Newspaper Page Text
10
Ntmmbrr, /97»
Ampersand
AUTHOR HARRY CREWS
Swampy Lust, Blood Guts
Glenn Abei.^ v
Johnny McLean
he black twirlies still
haunt Harry Crews. He
fights them daily,
pounding away at his
1920’s manual type
writer, occasionally
i throwing the machine
across the room in fits of'creative rage, but
the twirlies persist. They come at night
after the writet has laid himself to rest;
they come before his lectures at the Uni
versity of Florida; they follow in his travels,
often (It in mg him into libraries in distant
cities—just to reaffirm his identity In
looking up bis name in card catalogs.
Crews, like many authors, feels an acute
dread of c reative impotence. *‘l live w ith
the constant fear ot waking up one morn
ing and not being .Ihlc to write," said the
forty-three-year-old creator of ten books
and countless major magazine articles. “It
is always w ith me — the fear, the sinking
black twirlies."
Like the hero of Kris Kristofferson's
song I he Pilgrim,*’ Crews is a walking
contradiction: he’s a hard-drinking man
whom violence stalks like a cat after fresh
meat; at the same time, he is an erudite
professor of K.nglish. Crews is a cock fight
ing aficionado with the sensitivity of a
poet. He’s a southern cracker, raised in the
abject poverty of rural Georgia, who has
perused every major literary work in the
language. His writing has garnered do
zens of awards, hut he is proudest of the
South Af rican government ban on his
novel The (impel Singer.
Crews, as the song goes, is partly truth
and partly fiction. One week he may he
addiessing groups of up to 500 students at
Florida’s flagship university in Gainesville;
the next week he may fade into the Alas
kan luck country or into the set ret society
of the Klu Klux Klan on assignment lor
maga/ines such as Hltiybn% and
Despite Crews’ rising literary star, his
unconventional lifestyle has earned him
more than a few detractors in the academic
community at L’F. Nonetheless, students
patk his lectures and there is always a
lengthy waiting list tor class registration. “I
don’t understand why a man like Crews is
allowed to teach at any top college,*’ said
one of his peers at L’F. “Professors are
supposed to set an example for
students — not self-destruct in front of
them.’’
"Crews may occasionally come to class
lichind a few drinks,” countered one of his
past students, "hut Crews drunk is lietter
than ninety-nine percent of the other pr«r-
fessors in this university. He cares about his
students: he gives them their money’s
worth in class, and he treats them like
human beings. Besides, he’s the lx*si w liter
in Florida.”
Crews needs the academic life. I he uni-
veisity gives him a touchstone to return
to — a place to finctune his craft. His life
on the edge provides raw material for
stories — the lusis for his insights into the
human condition.
"Being vulnerable.” as Crews calls it. has
caused him to lie cut, broken and boiled
alive. As a child, ('tews stumbled into a
cast-iron wash pot filled with water hot
enough to scald the hide of! a hog. "I htokc
my neck when I was seventeen,’’ Crews
said, leaning his 215-pound bulk over a vat
sloppv. disgusting drunks,’’ he admits, “the
kind mothers can point out to their chil-
drcii as an example of the filial evil of alco
hol."
Bui trauma is the stuff Crews’ art is
itiftcle of. In A Childhood: the hwgrnph\ «/ a '
place, which Time dubbed the best non
fiction Ixxikof 1978. Crews tells of growing
up pom in Bacon County, (Georgia, a plat e
with "so little niaigin for error, for bad
luc k, that when something went w rong, it
almost always brought something else
clown with it." The book In-gins ten years
before Crews’ birth, with his fathet catch
ing gonorrhea from a Seminole girl while
working in the F.vergladcs. It ends with
Crews standing in a (cthaccn field, bac k
from three years in the Marines, knowing
he would never leave his people com
pletely, but reali/ing he had put a distance
between himself and Bacon County that he
would never again lie able to cross.
Childhutnl was by fai the most difficult
Ixtok I’ve ever written," said Crews, who
has produced eight novels and two non
fiction books. "It was difficult for many
reasons — as a w riter vou have to get some
distance on a subjec t to be able to do any
thing w ith it. Otherwise you just warp it,
distort it. whatever. Secondly, the people I
w rote about are still alive. Or their chil
dren are still alive. And I have better things
to do with inv time than to make people
feel liad aliout themselves.
"The hook is obviously a search for my
father, whom I never knew, who dic'd when
I was twenty-one months old. There is
nothing unusual in that, it doesn't make
me unic|ue, except that in my case it influ
enced everything.”
A Childhood, like most ol ( dews’ works, is