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HARRY CREWS (1935-2012)
During the first half of the '90s I had a job
at the late, great Oxford Books. People my age
and older remember Oxford, at the time the
Atlanta bookstore. Before Barnes & Noble and
Borders found their way down here, Oxford
was the place to go for a reading fix, some
visiting-celebrity-watching and the occasional
drunken late-night rendezvous upstairs in the
stacks. It was also the prime destination for
touring authors with books to plug.
When Harry Crews came to Oxford Books to
talk, read and sign, the placets packed. At
the time Crews was a resident writer and pro
fessor at the University of Florida, and his lec
tures were legendary, not just for the content
but also for Crews' reputation for showing up
at public events with a drink or 12 under his
belt. Crews stood up, sporting a fresh Mohawk,
and opened with his two new tattoos. One was
a hinge that had been inked on the inside of
his elbow. How it got there he had no idea,
only that he was in Alaska at the time, woke
up one morning, and there it was. The other
was a shoulder piece with a grinning skull and
the words, "How do you like your blue eyed
boy Mr. Death" from a poem by e.e. cummings.
Before Crews had stepped up that day, I
knew I liked his work. By the time he finished
and the crowd queued up wi*h books for him
to sign, Harry Crews was my hero.
Crews died a couple of weeks ago, at this
writing, something I missed in the news until
a friend of mine happened to mention it. The
news was unsurprising, considering how hard
Crews lived, but it was shocking nonetheless.
Though Crews is far from a household name,
the man's writing is some of the best work to
come out of the South since Faulkner or Crews'
own primary influence, Flannery O'Connor.
I was introduced to Crews by James Kibler
while taking his course in the 20th-century
American novel. My assigned work was The
Hawk Is Dying, the story of a man who deals
with the shortcomings of his life and the
bizarre drowning death of his sister's autis
tic son through his feverish obsession with
training a red-tailed hawk he has captured.
Losing himself in the battle of wills with the
bird, the man allows the rest of his life to go
to hell while he seeks his redemption in tam
ing something that will not be tamed. It's a
grotesque, absurd novel with a powerful cen
tral metaphor, the signature of Crews' work.
Crews worked Southern Gothic like few oth
ers have ever been able to do. Bom in Alma,
GA, he suffered the white-trash blues that
forges all great artists working in the blend of
hardship, strangeness and moments of unex
pected revelation peculiar to the South. He
grew up dirt-poor, jumped into the Marines
and served in Korea, went to college on the
GI Bill and started writing, married and had a
son who died tragically (by drowning). By the
time Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was
published in 19C3, he had a lifetime of hard
knocks to draw from for the rest of his life.
Crews dealt in the brand of sweaty, mas
culine fiction of Hemingway or Jim Harrison,
skewed by a deep affinity for misfits and
the functionally insane. Again and again
his characters turn to obsession as a way of
powering through personal tragedy, like the
protagonist of Car (perhaps his most infamous
novel) who engages on a mission to eat an
entire automobile a bit of metal at a time,
or the hero of Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit,
who channels his grief and rage into his mania
for martial arts. This is not to say that Crews
was all about the repression or redirection of
emotion. His novel Scar Lover deals with one
of the most tender and often neglected facets
of love, the idea that one person can love
another so completely that one loves even the
other's deepest flaws.
Crews was a broken master, a man who did
battle with demons on a daily basis through
drink, excess and words. He was a hard man
with a vulnerable core who wrote every word
in his own blood. His writing pulled the plow
like few others'; he will be missed.
John G. Netties
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APRIL 18, 2012 • FLAGPOLE.COM 11