The ranks of Alabama fiction writers are, alas, thinning. In 2020 we lost Winston Groom, Bill Cobb and Brad Watson. Then there was a merciful hiatus.
On July 21, Charles Gaines passed away at the age of 84. His obituaries are generous, and many praise his splendid writing of the outdoors, hunting and fishing, his invention with two friends of paintball, and most especially the 1974 book “Pumping Iron,” which put the sport of body-building and Arnold Schwarzenegger into the mainstream.
Since his teen years, Gaines had an interest in body-building, and his finest novel was surely “Stay Hungry” (1972), set in Birmingham. In 2020 Gaines won the Alabama Capote Prize for distinguished work in nonfiction, not for sports writing but for the memoir “A Family Place,” published in 1994.
Gaines writes here with a startling openness and honesty. In the early chapters he tells of his courtship and marriage to Patricia Ellisor of Selma and their glorious, enviable early years. They lived in Iowa. They lived in Ireland. They lived and raised three children in New Hampshire. He wrote and Patricia painted.
But the huge success of Gaines’ books and the movies made from them cast them into a circle of wealth and celebrity which was, very understandably, intoxicating. They moved among movie stars; Charles travelled the world fishing and hunting.
They had succumbed, husband and wife, but mostly Charles, to the emotions of pride, desire and fear. They grew apart and lost, in his metaphor, the Edenic walled garden of family they had created.
And, after a period of crisis, separation and pain, the Gaineses determined to rebuild that garden, in the physical form of a house on a piece of land in Nova Scotia, which they, with their children and a couple of close friends, would build board by board, stone by stone with their own hands.
Now they wanted safety, intimacy, calm. Like Thoreau they wanted simplicity—no TV for example—but it was not isolation they craved. They wanted the house to be welcoming to family and friends, for generations. They worked in the summer of 1991, and the building was not without its problems. Gaines was a splendid fly fisherman and bird hunter, not a carpenter.
And he brought his intensity for sport to the building process, becoming impatient, unattractively irritable, driving Patricia and the children hard, to accomplish more each day, until the family rebelled and he had to be warned: “Don’t spoil this!”
He regrouped and admits, humorously, to his own excesses. In his passion for fitness, he ran so much his hips needed replacing. Excessive weight-lifting had torn up a knee, a shoulder and his lower back. Charles needed to learn moderation, a smarter middle way, achieve an inner peace, and he did.
