Harry Crews – Ash Clifton, Writer

Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine, and at some point in the course of the conversation I told her about one of my favorite thriller novels of the last twenty years. It was Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, who sadly passed away in November. I described the plot to my friend, explaining how it’s about a 16-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, who lives in the Ozark mountains, raising her two little brothers. When her meth-dealing father goes missing, Ree faces the prospect of the bank foreclosing on the family mortgage, which would leave them all homeless (in addition to crushingly poor). To prevent this, Ree goes alone on a quest to find her father—or, at least, to find his body (she suspects he’s dead) so that she can get the money from his life insurance policy. This quest leads her into the mountain-shack domain of the local drug lord.

As I told all this to my friend, her expression became doubtful.

“Sounds dark,” she said.

I was taken aback, momentarily, and not just because my enthusiasm for Woodrell’s book failed to penetrate her skepticism. I was taken aback because I did not, in fact, have a good reply to her complaint. Yes, Winter’s Bone is a dark novel. Very dark. About as dark as you can get in a realistic, literary work. However, my enjoyment of the book is not dark. In fact, I remember the light-hearted, almost giddy thrill I felt while reading it—feverishly, tearing through it in a couple of days. It was the sensation that Vladimir Nabokov called a “kindling of the spine,” which one gets when reading a truly fine book.

What I found myself unable to communicate to my friend is the simple fact that I loved Winter’s Bone, even though its subject matter sounds like the stuff of an awful, depressing PBS documentary. How is this possible? Why do people like me sometimes read, and love, “dark” novels. More to the point, why do we read “heavy” novels in general—novels about tough subjects, adult circumstances, and big, real-life, consequential choices?

Why don’t we only read fun, predictable, pop-novels of the sort that dominate the best seller lists (not to mention the top 100 slots on GoodReads)?

I often think of something the late, great film critic Roger Ebert once said: “Happy movies don’t make you happy, and sad movies don’t make you sad. Good movies make you happy, and bad movies make you sad.”

Such a simple statement, and yet so profound! It applies equally well to novels. Good novels make you happy, and bad novels make you sad (or, at least, bored). Ultimately, though, Ebert’s aphorism is insufficient to answer my friend’s reaction. What does “good” mean in a movie, or a novel? For that matter, what does “happy” mean? Neither word seems easily definable, in this circumstance.

Happiness, in the grand sense, is not the sensation one gets from a book like Winter’s Bone. As thrilling and, yes, entertaining as it is, it does not induce true happiness. Rather, what it grants the reader is a sense of being transported—of movement, into the mind and world of the main character. That is, for each one- or two-hours session of reading the book, one becomes Ree Dolly. Take this opening paragraph:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

What most people misunderstand about books like Winter’s Bone is that they are not merely well written. Yes, good writing is a necessary—but not sufficient—quality of a successful literary novel. What is also required, though, is this shift in psychic awareness. In the paragraph above, we feel Ree’s sense of life—her desperation, her determination to survive in the most severe physical circumstances. We, as readers, are right there with her, standing on the snow, freezing our butts off, wondering how we’re going to survive the winter.

In a later passage, we also get a sense of Ree’s love and compassion for her two little brothers:

Sonny and Harold were eighteen months apart in age. They nearly always went about shoulder to shoulder, running side by side and turning this way or veering that way at the same sudden instant, without a word, moving about in a spooky, instinctive tandem, like scampering quotation marks. Sonny, the older boy, was ten, seed from a brute, strong, hostile, and direct. His hair was the color of a fallen oak leaf, his fists made hard young knots, and he’d become a scrapper at school. Harold trailed Sonny and tried to do as he did, but lacked the same sort of punishing spirit and muscle and often came home in need of fixing, bruised or sprained or humiliated.

The great novelist Martin Amis once related Vladimir Nabokov’s belief that the reader should not identify with the character in a novel; rather, they should identify with the author. But I’ve never believed it. Yes, a good book does impart the wisdom of the author (this especially true in a masterpiece like George Eliot’s Middlemarch), as well as the benefit of their wit and depth of feeling. But that’s not the main reason people read novels. Rather, it is identification with the protagonist. And it’s not just that we identify with the main character; we must sympathize with them. We must participate in their struggle.

Even a rat-bastard character like Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert—the most famous pedophile in literary history—could not keep our attention as readers if we did not, on some level, see ourselves in him. We must like him, if only a little. Feel sorry for him, even. Yes, he commits dreadful acts, but he does so, we sense, in a mistaken pursuit of happiness (that, what he believes is happiness, as he equates it to his sexual possession for Delores Haze). He is, in other words, a very wicked man but not a truly evil one.

Ree Dolly, of course, is neither wicked nor evil. She is, in fact, a completely valiant and admirable character. But that’s not the point. The relative morality or immorality of the main character is almost irrelevant. The only real requirement of a successful novel is that, through the art and skill and sympathy of the author, we are able to pierce the membrane of our own egos and enter that of the character. And, in doing so, we inevitably reflect upon our own, personal, real-life struggles. To paraphrase something I once heard Harry Crews say, it is a psychological truism that, in thinking about and judging a character in a novel, we inevitably come to think about and judge ourselves.

Right about now, you might be thinking of the Ancient Greek concept of carthasis, which refers to that paradoxical feeling of renewal one gets after watching a great, tragic play like Oedipus Rex or Othello. It is the sense of having participated in the plight of the tragic hero and come out the other side, as if reborn. And this idea certainly applies to literary novels. But what I am talking about is even deeper, more elemental, than catharsis. Rather, it has something to do with what Joseph Campbell described as “the rapture of being alive.” The rapture can, and in some ways must, transcend what we normally think of as decency or even morality. It goes deeper. It gets as who—and what—we really are, as beings that exist on both a physical and a spiritual plane.

So, I guess the title of this essay is a trick question. I don’t know why we read heavy, challenging novels. I don’t know why we enjoy them, and even need them. And I doubt anyone else really knows, either.

I just know that we do.

Years ago, my son Connor and I went on a hiking trip with my dad. At some point along the trail, we stopped to rest, and he told us about something from his past that he’d never talked about before. Namely, that in high school, he once had a part-time job delivering ice. Not those bags of ice people today buy at the grocery store before a party, but blocks of ice that people would put in their ice-box, the precursor to the modern refrigerator.

Of course, his story was not a total surprise. I knew that my grandfather—Connor’s great-grandfather—had owned an ice factory in rural Mississippi, where my father’s family is from. And my father had been in high school in the late 1950s, when much of that part of the country was still lagging several decades behind in terms of technology. Still, my father’s tales of hauling blocks of ice up tenement stairwells impressed me, as did his description of the blocks themselves, which were notched into thirds. This was done so that poorer people could buy a third or perhaps two-thirds of a whole block. All that was needed was to cleave the block with a small hatchet, which my father had carried with him for this purpose.

I found myself thinking about these stories a lot as I read a memoir by my old professor—the great writer Harry Crews—called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Like most good memoirs, the book gives the reader a window into a time and a place that is now long gone. In Crews’s case, it was Bacon County, Georgia in the Great Depression, when poor farmers had a skillset that seems almost fantastic to our modern sensibilities. Take, for instance, this passage, in which Crews describes the technical and highly prized ability to estimate the age (and, thus, the mileage) of a mule:

A mule has a full set of teeth when he’s born. But when he is two years old, he sheds two of the teeth right in the front. A good mule man can tell if he’s shed those two front teeth, in which case he is between two and three years old. A really good man can tell if those teeth have just grown back in or if they’ve been back in the mule’s mouth for several months. The next year, when he’s three, the mule sheds two more teeth, one on each side of the two he shed the year before. From then on the mule sheds two teeth a year until he’s five years old. That’s the last time he sheds.

Reading this passage, I was struck—as I was on that day with my father and my son—by how much the texture of daily life has changed in the past one hundred years. How one human lifetime (Harry Crews’s and also my father’s) could span the era of mule men and ice-delivery boys to my own, in which I make my living programming a computer (an occupation as complicated, surely, as appraising a mule’s age, but not nearly as artful).

Not all of Crews’s memoir is as comfortingly rustic as the sample above. Crews was never guilty of sentimentality in his writing, and his description of his family and neighbors enduring desperate poverty are as horrifying as any I have ever read. To name just one example, he explains how a problem as mundane as a rotten tooth—a mere annoyance for us today—was an agonizing crisis in rural Georgia, where no dentists were available and no one could afford them even if they were. So, naturally, people were driven by relentless pain to pull their own teeth, as Crews witnessed a hired man do one night:

He had a piece of croker sack about the size of a half dollar in his left hand and a pair of wire pliers in his right. He spat the water out and reached way back in his rotten mouth and put the piece of sack over a tooth. He braced his feet against the well and stuck the pliers in over the sackcloth. He took the pliers in both hands, and immediately a forked vein leaped in his forehead. The vein in his neck popped big as a pencil. He pulled and twisted and pulled and never made a sound.

It’s this kind of detail that makes one appreciate the mercies of modern life, even as it vaporizes any nostalgia we might harbor for the so-called “good old days” that right-wing politicians are always blathering about. For Crews, the “good old days” were marked by disease, privation, hunger, and lethal violence. They were also marked by unexpected moments of kindness, decency, and courage. People helped each other out in times of need without any thought of recompense; it was simply the way of things.

As Crews writes:

Back in the county there was no charity. People gave things to each other, peas because they couldn’t sell them or use them, same with tomatoes, sweet corn, milk, and sometimes even a piece of meat because it was going to turn rank in the smokehouse before they could eat it. But nothing was made out of giving or receiving. It was never called charity or even a gift. It was just the natural order of things for people whose essential problem, first and last, was survival.

Clearly, hard times bring out both the worst and the best in human nature. But there is an even deeper lesson to draw from Crews’s narrative. Namely, that physical suffering can deepen and intensify the human spirit. I was particularly struck by the chapter in which Crews describes the time he was stricken by polio as a small boy. As he lay in bed, paralyzed, he was kept company by an African-American woman called “Auntie” who regaled him with stories of backwoods monsters and superstitions, which both entranced and terrified him. For instance, she warned him of a bird’s ability to spit in a person’s mouth and take over their body.

“Look in there, youngun,” she said. “Look in there and bleve. A bird mought take you to hell. Mought take you anywheres at all. Me, I been grieved more than some, you up here in the house with them birds. Them spittin like snakes, lookin to hit you all up in your mouf. One hit you—an one gone hit you—that bird own you, own all of you. Now you look in there an bleve.” Her old soft voice got sharp when she demanded that I believe. But she could have saved it; I’d been a righteous believer in the deadly accuracy of bird spit long before we came down the hall. “Bird spit mix all up with your spit, and then your spit is his and he’s you. You listening, chile?”

Crews never comes out and says it, but there is a strong implication that it was the power of Auntie’s imagination, and those of others like her, that fostered a desire in him to be a writer. The same was true of the place itself—Bacon County—whose very harshness gave him an appreciation of the miraculous divinity of all things. “I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power.” What better description could there be of the artistic impulse? The need to capture the sublime and terrifying experience of daily life?

My appreciation of A Childhood is undoubtedly tinged by the fact that I got to know Harry Crews for a while. By the time I became an English major at the University of Florida in the 1980s, Crews was already a legend. He had written a lot of great books, of course, but he was more famous locally as a teacher and all-around character. Everyone seemed to have a Harry Crews story. He got into brawls. He took drugs. There was the time he had once (allegedly) tackled an irate student who had attempted to storm out of his class. He studied karate. He caught and raised hawks. He trained body-builders. He wrote five-hundred words a day, even if it took him three hours of sitting at keyboard, staring.

And he drank. A lot.

As a bright-eyed, wannabe writer, I was enthralled with the idea of Harry Crews. But by the time I finally signed up for his creative writing class—a night class, obviously, since he wrote in the mornings—the old Harry of lore was already in the past. He’d given up drinking (he took Antabuse daily), and he’d mellowed out. But he was still a legend. He produced one fine novel after another, and he made a lot of money writing for big-name magazines like Playboy. One of his most notable fans was Madonna, who would only agree to be the focus of a celebrity study in Playboy if Harry were the journalist. So, Harry flew to Manhattan and spent a few days with the Queen of Pop and her then-husband, Sean Penn (who also became a fan).

And yet, as awed as I was that fall evening when I sat in a classroom with a dozen other nervous students, I still had no idea what Harry Crews looked like. Then, at exactly six-o’clock, a lank man in faded jeans shuffled into the room, slightly stooped and smiling. For whatever reason, he looked at me first, sharp grey eyes fixing on me. He nodded and said, “Hey, guy,” a gentle greeting that I have often used. He then proceeded to teach a class that was ostensibly about the writing craft but more directly about the importance of fine art and the dedication required to create it.

My only regret about reading Crews’s memoir after all these years is that I didn’t do so sooner. It would have given me even more appreciation for the man. After all, most people who have the kind of childhood grow up to be hard, violent individuals. And, indeed, Crews wrote hard, violent novels, filled with men and women for whom brutality is a way of life. But the author himself–once you got to know him–was a bit of a sweetheart. I’ve been told that Harry wasn’t always so sweet, in his youth, but he was when I knew him, and so that’s the Harry I remember: a man who felt that all human beings deserve sympathy, but especially the most underprivileged and marginalized. He also knew of the power of imagination and storytelling to sustain us even in the most desperate of circumstances. As Crews says of his beloved Auntie and her bizarre superstitions, “Fantasy might not be truth as the world counts it, but what was truth when fantasy meant survival?”

P.S. Here’s a review of A Childhood recently published in the New Yorker.

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)

Tag: Harry Crews

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