Harry
Some years ago — more than I care to admit — I was a freshman at the local community college, sitting in a Composition 101 class, listening to a professor tell how one should think before committing words to paper. He carefully explored the logical nature of expository writing, explaining in fine detail how a thesis statement should be constructed, how it should contain an overview of all the paragraphs to follow, and how great thesis statements did so without sounding like every other thesis statement in the universe. He then read the beginning paragraphs from a number of classic essays, and that’s when he put the hook in me.
He was tall, ruddy-complexioned, mid-thirties, neither gaunt nor fat but somewhere between; obviously once well-conditioned, he had grown a little soft in the middle. His hair was the pale color genuine blonds turn just before they gray, and his eyes were sky blue. He appeared at times painfully shy, awkward in front of people, in some ways the antithesis of a teacher; but when he read aloud enthusiasm crept into his voice, and his great love for his mother tongue leant him a note of confidence he lacked at other times. The written word was his One True Religion, the classics were his cathedral, and he was a deeply devoted evangelist of the faith. He talked about writing the way most men talk about God.
He also wrote, though I did not learn this until much later in our relationship. He wrote terse, carefully worded Southern gothic short stories; he wrote a dark, dense novella; and he wrote poetry, lots of poetry. “If the novel is the king of literature,” he once told me, “then poetry is surely its prince.” His poems were like finely crafted Swiss watches, each phrase a tiny gear in a larger clockwork, each precisely interlocking with the next, recording the passage of time, ticking down a man’s years in his love of the South, especially the Appalachian South. Many of his poems were published: some in smaller magazines, some in celebrated literary journals. They deserved publication; they deserve wider reading.
We became acquainted as more than student and teacher on a fluke. When he returned the first paper I submitted in his composition class, a fat red “F” was scrawled on top of the front page. I scoured the pages, searching for places where grammar had been corrected or errors had been ticked off; they were clean. Incensed, I waited until class ended and the room was empty before I confronted him, slamming the essay down on his desk and demanding, “What is this? I didn’t deserve an F.”
Harry Dean looked up from the book he was reading and said in his characteristically soft voice, “No, sir. The person who wrote that essay deserves a much higher grade.”
I couldn’t believe my ears: “Are you saying I plagiarized this paper?”
“I am.”
“I wrote every word.”
Harry’s steely eyes were giving nothing away. “No one,” he said, “in this school wrote that essay.”
“I did, and I’ll prove it,” I insisted. “I’ll write every word of my next assignment right here in class. Under your nose. I can write.”
So I did. Every word at a desk directly in front of his. Nothing on the desktop but a handful of notebook paper and a blue ballpoint pen. When I was done, Harry apologized. He turned the “F” paper into an “A” and gave me an “A” for the second paper as well. Years later, when Harry edited the college’s first literary anthology, my essay appeared in it.
“I couldn’t believe anyone in this town cared about writing,” he told me later. “You don’t expect an essay like that from a Comp 101 student.”
It was the beginning of a thirty-three year friendship, one that started with Harry mentoring me through an introduction to Southern literature. At his insistence I read William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers became familiars, as did later writers, James Dickey, Reynolds Price and John Kennedy Toole. We’d meet for lunch in the canteen and wear out others at the table, talking about books. His wife invited me to dinner in their home, where I met his two sons and where Harry and I argued about Jazz Era writers and Beat Poets. At one point I extolled Charles Bukowski, and Harry slammed his fist down on the table and shouted, “He isn’t a poet! He’s a fad!” Some years later, during a telephone conversation he recanted, “He might be a poet after all.” Harry never forgot, and he never clung to a notion he couldn’t support. He was a guy you rely on to tell you the truth.
We were both political lefties; we doubted the church but could not divorce ourselves completely from the notion of God; and we loved the English language. We’d sit up late into the night, discussing verbal philosophies, hacking away at deconstructionism, and marveling over semiotic constructs. He was one of a handful of people I could talk with about meaningful things without being ridiculed or humored.
He was a straight-up guy, a good father, and a deep thinker; few things in life are more important. He loved music, wrote songs, and played several musical instruments; there, too, his passions were rooted in the folk and bluegrass traditions of the Appalachian South. Even after I left school and we fell out of constant touch, I considered Harry one of my better friends. When we did talk, we simply picked up the thread of our last conversation, whether it was two days or two years ago, and we ran with it. At the center of every discussion was a single question, “Who are you reading now?”
We won’t pick up another thread. Harry died last Friday in a Chattanooga hospital. I owe him a lot. My understanding of the South would be much shallower without his influence, and my appreciation of literature would be much poorer. He was one of a kind. I’ll miss him.
Harry has 1 response
Jim says:
29 July 2008 at 10:37 pm
Sorry about Harry.
You’ll always miss him, but a little of him lives on in you.
Maybe we’ll see him at The Pub.
