German actresses have captured the sustained imagination and enthusiasm of the American filmgoing audience: Marlene Dietrich, who appeared only once in a German film before developing her career in America, and Hanna Schygulla, who chose to stay in Europe, where her career has flourished for more than three decades. Nurtured by the writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder—she appears in 18 of his films—Schygulla continued, after Fassbinder’s death, to work with such major filmmakers as Marco Ferreri, Jean-Luc Godard, Margarethe von Trotta, and Andrzej Wajda. Schygulla’s performances are so unmannered that she elevates the films in which she stars, no matter how artificial, to the level of truth.’ — MoMA

‘Their names are closely entwined: Hanna Schygulla and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The actress became the female anti-star of Germany’s most successful filmmaker in the 1970s and early 1980s and thus the face of New German Film. Schygulla’s unique presence in the role of Maria Braun made her world famous. And she likewise played Effi Briest and Lili Marleen. Writer Georg Stefan Troller once described Hanna Schygulla as “on the one hand overwhelmingly feminine, soft and on the other, standing aloof above thing. She is a narcissus bereft of vanity.”

‘After Fassbinder’s untimely death in 1982, her long-standing collaboration with directors the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Marco Ferreri, Ettore Scola, Andrzej Wajda, Alexander Sokurov and Fatih Akin made her one of the very special actresses in European cinema. As early as 1983, Hanna Schygulla won the award for best actress in Cannes – for her role in Marco Ferreri’s film “Storia di Piera”.

‘In her autobiography, entitled “Wach auf und trauma”, which she published at the end of 2013 to mark her 70th birthday, now firmly a Parisian she tells of her time with Fassbinder and her life in three home countries, namely Poland, Germany and France. Born in Kattowitz in Silesia, she fled with her mother to Munich and grew up during the years of the German economic miracle. Aged only 20 she met Fassbinder: “He was to become the most important person in my path as an actress.” However, after almost 20 years this meeting of creative minds ended in anger. After falling out with Fassbinder Hanna Schygulla moved to Paris, where as a young woman she had already learned the language. There, she continued to work in the movies, but chose to put her career “on hold” for a few years when her elderly parents suddenly needed caring for. Indeed, Hanna Schygulla’s autobiography also tells the tale of the person behind the actress.’ — deutschland.de

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Hanna Schygulla @ IMDb
The muse and the monster: Fassbinder’s favourite star on surviving his abuse
Les musiques d’Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla Remembers Rainer Werner Fassbinder: ‘I’m One of the Survivors’
Actress Hanna Schygulla looks back
Hanna Schygulla, 56 ans, égérie de Fassbinder, revient au théâtre de la Villette, auteur, actrice, chanteuse.
15.6. Morning Discussion with Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla: «Je veux des films qui me donnent des ailes»
Veteran German Actress Hanna Schygulla Criticizes #MeToo
Hanna Schygulla: la musa de Fassbinder cumple 75 años
HANNA SCHYGULLA @ MUBI
Hanna Schygulla veut encore rêver
Who was Hanna Schygulla: from au-pair to cinema legend
Hanna Schygulla: ‘Fassbinder had very concrete ideas about the choreography of bodies’
Video: Hanna Schygulla on THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN
Book: Hanna Schygulla, by Ulrike Sieglohr
Hanna et ses films
Hanna Schygulla : Un amour impossible en Allemagne
Europe’s Incandescent Hanna Schygulla Blazes

 

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Extras

Hanna Schygulla interview, 1982

Hanna Schygulla, Actress and Chanteuse

Fresque biographique de Hanna Schygulla

Hanna Schygulla on Rainer Werner Fassbinder

 

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Interview
from Little White Lies

 

LWLies: The 1968 short film, The Bridegroom, the Comedian and the Pimp, was your first time in front of a camera. How did that feel?

Schygulla: The director was Jean-Marie Straub, who is quite a phenomenal artist though he’s not very known. He was shooting the moments of a play when the actors entered or left the stage. That idea was unusual, and for us it felt not that different to what we had been doing stuff like that on stage. Fassbinder was into what he liked to call “anti-theatre”, meaning that because he didn’t have the money to do films, which is what he always wanted to do, he did theatre a little like film. So he would change and alter the angle of looking at how a story is told. He always liked to turn things around.

Is there a difference in playing for a camera than working in theatre?

In the first movies, no. Because the camera was not very close to us. It was a way to get into it which was not particularly cinematic. But as Fassbinder’s career went on, his camera got closer to us.

Did you have time to reflect on the performances, or was it a case of just moving on to the next film?

He wanted everyone to look at the rushes. At the time, you couldn’t just have a video and play it back instantly. The film was developed and then we’d all sit down and look at what had been shot. It was like a ritual. He’d talk about what could be done better or differently.

Did he ask for your feedback?

No.

So why did he want you to see the rushes?

He was a man who embodied opposing forces. On one hand, he was the total filmmaker. He knew exactly what he wanted. On the other, he gave quite a bit of responsibility to everyone taking part in the film. People liked working with him because he only interfered when he had a clear way he wanted to go and it was that way and no other. If not, he liked that people had their own creativity.

You starred in the TV series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, where you wear a giant perm wig throughout. Is that something Fassbinder asked you to wear or did you choose it yourself?

No, no. We stuck closely to an image we had found. Before, my hair was my hair. But then I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, if I do six chapters, I’ll always have to mess up my hair, so why not just use a wig?’ When I saw it I realised that a wig never actually moves like your own hair. He didn’t say he wanted me to look like that. He’d only tell you when he didn’t like something. Actually he didn’t tell you, he just pulled a face. So then you’d try to offer something else.

Was this the same on takes? Did you get the face?

He wanted to get a certain choreography, meaning the interplay of bodies in the frame.

Would he physically move your body?

Yes, this absolutely was his way to direct. He never gave psychological explanations. He didn’t talk about roles or characters. He had very concrete ideas about the choreography of bodies and certain gestures that had to be accomplished. He would occasionally leave it to us to invent something. But most of the time he would arrive on set with these little drawings. They were very schematic. That was his homework. That was why he could work so quickly. He knew. He learned filmmaking by film watching.

Did he ever get yourself or the group to watch the films he liked?

Not systematically. But we watched Antonio das Mortes by Glauba Rocha. We watched The Damned by Visconti. He wanted us to see Vivre sa Vie by Jean-Luc Godard, which he saw more than 20 times. He would do by watching. And this is why he had those images that he wanted to quote. He watched whatever was on. He watched movies just keep himself out the house. In his early life, he didn’t get along with his step father, so he would go and watch movies all day.

Do you remember the first time you and Rainer met?

Yes, I do. I was in university and I getting kind of tired of it. The process of becoming an intellectual was frustrating for me. I was making some extra money at the time working as a waitress. One of the other girls at the restaurant told me about drama school, and she invited me along. I said why not. The coincidence was that he was in the same class.

Did he approach you?

It was a private school. We only met once a week. Everyone would improvise on a theme, and then afterwards we’d all go and drink beer. We did not talk much. He was extremely shy, especially with me. Once he saw a scene that I had been improvising, and he made his boyfriend come up to me and tell me that he liked it very much.

Did you then approach him?

No. I just found that very strange. He was clearly the rebellious type, so I couldn’t quite understand what he liked about this scene. It was Goethe, and a love scene between two people who were supposed to be brother and sister. It wasn’t really a love scene, in the sense of any sexual intercourse, but it was all based on not showing feelings. Later I understood why he liked it, because that was the kind of relationship that we had.

Did he ever tell you why he kept casting you in his films?

No. He would make remarks to the others, tell them that ‘she’s a star’ or whatever. But to me, no, never. When I said I need a break and I want to get some distance, he was so hurt. I took four years before he got over that. He contacted me to be in The Marriage of Maria Braun.

Is there a Fassbinder film that you wanted to be in but you weren’t cast?

Yes. That was Lola. He said that the next film we’d do is Lola. Then, while we were filming Berlin Alexanderplatz, we were crossing in a doorway. And in this very casual way, he told me that he’d cast Barbara Sukowa in Lola. I said, ‘Okay, why?’ and he said that I’d been talking too much about it. And I said that I was doing promotion for Maria Braun and everyone would ask what the next film would be. For some reason, that annoyed him. Or maybe he got fed up with me?

How often were you in contact with Hollywood?

Not much. I had been there once for sure, but I can’t remember which studio I went to. I did Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh which was shot in Los Angeles. David Lynch did get in touch with me once. He sent me the script for a film called Blue Velvet. I found it horrifying. It was for the part of Dorothy Vallens [played by Isabella Rossellini]. The script didn’t feel at all like the finished movie. It was about a man who violates a woman, he keeps her in captivity and badly mistreats her. He even has his hand on her child. Then she almost starts liking it. When I read it I thought it was really sick stuff. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t aware that he was a good filmmaker. At the same time I was dealing with the fact that my mother was becoming old and I was living a very different life. The emotions I was experiencing at that time just made me think that I couldn’t do it. It seemed to me… kinky.

Did you see the film in the end?

Yes, I saw it and thought it was quite a good film. Especially the beginning and the end. I wrote David a letter telling him that I never would have guessed that that film would have come from the script he sent me. I’m not used to regretting decisions I make, as regret is a feeling that doesn’t create anything. But I said that if he asked me another time, I would say yes. But he never asked.

 

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23 of Hanna Schygulla’s 103 roles

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Peter Fleischmann Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1969)
‘A young farm mechanic Abram returns home to a remote village in Low Bavaria, after a short stay in the city. Soon, rumours spread that Abram was in prison because of his homosexuality and he is accused of raping the village idiot. Abram escapes to the forest and a man hunt begins. In an excruciatingly precise manner, the film exposes the murderous process of exclusion in a community where ferocious behaviours hide behind righteous attitudes, forty years before Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Hunting Scenes from Bavaria is the first critical Heimat film of “New German Cinema”.’ — le pacte

Trailer

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Love Is Colder Than Death (1969)
‘For his feature debut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder fashioned an acerbic, unorthodox crime drama about a love triangle involving the small-time pimp Franz (Fassbinder), his prostitute girlfriend, Joanna (future Fassbinder mainstay Hanna Schygulla), and his gangster friend Bruno (Ulli Lommel). With its minimalist tableaux and catalog of New Wave and Hollywood references, this is a stylishly nihilistic cinematic statement of intent.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpt

 

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Volker Schlöndorff Baal (1970)
‘Schlondorff presents his adaptation of a Brecht play as 24 numbered (and distinctly separate) scenes, and uses several other distancing techniques in the Brechtian mode. Real exteriors and interiors are used instead of studio sets, but the theatricality is retained in the physical stagings and (sometimes deadpan) line readings. Hand-held camera-work is frequently (but randomly) distorted by application of Vaseline-smeared lens to create a diffused, haloed image, a technique popularized at the time by the son/father filmmaking team of Jean- Gabriel & Quinto Albicocco in the classic adaptation of LE GRAND MEAULNES.’ — lor_

Excerpt

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970)
‘Herr R. (Kurt Raab) has a wife and a child, a medium-size rental apartment with a garden, he owns a TV set, and comfortable furniture complete his middle class existence. His work at home and in the office fulfills him, hobbies offer him a change; and then Herr R. loves peace and quiet. The machinery of everyday routine functions. At work – Herr R. is an engineering draftsman – the colleagues are nice, his boss (Franz Maron) is content, his wife (Lilith Ungerer) picks him up every day after work in their car. He corrects his son’s homework, invites the in-laws and an old school friend on Sunday afternoons, a promotion is in sight. Everyone is happy. It appears that without too much mental or physical complaint, Herr R.’s self-realization will be possible. Then one evening – a neighbor (Irm Hermann) has just stopped by – Herr R., like a machine, attacks his wife, child, and neighbor.’ — TFF

Watch the trailer here

Watch the entirety in German (with Italian subtitles) here

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Whity (1971)
‘Whity is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the south-west U.S. in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife, Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank and the disabled Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.’ — Will Gilbert

Excerpt

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Beware of a Holy Whore (1970)
‘If Love Is Colder Than Death is Fassbinder’s most underrated film—at once too gnomic and too precociously ruthless—then Beware of a Holy Whore is where Fassbinder incontrovertibly graduates from being a dazzling student of filmmaking to working on a level commensurate with the high masters. Shot for shot, scene for magnificently mortifying scene, this goes proudly toe-to-toe with the insider-straits of Wilder, Minnelli, and Godard; it also makes Johnny-come-latelys like Day for Night, Nashville, or Boogie Nights look like postcards from the edgeless. Could anyone ever order a “cuba libre” again after seeing this? A sardonic monster movie—well, a primer on how filmmaking can serve as permission slip for otherwise semi-decent, halfway sane people to behave as monsters, tyrants, frauds, cheaters, and infantile aggressors/victims—Beware packs a layered wallop of scorn, moral squalor, delicious absurdity, and flickering humanity. Playing the Fassbinder-ish director, Lou Castel’s Jeff is a wonderfully appalling self-projection, both as wish-fulfillment (a blond Adonis, he looks like he should be starring opposite Sandra Dee in a 1950s romance) and worst-nightmare-scenario (he acts like a bitter Caligula who fears he’s about to lose his throne and be forced to turn tricks on the street). It is a grand, sweeping indictment of the pettiness and rancor that can fester inside “art,” and yet it has one of the most perversely transcendental moments the movies have ever supplied. Schygulla dances slowly, this time à la Marilyn Monroe, to Ray Charles’s “Let’s Go Get Stoned,” while chaos reigns around her. Fassbinder wrapped up his first creative period with a suitable bang. This was no end-of-cinema lamentation, but a beguiling epitaph scrawled in ruby red lipstick on the medium’s grave: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’ — Howard Hampton

Excerpt

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972)
‘Formally stiff and technically wobbly, The Merchant Of Four Seasons marked Fassbinder’s emergence as a punk classicist and a director of blunt gestures. He was all of 26 when he made it, with almost a dozen features and TV movies to his name. The year before, he had discovered the films of Douglas Sirk, the German-born master of Hollywood melodrama, whose work would undergo a complete reappraisal during the 1970s and whose influence is evident—in a film-school sort of way—in the framing of Hans’ bedroom, lit by two tiger-lily-like lamps and dominated by a crucifix. (One side effect of Fassbinder’s extreme productivity: A viewer can track him imitating and eventually internalizing his influences feature by feature.)’ — AV Club

Trailer

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
‘In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla)—based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor—is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring exquisitely claustrophobic cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and full-throttle performances by an all-female cast.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpt

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Effi Briest (1974)
‘Theodor Fontane’s 1894 novel Effi Briest holds a position in Germany analogous to that of Madame Bovary in France. Fassbinder’s film is both a faithful adaptation of the novel and a subtle manipulation of its structure. The result is a unique double perspective that recreates the nineteenth century and offers a modern analysis of it in terms of the rise of fascism and the oppression of women. Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla), a vivacious mixture of nonconformity and mediocrity, is married when very young to a much older Prussian diplomat. Carried away to a remote Baltic port by her pedagogical husband, Effi drifts into a brief, passionless affair with a local womanizer. The full effects are only felt six years later, in a chilling manifestation of the Prussian code, but are reflected throughout in the intensity of Fassbinder’s visual style – gleaming black surfaces sharply etched against pale backgrounds; the elaborate use of mirrors, screens, and curtains; and the desolate beauty of sand dunes and pine forests.’ — BAMPFA

Trailer

 

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Wim Wenders Wrong Move (1975)
‘Wim Wenders updates a late-eighteenth-century novel by Goethe with depth and style, transposing it to 1970s West Germany and giving us the story of an aimless writer (Rüdiger Vogler) who leaves his hometown to find himself and befriends a group of other travelers. Seeking inspiration to help him escape his creative funk, he instead discovers the limits of attempts to refashion one’s identity. One of the director’s least seen but earthiest and most devastating soul searches, Wrong Move features standout supporting performances from New German Cinema regulars Hanna Schygulla and Peter Kern and, in her first film appearance, Nastassja Kinski.’ — Janus Films

Trailer

 

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Peter Meincke Der Katzensteg (1975)
‘Preußen zur Zeit der Befreiungskriege gegen Napoleons Armee 1813 bis 1815: Baron von Schranden (Jan Niklas, “Anne Frank”, “Oberst Redl”, “Die Kette”) ein Anhänger Napoleons, führt mit Hilfe seiner Dienstmagd Regine (Hanna Schygulla, “Die Ehe der Maria Braun”) französische Soldaten über den ‘Katzensteg’ seines Schlosses. Die preußische Armee gerät in einen heimtückischen Hinterhalt. Dieser Verrat bleibt nicht ohne Folgen: Als der tapfere junge Leutnant Baumgart ins ostpreußische Dorf Schranden zurückkehrt, wird er zunächst als Kriegsheld gefeiert. Als sich jedoch herausstellt, dass Baumgart in Wahrheit Boleslav von Schranden, der Sohn des verräterischen Barons, ist, richtet sich der Hass der Dorfbewohner gegen ihn.’ –az

Trailer

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)
‘The cinematographer Ballhaus worked with Fassbinder on a dozen films in nine years, then “burned out,” resigned, and started working for Martin Scorsese, who by comparison “was like a dream.” “Maria Braun” was their final film together; observe how they like to keep the camera moving, through elegant setups in which characters and locations are arranged so that the fluid visuals flow from long shots through closeups without cutting, often moving behind walls, peering through doors and windows, looking around posts, so that the characters seem jammed into the space around them.’ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Third Generation (1979)
‘The film that prompted Vincent Canby to call Fassbinder “the most dazzling, talented, provocative, original, puzzling, prolific, and exhilarating filmmaker of his generation.” In West Berlin in 1978, computer magnate P. J. Lurz seeks to increase sales by covertly promoting terrorism. He recruits a new-styled gang of terrorists-middle-class people for whom terrorism is a lifestyle. For Fassbinder, “terrorism is an invention of capitalism to better protect its capital,” and contemporary German terrorists are distinguished from their predecessors (including the Baader-Meinhof cell) by their lack of coherent political beliefs. “To act in danger but without perspective, the ecstasy of adventure experienced in the absence of ulterior motive: this is what motivates The Third Generation,” he said. Included in the cell of terrorists are Bulle Ogier and Hanna Schygulla. Eddie Constantine (quintessential gangster) plays the businessman who manipulates the conspirators in this “comedy in six parts/ about party games…horror and madness/ just like the fairy stories/ they tell children….” (Fassbinder).’ — BAMPFA

the entirety

 

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Lili Marleen (1981)
‘Inspired a song that was extremely popular with the German soldiers during WW II, this fictional story begins in 1938 while Wilkie Bunterberg (Hanna Schygulla), a third-tier cabaret singer, performs in a Zurich nightclub. It is her boyfriend, a Swiss Jew who also turns out to be a resistance fighter who pens her the famous song Lili Marleen. She sings it in Germany and it becomes a hit with the German troops. As a result, Hitler himself invites her to perform for him. This does not set well with the songwriter’s powerful who, upon learning that Marleen has become a famed singer in Germany, seek to have her barred from Switzerland. This does not stop the songwriter from loving her though and desperate to see her one last time, he sneaks into Berlin for a tryst. Unfortuantely he is arrested and she gets blacklisted. They do not see each other again until after the war. By this time, their lives have changed considerably. This is not considered among the best of Fassbinder’s best films.’ — Sandra Brennan

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Volker Schlöndorff Circle of Deceit (1981)
‘Filmed in a battle-scarred Beirut as the Lebanese Civil War raged on, Circle of Deceit evokes the fog of war, love, and journalistic ethics—the fetishizing and aestheticizing of manmade death—with gripping authenticity. Volker Schlondorff and Jean-Claude Carrière present this timely and brilliant film, which stars a superb Bruno Ganz and Hanna Schygulla.’ — MoMA

Excerpt

 

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Jean-Luc Godard Passion (1982)
‘A small provincial town. A remote and yet modern region. A factory with twenty workers, most of whom are young, who accept any salary so long as there is a job. For six months, a war of attrition has been raging between the boss and a young woman determined to form a union. All the women working in the factory are against her, except her mother, an elderly worker, and another young woman who is living with the boss. She is running a hotel that is currently occupied by a film crew in town for a film shoot. On a large set, the film’s Polish director is shooting the reconstitution of famous paintings. He is never happy, and admonishes the producer, who protests. The story weaves back and forth between the set, the hotel and the factory.’ — unifrance

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Marco Ferreri The Story of Piera (1983)
‘An incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter which is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti though it focuses more on her mother Eugenia. The liberated Eugenia and her spaced-out, husband professor Lorenzo live in a small provincial Italian town, where Eugenia is noticed as she zooms around on her bicycle and chats up strangers at the train station. While still no more than a grown child, Piera — in tight dresses — goes with her mother for a threesome when she engages in sexual relations with other men and subsequently suffers both from poor health and the lack of a normal home. The shadow of the future already clouds the household when Eugenia is committed again and again to the psychiatric clinic. By the time Piera has become an adult, both of her parents are in separate mental hospitals — and both (even the father) are still sexually eccentric, to say the least.’ — IMBb

Excerpt

 

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Andrzej Wajda A Love in Germany (1983)
‘Unfortunately, the story barely indicated the plot and described it generally and briefly, using only selected details. I, meanwhile, was unable to reconstruct real life in a small German town during the war. I didn’t know the realities, and had to resort to fiction.The German audience sensed this unreality at once, which afforded them the opportunity to reject, with relief, the problems touched upon in the film.’ — Andrzej Wajda

Excerpt

 

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Kenneth Branagh Dead Again (1991)
‘What went around comes around in Kenneth Branagh’s “Dead Again,” a campy Gothic melodrama about one couple’s ongoing hassle with bad karma — which probably also explains why the actor-director and his real-life missus, Emma Thompson, are involved in this overwrought and overly facile look at accounts payable in the afterlife.’ — The Washington Post

Excerpt

 

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Agnès Varda One Hundred and One Nights (1995)
‘Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made. Also, a line of movie stars comes to visit him, giving him back the pleasure of life, but amongst them, there are also some young students only striving after his money for the realization of their film projects. The two stories, Monsieur Cinema’s and the young people’s life, are told in parallel until they come together in the end, when the old man plays a role in the film made by the students.’ — Antje Kuechler

Trailer

 

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Bela Tarr Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
‘A traveling circus touting the display of an honest-to-God whale rolls into a blighted backwater of a Hungarian village already preparing for apocalypse, and their arrival upends the entire social order, troubling the established relationships between social classes, families, and lovers. Awash in feelings of cosmic impotence and hopelessness, it is nevertheless a curiously pleasurable film for the frigid beauty of its black-and-white photography, and the gleeful resignation of Tarr’s gallows humor.’ — Metrograph

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Hans Steinbichler Winterreise (2006)
‘Just when you hoped to escape heavy-handed German pretentiousness it sneaks up on you, hidden in highly metaphorical intonations of Schubert’s great song cycle “Winterreise”, which accompanies Josef Bierbichler’s (inner) journey from wintry Bavaria to arid Kenya, from captivating mental depression to liberation. But for most of the time, despite Kekilli’s wooden turn and some other positively eccentric acting in the supporting roles, it’s a decent enough pic because Bierbichler stems it on his broad shoulders. He offers a real tour-de-force performance, aided by the accentuated direction and camera-work.’ — Rindiana

Excerpt

 

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Aleksandr Sokurov Faust (2011)
‘Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote: “…and bliss out the next on the delirium that is “Faust,” the latest from Alexander Sokurov (“Russian Ark”). An eccentric interpretation of the Goethe play, “Faust” is mesmerizing, at times predictably if divertingly bewildering and beautiful, with images that burn into your memory, like that of an embracing couple falling into a lake in a vision of desire and the abyss that invokes “L’Atalante” but is definitely Sokurovian.”‘ — Wiki

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** wolf, Muah! I hadn’t put those things together either. Interesting. And you know, fog machines. I’m only now getting past my initial knee-jerk reaction to vaping namely that it looks it looks kind off silly and defeatist. Well, you’re lucky smoking didn’t take since it’s ultimately just a big, life-controlling hassle. It’s good for concentration. And it’s a boredom killer. And it gives you an excuse to get away from some boring conversationalist. Yeah, you have to get into the failure of CGI to do smoke and clouds, and, if you do, they can look kind of meta or something. Yeah, let me know how the opening goes. Pubs reopening seems super dangerous to me, but I hate pubs, and what do I know. Is it hot there? It’s hot here, fucking ugh. ** Marc Vallée, Hi, Marc! Nice to see you, sir! I trust this message will be visible to you. I too am a Templeton fan, and yet I don’t know those particular zines, so your links were most helpful to me, and, I presume, to everyone. Let’s find out, shall we? Everyone, If yesterday’s smoke fest was not enough smoke for you, the fine photographer Marc Vallée suggests a few smoke-themed zines/ photobooks by the artist Ed Templeton, i.e. Teen Smokers Zine, Teenage Smokers (book 1), and Teenage Smokers (book 2). ** Misanthrope, And what does that say about you, or about your instinctual guesses about me? Probably the obvious and nothing more. I always try to fantasise about the worst possible outcome, and then I use my logic to explain to myself what the actual, very low odds are that such bad things could happen, and ultimately I just end up being trepidatious but determined in a ‘why the hell not’ way at the very least. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed. ** _Black_Acrylic, It will not surprise you that I had to dodge a whole lot of YBA art in my searching for smoke-related stuff. And I think I almost managed to evade them. Nice Sarah Lucas. She is definitely one of the best of that bunch, I think. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Wow, score. Nice batch. I vaguely remember that Iggy Pop being kind of awful, but it’s been a while since I heard it. Oh, I have no plans to quit smoking unless some health issue forces me to. Interesting you mention Fassbinder given today’s blog star. I haven’t seen that variety show film. Boy, he was prolific. I’ll try to find it. ** Okay. The blog goes in whole hog on the great German actor Hanna Schygulla for very good reasons, I hope you will agree. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935, this poor country boy lived through more shit by the age of seven than most of us experience in a lifetime. He was only twenty one months old when his father died of a heart attack, leaving his mother to raise the children and work the family farm. It was a burden she couldn’t handle by herself, so she married her brother in-law out of necessity. In his essay, “Mama Pulled The Load Alone,” Crews describes his stepfather as “…a man who might have been a good husband had he not been a brutal drunk.”

‘But that was the least of his worries. He had a hard enough time doing a little something called “staying alive.” In the 2007 documentary, Survival Is Triumph Enough, Crews tells the story of how baby Harry popped lye like candy and had to be rushed to the doctor. On a horse-drawn cart. If he had swallowed the stuff, it would have killed him from the inside.

‘At the age of five he contracted polio, which caused the muscles in his legs to tighten, drawing his heels all the way back against his buttocks. He was bedridden for six weeks, and it took almost a year of dragging himself across the ground before he could walk again.* Shortly after regaining the use of his legs, Crews fell into a pot of scalding water used for hog butchering. From his autobiography, A Childhood (which is a MUST read): “I reached over and touched my right hand with my left, and the whole thing came off like a wet glove. I mean the skin on the top of the wrist and the back of my hand, along with the fingernails, all just turned loose and slid down to the ground. I could see my fingernails lying in the little puddle my flesh made on the ground in front of me.”

‘He was once again confined to his bed. The pain was so great, he couldn’t even cover himself with a sheet. The doctor said if his head had gone under, he would have been killed.

‘You’d think a person with his luck wouldn’t be long for this world, but somehow Crews has managed to live an additional seventy years, all of them hard. He survived the Marines, the Korean War, a broken neck, two divorces (from the same woman), the drowning death of his four year old son, a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction, a suicide attempt, and a knife fight that put him in the hospital for sixteen days and left him with a scar from stomach to sternum. (He was in his seventies at the time. I refer you to my opening sentence.)

‘And if you thought Crews was tough as nails in life, you’ll find him harder than a railroad spike on the page. His unique brand of white-trash southern gothic focuses on the violent and grotesque, mining his own life for inspiration. He writes unflinchingly about religion and race, love and obsession, fucking and fighting. Many of his novels end in a grand guignol of blood and insanity. He was writing about “deviant” practices like ATM and amputee sex long before the internet made them available to every thirteen year old with a computer. He has written over twenty books, as well as countless essays and magazine articles, each one a cocktail of piss and vinegar and machismo that I like to call Vinepisschismo.’ — Joshua Chaplinsky, Lit Reactor

 

____
Further

Harry Crews Website
Harry Crews @ goodreads
Harry Crews Obituary @ The Guardian
‘Reconstructing Harry Crews’
‘Harry Crews On Writing And Feeling Like A ‘Freak”
‘God Is Dead – What Next? A Harry Crews Retrospective’
‘HARRY CREWS – THIS LONG CENTURY’
‘Harry Crews and the Death of Southern Literature’
‘R.I.P. Harry Crews, rough-and-tumble man of letters’
‘HARRY CREWS ON WRITING: FOUR QUOTES AND AN INTERVIEW’
‘Remembering Harry Crews’
Harry Crews Quiz
‘HARRY CREWS’ MOTHER IS HIS BEST CRITIC’
Audio: Audio Interview with Harry Crews
‘EATING RATTLESNAKE, HARRY CREWS-STYLE’
‘Place and Imagination in Harry Crews’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place’
‘Phone Call to Harry Crews’
‘“C” is for Harry Crews’
‘Harry Crews and the Myths of the American South’

 

____
Media

Just Harry

The Rough South

Harry Crews: Guilty As Charged

Harry Crews Reading and Q&A

harry crews on the dennis miller show

 

____
Things

manuscript

 

Harry Crews teaching @ University of Florida

 

article

 

young

 

younger

 

____
Interview
from VICE

 

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.”

Last time we talked on the phone, you told me that you’re very ill.

Yeah, I’m really ill. But I don’t want to talk about it much. I’m all right.

I guess a lot of great writers have worked while seriously ill.

Flannery O’Connor was dying the whole time she was writing, and I can name a number of other writers who were dying the whole time they were writing. Look, Flannery got to this place where she could only write three hours a day. The doctors told her: You can write three hours a day. You can’t write any more. What a shit thing to tell somebody. Goddamn. Anyway, the worst thing for me now is the pain. Pain will humiliate you and humble you and I’m not used to being humiliated and humbled. I don’t like it. It offends my notion of who the fuck I am and what I am and everything else. I’d rather do just about anything, up to and including cutting my fuckin’ throat.

Speaking of which, you told me about a recent fight you got in. You got sliced up the belly and it left a massive scar.

It’s really a beautiful scar. It starts right in my pubes and it goes up through my navel to my sternum, where it is equidistant between my nipples. I was gutted, man. I had my guts in my hands.

And it happened at a fish camp, you said?

It did indeed.

Kind of ironic, getting gutted at a fish camp.

Well, yes and no. This is a fish camp that’s more a sort of drinking and fighting bar that just happens to be on a nice lake where a lot of fish swim. You can get a boat there and you can go out and fish or you can drink beer and shoot pool and fight and fuck and whatever else you can find to do. But it is a great fishing place. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s old house, Cross Creek, is not far from where I live. On one side of the road is Orange Lake—10,000 acres of water—and on the other side is Lake Lochloosa, which is 18,000 acres of water. And then there’s the creek which runs from Orange to Lochloosa, right across the road near where her house is.

What’s in there, catfish?

There’s catfish in there, but there’s catfish in every body of water around here. These lakes have got great bass, great brim, speck… You got a bunch of good panfish in there. Good bass lake, if you like to fish bass. But the bass get too big. The ones that are good to catch are not very good to eat. A bass that gets very big, it’s too gamey. Too fishy. Not very tasty. Little bass are the ones you want to eat, but they aren’t very fun to catch because they don’t put up a fight. Anyway, whatever.

Yeah, but can you tell me how you ended up getting split open?

I’ve known this guy for a very long time and there’s been bad blood between us. This was not the first fight we’ve been in with each other. There have been times when he went to the hospital and times when I went to the hospital and this time both of us went to the hospital. And I told about a million lies to keep him out of jail. I don’t want the son of a bitch in jail.

What is it with this guy and you?

We’re like a couple of fuckin’ dogs. I drove up to the fish camp and I thought I could smell the son of a bitch. I said, “Goddamn, I oughta turn right around and go home. That son of a bitch is out here just as sure as I’m alive.” And he was. When we lay eyes on each other it’s like two goddamn pit-bull dogs looking at each other from their corners, you know? They scratch and go. And there it is.

How long ago was this?

Oh, I haven’t been out of the hospital very long. I was in there over a month. I was in ICU. I couldn’t talk. I had a trach tube in and I had to get food and water through a tube too. My son teaches at a university for a bunch of Yankee kids up north, and he came home and that was good. I don’t see him as much I’d like to and he’s just a great fuckin’ kid. He’s about 6’3″, 220, all lean and righteous. Good athlete. He’s very bright—writes plays, and they’re produced. He’s a good writer. I don’t know how he got started with plays, but he did. His wife is the head of the drama department at that university. She directs the plays he writes, at least initially, to get the kinks out of them. So they got a thing going and it gives them a life they tell me they love, and I don’t doubt it. But he rarely gets home.

But he came back when you got hurt.

He stayed by my bed forever. I was in there over a month. I was in the ICU for 16 days and then I went to rehab. The surgeon had to sew me up and all that good shit. Now I’ve been out for about four and a half months. It’s a short enough time that the goddamn scar is sore. When you get a really big, wide one… I’ve never had a scar like this. Now, I’ve got scars on me all over and I’ve broken damn near everything you can think of at one time or another, including my neck. At my age, whatever you broke growing up, however you nicked yourself, in that place of course, you’re arthritic. And arthritis ain’t a fuckin’ joke.

It’s an evil, evil thing.

It really is. I broke my neck diving off the Main Street bridge in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a really high bridge that boats go under and shit. Nobody had a gun to my head saying I had to dive off that son of a bitch. And the water is deep enough that I shouldn’t have been hurt.

Were you drinking or something?

No, no. I was just young. I was with a bunch of other guys and somebody went off it and so I went off it. I just did it wrong. I broke a vertebra in my neck and I had to wear one of those halos. Had to sleep in the son of a bitch.

So now you’ve got an arthritic neck. That’s the kind of stuff that makes me feel terrified of growing old.

You oughta be terrified of growing old! It’s a motherfucker. What you’ve got to do is to just have no respect for it whatsoever. Cuss it a lot and kick and raise hell. Spit and scratch your ass and do all the things you can do when you’re an old guy. And don’t suck up and suck around when you’re an old guy. Fuck it. So you’re old, so what else is new?

So don’t behave like a senior citizen, basically.

Anger has gotten me through a lot of things in my life and I have to confess—and I don’t recommend it really to anybody else—but hell, I stay mad. Mad as a motherfucker.

And that’s just the way you’ve always been?

Yeah, for one reason or another. If I can’t finish a book, I’m mad. If I’m not writing a book, I’m mad. If I am writing a book, I’m mad. It don’t matter. I just got a very short fuse. I try to be polite and civil and decent and whatever, but I’m not very good at it. I’m just not.

Did you ever think that anger would go away if you reached some kind of a brass ring, like finishing a certain amount of novels or finding the right woman?

No. All the males in my family are like this. They’re like a bunch of goddamn sore-tailed cats. They just walk around looking for pussy and a fight. I was the light heavyweight champion of the first marine division. My nose has been broken I think six times. For a long time I never knew which side of my face it was gonna be on from year to year. But I liked boxing for a long, long time and I like karate and I like blood sports. I like a lot of things that are really not fashionable and really not very nice and which finally, if you’ve got any sense at all, you know, are totally indefensible. Anybody who is going to defend much of the way I’ve spent my life is mad. Crazy. It’s just that there’s so much horseshit in the world. How can you live through it without being madder than hell?

You can set yourself aside from it.

Well, yeah, you can, but getting away from the world means getting away from bars, getting away from women, getting away from all the stuff that’s been good in my life. I, curiously, don’t drink at all anymore. I haven’t had a drink in ten years. Not a drop of anything. But goddamn, I drank my share in my life and I’m not a bit ashamed of it.

I wish I could say the same.

Well, do you regret much of it?

Some, but I also know that it would have gotten way worse if I’d kept going.

Alcohol was good to me and good for me. I swear to God. But I swear on my dead mother’s eyes, man—and my dead son’s eyes—I ain’t had a drop in ten years. I put it down for the very reason you said. I thought, Well man, this is gonna get really sloppy and really bad if you go on with it. You’re just not strong enough to do this anymore so you’ve got to put it down. I was thinking yesterday about Hemingway killing himself. Did you know the things that were wrong with Hemingway when he shot himself?

I read a biography of him, but it was a long time ago.

You know how he drank all his life. He drank like a European drinks. Sometimes he drank wine for fuckin’ breakfast, and usually at lunch and dinner he drank a bottle of fuckin’ wine. He drank, period. A lot, his whole life.

Right.

And then he went down there to that clinic, that psychiatric clinic, and they told him he could have one eight-ounce glass of wine a day, all right. He weighed about 220, 225, his whole fuckin’ life, and they told him he had to go down to 180 pounds. So he couldn’t eat the way he did. There was something wrong with his ejaculatory duct, whatever the fuck that is, so he couldn’t have conjugal relations with Miss Mary anymore. So check that one off—he couldn’t fuck anymore. So now we got a guy that can’t eat, can’t drink, can’t fuck… and whether or not he could write then, he thought he couldn’t. He tried and it made him sick—he just couldn’t stand what came out of his pen. Sixty-two fuckin’ years old and he puts what was called an English bulldog—it’s a short double-barreled shotgun—in his friggin’ mouth and that was the end of him.

Because he had too much taken away from him.

Well, I don’t know, man. He just got mad enough with it. But there’s a number of things you can do. Something with your ejaculatory duct and you can’t fuck? Well, who says I can’t fuck? I’ll find another way to get off. Damn, do something. You say I can’t drink anymore—the hell I can’t. I might die, but I can drink. Listen, if I can’t have but one glass of wine, I don’t want any at all.

There’s no point in getting part of the way there.

And it was the Mayo Clinic, that’s where it was. And while he was up there those fucking shrinks would take him home on the weekend and have a cookout in the backyard and invite all their shrink friends over and show him off. “Look who we’ve got as a houseguest—Hemingway. Look at this.” And he was just old—well, not old, 62—but he was hurt and confused. It was terrible. Just awful.

Maybe he did the right thing at the end then.

Maybe so, man. I don’t know.

Why do so many writers end up being drunks?

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t know.

A lot of people seem to think it goes hand in hand with the solitary life a writer needs to lead to get their work done.

Well, that may be true. I don’t know what it is, but it would seem to be a true thing. Alcohol is the writer’s friend or enemy or something, and they do a lot of it.

 

___
Book

Harry Crews A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
University of Georgia Press

‘A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews’ earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him–and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper’s cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.

‘At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews’s youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world “in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.”

‘Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father’s death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather’s failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews’s childhood world: “its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness.” Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates in detail one writer’s search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.’ — University of Georgia Press

_____
Excerpts

Whatever I am has its source back there in Bacon County, from which I left when I was seventeen years old to join the Marine Corps and to which I never returned to live. I have always known, though, that part of me never left, could never leave, the place where I was born and, further, that what has become most significant in my life had all taken place by the time I was six years old. The search for those six years inevitably led me first to my daddy‟s early life and early death. Consequently, I have had to rely not only on my own memory but also on the memory of others for what follows here: the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.

*

I wondered what would give credibility to my own story if, when my young son grows to manhood, he has to go looking for me in the mouths and memories of other people. Who would tell the stories? A few motorcycle riders, bartenders, editors, half-mad karateka, drunks, writers. They are scattered all over the country, but even if he could find them, they could speak to him with no shared voice from no common ground [. . .] It was in that moment and in that knowledge that I first had the notion that I would someday have to write about it all, but not in the convenient and comfortable metaphors of fiction,3 which I had been doing for years, It would have to be done naked, without the disgusting distance of the third person pronoun. Only the use of I, lovely and terrifying word, would get me to the place where I needed to go.

*

It was commonly believed then in Bacon County, and to some extent still is, that a miscarriage or a baby born dead or deformed was the consequence of some taint in the blood or taint in the moral life of the parents. I know daddy must have keenly felt all over again the crippled pleasure of that night so many months before under the palm-thatched chickee with the Seminole girl.

*

If I ever woke up and the house was empty and the weather was warm— which was the only time I would ever awaken to an empty house—I always went out under the oak tree to finish my nap. It wasn‟t fear or loneliness that drove me outside; it was just something I did for reasons I would never be able to discover.

*

I went into the long, dim, cool hallway that ran down the center of the house. Briefly I stopped at the bedroom where my parents slept and looked in at the neatly made bed and all the parts of the room, clean, with everything where it was supposed to be, just the way mama always kept it. And I thought of daddy, as I so often did because I loved him so much. If he was sitting down, I was usually in his lap. If he was standing up, I was usually holding his hand. He always said soft funny things to me and told me stories that never had an end but always continued when we met again.

He was tall and lean with flat high cheekbones and deep eyes and black thick hair which he combed straight back on his head. And under the eye on his left cheek was the scarred print of a perfect set of teeth. I knew he had taken the scar in a fight, but I never asked him about it and the teeth marks in his cheek only made him seem more powerful and stronger and special to me.

He shaved every morning at the water shelf on the back porch with a straight razor and always smelled of soap and whiskey. I knew mama did not like the whiskey, but to me it smelled sweet, better even than the soap. And I could never understand why she resisted it so, complained of it so, and kept telling him over and over again that he would kill himself and ruin everything if he continued with the whiskey. I did not understand about killing himself and I did not understand about ruining everything, but I knew the whiskey somehow caused the shouting and screaming and the ugly sound of breaking things in the night. The stronger the smell of whiskey on him, the kinder and gentler he was with me and my brother.

*

This boy right here is seeing that girl back there, the one in her step-ins, and she is the youngun of him back there, and them shotguns behind’m belong to him, and he ain’t happy [. . .] That gal is the only youngun the feller in the jacket‟s got, and he loves her cause she is a sweet child. He don’t want her fooling with the sorry man in that suit. He‟s so sorry he done got himself in trouble with the law [. . .] He‟ll steal anything he can put his hand to [. . .] He’ll steal your hog, or he‟ll steal your cow out of your field [. . .] That suit [. . .] done turned that young girl’s head. Daddy always says if you give a man a white shirt and a tie and a suit of clothes, you can find out real quick how sorry he is. Daddy says it’s the quickest way to find out.

*

Some farmers always had crops that grew in rows straight as a plumb line. Others didn‟t seem to care about it much, one way or the other. It was not unusual for a farmer bumping along in a wagon behind a steaming mule in the heat of summer to comment on how the rows were marked off on each farm he passed. “Sumbitch, he musta been drunk when he laid them off.‟ “I bet he has to git drunk again ever time he plows that mess‟ [. . .] For reasons I never knew, perhaps it was nothing more complicated than pride of workmanship, farmers always associated crooked rows with sorry people [. . .] the feeling was that a man who didn‟t care enough to keep his rows from being crooked couldn‟t be much of a man.

*

Daddy followed us about the house, alternately begging mama to stay and threatening to shoot something else if she did. There was no doubt in my mind that what he might shoot was me or all of us. But I still loved him. For all I knew, every family was like that. I knew for certain it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife. It was only unusual if he hit her. I had heard enough stories—many of them told by the same wife the shot barely missed—to know that.

*

I had always been fascinated with boundaries and borders—the Little Satilla, for instance, separating Appling County from Bacon, made me feel safe and good when I started to sleep at night, knowing that it was keeping all of us in and all of them out—but the St. Marys River was a border that went beyond fascination. Before mama spoke to me, I had recognized the river although I had never seen it before. I knew also it formed the border although I don‟t remember anybody ever telling me that it did. The vague shape of streets and houses and buildings and factories began to filter down behind my eyes. I knew I had never seen any of it before but if I concentrated, I could see all of it.

*

I knew it was hopeless. I could not have said it then, but I knew in my bones that he was caught in a life where the only thing left to do was what he was doing. He had told himself a story he believed, or somebody else had told it to him, a story in which the next thing that happened—the only thing that could happen—was the knife. It was the next thing, the right thing, the only thing, and the knife felt good. If my life to that moment had taught me nothing else, it had made me understand exactly what he meant. Talking wasn‟t going to do any good.

*

As soon as I‟d spoken, I knew what I had done. The four boys perceptibly flinched. When they turned to look at me, the joking and laughter were gone. “Look,‟ I said, “I . . . I didn’t . . . ‟But there was nothing I could say. I had already done what, in Bacon County, was unthinkable. I had cursed the sun. And in Bacon County you don‟t curse the sun or the rain or the land or God. They are all the same thing. To curse any of them is an ultimate blasphemy. I had known that three years ago, but in three years I had somehow managed to forget it. I stood there feeling how much I had left this place and these people, and at the same time knowing that it would be forever impossible to leave them completely.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** wolf, Hi, EW! Happy that I, or, rather, Brendan, albeit with the help of my instincts, such as they are, hit your spot! Well, it was about 10 years between ‘Thin Black Duke’ and their previous album, so … don’t hold your veritable breath? Misa has admitted he never tried the bbq sauce, so it’s in the clear as soon as I feel up to making the trip to The American Store, which I’m told has, since my last visit, been bedecked with pro-Trump posters, so there’s that off-putting thing in addition to its weirdo location. Unless Anglophile-centric WH Smith, which is three minutes walk from me, has it. They sell Pop Tarts so it might be possible. Glad you’re at least wearing a hat, but, hey, it’s just skin, you know? What are you reading? ** David Ehrenstein, I hope Brendan sees your thanks and feels thanks. You know him, or you’ve met him at least. He used to run that little newsstand just off La Cienega where we had an LA d.l. meet up years ago, if you remember. Sorry for your loss, and I hope you find his music. ** Misanthrope, If and when I ferret out a jar (?) of Paul Newman bbq sauce, I will review it for you. I think Gaddis can be lumped into the post-modern area of the experimental category. Great stuff. Or I think so. Oh, wow, you were so gung-ho and diligent when you were working on the novel. But, yeah, it’s so much easier to feel that way when you’re writing a novel than when you have to schlep it into print. Nose to that grindstone though, I say. ** Wow, quiet. Okay. For those of you might not know, Harry Crews, spinner of tough, shapely fiction and non-fiction, used to be quite hip and fairly widely read at one point. There was even a very cool, short-lived band called Harry Crews featuring Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch. But I feel like almost no one talks about, or maybe even reads, Crews these days, which was one impetus to put something by him in the spotlight, and, hence … Check it out, no? See you tomorrow.