Harry Crews - American Writer

I never heard of Harry Crews until Harry Crews: An American Tragicomedy from 3:AM Magazine arrived through a blog feed. I want to make note of writers who are not so well known on this blog. With this blog, I hope to save someone the trouble of finding writers they might have known at a better time. See, I knew of some writers (for example Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth and Robinson Davies) without reading their actual works, when I should have. No made clear to me there was anything to learn from them. Other writers (Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, for example) I might have profited from, but did not know of their existence.

Harry Crews sounds like someone I might have learned from.

Harry Crews, it scarcely needs saying, is an unapologetically macho individual. Born and raised in Georgia, Crews worked as a marine, a pulp mill labourer and a tomato picker before turning novelist. Today he has acquired a reputation as a literary hellraiser that makes Norman Mailer look like an Ivy League dilettante. But the legend of ‘Harry Crews — tattooed wild man of American literature’ has not been all to the good, tending as it has to obscure the real quality of his fiction. For Harry Crews is to the novel what Diane Arbus is to photography: a celebrant of the freakish and the outlandish, the sad and the mad — an American original.

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The Gospel Singer‘s acceptance was the payoff for ten years of hard work, rewarded only by the publication of two stories in literary magazines. It was well reviewed on publication, in 1968, and, crucially, it led his alma mater, the University of Florida, to offer him a job, teaching Creative Writing in the English Department. It was a great job — good money, not much teaching, plenty of time to write — a novelist’s dream.

And for a while things went very well indeed. His second book, 1969’s Naked in Garden Hills — a North Florida epic that saw him moving from the Southern Gothic of his first novel to the trailer park surrealism he made his own — received the best reviews of his career. Further funny, weird novels like Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, Car and The Gypsy’s Curse, appeared on a more or less annual basis though the early seventies. What connects them is their concern with people most of us see simply as freaks: a midget jockey, a band of karate nazis, a man who decides to eat a car.

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The prestige gained by Crews’ steady stream of remarkable novels meant that his writing class became a sought-after institution. His fellow Floridian surrealist, Carl Hiaasen, for instance, told me that he failed to be accepted onto the course as an undergraduate.

By the mid-seventies Crews had also found a way of subsidising his trips away from the land of academe: magazine work. This, the most underrated aspect of his writing, began when Playboy called to ask him to write a piece on the building of the Alaskan pipeline. The result was a prizewinning slab of prime New Journalism, entitled ‘Going Down In Valdeez’, and it established Crews as a kind of white-trash Hunter S. Thompson. The 1979 collection of Crews’ magazine journalism, Blood And Grits, rates as one of his finest achievements.

The Los Angeles Times reviewed two reissues of Crews books under The problematic white, male Southern writer who inspired a diverse generation

Critics and awards anoint some authors as legends. Others depend on word-of-mouth and prose that stands the test of time. “Art’s primary purpose was to offer up pleasure and crush the human heart with a living memory,” Byron Crews writes, of his father’s central focus, in an email. “Papa often judged writing by the degree to which it is honest and resonates and is memorable — across time — across years.”

This week, Penguin Classics will reissue Crews’ memoir “A Childhood: A Biography of a Place” (1978) and his debut novel, “The Gospel Singer” (1968). The imprint’s publisher and acquiring editor, Elda Rotor, recalled being “intrigued by his influence as an author and a teacher and curious about the craft of storytelling.” Struck by Crews’ “larger than life” mark on literature, she hopes the reissues will allow a new, wider readership to wrestle with his works and “revisit them through the lens of classics.”

As with the first article, the review makes him intriguing to me:

Canonical midcentury Southern writers — Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty — were often perceived as white eccentric outsiders. Today the field reflects the diversity and modernity of the region (Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Kiese Laymon, Cosby and many others). They represent the whole of America — but then, so did their forbears, because, as Imani Perry recently argued, the South is America. It’s a farce to isolate racism, classism and misogyny past or present in one region.

Among those fighting back against such convenient parlor tales was Crews, whose work serves as a bridge between Southern writers past and present. Richard Howorth, the owner of storied Square Books in Oxford, Miss., notes that while Crews’ voice was “distinctly Southern,” he was also “unquestionably unaffected, genuine. There was no one like him at the time.”

Midwestern writers need someone like this:

Cosby and Wilson spoke at length about how Crews exceeds even Faulkner and O’Connor in depicting a grotesque anti-pastoral that spares no one. “When I read him,” says Cosby, “I always felt like he was a person who realized racism, sexism, misogyny were all wrong, but instead of shying away from [these horrors],” Crews opts for “sensory overload.” He imagines Crews saying, “I’m not going to give you any moral proclamations. But I’m going to show you how bad it can get.”

Ultimately, the emotions and conflicts Crews depicted weren’t bound by geography. He wrote about nothing less than the starkest extremes of human nature.

From The Guardian: Harry Crews obituary:

Perhaps the most successful of his students was the crime novelist Michael Connelly. "Crews's characters are usually damaged people, with a jaded world view, and there is an element of that in my character Harry Bosch," Connelly said. "More important for me was his memoir, which begins five years before he's born. In my books I try to move backward and forward at the same time, integrating character and place. Actually, what really impressed me was that, as a novelist, Crews was larger than life. He had an aura about him."

That memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), is often considered Crews's finest work. It detailed a life worthy of his most absurd characters. Crews was born in hardscrabble poverty in Alma, Bacon County, Georgia. His father, a sharecropper, died when he was two; his mother married her husband's brother, a man who "might have been a good father had he not been a brutal drunk". At the age of five, Crews suffered seizures, which may have been polio, causing his leg muscles to draw up in severe cramps. His bent limbs attracted visitors from miles around. He recovered, in part by dragging himself along farm fences, only to fall into a pot of boiling water used for scalding freshly slaughtered pigs. "I felt," he later wrote, "how lonely and savage it was to be a freak."

There is also a biography, Blood, Bone, and Marrow.

I wish I were younger, I wish I had more courage when I was younger.

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