George Garrett a man like few others

By Bryan McKenzie

Published: June 6, 2008

George Garrett wrote like a man.

I’m not talking about a big, hairy, chest-beating man with run-through-the-parking-lot, shoot-em-up prose packed with exploding Corvettes and punctuated by sizzling romantic interludes with buxom nymphs. I’m talking about an honest, hard-working, been-in-the-ring, doing-my-best kind of man.

Johnny Cash.

Ernie Pyle.

George Garrett.

Fearless

The former college professor and Virginia poet laureate — for whom a memorial service is being held at 11 a.m. at St. Paul’s Memorial Church — looked into the hearts and minds of men without flinching. Adolescent sexual fantasies, adult trials and petty jealousies — his drama never summoned the hero-as-god to lift plot and raise action while making normal guys feel miserably inadequate.

From geek love in steamy Florida to Elizabethan intrigue and even a novel based in the process of novel writing, George never wrote the same book twice.

“The way to commercial successful is to find a formula and write it,” he once told me as we sat in his kitchen swapping manly stories of oddball kooks while ignoring the oddball kooks we were. “There’s nothing wrong with a formula as long as you write well.”

George wrote well.

I am not big on poetry. I don’t read in pictures. Still, I felt something reading George’s prose.

Such a long time ago I swallowed whole

The toad of my anger and slept with my joy

Hidden like wedding cake under the pillow.

For such a long time I have loved

That beautiful princess dreaming all alone

In her tower, dangerous and perfectly silent.

Meaning matters

I never asked him why he wrote that passage in “A Little Night Music” or what it meant to him. It has meaning to me and, to a reader, that’s what matters.

I thought I saw in George a kindred spirit of sorts when I read Luck’s Shining Child. In that poem, I imagined George accepting the need to relinquish boyish desires and address adult responsibilities, knowing that the boy would somehow live forever in the back of his mind, an obnoxious juvenile with his tongue stuck out, mocking others.

George Garrett wrote like a man. He also behaved like one. He gave his time and expertise to others without worrying that he was increasing the competition for the books that he wrote. He loved his vocation and shared it with others.

“George Garrett had 10,000 friends,” author R.H.W. Dillard said, “and 10,000 people who owed him something.”

A great writer, a great poet and a good friend, George Garrett was a good man.

Unfortunately, those are increasingly hard to find.