In which Netty tells you why you don’t know about Harry Crews (the author, not the band) and why you should …

Meet your new favourite author …

Not to brag or anything, but I like to think that I know stuff. Cool stuff. Hip stuff. Awesome stuff. Stuff that other people don’t know. If they do know it, then I still knew it before them. In an alternative universe I might make a helluva futurist; in the present I will continue to tread that very fine line between buff and blowhard.

So it inevitably floors me when I discover that something has somehow, inexplicably, fallen through the cracks. And so it was one afternoon, sometime last year, when I was having a conversation with an obviously-far-hipper-than-myself colleague who was singing the praises of an American author by the name of Harry Crews. As I was drawing blanks, left, right and centre.

“Oh, c’mon,” he cajoled. “Kim Gordon was in a band named after him.”

It was at about that point that my head exploded. How could Kim Gordon – MY Kim Gordon, from MY all-time favourite band in the whole universe, Sonic Youth – be in a side band that had somehow escaped my attention???

Obviously-far-hipper-than-myself colleague 1, Netty -1,000,000 …

I scampered off shame-faced, tail between my legs, and did my homework. Kim Gordon was – albeit very, very briefly – in a band called Harry Crews, along with fellow post-punk luminary Lydia Lunch and some other chick called Sadie Mae. They released one album, Naked In Garden Hills – named, of course, after one of Crews’ novels – in 1989, then promptly disbanded. There’s a few songs on YouTube set against stills; no live footage of which to speak. If I was being kind, I would describe it as rudimentary; if I wasn’t, as fairly forgettable. And maybe that’s why it passed me by … yeah, I know – I’m clutching at straws here …

Fortunately, while the band named after him is far from essential, the author himself is most certainly not. Crews, who died last year at the age of 76, has 16 novels and a memoir to his name – his books aren’t that easy to source here, so once we (or, rather, I) ruled out A Feast Of Snakes (apparently one of his best-known books), we ended up settling on Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader. It contains the aforementioned memoir, A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place, plus two novels, The Gypsy’s Curse and Car, and three autobiographical essays.

After a bit of a misunderstanding (ahem, mine), when Andy and I had our regular pre-posting get-together, we ended up discussing only the memoir. As my blogging partner has done such a sterling job (and no, I am not sucking up to you, Andrew) dissecting that, I thought I would expound more on the other two novels and the essays. Or at least one of the novels and the essays (sadly, I am still yet to tackle The Gypsy’s Curse. But any day now …  *pumps fists in the air*).

A couple of months ago I wildly gushed over Ian McEwen, proclaiming him to be my new favourite author. Crews has since given him a stiff run for his money. In fact, if I read anything/anyone better this year, I’ll be a very happy girl indeedy. Crews is roughly in the same ballpark as writers such as Charles Bukowski, but without the name recognition and the notoriety. Born in Georgia, U.S. of A. In the mid-1930s, he mines the same territory as fellow southern authors William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner and Carson McCullers (see our ANRC archives for more details on all three). I dusted off a book I’ve got called Cult Fiction; sure enough, Crews is in there. Interestingly, its authors (Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard) sum up Crews thus: “At times Crews’s first-hand depictions of the south … bears an uncanny resemblance to the second-hand caricatures that are so often applied to those living below the Mason-Dixon line”. I’m still not sure if this is a cheap shot or a back-handed compliment.

It’s fortunate that Crews ended up writing anything at all. Born into a dirt-poor family of sharecroppers, his biological father dying when he was only a few months old and his alcoholic stepfather eventually being given the boot by his mother, Crews escaped the land as a teenager to join the Marines. After serving in the Korean War, he returned home and enrolled in university under the GI Bill, which provides benefits for ex-servicemen. Crews married young and had two sons (the death of his eldest boy Patrick, who drowned just shy of the age of four, is the subject of his very moving essay Fathers, Sons, Blood, included in Classic Crews). He balanced his life’s writing output with working as an educator, initially teaching English at junior high level, latterly at the University of Florida, where he was a creative writing faculty member.

Of course, his family background and the rich pickings of the deep south provided Crews with all the material he would ever need. Regardless of the true meaning behind Calcutt’s/Shephard’s assertion, Crews writes warmly and lovingly of the south and its people; he embues his characters – the freaks, the weirdos, the backwards folk – with real heart and soul. There’s grit and grunt aplenty, but there’s also real feeling. His writing is as measured and metronomic as a drummer’s backbeat; you get the sense that every word is carefully weighed and considered before being committed to print. Quite frankly, I was – and am – blown away by not only his words but his construction. I haven’t come across a writer who deserves a much, much wider audience in I don’t even remember how long.

Take Car – first published in 1972 and the final novel in Classic Crews – for example. Easton (Easy) Mack runs a successful carwrecker called Auto Town, for which his three children, daughter Junell and twin sons Mister and Herman also work. Herman, the “dreamer” of the family, decides one day he is going to eat a car “from bumper to bumper”. Yes, you read that correctly. A story like this could be simply played for schmucks in someone else’s hands. But Crews weaves a tale that’s astounding, jaw-dropping, as funny as fuck and also compassionate – he really gives a shit about these crazy, misfit characters of his. After all, they are his people. They are him.

Harry Crews the writer is absolutely awesome. Harry Crews the band, much, much, much less so (sorry Kim).

Go out and read everything he’s ever written, stat. I certainly am. And to the obviously-far-hipper-than-myself colleague, a very, very big thank you. I owe you big time!

A Childhood – And yet again Andy heads South, this time with Harry

The first line of Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table:

“From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.”

The first line of Harry Crews’ A Childhood:

“My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew.”

I’ve never been a fan of the idea that first lines are utterly vital, although I admit I try, when writing fiction, to make sure that the first line of anything I might write is at the very least not too boring. But I don’t think anyone could disagree that these are pretty amazing ways to open anything – story, novel, memoir, whatever. And as different as they are they share a little in common – Frame’s “memories of truths” have something in common with Crews’ memory of his daddy, built as it is not on his own memories but on stories he’s been told. And Frame’s Third Place – death – bears comparison to Crews’ knowledge of his father, based on stories that might be described as mythic. Catching the clap off a Native American chick and losing a ball as a result while building a highway through the mangroves swamps of Florida? OK look, maybe we have different ideas about “mythic”.

A Childhood is a very different book to Frame’s autobiography. For a start, it’s not an autobiography – it’s essentially a memoir of Crews from just before he turns five through to six, maybe a little older. It’s subtitled The biography of a place, but even this seems a stretch, although the landscape of Bacon County, Georgia, features prominently.

This is not to take anything away from Crews’ memoir. He and Frame leave me slightly bewildered by the detail of their memories of their childhoods (I lived in Northern Ireland from ages 3 to 7, during the absolute worst of the Troubles, and while I have many, many vivid recollections of that time I doubt there’s enough to fill a book). But there is certainly plenty of detail, by turns bewitching (almost literally, in one or two cases), repugnant, enchanting, often amusing – and always enthralling.

Crews is incredibly generous. His father died when he was a baby and his mother quickly remarried, to his father’s brother – his uncle, who had to divorce his wife to do so. Crews did not realise the man he called “daddy” was not his daddy until he was almost six, under pretty appalling circumstances. There was alcoholism, there was violence – most of it booze-fuelled, though not all – there was painfully grinding poverty. But there was also joy, sometimes in the strangest of places – the slaughtering and butchering of a pig, for example, is one of the most weirdly entrancing things I’ve read in a while. (Netty had a problem with this bit. No doubt she’ll tell you about it.) He has two bouts of serious illness as a young child; in the latter case in particular the ignorance of those around him makes a bad situation much worse, and in both cases his parents are tolerant of rather too much faith-based nonsense. But you never get the sense that Crews blames them. Overwhelmingly you get the sense that he felt loved, and decades later, as he wrote this memoir, he still valued that.

Violence inhabits a bizarre place in Crews’ memoir, and theremight be something here that at least partly explains the culture of violence in the States today that leaves most of the world shaking its head. There is little violence in Frame’s autobiography and most of it is institutionalised. But here’s Crews, talking about Bacon County: “Men killed other men oftentimes not because there had been some offense that merited death, but simply because there had been an offense, any offense.” Dogs and fences, Crews says, were as much a reason to kill as anything else. Obviously the NRA has plenty to answer for, but I wonder how much this cavalier, almost dismissive attitude towards killing another human being explains some of what we see far too often in the US today.

Sex also inhabits a pretty surreal niche here. I’ve read about sex games in prepubescent kids, of course, although I have little recollection of taking part in anything like that myself. (Although there was this one time in my first year in primary school in Northern Ireland when I ran around the playground trying to tear the knickers off all the little girls. I guess the shame of it maybe turned me gay. Or not. Whatever.) But what’s depicted here – little boys lining up their sisters, or the sisters of other little boys, so that yet other little boys can git theirselves some – wow. Around the age of six or seven I remember coming to a vague understanding of what then I probably would’ve described as naughtiness, or dirtiness. But rutting away at the crotch of a little girl? Um, maybe not.

A Childhood was not the Crews book Netty and I were supposed to read this year – A Feast of Snakes was abandoned because Netty doesn’t like snakes. We then settled on buying the Crews Reader and reading The Gypsy’s Curse – which ironically is the only piece of this volume Netty hasn’t read. I am glad we accidentally ended up choosing A Childhood for the blog though, because, apart from the fact that it dovetails nicely with Frame, it really is a wonderful read.

And I’ve got the rest of the Reader to go.