Remembering Harry Crews: Words such as his should never die →

That Harry lived as long as he did is a miracle. In fact, it is surprising he even made it to adulthood. As he related in his darkly beautiful memoir “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place,” Harry grew up during the Depression in the most desperate and benighted circumstances. A son of Bacon County, Ga., hard by the Okefenokee Swamp, he was raised on a diet of biscuits made from lard and flour, and he ate clay to compensate for various mineral deficiencies. His father died when Harry was 2. At 5 he contracted polio. When he was 7, he fell into a vat of boiling water during a hog slaughtering and watched in horror as pieces of his skin sloughed onto the ground in wet, pink folds. From his earliest years he felt damaged and outcast….

Harry was among the most original and challenging writers to come out of the South in the second half of the last century. Words such as his should never die.

See, if I do my job right when I’m writing, I will really get you turned back on yourself, and on your own code of ethics or morality or vision of the world or sense of self or whatever. If I get you turned back on yourself, then I done my job. I’ve done what I set out to do.

— Harry Crews, 1994 (The Georgia Review Blog: On the Death of Harry Crews)

To Harry.

Remembering Harry Crews →

Maud has written the most eloquent, and most apt, Harry Crews obituary/tribute you will read:

He would not have remembered me or my writing; if he had, I would have been one of the students he denounced as a category to the New York Times, one of the “scared little people [who] come and sit in a scared little class and tremble.” I was nineteen when I signed up for the course, knowing nothing of him or his work; I could just as easily have stumbled into any other undergraduate fiction section. Sitting there in my chair on the first day, I was terrified and awed and more than slightly defiant, but I intuited as he stood at the chalkboard, drawing an incomprehensible diagram and shouting, “Fiction is an action!” that I did not have to shrink from darkness and horror in my writing, that he would welcome it.

In his fiction and in his life, Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the f*ck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another.

— Maud, interviewed by The Daily, on Harry Crews

Listening to them talk, I wondered what would give credibility to my own story, if, when my young son grows to manhood, he has to go looking for me in the mouths and memories of other people,” he wrote. “Who would tell the stories? A few motorcycle riders, bartenders, editors, half-mad karateka, drunks, and writers. “Even though I was gladdened listening to the stories of my daddy, an almost nauseous sadness settled in me, knowing I would leave no such life intact. Among the men with whom I spent my working life, university professors, there is not one friend of the sort I was listening to speak of my daddy there that day in the back of the store in Bacon County.

— Author Harry Crews dies in Florida at 76; known for his gritty tales of the US South

Harry Crews, Writer of Dark Fiction, Is Dead at 76 →

Nice NY Times obit:

Harry Crews, whose novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, snake-oil-selling characters whose physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them somehow entirely normal and eminently sympathetic, died on Wednesday at his home in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76.

….A Georgia-born Rabelais, Mr. Crews was renowned for darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesquely populated and almost preternaturally violent novels.

From Maud:

In his fiction and in his life, Harry Crews empathized most with the people who needed it most: the freaks, the fuck-ups, people who’d been broken by loss of one kind or another. Crews died yesterday, at age 76. As his son Byron told The Daily’s Claire Howorth, “[he] put more miles on the Chevy than most of us.”

More to come, when I pull myself together. Until then, there are the archives.

Image courtesy of the UGA Library, where you can find a podcast of Crews teaching a creative writing seminar.

RIP Harry Crews

Via Maud and the Georgia Review, I’ve learned that Harry Crews died. I’m stunned by the incredible sadness I’m feeling right now.

…I first felt the miracle that keeps fiction writers writing fiction, the miracle of the alphabet turning into blood.

— Harry Crews, We Are All of Us Passing Through (via georgiareview)