The writer Harry Crews died recently, leaving a legacy of some of the weirdest fiction (and a memoir) you’ve probably never read. Although he wrote in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Hunter S. Thompson he never achieved their level of fame.
He believed that “the writer’s job is to get naked, to hide nothing, to look away from nothing.”
If you go by his memoir, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” he had lots to reveal. At the age of five he contracted polio. At seven he fell into a vat of boiling water (it was used for slaughtered pigs) and burned off most of his skin. He fought in the Korean War as a Marine and married and divorced the same woman twice. One of their sons drowned at an early age in a neighbor’s swimming pool.
Crews had tattoos before they were popular with anybody other than sailors and sideshow workers, drank too much, and got into fights—at the same time teaching at the University of Florida, where one of his students was crime novelist Michael Connelly.
A parade of freaks and outsiders populated his novels, which include “The Gospel Singer,” “Naked in Garden Hills,” and “Scar Lover.” He wrote between 4am and 9am, beginning his writing sessions with the prayer, “God, I’m not greedy. Just give me the next 500 words.”
The Georgia Review featured part of an unpublished memoir by Crews. Here’s an excerpt:
"As Mama and I walked, she had her hand clamped on my shoulder so tightly she was hurting me and my arm was starting to go numb. Each time she had to put her weight on her bad leg the viselike grip convulsively dug more deeply into the place where she held me. I had glanced at her face several times and it showed no sign of pain, only a kind of resigned indifference. But I knew the kind of hurt she had to be feeling from the way she held my shoulder and leaned into me as we walked. And in all the long years that followed that morning she never talked to me about the trip to the bus station or about the hideous ordeal that would begin for her as soon as I was gone.
She had to have been scared, terrified even, but no more than a dozen words, if that many, had passed between us. And that has seemed passing strange to me ever since I got old enough to think about that morning and what was happening, not only the enormity of what was ahead of her, but how distraught she must have been over what had already happened. She was looking at the prospect of having her hip and thigh ripped open like the belly of a butchered hog and then having most of her body encased in hard plaster during the hottest months of the year, but besides that, her worst nightmare had already come true.
She had always feared not being able to keep the three of us together, to earn enough money to keep me, my brother, and her under the same roof. And now we were being torn one from the other, and only God knew what the future held, whether or if we would ever get back together. The night before, after my brother had been gone to his job at the box factory for the better part of an hour, she said in a quiet, bemused voice, not so much to me, it seemed, as to herself: “I’m gone bring us all back together if I can, but . . .” She did not finish the sentence.
Now not only was my brother back at the apartment wrapped in an exhausted sleep, but she was taking me to the bus station to make the trip alone to stay with Aunt Eva and Uncle Alton in Bacon County just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia, and from the bus station she was going straight to the hospital to submit herself to the surgeon’s knife for the first time in her life. Her incredible courage that had been born of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives had not been enough to hold together that which she loved most in the world.”
While doing some research I made a mistake he might have enjoyed: instead of Harry Crews, I typed in Henry Crews (it was early in the morning...). I encountered quite a few Henry Crews, several recently deceased, including Henry W. Crews, who, the obit said, “had retired from Babcock and Wilcox, where he worked as a bar straightener.”
There was also a twitter page for another Henry Crews, started in December 2010 and finished in June of 2011. Did he die or just run out of Tweets?
Another was a genealogy search for William H. Crews: “Family legend has it that he was killed by lightning while working out in the fields about 2 yrs after their second son, George Marion was born.”
At about that point I realized something was wrong; the author wasn’t hugely famous but he was more famous than this search suggested. The search for Harry Crews was more productive. “A Feast of Snakes” and several other of his books are in print and available from Amazon and other booksellers. You might want to have a look.
Sources: LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-crews-20120401,0,1537312.story / Georgia Review http://garev.uga.edu/crewsleavinghome.html
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