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One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”
It’s an idea that Crews, the author of fifteen novels and countless pieces of long-form journalism, often returned to: there is the life that is lived, and then its rival, a counterlife, where every flaw is hidden and one can feel whole. “The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making,” he writes in A Childhood. “Fabrication became a way of life . . . not only a way for us to understand the way we lived but also a defense against it.” What began as dissociation, a kind of trauma response, would become a program for art and life.
Crews was drawn to people who believed in self-creation, showmen who came from harsh places and thought that with a bit of artifice and money they could become someone new—on television, in politics, on the page. His own life seems to have been a series of guises or mismatched masks. “I have always slipped into and out of identities as easily as other people slip into and out of their clothes,” he admitted. Foremost among these identities was that of the “crazy motherfucking freak from Georgia,” as one friend described Crews’s calculated public image. He was also a college professor and inveterate brawler, a scrupulous journalist and legendary drunk, a Marine who boxed in his spare time and once wet his pants when punched. He admired James Baldwin and André Gide, claimed to read Madame Bovary at least once a year, and could recite Shakespeare at length; he bragged that he had never set foot in Texas without being arrested, and said he’d “like to write a thing called Jails I Have Known.” Late in life he wore a Mohawk, had lines by E. E. Cummings tattooed down his biceps, and was described as looking like “a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and Vanilla Ice.”
Since Crews’s death in 2012, A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia. But the novels for which he was once notorious have found a narrower legacy: mocked when they aren’t outright dismissed as the minor works of a windbag regionalist. Crews has become, alongside his contemporaries Larry Brown and Barry Hannah, an avatar for a gin-soaked, testosterone-fueled subgenre of latter-day Southern gothic known as Grit Lit. “Flannery O’Connor on steroids” is how the critic John Williams described Crews’s work, not incorrectly.
Even his most passionate defenders must concede that many of Crews’s novels have aged poorly, and a number of them weren’t very good to begin with. He could lapse into the most shopworn tendencies of Southern writing; the best of his books are marred by a dull misogyny. (Crews tends to write two types of female characters: conniving nymphomaniacs and pathetic nymphomaniacs. Neither inspire his most artful descriptions.) But among the dross there gleam a few brilliant exceptions—deceptive, slippery books that defy the constraints of region and genre. They begin as pulpy entertainments but soon veer into murkier, more philosophical waters.
Many of the hustlers and fabulists who populate Crews’s fiction are typical American strivers. “We don’t want to be bettern nobody,” explains a doomed guitar player in The Gospel Singer, Crews’s 1968 debut. “All we want to be is famous and make a million dollars.” But in the strangest and most accomplished of his novels—Car (1972), A Feast of Snakes (1976), and The Knockout Artist (1988), the latter of which was reissued last year by Penguin Classics—what these strivers are after isn’t so material, and their pursuits are anything but slick or bloodless. Their obsessions are wild, dangerous, and grotesque. Their attempts to transcend their circumstances only bring them closer to death. This, at his best, is Crews’s subject: the relationship between art and self-annihilation—and whether the price of becoming the boy in the picture is too high to be paid by the one stumbling through the dark.
Crews was born in 1935, in the county seat of Alma, just north of the Okefenokee Swamp and some two hundred miles south of Atlanta—the “hookworm and rickets belt” of the South, as he liked to say. His great-grandfather had been a slave owner and large landholder; his parents were tenant farmers. In the intervening years, Crews writes in A Childhood, just about everyone in Bacon County had “fallen on evil days”: “There wasn’t enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man’s eyes.”
True to its title, A Childhood is a record of Crews’s first six years, almost every day of which was passed on the sandy-soiled plot where his family eked out their subsistence with corn, tobacco, and cotton. They had no electricity; according to one of Crews’s neighbors, that didn’t come to town until 1947, the same year that Bacon County got its first tractor. The portrait Crews draws of life there is at once dreamlike and implausibly precise. Here is his description of one of the family’s cows: “Her lifeless hide cleaved to her ribs and hung in folds down to her widened, shriveled udder which had been torn on one side and was now alive with worms.” Or this, about a family friend: “Cecil was six feet seven inches tall and weighed between 250 and 275 pounds depending upon the season of the year.”
His was an exceedingly brutal upbringing. Once, he saw a man walk into a grocery store, take a knife from the butcher block, and plunge it into his own chest. “It feels good,” the man said, as Crews watched him bleed to death. And never mind his mother getting shot at—the most memorable incident of his childhood occurred a few weeks before. It was deep winter, hog-killing season, and neighboring families had gathered for a day of slaughter. Crews describes a raucous scene of work and merriment, the scent of blood in the cold air. Playing with the other kids, he tripped and fell into a vat of scalding water that was being used to slough hair from the hogs. Someone pulled him out, and Crews watched as the skin on his hand slid off “like a wet glove.” The burns all over his body were nearly fatal. He passed the days of his bed-bound recovery looking at the models in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. There was something dishonest, he believed, about their apparent perfection: “It was all a lie. I knew that under those fancy clothes there had to be scars, there had to be swellings and boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world.”
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